Stupidity

Judge misdials in Sprint ruling on early termination fees

A California state judge handed down a surprising and oddly reasoned verdict Thursday: Sprint Nextel's early termination fees for cell phone customers are illegal.

My colleague Maggie Reardon wrote an article about the 38-page ruling, which orders Sprint to pay $18.25 million to California customers who were charged termination fees. Customers charged fees who never paid them get a credit of $54.75 million.

You can imagine how much of this will go to the members of the supposed class that was harmed, and how much to the plaintiff's lawyers. In the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas … Read more

Lovestruck MySpace teen not guilty of harassment, court says

The annals of history are replete with examples of teenage angst and unrequited love. It took the state of New York to make those a crime.

State prosecutors decided to charge Isaiah Rodriguez, 18, of aggravated harassment and endangering the welfare of a child over a series of MySpace.com messages professing his ardent devotion to a 14-year-old girl.

The messages said, in part: "I love you;" "we need to be together;" I will see you every day;" and "I will never stop trying to talk to you."

That, according to the solons … Read more

Al Gore bars press from RSA talk next month

Remember, folks, it's Al Gore's Internet. We're just using it.

Gore is scheduled to give a keynote speech on April 11 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. RSA says as many as 17,000 people showed up at last year's conference, and it's reasonable to assume a large chunk of this year's crowd will try to squeeze into Gore's keynote speech. These are security types, engineers, marketers, PR flacks, and so on--many of whom have their own blogs, Flickr accounts, and Twitter feeds where they'll share details about Gore's speech (… Read more

Sequoia warns Princeton professors over e-voting analysis

Ed Felten is a Princeton University computer scientist who became well-known in technology circles for a paper he co-authored that showed flaws in digital audio watermarks. More precisely, Felten became well-known for the legal threats he received at the time from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Now Sequoia Voting Systems, which is one of the largest e-voting machine manufacturers in the United States, is threatening Felten too.

On Tuesday, Felten posted e-mail he and fellow Princeton professor Andrew Appel received from Sequoia saying:

As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated … Read more

McCullagh's Law: When politicians invoke the do-this-or-Americans-will-die argument

Republicans are so eager to sink a wiretapping bill that includes some privacy safeguards that they're invoking what amounts to a do-this-or-Americans-will-die argument.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., said after an Intelligence Committee vote on the Restore Act on Wednesday that the bill "puts our nation and troops at risk." A few minutes earlier, responding to a Judiciary Committee vote, Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said the bill protects "terrorists, spies and other enemies."

Politicians of both major parties wield this as the ultimate political threat. Its invocation typically predicts that if a certain piece of legislation is … Read more

FCC asked to mandate 'e-mail address portability'

The Federal Communications Commission is being asked to do a remarkably silly thing: create mandatory "e-mail address portability."

The idea is that because the U.S. Post Office offers to forward physical mail, and because FCC rules require telephone service providers to offer number portability, the same principle should be extended to e-mail accounts.

Here are some excerpts from the petition to the FCC asking for an immediate rulemaking:

In today's world, many individuals and businesses depend just as heavily on their e-mail addresses as on their phone numbers as public points of contact with the larger … Read more

Feds use robots.txt files to stay invisible online. Lame.

I noticed, when writing a story on Thursday about the bizarre claims by National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, that the DNI is trying to hide from search engines. Its robots.txt file says, simply:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

That blocks all search engines, including Google, MSN, Yahoo, and so on, from indexing any files at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Web site. (Here's some background on the Robots Exclusion Protocol if you're rusty.)

So I figured it would be interesting to see what other fedgov sites did the same. I wrote a quick Perl program to … Read more