We've been seeing all sorts of lawsuits lately that show how the rise of technologies like the internet have really caused troubles. Most of these laws were written in a time when it was impossible to imagine a day when anyone and everyone could be their own instant publisher. Take, for example, a divorce case that is suddenly getting a lot of attention, due to legal questions drawn out by the husband's decision to publish a "fictional" account of his marriage on his blog. The wife asked the divorce court to issue an injunction, which it did, claiming that the site is harassment. However, the husband is fighting it, refusing to take down the content, noting that it's a violation of his free speech rights, especially since the order bars him from posting anything at all about his wife. There are a number of complications on top of that. First of all, there's the question of whether or not you can use an injunction to stop speech, even if it's defamatory. Then there's the question of whether or not the speech really is defamatory (made even more confusing by the guy's claim that the story is fictional). We're going to be seeing more and more of these cases, as it's going to take quite some time before people realize that the internet changes the way many people will think about certain types of laws.

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1sockchuck writes "Sun Microsystems wants to cut its IT department's data center footprint in half within five years, and then eliminate in-house data centers completely shortly afterward. 'Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015,' writes Sun data center architect Brian Cinque, who says Sun hopes to shift its in-house IT to a software-as-a-service model. Sun will use virtualization and consolidation to reduce its data center space and energy usage by 50 percent by 2013, with a goal of moving it all online two years later. Sun's plan reflects the shift to utility computing discussed in Nicholas Carr's new book, which we debated earlier this week."

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While the FBI has regularly decided that court orders aren't necessary for wiretaps, it is a bit surprising to find out that it seems to feel the same way about paying the bills for wiretaps. Newly released info show that the FBI often failed to pay its wiretapping bills, leading one telco to cut off the FBI's wiretaps until it finally paid up. Given how screwed up the FBI's computer systems are, perhaps it's not surprising that they don't have an acceptable accounts payable system either.

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Yesterday, we discussed reports of Microsoft and the OLPC project working towards a dual-boot version of the XO laptop. Now, BetaNews tells us that Microsoft has issued statements denying such plans. The software giant has also reaffirmed their intention to develop a Windows-only version of the laptop. Microsoft's statement to BetaNews had this to say: "While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop. As we announced in December, Microsoft plans to publish formal design guidelines early this year that will assist flash-based device manufacturers in designing machines that enable a high-quality Windows experience. Our current goal remains to provide a high-quality Windows experience on the XO device."

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Einstein Duble brings us news that astronomers using the Hubble Telescope have discovered an extremely rare double Einstein Ring. Occasionally, galaxies or other bright objects are located in such a way that they are behind another galaxy when viewed from Earth. When light from the further galaxy passes a sufficiently massive closer galaxy, the path of the light is bent inward from all sides, creating a "ring" effect. In this case, not one, but two galaxies are directly behind the foreground galaxy, so the gravitational lens produces two distinct rings. Quoting Presscue: "The distribution of dark matter in the foreground galaxies that is warping space to create the gravitational lens can be precisely mapped. In addition, the geometry of the two Einstein rings allowed the team to measure the mass of the middle galaxy precisely to be a value of 1 billion solar masses. The team reports that this is the first measurement of the mass of a dwarf galaxy at cosmological distance (redshift of z=0.6)."

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Chris Brogan asks a question...

What if you had $300K to spend on a luxury, an impulse buy, not something you need, what would you spend it on?

I just answered -- I'd buy 30 full-page ads in the NY Times.

What would you buy?

More than five years ago, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor announced plans to start a not-for-profit foundation to try to create an open source competitor to Microsoft Exchange. At the time, we didn't think that Microsoft would be staying up at night worrying about it. In fact, we doubt anyone anywhere thought much of the resulting project, dubbed Chandler, over the intervening years. Every once in a while there would be an update, but many other projects seemed to make a lot more progress than Chandler ever did. So it's not much of a surprise to hear that Mitch Kapor has finally bailed on Chandler, and that the foundation behind it is going to scale back its efforts. This isn't an indictment of open source projects, but it does suggest that it does matter how those projects are set up. Successful open source projects seem to start small and grow over time. They focus on solving a specific need and then building out beyond that. Chandler, on the other hand, seemed more focused on coming up with a big idea and building a huge project around it. That makes it a lot less flexible and a lot less able to take advantage of the sorts of benefits that open source development provides, such as the ability to repeatedly release, adapt and adjust to meet what the market actually needs.

