More On Sony: Hacking Your Customers

Chris Gulker, The Coverup is the Crime:

Unlike Cyveillance, Sony only uses this reprehensible technique on paying customers: so let’s shoot the guys who are buying our stuff? Am I alone in thinking these guys are not serving shareholder interests well? Hack the paying customers and make it hard for them to hear the CD they purchased? Yikes. It’s easier, and much smarter, to steal the music, than buy it, if your purchased CD makes your CD player, and possibly your whole computer, unusable.

Baldwin Votes Against Internet Free Speech

Tammy Baldwin voted against internet free speech yesterday [The House voted 225 to 182 on the Online Freedom of Speech Act (H.R. 1606) — a majority but less than the two-thirds required for a “suspension” bill to clear the House. via instapundit]. An explanation would be useful. Jim Abrams has more. There’s certainly growing activism online. Adding complexity via more and more laws will be a loss for everyone (which is, perhaps one perspective of Baldwin and others who voted against H.R. 1606). Google News has more. As is typical, the small players get screwed in these deals, while the special interests on both sides spend money to get around the legal spaghetti, as we saw in the last national elections.

Ed Cone says “Email your congressman and tell him you want to blog without Federal regulation.”

Wisconsin’s House delegation voted as follows: Mark Green (R) voted Yes along with Ron Kind (D), Jim Sensenbrenner (R) – (I agree on something with Sensenbrenner???) and Mark Ryan (R).

Voting No with Baldwin (D) were Petri (R), Obey (D) and Moore (D).

Send Tammy Baldwin a note with your views on this important, local issue.

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren’s supportive comments on this bill. Slashdot and Declan have more.

Our Tax Dollars at Work: Hollywood Lobbyists’ Halloween Work

Slashdot:

BoingBoing has an interesting article about a joint RIAA/MPAA move started yesterday on Capitol Hill. From the article: ‘Hollywood has fielded a shockingly ambitious piece of Analog Hole legislation while everyone was out partying in costume. Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.

No Cell Phone Tracking Without Probable Cause

EFF:

Agreeing with a brief submitted by EFF, a federal judge forcefully rejected the government’s request to track the location of a mobile phone user without a warrant.
Strongly reaffirming an earlier decision, Federal Magistrate James Orenstein in New York comprehensively smacked down every argument made by the government in an extensive, fifty-seven page opinion issued this week. Judge Orenstein decided, as EFF has urged, that tracking cell phone users in real time required a showing of probable cause that a crime was being committed. Judge Orenstein’s opinion was decisive, and referred to government arguments variously as “unsupported,” “misleading,” “contrived,” and a “Hail Mary.”

Feds Push Colleges to Upgrade Networks for Monitoring

Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton:

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.
The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.