Jeremy Jaynes, considered one of the biggest spammers in the US was sentenced to nine years in prison for violating a Virginia anti-spam law. As part of his appeal, Jaynes claimed that the anti-spam law itself was unconstitutional, as it violated his right to free speech. It would appear that argument hasn’t worked out, as a somewhat divided Virginia Supreme Court has ruled against him, upholding the conviction. It does raise some interesting first amendment questions — but most spamming activity involves so many other things that could be considered illegal (such as computer trespass, identity fraud, false advertising, etc., etc., etc.) that you would think spammers could be convicted on charges that have little to do with free speech issues.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The judge in the Wikileaks case has dissolved the injunction against Wikileaks, which means that it can get its .org domain back. He defended his prior ruling because it was based on the pittance of information the bank and registrar had provided him, saying ‘This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit… Nobody filed any timely responses to the court’s order.’”

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While a bunch of consumer groups have come out in favor of keeping the internet neutral, a bunch of civil rights groups are taking the opposing view. However, the reasoning is hard to follow, as it doesn’t make very much sense: “The effective prioritization of P2P traffic would represent an altogether new type of ‘back of the bus’ second-class status for our speech on broadband networks — and ought to be resoundingly rejected.” Actually, it’s the use of traffic management that would create a second-class status for some traffic. Preserving network neutrality does exactly the opposite — making sure all packets are treated equally. What the groups seem to be saying — incorrectly — is that by not using traffic management, P2P traffic is prioritized. That’s not true. It’s treated equally with any other traffic.

It’s completely fair to argue that treating all packets equally doesn’t make sense — as many have. However, to claim that treating all packets equally somehow makes some traffic “second-class” is an outright misrepresentation. No one denies (perhaps other than these civil rights groups) that traffic management is all about officially making certain kinds of traffic second-class. They just argue that this is necessary and reasonable. The filing by these civil rights groups is simply backwards.

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The Streisand Effect is getting a bit more coverage these days. After the Associated Press mentioned it the other day, I got to sit down and talk with Robert Siegel for today’s “All Things Considered” where we discussed The Streisand Effect starting with the Wikileaks case and moving on to some other cases where the Effect clearly made an appearance. If this keeps up, maybe we can look forward to a day when lawyers think twice about trying to force perfectly legitimate content offline.

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Add flavor to your favorite firewater using a process called infusion. Well, technically, it’s called maceration, but the effect is the same — tasty flavored cocktails of your own design.

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ScienceDaily is reporting that researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Southampton in cooperation with partners from Japan and the US have shed some light on the Standard Model of physics using a new computer model. “The project’s enormously complex calculations relate to the behavior of tiny particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to complete. Their result shows that the Standard Model’s claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists’ efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect.”

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We’ve been posting a ton of examples lately of authors giving away ebooks for free and seeing that it noticeably increases sales of their actual books. By this point, I’d think that such stories are old hat and don’t need to be repeated. But if you look through the comments on some of our posts, you’ll find people who insist that this doesn’t work or that we haven’t shown any examples. One commenter recently said that there’s no proof that this works unless “50% of publishers adopt such a model.” So, for the time being, here’s yet another example, as pointed out by my colleague, Chris. SciFi author John Scalzi just participated in publisher Tor’s recent effort to offer up free ebooks, and discovered an almost immediate boost in sales. He admits that there could be other factors involved, but tries to account for all of them, and concludes that it’s almost definitely the free ebooks that are driving the noticeable increase. So, here we are. Yet another example of it working. How long until someone points out in the comments that this, too, is a special case? Just how many special cases do we need to show before people recognize that this model does work?

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The Dungeons & Dragons Experience turns out to be a rich source of information about the upcoming fourth edition of the classic game.

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Tired of your old job? The Ars Technica job board is chock full of interesting positions to spice up your career.

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The rather infamous Jack Thompson gained his fame by picking up various lawsuits that involved kids shooting people and trying to get them off by blaming the video game. Rather than admit guilt, he was attempting to keep murderers from getting convicted by saying that it was the video game that made them do it. It appears that others are now picking up on this tactic. Adam Thierer points us to a recent case where a lawyer isn’t arguing that his client, a 24-year-old, didn’t commit a murder. He’s arguing that the guy thought he was playing a video game. This is a really weak way to try to get someone acquitted of murder — and says quite a bit about the lawyers who would use this sort of defense. As the article notes, the actual evidence suggests that video games had nothing to do with the murder, and that it was an old-fashioned robbery attempt.

