Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Three from BNA News: LOCAL GERMAN GOV'T CLAIMS VICTORY OVER HATE WEB SITES The Dusseldorf district government has claimed success in its battle against the "misuse of media." Authorities have have blocked 76 hate web sites and have won all of the cases they brought to court. Now, Büssow plans to launch a campaign against phishing and private betting on sports events in the Internet. AMAZON WINS ONE-CLICK PATENT APPEAL DECISION Amazon.com has won what could have been an expensive dispute over whether its 1-Click checkout system was patented by another company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals, on Monday upheld a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Amazon. REPORT FINDS OVER 30% OF DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES IMPROPER A new study from legal clinics at USC and UC Berkeley that reviewed over 900 DMCA takedown notices collected from the Chilling Effects project. The report finds that nearly one-third of all notices were improper. Report (PDF) 12:10:51 PM    comment []

A Benton Headline: SELF 2.0: INTERNET USERS PUT A BEST FACE FORWARD [SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Yuki Noguchi] People spend more of their lives online -- the average American Internet user spends 80 hours a month online at work and 30 hours at home, according to Nielsen-NetRatings -- and Web-based interactions are evolving to look less like word-based messaging and more like facsimiles of physical existence. Tens of millions of Internet users have online doppelgangers they design to act as their proxy online -- communicating, shopping and socializing on their behalf and expressing themselves through humanoid gestures, voices and facial expressions. 12:10:47 PM    comment []

Three from BNA News: LOCAL GERMAN GOV'T CLAIMS VICTORY OVER HATE WEB SITES The Dusseldorf district government has claimed success in its battle against the "misuse of media." Authorities have have blocked 76 hate web sites and have won all of the cases they brought to court. Now, Büssow plans to launch a campaign against phishing and private betting on sports events in the Internet. AMAZON WINS ONE-CLICK PATENT APPEAL DECISION Amazon.com has won what could have been an expensive dispute over whether its 1-Click checkout system was patented by another company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals, on Monday upheld a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Amazon. REPORT FINDS OVER 30% OF DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES IMPROPER A new study from legal clinics at USC and UC Berkeley that reviewed over 900 DMCA takedown notices collected from the Chilling Effects project. The report finds that nearly one-third of all notices were improper. Report (PDF) 11:10:46 AM    comment []

Three from BNA News: LOCAL GERMAN GOV'T CLAIMS VICTORY OVER HATE WEB SITES The Dusseldorf district government has claimed success in its battle against the "misuse of media." Authorities have have blocked 76 hate web sites and have won all of the cases they brought to court. Now, Büssow plans to launch a campaign against phishing and private betting on sports events in the Internet. AMAZON WINS ONE-CLICK PATENT APPEAL DECISION Amazon.com has won what could have been an expensive dispute over whether its 1-Click checkout system was patented by another company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals, on Monday upheld a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Amazon. REPORT FINDS OVER 30% OF DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES IMPROPER A new study from legal clinics at USC and UC Berkeley that reviewed over 900 DMCA takedown notices collected from the Chilling Effects project. The report finds that nearly one-third of all notices were improper. Report (PDF) 11:10:42 AM    comment []

Three from BNA News: LOCAL GERMAN GOV'T CLAIMS VICTORY OVER HATE WEB SITES The Dusseldorf district government has claimed success in its battle against the "misuse of media." Authorities have have blocked 76 hate web sites and have won all of the cases they brought to court. Now, Büssow plans to launch a campaign against phishing and private betting on sports events in the Internet. AMAZON WINS ONE-CLICK PATENT APPEAL DECISION Amazon.com has won what could have been an expensive dispute over whether its 1-Click checkout system was patented by another company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals, on Monday upheld a lower court's grant of summary judgment to Amazon. REPORT FINDS OVER 30% OF DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES IMPROPER A new study from legal clinics at USC and UC Berkeley that reviewed over 900 DMCA takedown notices collected from the Chilling Effects project. The report finds that nearly one-third of all notices were improper. Report (PDF) 11:10:37 AM    comment []

Dark Cloud Hovers Over Black Hat. New corporate ownership won't exempt the bleeding-edge security conference from future Ciscogates, and clashing court decisions leave the outcome up for grabs. Commentary by Jennifer Granick. [Wired News] 6:42:50 AM    comment []

How Badly Do I Want a Programmer at Work?. This badly. Chris Deweese over at our sister Illinois system Lewis & Clark LS went and implemented yet another thing Kate and I have been talking about for months. Except he got beyond the talking stage because he’s a programmer. I hate that LCLS is doing a lot of the things I’ve wanted to do simply because they have someone on staff devoted to implementing this kind of stuff.  And I really hate the fact that Chris has started a new blog called “the lcls weboratory: from our minds to the web” at the URL http://labs.lcls.org/. “Labs!” Okay, so replace the word “hate” with the word “love” in the above paragraph, but I still really want a programmer at work! [The Shifted Librarian] 6:42:29 AM    comment []

Outsourcing to the Heartland. Outsourcing IT jobs to India hasn't been wholly successful. Now some companies are realizing there are plenty of outsourcing opportunities here in rural America. By Emma Johnson. [Wired News] 6:41:54 AM    comment []

Aspirin and the Regulation of Medicine. As we discuss the effects of various laws designed to protect us from various and sundry, we often lose track of the real, tangible benefits of liberty that we're giving up. They're sometimes hard to see, in the same way the Internet was hard to see in the early 90s. It was here, but most people didn't know about it. Bad laws could easily have prevented the rise of the web (and the reams of pornography it brought), or free, interconnected email (and the spam it brought). Many people would never have realized they were missing anything. It's one of the unfortunate things about limiting freedom: its hard to know what you might have had. There are many medicines that you can not buy in the US because of the FDA, and some which you can only because they predate the FDA. A prime example is aspirin. There's an interesting article about this in Medical Progress Today: As a drug discovery researcher, I can tell you something that might sound crazy: many of these older drugs would have a hard time getting approved today. Some of them would never even have made it to the FDA at all. The best example is aspirin itself. It's one of the foundation stones of the drug industry, and it's hard to even guess how many billions of doses of it have been taken over the last hundred years. But if you were somehow able to change history so that aspirin had never been discovered until this year, I can guarantee you that it would have died in the lab. No modern drug development organization would touch it. (Via Marginal Revolution.) [Emergent Chaos] 6:41:18 AM    comment []

On Education: School Radio Stations Face Competition Over Licenses. Some high school and college radio stations are fending off challenges to their licenses by Christian broadcasters. By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN. [NYT > Education] 6:40:45 AM    comment []

Oh, my: Top Texas Court Voids School Financing System. Texas school districts illegally use property taxes to pay for public education, the Texas Supreme Court ruled. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. [NYT > Education] 6:40:40 AM    comment []