http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=11784
Illinois court rejects Dendrite standard
June 22, 2010 by Dissent
It seems like just yesterday I was noting some progress in the courts in protecting online anonymous speech. Then today I came across this article by Douglas Lee about how the Illinois Court of Appeals rejected the Dendrite and Cahill standards in a case where anonymous online posters accused individuals of bribing public officials:
It’s cases like Maxon v. Ottawa Publishing Company that test what we’re willing to accept in the name of free speech.
[...]
In Maxon, Donald and Janet Maxon asked Ottawa, Ill., to change its ordinances so as to allow bed-and-breakfast establishments in residential areas. The local newspaper covered the city’s consideration of the request, and several readers posted comments on the issue on the newspaper’s Web site. To post a comment, a person had to register only with an e-mail address. Registrants did not have to give the newspaper their real names and could post comments under pseudonyms or screen names that did not reveal their identities.
Mary1955, FabFive from Ottawa, and birdie1 commented on the bed-and-breakfast issue frequently, expressing their opposition to the Maxons’ request and their displeasure with the city officials considering it. At one time or another, all three suggested the Maxons had bribed some of the officials.
[...]
The Maxons responded by filing a petition for discovery, a procedure under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 224 that allows parties to learn the identity of potential defendants before filing suit. In this case, the Maxons sought from the newspaper all information that would allow them to identify the three posters.
The trial court, relying on decisions from courts in New Jersey and Delaware, denied the petition, ruling that courts must take special precautions to protect the anonymity of Internet posters.
[...]
The Maxons appealed the trial court’s ruling to the Illinois Appellate Court, and on June 1 that court reversed. In a 2-1 decision, the court refused to follow Dendrite and Cahill, holding that the test applied in those cases misguidedly offered anonymous Internet speakers more protection from defamation claims than the law provided speakers who identified themselves.
[...]
Moreover, the court said, no reason exists to balance “the rights of the speaker to anonymity against the rights of a would-be plaintiff.” While acknowledging that “certain types of anonymous speech are constitutionally protected,” the court said “it is overly broad to assert that anonymous speech, in and of itself, warrants constitutional protection.”
Rather, the court held, anonymous Internet speakers enjoy the same protections from defamation claims as identified speakers — but not more. “[O]nce the petitioner has made out a prima facie case for defamation, the potential defendant has no first-amendment right to balance against the petitioner’s right to seek redress for damage to his reputation, as it is well settled that there is no first-amendment right to defame.” Therefore, “given that there is no constitutional right to defame, we find no need for the additional procedural requirements articulated in the Dendrite-Cahill test.”
[...]
Read more on the First Amendment Center.
Isn't this the equivalent of wearing a Raiders jersey to a Broncos game and “trusting” everyone to ignore it? If ignorance of the law is no excuse, isn't ignorance of technology (any tool you use) also inexcusable?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/packet-sniffing-laws-murky/
Packet-Sniffing Laws Murky as Open Wi-Fi Proliferates
Starbucks is rolling out free, unsecured Wi-Fi access at about 7,000 coffee shops across the United States beginning July 1. But will there be packet-sniffing with your latte?
… Google, in response to government inquiries and lawsuits, claims it is lawful to use packet-sniffing tools readily available on the internet to spy on and download payload data from others using the same open Wi-Fi access point.
“We believe it does not violate U.S. law to collect payload data from networks that are configured to be openly accessible (.pdf) (i.e., not secured by encryption and thus accessible by any user’s device). We emphasize that being lawful and being the right thing to do are two different things, and that collecting payload data was a mistake for which we are profoundly sorry,” Google wrote Congress.
… There’s no way to say how many unsecured hot spots dot the United States. McDonald’s announced in January that it would provide unsecured Wi-Fi access in 11,000 restaurants, and more businesses are expected to follow.
So far, government regulators aren’t sure whether Google committed any legal wrongdoing. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced Monday that as many as 30 attorneys general were examining the lawfulness of Google’s actions. But Blumenthal never said the Mountain View, California, internet giant’s activities were unlawful, going so far as to say they were “potentially impermissible.”
… Joel Gurin, the Federal Communications Commission’s government affairs chief, said “Google’s behavior also raises important concerns. Whether intentional or not, collecting information sent over Wi-Fi networks clearly infringes on consumer privacy.”
Like Blumenthal, Gurin stopped short of declaring such snooping unlawful and instead reminded consumers to be wary of open Wi-Fi networks.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes Google’s actions amount to wiretapping, and he asked the FCC to investigate.
What’s more, Rotenberg said U.S. policy should clearly spell out that such activity is illegal [even if that conflicts with the law? Bob] — all in a bid to encourage free Wi-Fi access and protect privacy.
“Telling everybody to race around and lock up their hot spots misses the point,” he said.
… The closest court ruling was in January, when an Oregon federal judge ruled evidence of child pornography found on a local man’s computer through his open Wi-Fi network could be used against him in court, absent a warrant. In arguing to uphold the warrantless computer search, the government said privacy interests were nullified with unsecured Wi-Fi networks.
(Related) This is the opposite of a “Please don't take advantage of the poor dumb schmucks” law.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20008539-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Aussie ISPs to cut off unsafe Web users?
An Australian government report into cybercrime has recommended that Internet service providers force customers to use antivirus and firewall software or risk being disconnected.
