I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The judge overseeing the SCO Chapter 11 bankruptcy case has issued an order appointing a chapter 11 trustee to oversee SCO's operations. However, the judge's reasoning is far from clear. While the judge believes that SCO has 'abandoned rehabilitation' to bet its future on litigation, he doesn't think it appropriate to convert their case to Chapter 7 liquidation. So SCO's management hasn't been fired yet, but they're no longer fully in charge either. It's not clear why the bankruptcy judge opted for this solution, when even the US Trustee was pushing to fire SCO's management and convert the case to Chapter 7. In short, SCO is still only mostly dead, rather than all dead, and in desperate search of a miracle worker."

Ars Technica reports that the Utah State Senate and House have both passed Jack Thompson's proposed legislation that would stiffen penalties for the sale of M-rated games to minors. Oddly, on its trip through the state legislature, amendments rendered it largely ineffective; retailers are in the clear if the employee who sold the game goes through a training program, or if the minor misrepresents his age. It's also possible that the bill could cause some retailers to simply take down their ESRB-related advertising. Thompson's statements about the bill put the focus on advertising, but discussion on the Utah Senate floor had a familiar ring, touching on the story of a Grand Theft Auto player who killed two policemen in 2003. The ESRB wrote an open letter in opposition of the bill, saying it could undo the efforts they've made to popularize their rating system. The bill's sponsors fired back, questioning the industry's overall commitment to ratings, and now it awaits only the governor's signature before becoming law.

California State Senator Joe Simitian has introduced new legislation designed to tighten data breach notification requirements, forcing businesses to provide more information about any data that has been leaked in addition to notifying state authorities. What was not included in the legislation was imposed compensation requirements for data breach victims, and according to Simitian are not likely to be for quite some time. "Instead, the next focus of legislation, he said, would likely be on who should bear the cost of sending out notifications to consumers. For example, should a credit card processing company that experiences a breach be responsible for the cost of notifying bank customers? When retailer TJX discovered in 2006 that hackers had accessed credit and debit card numbers passing through its network, banks were left notifying the customers, then had to sue TJX to get compensation for those costs. Heartland Payment Systems, which experienced a breach of credit and debit card numbers in January, has recently been sued by banks to recover their breach notification costs."

Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System) experiment. "AEGIS is not self-sustaining, at least not yet, and with 12 DNA building blocks -- as opposed to the usual four -- there's little chance it will be confused with natural life. Still, Benner is encouraged by the results. 'It's evolving. It's doing what we designed it to do,' said Benner, a biochemist with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The US President-elect, Barack Obama, has selected Julius Genachowski to lead the Federal Communications Commission. This appears to bode well for a forward-looking (or at least clued) Internet policy, since Genachowski is credited with running Obama's internet-based election campaign, and, according to 'Fierce Telecom,' 'has an impressive record working with technology and communications companies: He was Chief of Business Operations at InterActiveCorp; he's co-founder of Rock Creek Ventures, which currently backs 11 internet-based start-ups, and he's also served on the boards of numerous technology and new media companies, including The Motley Fool, Web.com, Truveo, and Rapt'."

debatem1 writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA has decided to abandon its current tactic of suing individuals for sharing copyrighted music. Ongoing lawsuits will be pursued to completion, but no new ones will be filed. The RIAA is going to try working with the ISPs to limit file-sharing services and cut off repeated users. This very surprising development apparently comes as a result of public distaste for the campaign." An RIAA spokesman is quoted as saying that the litigation campaign has been "successful in raising the public's awareness that file-sharing is illegal."