Notes from the Electronic Cottage 8/09/07

Producer/host: Jim Campbell

These are the lazy, hazy days of summer but that doesn¹t mean that there isvany vacation in cyberspace. Today we reflect on new NSA powers to intercept your phone and email communications; invisible yellow dots made by color laser printers that allow the government to track what printer printed what documents (seeingyellow.com, www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php); electronic voting machine vulnerabilities; TASER stun guns in “designer colors;” a new Microsoft patent application that would scan the contents of your hard drive to enable advertisers to better target your interests; and a very nice youtube video that manages to cram a huge amount of information about our world into six minutes (youtube.com/watch?v=xHWTLA8WecI).

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 8/01/07

Producer/host: Jim Campbell

Should civil liberties – in cyberspace or anywhere else – diminish to provide increased security? What does the Constitution say, or is it mute on such a question, in a technologically dangerous world the founders could never have contemplated? Eminent jurist Richard A. Posner takes on those very questions in “Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency.” Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the questions he raises are ones we all need to answer for ourselves in the post 9-11 world we all live in now.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 7/12/07

Producer/host: Jim Campbell

Topic: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has gone after tens of thousands of people who it alleges have illegally downloaded music in violation of copyright laws. Some of those people are fighting back, and winning. Now the RIAA is sometimes finding itself a defendant in court cases. We take a look at what is going on, and why things are not going so
smoothly for the RIAA these days as they once were.

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