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Domain: brandx.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to brandx.net.
Stories · 5
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Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier
l2718 writes "The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed with the Federal Communications Commission that cable Internet service is an 'information service' rather than a 'telecommunication service.' This means that cable companies don't have to make their infrastructure open for competing ISPs to use. This is in distinction to the case of telephone companies and long-distance service, for example. For more information try the Center for Digital Democracy or read the Telecommunications Act." -
Net Privacy -- Cable vs. Telecom Service
doranb writes: "Carl Kaplan has a good article this week in his CyberLaw Journal. It seems U.S. users who access the Internet via cable modems may enjoy greater privacy protections. About halfway through the article he says: 'That's because the laws governing the cable television industry, the Cable Act of 1984 and the related sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 have privacy protections for cable subscribers that make the telephone wiretap laws seem positively pallid. Take a case where an FBI. agent wants to intercept real-time e-mail generated by a cable-modem user. Under section 551(h) of the Cable Act, the government has to secure a court order based on "clear and convincing evidence" that the target may be involved in a crime. That's a higher standard that the "probable cause"" required for a phone tap.' The question becomes: Should the U.S. 'dumb down' these protections to be equivalent to telecom, or should they beef up telecom's protections to be equal to the cable industry?" -
Neal Stephenson on Digital Village
Doran writes: "We interviewed Neal Stephenson this Wednesday morning for Digital Village and will be playing Part One of the tape this Saturday and Part Two on April 29th. We discussed his recent talk at CFP2000, his thoughts on Open Source vs. Everything Else, and how the cypherpunks have received latest effort. It starts a little slow (it was 6 a.m. for us, 9 a.m. for him) but once we got going, it was pretty interesting. For those of you not in Southern California, we'll be posting the program in RealAudio by Sunday evening. " -
iCrave TV Loses Battle against U.S. Broadcasters
Doran writes "C|Net has this story about how the Canadian company iCraveTV.com has lost its latest battle in U.S. courts over whether it can rebroadcast TV signals over the Web. The broadcasters say it's theft, while iCraveTV sez it's just doing what's legal for other cable TV companies in Canada (ie. rebroadcasting TV). Of course, by framing the streaming video iCraveTV is doing more than just rebroadcasting, they're also adding more commercial content, which the broadcasters feel dilutes their TV commercials. " -
DoD Computer Forensics Lab to use Beowulf
Doran writes "The U.S. Dept. of Defense is showing off its new $15,000,000 Computer Forensics Lab and it looks like they'll be using a Beowulf cluster to gleen as much info as possible from the computers they confiscate. Here is the story from Nando. An interesting aside is that they seem to be using Clinton's 'approval' last week to allow sale of more powerful encryption software as a justification to ask for $80,000,000 more for the Center. " Beowulf cluster mentioned, but not Linux, oddly enough.