Monthly Archives: October 2003

Disregarding Bad Laws

This entry was posted in Law on by

Glenn Reynolds argues that there are too many laws on the books:

There are too many laws � many of them contradictory or obscure � for any person to actually avoid breaking the law completely.

and that breaking some of them may not be a bad thing:

And given that many laws are dumb, actually following all of them would probably bring society to a standstill,
….
Sometimes � not often, but sometimes � the best way to get a law changed is for people to ignore it. As, I suspect, they ignored the one about oral sex in Georgia.. . .

Which leads me to wonder 1) why there are not madatory sunset laws at all legislative and regulatory levels and 2) when we are going to start electing folks based on the laws they will eliminate instead of the special interests that they will bolster.
Via Talkleft.

Information Rights Management

This entry was posted in Information on by

The supporters of the Patriot Act who argue that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear will love this new bug feature that is part of Microsoft’s Office 2003, Information Rights Management or IRM:

Information Rights Management (IRM) in Microsoft Office 2003 gives organizations and information workers another mechanism to help control their own information. IRM is a persistent file-level protection technology from Microsoft that allows information workers to specify who can access and use documents or e-mail messages, and helps protect that digital intellectual property from unauthorized printing, forwarding or copying.

Mac users may not be so happy:

Because the technology is exclusive to Office 2003, it does mean that not only can protected files not be read in Mac versions of Office, they will also be inaccessile to users of older Windows versions, including Office XP. To solve this Microsoft has released a plug-in for Internet Explorer 6 that utilises a built-in HTML version of the rights managed file, which the authoring application automatically creates.

This will likely be a problem for other folks who have not submitted to microsoft. For instance, do you use open source products like Linux, Firebird, Mozilla or other non MS browsers or email programs. You may soon find yourself unable to read certain emails, web pages or documents that have been created in the Office 2003 environment.
I expect you will be reading a lot more about IRM and its implications.