Now, the Recording Industry Association of America seems to want digital radio to get nannied over copyright protection. They're hoping to prod the federal government to ward off what they fear might be an even bigger piracy threat than peer-to-peer networks by themselves are, in their view. "We're in favor of HD radio," said RIAA chief executive Mitch Bainwol. "It offers great benefits for consumers and everyone involved, but we're not blind to several concerns. Someone could cherry-pick songs off a broadcast and fill up a personal library and then post it on Kazaa." You mean the way they used to do with the tape recorder?…
The music industry isn't the only one looking for a cybernanny. Some other industry insiders think the Net is such a mess that it's a shame so few government officials are really willing to hit the virus writers, spammers, and scammers where it hurts. "We had a digital revolution in the 1990s – now we've slid into digital terror," said best-selling author Bruce Sterling, at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington this week. "Today's Internet is a dirty mess – its revolution failed. E-commerce was extremely inventive for a while, but the financing model was corrupt. There was poor governance in the financial systems, there was worse industrial policy; the upshot was a spectacular industry-wrecking boom and bust." And, he said, most Net advancements since have been of the illegal kind, from accelerated spamming and identity theft to phishing (fake Websites or messages luring credit information yields from unsuspecting victims)…
A British media and telecoms watchdog, Ofcom, is asking businesses to comment on their plan to label Internet content, the better to filter "inappropriate" content more readily. The idea is to help human resource departments keep staffers from seeing such material by making it easier to block, this in the wake of Michael Soden's resignation as Bank of Ireland's chief executive after he admitted seeing adult material on his office computer. Speaking of which, both the bank and its partner in outsourced information technology personnel, Hewlett-Packard, are probing individually how Soden's computer was part of a planned limited audit of Net usage in the IT department – including trying to learn who ordered the original audit, who extended it, and who leaked the results to the press…
Japan might be wondering who's going to come up with the next best option for keeping teenagers away from adult and violent Web content. A survey by software developer Digital Arts shows almost a quarter of Japanese youth polled had visited adult sites, with 15 percent visiting violent sites. This came in the wake of an incident that stunned Japan, when an 11-year-old student killed a classmate after the victim posted comments about her online. The student had bookmarked several violent and horror Websites without her family's knowledge…
Speaking of horror, consider Keith and Terri Anderson, charged June 9 in federal court of recording images of her having oral sex and simulated intercourse with her two young sons and posting the images online. Mrs. Anderson told the FBI under questioning last week that she did it to please her husband, whom she said came up with the idea. He was arrested June 6 and she, two days later. The incidents were said to have taken place between January and September 2003.
