David Canton is a business lawyer and trade-mark agent with a practice focusing on technology issues and technology companies.
Slashdot points to a University study that showed how easy it was to fool some biometric scanners.
I believe biometrics is the eventual answer to many of the issues we have surrounding passwords and authentication. This study shows that the technology may not yet be as foolproof as it needs to be.
The study showed 90% false positives using things like moulds made from fingers or cadaver fingers.
This new organization has just been launched. It is jointly supported by the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Its purpose is to “promote the public’s interest in technology and information policy”
It currently addresses 2 issues I have mentioned before – the “lawful access” surveillance proposal (they refer to is as “awful access”), and the copyright reform bill.
Both of those bills died before the election call, but it is inevitable that they will be brought back.
These issues have the potential to affect all Canadians – and are worth understanding – so I recommend taking a look and adding their RSS feed.
Adding to the Sony-BMG rootkit fiasco, it has another copy protection problem on its hands.
Within the last few days, it was discovered that a different copy protection scheme it uses leaves a security hole is user’s computers. This time they acted quickly to release a patch, but today we hear that the patch fixes that problem but creates another.
Repeat after me: “DRM is evil”
The Wall Street Journal estimates that as much as $600 million will be made worldwide from this this year. Is it the latest version of cybersquatting, or just a clever use of the system?.
First, sign up for millions of domain names.
Then put ads on them and watch the traffic to the sites.
Within the 5 day refund period after a domain name is registered cancel all but the few sites that make money from the ads.
Critics don’t like the practice as it ties up domain names that “legitimate” users can’t obtain.
ITBusiness.ca has an article about on Ontario case where the judge dismissed a lawsuit after the plaintiff hacked into the defendantâs computer server while legal proceedings were taking place.
It seems that the plaintiff hacked into the defendant’s computer system – with the knowledge of their counsel – and downloaded the entire contents of their server.
The plaintiff maintained they were just recovering property owned by them (the subject of the lawsuit), and gathering evidence.
The judge was so dismayed by the conduct of the plaintiff and its lawyer that he dismessed the case.
As the article points out, this action was probably a breach of the criminal code, copyright, and privacy, not to mention the ethical and evidentiary problems it creates.
Techdirt reports that EA has been sued by an individual who claims one of their games came from an idea he presented to them. EA denies this was the case.
The Techdirt post does a good job of explaining why there should be no ownership of such an “idea”.
From a legal perspective, the only way to make claim to an “idea” is to patent it, or to show some sort of confidentiality breach.
It is not unusual for individuals to come up with an idea they think is valuable that they want to pitch to a business – thinking that their idea will be worth something. As Techdirt points out, you can’t blame many companies for refusing to sign any sort of confidentiality agreement in such cases. They are concerned that doing so would limit their ability to use the idea even if they came up with it independently.
Technolawyer – a technology information service for lawyers – released an ebook yesterday called Blawgworld 2006 – Capital of Big Ideas. It contains samples from 51 of “the most influential blawgs”, including eLegal Canton.
In the first 24 hours it has been downloaded 9000 times!
The entire ebook is available only to Technolawyer members, but the portion with my entry is linked below.
SCO is the company that has sued IBM and others claiming that Linux uses UNIX source code that belongs to SCO. This saga has been ongoing for a long time.
CNet and Groklaw (the site for tracking the SCO/Linux issue)report that SCO just raised $10 million in a private placement. It seems that the funders were existing investors, not new ones.
SCO is reported to have said: “The proceeds should ensure that the company has adequate funding to pursue its existing business strategies, including the resolution of the company’s existing legal proceedings,”
In other words, these investors are gambling that SCO will make enough money from the lawsuit to pay them back – and they have sunk so much into this already, they can’t turn back.
Unless otherwise stated, all original material created by David Canton included in this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
