AP: Consumers get telemarketer relief (also see FTC's National "Do Not Call" Registry)

Associated Press: Cubs file lawsuit against rooftop owners (the Cubs should fare better in court than on the field)

Wired News: Big retailers squeeze FatWallet (Wal-Mart and other big retailers threaten bargain shopping site with copyright suit for reporting their sale prices)

BBspot: Ryder pledges to find the real shoplifters

InternetNews.com: AOL loses subscriber privacy suit (also see Reuters)

CNET News.com: Digital copyright law on trial (also see ACLU information on Edelman v. N2H2)

CNET News.com: Who owns your e-mail? (customer sues Canadian ISP that kept her account open for incoming e-mail but denied her access to the messages) (also see Privacy Commissioner of Canada ruling; Canadian privacy legislation; and the customer's own account of the incident)

CNET News.com: Promise of P3P stalls as backers regroup (also see Platform for Privacy Preferences project overview and CPSR's P3P FAQ)

Slashdot: First worm with a EULA? (also see McAfee virus profile and Symantec security response)

Wired News: Band can't sell own music on eBay

CNET News.com: Judge: Disabilities Act doesn't cover web (federal court rejects ADA suit challenging Southwest's inaccessible web site)

CNET News.com: Direct marketers want anti-spam laws (not surprisingly, the type of law favored by the DMA would simply prohibit forged message headers; the result would be to legitimize spam, and the quantity of spam would increase dramatically, so no legislation at all would be far better)

Wired News: Privacy czar: Past haunts present (Peter Swire compares war against terrorism to 1950s anticommunism)

Wired News: Spam masquerades as admin alerts (yet another Microsoft-related security vulnerability) (also see CNET News.com; Stop Messenger Spam; and Internet Privacy for Dummies)

Wired News: Man sues airlines for fare access (lawsuit contends that Southwest and American Airlines are violating Americans with Disabilities Act by designing their web sites to thwart access by screen reading programs)

CNET News.com: IBM flushes restroom patent (I thought this might be a joke, especially after noticing all of the bathroom humor in the article, but the patent is for real -- see U.S. patent no. 6,329,919, "System and method for providing reservations for restroom use")

Washington State U. Daily Evergreen, Oct. 3: Filipino-American history recognized ("The month of October is officially observed as Filipino-American History Month. On Oct. 18, 1587, the first Filipinos landed on the shores of Morro Bay, California on a Spanish galleon called the Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza, which translates to 'The Big Ass Spanish Boat.'")
Daily Evergreen, Oct. 4: Apology and retraction ("The story 'Filipino-American history recognized' stated that the 'Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza,' the galleon on which the first Filipinos landed at Morro, Bay, Calif., loosely translates to 'The Big Ass Spanish Boat.' It actually translates to 'Our Lady of Good Peace.' Parts of the story, including the translation above, were plagiarized from an inaccurate Web site.") (also see PinoyLife.com, from which the story was copied, and Seattle Times coverage)

Martin Schwimmer's Trademark Blog: 7th Circuit Fair Use Decision re: BARGAINBEANIES.COM (also see Ty v. Perryman [alternate link] (7th Cir. Oct. 4, 2002) [PDF])

Chicago Sun-Times: I-Pass has a new role: I spy

This court decision isn't particularly interesting if you're not a patent type ("In order to prevent the flexible elastic ring from being dislodged from its seating by the intense compression of the parts, the '657 patent discloses the use of an annular extension 33 on the cutting ring 14, and a corresponding annular extension 34 on the shutter mechanism 3, to hold the flexible elastic ring in place.") . . . but you gotta love the name of the case:  Schwing GmbH v. Putzmeister AG, ___ F.3d ___, 2002 WL 31109922, 2002 U.S. App. LEXIS 20205 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 24, 2002).

