The whole “cyberterorrism” fear mongering is being taken to even more extreme levels. At the Strategic Command Cyber Symposium, William Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary apparently told the audience that companies who operate critical infrastructure need to let the US install monitoring equipment or it puts everyone at risk. The NSA has apparently developed a monitoring system called Einstein (I wonder if they paid the license fee), and want to let companies “opt-in” to installing the gov’t's system on their own systems, or face the “wild west” and put everyone at risk. This sounds like blatant fear mongering to let the government tap into all sorts of private infrastructure systems. After all, the government has shown, time and time again, that once it gets access to information, it doesn’t take those whole “oversight” or “privacy rights” issues particularly seriously.

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Web developers, brace yourselves for Firefox 4 features. One in particular, IndexedDB, gives Web applications new data storage abilities.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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A few years back, we wrote about a teenager who used “innocent infringement” as a defense to an unauthorized file sharing lawsuit brought against her by the RIAA. Innocent infringement is in the law, as a way to reduce the statutory awards from the $750 minimum to $200. It doesn’t absolve the person or get them out of paying, but can greatly lower the amount. The district court agreed, and said she could just pay the $200 rate. However, an appeals court overturned, saying that because CDs have copyright notices on them — even though the girl never saw the CDs — the girl should have known that the mp3s were infringing. The logic there made very little sense. How can you hold someone to a clause that was never seen?

The girl’s lawyers have now appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which now has the option of weighing in on the matter (the Wired article linked here is a little misleading, in that at the beginning and in the headline, it implies that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case). If I had to guess, I’d say the Supreme Court won’t take the case, even though it is an important issue.

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Storage service Box.net is now using HTML5 to bring drag-and-drop upload functionality to its users.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Jamie alerts us to the news that the giant luxury department store Harrods, in London, is threatening a small roadside cafe, called Hollands (accurately named after the cafe’s owners) for having a logo that’s too similar. The Daily Mail article above has a number of excellent photographic comparison shots, including a nice one showing the dumpy looking cafe juxtaposed with Harrod’s famous, iconic, storefront. The logos themselves both use similar script fonts, but it seems unlikely that anyone would be confused, and the whole thing comes off as the department store bullying a little cafe.

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Jabbing at Google’s elaborate Chrome speed test, Opera counters with low-tech browser video involving potatoes and kinetic energy.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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Just recently, we wrote about how a ridiculous ruling by the Australian Copyright Tribunal, boosted the royalty rates that gyms needed to pay if they played any music covered by the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA). In some cases it went from less than $1 per class to $1 per participant per class. At the time, we noted that gyms were switching to music that wasn’t part of PPCA, and apparently that includes swapping out popular songs for cheap cover versions. This is, of course, similar to what happened years ago with various music video games when record labels and bands demanded too much money to be in the games. Eventually, they figured out they were doing more harm to themselves by shutting themselves out of a market, but it’s not clear if the PPCA is ever going to realize that.

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Another Google property will no longer work with Internet Explorer 6. But the 2001-era browser isn’t the only one whose support is ending.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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While courts in nearby Norway rejected attempts to force ISP Telenor to block The Pirate Bay, the story appears to be quite different in Denmark. There, Telenor (which had been Tele2) was ordered to block The Pirate Bay, followed by a higher court upholding the block. Now, the Danish Supreme Court has weighed in and again insists that it’s perfectly fine for courts to demand an ISP totally block a website.

Apparently the ruling hinged on a questionable bit of Danish copyright law that makes an ISP liable for the content sent by users, because “the ISP makes temporary copies of small fragments of the copyrighted work as IP packets pass their routers.” Of course, if you read the law that way, that puts tremendous liability on any ISP. It seems wholly unreasonable to interpret the law that way — and, in fact, some point out that this appears to go against EU law. The article also notes that the questionable clause in Danish copyright law that puts this burden on ISPs was written by a guy who (you guessed it) now works for the recording industry. Funny how that works.

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