Loss of Privacy

We all laughed last October when a law firm claimed copyright on their cease-and-desist letters.  We thought it was stupid that a law firm could claim that, if they sent you a cease-and-desist letter and you placed in a public space, say on the Internet, you would be violating their copyright.  We’re not laughing now.  A judge has sided with the law firm.  The lawyer in question has now threatened to sue anyone who prints his cease-and-desist letters.

“The publication of cease and desist letters is an easy way for scofflaws to generate online ‘mobosphere’ support for illegal activity and, until today, many businesses have been hesitant to take action to address some of the lawlessness online because of possible retaliation and attacks.”

Apparently, free speech doesn’t mean anything to this lawyer.  However, Techdirt believes differently.

“The copyrighting of cease-and-desist letters is an easy way for law firms to bully small companies who have committed no wrong, but who have no real recourse to fight back against an attempt to shut them up via legal threat. Until today, many companies who were being unfairly attacked by companies and law firms misusing cease-and-desist letters to prevent opinions from being stated, had a reasonable recourse to such attacks, and could draw attention to law firms that used such bullying tactics to mute any criticism.” This is an unfortunate ruling and can only serve to create a serious chilling effect on free speech.

Technically, the lawyer is right, however, I believe that this is not within the spirit of the law.  Hopefully, there will be further cases where the validity of such law is challenged.  That is when it will get interesting.  That is when arguments for/against fair use, ownership, and creativity can take place.

Again, this case isn’t so much a case of a lawyer trying to protect his ownership of a cease-and-desist letter.  It is a case of suppressing information.  If you cannot make such items available to the general public, you cannot get help in your own case because the other side has, essentially, shut you up before things even start.  It eliminates free speech.  It should be easily overturned on appeal.  Then again, we never thought this case would get this far.

Smartex has created new clothing that will not only keep you warm, but will keep you healthy. Dubbed, the “Wealthy” outfit, it is one of Smartex’s latest creations.

Powered by a tiny embedded lithium battery, it’s a washable unitard that reads the wearer’s vital signs and beams the data wirelessly to a computer. Information on posture and movement is measured by the stress on sensors built into the garment. Other components gauge electrical activity, yielding EKG data. Heat sensors measure temperature. In the not-so-distant future, De Rossi says, health professionals will be able to monitor cardiac patients by unobtrusively tracking their vital signs as they go about their lives.

The challenge in incorporating sensors into clothing — even skin-tight unitards — is that the fabric shifts when the body moves, resulting in sloppy, irregular signals. To deal with this, De Rossi’s team developed software algorithms to clean up the data, along with code to reconstruct the wearer’s movements. These programs are the real genius behind the company’s work.

While these have a nice potential for those that are handicapped in one way or another, I don’t think I would want to get one.  Any monitoring of my vital statistics is, to me, obtrusive and unwarranted.

The US government is now implementing a policy whereby RFID tags will be inserted into the new $1 presidential coins.

If the experiment is successful it could usher in a super easy automated micro payment system that would make cash registers and human to human money exchange obsolete.

The Treasury is focused on popularizing the notion of large denomination coins to save on the substantial printing cost of 6.5 billion paper dollars a year, which on average last about 18 months in circulation . The Government’s last attempt to introduce a $1 dollar coin, the Sacagawea dollar was a disaster with 97% of the public having never used it.

A possible flaw in such use of RFID tags is that coins cost more to produce than paper bills.  However, coins can also last for many years, as opposed to paper, which has a very short life.

Not all the coins will have RFID tags.  An as yet unknown percentage will be allocated in order to test the feasibility of such a wide deployment later on.  The government hopes that, with RFID embedded into coins, money transfers would become easier, eliminated the need for humans to count the coins.

Everything else would cost money to upgrade, instead of keeping the machines that currently work.  Vending machines, for example, would have to be remade to accommodate the coins and there would be very little advantages to changing over.

What the government should do is simply stop printing one dollar bills.  If the only thing that is available is one dollar coins, then people will complain for a while, then simply accept that the $1 is now a coin.  Once that is accomplished, a $2 and $5 coin can also be made.  Then there would be no necessity of putting RFID into the tags because the government would already have saved the government thousands.

Google is planning on entering the world of online health records.  On the login page, which you cannot yet log into, Google health claims that you can

* Build online health profiles that belong to you

* Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies

* Get personalized health guidance and relevant news

* Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services

* Share selected information with family or caregivers

Google Health was rumored back in 2006, however, even the slow Microsoft beat them to it with their own product last October.  Google should stop trying to meet everyone’s needs and stick to what it knows best.  HIPAA will have a field day with Google, especially since they are known for allowing all their data to be searchable everywhere at anytime.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has managed to screw up royally by holding an American for deportation and refusing to verify his citizenship in a timely manner.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine.

Court officials were skeptical. Not only did his story seem preposterous, but the longtime heroin addict also had a Southern accent and didn’t speak Russian.

Colorado court officials quickly determined his true identity in a national crime database: He was a Minnesota-born man who grew up in Georgia. Before Warziniack was sentenced to prison on the drug charge, his probation officer surmised in a report that he could be mentally ill.

Although it took only minutes for McClatchy to confirm with Minnesota officials that a birth certificate under Warziniack’s name and birth date was on file, Colorado prison officials notified federal authorities that Warziniack was a foreign-born prisoner.

Warziniack, 40, told McClatchy that he has no memory of telling anyone he was Russian. Instead, he recalled the shock of withdrawing from his heroin addiction after 18 years of drug abuse.

Even after he produced a US birth certificate and his half sisters vouched for him, Warziniack was still told he could be deported because a judge had to investigate his birth certificate to verify its authenticity.  Although he is to be released this week, ICE officials are still refusing to admit any wrongdoing in the matter.

Katherine Sanguinetti, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, suspects that prison officials were relying on information that Warziniack gave when he was first taken into custody because they never received the Colorado court documents concluding that he was a U.S. citizen.

Even now, the prison records inaccurately show his current location as “the Soviet Union.”

Wait for this story to reappear in its new incarnation, “Why We All Should Have Identity Cards.”