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One of Italy’s most famed designers unveils the Quaranta concept, a solar-assisted hybrid supercar that’s as quick as it is ugly.

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Feb. 29, 2008, a leap year day, caused South Carolina’s DMV to shut down for half a day due to software glitches, and one other government site — a volcano webcam — could be affected for months to come.

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E Online is reporting that a new spinoff is currently in the works to feature Cleveland, the soft-spoken neighbor in popular animated sitcom Family Guy. “Not much is known about Cleveland other than the fact it will revolve around the Brown clan. It’s unclear whether the series will remain set in the town of Quahog or whether Cleveland, along with his wife and son, will continue to appear on Family Guy, though as both series are animated, the double-billing won’t so much be a logistical problem as a creative decision.”

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The state Supreme Court affirms the nation’s first felony conviction for spamming, ruling that Jeremy Jaynes is not protected by the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment.

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A couple weeks after trying to shut down Wikileaks a federal judge in California, after hearing the various first amendment concerns realized that perhaps he was a bit hasty. He has now reversed the order, allowing the site to have its domain name back. So, after all of this, the site still remains up and millions more people now know that the Swiss bank Julius Baer tried to shut it down to hide various documents. The end result: not only is the disputed content still available, many more people have seen it. I assume that this was not quite how the bank’s lawyers expected this situation to turn out.

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SpaceAdmiral writes to mention that NASA has some new high-resolution radar maps of the Moon obtained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The new images have also been used to create a simulation of the Moon’s day and a movie of a Moon landing from the point of view of the astronaut. “NASA is eying the Moon’s south polar region as a possible site for future outposts. The location has many advantages; for one thing, there is evidence of water frozen in deep dark south polar craters. Water can be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn as rocket fuel–or astronauts could simply drink it. Planners are also looking for ‘peaks of eternal light.’ Tall polar mountains where the sun never sets might be a good place for a solar power station.”

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We’ve been discussing how patents can have a serious economic downside (as was recognized by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as they designed the patent system). It appears that some researchers are trying to quantify just how much damage bad patents are doing to the economy. Against Monopoly points us to a blog post at Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property that discusses the results of a preliminary study (pdf file) that estimates a loss of $22.5 billion due to bad patents. The researchers admit that the findings are preliminary, but it does create an initial framework by which to look at the negative impact of bad patents on the economy. Among other things, the paper lists out the following ways that bad patents harm the economy:

• Cause consumers to absorb monopoly prices over “inventions” that were
  already effectively common knowledge
• Direct resources away from productive research and instead towards
  strategic accumulation of patents already filed over innovations already
  deployed
• Divert resources to “defensive patenting” or securing offensive “blocking
  patents
• Direct research away from areas of existing patents that should not have
  been granted
• Direct resources toward acquiring and enforcing substandard patents and
  collecting royalties rather than other more-productive fields of economic
  activity.

We’ve seen all of these in action lately. And, of course, this doesn’t even get into how much is thrown away in legal resources to litigate patents and defend infringement claims on patents that should not have been granted. Also, it’s worth noting that the TIIP blog post reminds us that the author’s own book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk comes out next month.

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Next time it rains, blame bacteria. According to a study published this week, airborne bacteria are the most common particles that let ice crystals — the precursors of raindrops — form in clouds.

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yorugua writes “Furniture trembled as Steve Ballmer was to be interviewed by InformationWeek. He then went on to talk about Linux: ‘How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way “you beat any other competitor: You offer good value, which in this case means good total cost of ownership,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says.’, Embrace-Extend-Extinguish: ‘We say when we embrace standards, we’ll be transparent about how we’re embracing standards. [...] If we have deviations, we’ll be transparent about the deviations.’”

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The anonymous whistle-blower site WikiLeaks is allowed back online in the United States as a federal judge rescinds his earlier order shuttering the site for publishing leaked Swiss banking records that hinted at money laundering.

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netbuzz writes “Lawyers for the Swiss bank that got the plug pulled on Wikileaks.org have dragged a Stanford grad student/human rights activist into the case because he moderated a discussion group about Wikileaks on Facebook. He has no relation to Wikileaks or the case, other than that he helped authenticate documents — completely unrelated to the bank matter — that were posted on Wikileaks. The guy and his lawyer have done a nice job of making lemonade out of this lemon, though.”

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California’s stem cell agency has announced that grant applicants have raised nearly $500 million in matching funds, qualifying for another $262 million in state money for the construction of stem cell research laboratories.

