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Still no junk email in the mailbag. Very interesting. A couple of more days
and I can mark this up as the spamless week.
Despite a sweeping search for the culprit or culprits, the US Justice Department
said Thursday it had not identified who was responsible or what prompted
the raids. The Pentagon is reviewing the 10,000 or so defense networks to
make sure that some of these have not been tampered with and used in the
d-o-s attacks.
Some are hyping the ultimate e-business model for the Internet: aka the
E-Bay online auction thing
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NO inventory and NO deliveries -- just charge your mediation fee.
Perhaps. But it has been noted before that the E-Bay model is flawed in how
many customers experience it.
Somehow, this next news item is disturbing...
Mandatory ID-marking of dogs proposed by Swedish government.
The marking will be either by ear tattoo or by using an implanted microchip,
and connected to a national registry of dog owners.
For some reason, the term "pilot study" comes to mind, because I have in
the past few years seen several serious suggestions that relate to implanted
chips with links to GPS and ID registries as a supplement to, or replacement
for.traditional identification and authentication methods. Some have been
open enough to say that large scale implant programs without the subjects
necessarily being aware of being implanted are feasible .And please note,
I am here not referring to the fringe community that have been raving about
this sort of thing for years, but to the serious, commercial developers of
the technique. I am not especially thrilled at the prospect of a bodily GUID.
Critics of the recently submitted UK legislation to regulate covert
surveillance say the law could make a criminal out of anyone who
uses encryption to protect their privacy on the internet. The issue here
is that the Bill proposes that the police or the security services should
have the power to force someone to hand over decryption keys or the plain
text of specified materials, such as e-mails, and jail those who refuse.
People must be able to prove they did not have a requested key -- an impossible
defence for someone who has lost the software code. A law such as this which
presumes someone guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent is not
compatible with the Human Rights Act.
Indicators of the Swedish legal climate...¨
Slap costs job and fines. A woman teacher in upper grade
school lost her job and was subsequently fined 6000 Crowns (USD 700) after
being sued by the pupil. The story is that the pupil felt unjustly accused
of cheating on an essay because of a written comment by the teacher, so she
confronted the teacher about this. The argument moved from corridor into
classroom and grew heated enough so that, as the teacher says, she involuntarily
slapped the girl with her left hand. The teacher immediately made a public
apology. She went on sick leave for two weeks, but later lost her job because
of the incident. Meanwhile the pupil went to court and demanded the 6000
as compensation, and when the case came up a year later, won. Mild assault.
It should be noted that lawsuits are not that common here, and compensations
not often awarded, and even then rarely for significant sums.
Prosecuted for pedophilic porn. Accused 21 year-old claims
that he received unsolicited porn picture files, and that his visits to
child-porn sites was with the intent to harass them by repeatedly downloading
hundreds of files at a time. He claims that he immediately erased the files
without looking at them. Police searched his home and found 27 apparently
empty diskettes. Using special tools, police experts recovered evidence that
the erased diskettes had contained pornographic pictures. (Unclear
from article whether files were just deleted, or the disk in fact
"wiped".) The man had however been running a fileserver program
(? again, article is not clear except to imply not an ordinary
website) with some porn content "to attract visitors" to his own
site. Learning some weeks before the police visit that he might be at risk,
he had deleted all porn files from his system.
If convicted, he risks up to two years prison for possession or
dissemination of child pornography. Granted, none of the accused's actions
seem particularly bright. What I do find interesting about this is that the
newspaper article implies the police are at least in part building their
case on deleted -- or even wiped -- data files, which their experts
have reconstructed as evidence. From other contexts it's known that files
still in a browser cache may be legitimate evidence as well, along with history
files and server logs.
The lesson is clear enough. Don't do the wrong things in the wrong context
at the wrong time, whatever your intentions. One does come away wondering
what these new Internet snoops are monitoring, and how. An interesting puzzle
to consider is what happens when you receive "blank" media from somewhere,
which later police reconstruction can show contained illegal files? After
all, people have bought "recycled" videotape that turned out to have unerased
porn films on it. What if you get a legitimate file on a disk from a friend,
and later investigations reveal it had earlier been used to store porn files?
Hmm, unfortunately, legal precedent is that bona fide purchase or
possession is not always accepted, even when the real past history is
not knowable at the time -- as innocent used car buyers have found to their
loss.
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The
update-link (above) points to where I last added
some text -- I have so far not implemented a current-entry page, nor a day
per page, but instead stayed with the week-per-page format.
about it, without getting too technical.
