A California court case is pitting blind users against the retailer Target over the lack of accessibility of Target.com. The case is being brought under a federal statute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and two California laws that are somewhat broader. Even though Target has made improvements to the site since losing the first phase in court, the judge has just ruled that the case is eligible for class-action status. The end result could be mandated accessibility for for all Web sites reachable by visually impaired users in California — via Slashdot
The UK government considers possession of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, even though it’s available in Amazon UK, an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000 and is prosecuting a 17 year old boy, in part, for having a copy of the book. The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000. The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year. The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism
Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the long-running SCO case, Novell wants to get paid. Now. They’re requesting that the customary stay on SCO’s finances (as a result of their bankruptcy) be lifted so that Novell can begin recouping some of its losses from the protracted legal battle — via Slashdot
New laws going into effect in the United Kingdom make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form
Google is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers. But the company said it would probably blur people’s faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws
An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds of Internet privacy, First Amendment freedom of speech and whistle-blower rights
A cross-site scripting vulnerability may mean bad news for Gmail users. The ethical hacking group GNUCitizen has developed a proof-of-concept program that deftly steals contact information and emails from the popular web-based mail service. At the moment there are no wild
exploits for this vulnerability — via Slashdot
Copyright lawyers from Harvard’s Berkman Center have written an article in the Harvard Crimson excoriating the Harvard Coop bookstore for claiming that its prices are intellectual property
— via Boing Boing
New Zealand police have launched a wiki open at anyone wanting to edit and make suggestions to the Police Act as part of a wider revamp. New Zealand’s current Police Act is nearly 50 years old. In March 2006 a review undertaken. Following this a new website wiki.policeact.govt.nz has been launched to allow people to suggest wording for the new Policing Act. The wiki version of the Policing Act will be viewed by New Zealand parliamentarians, before an official bill is introduced into Parliament — via Boing Boing
Burma’s bloggers are using the internet to beat censorship, and tell the world what is happening under the military junta’s veil of secrecy
Random House and eMusic have begun to sell DRM-free audiobooks on their site. This is pretty big news, since iTunes has an exclusive deal with Audible for ebooks, and Audible won’t sell non-DRM ebooks (though they have other non-DRM products), even when the author doesn’t want any DRM
The Pirate Bay has been digging through the enormous chunk of leaked email from MediaDefender, the sleazy enforcers used by the entertainment industry to fight P2P, and they’ve discovered evidence of illegal sabotage. So they’re suing all the big movie and record comapnies in Sweden — via Boing Boing
London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost ¬£200 million but an analysis of the publicly funded spy network has cast serious doubt on its ability to help solve crime. In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any — via Slashdot
A US federal court ordered the Chiquita banana company to pay $US25 million ($30 million) in fines for paying more than $US1 million in protection money to Colombian paramilitary groups between 1997 and 2004
A German operator of a Tor server used to anonymously route traffic over the net said he was arrested in a midnight raid on his residence that stemmed from an investigation into bomb threats said to have passed through an internet protocol address under his control
Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt. The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up. The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying. They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink
The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender’s internal emails from the last six months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business — via Slashdot
The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report [PDF] that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the US economy and add more value to the US economy than copyright industries contribute. Recent studies indicate that the value added to the US economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion,
said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the US economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion — via Slashdot
Google is calling on businesses and regulators throughout the world to set international standards for protecting consumer privacy online and offline
First drug companies were caught deleting side effects about drugs on Wikipedia, now the big law firms working for the drug companies are getting caught deleting what they don’t want people to know about them
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