In a ruling that appears to me to call into question the common-carrier status of ISPs, Verizon has been ordered to reveal the identify of one of their customers who downloaded 600 songs in a day. They are not doing so immediately, pending appeal. The DMCA is a ridiculously over-reaching piece of legislation that accomplishes no public good.

There’s nothing like googling yourself and finding a page full of how you feel about reproduction at the moment. Or even how you felt about it a couple months ago. Not like I wasn’t signing up for exposure by agreeing to be the poster-boy, but it’s still a little unnerving. Also, for the record, despite the fact that the oral version is what got all the play, I was actually more recently involved in a trial of this.

The Chinese place near my work provides a wonderful Dim Sum magic decoder ring (in addition to their wonderful Dim Sum).

Now that we’re getting regularly crawled by Google, we’re getting a few more hits than we probably used to. A thing that I found surprising is that almost all of the Google-generated hits go to Saint Sarah.

Update: Ever since the weekend of the 403, we’ve largely dropped off Google’s map in searches for our patron saint, so I’m thinking maybe this sort of attempt to drive traffic by internal linkage isn’t helpful.

The first test case of the MPAA’s desire to keep you from watching content that you have legally purchased has ended, and the MPAA lost. Who knows if the precedent will be meaningful here in the Secure Homeland, where that sort of activity is tantamount to terrorism, but it’s pleasing to know there’s some justice somewhere.

In more best-of news, Yahoo UK has issued its Web picks of 2002. I haven’t gone over the entire list, but it looks really good. The inclusion of Rather Good (home of those those kittens and other bizarre stuff. Requires Flash, but (and keep in mind who’s telling you this) it’s well worth it. Also requires significant bandwidth and/or patience) bodes great good for the list as a whole.

“Scientists” (which actually seems to mean “a life coach”) have figured out a simple equation to answer that ages-old question: How happy am I? I got a 61. I kind of thought I was happier than that.

While we here at FP don’t so much do New Year’s resolutions, 2002 was a terribly interesting year, and I for one am looking forward to more of the same in ’03. Happiness and good health to all in the coming year.

Hot damn! Penn & Teller have a new series, called Bullshit! Premièring on Showtime 24 January.

The redirects for www.forcedperspective.org appear to be fully functional once again, thanks to the kind folks at junkie.tv.