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The LA Times has a story about a Japanese man who has been wanted on charges of murder for over 25 years, who was finally arrested thanks to him tipping off authorities on his blog that he would be traveling to the US territory of Saipan. Kazuyoshi Miura is believed by US authorities to have killed his wife, while the pair were visiting the US in 1981. He was tried and convicted in Japan — but the case was overturned. US authorities have been trying to arrest him ever since. Apparently, a few years back he set up a blog, and US police have been monitoring it to see if he would do something so silly as to mention the fact that he’d be traveling to a US territory — which he actually did. So, just as a public service announcement: if you’re a wanted fugitive in the US, perhaps don’t announce on your blog that you’ll be traveling there.

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The only way Ed Reese has been able to get Google to acknowledge his business is by paying monthly fees to local listing networks such as Superpages.com and Yellowbook.com. His experience begs the question: Does local search work, or do you need to pay to play?

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eldavojohn writes “I’ve been charged with making a specific user interface style guide for a suite of software by my employer. I’m not quite sure where to start. So I turned to my favorite search engine only to be brutally disappointed with what is out there to help me. I’m a software developer but have not had any formal training in UI design or look and feel. I’m looking for something more than just “keep it simple, stupid.” I’m looking more for something that is specific but not technologically dependent. This doesn’t have to be a global standard, merely a document that illustrates how one would effectively describe look and feel. Does anyone know of such a guide either created by an organization, government or company for their own uses — possibly one even released under the creative common license?” In addition to just documentation, what other UI advice can Slashdot readers offer in order to ensure quality development?

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Wired has an interesting editorial on the latest resurgence of the old days of phone phreaking and the latest phreak that is rising into the FBI crosshairs. The most recent hoax, “swatting”, involves malicious pranksters calling police with reports of fake murders, hostage crises, or the like and spoofing the call to appear as though it was from another location. “Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as “Li’l Hacker.” Because he’s underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li’l Hacker’s last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth. If he’s guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive.”

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When neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor experienced a stroke in 1996, the first thing to go was her sense of being separate from the objects around her. Taylor gave a first-person account of her experience at the TED conference in Monterey this week.

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My friend Reihan Salam has an interesting piece in Slate that nicely pulls together much of the discussion at Princeton’s Computing in the Cloud workshop last month. He argues that web startups that have cultivated a squeaky-clean image start to have difficulties when they start trying to monetize all the traffic they’ve generated. The most obvious example is Facebook’s Beacon fiasco. Reihan suggests that the “immaculate capitalism” of early-stage startups gives way to ordinary profit-seeking once companies face pressures to turn a profit. There’s clearly something to this, but I think Reihan’s time horizon might be a little bit too short. Keep in mind that even the mighty Google faced questions about its profitability as it stubbornly resisted the pay-for-placement schemes that many other search engines adopted. Google’s refusal to compromise the quality of its search results for short-term profits helped it build market share, and it ultimately found non-disruptive ways to monetize all of those eyeballs. Facebook and Wesabe are much younger companies, and so it’s not too surprising that they haven’t found the right model for monetizing their users. Ultimately, their reputation with users is their most valuable asset, and so it’s smart business to safeguard that reputation, even at the cost of foregoing some short-term business opportunities.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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We ran an article about the new Air Force Cyber Command and its recruiting efforts on February 13, 2008. Now Major General William Lord, who is in charge of this effort, has agreed to answer Slashdot users’ questions. If you’re thinking about joining up — or just curious — this is a golden opportunity to learn how our military is changing its command structure and recruiting efforts to deal with “cyberspace as a warfighting domain.” Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.

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The wireless internet widget device Chumby touches down after years in development hell and it’s totally worth the wait.

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Baidu is being sued by the Music Copyright Society of China for directly linking to copyrighted music. News of the lawsuit comes just weeks after the search engine was hit with a similar suit by the IFPI.

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willdavid writes to tell us that Sam Ramji over at Port25 has a nice succinct list of the major open source principles that have been used while developing Windows Server 2008. “Overall, we’ve learned and continue to learn from open source development principles. These are making their way into the mindset, development practices, and ultimately into the products we bring to market. I’ve focused here on ‘what Microsoft has learned from Open Source’ - and ironically, I’ve agreed to do a panel at OSBC on 3/25 with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation on ‘what Open Source can learn from Microsoft’. As all of the different organizations in IT continue to evolve, we’ll learn from each others’ best practices and make increasingly better software. As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward.”

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Web 2.0 office app Zoho updated recently with DocX support and more robust collaboration features. Ars takes a look at what the new and improved Zoho Writer has to offer.

