Saturday, July 07, 2012

MIRLN --- 17 June – 7 July 2012 (v15.09)

MIRLN --- 17 June - 7 July 2012 (v15.09) --- by Vince Polley and KnowConnect PLLC (supplemented by related Tweets: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln)

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NEWS | PODCASTS | LOOKING BACK | NOTES

The "Bring Your Own Device" to Work Movement (Littler, May 2012) - We are pleased to share with you Littler's Report on the 2012 Littler Initiative entitled The "Bring Your Own Device" to Work Movement. The Report analyzes the challenges employers will face over the next 1 to 3 years as more and more employees use personal devices to perform work. For some companies, a BYOD or "Bring Your Own Device" policy may be the right response. [Editor: A thorough, actionable analysis of the various legal and technological issues, co-authored by Mike McGuire. The entire report is here .]

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Ethics Opinion Warns Lawyers About Perils of Unintentional Juror Contact During Online Research (ABA Journal, 5 June 2012) - Lawyers may research potential and sitting jurors on Facebook and other social media sites, but communications with jurors should be avoided, according to a new ethics opinion. The opinion by the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Professional Ethics notes that it's not always easy to discern whether a visit to a website will result in a communication. The opinion says it is unethical for lawyers or those working on their behalf to make juror friend requests, a finding that is in accord with a recent opinion by New York County Lawyers' Association. But the City Bar opinion sets out to address a broader issue: what constitutes a prohibited ex parte communication with a juror. According to the opinion, the ban on communication is violated not only through friend requests, but also when the lawyer is aware that his or her review of the juror's comments, pages or posts will be disclosed to the juror. In addition, a violation might occur even if the communication to the juror is inadvertent or unintended. "In the social media context, due to the nature of the services, unintentional communications with a member of the jury venire or the jury pose a particular risk," the opinion says. "For example, if an attorney views a juror's social media page and the juror receives an automated message from the social media service that a potential contact has viewed her profile-even if the attorney has not requested the sending of that message or is entirely unaware of it-the attorney has arguably 'communicated' with the juror." Although the relevant rule appears to bar even inadvertent communication, the ethics committee takes no position on whether such a communication would in fact be a violation.

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California Draft Opinion on Lawyers' Use of Social Media (June 2012) - ISSUE: Under what circumstances would an attorney's postings on social media websites be subject to professional responsibility rules and standards governing attorney advertising? DIGEST: Material posted by an attorney on a social media website will be subject to professional responsibility rules and standards governing attorney advertising if that material constitutes a "communication" within the meaning of rule 1-400 (Advertising and Solicitation) of the Rules of Professional Conduct of the State Bar of California; or (2) "advertising by electronic media" within the meaning of Article 9.5 (Legal Advertising) of the State Bar Act. The restrictions imposed by the professional responsibility rules and standards governing attorney advertising are not relaxed merely because such compliance might be more difficult or awkward in a social media setting.

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Banks: Hackers More Aggressive In Attacking Customer Accounts (Computerworld, 14 June 2012) - A survey of large financial institutions shows they faced more attacks by hackers to take over customer banking accounts last year than in the two previous years, and about a third of these attacks succeeded. The total number of attacks to try and break in and transfer money out of hacked customer accounts was up to 314 over the course of 2011, according to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), which released findings of its survey of 95 financial institutions and five service providers. That's an increase from 87 attacks against bank accounts in 2009 and 239 in 2010. FS-ISAC is the group that coordinates on security issues with the Department of Homeland Security. The survey was conducted by the American Bankers Association. Increasingly, banks are extending strong authentication to their customers to prevent successful takeovers of accounts by hackers, whose strategy is often to use malware to take control of the computer of someone authorized to make payments or other high-dollar transfers related to corporate accounts. These authentication methods can take many forms. United Bank & Trust, located in Ann Arbor, Mich., for instance, increased security for customers through a method that automatically phones the customer making an online funds transfer to verify the details about the transaction before it's executed.

