There have been various accusations in the US that the techniques used by various P2P monitoring firms that the entertainment industry uses are an "illegal investigation." While we're still waiting to see the outcome of such cases, over in Italy, the government organization in charge of privacy has determined that, indeed, the efforts to monitor P2P use violates local privacy laws. This comes just a few months after a similar finding in Switzerland. With the EU recently saying that IP addresses are private information, you can see why these types of rulings are coming through.

While I will argue vehemently over the fact that the entertainment industry's tactics are wrong, short-sighted and unfair to many of the people it accuses of copyright infringement, I'm not so sure that merely collecting information that someone's computer broadcasts about themselves should be considered a violation of privacy. I do agree that ISPs shouldn't just hand over data on who's account is attached to a certain IP address (that's a privacy violation. But, to simply collect the data, which is publicly "broadcast" by the user, hardly seems like a privacy violation. There are plenty of arguments against the entertainment industry's tactics -- but you get into dangerous territory when you start declaring publicly broadcast information as somehow "private." While it may be appealing in that it makes life more difficult for short-sighted entertainment industry execs hellbent on suing customers, the unintended consequences of such things could be dire. It raises serious questions about how other types of publicly broadcast info may be judged later.

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ohxten sends news from earlier this month that GCC 4.3.0's new behavior of not clearing the direction flag before a string operation on x86 systems poses problems with kernels — such as Linux and BSD — that do not clear the direction flag before a signal handler is called, despite the ABI specification.

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NYT: Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage. 

I wish I was a great notetaker/artist like Mike Rohde, who posted pages of his beautiful personal notes from SXSW Interactive 2008 on Flickr. Link (via Laughing Squid)

The just-released Safari 3.1 has a new "Develop" menu (check the Advanced tab in Preferences to activate it). I usually rely on Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar for testing and diagnostics -- but preferring Safari as my general browser of choice, I was happy to see some native tools baked-in.

I often run these "bulletproof integrity tests" after finishing an initial design: disabling styles, javascript and images to check for readability and flexibility. Favlets and Firefox extensions have made this easy for years, and Safari's new Develop menu has several of these. Excellent, I said.

It also ships with a Web Inspector (think Firebug), which allows you to break down a web page by listing it's various files, drilling down to see computed styles and DOM info. At first glance this looked exciting and very promising, with "editable CSS" promised in the release notes. Unfortunately, you can't edit the full CSS file (a feature we'd all love, and one that's found in other developer extensions), but rather choosing "Inspect Element" by right clicking on a web page's element will activate a semi-confusing-but-comprehensive status on that particular bit of code selected. I was initally confused by choosing "Inspect Element" on one of the CSS files in the list view in an attempt to edit it, only to find that the Inspector was in fact inspecting itself (which is apparently built with HTML and CSS). Heh, recursive inspection. Recurspection. Inspursive.

It seems I wasn't the only one confused, with a chorus of Twitterers wondering the same thing: how the heck can I edit the CSS? The answer is by choosing "Inspect Element" from the browser window (a right or ctrl click), then double-clicking a property from the Styles sidebar in the Web Inspector -- but not in the "Computed Style" box that's also in the sidebar.

So, it's a start. I'd love to see full live editing of CSS and HTML in a future version -- but it's nice to see the beginning of all of this built right into the browser.

Dustin Carter is a high school wrestler from Hillsboro, Ohio. He doesn't have much in the way of arms or legs. This year, Carter made it all the way to the state wrestling championships.
Link to YouTube video of a match, Link and Link to Cincinnati Enquirer coverage (Thanks, Rick Pescovitz!)

I've explained why I'm not comfortable with the proposed patent reform effort, as there are a number of changes in it that could potentially make the system much worse. One example, as the EFF highlighted last month, was that it would unnecessarily limit the ability of third parties to request a re-exam of a patent. Now the EFF is looking through some statistics and noting some rather shocking numbers about third-party-initiated patent re-exams. Contrary to what some supporters of the patent system claim, it appears that a large majority of these requests aren't just legitimate requests, but serve to have a patent's claims limited or rejected entirely. 92% of re-exam requests are granted, with 3 out of every 4 exams resulting in adjustments (or total rejections) of the patents. In other words, clearly, the process helps improve patent quality. So why would Congress want to remove that part?

