So what happens when special interests like the RIAA and the MPAA get together with Congress? C|NET reports on the draft of a bill that gives copyright holders permission to go after people they perceive to be pirates. The technique for attacking a user's machine will be secret and only needs to be disclosed to the US Attorney General.
Monitoring techniques are not mentioned, but for this to work serious snooping would be required. Being a one-sided industry bill remedies to discourage abuse are weak.
It is disturbing to note that the recording industry is actively designing tools that would permit them to carry on this sort of work (I was contacted by a major label and asked to work with them on just such a project a few weeks ago. It was astonishing to learn how far they were willing to go to protect their content).
Efforts like this will only embitter the user population and open up the way for others to monitor what is on your machine. It is not much of a leap to imagine this being used for homeland security.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945923.html?legacy=cnet&tag=lthd
Summer nights are great for sky watching and tracking satellites can be particularly fun. Some of them are large enough to be spectacular and close enough that a skilled observer can resolve their shape with a small telescope. NASA has a nice applet for predicting overflights.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/
Another very nice tool from the same folks is JPass.
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JPass/
Both of these are useful tools, but I have a preference for JPass. If you tried JPass a few years ago, the current version is greatly improved.
6:09:11 AM 
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