Do you suppose this will become commonplace? (Lots of interesting ideas in the comments, too.)

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/26/1425201&from=rss

Disabling the RFID in the New U.S. Passports?

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday December 26, @10:19AM from the very-high-tech dept.

slashchuck writes "Along with the usual Jargonwatch and Wired/Tired articles, the January issue of Wired offers a drastic method for taking care of that RFID chip in your passport. They say it's legal ... if a bit blunt. From the article: 'The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn't invalidate the passport, [Want to bet? Bob] so you can still use it.' While this seems a bit extreme, all indications seem to be these chips aren't very secure. How far will you go to protect or disable the RFID chip in your passport? Do you think such a step is necessary? Does anyone have an argument in favor of the technology's implementation here? "

Inevitable, but it looks like the “time to adoption” David Paul measured for the dynamo (20 years) is much shorter for technology that does not require a capital investment.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/26/1510207&from=rss

DVD Player Ownership Surpasses VCR Ownership

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday December 26, @12:04PM from the just-in-time-for-a-new-format dept.

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an Ars Technica post stating that, for the first time, more U.S. consumers own a DVD player than own a VCR. The DVD player dropped below $100 quite some time ago, but the third quarter of this year saw the percentage of DVD player ownership reach 81.2. Only 79.2% of consumers now own VCR players, reports Nielsen.

From the article: "For all of the talk about the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray, both technologies are far, far away from most family rooms. Yes, the two are just now beginning what could be a long battle for entertainment-center supremacy, but keep in mind that the technology that they are vying to replace has only recently gained the upper hand against the previous-generation technology--a decade after first being introduced. Even if Blu-ray or HD DVD unexpectedly routs its opponent from the market in the next two or three years, it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD."

No politician will want their words used against them.

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/27/0333256&from=rss

Liberating & Restricting C-SPAN's Floor Footage

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 27, @06:43AM from the bye-bye-insomnia dept. The Media United States Politics

bigmammoth writes "C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the U.S. government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high-quality Ogg Theora using all open source software, guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view-only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions." (Continues)

"If C-SPAN succeeds, reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all already 'liberated' committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of 'dignity and decorum' and will be denying C-SPANS request."

Can you do this anonymously?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/013373.html

December 26, 2006

Identity Theft Task Force Seeks Public Comment

Press release: "The Federal Identity Theft Task Force, chaired by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and co-chaired by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, is seeking public comment on ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of federal government efforts to reduce identity theft. The public comments on these issues will supplement the research and analysis being conducted, provide further information about the proposals being considered, and identify areas where additional recommendations may be warranted. The Task Force was established by an Executive Order 13402 on May 10, 2006."

• Statement by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras On US SAFE WEB Act Being Signed Into Law by President George W. Bush, December 26, 2006

Attention Virtual Lawyers!

http://techdirt.com/articles/20061226/103514.shtml

Korea Doesn't Want That Virtual Currency To Be Traded For Real Money

from the and-you-will-do-this-how-exactly? dept

It's not like people haven't been warning others around the world about the potential tricky issues that come up with online worlds and offline laws -- but it seems that no one paid much attention and everyone simply plowed onwards. As these worlds gain more attention and users (though, perhaps not as many as the press would have you believe), governments are increasingly taking an interest in them. There's the obvious issue of taxation of virtual winnings, which some governments are starting to explore, but a bigger issue may be the secondary economies found within these worlds, and what that means for government-level monetary policy. The idea that of these kinds of secondary currency systems forming beneath the surface of official currencies is nothing new at all, but are usually narrowly focused on local communities. However, when that "local community" suddenly gets much bigger thanks to the internet, it can represent a big issue.

It appears that South Korean politicians are trying to tackle this issue, but are doing so badly. They've put forth legislation that would ban the trading of virtual currencies, as an attempt to cut off the use of in-game money as an alternative to real money. Of course, trading virtual currencies and objects from within these games is a big part of the appeal of the games -- and has proven pretty much unstoppable for games that have tried to prevent it from happening. Black markets open up very quickly. To make matters even worse, the South Korean proposal only looks to ban the trading of in-game currencies, not in-game items. In other words, all you need to do if you want to trade in-game currency is buy some sort of object in the game, and then trade or sell that, and you've now stayed within the law, but accomplished the same exact thing. It's no surprise that governments are worried about these non-regulated currencies, but simply announcing a ban on trading them clearly isn't going to be very effective.

