We bought it, we should be able to do whatever we want with it in the privacy of our own homes!

A great line on Fair Use from a haiku, by Norm, referred to us by one of our favorite freedom fighters, Cory Doctorow:

Restrictive copyright is like a vegetarian knife. You bought the knife, but if you cut meat with it, we'll sue you.

UPDATE:
And, you gotta love this Cold Pizza license.

Why it's good to be a little paranoid

Well-meaning citizens expressing concerns to the US State Department about the RFID passport proposal (which may be unstoppable at this point) now find that their contact information and comments have been posted in full on the US State Department web site. A spammer's dream, not to mention the stupidity of posting all of this in light of the overwelmingly obvious concern of the vast majority of commenters about how important privacy is. [via Boing Boing]

AT&T sued for participation in illegal NSA domestic spying

While we wait years (if ever) for a case to get to the Supreme Court...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T Tuesday, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications...

In the lawsuit, EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, has given the government unfettered access to its over 300 terabyte "Daytona" database of caller information—one of the largest databases in the world...

The EFF is representing the class of all AT&T customers nationwide. EFF is seeking an injunction to stop AT&T participation in the illegal NSA program, as well as billions of dollars in damages for violation of federal privacy laws.

The first win of course would be a successful injunction, but I really wonder what sort of damages are appropriate for loss of privacy on a massive scale?

UPDATE:
The AT&T logo may have been refreshed slightly, but it still looks to me like a symbol of the evil empire. From Wikipedia:

Internally, the logo of AT&T, due to its visual similarity, is known as the Death Star. When political cartoon and comic strip creators learned of this, many references to AT&T used the Death Star analogy. It was widely seen in Doonesbury and Bloom County comic strips. This name was also given to the titanic former Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, now owned by Lucent.

UPDATE:
The magic number is apparently $22,000 per AT&T customer.

Buy your senator an iPod

It always helps for your elected representatives to have vested interests aligned with your own.

Apple iTunes/iChat Spyware?

Boing Boing reported today on a new "feature" of iTunes 6.0.2 that sends the song you are listening to to a third-party marketing company without your consent or knowledge. This appears to only occur when the new Mini-Store pane is showing.

Reading the Boing Boing post gave me a couple of other ideas about potential privacy issues related to iTunes listening, one of which was the simple observation that iTunes is a specialized browser but it doesn't include even the basic security & privacy features of Safari (e.g., cookie editing).

A very quick Google search didn't come up with any corroboration of my other hunch, so I thought I'd verify using tcpflow to monitor my network traffic. Anyway, it turns out that if you are using the "Current iTunes Track" status in iChat, the song you are listening to is also broadcast to AOL servers. Not surprising in itself, but the song is not just as a simple text string, but rather a full URL in the form itms://itunes.com...

This is needed so that when your song shows up in someone else's buddy list, it contains a link to the iTunes Music Store. But, is it stored or used for anything else? OK, perhaps not quite as scary as the Mini-Store data, but then again, we don't yet really know.

Update: ars technica has also posted an article on the new Mini-Store marketing "feature".

UPDATE: Apple was quick to fix the Mini-Store issue, kudos to them! The Mini Store is now off by default, and a concise warning appears when it is turned on.