Daily Archives: September 29, 2003

Yahoo! Wants $299 for Listings

Posted on September 29, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

One of the few things I did to announce this blog (I’m still struggling with whether to send an email to the colleagues) is attempt to list it on Yahoo!

I looked around and the most appropriate category seemed to be Directory > Computers and Internet > Internet > World Wide Web > Weblogs >
Law so I clicked on the “suggest a site” button in that category.

My first reaction was, Wow! Either they’re desperate, or things have changed in the three years or so since I last tried to put something in the directory. For this is (approximately) what I saw (squeezed a bit to fit the blog):

Continue reading →

Posted in Internet | Leave a comment

This Could Spell the End for Margaritaville

Posted on September 29, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Wasting Away in Margaritaville isn't just Sen. Bob Graham's favorite song, it's more or less the antham of Key West and erratic points north as far as South Beach. Imagine the horror that will grip South Florida if it sobers up enough to learn that Mexico is threatening to cut off all bulk exports of Tequila.

Kidding aside, this has all the makings of a classic NAFTA reference, as Mexico will claim its motive in blocking bulk exports is product purity, and the US will claim it's just a cover for the real motive, forcing all those bottling jobs to move south of the border

Posted in Completely Different | Leave a comment

New Handy Cyberlaw Resource

Posted on September 29, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society has just announced the publication of the first Packets newsletter designed “to provide the legal community with concise descriptions of recently decided cyberlaw-related cases, and to point to the original decisions.” The announcement says it will be a bi-monthly publication written by Stanford Law School students. Staff and fellows of the center and volunteer attorneys will be the editors. The first issue is already online. It looks like a good, and well-written, resource for students and for lawyers who are not immersed in the field, complete with links to the sources after the summaries. People wanting more news, more often, albeit even more summarized, will probably want to subscribe to Michael Geist's exhaustingly comprehensive free daily newsletter, BNA Internet Law News.

Posted in Law: Internet Law | Leave a comment

The Admirable IETF Reform Process

Posted on September 29, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is engaged in a lengthy bout of self-criticism and attempts to reform the processes by which it creates the Internet standards most of us don't know but love. (If you want a short intro to the IETF, it has a sort of self description and a sort of mission statement.)

Very much in line with the open, participatory ethos I described in Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace, the IETF is going about the project of trying to make itself better — a daunting task in light of the self-perceived decline in both the speed and quality of new standards, various workflow difficulties including duplication of effort and inconsistent projects, plus the sense among some participants that the entity is no longer as effectively bottom up and democratic as it used to be. Rather than reject these claims, the IETF establishment, gently herded by IETF Chair Harald Tveit Alvestrand, is addressing these very difficult, sometimes intractable problems head-on. You can monitor their efforts at Status of change efforts within the IETF. The problem-statement working group charter and the problem-statement mailing list provide richer detail for those with the time to delve deep. So far, it's an impressive effort that I think largely justifies my claim that the IETF is the closest thing we've got going to Habermasian discourse in action.

Update: And here's a link to draft-ietf-problem-issue-statement-04.txt which lays it all out.

Posted in Internet | 8 Comments

Our Terrorism-Fighting Tax Dollars At Work

Posted on September 29, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

The folks at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) sure have been busy. The BBC reports that US spies monitor whisky plant:

'They said they had been monitoring our webcams because the process of making something very innocuous and pleasant is close to making weapons of mass destruction, apparently.'

There's of course nothing legally or morally wrong with this government or anyone else watching a webcam feed made freely available over the Internet. But given the DTRA's mission…

'The Defense Threat Reduction Agency safeguards America's interests from weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosives) by controlling and reducing the threat and providing quality tools and services for the warfighter.'

…haven't they anything more productive to do?

Posted in Politics: US | Leave a comment

Spot The Weird Detail

Posted on September 29, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

For today's enjoyment, we present a fairly typical Florida news item, Large lizards confiscated from trucker. Can you spot the odd and unusual fact?

A Connecticut truck driver was charged Wednesday with three misdemeanor offenses for traveling with his pets – a 3-foot alligator and a 5-foot caiman.

“He had a dog harness and a leash to walk the caiman with,” said Lt. Joy Hill, spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which levied the charges. “They are not really very warm and cuddly.”
…
Avery said the crocodilians were his pets and that he had the caiman about 10 years and the alligator for about a year. It is illegal to have an alligator for a pet in Florida, and one must have a Class II permit to have a caiman. Avery had no permit.

Is the odd fact that,

  • A trucker kept good-sized crocs as pets?
  • That he walked the crocs on a dog leash?
  • That he didn't have a croc license?
  • That he was a New Englander who brought his weirdness down to Florida?

No, all of those are the sort of things a good denezin of South Florida must learn to take without blinking. The weird thing about this story is that there's an applicable law and it was enforced…

Posted in Completely Different | Leave a comment