Nancy Hancock's List: InfoEthics

Desire2Learn's blog about their lawsuit against Blackboard and their patent for course management software.

Microsoft patents PageUp/PageDown functionality. Really.

Employers are fitting out their fleets of company cars with invasive GPS tracking systems despite claims the technology unnecessarily invades staff privacy and contributed to the suicide of a Telstra linesman last year.

Newspapers in Tennessee are reporting that a University of Tennessee at Knoxville student may be at the center of the investigation of who hacked into the Yahoo e-mail account of Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

An effort by the state of Kentucky to seize more than 140 online gambling Web site names is raising novel legal questions about the physical location of digital property and the reach of local and regional governments on the global Internet.

Defense attorneys had their day in court Tuesday as they tried to convince Judge Thomas Wingate to dismiss Kentucky's attempt to seize 141 online gambling domains.

The domain names clearly are "property" that the state can seize, the state brief said, citing court decisions dating to 1996. By violating Kentucky law, the sites have violated the UDRP -- to which all domain registrants agree -- opening themselves to seizure if their registrars do business with the state, Kentucky said.

A vestige of technological times past, Seattle University's "bad words list," which screens out nonuniversity E-mails containing at least one of 40 offensive words, has annoyed some students and faculty for years and will most likely disappear by the end of this year, the Spectator reports.

RFID tags identifying who and -- gasp! —- where you are can be found in passports, ATM cards, credit cards and some state-issued ID cards. The same technology will possibly even be used in paper money in the near future.

Australians may not be able to opt out of the government's Internet filtering initiative like they were originally led to believe. Details have begun to come out about Australia's Cyber-Safety Plan, which aims to block "illegal" content from being accessed within the country, as well as pornographic material inappropriate for children. Right now, the system is in the testing stages, but network engineers are now saying that there's no way to opt out entirely from content filtering.

Could Twitter become terrorists' newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human".

Is the Rudd government about to erect a Great Firewall of Australia - introducing a form of internet censorship that will infringe upon the freedom of computer users to browse the worldwide web?

Chinese Internet users have expressed fury at Microsoft's launch of an anti-piracy tool targeting Chinese computer users to ensure they buy genuine software.

The "Windows Genuine Advantage" program, which turns the user's screen black if the installed software fails a validation test, is Microsoft's latest weapon in its war on piracy in China, where the vast majority of 200 million computer users are believed to be using counterfeit software, unwittingly or not.

Leading Internet companies, long criticized by human rights groups for their business dealings in China, are agreeing to new guidelines that seek to limit what data they should share with authorities worldwide and when they should do so.

The guidelines, to be announced Tuesday, call for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to try to reduce the scope of government requests that appear to conflict with free speech and other human rights principles.

The Thai government says it is planning to build an internet firewall to block websites deemed insulting to the country's hugely popular royal family.

The DMCA (.pdf) was conceived a decade ago as the United States' implementation of an international copyright treaty called WIPO. Hollywood wanted the bill to protect its intellectual property from being infringed on a massive scale, and secured a still-troubling anti-circumvention rule that generally prevents consumers from bypassing copy protection schemes. But history has shown that the far-more beneficial element in the law is a provision that provides ISPs, hosting companies and interactive services near blanket immunity for the intellectual property violations of their users — a provision responsible for opening vast speech and business opportunities — realized and unrealized.

Microsoft recently obtained a patent designed to create an Automatic Censorship of Audio Data For Broadcast . The invention is intended to act as a filter for live broadcasts where it is impracticable to delete or make inaudible certain undesired words or phrases. Additionally, other audio streams like music or games can utilize the automatic censor.