Canadian senator Sheila Finestone says that country's pending information privacy act isn't enough - she's proposing a bill to consecrate privacy as a fundamental right, and it isn't just cyberspace that has her thinking that way. "It's not just a question of electronic commerce," says the Liberal Party lawmaker. It goes far beyond that. Privacy is essential to the principles of common trust that underlie our society."
Finestone's bill is now open for public comment and goes to Parliament next month. It would prohibit unauthorized collection and distribution of personal information, protect communications, cover personal physical privacy, and protect citizens from surveillance. This, she says, would fix what privacy advocates think is a huge omission in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
SANTA BARBARA, CA - Are some e-porn sites finding ways to beat the Net filters? Well, Solid Oak Software president Brian Milburn says many adult Web sites have found ways and means of hiding their sites from filter robots and making keyword identification impossible. Many, he says, use Java script to make HTML source documents unintelligible, as the user's Web browser translates the page when it loads and thus bypasses intelligent content recognition methods used by Solid Oak's CYBERsitter and other filtering products. "The only reason a Web publisher would do this would be to hide the content of their Web site," Milburn tells Business Wire. "Most robots are not Javascript-enabled, and the porn publishers probably know this."
Milburn also speculates the Web porn owners are making more use of domain names which might be misspellings of popular children's products or activities. "We recently had a customer purchase our product because her daughter, who was on a swimming team in school, tried to access swimming.com. She left out an `M' and ended up at a porn site," he says. "There are thousands of others." Milburn says these tactics do not, however, affect CYBERsitter's overall performance effectiveness.
ROCK HILL, SC - Former Republican presidential hopeful John McCain made a campaign issue of a Greenville library's inadvertently allowing a sex offender to access Web porn, and it had already triggered lawmakers into action. But South Carolina public librarians can relax a little - a state Senate bill to hold county libraries criminally liable if children get to Net porn in them has all but died during a subcommittee hearing. It would have removed library immunity under a law banning minors' access to porn. Another bill to require libraries to put filtering software in their computers to block porn sites was taken out last week, too. That bill would now require libraries to have a Net policy aimed at blocking people from using the Net for obscenity.
SAN JOSE, CA - Talks between cyberspace's most popular auction site and one of the Web's most popular portals are said to be over - for now, anyway.
Yahoo! has held talks with eBay and with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. about a possible alliance or merger. eBay stock jumped Tuesday night after the word first hit that it was mulling a partnership which could mean a takeover by Yahoo! But don't jump quite yet, warns the Associated Press - the wire service says that, according to those familiar with the situation, no transaction is imminent and talks were likely to collapse on the issue of figuring an appropriate value for eBay. And USA Today says the talks have ended, in fact, over that very question.
Speculation since the Time Warner/America Online merger has put it that Yahoo! would like to acquire a major Internet or major media company to compete with that union. An eBay merger would put a steroid shot into Yahoo!'s faltering online auction operation, analysts believe.
NEW YORK - Nineteen people have been hit with charges of putting over $8 million in their pockets based on stock secrets swapped in online chat rooms - the first known insider trading case using the Internet to execute it, says the Securities and Exchange Commission. The FBI says the defendants made the big mistake of thinking cyberspace equaled anonymity.
John Freeman of New York and James Cooper of Kentucky have pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the case. Authorities say Freeman, a part-time computer graphics worker, was at the root of the plot, stealing information from two investment banks for whom he had worked - Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse First Boston. Freeman's accused of launching the scheme three years ago, when he lost money investing in a helmet maker and found other disgruntled investors in America Online chat rooms. He allegedly offered to pass inside information on Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse clients to Cooper and Benton Erskine of West Virginia, in return for a percentage of any profit they earned. They exchanged information over the next 2 1/2 years, the SEC says, with Freeman earning up to $100,000 in kickbacks while Cooper and Erskine each pocketed over $200,000.
Freeman and Cooper face up to ten years in prison and $1 million in fines when they're sentenced in September.
--- Compiled by Humphrey Pennyworth