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Ian Lamont writes “The IDG News Service is reporting that US and Canadian authorities have made more than 400 seizures of counterfeit Cisco hardware from China in an ongoing investigation that started in 2005. The most recent seizure was last Friday in Toronto, where the RCMP charged two people and a company with distributing large quantities of counterfeit network components to companies in the US through the Internet. The RCMP seized approximately 1,600 pieces of counterfeit network hardware with an estimated value of $2 million, says the report. According to another source, bogus Cisco gear from China typically includes network modules, WAN interface cards, gigabit interface converters, and less expensive routers.”

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It’s a refrain we’ve been repeating year after year: patent examiners don’t scale. While some patent system supporters continue to insist the only problem with the patent system is not enough examiners, that’s simply incorrect. Thanks to the way the patent system has changed over the years, combined with the ever-increasing rate of technological change and advancement, the number of patent applications are only going to increase at a rather rapid rate — far exceeding any attempt to hire out of the backlog. The Government Accountability Office has basically said as much, admitting that even if the USPTO could hire 1,200 new examiners each year over the next five years, the patent backlog would continue to increase.

The answer is clearly not to focus on hiring more patent examiners. The way the system is currently designed, this is not a problem you solve by hiring more people. You only solve this problem by reducing the number of patent applications. And, the only way to do that is to completely revamp the patent system itself. Don’t think the current attempt at patent reform is the answer, either. While there are some good things in there, the proposal to switch from a “first to invent” system to a “first to file” system will make this problem worse. By using a “first to file” system, the incentive is to file as quickly as possible for any idea possible, to make sure you beat anyone else. A first to invent system at least gives the person some leeway to make sure that it’s worth filing.

In the meantime, let’s repeat it once more: patent examiners don’t scale. If you design the patent system to expand at a rapid rate (which, thanks to the USPTO, the courts and Congress, we have…), then it’s only natural that it will scale well beyond the reach of a system that requires humans to analyze each and every patent. The end result is that a lot of bad applications get approved, which only increases the problem, since more people try to patent bad concepts, knowing that they have a decent chance of getting it through the system.

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Two Chinese dissidents are suing Yahoo in US federal court, and they’re doing it without lawyers. The PR Pain Train rolls on for Yahoo.

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Alex Dekker writes “Sony’s Mike Abary says in an interview, ‘If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble.’ Presumably by ‘we’ he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops. And he’s not going to be too pleased when he sees the Linux-powered, sub-$200 Elonex One. Looks like what’s bad for Sony may be good for the consumer.” The CNet article mentions that a version of the Eee running XP is available in Japan now and will be coming to the US within weeks.

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The Chinese downloading service is targeted by a local music industry group, which accuses it of “unfettered piracy.”

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ZonkerWilliam recommends a bulletin from the American Institute of Physics, which discusses a study noting that recent spacecraft, such as NEAR, appear to display velocity anomalies much like those seen in Pioneer 10 (which were observed beginning ten years ago). The anomalies amount to up to 13 mm/sec., with a measurement accuracy of 0.1 mm/sec. Quoting: “A new look at the trajectories for various spacecraft as they fly past the Earth finds in each case a tiny amount of surplus velocity. For craft that pursue a path mostly symmetrical with respect to the equator, the effect is minimal. For craft that pursue a more unsymmetrical path, the effect is larger.”

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The software maker will cut between 20 and 48 percent off the price of some versions of its operating system, but not without some internal turmoil.

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A Mozilla developer has discovered undocumented Mac OS X framework APIs that are being used in Safari. This discovery has led some to question if Apple is giving itself an unfair advantage, with some pointing out that if Microsoft was caught doing this it might find itself in front of a judge.

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Engineers must redesign the heat shield for the Mars Science Laboratory, adding another $20 million to $30 million to NASA’s ambitious project that is already $165 million over budget.

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David writes in to point us to Jim Manzi’s guest post at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish suggesting that a way to deal with privacy issues is to create a market for private info. This is not a new idea, though it’s not clear if Manzi knows about those who have tried it before. Root Markets has been trying to do this for years without getting that much traction. Manzi’s idea is that right now people are lax with transaction data because they really have no choice: “When the choices are (1) opt out of modern life, or (2) implicitly surrender all of this info, pretty much everybody picks door #2.” His description of the solution, however, should immediately ring some bells on an analogy that shows why his plan will almost certainly never work:

“But what if I had the practical ability to charge commercial entities for access to or use of information of this sort? It would, first, go from a free good to a scarcer resource, and second, I could protect those parts of my transaction history that I feel to be most sensitive. In effect, we need a functioning market into which I can sell my transaction history.”