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U.S. Critical Infrastructure Cyberattack Reports Jump Dramatically (Dark Reading, 29 June 2012) - U.S. critical infrastructure companies saw a dramatic increase in the number of reported cyber-security incidents between 2009 and 2011, according to a new report from the U.S. Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT). In 2009, ICS-CERT fielded 9 incident reports. In 2010, that number increased to 41. In 2011, it was 198. Of those 198, seven resulted in the deployment of onsite incident response teams from ICS-CERT, and 21 of the other incidents involved remote analysis efforts by the Advanced Analytics Lab. Incidents specific to the water sector, when added to those that impacted multiple sectors, accounted for more than half of the incidents due to a larger number of Internet-facing control system devices reported by independent researchers, according to the report. All totaled, ICS-CERT performed 17 onsite assessments during 2009, 2010 and 2011, including seven last year. The most common attack vector for network intrusion was spear-phishing, which accounted for seven of the 17 incidents. "Sophisticated threat actors" were tied to 11 of the incidents, with the goal in several cases being the theft of data. "No intrusions were identified directly into control system networks," the report states. "However, given the flat and interconnected nature of many of these organization's networks, threat actors, once they have gained a presence, have the potential to move laterally into other portions of the network, including the control system, where they could compromise critical infrastructure operations." Tellingly, in 12 of the 17 cases, implementing of security best practices such as login limitations and properly configured firewalls could have deterred the attack, minimized the time it took to detect it or reduced its impact, ICS-CERT reports.

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Analysis: You Can Record Cops, Even In Private (ArsTechnica, 19 June 2012) - In the past year, two different appeals courts have ruled that recording the actions of police officers in public places is protected by the First Amendment. A new legal analysis argues that the right to record the actions of law enforcement is also protected by the Constitution's due process clause. This right can apply even in non-public settings.

The paper is written by Glenn Reynolds, best known as the author of the Instapundit blog. He has a day job as a law professor at the University of Tennessee, and he co-authored the paper with attorney John Steakley.

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Google Documents Government Snooping (ReadWriteWeb, 20 June 2012) - Google disclosed government requests for user data in the latest installment in its Transparency Report . The report documents an upward trend in requests that Google itself finds "troubling." For this fifth installment of the interactive report, Google added the ability to view aggregated court orders and other requests across all countries . From July to December 2011, governments requested information on 28,562 user accounts worldwide. This number covers requests for user information and blog post or video take-downs and includes Google's rate of compliance. The U.S. government submitted 6,321 requests for data, of which Google fulfilled more than 90% at least partially. The federal government also lodged 187 requests for blog and video takedowns.

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The Chilling Effects On Innovation Caused By Bad Copyright Law (TechDirt, 20 June 2012) - We've talked a few times about how attacks on new innovations in the name of protecting copyright can create massive chilling effects. For example, the increasingly questionable arguments against Megaupload have created a real chill for online cloud storage providers. That was likely manifest last week in the news that Dropbox was killing off its "public folders" feature in deference to its link feature, basically making the product less useful. Matt Schruers, from CCIA has an interesting blog post up which ties actions like those done by Dropbox here with a new study showing how the chilling effects of bad copyright law can impact innovation . The full study (pdf) is actually something of a follow up to an earlier study we wrote about, which showed how good judicial rulings on copyright which allowed for greater innovation (such as the Cablevision ruling , which allowed cloud-based DVRs to exist) contributed directly to greater funding of innovation. 

This new study, also by Harvard professor Josh Lerner, highlights the unfortunate opposite impact: the chilling effects on investment in innovation that comes as a result of anti-innovation judicial rulings.

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Whose Intellectual Property? (InsideHigherEd, 21 June 2012) - Over the last 30 years, universities have become increasingly aggressive about securing the rights to faculty intellectual property (IP) that is patentable and thus potentially profitable. The operative distinction in many current policies is between faculty IP that can be protected by copyright, versus IP that is patentable. In a major new 100,000-word report issued this month -- Recommended Principles & Practices to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships -- the American Association of University Professors argues that this distinction is not grounded in any rational analysis of the nature of faculty research and productivity. It is essentially an opportunistic maneuver to gain administrative control over IP that may be income producing. We urge that the administrative distinction between ownership of copyrightable and patentable intellectual property be abandoned. Faculty members should have primary authority over the disposition of all their IP, subject to legal and contractual restrictions and subject to principles articulated by campus faculty collectively.

