The MPAA may be gearing up for an RIAA-inspired assault on US colleges and universities. Last week the group announced its support for the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act (2007)," and MPAA head Dan Glickman said that his organization would work with school administrators to put an end to movie piracy on campuses, which Glickman says costs the industry $500 million annually.

Most telling, the group has heard the call of Representative Howard Berman and has compiled a list of the most piracy-ridden schools in higher education.

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.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after the attacks on September 11, 2001 as a kind of overriding department, wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system's root zone on the Internet.

At the ICANN meeting, Turcotte said that the managers of country registries were concerned about this proposal. When contacted by heise online, Turcotte said that the national registries had informed their governmental representatives about the DHS's plans.

If the IANA retains the key, however, US authorities still have a political problem, for the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA. If the keys are then handed over to ICANN/IANA, there would be even less of an incentive to give up this role as a monitor.

MSNBC has up an article discussing the results of a Newsweek poll on faith and religion among members of the US populace. Given the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?', some 48% of Americans said 'No'. Furthermore, 34% of college graduates said they accept the Biblical story of creation as fact. An alarmingly high number of individuals responded that they believe the earth is only 10,000 years old, and that a deity created our species in its present form at the start of that period.

The key Internet oversight agency decided not to give adult websites their own ".xxx" domain for the third time.

The rejection comes on the back of complaints from both the porn industry and religious groups. The adult entertainment groups were worried that their businesses would be censored into a coma and the religious groups thought it would encourage the adult industry.

The idea was first pushed by ICM Registry which handles Web-site registrations with the aim of overseeing sites that want to have the ".xxx" Internet suffix. According to Associated Press, ICM is considering suing ICANN.

California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could banish ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state.

For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with "red teams" of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes.

County elections officials balked at the proposed standards in a letter Monday to Bowen and hinted broadly at the same conclusion reached by several computer scientists: If enforced rigidly, the standards could send many voting machines, especially touch-screens, back for major upgrades.

Local elections officials argued that there isn't enough time to fix any deficiencies before the February 2008 presidential primary.

For years, the RIAA has been bullying all sorts of people with lawsuits over file sharing -- but the evidence they use has always been weak, at best. In the early years, before most people recognized this, they were forced to settle. But, more recently, lawyers have realized that pointing out how weak the evidence is will often make the RIAA turn and drop the case. They usually try to get out of paying legal fees, but even that's becoming more difficult. In the latest case (as usual, pointed out by Ray Beckerman) a strong letter pointing out all the problems with the RIAA's case has resulted in a very quick voluntary dismissal of the case.

A Suffolk Superior Court judge yesterday denied a request from Diebold Election Systems to block a bid by Massachusetts to buy electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software Inc.

Diebold had filed a lawsuit against the commonwealth of Massachusetts on March 15 looking to invalidate the state's $9 million contract to buy handicapped-accessible AutoMark voting machines made by rival ES&S.

In announcing the selection of the AutoMark machines on March 5, Galvin stated: "After extensive testing and analysis for security, I have determined that the AutoMark terminal is the one that will best enable voters with disabilities to cast their ballots without the assistance of another person."

Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the country's largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.

Weisberg said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes "it's worth the time and money" of going to court to challenge the contract's award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.

"We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition," he said.

While price was a key consideration, other criteria were considered, such as the quality of machine, security, and service.

Once you join Flixster, Flixster commandeers your address book - your list of all of your personal contacts in your AOL (or Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail) address book - and sends out an invitation to join Flixster "from" you. Oh sure, you enable them to do it - but clearly enough people are unaware of what they are doing that it's causing a problem.

Using AOL as an example, when you first sign up for Flixster using an AOL email address, after you select a username and password, the very next screen prompts you for your AOL password!

If you use a Gmail address, you can get the same screen, only with the Gmail logo. Same for Hotmail and Yahoo.

Once you give them your password, they grab everyone's email addresses from your AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail address book, and spam them with the invitation. In your name using your email address.

Flixster's Terms of Service start out by saying: "I can’t believe you really clicked on this. What are you trying to find out? Here is our privacy policy (link to privacy policy)."