August 12, 2002 - Straight Talk on XP Activation - By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, Over the past year, the Microsoft Product Activation procedure, which seeks to police how many times an operating system can be installed, has triggered continual controversy and lots of misunderstanding. Looking back, I realize that very few facts are known about the activation policy. Also, Microsoft's Web site and rhetoric are vague on this topic. We really don't know how many times you can install Windows XP. We don't know whether it can be remotely disabled. We're left guessing as to whether a system can be radically reconfigured without breaking XP and what to do if the OS breaks. This column is an attempt to clear these issues up by soliciting users to experiment radically, if they haven't already...

August 22, 2002 - UK's DMCA: there ain't no sanity clause - The Register.com, By Andrew Orlowski in London, The UK's take on the "European DMCA" - the European Copyright Directive - will make criminals out of ordinary computer users, according to a new critique by the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. And it will also fail to protect researchers, says Julian Midgley who penned the report.

"As it stands, the UK implementation of the European Copyright Directive will hinder research into cryptography (in contravention of the express intent of the Directive itself), make criminal current common practices of the music industry, give software companies unwarranted control over the creation of software products interoperable with their own, and provide an inadequate and entirely impractical mechanism for beneficiaries of the Directive's exceptions to obtain access to copyrighted works protected by technological measures," the report concludes...