Law.com: Court OKs student expulsion over derogatory web site (also see J.S. v. Bethlehem Area School District (Pa. Sept. 25, 2002))

InternetNews.com: PayPal targeted by scam artists

CNET News.com: SparkList confirms e-mail address theft (but why should people have to keep their e-mail addresses secret to avoid spam?)

ESPN: Top 20 sports movies of all-time (also see Worst sports movies ever)

Reuters: Google inaccessible in China

The Onion: Wine appreciation tips

New York Daily News: Justice is served -- with a ticket

Don't Link to Us! (featured today on CNET News.com, CNET Radio, Slashdot, and perhaps elsewhere)

CNET News.com: Godzilla vs. the blog thing

Forbes: Top-earning dead celebrities (Elvis lives, but he's listed here anyway, followed by Charles Schulz, John Lennon, Dale Earnhardt, and Dr. Seuss)

ABC News: Bleacher fan's right to heckle players upheld (Ohio appeals court reverses conviction of baseball fan who shouted insults at player)

CNN: Bugs Bunny tops greatest cartoon characters list

MSNBC: ICANN ordered to open records (also see the court's ruling, AP, CNET News.com, Bret Fausett's icann Blog, and ICANN's surreal spin)

Wired News: Deep linking takes another blow

CNET News.com: Yale alleges an ivory tower break-in (also see Associated Press, Washington Post, Yale Daily News)

New Scientist: Maths improves baseball batting line-up (mathematician says best hitter should bat second, not fourth)

The Recorder (via Law.com): Name dropping: Wide trademark impact could be felt in suit over sale of cheaper brand under Shell canopy (meatspace imitates cyberspace, or something like that, as Shell Oil Co. files initial interest confusion trademark suit against San Francisco Shell franchisee that advertises both Shell brand and cheaper gas under Shell sign)

What does "medireview" mean? Apparently Yahoo Mail quietly changes all instances of "eval" in HTML messages and attachments to "review," and makes similar substitutions for other words that also correspond to Javascript commands. And apparently many people copy text from Yahoo Mail to other places without noticing the substitutions made by Yahoo. As a result there now are thousands of published articles, reports, CVs, web pages, and other documents that use words like "medireview," "reviewuation", "Chreviewier," "prreviewent," and "retrireview." (See RISKS Digest (11 April 2001), NTKnow (12 July 2002), New Scientist, and this list of Yahoo's word substitutions.)

CNET News.com: Judge: See ya later, Gator (federal court orders parasitic web ad firm to stop displaying popup ads over competitors' sites)

ShutYourPhoneUp.com attempts to educate rude mobile phone users. The site includes a form you can use to send an anonymous message to someone telling them about their poor mobile phone etiquette.

CNET News.com: Canning spam without eating up real mail

Reuters: PBS discusses advertising with FCC (the 15-second "sponsorship messages" are a minor annoyance -- what they really ought to crack down on are the interminable pledge drive breaks)

Wired News: Deep link foes get another win (also see CNET News.com)

CNET News.com: eBay picks up PayPal for $1.5 billion (also see AP, CNN Money, InternetNews.com, Reuters)

CNET News.com: Yahoo relaunches with streamlined look (Yahoo's popular web site directory now appears in smaller type buried in a corner of Yahoo's home page. For a more usable version, go directly to dir.yahoo.com instead)

Salon.com: It's time for ICANN to go (interview with John Gilmore)

Reuters: ICANN squeezes out regular folk

San Francisco Chronicle: FBI checking out Americans' reading habits; bookstores, libraries can't do much to fend off search warrants

A page on NPR's web site says that "Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited." (NPR is National Public Radio.) Oops, I just linked to NPR's web site without asking for permission. Please don't sue me, NPR! (Also see Wired News story about this ridiculous policy, and a follow-up story (also from Wired News).)

