shouting loudly

Still in NYC and have no time to write. See this story about “Trusted Computing” on Slashdot.
Don’t know about TC? See this article on EFF that discusses the pros and cons. About halfway down, you’ll notice one particular problem: TC is deployed to threat YOU, THE END USER as a potential “threat” to the system. [...]

Can’t write much; I’m at the ICA convention in NYC.
Check this awesome Philadelphia Inquirer editorial blasting the new PATRIOT Act. (Use BugMeNot.com to avoid signing up.)
More info from the ACLU and EFF. (EFF link is an action alert for the good people of Kansas, Utah, Ohio, Missouri, Maine, Nebraska, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, [...]

Here’s a copyright battle with no clear moral high ground: University presses are rankled by Google’s plans to scan almost every book of any scholarly value into a gigantic, searchable database.
Google hasn’t entirely tipped its hand yet, so I’m not making any predictions or throwing my weight behing either side just yet…
Read the full story [...]

Today on C|Net:
Legacy Elementary School, in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah, is holding its graduation ceremony today. Jon Dudas, director of US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), is delivering the commencement address.
Dudas is using the speech as a platform for lecturing children about the perils of peer-to-peer file trading. That’s right, your Under Secretary of [...]

Jorge Cortell, a lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain, has been fired for discussing the legal uses of P2P networks.
Cortell was scheduled to give a public lecture, including a public use of P2P software, to demonstrate the socially valuable and (under Spanish law) fully legal uses of this software. He [...]

Discovering flickr.com; including obligatory link as legal duty.
Picture is available under attribution, noncommercial, share-alike license, as described at CreativeCommons.org.
Consider this notice that, in fact, so is the whole damned blog.

Here on Ed Foster’s Gripelog, you’ll find a story alleging that eBay is blindly enforcing the copyright allegations of NetEnforcers, a coin-operated IP enforcement shop. (What they call “comprehensive brand protection services.”)
This may be a private IP rent-a-cop going overboard to inflate its enforcement numbers, or it could also represent a copyright owner (in this [...]

Here are two really creepy stories about how privacy is a) already a thing of the past, and b) in worse shape, if big movie studios have their way.
First, here is a Times article (link dies in a week; see BugMeNot.com to view anonymously) about how Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was able to pick up [...]