Just about everyone seems to be submitting the story from last week about a local Kentucky legislator who has put forth a bill to make anonymous comments online illegal. I first saw the story on Digg, but it's been submitted about 30 times already and is starting to show up elsewhere -- sometimes with inflammatory headlines (including the one at Digg). First off, this is for Kentucky only. Second, the chances of the bill getting anywhere are slim to none. Third, even if it does miraculously pass, there is no way that it would be enforceable. In fact, even the guy who introduced the legislation admits as much. Fourth, the bill is clearly unconstitutional, violating our rights to anonymous speech (which has been reaffirmed many times by US courts). Fifth, it goes against section 230 of the CDA in that it puts the blame on service providers for the speech of their users, rather than putting the liability on the users themselves. In other words, while this gets some attention as a ridiculously bad bill, the chance of it actually going anywhere or having any impact at all is virtually nil.

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These photos depict Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch in a sorry state. The Daily Mail has a series of photos showing the neglected grounds, near Santa Barbara, California. Seen here at left is the ripped tent over the bumper car rink. At right is an animal enclosure for his once famous menagerie. Jackson has to pay off $25 million in debt by next week or Neverland will go on the auction block. According to the NME, two wealthy fans may bid on it in a last ditch effort to bail Jacko out. Link to The Daily Mail Link to NME (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Ant writes "MacNN reports that the thin design of Apple's MacBook Air is causing some confusion for the technically ignorant, according to one blogger who says that the ultra-portable caused him to miss his flight. When going through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security checkpoint, blogger Michael Nygard was held up as security staff gathered around his MacBook Air, trying to make sense of the slender laptop/notebook. One of the less technically knowledgeable staff points out the lack of standard features as cause for alarm..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ant writes "MacNN reports that the thin design of Apple's MacBook Air is causing some confusion for the technically ignorant, according to one blogger who says that the ultra-portable caused him to miss his flight. When going through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security checkpoint, blogger Michael Nygard was held up as security staff gathered around his MacBook Air, trying to make sense of the slender laptop/notebook. One of the less technically knowledgeable staff points out the lack of standard features as cause for alarm..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://www.chatterous.com/landing/dave/

Passcode: 2chil

What is it? I have no clue.

I found out about it from this Seattle P-I piece.

Come over and help us figger it out.

Over the last few months, there have been some indications that major label EMI was sick of the RIAA and IFPI's war on music fans -- and even had threatened to leave the groups. While a huge step, it wasn't a huge surprise, given the new management in charge at EMI, who did not come from a music industry background. It became clear quite quickly that the firm wasn't going to rest on its laurels, but wanted to learn to adapt and to adopt the new business models that involved treating fans right, not suing them. It appears that EMI has now worked out a deal with the IFPI, where it will stay a member of the organization but will contribute significantly less money towards IFPI's "anti-piracy" activities. At the very least, this makes it quite clear that EMI recognizes those activities are counterproductive. For years, the record labels have been insisting that they need to step up such activities, even as every time they did so, things got worse. Of course, the IFPI is still suing and trying to take down sites, so it's not as if the industry has fully realized how counterproductive these activities are. Eventually, though, perhaps they'll realize.

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I have a great rig here and I'm learning how to use it.

I can interview any willing interviewee with a telephone. I can do the interview when I'm at my desktop, or with somewhat less fidelity, using my iPhone from the road.

I like the 15-20 minute format.

I've interviewed Guy Kawasaki, Joe Trippi, Steve Gillmor, Marc Canter, Jay Rosen, Scott Rosenberg, George Lakoff.

Who should I interview next?

PS: Lots of great suggestions. I'm interested in either talking with people I know well, because it's easy for me to pull a good story out of them. Or people who have a new product, esp one related to products I use. Or people involved with national politics because that's a current focus for me. Better if there are people who mix all these.

My Cato colleague Jim Harper has a new paper looking at proposals to implement a nationwide electronic "employment eligibility verification" program. This was one of the key elements of last year's immigration proposals. Under the EEV program, every employer in the United States would have had to submit the names and Social Security numbers of new hires to a centralized government database. The system would match the submitted information against various databases, and return an answer to the employer about whether the employee could be hired. Employees who received a negative answer would be required to go hat in hand to a federal bureaucracy, seeking to prove their "eligibility" for employement.

While Jim doesn't quite put it this way, the fundamental problem with a system like this is that it would inevitably face a difficult trade-off between false-positive and false-negative errors. Strictly enforcing the rules will deprive many eligible workers -- including American citizens -- of the ability to make a living. A single mis-typed digit during data entry could cause an American citizen weeks of grief the next time he tried to change jobs. On the other hand, if the system errs on the side of caution and allows workers to continue working while their paperwork is straightened out, many illegal immigrants would slip through the filters. My guess is that as soon as a significant number of American citizens started being deprived of their right to work -- or required to spend days arguing with federal bureaucrats to clear their names -- the DHS would face intense political pressure to loosen the rules. But if the rules aren't going to be strictly enforced, what's the point of having the system in the first place?