InternetNews.com: Cloudmark unveils P2P anti-spam system

The Specious Report: Internet to shut down for two weeks in August

CNET News.com: Old code in Windows is security threat (last week, a Finnish security company warned of a serious vulnerability in the gopher protocol support in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser; several days later, Microsoft responds by simply removing gopher support from the browser entirely, rather than trying to fix the vulnerability)

Reuters: China paper bites on Onion gag (Beijing Evening News reports that the U.S. Congress may relocate from Washington to Charlotte or Memphis, based upon a report in The Onion)

Associated Press: Federal judges toss out online pornography law (also see CNET News.com, InternetNews.com, Wired News, and Eugene Volokh's summary of the decision) -- American Library Ass'n v. United States, No. 01-1303 (E.D. Pa. May 31, 2002)

EFF's Consensus at Lawyerpoint blog (via LawMeme): A long time ago, in an industry far, far away (testifying before Congress in 1982, MPAA president Jack Valenti attacked the "savagery" and "ravages" of VCRs, saying that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone") (also see full transcript of Valenti's testimony on Cryptome)

MSNBC (Brock Meeks editorial): Cannibals in cyberspace: Internet governing body feasts on itself (yay, more ICANN bashing!)

ZDNet Australia: Aussie spammer sues anti-spammer

Washington Post: Critics say ICANN should compete for net governance duties (groups challenging ICANN's control over Internet domain name system include ACLU, CPSR, Consumers Union, EFF, EPIC, and others)

The Onion: Factual error found on Internet

Politech: Neulevel's PostMinder tracks email without recipient approval (also see PostMinder) (isn't this what e-mail marketers and spammers have been doing for a long time?)

AP: AT&T Broadband e-mail filter may work too well (ISP-endorsed spam filter blocks e-mail from the ISP itself -- including a notification of a pending rate increase) (also see RISKS)

WeirdBytes: Info-security and privacy: a dog's view (describing cats as "pathological individualistic privacy freaks")

eWeek: Allchin: Disclosure may endanger U.S. (Microsoft exec tells a federal court that Microsoft code has so many flaws that disclosing it to competitors may threaten national security) (also see Slashdot)

CD crack: Magic marker indeed (also available via CNET) (Sony's new copy-protection scheme for what it still claims are "compact discs" -- an irritating scheme that distorts the data, preventing legitimate purchasers from played CDs they've bought and paid for on CD/DVD players, car CD players, and computers -- apparently can be defeated simply by writing on the disk's rim with a felt-tip pen. So, is the pen mightier than the RIAA, or will the RIAA seek to ban felt-tip pens next?)

Cosmiverse (via Fark): New technology creates realistic videos of false testimony (researchers at MIT can make videos of people appearing to say anything)

Reuters: Senate toughens up on spam (Commerce Committee marks up "CAN SPAM" Act, sends it to Senate floor)  (Memo to Congress: Please don't pass yet another ill-advised Internet bill. A feeble spam law like this one would legitimize spam, making the problem much worse than it is now. Even those who support antispam legislation should prefer no law at all to this inept approach.)

Politech: Ninth Circuit rules 6-5 that Nuremberg files website is unlawful (see also decision [PDF])

Wired News: Another run to a deep-link suit

Politech: Criminal defendant insists his own name is copyrighted

Politechbot: Exciting new use of DMCA! Banning font-twiddling software! (commercial font vendors claim that a distributor of free fonts violated copyright law by posting a program that enabled him to easily change one character in his own font files ... but never fear, ChillingEffects is watching)

InternetNews.com: Online privacy bill raising 'grave' e-commerce concerns (of course, the industry would have similar concerns about a law against fraud)

Washington Post: High court overturns 'virtual' porn ban (also see CNN) -- Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (Apr. 16, 2002) [alternate location]

AP (via Wired News): Web group OKs privacy standards (also see W3C's main P3P site)

CNET News.com: Web surfers brace for pop-up downloads

Wall Street Journal (via Politech): Microsoft's anti-Unix website runs, well, Unix; CNET News.com: Anti-Unix Web site on the fritz? (This week, Microsoft launched a web site intended to persuade people to switch from Unix to Microsoft's server software ... but it was quickly discovered that the site was running on the free Apache web server software, under an open-source version of Unix ... so an embarrassed Microsoft moved the site to a server running its own software ... which promptly crashed.)