Belinda Neal, committee chair, said in her introduction to the 262-page report, titled "Hackers, Fraudsters and Botnets: Tackling the Problem of Cyber Crime," that due to the exponential growth of malware and other forms of cybercrime in recent years, "the expectation that end users should or can bear the sole responsibility for their own personal online security is no longer a tenable proposition."
[The report is available here:
It's all about trust – trust me.
Facebook Has Been Massively Underreporting Twitter App Users — By Over 6 Million
… As Inside Facebook (another site under InsideNetwork) noted yesterday, some change Facebook recently made appears to have corrected the stats for a number of apps. The aforementioned Facebook for Android shot up to 4.7 million MAU from its 67 — a 7 percent increase. The other big increase in the top 10 gainers? Twitter, which went from it’s previously reported number of just over 400,000 users, to nearly 7 million — a change of over 1,300 percent. And the app still appears to be growing pretty fast. The Twitter app’s own page on Facebook now confirms this new number.
This is not behavioral advertising, it's the Internet equivalent of flyers stuck on your door. (Now we need a mobile app to stick them under your windshield wherever you roam...)
Coming Soon, Web Ads Tailored To Your Zip+4
Posted by kdawson on Wednesday June 23, @08:17AM
On the heels of Apple's intention to collect and sell detailed location data comes word that Juniper is putting together technology that will allow any ISP to present you to advertisers by your Zip+4. An anonymous reader sends this snip from Wired:
"Your Internet service provider knows where you live, and soon, it will have a way to sell your zip code to advertisers so they can target ads by neighborhood. If your local pizza joint wants to find you, they will have a new way to do that. National advertisers will be able to market directly to neighborhoods with like characteristics across the whole country using demographic data they've been gathering for decades. ... Juniper Networks, which sells routers to ISPs, plans to start selling them add-on technology from digital marketer Feeva that affixes a tag inside the HTTP header, consisting of each user's 'zip+4' — a nine-digit zipcode that offers more accuracy than five-digit codes. Juniper hopes to sell the software to ISPs starting this summer, having announced a partnership with Feeva earlier this year."
Since nobody reads them, my Terms of Service require you to include me in you Will
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/its-your-data-its-your-bot-its-not-crime
It's Your Data, It's Your Bot: It's Not A Crime
Can public websites decide who is and is not a criminal through their terms of service? A brief EFF filed yesterday argues no.
The amicus brief is a follow-up to one we filed last month in Facebook v. Power Ventures. Facebook claims that Power breaks California criminal law by offering users a tool that aggregates their own information across several social networking sites.
… This is not an esoteric business issue, because the legal theories Facebook is pushing forward would make it a crime not to comply with terms of service.
This is a big issue in Cloud Computing generally, not just social networks...
Why Every Site Should Have A Data Portability Policy
Editor’s note: Today the DataPortability Project announces PortabilityPolicy.org – the result of a 16 month effort that it hopes the industry will embrace. This guest post explains what a Portability Policy is, why your site should have a one, and why you should be looking for them. The author, Elias Bizannes, is the chairperson and executive director of the DataPortability Project.
This is an old scam, but it was harder to detect when computers and applications crashed frequently. Contracts used to have 'up-time' requirements...
Arrests For Selling Poison-Ware In Spain
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 22, @09:06PM
"Spain's FBI equivalent has arrested the management of a software company (Google translation; Spanish original) for selling custom software to small and medium-sized businesses with 'controlled errors' that resulted in the software bombing on a predetermined date. They would then charge for fixing the problem and press the client into buying a maintenance contract. More than 1,000 clients were affected."
“Oh, wait! Our biggest contributors don't like 'works' they can't charge for.”
Court Takes Away Some of the Public Domain
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 22, @01:28PM
"In yet another bad ruling concerning copyright, a federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling, and said that it's okay for Congress retroactively to remove works from the public domain, even if publishers are already making use of those public-domain works. The lower court had said this was a First Amendment violation, but the appeals court said that if Congress felt taking away from the public domain was in its best interests, then there was no First Amendment violation at all. The ruling effectively says that Congress can violate the First Amendment, so long as it feels it has heard from enough people (in this case, RIAA and MPAA execs) to convince it that it needs to do what it has done."
TechDirt notes that the case will almost certainly be appealed.
Geeky stuff Including some potential security benefits.
How HTML5 Will Change the Web
Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday June 23, @09:40AM
"InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond the codec and plug-in wars to examine nine areas where HTML5 will have a significant impact on Web development. From enabling more interactive graphics, to tapping local file storage, to geolocation, HTML5 is rife with rich capabilities — and may even improve our ability to secure applications delivered via the Web, Wayner writes. But the most important impact of HTML5 will be its ability to simplify Web development itself: 'HTML5 offers one language (JavaScript), one data model (XML and DOM), and one set of layout rules (CSS) to bind text, audio, video, and graphics. The challenge of making something beautiful is still immense, but it's simpler to work with a unified standard.'"
An extremely interesting “Infographic” Seems I'll need a bigger thumbdrive...
http://gigaom.com/2010/06/22/cloud-computing/
The Big Shift: The Rise of Cloud Computing
For more cloud computing research, see GigaOM Pro (sub req’d). Or join the GigaOM Network at its annual cloud-focused conference, Structure, this Wednesday and Thursday in San Francisco.
These are for educational purposes only! (and I bought Playboy for the articles.)
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-quick-casual-google-search-games/
7 Quick & Casual Games You Can Play On Google Search
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