An article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes the ordeal of a college student and her fish trying to get home for the holidays. Suffice it to say that the TSA wasn't particularly helpful or supportive and the fish's life was at stake.

In a well-watched privacy case, the RIAA has been handed a defeat in its contest with Verzion over releasing personal information about subscribers. According to an article from USA Today, the US District Court of Appeals overturned the ruling and sided with Verizon (and the customers). This now throws into …

A very interesting article appears in tomorrow's Washington Post about Howard Dean, the Internet, Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase, and possible changes in our two-party system. The article reflects many ideas discussed here about disintermediation, including the reduction in organization size due to the Internet (little did I know …

According to an article from CNet, the Canadian courts have determined that downloading files from P2P services is legal, although uploading them is not (if you don't own the copyright). This continues the existing tradition of favoring individual use over copyright holders rights in Canada. The additional twist this time …

An article from the Washington Post tells about the arrest of a North Carolina man on charges of spam proliferation (specifically forging from addresses). Another amusing fact is that the Post is using the Spamhaus.org top ten list to call him number 8 on the top 10 list.

Most of us living in the DC area have them-- the little toll boxes that allow us to zip along without stopping to toss coins into the bin. The Associated Press has now written an article about using records from the EZPass system to help solve crimes. The system in …

SCO, in its reply to IBM's suit, has basically declared that they believe that the GPL is bunk and that therefore they don't need to follow it, according to an article from net legal site, Groklaw. According to the interpretation by the folks at Groklaw, the SCO folks would like …

According to a story on CNet, the Library of Congress has issued the new exemptions to the DMCA and they are minimal. The exemptions allow for the removal of copy protection systems in four specific cases: obsolete software that requires security dongles, e-books that don't provide for handicapped access (specifically …

An article from the Washington Post tells the unfortunately not-quite- unbelievable story of a judge in Nebraska who ordered a father "not to speak the Hispanic language" around his daughter. At the crux of the case is the defendant's relationship with his 5-year-old daughter from his girlfriend. It appears that …

An article from the Washington Post discusses some of the possible implications of a opinion by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit which vacates an FCC ruling that cable modem internet services are an "information service" as opposed to a "telecommunications service" and thus are not subject …

A good article on CNet today by Declan McCullagh about his recent set of exchanges with the FBI about preserving his records of interviews with accused hacker Adrian Lamo. Once again, the subject is the Patriot Act and its amazing expanding powers.

An article from CNet tells of a new state capital spending plan in Massachusetts that requires that preference be given to open source software and software that complies with open standards. Sounds like a pretty reasonably approach. It doesn't ban proprietary software outright, but moves to protect infrastructure by removing …

According to an article from CNet this morning, the State of California is joining Wisconsin and Minnesota in requiring VoIP carriers to submit to regulation as a telephone company. It remains unclear exactly what any of the three states expects to do with this regulation, but there are indications that …

Karl Auerbach (all-around good guy, former ICANN at-large member, California lawyer) points out in his latest weblog entry that Network Solutions (purveyors of SiteFinder, that place everyone now goes when they type in the wrong domain name) has started a new web site aimed at domain information privacy called InternetPrivacyAdvocate …

An article from BBC News discloses that 52 of the 251 people recently sued by the RIAA for file swapping have settled out of court for amounts ranging from $2,500 to $10,000 and that 832 people have voluntarily signed up for the so-called "amnesty" program that the RIAA …

An article from The Register describes letters reportedly sent to a number of journalists requesting source information about accused (and admitted) hacker Adrian Lamo. The article (originally appearing on the web site Security Focus, a clearinghouse for computer security information) goes on to describe the way in which the FBI …

In the gathering storm against SCO's attempt to gather licensing revenues from Linux, IBM has upped the ante once again, filing an amended complaint against SCO asking for, among other things, a declaratory judgment that would explicitly prohibit SCO from imposing additional restrictions on software that it had released under …

In what appears not to be the only case of its kind, the RIAA has withdrawn a suit against a Macintosh user who they claimed was using the Kazaa file sharing service to share 2,000 songs. The problem? Kazaa doesn't run on the Mac. According to an article in …

A report in the New York Times indicates that the Senate and House have now jointly removed most of the funding for the TIA (Terrorist Information Awareness -- previously Total Information Awareness) program of the Department of Defense. Questions were raised when the program sprung up after 9/11 that an …

An article from CircleID alerts the internet to the kinds of information that Verisign is gathering from you each time you mistype a URL. They are using services and software from Omniture to collect data about your browser, screen size, etc. And, just so they are able to track you …