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Wiki RSS
Recent Comments
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Wed, 10 Oct 2007
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From the give-me-$5-for-the-song-playing-in-your-head department... There's a case in the UK where a car repair business is being sued for copyright infringement because their mechanics are playing music loud enough that it can be overheard by others. Silly, no? Even sillier, it's not the employees of the business that are being sued for the actual sharing of the music (by turning their radios on). Rather, it is the business being sued for facilitating that sharing. (Never mind that broadcast radio has already paid for the broadcasted content and that it is able to be heard by anyone with enough skill to operate a tuning dial or button.) Or will the employees be sued at a later date, once it can be determined whose radio played what song when? What's next? Having to pay a service fee for riding the elevator because muzak was playing while you rode? Of course, the elevator company would have to record the number of riders and the distance (in floors) that each rider traveled. joat: 15:48:51 10 Oct 2007 |
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Thu, 23 Aug 2007
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Lawmakers are currently working on a bill called the " Truth in Caller ID Act of 2007". I have issues with it in that: - it is vaguely worded. "Inaccurate" and "misleading" are undefined, meaning they are left up to interpretation, both by law enforcement and the legal system (meaning that it will be up to case law to determine the definition).
- the wording of the law allows for a non-judicial entity to interpret the law
- the law does not define who is allowed (or how) to monitor the Caller ID "system" (Remember, it is a loosely worded protocol agreed upon by a collection of "peered" communications companies)(Does the fact that I own/manage/use a number of Asterisk boxes make me a communications entity? An infrastructure owner? Am I POTS (see below)?)
- it strikes me as being worded like a statute (no need to prove intent) (but hey, I am not a lawyer so...)
- it is intended to protect an insecure protocol (with poor implementations) that was never intended to be employed as a legal form of identity
- Caller ID is not a universal service
- There's no definition of "POTS". POTS stopped being 100% analog lines and hardware switches decades ago.
- the wording of the law protects only a specific industry (POTS)
It is this last issue that caused the title of this post. Given the move away from POTS to IP-based services (POTS has been losing ground to special purpose (usually smaller) carriers for years. Vaguely worded laws get enforced in all manner of ways unintended by their authors. I think that this law may just push various user communities (industries in particular) away from POTS. (i.e., Caller ID will be whatever the company wants internally. Organizations like autonomy in controlling what they have, especially internal infrastructures. I don't see this as improving organizations' relationships with "the phone company". Think about it. Anyone receiving a phone call from any one of 400,000+ phones internal to Microsoft (as an example) will probably only see "Microsoft" in the Caller ID, even though the capability is there to show "S. Jobs" (or whomever). [Yeah, I know he doesn't work there.] Hmmm... This may create a niche industry for Caller ID interfaces (internal call recipients see one thing, external another). joat: 05:54:14 23 Aug 2007 |
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Tue, 14 Nov 2006
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The fall issue of the International Journal of Digital Evidence is out (probably has been for awhile as I've not been tracking it). Again, it contains good topics. Topics this time out: memory analysis, SIM card forensics and Google Desktop as a source of evidence. joat: 08:00:00 14 Nov 2006 |
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Wed, 07 Sep 2005
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If you administer a system/site for anyone, even for family members,
it's a good idea to be familiar with the topics described in David
Loundy's E-Law4.
joat: 07:00:00 7 Sep 2005 |
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Fri, 06 May 2005
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LinuxElectrons has an pointer to Congressional testimony concerning The Hacker Trespasser Exception. It's an interesting read. I just wish that lawmakers would refrain from using slang terms (such as hacker) when writing laws. That sort of thing always requires rewriting of the law after years of judicial interpretation of what the use of the slang term actually meant and the intent of the law that's wrapped around it.
joat: 07:00:00 6 May 2005 |
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Mon, 17 Jan 2005
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You may want to note that Samba is affected by IBM's recent patent action. In my usual no-good-deed-
goes-unpunished skepticism, we may see a few lawsuits against IBM
because of it. Remember, there are things in those patents that were
developed in conjuction with other companies. SMB makes a good example
in that the protocol was developed by MS and IBM.