Yes, he’s basically saying that we should take an infinite resource (data about our transactions) and forcibly create artificial scarcity, and then create a market around that artificial scarcity. It sounds nice in theory, but given how just about every market that’s based on artificial scarcity is disintegrating as we speak, it seems unlikely to get very far. If there’s one lesson that we’ve learned from watching the entertainment industry implode over the last decade, it should be that artificial scarcity doesn’t last. Basing a business model on artificial scarcity is incredibly risky.

Given how little attention Root Markets has received from users, Manzi may not be correct in estimating where consumers’ feelings lie on this matter. As they’ve shown time and time again, it’s not that people want to keep their transaction data private and just don’t have the means to do so — it’s that very few really seem to care at all.

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Citing operational security risks, the United States Air Force has set up new filters in an effort to prevent Air Force personnel from reading blogs. Members of the USAF who use blogs to expand their expertise are frustrated.

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dforristall alerts us to an odd move by Microsoft: cutting the price of retail boxes of Vista in many markets. Analysts didn’t see this one coming, and they are scratching their heads a bit over it; one called it “very unheard of.” The price cuts vary by country — they’re largest in the developing world where piracy levels are high — and they don’t apply to OEM copies of Vista, which account for 90% of sales. “Gartner analyst Michael Silver said the move… is puzzling… [He] noted that the market for such upgrades is fairly limited. Those who bought XP in the fourth quarter of 2006 got a coupon for a free Vista upgrade, while most of those who have bought systems since then have gotten Vista. Machines purchased prior to 2006 probably aren’t all that attractive as candidates for a Vista upgrade… ‘The whole notion of upgrading PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside.’”

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damienhunter notes a Wired story on the power-hungry ways of the first generation of Blu-ray players coming soon to a laptop near you. “With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba’s HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook… But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology’s vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say.”

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lelitsch writes “The Washington Post reports that the initial pilot of the Virtual Border Fence planned by the DHS and subcontracted to Boeing has been a miserable failure. A lot of the points in the report have the hallmark of death-march software development projects. Some choice quotes include ‘did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol,’ ‘DHS officials do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed,’ and ‘the design will not be used as the basis for future… development.’ The article notes that Boeing was forced to deliver ’something’ early as President Bush pushed for immigration reform in Congress in 2006. That reform effort died last year in the Senate.”

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gnujoshua writes “Has the time come to abolish software patents? Fortune columnist Roger Parloff reports on a new campaign called End Software Patents, which he views as ‘attempting to ride a wave of corporate and judicial disenchantment with aspects of the current patent system.’ Ryan Paul of Ars Technica writes that the purpose of the campaign is to ‘educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.’ The campaign site is informative and targets many types of readers, and it includes a scholarship contest with a top prize of $10,000.00. We’ve recently discussed the potential legal re-examination of software patents.”

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For all the talk about how Apple patented so many different aspects of the iPhone, it really hasn’t stopped a ton of iPhone-related patent infringement lawsuits against Apple. Bill Squier writes in to let us know of the latest. Someone is suing Apple over a patent on the iPhone’s caller ID feature. Yes, apparently, the patent covers matching up the phone number of an incoming call with a local contact database to display who is calling. Of course, the patent also talks about a two-line LCD display and a separate receiver, which aren’t exactly a part of the iPhone these days.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The RIAA’s litigation campaign has met resistance from the academic community before, but now it’s been taken to a whole new level: the defense of RIAA victims who are not part of the college community. First the University of Oregon lashed out on behalf of its students, then it was the University of Maine’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic on behalf of its undergrads. Now, the University of San Francisco School of Law has taken the fight a giant step further. Its Intellectual Property Law Clinic’s attorneys-in-training, working under the supervision of law professors, are going to bat against the RIAA by helping outside lawyers to defend their clients, pro bono. They reached out 3000 miles to get involved in Elektra v. Torres and Maverick v. Chowdhury, two cases going on in Brooklyn, NY, against non-college defendants. Two of the law students in the USF’s legal program assisted in the research and preparation of briefs in these cases, opposing the RIAA’s motion to dismiss the defendants’ counterclaims. Thousands of honor students throughout United States law schools, most of them digital natives who actually understand the legal fallacies and technological missteps the RIAA is taking, and who can’t wait to expose them, make a pretty good resource for the poor and middle class people trying to defend these cases.”

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