“We don't want to spend money to deliver what we promised our customers, so we will spend money to ensure the service becomes worse!” (Promise everything, deliver within budget.)

http://techdirt.com/articles/20061226/100457.shtml

Trying To Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic Will Backfire, Badly

from the bad-bad-plan dept

Over the past couple of years, a bunch of ISPs have started (usually quietly) applying traffic shaping efforts to slow down your high bandwidth applications like BitTorrent. This is part of what the whole network neutrality debate is about, but this has more to do with the ISPs trying to keep out services that use up more bandwidth then they budgeted for. What it really represents is the inability of ISPs to recognize a simple fact: if you offer people bandwidth, they'll figure out ways to use it. [Amen! Bob] The ISPs got into this big race with each other, and all promised unlimited bandwidth at cheap prices, making the calculation that the demand for bandwidth wouldn't increase very much, and most people wouldn't use very much at all. They were wrong. But, rather than admit that they made a mistake, they suddenly pretend that the "all you can eat" broadband they sold you is something different -- one where they can arbitrarily limit what you can do with that bandwidth. They sold you one thing, with the belief that you wouldn't actually use it, and now that you are, they're shoving in place temporary fixes to stop you from using what they sold you. Of course, there are many who believe the whole thing is simply a ruse to try to charge everyone more money, a concept that gained steam when a loose-lipped CTO from Qwest admitted that file sharing traffic isn't actually much of a burden for them, and he didn't understand other ISPs claiming it was such a problem.

The funny thing, though, is that whether or not it really is a burden, the idea of using traffic shaping is absolutely going to backfire. As we've already discussed, the more ISPs try to snoop on or "shape" your internet usage, the more that's going to be a great selling point for encryption. People are going to increasingly encrypt all of their internet usage, from regular surfing, to file sharing to VoIP -- as it makes it that much more difficult to figure out what kind of traffic is what and to do anything with it. Broadband Reports today is moderating something of a debate on whether or not encrypting BitTorrent is a good thing, with Wired taking the bad side and TorrentFreak (not surprisingly) taking the good side. Of course, it's really all a matter of perspective. It may be good for some people or bad for the others -- but what's most amusing, is that encrypting all of this traffic will simply add a lot of overhead for the ISPs to deal with. That means, for all their talk about how file sharing traffic was a burden on their network, by trying to slow it down with traffic shaping, they're only likely to increase the burden as everyone shifts to encrypted systems making it more difficult and more costly for them to do anything about it. Add to this that the traffic shaping hardware costs money that could have gone into simply upgrading their overall network, and it seems doubly problematic. They're left with an expensive solution that doesn't solve the issue and actually makes it worse, when they could have just spent more on upgrading their network to handle more capacity.

Remember the “Streisand effect!”

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20061227063053769

Cyberspace Sex Scandal Heads to Trial

Wednesday, December 27 2006 @ 07:00 AM CST - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Internet & Computers

WASHINGTON - When Robert Steinbuch discovered his girlfriend had discussed intimate details about their sex life in her online diary, the Capitol Hill staffer didn't just get mad. He got a lawyer. Soon, though, the racy tidbits about the sex lives of the two Senate aides faded from the front pages and the gossip pages. Steinbuch accepted a teaching job in Arkansas, leaving Washington and Jessica Cutler's "Washingtonienne" Web log behind.

While sex scandals turn over quickly in this city, lawsuits do not. Steinbuch's case over the embarrassing, sexually charged blog appears headed for an embarrassing, sexually charged trial.

Lurid testimony about spanking, handcuffs and prostitution aside, the Washingtonienne case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline.

Source - AP

Would denying these records to an insurer aide in a fraud?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20061226093135615

Spread of Records Stirs Patient Fears Of Privacy Erosion

Tuesday, December 26 2006 @ 09:53 AM CST - Contributed by: PrivacyNews - Medical Privacy

After her fiancé died suddenly, Patricia Galvin left New York for San Francisco in 1996 and took a job as a tax lawyer for a large law firm. A few years later, she began confiding to a psychologist at Stanford Hospital & Clinics about her relationships with family, friends and co-workers.

Then, in 2001, she was rear-ended at a red light. When she later sought disability benefits for chronic back pain, her insurer turned her down, citing information contained in her psychologist's notes. The notes, her insurer maintained, showed she wasn't too injured to work.

Ms. Galvin, 51 years old, was appalled. It wasn't just that she believed her insurer misinterpreted the notes. Her therapist, she says, had assured her the records from her sessions would remain confidential.

As the health-care industry embraces electronic record-keeping, millions of pages of old documents are being scanned into computers across the country. The goal is to make patient records more complete and readily available for diagnosis, treatment and claims-payment purposes. But the move has kindled patient concern about who might gain access to sensitive medical files -- data that now can be transmitted with the click of a computer mouse.

Source - Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)

Related - Kaiser Permanente's Privacy Policy

A collaboration tool or a way to snoop?

http://digg.com/software/Google_Notebook_Search_Go_through_people_s_notebooks

Google Notebook Search: Go through people's notebooks

Google Notebook Search is still a Google Labs service, but it's open to the public. It lets you search through everyone's public notebooks. Fun.

http://www.google.com/notebook/search

Attention Class Action Lawyers?

http://www.metrowii.com/2006/12/and_now_the_wii.html

And now the Wiixercises !!!

Wii_yoga The British Chiropractic Association has advised people to warm up before playing the Wii games. They are advising people to consider the Wii session as a form of excersise and hence do a warm up and a cool down. Players can then avoid “stiffness and possible injuries.”