Wired News: Anti-copy bill hits D.C. (S. 2048, introduced by Sen. Fritz Hollings, would ban computers and other electronic devices that don't include crippling technologies that prevent them from performing functions for which they were designed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is a co-sponsor. This profoundly stupid bill is supported by the motion picture and recording industries, but just about everyone else is against it, including the IT and electronics industries and consumer groups. Let's hope it dies a quick and permanent death.)

Wired News: Google yanks anti-church sites (also see CNET News.com and update at Politech) (in response to complaints from the Church of Scientology, search engine Google has stopped providing links to anti-Scientology web sites, to comply with Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- among the sites that Google no longer links to are Xenu.net and clambake.org)

News.com: Companies taking desperate steps against spam

InternetNews.com: Blackhole list, facing legal challenge, closes (also see The Register and Wired News)

Scientific American: Copy that: Technology is making it harder for word thieves to earn outrageous fortunes

Politech: Karl Auerbach sues ICANN to open books, inspect financial info (also see Salon.com, ICANNWatch[1], ICANNWatch[2])

Newsbytes: CIA web site cans cookies after report (also see InternetNews.com)

Wired News: The old Mac that went to pot

AP: Wyoming cries foul over postal stamp (Wyoming officials complain that bucking bronco pictured on new Montana stamp infringes Wyoming's trademark)

Privacy.Org: Student obtains $5 million In lawsuit against voyeur video company

Declan McCullagh's Politech: Calif. governor candidate, DNC chairman turn to political spam

N.Y. Times: The murky debate over an Internet address database (controversy over use of Whois domain data by marketers)

Washington Post: Anti-telemarketers send out a very busy signal

Wired News: Ads play to users' privacy fears

Wired News: Not all Asian e-mail is spam (many ISPs block all incoming e-mail from Asian countries, because so much of it is spam)

InternetNews.com: Lindows.com CEO opens 'Windows' to trademark case

Newsbytes: Court rules 'thumbnail' images ok, full-sized copies not (also see Kelly v. Arriba [PDF])

Newsbytes: Court orders Kazaa closed, but it stays open

Wired News: Trillian won't heed AOL's message (AOL battles to prevent interoperability with small firm's messaging application, claiming security is at issue)

InternetNews.com: Weight loss company sues search engines

Newsbytes: Napster case: Is judge turning tables on labels?

Reuters: SEC uses fake site to warn investors (also see McWhortle Enterprises)

Turning Macs on thievery (theft victim hacks into stolen computer, instructing it to call home)

Privacy.Org: FTC proposes changes to Telephone Sales Rule (also see FTC press release)

Wired News: Abandonware: Dead games live on

ZDNet UK: .Net vote rigging illustrates importance of Web services (Microsoft attempts to stuff ballot box)

Reuters: CD creator burns copy-protection efforts (Philips blocks use of trademarked "compact disc" logo on copy-protected CDs that won't play on computer CD-ROM drives or DVD players)

Wired News: Europe GPS plan shelved

Yahoo! News: Six shot at Virginia law school (also see Appalachian School of Law)

Reuters: Actor's plaque mistakenly honors King's assassin

Wired News: Cybercourts set for tech trials

Ed Anger in Weekly World News: You gotta be an idiot to put pineapple on your pizza

Washington Post: Judge flunks Microsoft school plan (also see CNN/Money, CNET News.com, and InternetNews.com coverage)

Wired News: Elmo so tickled he can sing

Chicago Tribune: Sick of signing on to unsolicited pornography

CNET News.com: Appeals court upholds anti-spam law (also see Ferguson v. Friendfinders, Inc.)

New Scientist: Euro coin accused of unfair flipping