An apparently unsubstantiated Weblog rumor that he solicited gay sex provoked U.S. Rep. Edward L. Schrock (R-Virginia Beach) to withdraw his re-election bid late last month. BlogACTIVE.com publisher Michael Rogers published the three-year-old claim August 19, with an attached audio file on which a man asks to get together with "a guy from time to time to just play" and for oral sex, according to a published report that added Rogers never offered proof that the voice belonged to Schrock. Thelma Drake of Norfolk was picked August 31 by district Republicans to replace Schrock against Democratic challenger and Iraq war veteran David Ashe. Rogers told reporters Schrock's lack of comment between the posting and his withdrawal made him think the rumor is true, and he also challenged Schrock to take him to court if the posting isn't true. Schrock's chief of staff said the popular Navy veteran withdrew to protect his family, and there was no pressure from local or national Republicans for him to withdraw.
The city fathers of the City of Brotherly Love think they can turn the whole square mileage of the city into the world's biggest wireless Internet hot spot for less than it cost their baseball team to sign its top power hitter. For a measly $10 million, Philadelphia believes it can work up a system involving hundreds, even thousands of small transmitters around the city, maybe on top of lampposts, each able to communicate with wireless networking cards now standard with many computers. And the city thinks that once it's in place, this network would bring broadband Internet anyplace radio waves can go – even into poor neighborhoods – and at costs lower than the $35-60 a month commercial Wi-Fi providers typically charge. If they bring it off, Philadelphia would take a great leap forward and ahead of other cities pondering Wi-Fi offerings.
Vineet K. Chhabra will be pondering life in the calaboose following his guilty plea to a federal conspiracy charge, as the leader of a ring selling weight-loss drugs and other controlled substances on the Internet. Chhabra's plea makes seven pleading guilty in the scheme, which distributed the pills by the millions illegally to Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and four other states. Chhabra is looking at 33 months behind bars, while remaining defendants who come to plead guilty in the case could be looking at cash and asset forfeiture in the millions of dollars.
Anti-abortion cybersquatter William Purdy won't be going to the calaboose, but he will be turning over his domains to a number of major brand names – including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pepsi, and the Washington Post –after the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that held him in violation of the 1999 Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. Purdy claimed the First Amendment protected his free speech right to criticize the targeted companies – whom he argued promote abortion – through domain names similar to their actual names, but the 8th Circuit Court held his domains were too confusingly similar to the real things, and that Purdy had no right to misappropriate the trademarks to confuse or trick Web surfers into believing they were going to visit the companies' actual sites.
There's no trickery involved in SCO Group's cash reserves eroding and losses mounting – the company reported a $7.4 million revenue loss for the year's third quarter, almost all of which was attributable to the legal expenses incurred in the quarter while pursuing its lawsuit against IBM over Big Blue's contributions to the Linux open-source operating system. SCO chief executive Darl McBride, however, told a conference call the company has a deal with the New York law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner to cap its legal costs at $31 million. And, the company said it now has $43 million in cash reserves following settlement of an investor dispute with Baystar Capital.
The federal government has backed off a demand that the Internet service provider for a number of Indymedia Websites, Calyx, answer to a grand jury on who posted online the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and New York hotel accommodations for delegates to the Republican National Convention. Some of the information was already publicly available but the Secret Service launched a criminal probe into the Indymedia posting, charging it could have been used to intimidate voters. But an American Civil Liberties Union official said she expects more investigations in the case because the information was posted on other Websites after it turned up on the Indymedia sites.
