Posts with keyword: law

5 entries

Automatic Negotiation of Contracts Using Context

Wed Apr 28 17:40:00 2010

Image by IsraelMFA via Flickr I had some great discussions with Renee Lloyd of Project VRM this week at Kynetx Impact on the subject of legal agreements and context. I don't pretend to understand the legal issues sufficiently well to exilian them here, so I'll just summarize my understanding and let Renee and others correct me where necessary. The problem is that the terms and condition agreements that most Web sites use ubiquitously have some legal issues that make them less than ideal. Moreover people dislike them. Their inflexibility leads to lost business and opportunity. What if we had
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EFF Wins 4th Amendment Email Victory

Wed Jun 20 08:57:00 2007

Richi Jennings has a nice wrap-up of reactions to the court ruling that EFF won against warrentless email snooping. Quoting Luke O'Brien: The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upheld a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using "Smiling Bob" ads that have gained some notoriety. The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional
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The SHA-1 Defense

Mon Jan 22 16:44:00 2007

SHA-1 has been officially cracked. So what? Technically, it probably doesn't mean much. Being able to produce a hash collision doesn't mean that you can produce a meaningful collision. For example if you have a digitally signed contract for $100, you won't be able to produce a contract for $100,000 that has the same signature--at least not yet. What could be a problem are the legal challenges to SHA-1 based signatures on the basis of "reasonable" doubt. George Ou discuses these kinds of challenges and points to the MD5 defense: A Sydney Magistrate threw out the digitally time stamped
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Registering Identity

Fri Feb 10 11:17:00 2006

A couple of bills caught my attention today. Both bills, under consideration by the Utah Legislature, deal with identity. The first, HB158 would require convicted sex offenders to renew their driver's license yearly. The idea is that while sex offenders are under no pressure to keep their data current in the state's online sex offender registry, they need a driver's license. The bill turns a manual process of checking into a more automatic process where renewing a driver's license updates the registry. The second, HB429, places restrictions on the sale of components used to make meth. Anyone purchasing medicines
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A Model Regime for Privacy Protection

Mon Feb 6 10:24:00 2006

Daniel Solove and Chris Hoofnagle have published a paper entitled A Model Regime of Privacy Protection. The paper outlines patches that could be applied to current US law to increase privacy protection. In the paper, Solove and Hoofnagle build the model regime around Fair Use Practices, a set of very general principles: There must be no personal data record-keeping system whose very existence is secret. There must be a way for an individual to find out what information about him is in a record and how it is used. There must be a way for an individual to prevent
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