The US District Court of Southern California recently issued a permanent injunction shutting down Qchex, an online bank check creation service. The idea behind Qchex was that account holders could use Qchex to create and draw checks on any bank account.to third parties for licensing, sale or merger”: possibly to pay off the $535,000 disgorgement of profits that are also part of the court’s ruling.

However, the Qchex system, which included a step to check whether or not the Qchex account holder and the actual bank account holder were the same person, was woefully inadequate. While Qchex would shut down individual accounts and ban IP addresses for “unusual behavior”, it had no true verification procedure in place to establish authority over an account.

As a result, the service was used for widespread fraud.  Users illegally drew checks from third parties, where the checks would initially clear, but later bounce, leaving people’s bank accounts frozen for investigation while they escaped with the goods. There were also cases over overcharging scams.  These involved writing a Qchex check for more than the payment required, coupled with a request to transfer back the extra money. The scammer would pocket the cash sent after the inital check cleared, and vanish before it fully bounced.

Currently, The Qchex site is shut down for “restructuring” as they intend to continue the legal fight.  In the meantime, they are offering their technology “

In Lake v. Phoenix, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the metadata of public documents need not be released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The plaintiff had filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Act claim stemming from his job as a police officer, and requested copies of his evaluations from his superiors. After he recieved the records, he suspected they were newly made and backdated in response to his requests. He made a new request for the creation and access dates and times for the files. The state rejected his demand by saying that they were not part of the public record. The majority ruled that under any of Arizona’s definitions of public records, Metadata wasn’t included. A paper printout of a digital record would suffice to meet the demand.

President Barack Obama is notorious for being attached to his Blackberry. However, the device is not secure, and rumor had it that the device would be forbidden for security reasons after the inauguration. Currently, Obama possesses a Sectera Edge,a $3000 secure smart phone built to NSA standards, for secure messages, and retains his Blackberry for personal use.

For example, using publically available service in the US presents little problems, but what about, say, a state visit to China or Russia? In a foreign country, the services are accountable to that state- including its requests for access and information. It’s possible that the next wave of espionage might be trying to read the communications of the president at the service level- intercepting the transmission as it passes through the local infrastructure, instead of trying to crack the device.

A CNet Articlesuggests that aside from a digital security risk, there exists a personal security risk as well. Each Blackberry broadcasts an unique IMEI serial number, similar to the MAC Address of a computer- a unique code per phone. If the President’s IMEI number is determined and located, then people could track this number- and with it, the President’s location. If an unmarked car in a motorcade is carrying the President for security reasons, the jig may be up through the use of some wireless software and a big reciever dish.

Still, it was apparently equivalent of pulling teeth to try and reach the current level of compromise between security and the President’s digital access. As time goes on, future presidents and government officials will only be growing more and more tech-savvy. Figuring out how to maintian security for people of such massive political importance is critical.

Consumer International has launched a2knetwork.org.  The network

seeks to harness the collective voice and effectiveness of consumer
groups working around the world and across issue sectors, to guarantee
that consumer interests are adequately represented in national and
global Intellectual Property (IP) debates having to do with educational
materials, software, film, and music, and thereby to serve as a
catalyst for policy change, by putting pressure on governments and
international organisations to develop more balanced IP regimes.

The class action against Microsoft over their “Vista Ready” certifications issued during 2006 holiday season recently took another turn.  Keith Leffler, Plaintiff’s economic expert, valued the claims at over eight billion dollars. The case’s premise is that Microsoft stoked demand for PCs that could support their new operating system, causing people to pay a premium for machines that could, in actuality, not even use the majority of the new OS’s features, such as the Aero interface featured prominently in ad campaigns. Keffler’s math was based on an estimate of over 19 million of these bare-minimum PCs shown multiplied by the cost per machine to upgrade the machine to use all of Vista’s features- from $155 for a desktop to almost $600 for notebooks and laptops. Microsoft has already made a counter-filing.

It’s worth noting that the judge on this case is one of the more tech-savvy US District Judges, Marsha Pechman. Most notably she ran the trial of Robert Soloway, the “spam king”, and sentenced him to 47 months in prison.

Google has now released a new set of free tools, developed in sync with academics and other research organizations, for measuring the connectivity of different types of data through your internet connect. Most notably, the tools will be able to detect if your ISP filters or rate limits certain traffic- like the ports that file distribution protocol BitTorrent uses, for example. The collection of tools is simply called Measurement Lab, or M-Lab for short.

The key thing for future developments is that Google has made much of the protocols freely available. A number of uses can be imagined, such as examining whether or not certain political sites are being censored or whether users have access to pirated material. 

Given that President Obama has supported Net Neutrality on the campaign trail, and that Julius Genachowski, his probable FCC head, is a Net Neutrality advocate, this may be a savvy move by Google. If filtering practices are limited by law, giving the common user the ability to detect “stealth” filtering makes such bandwidth limiting all but impossible for US-based ISPs.

Additional Links

The official Google announcement from their Public Policy blog.

This past October, Judge Thomas Wingate of the Kentucky Circuit Court, in an attempt to ensure compliance with a new state statute, ordered the seizure of 141 domain names of internet gambling sites that allowed citizens of Kentucky to access the site. The move was made by defining the domain names as “gambling devices” of a type forbidden by Kentucky. The majority of the servers the sites ran on, as well as the controlling corporations, were nowhere near Kentucky. In many cases, they even existed outside of the United states. However, registrars were ready to comply with the court order as the first domain names were turned over. The question became whether or not Kentucky had the power to reach out and project its state law into the internet with such force.

After a motion for appeal and a stay granted in December, Kentucky’s Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, overturned the circuit court’s opinion, granting a writ of prohibition to the defendants for the previous court order. The decision declared that the lower court had overstepped its bounds by including “a series of numbers, or internet address” as a gambling device, on the basis that it was soley the province of the legislature to explicitly include domain names in the gambling statute. A seperate concurrence also questioned the procedural ability of the lower court to order the seizure without the previous assessment of criminal charges for the possession of a gambling device. The dissenting judge took the view that the remote server, the internet connection (including the address and the data communicated) and the local computer, are unified in one device when functioning to facilitate the gambling.

For now, the domain names are going back into their original owners’ hands. Kentucky has already filed for appeal.

Additional Links

Judge Wingate’s original decision on the seizure.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals decision.