LuminousVoid

The ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century. According to Human Events, the “national conservative weekly.” Includes Marx, Hitler, Kinsey, and Keynes:

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

Also with 15 “honorable mentions,” including Adorno, Gramsci, Darwin, Mill and Nader.

My wishlist grows.

So Intel is going to build DRM at the hardware level in its new chips: Intel quietly adds DRM to new chips.

Officially launched worldwide on the May 26, the new offerings come DRM-enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case.

Looks like my earlier idea to move to Mac is getting another boost. Why would I want hardware that gives someone else control over what I do with my computer, and takes it away from me? Of course, I shouldn’t put it past Apple to do this sort of stuff too, given their content focus.

However, Tucker ducked questions regarding technical details of how embedded DRM would work saying it was not in the interests of his company to spell out how the technology in the interests of security.

I really hope that’s PR, and not an actual security-through-obscurity plan. This new DRM is supposed to come with an on-board “active management technology” which gives a lot of firmware level (ie, your hardrives, your BIOS settings etc..) access to remote users. That’s very troubling from a security perspective.

I’m really curious how this DRM is going to work. It can’t be that hard to use software to fool your hardware into playing content that’s locked up.

I have previously blogged about the WMATA Smartrip cards. These are RFID enabled platstic cards that are used in the DC metro system. These are different than the paper farecards which are normally discarded after several uses.

EPIC submitted a FOIA request for what sorts of data are kept, and confirmed that data is maintained is associated with the individual data, and is maintained for up to a year detailing entry and exit points and times.

They also got some information on what is done with the data. Included in the FOIA is some subpoenas for SmarTrip data. This ties in to EPIC’s comments on WMATA’s policy of disclosing this data. WMATA is working on their policy and has recently published a revised draft of their policy.

WMATA is proposing to allow law enforcement access to personally identifiable data without requiring a court order. Other than that, access to personally identifiable data is available via a court order or to the subject of the data. Notably, third parties cannot get the data even if they have permission of the subject to do so.

Normally, people who tell are rewarded for coming forward. It can take the form of a reward for catching a criminal. Or it can be in the form of reduced charges in a criminal prosecution for someone who informs on and/or testifies agaisnt others.

The folks over at ReportIllegals.com have come up with a new twist on the snitch industry: tap into the nativist wish to tell on undocumented migrants. Via their website, you can file a report of a “suspected illegal alien” or a “suspected illegal employer.” They then forward this report to the appropriate agencies. According to them:

It takes only a few minutes to file a report with our service, whereas it would typically take you several hours on your own to find the proper agency and complete and submit a report. Let us file the report and save you time.

I’m not sure who to think is the biggest jerk. The guy who’s gonna spend ten bucks to tell on an immigrant, or the guy that came up with the idea to charge that first guy 10 bucks for getting his nativist kicks.

CISCO is offering a new RFID based wireless security solution: the Wireless Location Appliance 2700. It’s a server that can use your wireless network to track the location of all wi-fi equipment and active RFID chips within your network. The server can store the data and provide “trend” data for how stuff moves around. The launch touted the use of the server to monitor the movement of medical equipment in a hospital.

With the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance, doctors, nurses, and support staff can spend less time searching for equipment and more time providing patient care. High-end medical equipment scheduled for routine maintenance can now also be located in minutes not days

The privacy problem? This can pretty easily be used to track employees in the workplace, once they are given RFID-tagged badges. Trend analysis will tell us who is spending too much time in the bathroom, or with other employees. Historical data will let an employer track who has been in the same room as the pro-union members of their workforce.

Retailing for 15K ought to slow the deployment of this technology as an employee tracker. But these prices won’t last, and to some employers, 15K might be worth it to monitor several hundred employees.

So I’m going to spend this summer working at EPIC. I think its going to be a real neat program. At the interview they told me they even have a syllabus for the summer clerks. Geek that I am, it sounds much more interesting than my firm-going colleagues who are going sailing and to baseball games.

I got my privacy grade. I beat the mean, which is good, given that I’m specializing in privacy and may end up with a career in it. What makes me feel really great about that is that my computer konked out during the exam and I had to write it longhand in bluebooks. That was awful. There I was listening to everyone clacking away while I sat there trying to tame my awful handwriting. All that while trying to write 3 coherent essays. I was expecting to get the lowest grade in the class.

Now that exams are over I should change the tagline at the top to 3L.

Congress is putting the finishing touches on the REAL ID act. Bruce Schneier has a rundown of its privacy and security implications. One of them is the national mandate that all driver’s licenses have machine readeable techonology.

The fear is that this will morph into a requirement or a defacto implementation of RFID in driver’s licenses.

Engadget has more.

I previously blogged the Broadcast Flag Oral Arguments.

The decision is now out. The unanimous court found that the ALA had standing, and that the FCC overstepped its authority. A quick perusal turns up this gem:

Intervenor MPAA, which does challenge petitioners’ standing, [the FCC did not] argues that any injury suffered by the Libraries . . . will be “due solely to the independent . . . decisions of third parties not before this court.” . . . Thus in the MPAA’s view, redress for petitioners must come from the hardware manufacturers, not the FCC. This is a specious argument.

The MPAA tried to say that if the broacast flag hurts you, its because people aren’t manufacturing equipment that would be allowed for your special circumstance, and thats just too bad. The court rejected that. Good stuff.

So I finished my privacy and trademarks exams. Both were well written. Trademarks even included as a fact pattern this recent issue: This post is rated G

The New York Times reports that the Motion Picture Association of America is sending cease-and-desist notices to fan fiction writers for merely rating their stories according to the MPAA’s G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 code.

As IdleGrasshopper has recently found out, sometimes professors read blogs. I don’t want to give any exam particulars because I don’t want to spoil grading anonymity.

Now just my papers are left. One is a little bit for art of lawyering. I take some of the literature on what influences whether people will work in the public interest after law school and use those conclusions to discuss GW’s recent decision to compress our semester. The compressed semester makes for a busier week, more compressed projects like journal writing and moot court, but allows for an extra week at the beginning of the semester so that people can go to lots of Fall Interview Program activities. It’s mostly done

The big one is about the multinational treaty limitations to orphan works solutions. Orphan works are those works that we cannot find an author for. Thus people who wish to incorporate or license those works have nowhere to turn to and we end up losing these works. So people are looking for a solution where users of these works can pay someone and not face willful infringement liability.

The Berne Convention and TRIPS both limit what we can do with our copyrights. Berne Art 5(2) says that we cannot have any “formalities” like requiring owners to register their names somewhere. TRIPS Art. 13 says that limitations of rights (such as what an orphan works solution would be) have to be limited to special situations that do not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder.

In trying to figure out how to bluebook a comment to a Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry on Orphan Works, I thought it might be useful to google “bluebook comment citation.” What I hit upon was this preview of the preface to the 18th edition of the Bluebook, coming out in the summer of 2005.

Skipping right down to Rule 18: Electronic Media, I got this:

Rule 18 has been almost completely re-written to account for the increasing use of Internet citation. Major changes include the categorization into two kinds of Internet citation (direct and parallel), the expanded use of analogy in Internet citation, and the addition of citation formats for blogs.

Fun fun fun.