The blog
Writing & notes
Essays, notes and reflections on technology, law and life.
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Attention Widows: When in Florida, Never Parachute on Sunday
Two American students are intent on making criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible. Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course. In the far… Read more →
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Parents to Fight Order Terminating Life-Support
The father of a brain-damaged Florida woman said a judge’s ruling Friday ordering his daughter’s feeding tube to be removed March 18 is ‘a temporary relief.’ The parents’ attorney, David Gibbs, said he will appeal to the US Supreme Court contending that his daughter, who has been severely brain-damaged since she suffered heart failure in… Read more →
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European Parliament to Reconsider Software Patents Directive
The European Parliament has unanimously backed a motion for the European Commission to review its proposal for a software patents directive, in accordance with decisions taken by the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee on February 2 and the Conference of Presidents on February 17: ‘The Newspeak from the European Patent Office has failed to achieve its… Read more →
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Teenager Arrested for Sending ‘Spim’
A US teenager has become the first person to be arrested on suspicion of sending unsolicited instant messages, or ‘spim’. Anthony Greco, 18, was lured from New York to Los Angeles under the pretence of a business meeting. He was arrested upon arrival at Los Angeles International Airport last Wednesday. Greco allegedly sent 1.5 million… Read more →
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EA Employees File Second Class Action against Game Publisher
An engineer working for leading electronic video game publisher Electronic Arts has become the second staff member to file a class action lawsuit against the company, seeking back pay, damages and penalties for unpaid overtime: Leander Hasty, who has worked for the firm since mid-2003, filed his suit yesterday against the company, arguing that a… Read more →
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Amazon Applies for Patent over Personal Search History
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued details of a recent patent application made by Amazon.com, which describes a method for persistently storing and serving event data. Essentially, this allows their search engine, A9, to store and remember personal search histories. The original application was made in 2003, but withheld from publication until… Read more →
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Not Guilty, Pleads Lynx User Accused of Hacking
A man has denied attempting to hack into a website designed to raise funds for victims of the December tsunami, pleading not guilty to a charge of ‘causing a computer to perform a function which intended to secure unauthorised access to a program or data held in a computer’: Daniel Cuthbert, 28, made a tsunami-relief… Read more →
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Users Circumvent Proprietary Coffee Machine DRM
Manufacturers of non-computer products are using rights management technology to restrict the supply of aftermarket services such as maintenance and consumables. The Senseo espresso machine is one such example; it utilises what its manufacturer calls ‘protected’ coffee pods that are only compatible with Philips’ own pod system – similar to the way DRM is used… Read more →
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‘This Is An Ex-Parrot!’
According to The Australian and the Globe and Mail, life is imitating Monty Python in this amusing recreation of the famous parrot sketch — only this avian dispute has ended up in court: An indignant Israeli is suing a pet shop that he says sold him a dying parrot, reports the Ma’ariv newspaper. Itzik Simowitz… Read more →
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Webmasters Defend Insider Sources against Apple Subpoenas
‘Apple has shown an increasingly litigious face in recent months, targeting news site Think Secret a week before the start of Macworld San Francisco last month, and going after two additional sites in December 2004 for their reporting on prerelease builds of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). In the case of the Tiger… Read more →