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coreymetrics writes "Anyone have one of these things? While it's no substitute for an improved mass-transit solution in the Puget Sound area, TrafficGauge's new gadget sure looks like it beats any PDA or cell phone auto traffic map I've used. It uses the same data that powers the Washington State DOT's indispensable website. Now why can't auto makers put this kind of thing in a dash instead of mostly worthless GPS navigation and DVD units?"

jhylkema writes "According to the Seattle P-I, the Washington state legislature has unanimously passed a bill that makes it easier for spammers to be sued for $500 per message by allowing them to be sued in district ("the people's") court. This should put an end to the many problems that potential spam litigants have faced here. You can email Governor Locke here and ask him to sign it into law."

jhylkema writes "According to the Seattle P-I, the Washington state legislature has unanimously passed a bill that makes it easier for spammers to be sued for $500 per message by allowing them to be sued in district ("the people's") court. This should put an end to the many problems that potential spam litigants have faced here. You can email Governor Locke here and ask him to sign it into law."

jhylkema writes "According to the Seattle P-I, the Washington state legislature has unanimously passed a bill that makes it easier for spammers to be sued for $500 per message by allowing them to be sued in district ("the people's") court. This should put an end to the many problems that potential spam litigants have faced here. You can email Governor Locke here and ask him to sign it into law."

jhylkema writes "According to the Seattle P-I, the Washington state legislature has unanimously passed a bill that makes it easier for spammers to be sued for $500 per message by allowing them to be sued in district ("the people's") court. This should put an end to the many problems that potential spam litigants have faced here. You can email Governor Locke here and ask him to sign it into law."

The Seattle Times reported a while ago that Microsoft is pushing for Washington State Senate Bill 5734 which will overturn most of Washington State's laws that specify monetary penalties for companies who send out spam. This will completely exempt ISPs from current Washington spam laws, which Microsoft just happens to be. It seems that they are jumping the gun a bit. They are having a company named Digital Impact (save that address for you spam filters) send the email for them. Thankfully I live in Seattle so maybe I can collect an easy $500 before Microsoft guts the current law.

Slashback tonight with more on SBC's claim to own patents covering basic Web navigation techniques, an eyebrow-raising look at Slammer's spread, bad news for Ogg streams from the BBC, and more. Read on for the details. Update: 02/04 00:13 GMT by T : And late-breaking good news from SDF regarding its Public Access UNIX System.

FedEx should take notes. nweaver writes "We have completed our preliminary analysis of the Sapphire/Slammer SQL worm. This worm required roughly 10 minutes to spread worldwide, scanning at a peak rate of over 55 million IP addresses per second, making it by far the fastest worm to date and nearly two orders of magnitude faster than Code Red. It infected at least 75,000 victims and possibly considerably more. The remarkable speed was due to the use of a bandwidth-limited scanner. There were also two bugs in the random number generator. Copies of our analysis are available from CAIDA, Silicon Defense, and UC Berkeley."

"Sir, this patent application needs to filled out in ink. Not Crayon." We recently posted that the company SBC was calling in the chips on patents it holds which the company claim cover certain types of navigation links found on many web pages. Dan Gillmor writes "Noticed the link to Cringley's piece. Well, I did ask readers for prior art and got quite a bit, some of which I've posted..."

Speaking of SBC, theodp writes "The SBC Intellectual Property folks are back in the news, this time for donating a $7.3 million virus screening patent to the University of Texas. While patent donations are one of the latest twists on corporate philanthropy, the practice has aroused the curiosity of the IRS as a possible tax avoidance scheme."

I wonder how much they'd feel justified in writing off if they donated their web patent portfolio to the FSF.

Can we call this an on-again, off-again relationship? Albanach writes "It seems the BBC who had pioneered Ogg Vorbis broadcasting on a serious scale have abandoned Ogg indefinitely. They say other work commitments make Ogg support no longer a priority. Their statement can be read here"

What, and let all my pigeons escape? FedeTXF writes "We already love pop-up blocking in Mozilla and some other related browsers, now Blogzilla is reporting a great trick to get rid of embedded ads (banners and iframes) using plain CCS and the always amazing Mozilla flexibility and openness. Go check this page if you are anxious to see how to set it up."

Did you have your video camera trained on Columbia? Finally, Child of Apollo writes ""For anyone who has recorded video or taken photos that they believe may be of aid in the investigation of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, NASA has established a special location on the Web where Internet users may upload their media files to be reviewed by NASA." Although sad news all around, thanks to pleasant for the link."

Here's the late-breaker. fonixmunkee writes "looks like SDF will return soon. a message stating that they negotiated a new contract graced the single page in the "members area" of the temporary www.lonestar.org, but did not cite who specifically with. a few different ideas were tossed around for hosting, so only time will tell with who. i also just today got an e-mail from the Washington State Attorney General's Office that offered a small ray (read: none) of hope for assistance with SDF's run-in with NWLink. (NWLink breached SDF's contract.) hope all is well soon." This is good news, especially so soon after SDF got the rug yanked from under them.

bullshizzle writes "The longest running Public Access UNIX System (SDF, running BSD) est. 1989 had their services terminated abruptly by NWLink because of a DDoS attack. Termination was carried out immediately without prior notification, which violates their contract (page1, page2). Complaints can be filed to the Washington State Attorney General's Office by filling out this simple form conveniently located online. You can follow the story at lonestar.org." While still bad, I've been corrected - SDF was *not* the longest running public access Unix - ArborNet (Located right here in my town) has been around for at least a number more years.

molywi writes "Between 1992 and 1997, the Washington State Department of Ecology acquired oblique aerial photography of the state's entire 2,500 miles of marine shoreline. The collection of over 10,000 photographs provides a valuable educational monitoring tool for coastal managers and the public. The true-color photos comprise a continuous series, panning left to right along the shoreline. The photos were taken to optimize sun angle, shoreline orientation, and low tides. Oblique photos are useful for interpreting bluff geology and land-sliding, riparian vegetation, and shoreline modifications such as bulkheads and seawalls."

bje2 writes "Privacy advocates will undoubtedly be up in arms about a ruling by the Washington State Supreme court which decided that such privacy violating technology as 'up the skirt cams' are not illegal in public places (like a mall)... CNet has the story here."

An anonymous submitter sent in news that the Washington state Supreme Court upheld Washington's anti-spam law today. The law requires truthful information on all commercial emails sent from Washington state or to a Washington resident - commercial emailers may not disguise the origin of their messages (but aren't prohibited from sending UCE if they don't try to disguise themselves). It is a civil law, not a criminal one. Since this affects residents of other states who email into Washington, a spammer sued under the law by the state of Washington claimed that this was interfering with interstate commerce - regulating interstate commerce is a power reserved to the Federal government, not states. The trial court agreed. Washington appealed. The Washington Supreme Court held that requiring accurate identification information actually facilitates interstate commerce rather than burdening it. The decision is interesting, because several state internet censorship laws have been struck down due to their effects on residents of other states - it's worth reading for anyone interested in internet legal issues.

ThatGuyAZ writes "A King County (Wash.) Superior Court Judge threw out a lawsuit under the tough Washington Anti-Spam law, calling the law "unduly restrictive and burdensome" in limiting interstate commerce. While the state can appeal this low-level ruling, this is definitely the opening shot in the coming legal battle over state attempts to regulate spam. "