Recently, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent out a letter to participants of the X Prize, a sponsored, private-sector contest to create a reusable space vehicle.

The letter stated that if participants actively or passively sense the Earth’s surface, including the use of electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected or diffracted, then they need to apply for a license. The application process could take up to 120 days.

At first blush, this seemed like a wildly insane notion, worthy of a rant. Indeed, there have been such rants, which is why the law blog Res Communis has shed some light on this notion. The blog, run by the University of Mississippi School of Law, and deals with space law. Apparently, they received a ton of hits on this story, and they wanted to explain why NOAA sent the letter and why it is consistent with international policy.

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FCC Prepares to Punish Comcast
A majority of members of the Federal Communications Commission have cast votes in favor of punishing Comcast Corp. for blocking subscribers’ Internet traffic, an agency official said Friday.

ISP Ad Networking Scheme May Violate Wiretap Laws
The Center for Democracy & Technology has advanced a legal theory that the practice of ISPs sharing records of individual website visits may constitute illegal wiretapping.

Last Week Google Wanted to Be Second Life, This Week They’re Wikipedia
This creates a substantial new conflict of interest between Google and Wikipedia, which currently receives extremely high search authority in Google searches.

Permanent Injunction Against COPA Enforcement Upheld
This is the third time the Third Circuit has held that COPA violates the First Amendment, after nearly ten years of litigation over the law’s constitutionality. As with those previous decisions, the DOJ is expected to seek review by the Supreme Court.

Taco Bell Accused of Stealing Rapper 50 Cent’s Endorsement
In a public relations letter, the chain, owned by Yum! Brands, encourages the rapper to change his name to “79 Cent,” “89 Cent” or “99 Cent” to match their promotion. Instead the rapper slapped a lawsuit on the punk chain for leveraging his name to get their taco sale visibility.

This week I participated in a the wrap-up panel discussion at Boston stop of the Online Marketing Summit. My co-panelists were Blake Coyle, a sales exec from Google, Paul Hyland, Executive Producer, edweek.org, and Theresa Regli, Principal, CMS Watch.

As usual, I’m injecting personal observations along with what happened. If you were there too, please join in. My soapbox is your soapbox.

Why the Final Panel Discussion Is Cool
There are a few things that make the final discussion at the OMS conference unusual. Anyone who asks a question is rewarded with an early drink from the conference’s reception. This helps keep things lively. Also, it’s when participants can ask practitioners how they bring the day’s ideas together, and which ideas they in fact ignore or disagree with in practice. Last year, Mike Angiletta had comments about the need for online brand protection, which were seminal. I was interested in what would emerge, and was honored to get to kick in some thoughts.

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Raising concerns about student privacy, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that legislation renewing the Higher Education Act contains language that may bring video surveillance or biometric testing into the homes of students participating in distance learning.

The paragraph is actually about clamping down on cheating. It says that an institution that offers an online program must prove that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work.

Already, the language is spurring some colleges to try technologies that authenticate online test-takers by reading their fingerprints, watching them via Web cameras, or recording their keystrokes.

Slippery Slope?
How do professors know that students handing in assignments or tests in person are who they say they are? It’s only a small step to require biometric recognition for all students handing in materials. Think how much better our ability to track people with video would be if there were databases containing reference shots of people from college onward.

This issue needs a reality check from the public. Are you comfortable with the requirement to identify students as they do academic work outside the classroom? Would you be willing to contact your Congressional rep to express concern?

Tip of the hat to Brandon Lovested, who pointed this out by email.

We’ve previously discussed Barak Obama’s comprehensive, and somewhat idealistic, technology plan for the federal government. He proposes establishing a CIO, and I discussed what we have learned from introducing this role at the state level. He’s idealistic, and perhaps naive.

But John McCain’s still-emerging approach seems to be based on near-complete disregard. There, I’ve said said it, now please read on and let me know if you see this differently.

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The Sanfrancisco Chronicle reports that after a secret visit by the mayor of San Francisco, the network administrator who locked the cities technology staff out of the network surrendered his password.
See earlier coverage of this story.

Terry Child’s defense attorney, Erin Crane, claimed that Mr. Childs was merely protecting the network from incompetent staff, and there was no clear policy who he was authorized to release the systems master password to in such a situation.

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Slydial is a free voice message service that directly connects you to someone else’s mobile voicemail. Their phone never rings, and you get to leave a message without actually speaking with them. (Wait for the legal angle; it’s coming.)

Their wonderfully written weasely website spells it right out. There are people you must phone: bosses, significant others, or your aunt for example. And while you might not want to talk to them at the moment, you still want the credit of calling. Now you can Slydial them.

Yep, it’s still in beta and already the product name is a verb.

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Do You Own What You Buy?
Increasingly, it seems that we no longer own our own stuff.

Is Your Website Yours?
Are we getting used to governments seeking to regulate websites? If I own or rent a server, and pay to connect it to a private network so that other users can access my private machine from their private machines, what is the state’s interest in the distribution of lawful data on such a medium? The regulation of Internet content is a hot topic around the world.

I understand that my real estate needs to be zoned for public good, but must we how we track visitors on private machines be a matter of policy too?

Is Your Computer Yours?
How about the operating system of your computer?  Is that yours? Not if it’s Microsoft Vista,  which you’re only licensed to use. What good is owning a computer if you don’t really own the OS? Is Mac any better?  Not if you put it on a machine Apple didn’t make.

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James Boyd White is a distinguished professor of Law and English at the University of Michigan. In the spirit of Erazim Kohak, his recent talk on Law, Economics and Torture admonishes us against reducing life, democracy or law to mere economics, and to resist this trend when it is presented as inevitable.

Long ago I had the pleasure of taking many courses taught by Erazim Kohak.  He wrote poetically on the need to appreciate the phenomena of nature and life without reducing it to measurable scientific factors. His Embers and the Stars is among the richest, most eloquent, original, and challenging works of philosophy to appear in recent years. Its a gift, which is very much in the spirit of Professor White’s talk.

Last week, the whistle-blower site Wikileaks published a confidential 2006 contract in which Venezuelan and Cuban firms agreed to lay an undersea fiberoptic cable connecting the countries. The cable is to be completed by 2010.

Among the agreement’s stated objectives is to build a relationship of “strategic value,” which will permit Cuba and Venezuela to increase interchange between the two governments. The proposed 1,500-kilometre cable will connect Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and Trinidad to the rest of the world via La Guaira, Venezuela.

The contract adds credence to the opinion that the US economic embargo against Cuba has forced the country to rely on slow and expensive satellite links for Internet connectivity. It is also a prime example of how oil-rich Venezuela is seeking to build its influence. So, instead of AT&T building a 120-kilometer cable from the US, Venezuela’s CVG Telecom (Corporacion Venezolana de Guyana) and ETC (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba) are making one ten times that length.