Joseph Menn:

The standards are intended to weed out impostors applying for licenses, in part by requiring state employees to check on the validity of birth certificates and other supporting documents. After states adopt the necessary changes, anyone applying for or renewing a license will get one reflecting the new standards.
But once the law takes full effect three years from now, it will also give many more bureaucrats access to personal information on people nationwide. And it will add more data to each file — including digital copies of documents with birth and address information.
To some industry experts and activists concerned about the fast- growing crime of identity theft, putting so much data before more eyes guarantees abuse at a time when people are increasingly concerned about who sees their personal information and how it gets used.
“It’s a gigantic treasure trove for those who are bent on obtaining data for the purpose of creating fake identities,” said Beth Givens of the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Armed with a stranger’s name, Social Security number and date of birth, it’s not hard for fraudsters to take out bogus loans that can wreck a victim’s credit record.

Additional Background. Let Senators Kohl & Feingold know your views on this latest personal information grab.

Art Wolinsky:

Wait a minute… Let me see if I have this right. You installed Dell Support on my computer and then tell me that if I don’t want the upgrade, I’m going to have to pay you help me get off what you put on?
After some discussion, it is absolutely clear that is the case with “no exceptions”. Any software support I need, no matter what the nature of that support, I am going to have to pay for.

Similar to Microsoft charging for anti-virus software…

Andrew Leonard:

Haven’t we seen this rerun before? A particular version of file-sharing software becomes popular. The entertainment industry starts paying attention. Lawsuits begin to fly. A few people get their fingers burned, and then we do it all over again. Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and now BitTorrent — the names change but the story doesn’t. The software will get better and the busts will get bigger. Same as it ever was.
The latest news in the file-sharing wars was delivered via a press release from the Department of Justice with all the solemn portentousness of an announcement that a major terrorist had been captured. “This morning, agents of the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed 10 search warrants across the United States against leading members of a technologically sophisticated P2P network known as Elite Torrents.”

Intel is baking Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into its latest chipsets, according to the Register. Slashdot has a discussion as well. Bad news for wintel pc users as these tools mean that someone can shut down activities on your computer….
UPDATE: More

The Motion Picture Association of America:

The U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security today announced that they have shut down one of the world’s largest BitTorrent websites, Elite Torrents. Carrying out what is known as Operation D-Elite, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed search warrants against prominent members in Elite Torrents’ membership. Elite Torrents was one of the first peer to peer networks to post an illegal copy of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith before the movie officially opened in theaters last Thursday.

I’m not making this up….. Visit Elite Torrents and check out the home page, which now features US DOJ and DHS logos….


Copyright is important to some fair degree (Congress, via Hollywood money has greatly distorted the copyright law…). However, spending our tax dollars to save the latest Star Wars film is simply absurd. Let’s use some of that money for education or debt reduction.

Kim Zetter:

The bill, which California lawmakers believe is the first of its kind in the nation, would prohibit the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips in state identity documents such as student badges, driver’s licenses, medical cards and state employee cards. The bill allows for
some exceptions.
RFID, also known as contactless integrated circuits, transmits information wirelessly, allowing scanners to read cards from a distance, typically a few feet. The technology is widely used in building security and inventory-tracking systems, and is being considered for numerous other applications.
The bill, which passed out of the state Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday with a vote of 6 to 1, also would outlaw skimming — which occurs when an unauthorized person with an electronic reading device surreptitiously reads the electronic information on an RFID chip without the knowledge of the person carrying or wearing the chip.

I assume, unfortunately, based on our political leaders initial embrace of the Matrix personal data mining scheme, that we will not be as wise in Wisconsin…

Eugene Zinovyev (A UC Berkeley undergrad):

Today, entertainment lobby groups are consciously trying to prevent technological and creative progress in the United States.
Late in March, Ted Olson, the former solicitor general under the current President Bush and counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing against peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, likening them to services that allow users to exploit others’ property illegally with no legal repercussion. Yet, the analogy between his scenario and the sharing of music and movies is deeply flawed, because digital movies and songs are not property in the same sense that a car or a pair of shoes are.

UW Professor John Webster dropped an adviser tied to the Taser Company from his proposed taser experiment on pigs after USA Today revealed that the adviser was a paid consultant for the company that makes the stun guns. Google News