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The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life (BeSpacific, 21 June 2012) - Alice Marwick. Surveillance & Society, Vol 9, No 4 (2012): "People create profiles on social network sites and Twitter accounts against the background of an audience. This paper argues that closely examining content created by others and looking at one's own content through other people's eyes, a common part of social media use, should be framed as social surveillance. While social surveillance is distinguished from traditional surveillance along three axes (power, hierarchy, and reciprocity), its effects and behavior modification is common to traditional surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of United States populations, I look at social surveillance, how it is practiced, and its impact on people who engage in it. I use Foucault's concept of capillaries of power to demonstrate that social surveillance assumes the power differentials evident in everyday interactions rather than the hierarchical power relationships assumed in much of the surveillance literature. Social media involves a collapse of social contexts and social roles, complicating boundary work but facilitating social surveillance. Individuals strategically reveal, disclose and conceal personal information to create connections with others and tend social boundaries. These processes are normal parts of day-to-day life in communities that are highly connected through social media."

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OSC Sends a Stern Warning About Reading Employees' Emails (NextGov, 21 June 2012) - In a fiercely worded bid for whistleblowers' rights, the Office of Special Counsel released a memo Wednesday to all executive departments and federal agencies strongly urging them to evaluate their policies on monitoring employee emails and other communications. "Agency monitoring specifically designed to target protected disclosures to the OSC and inspectors general is highly problematic," Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner wrote in the memo . "Such targeting undermines the ability of employees to make confidential disclosures." The memo doesn't mention any agency or case by name, but the Food and Drug Administration is under investigation for alleged monitoring of employee correspondence with OSC, members of Congress and the news media. As early as 2009, FDA whistleblowers seeking to report on their agency's lax approval processes for medical devices were being unlawfully watched and reprimanded by management, according to the National Whistleblowers Center.

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Technology and the First Amendment (MLPB, 21 June 2012) - Christopher S. Yoo, University of Pennsylvania Law School & University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, has published Technologies of Control and the Future of the First Amendment at 53 William & Mary Law Review 747 (2011). Here is the abstract: "The technological context surrounding the Supreme Court's landmark decision in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation allowed the Court to gloss over the tension between two rather disparate rationales. Those adopting a civil libertarian view of free speech could support the decision on the grounds that viewers' and listeners' inability to filter out unwanted speech exposed them to content that they did not wish to see or hear. At the same time, Pacifica also found support from those who more paternalistically regard indecency as low value (if not socially harmful) speech that is unworthy of full First Amendment protection. The arrival of filtering technologies has introduced a wedge between those who supported the constitutionality of indecency regulations out of a desire to enhance individual autonomy and those who wish to restrict speech in order to promote a particular vision of the public good. At the same time, commentators on the political left have begun to question whether continued support for the classic liberal vision of free speech may be interfering with the advancement of progressive values. This Article offers a qualified defense of the libertarian vision of free speech. Deviating from the civil libertarian view would require a revolution in doctrine and would contradict the postulate of independent moral agency that lies at the heart of liberal theory. Although some suggested institutions for ascertaining the idealized preferences that individuals ought to have could justify allowing the government to override individuals' actual preferences, such an approach is all-too reminiscent of the Rousseauian notion of being "forced to be free" and has never been accepted by the Supreme Court. Finally, claims that private censorship presents risks commensurate with public censorship fail to address the fact that liberal theory presupposes the existence of a private sphere into which the state cannot intrude, as well as the long tradition recognizing the special dangers associated with the coercive power of the state. Moreover, the rationales upon which the Supreme Court has relied to justify overriding individual preferences in broadcasting and cable have been undermined by technological change."

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Scholarship Roundup: A Guide to the Legislative History of the America Invents Act (PatentlyO, 22 June 2012) - One of the challenges of working with the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act stems from its legislative history, which is scattered through more than five years of Congressional materials. To address this challenge, Joe Matal, Judiciary Committee Counsel to Senator Jon Kyl, recently published a comprehensive guide to the legislative history of the AIA in the Federal Circuit Bar Journal. Matal's compendium provides both a history of the Congressional discussion leading up to the AIA as well as a roadmap to the relevant legislative materials, linking them to particular provisions of the AIA and explaining how to locate each source. Part I addresses the portions of the AIA that relate to applications before a patent issues, while Part II deals with the portions that apply after a patent is granted. Paper here .

