Monday, June 04, 2007

Only 600 students, but it suggests that this type of information is completely out of control.

http://www.al.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-29/1180904393189240.xml&storylist=alabamanews

Some Gadsden State student records scattered on driveway

6/3/2007, 4:46 p.m. ET The Associated Press

ANNISTON, Ala. (AP) — Some Gadsden State Community College records containing personal information on some 400 students [actually 600 Bob] were found scattered across the driveway of an Anniston business.

Students taking an Art Appreciation class at the Ayers Campus between 2005 and 2006 had their names, grades and Social Security numbers scattered across the driveway.

Business owner Mike Sparks told Birmingham television station WBRC on Saturday that he saw the records blowing across the yard of his business as he mowed grass.

Gadsden State officials said they are looking into the incident and thanked Sparks for reporting the scattered records.

Information from: WBRC-TV, http://www.wbrc.com/index1.shtml



Once we can convince/coerce other countries to enact extreme laws, it is easier to adopt them here, claiming “we need to follow the rest of the world” Good strategy?

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005287.php

Latest U.S. Free Trade Agreement Contains New Twist

June 01, 2007

The US Trade Representative’s Office has just released the text of the U.S.- South Korea Free Trade Agreement and it makes for fascinating reading.

As those following the debate around the U.S.’s bilateral free trade agreements will know, since 2002 the last nine free trade agreements have required America’s trading partners to adopt very specific intellectual property laws and to provide a higher level of legal protection than international standards embodied in multilateral treaties. Like those before it, the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement requires Korea to create an anti-circumvention law mirroring the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, extend the copyright term to 70 years beyond the life of the author (beyond the international standard of life of author plus 50 years), create a pre-established statutory damages regime for potential copyright violations that is likely to chill research and innovation, and to adopt the complex U.S. online service provider “safe harbor” regime.

But the Korea FTA also includes several new and decidedly disturbing features. There are three side letters to the Intellectual Property chapter. The second focuses on “book piracy”. The third side letter includes the following statement:

“The Parties agree on the objective of shutting down Internet sites that permit the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or transmission of copyright works, of regularly assessing and actively seeking to reduce the impact of new technological means for committing online copyright piracy, and of providing generally for more effective enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet.”

This language is extraordinarily broad: it appears to apply not just to websites that are directly infringing copyright, but to any site that can be argued to be “permitting” certain activities – perhaps with BitTorrent in mind.



Is this good lobbying or ignorant legislatures?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/03/2143218&from=rss

Pro-ODF Legislation Loses In Six States

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 03, @08:16PM from the best-paid-suits dept. Microsoft IT Politics

ajanp writes "Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut which 'would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats.' A similar bill in Minnesota was changed to study the issue instead. There was heavy lobbying being done in private on both sides with one problem being 'the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath.' However, 'Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.'"



I suspect it is the age of the users that keeps most from the audio/video sources. Perhaps that is why training is the #3 “new initiative”

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/014996.html

June 03, 2007

LexisNexis Releases Survey on Information Professionals Use of Web 2.0 and KM

Press release: "LexisNexis, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced the results of a nationwide survey to provide insights into how Information Professionals (IPs) are adding value to their organizations through technology and knowledge management... The survey revealed an interesting breakdown and frequency of information sources accessed...nearly four in ten access Weblogs at least weekly (39%), and more than a third access wikis (34%)... More than nine in ten surveyed access news Web sites (92%), and company Web sites (93%) at least weekly (or more often). Video or audio podcasts were rarely accessed. Less than two in ten access video podcasts (16%), or audio podcasts (15%)."


So where do you get your news...

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/014989.html

June 03, 2007

International News and Problems with the News Media's RSS Feeds

"A new ICMPA study takes a look at the media's use of RSS and concludes that RSS feeds work very poorly for those who use news for more than infotainment. The study looked at 19 of the world's top news sites to see which ones gave the users of their RSS feeds the same number of stories, the same range of news sources, in as timely a fashion as could be gotten if those users went to the individual websites."



Attention Virtual Lawyers... (Is this the next big area of law?)

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070601/014044.shtml

Court Wants To Hear The Case Of The Second Life Land Deal Gone Bad

from the messy-situations dept

Late last year, we described the complicated case of a lawyer suing Linden Lab for kicking him out of Second Life and "reclaiming" some property he had purchased within the world. The case was quite complex for a variety of reasons. The guy was clearly exploiting a bug in Second Life that allowed him to buy the virtual land at below market values. However, Second Life touts the fact that you own whatever it is that you buy or build in their world, so simply taking it away could be questionable. Even more importantly, since Second Life is a fairly free form world. there's an interesting legal argument that anything that can be done in the world should be allowed, even if it wasn't what Linden Lab intended. Well, we may get to hear some of those arguments as the court hearing the case has turned down Linden Lab's request to have the case dismissed. There are lots of questions raised by this case that could clearly apply to other legal issues within virtual worlds, so it should be worth paying attention to the arguments both sides make, as well as the eventual decisions (and appeals).



A “Go to” site?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070603091639668

Resource: Morrison & Foerster's Privacy Library

Sunday, June 03 2007 @ 09:16 AM CDT - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Other Privacy News

Morrison & Foerster has launched a terrific website for international privacy law. The website features information about U.S. federal and state privacy statutes as well as the text of privacy laws from around the world. It's a fantastic website, especially for those interested in privacy statutes from other countries which are often hard to track down.

Source - Concurring Opinions (blog)

Web Site: Morrison & Foerster's Privacy Library

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