joat: 08:00:00 17 Jan 2005 |
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Sat, 13 Nov 2004
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The WTO has told the U.S. how to (I wanted to say "suck eggs" but...) run its internal affairs by ruling that the U.S. law banning online gambling is damaging to the Antigua and Barbuda economies. (Uh, when did the WTO become a legislative body?) While it may be true that the law blocks the growth of that industry, I'm not so sure that passing the law damaged the economy. Rather, the law made online gambling within the U.S. illegal, forcing the sites to move out of the country, thereby creating the economy that is supposedly now endangered. It should prove interesting what comes out of this and the upcoming attempt by the U.N. to "govern" the Internet, not only for the U.S. but for any country who'll have to give up sovereignty to participate. (Example: some of the things that I talk about here are illegal in Europe but inane here in the U.S.)
joat: 11:30:00 13 Nov 2004 |
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Giants are battling somewhere. Me? I'm going to pull the covers up over my head. Tell me when Novell v Microsoft and the whole SCO thing is over.
joat: 11:00:00 13 Nov 2004 |
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The rules change next week. Most of the industry is waiting for the first "case" to go to court to see what happens. After that, it'll either be yawns or a sudden shift in security budgets.
joat: 09:00:00 13 Nov 2004 |
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Mon, 04 Oct 2004
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Here's a
news article about how LURHQ provided expert witness to rebut a
defense's expert witness. Seems they'd left out a bit of information
about how spam can be bounced off of misconfigured systems. It's nice
to see the legal profession finally catching up. Our area only has one
technically trained lawyer and he is a very busy person. As dry and
boring as most court cases can be, I'm looking forward to reading the
judge's opinion on this. Google returns 15 links for this.
joat: 07:30:00 4 Oct 2004 |
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Mon, 27 Sep 2004
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The House of Representatives recently passed a bill which would add
penalties for using false information for WHOIS records. (see Slashdot
article). This can be a good thing and a bad thing at the same
time. A good thing as it might help track down spammers and fraudsters
who fake up their WHOIS records. It's a bad thing as it will once again
expose techie inboxes to tons of spam due to addresses "borrowed" from
those same records. The current practice is to use a pseudonum for
business domains. That way when there's a phone call from a salesman
that claims he has an appointment with Bob Wackemwidahammer, you know
it's BS.
joat: 07:00:00 27 Sep 2004 |
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Sat, 25 Sep 2004
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California law now bans
anonymous file sharing. How long before someone applies the law to
anything you can download from a website via a single-click or, for that
matter, figures out that visiting a website via a proxy constitutes
anonymous file sharing. This has the capability of getting really ugly
before it gets better.
joat: 07:30:00 25 Sep 2004 |
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Tue, 14 Sep 2004
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Doug Simpson has some good pointers
to IP Law primers.
joat: 08:00:00 14 Sep 2004 |
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Thu, 02 Sep 2004
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Here's
an interesting article about how the DCMA applies to search engines.
joat: 07:30:00 2 Sep 2004 |
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Sun, 29 Aug 2004
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(from /.) The
US Sentencing Commission has proposed guidelines for
punishment under the CAN-SPAM act.
joat: 07:30:00 29 Aug 2004 |
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Thu, 26 Aug 2004
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Barry Irwin has an interesting
post about the recent 419legal.org hijinks.
joat: 07:00:00 26 Aug 2004 |
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Tue, 03 Aug 2004
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Barry did a good job with this except he missed one thing. Since he doesn't
allow comments, hopefully he'll see it here: Barry, do a whois on the reverse lookup (IP address) for the web site! It's in the U.S.
joat: 15:00:00 3 Aug 2004 |
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Thu, 29 Jul 2004
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There seems to be some (karmic?) balance in the news today. The insanity
concerning the INDUCE Act seems to be balanced by what appears to be
careful consideration at the FCC concerning swapping
out WiFi antennas. Sorry for the use of /. links, it was the
quickest way to post this.
joat: 07:00:00 29 Jul 2004 |
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Thu, 22 Jul 2004
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Orin Kerr has a mailing
list to which he posts various crime and court cases. If you like
Groklaw, you'll like this mailing
list.
joat: 07:00:00 22 Jul 2004 |
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Wed, 21 Jul 2004
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Not sure if i blogged this before but it's a story about a 419'er being caught red-handed.
joat: 07:00:00 21 Jul 2004 |
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