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German University to Stream Subtitled Lectures (DW, 25 June 2012) - German is not easy - international students often have trouble understanding their professors. But a German university is trialing software to translate and subtitle lectures. International students at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in western Germany may soon only need to turn on their laptops to understand their professors - a new program is will automatically transcribe lecture and translate them into English. The result will appear almost simultaneously on the student's computer screen, like subtitles on a film. The translation is to be streamed live on the Web, and will avoid the need for students to install any special software. The subtitles will be available to view on any browser. In addition to the live stream, students will also be able to view any Powerpoint presentation in English.

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Client Secrets at Risk as Hackers Target Law Firms (WSJ, 25 June 2012) - Think knowing how to draft a contract, file a motion on time and keep your mouth shut fulfills your lawyerly obligations of competence and confidentiality? Not these days. Cyberattacks against law firms are on the rise, and that means attorneys who want to protect their clients' secrets are having to reboot their skills for the digital age. Lawyers sling millions of gigabytes of confidential information daily through cyberspace, conducting much of their business via email or smartphones and other mobile devices that provide ready access to documents. But the new tools also offer tempting targets for hackers, who experts say regard law firms as "soft targets" in their hunt for insider scoops on mergers, patents and other deals, as WSJ detailed in this Monday's Law Journal. "The challenge is not the laptop, the iPad or whatever," said Carlos Rodriguez, manager of network infrastructure and security for the Midwestern law firm Lathrop & Gage LLP. "The challenge is protecting the data… the smaller the firm gets, the more difficult it gets for them to put the proper controls and to educate the firm."

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The Future of Predictive Coding - Rise of the Evidentiary Expert? (BullsEye Blog, 26 June 2012) - Ponder these mind-boggling statistics, courtesy of the ABA 2012 Litigation Section Annual Conference: Some companies estimate that for every 340,000 pages of information preserved for litigation, only 1 is actually used. In addition, discovery comprises approximately 50% of the cost of litigation. Like a dog chasing its own tail, technology has been forced to generate new solutions to deal with the escalating costs and burdens associated with legal review of massive amounts of electronically stored information. Welcome to computer-assisted document coding and review, sometimes better known by the legal industry as predictive coding. Thanks in part to three cases that have recently emerged on predictive coding, ( Da Silva Moore , Kleen Products, LLC , and Global Aerospace Inc. ), this relatively novel technique is now garnering recognition, and in one seminal case, judicial approval. In the ground-breaking case of Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe , Case No. 11-cv-01279 (S.D.N.Y. April 26, 2012) the U.S. District Court for the S.D. of New York became the first court to officially approve the use of predictive coding as an acceptable way of reviewing electronically stored documents in certain cases. Although definitions can differ , what is commonly referred to as predictive coding - perhaps more appropriately called computer-assisted document coding and review - is a human-driven, human-supervised technique of utilizing computer technology to review, analyze, and process large sets of electronically stored data for relevance, privilege, priority, issue-relation, or other thematic patterns. According to a report submitted at the ABA 2012 Litigation Section Annual Conference, predictive coding involves the development of decision-making criteria which is based upon a training set, and then applied to a larger body of data for the purpose of making predictions. At the heart of predictive coding lies the concept of "supervised learning," defined as "an algorithm that learns from human decisions and then has the ability to apply those decisions to new data."

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Protecting False Reputations and Valuing Free Speech (MLPB, 26 June 2012) - John A. Humbach, Pace University School of Law, has published Privacy Rights: The Virtue of Protecting a False Reputation. Here is the abstract: What is the virtue of protecting a false reputation? The thesis of this paper is that there is none. There is none, at least, that justifies the suppression of free speech. Yet, there is a growing trend to see the protection of reputation from truth as a key function of the so-called "right of privacy." 

Unfortunately, people often do things that they are not proud of or do not want others to know about. Often, however, these are precisely the things that others want or need to know. For our own protection, each of us is better off being aware of the negative or less-than-flattering qualities of others with whom we deal. 