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Multiple users have notified us of reports that the Attorney General of New York has initiated an antitrust investigation of Intel. The EU served Intel with similar charges last July, and AMD has been battling Intel over antitrust issues for some time. Quoting the New York Times: "The subpoenas from Mr. Cuomo's office will seek internal memos, billing documents, and correspondence between Intel and its customers to determine whether the company engaged in a variety of anticompetitive practices, like penalized customers, primarily computer manufacturers, for purchasing processors from competitors or improperly paying customers to use Intel chips exclusively. Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel, said the company would comply with Mr. Cuomo's subpoena but denied any illegality."

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I came across two separate stories today at about the same time, which seemed to be saying very different things, but seem worth discussing together. The first is about how big companies are increasingly technology savvy in spying on workers in everything that they do (sent in by reader gonzogirl). It notes that while CIOs used to worry about how employees would react to being spied on, these days it's barely a second thought, as it's become almost standard. The other study involves some research suggesting that employees are becoming a lot more tech savvy than their employers and trying to drag them into the 21st century. The researchers behind that report say that employees understand technology much better than their own CIOs.

At first glance, the two reports may seem to contradict each other, but that may not really be the case. It may actually show a lot more about where the priorities are for CIOs of large companies these days: fearful of what employees are doing, rather than looking for ways to help them get things done. Thus, when employees show up with new tools to make them more productive, the response isn't too embrace them, but to fear them (or figure out how they can be monitored). This wouldn't be particularly surprising, but it should be troublesome for those large companies, who are breeding atmospheres of distrust and trying to hold back the innovation needed to boost productivity and compete with more nimble companies.

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LowSNR writes "The South Carolina based startup Nextreme, Inc. is developing technology to put Peltier Coolers in chip packages, according to an Ars Technica report. The tiny coolers could be situated on top of local hotspots on the die and pump heat away through a package pin to the motherboard. Also, the Seebeck Effect allows the waste heat to be used to be harvested to generate/reclaim power."

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mlimber writes "Nature magazine's news section has an interesting story about how the seats in the US House of Representatives should be divided up. The problem is that the population isn't evenly divided by the number of seats in the House (435). So how should one allocate the fractional parts? The current method tends to favor big states, while a recent proposal by a mathematician is for what he calls a 'minimally unfair' allotment. He is predicting 'one person, one vote' challenges on this topic in the near future."

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We've covered the history of Burst.com and its questionable patents before. While the company was recently able to squeeze $10 million out of Apple, following the $60 million it got from Microsoft, speculation had begun on who the next target would be. In fact, apparently a Burst investor had started posting videos to YouTube trying to show how a variety of companies all infringed on Burst's patents. Of course, if we had a sane patent system, most people would look at this to suggest that the concepts in Burst's patents were fairly obvious and never should have received patent protection in the first place -- but that's not how things work these days. Among the companies listed in the videos were Google, AOL, Adobe and RealNetworks. Apparently, that was enough to worry RealNetworks, who has filed for a declaratory judgment in Northern California claiming that it does not infringe on Burst's patents. This was, by the way, the same strategy that Apple took (suing first) almost exactly two years ago. With so much fear of cases getting forced into Marshall, Texas, it's no surprise that those threatened would try to file for declaratory judgments on friendlier grounds. It will be interesting to see if Google, AOL or Adobe follow suit.

