the_danielsan writes: "I first thought this (this ain't yellow press) would be a joke, but apparently swiss ISPs are now enforced to monitor all outgoing mails up to a period of 6 month - at their own cost! sunrise, a larger ISP, speaks of 50,000 to 100,000 CHF (that's about 31,405 to 62,810 USD according to my currency calculator) to update their systems. heise Newsticker has the same story running (both German). I can't believe this." For non-German readers, babelfish does a decent job with these articles.

Slashdot | Freaky Flash 6 Fishy Features.

Political News from Wired News - Kid Smut Law Needs More Work.

The Supreme Court partly upheld a law intended to shield children from online smut, but said there are unresolved free speech questions that prevent the law from taking effect now.

The American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the law as unconstitutional, claiming that in protecting children the Child Online Protection Act also violates the rights of adults to see or buy what they want on the Internet.

Yahoo News - Supreme Court: Internet Porn Law Not Too Broad.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a federal law that makes it a crime to put on the Internet sexually explicit material that can be viewed by minors was not unconstitutional just because it relied on community standards.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices said a U.S. appeals court was wrong in barring enforcement of the law on constitutional free-speech grounds because it relied on community standards to identify online pictures and writings harmful to minors.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that reliance on community standards to identify material harmful to minors does not by itself render the law too broad under the First Amendment.

LawMeme: (Yale) - Supreme Court Upholds Portions of Net Pornography Law.

The Supreme Court ruled [PDF] today in the case of Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union that a law, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), that makes it illegal to post sexually explicit material on the Internet that has the possibility of being viewed by minors was not unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas stated that using community standards to identify material that could be harmful to minors does not make the law overly broad and therefore unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Although the majority finds that community standards are not overly broad for First Amendment purposes, the government may not enforce the law until a lower court determines whether the law is unconstitutionally vague, too broad for other reasons, or does not survie the strict scrutiny standard.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Supreme Court Rules on Challenge to COPA.

New York Times - free registration required The Yahoo Privacy Storm That Wasn't.

Internet privacy is like the weather. Everyone complains about it, and no one does anything about it.

The latest example involves users of Yahoo, the vast Internet portal that set off howls of protest when it abruptly changed its marketing policy in March. Suddenly, Yahoo granted itself the right to send advertising messages to tens of millions of its users who had previously asked to receive none. The blanket permission went beyond e-mail to include postal mailings and telemarketing phone calls.

Immediately, privacy advocates reacted with criticism, and outraged postings flooded message boards all over the Internet.

But for all the smoke, there was little fire of reaction, according to a study conducted by comScore, a research firm that monitors the Web pages viewed by more than a million Internet users.

Yahoo's changes did get some users' attention. In the four weeks from March 25 to April 21, nearly a million Internet users in the United States looked at Yahoo's new privacy policy (http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/). That figure represents 1 percent of Internet users in the United States and was up sharply from the preceding four weeks, when only 0.3 percent of Yahoo users read its privacy policy.

Slightly more people, 1.1 million, visited the page Yahoo had set up where users could "opt out" by telling the site not to send e-mail or other messages (http://subscribe.yahoo .com/showaccount). That page did not exist before the portal's policy change.