:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 7.14.2008 ::

:: President George Bush: 'Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter' ::

George Bush surprised world leaders with a joke about his poor record on the environment as he left the G8 summit in Japan.
Telegraph.co.uk

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution."

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:48:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: One Subpoena Is All It Takes to Reveal Your Online Life ::

New York Times
By Saul Hansell

Whenever questions are raised about privacy, big online companies talk about how benign their plans are for using data about their customers: Much data is anonymous, they say, and even the information that is linked to individuals is only meant to offer users a more personal experience tailored to their interests.

They never talk about subpoenas.

Yet in the United States, one of the biggest privacy issues is what information about people can be revealed through a court process, either as part of a criminal investigation or in some sort of civil dispute. This article I wrote in 2006 gives some examples.

The issue came up again last week when Google was ordered by a court to turn over records of activity on YouTube, including the user names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of people who watched videos. A judge agreed with Viacom that the records could assist its case arguing that YouTube has infringed on its copyrights.

There is nothing special about the way the law treats the Internet here. All sorts of records, from your health club dues to your auto repair history, can be drawn into all manner of legal proceedings, and the records of Internet companies are generally no different.

There is a higher standard for the disclosure of the content of e-mail messages under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but there are many ways for investigators to get access to e-mail as well, particularly if the user has already read it. (The law has traditionally given greater protection to a sealed envelope in a post office than to an opened letter sitting on a person’s desk.)

But Internet companies are different from other businesses that keep records about their customers. A person’s activity online represents an unusually broad picture of his or her interests, transactions and social relationships. Moreover, it is the nature of computers to keep records of all of the bits of data they process.

Much of this data is spread among various different companies and their servers. But these puzzle pieces can be put together. This is the key fact that so much of the discussion about I.P. addresses skips past.

The way the Internet is set up now, an I.P. address, by itself, doesn’t identify an individual user. But an I.P. address can be traced to a specific Internet service provider, and with a subpoena, the Internet provider can be forced to identify which of their customers was assigned a particular I.P. address at a particular time. That is how the recording industry has been identifying and suing people who use file sharing programs.

Viacom says that it isn’t going to use the information from Google to sue individual YouTube users for copyright infringement, but there is nothing under the law to stop it from doing so.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 2:13:00 PM [+] ::
...