The things that people say about each other are protected by the Constitution as much as any other form of expression. The Supreme Court has recognized repeatedly that the judgment embodied in the First Amendment is that the benefits of a free flow of information outweigh the costs and that those who speak truthfully cannot be made to do so at their peril. Therefore, disclosures of truthful information cannot, in the name of "privacy," be constitutionally subjected to after-the-fact governmental determinations that they were not justified, unnecessary or even a crime. 

Perhaps there are things that it is better for us not to see or hear. But the assumption of the First Amendment is that government should not be deciding these limitations on the free flow of information or what speech is important enough to be "worth it." If, in the name of protecting privacy or reputations, government agencies can decide after the fact what is and is not legitimate negative information, self-censorship will abound and valuable information will suffer.

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Comcast Pays $800,000 to U.S. for Hiding Stand-Alone Broadband (GigaOM, 27 June 2012) - The Federal Communications Commission has settled with Comcast over charges that the cable company made it hard for consumers to find stand-alone broadband packages that don't cost an arm and leg. As part of the settlement Comcast paid the U.S. Treasury $800,000 and the FCC extended the length of time Comcast had to provide such a service. The cable provider was ordered by the agency to provide access to "a reasonably priced broadband option to consumers who do not receive their cable service from the company" under the Commission's Order approving the Comcast-NBCU transaction in 2010. To further show its ire with Comcast, the FCC also said Comcast would have to provide the stand-alone reasonable broadband-only package for another year - until February 21, 2015. From the FCC release: "Under the order the Commission required Comcast to offer standalone broadband services on terms equivalent to packages that bundle broadband and video cable service. Comcast was ordered to offer a broadband service with a download speed of at least 6 mbps at a price no greater than $49.95 for three years. The Commission also prohibited Comcast from raising prices on the required broadband service for two years. Finally, Comcast had to "visibly offer and actively market" standalone broadband Internet access service to highlight the availability of this special service and other standalone broadband services."

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SWAT Team Throws Flashbangs, Raids Wrong Home Due To Open Wifi Network (ArsTechnica, 28 June 2012) - The long-standing, heavily documented militarization of even small-town American police forces was always going to create problems when it met anonymous Internet threats. And so it has, again-this time in Evansville, Indiana, where officers acted on some Topix postings threatening violence against local police. They then sent an entire SWAT unit to execute a search warrant on a local house, one in which the front door was open and an 18-year old woman sat inside watching TV. The cops brought along TV cameras, inviting a local reporter to film the glorious operation. In the resulting video, you can watch the SWAT team , decked out in black bulletproof vests and helmets and carrying window and door smashers, creep slowly up to the house. At some point, they apparently "knock" and announce their presence-though not with the goal of getting anyone to come to the door. As the local police chief admitted later to the Evansville Courier & Press , the process is really just "designed to distract." (SWAT does not need to wait for a response.) Officers break the screen door and a window, tossing a flashbang into the house-which you can see explode in the video. A second flashbang gets tossed in for good measure a moment later. SWAT enters the house. But the family in the home was released without any charges as police realized their mistake. Turns out the home had an open WiFi router, and the threats had been made by someone outside the house. Whoops. So the cops did some more investigation and decided that the threats had come from a house on the same street. This time, apparently recognizing they had gone a little nuts on the first raid, the police department didn't send a SWAT team at all. Despite believing that they now had the right location and that a threat-making bomber lurked within, they just sent officers up to the door.

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FOIA Request Forces DOJ to Reveal National Security Letter Templates (ArsTechnica, 28 June 2012) - As the result of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Justice has revealed, for the first time, the types of secret letters that the government can send out to ISPs and other tech companies being asked to reveal personal data about their users and customers who are being investigated for national security reasons. In 2009, over 6,000 Americans received such National Security Letters (NSLs). According to the Wall Street Journal , the "letters show that the FBI is now informing people who receive the letters how they can challenge the documents in court. But some key elements of the letters remain blocked from view-including lists of material the FBI says companies can send in response to the letter." Most commonly, government investigators request names and addresses associated with phone and Internet records. There are also some especially broad requests, including "electronic communications transactional records," and "Internet activity logs." However, it remains unclear exactly what those terms mean, and how companies comply or don't comply with such requests is also a mystery. "You are hereby directed to provide the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the names, addresses, and length of service and electronic communications transactional records, to include existing transaction/activity logs and all electronic mail (e-mail) header information, for the below listed [e-mail/IP] address holder(s): [e-mail/IP address or addresses] [on a specific date] or [For the period from [specific date] to [specific date][present]," the template states . The newspaper also reported that exactly what information is disclosed to federal authorities is not usually made public. In requests for comment, Verizon and AT&T said they did not comment on national security matters, while Google and Twitter said they merely comply with "valid legal process," but that they would notify users of such requests whenever possible. Facebook, interestingly, has taken a much more narrow interpretation of the law. "We interpret the national security letter provision as applied to Facebook to require the production of only two categories of information: name and length of service," said Fred Wolens, a public policy spokesman for the social networking giant, as quoted by the WSJ.