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Anonymous Howard writes "If you visit a lot of bars and restaurants, you've likely crossed paths with drivers license scanners — machines that supposedly verify that your license is valid. In actuality, many of these scanners are designed to record your license information in addition to verifying them, and those that authenticate against a remote database are creating a record of when and where you buy alcohol. Not only that, but they're not even particularly effective — the bar code on your license uses an open, documented standard and can be rewritten to change your age or picture. Collecting our driver's license information is one thing, but collecting data about our personal drinking habits is not only a violation of, according to the ACLU representative quoted in the article, privacy and civil liberties, but this 'drinking record' could also create problems for people in civil and criminal lawsuits as proof of alcohol purchases in DUI cases or evidence of alcoholism in divorce lawsuits."

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Investor’s Business Daily has always been one of my favorite business papers, but I stopped getting it years ago. I just didn’t want to deal with the leftovers—the stacks of paper full of yesterday’s news.

However, when I got the Kindle I was excited to see that Investor’s Business Daily was one of the available newspaper subscriptions. $5.99 a month for the electronic version was a done deal.

This morning I read an article that made me smile. I love stories about people who’ve achieved huge things against all odds. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

The piece was on Sidney Weinberg, the former Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He was Chairman for four decades in the early to mid 1900s.

Sidney wasn’t formally educated. He didn’t have an MBA. He didn’t go to college. He didn’t even graduate from high school. He was just a determined, ambitious mail room clerk who wanted to do big things.

Read the rest of his story — it’s pretty incredible.

eldavojohn writes "With $200 machines being all the rage these days, it's surprising that more coverage hasn't been given to Shuttle's KPC which is an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB HDD. With deals like these, will Linux become the dominant home operating system for the thrifty?"

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We keep hoping that companies will realize that suing over competitors buying ads on trademarked keywords will finally go away, after case after case after case has shown that it's not a violation of trademark law. However, they just keep coming. The latest may be the most ridiculous, as described by Eric Goldman. 1-800 Contacts is suing competitor LensWorld for buying ads on the "1800Contacts" keyword. Again, assuming that LensWorld's ads are clearly for LensWorld, then there shouldn't be any chance of confusion and the case should be tossed out. However, what makes this case even more interesting is that 1-800 Contacts has already brought similar cases in the past -- and lost them decisively. In fact, in that case, 1-800 Contacts seemed to have a stronger case, as it involved adware popping up full ads next to their website, rather than just keyword search ads. So it seems odd that 1-800 Contacts would try again -- other than the fact that it's trying in a different circuit.

However, what's even more bizarre is that while 1-800 Contacts is suing, it has no qualms in doing the same thing itself. Yes, the company has a history of buying ads on the keywords of its competitors, which is part of the reason why the company lost the earlier case. Not only that, but when the state of Utah tried to put in place a law that would ban advertising on trademarked keywords, 1-800 Contacts was one of the companies that convinced Utah legislators that such a legislation was a bad idea, highlighting how the buying of trademarked keywords helped 1-800 Contacts promote its business. As Goldman says: "Hey 1-800 Contacts, maybe I'm missing something, but if you wanted to bring a keyword advertising lawsuit like this one, maybe you shouldn't have badgered your legislators to remove a law that would have ensured your success in court!"

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Here are a few old songs I've come across and enjoyed lately on YouTube.

Small Faces -- Itchycoo Park (1967)

An innocent song about teenage drug use and truancy. Itchycoo is slang for stinging nettle, an herb I swear by for pollen allergies.

The American Breed - Bend Me, Shape Me (1968) This band's only huge hit was a remake of the The Outsiders' song from year before.

Lemon Pipers - Green Tambourine (1967)

Françoise Hardy -- Ce Petit coeur (1965)

The Osmonds -- Chilly Winds (1970) (No video, just this groovy pin-up.)

This song appeared in Pretty Maids All in a Row, an underrated creepy movie from 1970 written by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Roger Vadim, and starring Rock Hudson, who plays a high school football coach who rapes and murders the female students. If you want to watch it, you'll have to TiVo it, Torrent it, or buy a used VHS copy.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Sixties music videos
• 9 great old punk videos
•