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.]

The February issue of Wired has an interesting feature on Sony’s struggle to figure out its position on technology, media, and copyright. As a consumer electronics maker, Sony wants to make products that give people flexible use of their recorded music and video. As a content provider, Sony wants to enforce limits on that flexibility.

For a while, the result was paralysis. The Wired story begins with a Sony executive looking wistfully at an Apple iPod, and wishing Sony had had the guts to create such a product. Sony’s consumer electronics business drifted, unable to create breakthrough products that provided the flexibility that users crave.

Now under new leadership, Sony is trying to find a middle path. Unfortunately, the new strategy seems to work only for customers who have all-Sony setups. One Sony device will talk to another, but it’s not clear how a customer could mix in other manufacturers’ products into a Sony setup. Open and flexible components are still too scary to allow.

The result is just another way of failing to serve customers. Instead of trying to make each product as useful to the customer as possible, Sony is still trying to corral and control their customers’ activities. They still talk about finding the “balance point” between customer-friendly design and content protection. Despite the hopeful ending of the Wired piece, the civil war inside Sony isn’t over yet.

Once again, somebody has attacked the RIAA’s web site, knocking it out this time for three days. The bozos who did this probably think it’s a clever way to retaliate against the RIAA. Instead, they’re just reinforcing the caricature of the RIAA’s opponents as amoral punks. There are plenty of constructive ways to contribute to the public debate; vandalism is not one of them.