Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

I’ve seen the government do a lot of stupid things; this is way up on the list. Library of Congress to House Entire Twitter Archive The U.S. Library of Congress, which archives many forms of media for their cultural and historical significance, has announced it will keep a digital archive of every public tweet that [...]

I saw this excellent article by Paul Strassman (writing a guest post for Larry Dignan) at ZDNet. I admit, though- I did not know that government officials– in this case, the Department of Defense– use Gmail for their government correspondence. Holy cow! Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has been a consistent advocate of increasing [...]

This is eyebrow-raising. Microsoft denies it built ‘backdoor’ in Windows 7 Don’t worry, company tells users; NSA involved only in security compliance standards November 19, 2009 (Computerworld) Microsoft today denied that it has built a backdoor into Windows 7, a concern that surfaced yesterday after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official testified before Congress [...]

On the surface, this sounds like good news. Basically, it’s a bill that would create a national standard for protection of data, and would require notification of breaches of sensitive data. Data breaches, data sharing, and data theft has become FAR too common, and businesses and the government have treated it very lightly. So, I’m [...]

I happened across this news alert at the Volokh Conspiracy website. Yikes!! Federal Felony To Use Blogs, the Web, Etc. To Cause Substantial Emotional Distress Through “Severe, Repeated, and Hostile” Speech? That’s what a House of Representatives bill, proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others, would do. Here’s the relevant text: Whoever transmits [...]

The coming conversion of television reception from analog airwaves to digital is bringing much more than a switch from one converter box to another. This is going to really shake things up, quite a bit. I remain skeptical (as I usually do with anything the government puts its hand into). This could be good, could [...]