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New European Guidelines to Address Cloud Computing (NYT, 1 July 2012) - The European Commission's panel on privacy is expected on Monday to endorse the concept of cloud computing as legal under the Continent's privacy law and to recommend for the first time that large companies and organizations police themselves to assure that personal information kept in remote locations is protected. The panel, known as the Article 29 Working Party, is expected to make the recommendation as part of its long-awaited guidelines on cloud computing, which have the potential, some industry experts say, to allay concerns over data privacy and pave the way for wider adoption of the remote-computing services that are more common in the United States.

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Social Media is the Message for Olympics (NYT, 2 July 2012) - At the Olympic Games in London, set to begin this month, the official motto of "swifter, higher, stronger" will be supplemented by a new label. If some marketers, fans and athletes have anything to say, these Games will be the first Social Media Olympics - the "Socialympics," as some are calling them. Even the Olympic movement, which sometimes steps into the future with great caution, has warily accepted the idea. * * * All this sharing and connecting has also created some new headaches. There is grumbling, for instance, about the restrictions that the organizers of the Games have imposed on this most freewheeling of media formats. [T]he guidelines include provisions for social media, detailing what marketers may and may not do. Among the banned actions are the use of certain word combinations in social media content: Nonsponsors have been warned not to try putting, say, "twenty-twelve" and "gold" in the same tweet. Athletes and spectators face restrictions, too. Neither will be permitted to post video footage of sporting events to online forums. Participants are allowed to post on blogs or Twitter, but the postings must be in a "first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist," the guidelines state. "They must not report on competition or comment on the activities of other participants or accredited persons, or disclose any information which is confidential or private in relation to any other person or organization," the rules say.

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CRS - Federal Laws Relating to Cybersecurity: Discussion of Proposed Revisions (BeSpacific, 4 July 2012) - "For more than a decade, various experts have expressed increasing concerns about cybersecurity, in light of the growing frequency, impact, and sophistication of attacks on information systems in the United States and abroad. Consensus has also been building that the current legislative framework for cybersecurity might need to be revised. The complex federal role in cybersecurity involves both securing federal systems and assisting in protecting nonfederal systems. Under current law, all federal agencies have cybersecurity responsibilities relating to their own systems, and many have sector-specific responsibilities for critical infrastructure. More than 50 statutes address various aspects of cybersecurity either directly or indirectly, but there is no overarching framework legislation in place. While revisions to most of those laws have been proposed over the past few years, no major cybersecurity legislation has been enacted since 2002." CRS report here .

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NOTED PODCASTS

Push: Law, Law School, Technology, and Fear (unknown author? posted 29 June 2012) - [Editor: terrific impassioned 6min video about lawyers' too-slow uptake of technology, and the inertia of FUD.]

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Anya Kamenetz on Who Can Learn Online, and How? (Berkman podcast, 25 June 2012; 64 minutes) - Much of the conversation around the new wave of online education startups has focused on what they mean for the incumbent institutions, from for-profit online universities to the traditional Ivy League. But what about what they mean for learners? Who is currently succeeding in open learning contexts? What are the missing pieces of the ecosystem - from discovery, to peer support, to mentoring, to assessment - that will allow the most severely underserved learners to succeed in this new learning environment? Anya Kamenetz - senior writer at Fast Company Magazine, and author of two books and two ebooks about the future of education - discusses who online learning serves, and how.

