Today was the deadline for that compliance, as Wired's Threat Level blog points out. Universities have been especially vocal in their opposition to CALEA, arguing that it will prove incredibly expensive to install, monitor, and maintain all the required gear and software. In an effort to make it easier and cheaper, the federal government has allowed schools to route all of their traffic through a Trusted Third Party who will take care of all the monitoring issues.

The government sees this as a mere extension of its existing wiretap authority to a new medium. Criminals shouldn't get a free pass, so the argument goes, simply because they're smart enough to switch to Skype.

Judicial oversight of the taps remains in place, and a judge is still required to sign off on every wiretap, though this may come as cold comfort to those opposed to the CALEA expansion; in 2006, no judge turned down a wiretap request.

Sometimes you see a story and think, nah, I'm dreaming this, hope I wake up soon. Then you nip yourself, it hurts, and you say to yourself my God, it's true, MC Hammer really is a Web 2.0 expert.

According to TechCrunch, Hammer is, "advisor to stealth internet startup Dance Jam". Doesn't sound that stealthy, if it’s on his biog.

Belgian newspapers that sued Google to be removed from its index are now back in, having agreed to use the commonly-accepted blocking standards that they initially rejected as not being legal.

The Belgian French and German-language daily press publishers and Google Inc. intend to use a quiet period in the court dispute to continue their efforts to identify tangible ways to collaborate in the long term.

There has been an understandable public outcry against the RIAA's attempts to more than triple the sound recording copyright royalties on Internet radio.

One solution proposed by Webcasters is to just not play RIAA-member songs under the assumption that then they don't have to pay the royalty to the RIAA's collection body, SoundExchange; Webcasters would then just pay the independent artist the royalty.

However, the RIAA is not about being fair and just. The game is rigged and the RIAA has rigged it in their favor. The strategy of playing only non-RIAA songs won't work though because the RIAA has secured the right to collect royalties on all songs regardless of who controls the copyright.

SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free.

Even if you do own the copyright to your own recording of your own song, SoundExchange will collect Internet radio royalties for your song even if you don't want them to do so.

Facing worries about its tracking Web surfers' every move, Google Inc. is now offering a feature to track Web surfers' every move. Its free Web History service is strictly voluntary - Google users can sign up to have the Internet giant keep detailed records of every website they visit so they can easily find them again later. Web History's quiet debut this week came as privacy advocates continued to raise alarms about the prospect of Google combining its collection of information on individuals with that of DoubleClick Inc. Google has agreed to acquire the New York-based company, which distributes Web ads and tracks where the majority of people go on the Internet, for $3.1 billion.

Apparently, a college student discovered and published a pretty major vulnerability found in the routers the company uses, allowing anyone to access the routers remotely. Rather than thank the customer for finding and highlighting a pretty serious vulnerability, the company has cut off his service and threatened him with lawsuits. Oh yeah, they also haven't bothered to fix the vulnerability -- despite it being published 7 weeks ago. The reasoning from the ISP is astounding. They claim that since they can't find any evidence that anyone ever used the vulnerability, he must have discovered it by "illegal" means.

And, of course, the ISP told the guy he's not allowed to talk about its legal threat to him -- which isn't actually legally binding. It's not clear if the ISP doesn't understand what it's done or simply doesn't want to fix the vulnerability -- but the fact that it seems to think it's ok to leave the vulnerability there and just cut off the guy who pointed it out should make other customers of BeThere wonder about how the ISP treats their security.

Internet cookies might not be as reliable an indicator of distinct Web site visitors as previously thought, according to a Monday report from Internet research company comScore.

A growing number of Internet users have taken to erasing their computer's cookies, which are unique identifiers inserted on a user's computer that reveal what Web sites someone has visited. While this might not seem like a catastrophic event, the deletion of these cookies could lead to inflated traffic reports for a particular Web site, according to the report.

Researchers found that 31 percent of U.S. Internet users erased their first-party cookies over the course of the month. As a result, Web sites could be inflating their web traffic by as much as 150 percent, according to comScore.

Far from being a "force for good", according to the UK's education minister Alan Johnson, Wikipedia is unreliable and "broken beyond repair", co-founder Larry Sanger said.

The Times reported Sanger's remarks in the wake of a speech Johnson made to teachers yesterday. Johnson said Wikipedia allows people to access info which formerly would require expensive subscriptions to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and the like.

But Sanger said the community was "often dysfunctional", the content was unreliable and it had serious management problems.

Mind you, Sanger has something of an axe to grind as he's just launched his own encyclopaedia, citizendium.org, which will be monitored by boffins.

The closest thing the Internet has to a governing body seems to want the same kind of immunity from national laws that the International Red Cross and the International Olympic Committee have enjoyed for decades.

The Bush administration doesn't appear to like the idea of ICANN becoming an independent international organization. In fact, instead of letting ICANN slip further out of its grasp, the administration seems to be tightening its grip on the Marina del Ray, Calif.-based group.

An August 2006 analysis from ICANN makes it clear that the Swiss framework for such international groups would be an especially attractive one. Another telling sentence in the new report says that "ICANN's headquarters may remain in the U.S.," as opposed to a flat statement saying it will remain here.

For some time we've been following the ongoing conflict between the US and the island nation of Antigua surrounding internet gambling. Even before the passage of the most recent anti-gambling law, Antigua had gone to the WTO to complain that the US government's actions against online gambling were de facto protectionist measures, and thus violated international trade law. The WTO ended up siding with Antigua, although, quite predictably, the US did nothing to resolve the issue -- in fact, things have only gotten worse. Now the WTO is speaking out again, slamming the US government for its failure to abide by the decision against it. Once again, it seems likely that the US will ignore the decision, although that would give Antigua the right to retaliate. One possibility that's been thrown out there is that Antigua may turn itself into a haven for free music and software and set up some site like allofmp3.com. Of course, the US put pressure on Russia to crack down on that site, as part of the country's admittance into the WTO, but since Antigua is already part of the organization, the US would have no such leverage.