A type of “driver’s license” for the Internet. Yeah. That’s what Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, proposed this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
It’s not as ominous as it sounds since Mundie was suggesting a simple solution for the complex world of cybercrime, and his analogy was a “driver’s license” for the Internet.
I wasn’t in Davos, so I’ll let Time magazine’s Barbara Kiviat explain it better:
The state’s high court said today that sexually explicit instant messages used by a Beverly man to arrange a sexual encounter with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl are not illegal under current state law.
The Supreme Judicial Court reversed the conviction of Matt H. Zubiel, who in 2006 used IMs to chat not with a teenager but with Plymouth County Deputy Sheriff Melissa Marino, who was searching the Internet for child predators.
In 2007, Zubiel was convicted in Plymouth Superior Court of attempted dissemination of materials harmful to a minor and was sentenced to one year in jail.
China’s police are working with the country’s highest investigative organ and the Supreme People’s Court to release a judicial interpretation on hacking crimes, according to the People’s Daily, the official paper of the Communist Party, citing a Chinese police representative. The report gave no details, but such documents are used to direct lower-level Chinese courts on how to apply laws.
The move would be the latest of China’s efforts to strengthen laws against cybercrime, which have come alongside a growing number of reported arrests and court sentences for hacking in the country in the last year.
The report comes after Google last month drew global attention to hacking in China by saying it had been hit by cyberattacks from the country. Google cited the attacks, which resulted in the loss of intellectual property, as one reason it plans to stop censoring its China-based search engine, even if the move forces it to shut down its China offices.
PITTSBURGH (AP) – A federal appeals court has revived part of a western Pennsylvania couple’s lawsuit against Internet search engine Google Inc.
But the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling says Aaron and Christine Boring will have to prove the pictures of their home on Google’s “Street View” actually hurt them to collect more than $1 from a federal court jury.
A federal magistrate last year threw out the lawsuit saying the Pittsburgh-area couple couldn’t prove the pictures actually harmed them.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
The Newseum, Washington, D.C.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you very much, Alberto, for not only that kind introduction but you and your colleagues’ leadership of this important institution. It’s a pleasure to be here at the Newseum. The Newseum is a monument to some of our most precious freedoms, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to discuss how those freedoms apply to the challenges of the 21st century.
Redmond’s top legal mouthpiece Brad Smith is calling on US lawmakers to overhaul rules on cloud computing, just as the company ramps up its efforts to belatedly step on other vendors’ toes in that marketplace.
He asked Congress yesterday to legislate cloud computing, in a move to protect business and consumer information.
Smith’s comments came on the same day that Microsoft inked a deal with cloud rival Intuit, and spun out a survey about the relevance of small businesses climbing on board the hosted services wagon.
Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.
It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.
NEW YORK (AP) – A federal appeals court in New York has revived a lawsuit that accuses major record labels controlling 80 percent of U.S. digital music sales of scheming to charge high prices.
The lawsuit brought by music purchasers had been tossed out by a lower court judge.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Wednesday that the lawsuit can proceed. It said there are enough facts to consider the claims.
On June 26, 1997, in the first Internet-related U.S. Supreme Court case ever to be decided, seven justices found the disputed provisions of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Justice John Paul Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court, and was joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Scalia, Souter, and Thomas. Justice O’Connor filed a separate opinion, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, concurring in the decision but dissenting in part.
Decision Highlights:
The opinion was a ringing endorsement of the Internet as a “dramatic” and “unique” “marketplace of ideas.”
FTC BEGINS COMPREHENSIVE PRIVACY REVIEW THROUGH PUBLIC ROUNDTABLES
On December 7, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began the first of three public “Exploring Privacy” roundtables. To an extent, the FTC is at a similar stage as it was in 1989 when it held its conference on online profiling (now referred to as “behavioral targeting”) that led to a recommendation to Congress for “legislation that would set forth a basic level of privacy protection for all visitors to consumer-oriented commercial Web sites with respect to profiling.”[i] The recommendation was withdrawn under the Bush Administration to determine whether the newly established Network Advertising Initiative’s (NAI) self-regulatory standards would prove sufficient.
In 2007, the FTC revisited this issue with its “behavioral targeting” workshop that led to the FTC proposing self-regulatory principles on behavioral targeting for the online advertising industry to adopt.[ii] The FTC’s “suggested” principles were not warmly received by the industry. By 2009, however, the NAI and a coalition of major trade groups including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) each released proposed principles addressing behavioral advertising.[iii]
Internet Lawyer Blog