Category: News

More Junk Faxes on the Way?

Senator Gordon H Smith (R-OR) has introduced a bill to the US Senate that proposed to amend section 227 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 227), which currently prohibits unsolicited junk faxes.

The Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005 (S.714) proposed by the Senator is for the most part similar to the existing laws against junk faxes, but makes one important change.

The new bill will amend the existing law to allow exceptions to be made for unsolicited advertisements “from a sender with an established business relationship with the recipient”. As other laws designed to prevent spam emails or junk faxes in the past have shown, the vague definition of an “established business relationship” allows far too many exceptions to be useful.

One potential clue as to why this bill’s been proposed: 527 groups will be exempt under the amendment in the same way that unsolicited political group emails are exempt under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

BBC Announces New Doctor Who Actor

David TennantThe BBC has announced the new star for the next season of Doctor Who. The role of the 10th Doctor will be played by David Tennant, a long time fan of the science fiction series.

Tennant has received much praise for his part in the three-part BBC3’sCasanova. The series was written by Russell T Davies who also serves as writer and executive producer on Doctor Who.

The star, who says he’s “delighted, excited and honoured” to have the role, will appear in a Christmas episode currently being filmed this summer and then in his first thirteen episode run next year. He’ll also be seen in as Barty Crouch Jr. in the November release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

“I grew up loving Doctor Who and it has been a lifelong dream to get my very own Tardis,” says Tennant, giving hope to the fans for a long run with the actor after it was announced that Christopher Eccleston would be leaving after his single year in the role.

$2 Bills Lead to False Arrest

The Baltimore Sun has a story up about Mike Bolesta, a Baltimore County resident, who went to Best Buy to have a new radio installed in his son’s car and ended up in jail because of $2 bills.

According to the story, Bolesta purchased a radio that Best Buy’s installation team could not fit into the car due to its size, so the store offered to install another, cheaper radio for free. However, despite the store telling him that there would be no charge for the installation, the next day Bolesta received a telephone call at home demanding that he come in and pay the installation fee, the store would call the local police.

Obviously, Mike Bolesta got a little upset over this and decided that he would pay the $114 fee in rare $2 bills he gets from the local bank through his company which puts together nationwide tours for students to east coast cities. But when Bolesta showed up at Best Buy, the staff was convinced that he was attempting to defraud them with fake bills.

The police were called and the bills were marked with a special anti-forgery pen, which was never designed for the old and rare $2 bills, causing the ink to smear. Because of this, Bolesta was arrested and walked out in front of store customers in handcuffs and leg irons.

Eventually a Secret Service agent, responsible for investigating forged money claims, arrived and declared the bills legitimate $2 bills after a brief period of examination. Mike Bolesta was quickly let go, much to the embarrassment of both the Baltimore County police and Best Buy.

San Francisco’s Proposed Blog Law

The Personal Democracy Forum is reporting that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be voting on a local law that requires “local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.”

The author of the piece claims that the city ordinance will require all online pages “that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits.”

However, not everyone agrees that this vote is as anti-blogger as it first sounds. Chris Nolan believes that while the law is poorly written, the core idea is sound that bloggers who receive money from a local candidate to write about them on their site should be compelled to openly disclose those payments to the local election board, and that they should be treated like any other commercial outlet receiving money to promote a candidate, rather than simply free press.

From reading these sites, it certainly appears to be a nasty little mess brought on by recent elections in which blogs and other online forums played a key role in the results. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially since national politics made good use of similar blogs in the last presidential election and how little regulation there is separating the honest protection of freedom of speech from paid-for online political mouthpieces.