i-mature and RSA announced a partnership that uses bone scanning technology to determine a person’s age:

The partnership will work towards a unique solution that would genuinely improve the safety of the Internet for children, by enabling both adult and children’s sites to restrict their content more reliably to their appropriate audience.

i-Mature has developed an innovative technology that can determine, through a simple biometric bone-scanning test, whether a user is a child or an adult — and thereby control access to Internet sites and content. AGR technology could help prevent children from accessing adult Internet sites and prevents adults from accessing children’s sites and chat rooms.

Dave Farber has posted an extensive discussion of this topic here, here, here, here, here and here.

Hollywood takes away more fair use rights. Cory Doctorow:

Every year, EFF president Brad Templeton throws a special Superbowl party: they tivo the whole Superbowl, ignore the football, and watch the ads. This might be the last year that they get to do this, though: when the Broadcast Flag kicks in this summer, this kind of shenanigan will require hardware that’s illegal to make and sell:

Slashdot discussion Microsoft’s recent PTO office application for compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates, in which the software giant explains how a floating-point number can also be represented as a less-precise integer that’s displayed in base-30 notation!

Cory Doctorow:

Chicago spent $270 million on its Millennium Park, placing a big public sculpture by Anish Kapoor in the middle of it, bought with public money. Woe betide any member of the public who tries to photograph this sculpture, though: it’s a copyrighted sculpture and Chicago is spending even more money policing Chicagoans who try to photograph it and make a record of what their tax-dollars bought.

Paul Biggar:

It seems that horrible day has come when my computer will no longer truly be mine. Since about 2000 we’ve heard about Palladium and Trusted Computing waiting in the wings for the day that I can no longer trust my computer, and my computer demands that it can trust me.
Digital Rights (restrictions) Management means that you can no longer play media which is not yours. Or, in its current implementation, you cannot use something which you have bought, in a way which you are legally entitled to play it, because the content owners do not wish it. Once Dell and others start shipping these chips, and Windows provides for it, then everything must be DRM, and non-DRM applications and hardware are rendered useless.

What can you do? Support the EFF and perhaps, buy a mac while it’s still open.

Slashdot:

The EFF filed a FOIA request yesterday with the FBI and other offices of the US DOJ regarding expanded powers granted by the USA PATRIOT Act. The EFF is making the request in an attempt to find out whether or not Section 216 is being used to monitor web browsing without a warrant. The DOJ has already stated they can collect email and IP addresses, but has not been forthcoming on the subject of URL addresses. It seems the EFF is seeking any documentation to confirm such activity is taking place. One can only hope the automated FOIA search doesn’t produce any false negatives or cost the EFF $372,999.”

The Electronic Freedom Foundation is making a list of technologically advanced, otherwise desirable gizmos threatened by folks who don’t understand that intellectual property protections are supposed to spur innovation, not suppress it. Support the EFF. Via Virginia Postrel.

Richard Smith summarizes the story of a Tukwila, Washington firefighter – Philip Scott Lyons. Lyons, a Safeway loyalty cardholder was arrested last August and charged with attempted arson:

According to the KOMO-TV and the Seattle Times, a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police investigators had discovered that his Club Card was used to buy fire starters of the same type used in the arson attempt.

For Lyons, the story did have a happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in January 2005 because another person stepped forward saying he set the fire and not Lyons. Lyons is now back at work after more than 5 months of being on administrative leave from his firefighter job.

The moral of this story is that even the most innocent database can be used against a person in a criminal investigation turning their lives completelyupside down.