law

(Updated 08.20 PST with quotes from the accused's fiancee)

On Friday, I wrote about the killer who appeared to be using Craigslist to meet masseuses.

Police said they believe he is responsible for the murder of Julissa Brisman, at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston, as well as several other incidents at Boston hotels.

On Monday, police announced that they have arrested Philip H. Markoff, 22, in connection with the murder. He is a premed student at Boston University, a school spokesman confirmed to the Boston Herald.

Markoff has been charged with murder, unlawful possession of a firearm, … Read more

This is a public-service announcement: please be very careful what you do when the cable guy comes around.

I make this announcement because I have just learned from the redoubtable Livingston Daily (the Livingston in Michigan, not the Scottish one, where Susan Boyle had her singing lessons) that a man is to stand trial for revealing a little too much of himself to Comcast.

No, not in a social-networking sense, though I know that Comcast is extremely active in this area.

Instead, Chris Philip Trikes, 45, of Howell, Mich., allegedly exposed his central nether regions to a Comcast chappy who … Read more

I've spent much time this week thinking about Jack Sparrow, pirate of the Caribbean.

Channeling his inner Keith Richards, Sparrow is a good pirate. Ugly and drunk, but good.

The Swedish pirates from the Bay are supposed to be good pirates too. You know, the ones who, according to a local court, channel Richards, Mick Jagger, and a whole host of other musical acts in a not quite legal fashion.

But the whole concept of piracy is rather current and vexing. Think of those other fresh-faced pirates, the ones in Somalia. The ones who captured Indians, Filipinos, and Egyptians … Read more

For a short time, it seemed as if the Denton Police Department outside Dallas had been inspired by great communicators such as Ashton Kutcher and CNN.

A Twitter page, headlined "Denton Police," fed details of every arrest the department had performed, coupled with TwitPic mugshots.

This remarkable, real-time communication between the police and outside world surely was a futuristic forerunner to Texas' progression towards secession.

Until it was revealed to be the work of University of North Texas senior, Brian Baugh.… Read more

Boston police believe that the killer of a masseuse on Tuesday night at the Marriott Copley Place may have been involved in several other incidents and that he may have selected his victims on Craigslist.

In the latest incident Thursday night, a woman who advertised her as yet unstated services on Craigslist was bound and held at gunpoint at the Holiday Inn Express.

Her description of her attacker appears to match that of a "person of interest" in the murder of masseuse Julissa Brisman, who also advertised her massage services on Craigslist, at the Marriott Copley Place on … Read more

Is there an exalted life force breeding among the fine, uniformed officers of the U.K. police?

I ask only because the redoubtable sleuths of a publication called Jane's Police Review decided to perform a little analysis of the religious leanings of police officers.

Strangely, the United Kingdom actually has a Freedom of Information Act, which means that you can find interesting jewels of fact about public officials.

And so it has transpired that eight members of the Strathclyde police, Scotland's biggest force, are, spiritually, members of a slightly more exalted force: The Jedi Church.

Well, it's … Read more

The good folks at Cloudiquity.com pointed me to a couple of Threat Level articles from last week that highlight yet another example of how public policy and the law are often at odds with running a business in the cloud.

The articles report that the FBI raided at least two Texas data centers last week, serving search-and-seizure warrants for computing equipment, including servers, routers and storage. The FBI was seeking equipment that may have been involved in fraudulent business practices by a handful of small VoIP vendors.

The problem is that they didn't just grab the systems belonging to the VoIP vendors, but also hundreds of servers that served a wide variety of businesses, the vast majority of which had never dealt with or even heard of the companies under investigation, according to Threat Level. Companies interviewed complained of losing millions of dollars in lost revenue and equipment with no warning whatsoever.

One company, auto vendor marketing and inventory management vendor Liquid Motors, filed suit in a U.S. district court seeking a restraining order against the FBI that would force the return of the company's servers.

In what has to be one of the most scary verdicts for cloud users everywhere, the district court sided with the FBI and supported its probable-cause argument for holding on to the servers. Although the FBI was kind enough to copy the disk drives for Liquid Motors (on drives Liquid Motors had to provide), the precedent set here sends a shiver down my spine.

The issue, I think, is one of how search and seizure laws are being interpreted for assets hosted in third-party facilities. If the court upholds that servers can be seized despite no direct warrants being served on the owners of those servers (or the owners of the software and data housed on those servers), then imagine what that means for hosting your business in a cloud shared by thousands or millions of other users.

As I noted in a blog post last fall, there are a series of legal issues that really need to be addressed before external cloud services can truly be trusted. Here is what I argue must happen:… Read more

So here's the story as told by Carolyn Lorimer.

She buys herself a little apartment, or "flat" as they call it in Folkestone, England. Eight months ago, she decides to rent it out to nice people.

She hires a rental agency whose agents tell her they have succeeded in finding a sweet, respectable couple who would like to enjoy her apartment.

Things appear to be going swimmingly, until, one day, Ms. Lorimer is wandering around Facebook, as one does, and sees a picture of a party, with folks dancing on the tables and generally looking a little … Read more

As we await the 60-day federal cybersecurity review from Melissa Hathaway, acting senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils , there is something else that could be done. It seems to me that the federal government could take another related action to help protect the private information of U.S. citizens while reducing the cost of doing so. In my humble opinion, it is time to create a single federal data breach disclosure law. I believe this action would:

Simplify the maze of current state legislation. As of the end of December, 44 states, the District … Read more