The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group, has filed a lengthy antitrust complaint against Microsoft with European authorities. The complaint centers on allegedly anticompetitive aspects of Windows XP. Here is an AP story; here is CCIA’s summary of the complaint.

According to CCIA, they are accusing Microsoft of:

Bundling multiple Microsoft products with the Windows [XP] operating system;
Biasing the user interface and operation of Windows XP and the products bundled with Windows to advantage Microsoft’s own software and services;
Imposing Microsoft proprietary technologies, protocols, and formats;
Employing abusive licensing and other exclusionary practices vis-a-vis PC OEMs to foreclose the PC OEM distribution channel to competing products; and
Refusing to disclose the document formats for the programs in Microsoft’s Office suite of personal productivity applications.

Brian McWilliams, who perpetrated the terrorist website hoax I wrote about yesterday, has now posted his response, including a quasi-apology.

[Link credit: Politech]

This one leaves me speechless.

According to a fascinating story over at ComputerWorld, tech journalist Brian McWilliams has admitted to running a hoax website that claimed to be the site of a scary real-world terrorist group. He even arranged to have the fake site “defaced” by (fictitious) anti-terrorist hackers, and he created a hoax message in which the group claimed “credit” for the recent Slammer/Sapphire worm attack. McWilliams claims to have gotten several emails from people wanting to join the terrorist group, and to have passed some of them on to the FBI.

[Link credit: Declan McCullagh’s Politech.]

If you’re interested in technology regulation, don’t miss Derek Slater’s interview with MPAA chief Jack Valenti, in Harvard Political Review. Slater asks only four questions about copyright and technology, but in answering those four short questions Valenti manages to display amazing ignorance of both copyright law and technology.

Don’t believe me? Here is Valenti on copyright law:

What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There’s nothing in law.

(Somebody should tell him about this law.) Now on technology:

In the digital world, we don’t need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out.

(Somebody should tell him that it is standard practice to back up all digital data.)

Nobody expects a lobbyist to be up on the esoteric details of law or technology. But is it too much to ask that he have at least a rudimentary understanding of the law he wants to change, and of the field he wants to regulate? Why do our representatives listen to this guy?

[Thanks to Copyfight and Ernie the Attorney for links.]