Jim also points out that electronic verification would greatly increase incentives for identity fraud. If getting a job required presenting the name and social security number of a legal worker, this would create a lucrative new revenue source for information gleaned from the data breaches that have become a fact of modern life. (And it doesn't help that the Real ID Act itself creates additional vulnerabilities to privacy breaches) American citizens -- especially those with Hispanic surnames -- would begin discovering that illegal immigrants were applying for jobs with their names and Social Security numbers. And because the DHS wouldn't have any easy way of determining whose identification was real and whose was fraudulent, these legal workers would be fired unless they could prove their identity to the satisfaction of federal bureaucrats within a few days of starting work. Thankfully, this debacle was avoided when Congress failed to pass immigration legislaton last year. But the issue will inevitably come up again, and when it does, it would be good to give more scrutiny to proposals to put a federal bureaucracy in charge of deciding who is "eligible" to earn a living.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Pickens writes "The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was launched in March 1998 — the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, though the price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release of the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300. The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had become the subject of a lawsuit from the RIAA which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home Recordings Act. It was later ruled that the Rio had not infringed the Act because it was not responsible for the actions of its customers. Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legal entanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rival gained from the lawsuit."

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Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat writes:

Here's a terrific interview with one of my favorite cartoonists in the world, Phoebe Gloeckner, about why she's an artist. Watch it for the interview material, but keep your eyes peeled for a lot of seemingly digital art from Gloeckner that as far as I can tell has not been seen before, much of it appearing to come from her project about the mass unsolved murder of women in Juarez, Mexico. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

20-minute interview with evangelist Guy Kawasaki on Microsoft, Twitter, SXSW, how to do interviews, Apple, RSS.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/guyKawasakiInterview.mp3

Picture of Guy's MacBook Air with hookups.



You can subscribe to my podcasts using this feed.

A year ago, we wrote about a popular law student message board/forum called AutoAdmit that was making some female law students upset, as they claimed sexist messages on those boards were making it difficult for them to find a job. The reasoning didn't make that much sense. The messages, while certainly crude, seemed unlikely to be the sort that would keep an employer from hiring. They basically just made comments about the women's appearances. There was no evidence at all that the postings kept the women from getting jobs. Not surprisingly, though, considering that we're talking about law students, it didn't take long for lawsuits to be filed, including one against a Penn State law student named Anthony Ciolli, who was an editor of AutoAdmit, but had no direct involvement with the content that upset the women. In November, Ciolli was dropped from the lawsuit, but not before all of the attention had cost him his job at a high-paying law firm.

Once again, given that we're talking about a bunch of lawyers, it will probably surprise no one to discover that Ciolli has now filed a lawsuit against the two women who had sued him originally, charging them with libel for falsely dragging his name into the mess. The whole thing seems like a giant disaster that's only likely to get worse before it works itself out. So far, the lesson seems to be that some lawyers are pretty thin-skinned and likely to file lawsuits over just about anything. But, perhaps we already knew that. Perhaps we should be happy that they're just filing lawsuits against each other, rather than bothering everyone else with unnecessary lawsuits.

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mikesd81 writes "Mobile technology group Ericsson is predicting a 'swift end' for Wi-Fi hotspots, according to the PC Pro site. Johan Bergendahl, the company's chief marketing officer, offers this analysis: 'The rapid growth of mobile broadband is set to make Wi-Fi hotspots irrelevant ... Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era. Industry will have to solve the international roaming issue ... Carriers need to work together. It can be as simple as paying 10 euros per day when you are abroad.' He also pointed to a lack of coverage as a potential hindrance to the growth of the technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal & Steffen Tiedemann Christensen visit from Copenhagen.

They are founders of the photo sharing site 23.

Thomas runs the popular and much-loved Reboot conference in Copenhagen.

rjshirts writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the Beatles and Apple have signed a reported $400 million dollar deal to bring the entire Beatles Catalog to iTunes. From the article: 'As of today there is no time frame as to when the catalog will appear online, but it seems to just be a matter of time. McCartney himself even said in November that the catalog would be making its way onto the the store some time in 2008. While we have heard this sort of thing time and time again, this might just be the real deal. Prepare yourself — Beatlemania is coming to iTunes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2005, Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, brought to public attention documents which showed that the National Security Agency had obtained access to Internet records from more than a dozen telecom providers.

This led to public outcry over the US government's warrantless wiretapping program, and a lawsuit against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation .

At the 2008 EFF Pioneer Awards ceremony during the O'Reilly ETech conference, the EFF honored Klein's whistleblowing efforts. In this interview at the awards ceremony, Klein and EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn speak to BBtv's Xeni Jardin about efforts to persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecoms that may have broken the law while helping the government in anti-terrorism efforts.

Link to BBtv vlog post, with discussion, downloadable video, and more information on the case.