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LOOKING BACK - MIRLN TEN YEARS AGO

(note: link-rot has affected about 50% of these original URLs)

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING CASE ENDS WITH PROBATION (The Register, 18 Jan. 2002) -- A sys admin who installed distributed computing software on computers at an American college has been sentenced to probation. This may seem harsh but David McOwen, the former BOFH at the state run DeKalb Technical College in Georgia, can consider himself fortunate - since the authorities brought charges against him that might have sent him to jail. McOwen has been given a year of probation and a $2,100 fine for linking up college PCs to Distributed.net, a communal code breaking network that takes advantage of spare computing cycles to crack codes. Since February 2000, McOwen has been the target of a "computer trespass" investigation and then prosecution. Last autumn McOwen was charged with one count of computer theft and seven counts of computer trespassing (one for each of the school offices where McOwen downloaded the distributed.net client), Newsbytes reports. He faced a fine of $400,000 and the prospect of prison if convicted at a criminal trial, which was due to take place later this month. Under the terms of the deal, announced yesterday, McOwen will receive one year of probation for each criminal count, to run concurrently, make restitution of $2100, and perform 80 hours of community service unrelated to computers or technology. McOwen will have no felony or misdemeanor record under Georgia's First Offender Act. "David never should have been prosecuted in the first place, but we're glad that the state decided to stop," said senior staff attorney Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which campaigned on his behalf. "This is a very good result for David. He very likely could have won if the case had gone to trial, but trials cost money and you never know what will happen," Tien added. The case, which turned on whether McOwen had fair notice that installing the Distributed.net client software was prohibited, has taken a heavy toll on the sys admin. He resigned from his job at DeKalb soon after the school threatened him. Last August he was fired from his next job at Cingular Wireless because of the bad publicity surrounding the case. The issue raised by McOwen's prosecution isn't an isolated one. Last year, the Tennessee Valley Authority banned the SETI@home program from its computers, declaring it a risk to computer security. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23737.html

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MIT DREAMS OF NEWFANGLED ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY (LinuxWeek, Nov 2002) -- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing a digital library called Dspace that it hopes will encompass virtually the entire intellectual output of its scholars and researchers. A joint venture between MIT and Hewlett-Packard is using open source software to create a super-archive to save trillions of bytes worth of digital information covering everything from recordings of classroom lectures and experiments to brain scans, surveys of the ocean floor and monitorings of interstellar space. MIT now wants to create a worldwide federation of universities using Dspace to make their content available to all Internet-connected devices. Under development since 1998, Dspace already contains a thousand items totaling over 2 terabytes of data - comparable to the hard-disk memory of 200 PCs. HP kicked in a $1.8 million grant to launch the project but stands to gain millions of dollars in new business if other universities join the Dspace federation. By comparison, the Library of Congress is estimated to contain 20 terabytes of data excluding pictures. http://www.sys-con.com/linux/articlenews.cfm?id=250 and http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964488.html?tag=lh {Editor in 2012: compare Universal Access to All Knowledge (Long Now Foundation; Brewster Kahle; 94 minutes), from MIRLN 14.17 ]

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NOTES

MIRLN (Misc. IT Related Legal News) is a free e-newsletter published every three weeks by Vince Polley at KnowConnect PLLC. You can subscribe to the MIRLN distribution list by sending email to Vince Polley ( mailto:vpolley@knowconnect.com?subject=MIRLN ) with the word "MIRLN" in the subject line. Unsubscribe by sending email to Vince with the words "MIRLN REMOVAL" in the subject line.

Recent MIRLN issues are archived at www.knowconnect.com/mirln . Get supplemental information through Twitter: http://twitter.com/vpolley #mirln.

SOURCES (inter alia):

1. The Filter, a publication of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

2. InsideHigherEd - http://www.insidehighered.com/

3. SANS Newsbites, sans@sans.org

4. NewsScan and Innovation, http://www.newsscan.com

5. Aon's Technology & Professional Risks Newsletter

6. Crypto-Gram, http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

7. McGuire Wood's Technology & Business Articles of Note

8. Steptoe & Johnson's E-Commerce Law Week

9. Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/

10. The Benton Foundation's Communications Headlines

11. Readers' submissions, and the editor's discoveries

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

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