However, a much bigger question should probably be: why is the Patent Office so bad at getting things right the first time around? If so many patents end up needing to be corrected on re-exam, it certainly sounds like patent examiners aren't doing a very good job. Given the already massive economic costs that result from bad patents, this should be a major concern.

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An anonymous reader writes "In an internal JP Morgan document published recently, Wikileaks exposes JPM's efforts to circumvent insider trading regulations, enabling their wealthy clients to profit even when others are losing. The document reads like a how-to and explains how to take advantage of SEC Rule 10b5-1, which has long been considered ripe for abuse. Now this abuse is publicly documented and will be hard to ignore."

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Last week, one of the stories that got a few headlines and made the rounds concerned the news that some popular heart monitors could be hacked, potentially in a way that would provide powerful shocks to to the heart of someone who had such a device implanted. The reports made it very clear that the likelihood of such a hack was incredibly slim, as it would require a tremendous amount of access. So, this isn't something to worry about today, but it does suggest one area where it may pay for medical device makers to start thinking a little bit more about security. There was a report, about two years ago, that also warned of something similar, which we played down as a bit of fear-mongering (it had no real details, just suggesting that pacemakers would become a hacking target). It still seems like this is not going to be a huge threat any time in the near future, but that doesn't mean that those who design medical devices, especially those with connections to the outside world, shouldn't at least think through the potential security concerns and design these devices with security in mind from the beginning. That seems a lot safer than having to fix all of the installed devices down the road.

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eldavojohn writes "If you're a Web developer, you should check out a quick post about the number of types, methods, & fields in the .NET framework. This was done using NDepend. The numbers are quite large — e.g. 39,509 types. The blogger went on to generate tree maps and a dependency matrix."

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Thank god for Little Joe!

Matt Springer interviewed Johnny Hiro creator Fred Chao for HeavyInk.

It's rare that a new series will grab you by the back of the head and smack your face into a soft, comfy cushion of fun goodness. Yet that's exactly what Johnny Hiro does. It's hard to describe in the usual Hollywood pitch-style loglines -- "Scott Pilgrim meets Bruce Lee and dates an adorable girl in a fantastically weird New York City" is about as close as you'll get, but even that doesn't convey the pure energy and enthusiasm evident in every panel of Johnny Hiro.

An illustrator and graphic designer by trade, writer/artist Fred Chao has published three issues of Johnny Hiro through AdHouse Books. He took some time to talk about his influences and inspirations, as well as the background on how Johnny Hiro came to be.

Link

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/18/call1.mp3

Here at Techdirt we have over ten years worth of content, all available for anyone to read, and as we certainly get a fair amount of traffic to those back archives. While we don't pay that much attention to ad revenues (our business isn't advertising), access to those archives (mainly from Google searches or links from other sites into a specific older story) represent a fair chunk of our page views and ad revenue. With that in mind, it's been quite surprising to see so many publications try to lock up their archives -- either (worst of all!) taking down old stories completely or trying to lock them up behind a pay wall. Luckily, it looks like more and more publications are recognizing that this is a bad business strategy. The article is in the NY Times, which only recognized this very issue a few months ago. Prior to that, it charged for access to its archives, but since opening it up has seen traffic shoot up and ad revenues appear to be following. The article also mentions how Newsweek has had a lot of success opening up its archive, and Sports Illustrated is getting set to make its own archive available later this week. For all of those publishers who worry that there isn't enough ad revenue online, it makes little sense to sit on so much inventory. These days, you need to work on using Google to help drive more traffic, not suing it to stop sending traffic. What better way to make money off your archive than getting a lot more people to look at it?

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TimeZone writes "Apparently, even subliminal exposure to the Apple logo can make you 'think different.' Researchers at Duke University subjected participants to subliminal images of the iconic Apple and IBM logos (during what subjects thought was a visual acuity test), and those who were shown the Apple logo generated more creative ideas after the test than did those who were shown the IBM logo. In a second test, subjects exposed to the Disney logo acted more honestly than those who saw an E! Channel logo." Here's a preprint of the paper (PDF) due for publication in the Journal of Consumer Research.

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I'll be a guest on G4 TV's "Attack of the Show" today, for a discussion about the blocking of YouTube, Google News, and other sites (including Boing Boing) in China in the wake of recent violence in Tibet. Link

Many readers are sending in word that Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka. He wrote over 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama, and popularized the ideas of geosynchronous communications satellites and space elevators.

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