Slashdot reports that a British EFF is in the works.

Slashdot reports that UK police wants to make it a criminal offense for people to refuse disclosing their encryption keys when the police want to access someone’s files.

Tourists visiting Disney theme parks in Central Florida must now provide their index and middle fingers to be scanned before entering the front gates.

local6.com – News – Finger Scanning At Disney Parks Causes Concern

via Klang

Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption | CNET News.com

A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent.

Slashdot discussion

A survey shows that most Americans do not think that blogs should be completely free. ZDNet Australia reports:

Most Americans believe bloggers should not be allowed to publish sensitive personal information about individuals, according to a new survey.

Web hosting company Hostway this week released the results of its poll of 2,500 respondents on blogging. Eighty percent of respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens.

via Slashdot

Personally, I think that there is usually no need to publish that kind of information and I think it is unfortunate that any kind of regulation is automatically labeled censorship. I see no real problems with rules that prohibit the publication of that kind of information. After all, you can choose to break them (and pay the price for that) if you think the publication is important enough. I think that there is a difference between this and real, pre-publication, censorship.

Slashdot | ISPs in Argentina Must Log Everything

According to a new presidential decree, and effective July 31, 2005, telecom carriers in Argentina will have to log every activity, including Internet chats, website visits, e-mails, phone calls, etc, made in Argentina. The data must be stored for 10 years, and must be available to the police and intelligence agencies within one hour, 24 hours a day.

AOL’s new terms of service for AIM seems unpleasant. For example:

…by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.

via Slashdot

I don’t understand a word of Finnish so I do not really have an opinion about this specific case myself. However, Antti reports that a Finnish blogger has been sued over his opinions.

As far as I have understood the case (from a quick reading of Antti’s post), a school teacher is accused of mistreating the school children and someone has written about this on a blog and been sued for defamation.

Personally, I cannot see a good reason for publishing the names of suspected criminals at all. In my opinion, it does far more harm than what can be justified by some “public right to know” etc. In a civilised legal system, everyone is innocent unless they are proven to be guilty. However, if they have already been portrayed as guilty in the press (or blogs), they will always be guilty in the eyes of the public.

Slashdot reports:

A Florida court ruled that it was illegal for a wife to install spyware on her husband’s computer, in order to catch him in an extramarital affair. The three judge panel barred the woman from using the chat records from being introduced as evidence in the divorce proceedings. The court ruled that the software, Spector, violated Florida’s wiretapping law – which states that it is criminal to ‘intentionally intercept’ any ‘electronic communication.’*

Read more on ZDNet. By the way, there’s some rather funny 31337 poetry in the comments on Slashdot.

The EC Working Party 29 on data protection invites comments of interested parties on its Working Document on DRM and data protection. The public consultation lasts until March 31st, 2005. The comments received by then will be posted on their website unless a specific request not to do so is mentioned. – via INDICARE