Day: February 20, 2003

Has anybody else noticed that the click-through “Day Pass” ad for has been from Salon Personals for, well, a while?
This can’t be generating business-model-redeeming revenues.
Once I realized how quickly you could click through those ads (about five to ten seconds total time) without actually reading them, I went back to browsing Salon regularly. Unfortunately, I think advertisers have figured this out too.
PS – An alternative explanation is that Salon is pimping their personals hard because they think that is how they’re going to generate some cash. This is not mutually exlusive with the “nobody else wants to buy the Day Pass ad” theory, of course: both could be true.

Speaking of privacy, Eugene Volokh just in an aside that he’s now a member of the “Privacy Committee of the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board”:
MICROSOFT PRIVACY COMMITTEE: I’ve just joined — together with a bunch of leading privacy law people — the Privacy Committee of the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, and our first meeting is today and tomorrow. I’m off to Seattle this afternoon, and won’t be blogging much today or tomorrow. My cobloggers, however, will still be posting.
Most interesting! Keep ’em honest, Eugene…

First posted 2/17/03
LawMeme has a scoop on how eBay makes life easy for law enforcement. Maybe bit too easy:
Without a subpoena, eBay will provide the following information regarding an eBay user to law enforcement:
Full Name, User ID, Email Address, Street Address, State, City, Zip Code, Phone Number, Country, Company, Password, Secondary Phone, Gender, Personal or Business, Shipping information (Name, Street Address, City, State, Zip)
In addition eBay will provide the following transaction information:
Bidding History on an Item, Other Items for Sale, Feedback about a user, Bidding history of a user, Prices paid for items, Feedback rating, and Chat Room/Bulletin Board (!).
Read the whole thing: I sense a you-heard-it-on-the-blogs-first level story here: expect Slashdotting momentarily (if it hasn’t happened already), soon to be followed by News.com notice, and eventual movement to the front page of Google News.
Update 2/18 9am PST Story hits Top-50 on Blogdex
Update 2/20 11am PST Bing! We have Slashdottage. With a Big Media link to Haaretz, of all places.

For the war skeptics among TTLB’s readership (you know who you are), here’s an interesting new site combining the powers of some of the Blogosphere’s most vocal anti-war voices. From the e-mail announcement of :
Starting immediately, readers of Back to Iraq, Warblogging, Daily Kos, Agonist and Stand Down: No War Blog will no longer be forced to skip from site to site for news on the war on Iraq, terrorism and civil liberties. I