The_Sock - Slashdot User

Submission + - Law to Order ISPs to Cache all Internet Activity

Submitted by

Philip L. Hage

on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @05:05PM

Philip L. Hage writes: "The companion to the McCain/Schumer bill for the 110th Congress dealing with online predators is a bill proposed by Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. She is planning on introducing legislation in January 2007 to force Internet Service Providers to maintain data on every American's net activity. The Justice Department has been campaigning for this for years and the notoriety of the Mark Foley incident has served as a catalyst. DeGette's initiative would require ISPs to cache senders and receivers of emails, chat room activity, IM activity and users' Internet histories for all 100 million U.S. users for an evergreen two-year period. In case a child predator or pornographer was identified, his entire Internet activity could be subpoenaed, scrutinized and provided as evidence in his possible trial. Caching 120 billion unique page views for 100 million Americans for two years to provide possible prosecutorial evidence on a thousand perverts is a misguided and dangerous invasion of Americans' privacy. While the "ends" are desirable the "means" are despicable. Currently, for business reasons, ISPs temporarily cache some of their users' Internet activity, but not in the detail specified in DeGette's proposal. ISPs do this for valid business reasons, generally to resolve possible billing disputes for periods of time matching the billing cycles."

Submission + - Search 2.0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @05:05PM

An anonymous reader writes: Which one will dominate the search engine space in the next few years? SearchMash innovations and Oli Aron algorithms powered Google? Yahoo with its research project Mindset's intent-driven approach? The whole new Live.com of Microsoft, with the advantages of being the default choice in Vista? Or the well funded upcomers, Snap, Hakia and Powerset which promise to bring better user experience and artificial intelligence applications to the game. Emre Sokullu's article discusses all these with other possibilities as well.

Submission + - Jail time for playing 1st person shooters?

Submitted by pclminion on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @04:54PM

pclminion writes: According to Gamespot, the German government is considering a new law which would make it a crime to commit "cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters." Conceivably, this could mean that gibbing your Quake 3 opponent (who happens to be using a human-like character) could become an actual crime. But the law seems more general than that — is a mannequin a "human-looking character," for example? Could chopping a mannequin apart for disposal now make one a criminal? Odd stuff.

Submission + - Congress and technology, all show and no go..

Submitted by

DrivebySoftware.com

on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @04:47PM

DrivebySoftware.com writes: "Congress and technology, all show and no go.. Our wonderful bought and paid-for Corporate Republician Politicians spent the last two years promising us new technology laws. Thank God they cut out over the weekend and ended the 12 years of terror on our working middle class and poor, only a few technology-related bills had actually made it through the legislative process but there police-state bills passed. The 109th only approved a pittance of technology-related items, leaving patent reform, net neutrality and data breach notification to die in committee, shame on them. Let's hope the Democrats get it right in the 110th Congress. The 109th should get a 'F' for failure. One bill sent to President Bush would make it a federal crime to use fraudulent tactics to buy, sell or otherwise obtain private phone record information (pretexting) although it explicitly exempts the police and the spy's at the NSA from doing it. The lame ducks split for the holidays without voting on the corporate H-1B visa, looks like Corporate America didn't get a boost in the guest worker program they claim is necessary to fill critical holes for there low wage workforce. Here's one? How about hiring U.S. IT Professionals, you know the ones that are out of work. We need to write to our elected official's and tell them not to raise the H-1B visas in the 110th because it's just another form of bought and paid-for corporate welfare."

Submission + - OpenHelpdesk goes open source!

Submitted by

BKervaski

on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @04:44PM

BKervaski writes: "OpenHelpdesk (finally) goes open source! http://openhelpdesk.org/"

Submission + - Official: Terrorist Threat to U.S. Satellites

Submitted by mattnyc99 on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @04:37PM

mattnyc99 writes: The Bush administration has issued a warning about — and defended the country's right to defend against — threats from terrorists and other nations against U.S. military and commercial satellites. Popular Mechanics looks at an Air Force program that's protecting our military satellites (and their vulnerabilities) with store-bought gear and old-fashioned sleuthing.

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