All it took was one white supremacist's conviction for trying to have one judge whacked, and the G-men are stepping up their watch on actual or alleged hate groups' Website watching. They are also giving protection to one man who was identified mistakenly on one such site as a witness in the case of Matthew Hale, convicted of trying to put a hit on federal judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow.
The FBI, says the Associated Press, will tolerate no one crossing the line "from protected speech to advocating violence." Beware, of course: you never know when it becomes a question of what your definition of "hate site" is, nor do you really know when, out of nowhere, comes a little extra attention paid a Website not because it actually is a hate site, but because what is hateful about the site is its mere espousal of opinions somebody else hates. Maybe here is a fine place to remind ourselves of the wisdom of Frank Chodorov, writing in 1949: Let them rant their heads off - that is their right, which we cannot afford to infringe - but let us keep from them the political means of depriving everybody else of the same right....
George and Tracy Miller aren't exactly ranting their heads off about it, but this Arizona couple have had it with the medical profession. You may remember them as the couple who lost their jobs as critical care nurses in Scottsdale in 1999 because they ran an adult Website - Tracy was a.k.a. Dakota Rae at that time - but they have now surrendered their nursing licenses, after George Miller lost his Paradise Valley Hospital nursing supervisor after testing positive for a painkiller on which his prescription had expired but which he took for chronic back pain.
The Millers gave up the adult Website and shifted their cyberspace activities to a Web business involving domain name sales. After their 1999 firing, they were given the authority to sue Scottsdale Healthcare Hospital by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but they never went through with the suit. She retired from nursing but he stayed on until now. "There's no need to go through a colonoscopy over this," George Miller told a reporter. "Life is too short. We'd rather be sailing."...
While the U.S. Senate continued grappling April 27 and 28 with reviving a proposal to ban Internet access taxes permanently, California for one began yapping that if such a Net tax ban becomes permanent it could "cripple" the state about $800 million a year's worth. The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste might be one group who'd like to tell California to stop flapping its yap: they've reiterated their previous support for a permanent ban, and while they prefer the original idea - Sen. George V. Allen's (R-Virginia) bill to bar all such Net access taxes - they can live with Sen. John McCain's (R-Arizona) alternative to ban them for four years, no questions asked.
"Americans are already overtaxed; instead of digging deeper into taxpayers' wallets, state and local governments should be finding ways to cut wasteful and unnecessary spending," said the CCAGW's president Tom Schatz. "There is no difference between a tax on residential users and a tax on the companies that own the data lines. Imposing a tax on telecommunications companies will force them to raise prices on consumers, which would have a stifling effect on the economic activity surrounding the Internet. Furthermore, a tax ban does not constitute a 'loss' for government officials because the money was never theirs to begin with. It keeps money in the hands of people who earn it."...
Bosses could find a taxing problem on their hands having nothing to do with government revenue-siphoning and everything to do with porn spam in the workplace: Europe's broadly-written new anti-spam legislation could make corporate muckety-mucks liable for fostering a hostile work environment if they don't do more to protect their workers from e-mail porn spam, University of Amsterdam information law researcher Lodewijk Asscher says. "European employers must be aware of the risk of new computer-related liabilities," he told Reuters. "An important example of such a potential new liability is the risk of being held accountable for not protecting employees against unsolicited pornographic e-mail."...
From accountability in the cyber-workplace to accounting for better search rankings. That's what Dipsie wants with their plans to bring forth a tool they say will help Websites improve their query result rankings on the big search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. Based in Chicago, Dipsie hopes to launch the tool before they launch a competing consumer search engine in test form in mid-July...
And, speaking of big search portals, would you like to buy one? All you need is a mere $200 million, which is what one purported insider in position to know says Terra Lycos wants to unload Lycos, which would mean the end of the merger between the Spanish-based Terra and the U.S. based Lycos at the height of the first dot-com boom in 2000.
"An acquisition of Lycos, one of the last available premier Internet search and content properties, represents an outstanding and unique value creation opportunity at a time when advertising budgets are increasing, paid online content is gaining broader acceptance and public markets are favorably rewarding consolidation in the rapidly growing search market," says a document from Lehman Brothers obtained by CNET News, which says the reason Terra wants to sell is to concentrate strictly on its Spanish and Portugese-language Internet properties...
The potential Lycos sale may mean the fortunes of Internet companies may be rising again, but also rising are phishing attacks - mimicking actual Website pages or stationery, and lately said to be including clever fakes of such sites' features like toolbars and link images - which those behind them may be hoping will hit epidemic status. The Anti-Phishing Working Group believes over one dozen unique phish land in the cyberstream every day. The phish-fighting group says eBay is the most often used for phish mimickry and mischief, with CitiBank, PayPal, and Fleet Bank right behind...
CNET wants to put itself behind a new subject of its renowned ad-supported free software downloads: ad-supported free music downloads. Now gone live as music.download.com, CNET wants the page "to offer free downloads of songs by artists who are not signed with major record labels. The musicians themselves upload their own work onto music.download.com," according to Advertising Age's Website. "There is no quality threshold. Anyone can upload their own songs to the site."...
We only wish anyone and everyone would knock it off with uploading and downloading child porn. Including, for openers, a former Manhattan prep school headmaster has pleaded guilty to holding indecent online chats with people he believed to be young girls and kept child pornography on a portable computer disk. That could have been good for fifteen months to four years in the not-so-portable pokey for John Dexter, when he's sentenced in July, but an acting state Supreme Court justice has promised him what Newsday called "shock probation": eight weekends in the clink max and ten years probation...
A California teacher won't necessarily be going from Folsom elementary school teaching to Folsom Prison, but Scott Gmitter will also be looking at a July sentencing, now that he's pleaded guilty to taking sexually obscene photos of girls under age 12. Belding, Michigan's city manager apparently couldn't manage his Internet time wisely: Michael Wood is on administrative leave while investigators look into charges that he had child porn on his office and home computers...
Meanwhile, back in the classroom, a former York County, Virginia elementary school has been charged with possessing child porn on his computer. If Ryan Krieger is guilty, it would prove that if he had two brain cells to rub together he'd have to be classified as a weapon of mass destruction: his teaching career was destroyed when he was convicted of child molestation and forced to register as a sex offender, compelling him to move to Pennsylvania, where he reportedly admitted his child porn habit has not abated...
The law was not made to chase the child porners alone. Unfortunately, it's also being used to chase more online music swappers. The Recording Industry Association of America has added 477 more to its litigation hit parade, including college students in eleven states, accusing them of the usual illegal music swapping online. The RIAA said the "most egregious offenders on campus" deserve nothing less, even while praising efforts on campuses to crack down on piracy on their own networks. "There is also a complementary need for enforcement by copyright owners against the serious offenders to remind people that this activity is illegal," said RIAA president Cary Sherman.
And the beat goes on... and on... and on...
