Thursday, September 18, 2008

"Hacker" breaches Yahoo! mail account Palin uses to circumvent Alaska's Open Records Act

The AP is reporting that someone breached Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account at Yahoo! Mail, which she told her staff to use in order to circumvent Alaska's Open Records Act. 

Somone used the "forgot password" feature on Yahoo! Mail to change the account password to "popcorn."   He or she did this by correctly answering some security questions about Palin, including her personally selected privacy question/answer about where she met her husband, according to the AP report.


My Commentary: 

This story is interesting because of the privacy violation, Palin's efforts to get around her own state's Open Records Act, the revelation of how the crime was committed (if the claim is genuine), and because the owner of the anonymity service the "hacker" was using says he's willing to cooperate with law enforcement officials, because the "hacker" violated the service's terms of use.  This cooperation may have a very helpful chilling effect on the illicit use of these services around the Internet.

The techniques Yahoo! uses to verify identity before changing a Yahoo! Mail password are pretty common on the Web.  Some e-mail providers will merely send a new, randomly generated, password to a secondary e-mail address that the user provided upon registering for the account.  Of course, this only works if the person kept, and can access, that older e-mail account.  Yahoo! apparently decided to opt for more ease-of-use and greater chance of the user being able to regain access to their Yahoo account. Unfortunately, that trade-off also lowers security.

One other way to increase security is by imposing ever-increasing time delays between subsequent attempts to retrieve a password or change it.  If the culprit in this case tried numerous times, the delay would eventually become too long for him or her to endure.  Another twist on this approach is to only allow three attempts per day, or something along those lines. 

Users must accept some, if not most, of the responsibility for these breaches, if they choose question/answer combinations that are easy to guess or easy to discover.  

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

GPL law - Limits on distribution fees? When is something "distributed?"

The document linked below contains some thoughts on GPL law. These are notes on the law surrounding the GNU General Public License (GPL, GPLv2 and GPLv3), created by Richard Stallman.  This is not intended to be exhaustive, as it's only preliminary academic research into a topic I find interesting and important.  This document is not intended to be a statement of the law in any definitive, or even reliable, way. As academic notes, by a 2L law student, this document is subject to mistakes and omissions. 


  CONTENTS

  Issue 1: What is the limit to transfer fees? 
  Issue 2: What is "distribution" under the GPL (and under the AGPL)?

Comcast net neutrality disclosure deadline looms

The deadline is nearing for Comcast to comply with the FCC's order to disclose its Internet bandwidth management techniques.  

The order stemmed from a challenge to Comcast's methods of dealing with the bandwidth-intensive trend of customers downloading movies over the Internet.  The complaint challenging Comcast was filed by two D.C.-based advocacy groups.

Under the FCC order, Comcast was given "30 days [from Aug. 20] to disclose how it has been managing Internet traffic, its plans for switching to a nondiscriminatory method of traffic management, and the details of the new traffic management system it plans to employ."

This FCC ruling is important to those who are follow the development of "Net neutrality" principles.

Law firm buys e-discovery company

A Colorado law firm recently purchased an e-discovery consulting company to "expand its litigation technology services operation and help attorneys mine digital data for court-case discovery."  I think this is becoming a common move for relatively large law firms.  The increase in the cost and extent of e-discovery is making this sort of move more economically sensible.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Trial lawyers say courts don't understand difficulties of e-discovery

The overwhelming majority (77 percent) of trial lawyers say courts don't understand difficulties of e-discovery, according to a new survey from the University of Denver's Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.

However, only 35 percent said the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure need to be reviewed and re-written.

Source: "Trial Lawyers: E-Discovery Too Expensive," Information Week; Sept. 9, 2008; by Andrew Conry-Murray.

Antitrust regulators looking into Google/Yahoo deal

Google and Yahoo! have been trying to complete a deal in which Google would provide ads to Yahoo!, perhaps Google's biggest competitor. The Justice Department might slow or prevent the deal, due to antitrust regulations.

The Justice Department is looking into the matter, according to The Washington Post.

Under the proposed deal, Google would supply Yahoo! with a stream of the small, text ads that appear along with search results. The deal could provide as much as $800 million annual revenue for Yahoo!, according to company officials.

Second Life property law will soon include zoning

The virtual world known as "Second Life" has long had property transactions and private covenants between "land" owners. Soon, Second Life will institute zoning, enforced by Linden Labs, the owners of the Second Life system.

Second Life terms of use allow a large degree of freedom for the users -- even going so far as to allow each user to retain all IP rights in anything they create in-world. However, the explosion of nuisance-like advertising led to numerous complaints and he forthcoming zoning regulations.

Yale law students demand more information law courses

Students at Yale Law School have gathered 300 names on a petition for more course in information law, according to Yale Daily News.

They say the law school has fallen behind other top law schools, in spite of the existence of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

“Intellectual property and Internet law issues are among the hottest issues in law schools and in practice today,” said Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

What is "CompuTech Law?" Why is this here?

This website will provide information and opinions about the law related to computers, computing, software, the Web, and the rest of the Internet. This will include intellectual property (IP) issues (copyright, trademark, patents), trade secrets, licensing (including open-source licensing), e-commerce, international law, and more.