- Smoke-screen CPRM "Generic Functionality" Proposal.
Link to PDF version of the T13 draft standard: http://cryptome.org/e01112r1.pdf (22KB)
[This is the proposal almost passed by standards committee T13 on disk drive interfaces last week. It replaced the CPRM proposal that IBM withdrew after it caused so much controversy. As anyone can see, there is nothing controversial in this new proposal; there is nothing in it at all. Every action and every data bit depends on what some other (secret, non-standard) spec would say.]
ANY function stuffed into a disk drive would be compatible with this spec, which means it doesn't define a standard at all. How exactly would this promote interoperability among manufacturers? Or as the committee chair asked, before voting against it, preventing it from immediately becoming part of the standard, "Why are we doing this?"
Slashdot | Your Rights Online: CPRM Smokescreen.
John Gilmore separates the chaff from the wheat with his look at the new copy-control proposal. See our previous story if you missed the bait-and-switch, as drive manufacturers attempt to include copy controls in all hard drives.
iTnews (Australia) - IT: Copyright extended to digital content.
Digital content will be protected under Australian law for the first time from Sunday as changes to the Copyright Act take effect. Until now, digital information has not been specifically protected under copyright law. The new law will give content creators wider powers over the licensing of their work.
It will also ban trade in so-called decoding devices for unscrambling digitally protected material. In a presentation to the Victorian Society for Computers and Law last week, Carolyn Hough, the acting principal legal officer in the intellectual property branch of the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department, said the changes were the result of several years of consultation.
Slashdot | Your Rights Online: Australia Is Getting Its Own DMCA.
Slashdot | Making PKI Work.
The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) has released this 80+ page PDF report on Information Security: Advances and Remaining Challenges to Adoption of Public Key Infrastructure Technology. Some good straight talk about what its going to take to get PKI to really work on a large scale. The obstacles seem formidable.
Political News from Wired News - Chat Room Rants Protected.
A federal court in California dismisses a lawsuit seeking damages from anonymous posters accused of making damaging comments on message boards. Privacy advocates call the ruling a significant victory in the fight to protect anonymous speech on the Internet.
[ ... ]
The ruling on the case -- Global Telemedia International vs. Does -- found that the chat-room banter posted by the defendants were statements of opinion, not fact. Electronic privacy experts say that distinction sets an important legal precedent.
Business News from Wired News - Ploy Intimidates Uganda Voters?.
Uganda, not very high on the list of human rights advocates, will employ face-recognition scanning in its next presidential election. Critics fear this will keep opponents away
[ ... ]
"Getting pictures of everyone raises some concerns," said Winston Nagan, a law professor at the University of Florida. "Obviously, taking pictures would be one way to maybe create an intimidation factor."
"San Francisco Chronicle" - Clerks Violate Privacy/Prints at photo labs often passed around.
Kathleen Harmon had just dropped off a roll of sexually explicit shots for one-hour developing when she got a call from an ex-boyfriend, a bartender. The photo clerk and his buddies were at his bar, he said, pawing through a duplicate set of her prints.
