Joseph Brownstein from ABC News forwarded me this article that absolutely infuriates me:

Copyright Silliness on Campus

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren’t expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies

…

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have bribed so many members of Congress that the house committees responsible for education and copyright have decided to bend over backwards and practically ask universities to expel students for copyright violations.

Congress constantly complains about America losing its technical superiority. Maybe if our universities receive the proper funding and are ask to concentrate on the things that really matter, we wouldn’t have this problem?

As reported from Slashdot and BBC, Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the maker of HD-DVD’s encryption scheme has declared war on the blogging community.

It all started when AACS’s HD-DVD encryption was cracked and the compromised key began leaking onto the web. Instead of perfecting their technology, AACS decided to pressure various websites (including the tremendously popular digg) to remove the offending key. The online community revolted and the compromised key soon appeared all over the web.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Now AACS is promising legal and technical recourse for EVERYONE who posts the above key. (Read BBC’s account here, and slashdot’s account here). Hey, if they want a war, we’ll give them a war.

What is kind of amusing and sad about all of this is that an unrevokable crack has already been developed by the good folks over at doom9. Read more about it here.

I am storongly against DRM technology in general, and as these implementations become more and more draconian, it’ll only be a matter of time before the general public revolts too.

Two decisions regarding technology were handed down by US courts today and I am once again disappointed by the result. Incidentally, the two cases just happen to be my two pet peeves, personal privacy and patents.

In the case of Vonage vs Verizon, a judge has issued an injunction against Vonage barring them from acquiring new customers on the grounds that Vonage has violated 3 very very broad software patents of Verizon’s. Not delving into the issue of whether software patents should be issued at all (and most of the world in fact do not issue software patents), Verizon’s own patents seem to cover nothing more than “obvious extensions” to current technology. See Clint Ricker’s brilliant analysis of the patents involved at his blog. Why can’t the US patent office do their job properly?!

In a much murkier case, a university student who was hacking sites like ebay.com was convicted based on evidence that the systems administrator of the network collected while hacking the student’s computer! Wire has published an article summarizing this case pretty well: Court Okays Counter-Hack of eBay Hacker’s Computer. This precedent can have potentially horrifying repercussions downstream. What stops Microsoft from deleting all of your files because they *think* you have a pirated version of Windows? or are we now going to let the RIAA hack computers that they *think* might contain pirated songs? Bruce Schneier, the CTO of Counterpane has written a great editorial about the subject: Vigilantism Is a Poor Response to Cyberattack.

Our civil liberties and our ability to innovate continue to get stymied by bad policies from the US government. Perhaps 1984 wasn’t nearly as fictional as people had thought.

Students often complain they are treated as nothing more than a collection of standardized scores and their GPAs. Well, it turns out adults are similarly judged by numbers, the most prominent of which is the credit score. Everyone from employers, banks to landlords use credit scores to get a quantiative measure of one’s “trustworthiness”. Even medical schools are beginning to use credit scores to evaluate applicants. When this single number is of such pervasive influence in everyday life, one might have expected strong government oversight… but you’d be wrong.

Until recently, most consumers have no idea what’s in their credit report. The information within it can be completely wrong and they wouldn’t even know! It wasn’t until 2003 that US Congress passed the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act (FACTA). It finally guaranteed consumers access to one annual credit report from each of the 3 major consumer credit agencies: TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. Exparian, of course just couldn’t wait to create some confusion for consumers. While the government mandated credit reports can be obtained here:

http://www.annualcreditreport.com

Experian decided they would operate a PAID credit viewing service here:

http://www.freecreditreport.com

When a service charges 13 dollars a month to view credit reports, how exactly does that qualify as free? MSNBC has even written an article on this most blatant deceptive marketing scam.

Don’t fall for FreeCreditReport.com

Also one year ago, credit bureau Experian was also slapped on the wrist by the Federal Trade Commission for misleading consumers at its FreeCreditReport.com Web site. The FTC said Experian didn’t make clear to consumers that they would be charged $79 for an annual subscription after they signed up at FreeCreditReport.com.

What the FTC didn’t say (but was abundantly clear to anyone with a brain) was that FreeCreditReport.com and Experian were benefiting from confusion over news stories telling consumers were entitled to a free copy of their credit report every year. And the site was designed to add to the confusion.

While not admitting wrongdoing, Experian agreed last August to give consumers refunds and make the terms of its product clearer.

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Given all the confusion, and the legal action, it’s amazing that FreeCreditReport.com is allowed to continue operating. I know it continues to cause mix-ups. Earlier this year, during the hubbub about the missing Veterans Administration laptop, I heard experts testifying before Congress point to the wrong site by accident.

Exparian has even recruited other websites (including movie ticket websites!) to sign up unsuspecting consumers onto their service, hoping they wouldn’t look hard enough at their credit cards bills to notice this recurring charge:

CIC*Triple Advantage877-4816825

The few times we actually need lawyers for a class action lawsuit and they are nowhere to be found!

Via Sara at Orcinus (read at Geoff’s blog):

I’ve been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America’s top universities. The message is short and simple: “Teach what you like, it’s all fine with us. But if you put ID in your science courses, we will not accept those courses as adequate for admission to our campus.”

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In a story that seems to have gotten almost no attention outside the local area, the University of California — the nation’s largest university system (motto: Fiat Lux, or “let there be light”) — has been engaged in a legal battle with Calvary Chapel Christian School over the question of what is an acceptable science education, and what rights a university has when it comes to drawing those lines.

While various school boards around the country continue to start small skirmishes over the merits of intelligent design, it is nice to finally see a university take a firm stand in such matters. It is very frustrating, and indeed quite maddening to watch so many institutions capitulate to the mere possibility of bad publicity. Whatever happened to standing up for one’s principles?