Stanford Center for Internet and Society

John Degen, a Canadian novelist, has a thoughtful post on how he has resolved to make his latest novel, The Uninvited Guest, freely available for download online. It his a short yet touching divulgation of a writer’s musing about copyright protection in the digital age, and about thinking out of the box. He says that the war is over. I’m not sure, but I liked the frankness of an author who writes books with his heart’s blood and his dilemma about coming to terms with the wired reality.

In spring 2007 I taught a class on Digital Identity in the STS Progam at UT Austin. Please find my syllabus attached below. I'd be very thankful for comments and suggestions.

David Hoffman in the 5/12 Christian Science Monitor: "When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang earlier this month, what kept them from making a deal? With Microsoft offering $33 per share for Yahoo's stock, and Yahoo willing to take $37, was there truly an unbridgeable gulf?

Was March National Privacy Month and no one told me? (October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, so don't try to hack anything.) In addition to a March 31, 2008 decision by the D.C. Circuit holding that “actual damages” under the Privacy Act need not necessarily include pecuniary harm (blogged here by Lauren Gelman), the Northern District of California affirmed the standing of a class action plaintiff to sue for negligence over a stolen laptop containing personally identifiable information, based on the mere risk of identify theft. These are both important cases in that they may signal a trend toward greater recognition of the emotional and dignitary interests implicated by the exposure of personal data.

Allrise.com: a community justice site... a couple people (Sanjana was first, John Muller was second) sent me this link after Michael Arrington profiled it on his website.
 

As the many thousands of loyal readers of this blog know, I eat far better than I deserve to, totally as a result of my betrothal to my beloved, the food writer Cheryl Sternman Rule.
 

A colleague and I were just discussing a new international working group, chaired by the FBI, which has “band[ed] together to fight cyber crime in a synergistic way.” The group is called the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group; it even has a tagline: “Cyber Solidarity: Five Nations, One Mission.”

Transcripts attached below of oral and written testimony by Assistant Professor Barbara van Schewick at the 4/17 FCC Hearing.