A random collection of thoughts ... well, OK, of links

[unixronin]

• Via Slashdot, it appears ICANN is putting the smack down on GoDaddy for at least some of their unethical business practices.

• C|Net reports that a recent court case could weaken common-carrier protections, which could leave Web forum operators and even ISPs at risk of being sued for illegal or defamatory content posted by their users.

  "We fear these cases might inspire a wave of new lawsuits that, even if ultimately dismissed, will create a chilling effect," said Sophia Cope, an attorney for the Center for Democracy and Technology, which has filed briefs supporting broad immunity and gets some financial support from a number of prominent Internet companies.  "Many small start-up Web services might find that the costs of defending such suits--in terms of time and legal fees--are too much to bear."

  And so it could.  Don't like a website, or disagree with what it's saying?  Perhaps it points out inconvenient flaws in creationism, or airs some of your company's dirty laundry?  No problem; just post something defamatory there via a sockpuppet, then sue the site out of existence.

• Adi Shamir commented at the RSA security conference that progress has been made in defeating SHA1.  Current attacks now have a complexity of 2^60, which, with current commodity hardware, is within reach of a distributed brute-force crack.  Also mentioned at the conference:  Intel announced future Intel CPUs (from 2009 on) will support AES in hardware.  Four new instructions will be added to access the new AES hardware.

• Ars Technica reports the existence of a worldwide "whisper campaign" by Big Content companies seeking "to chill the willingness of countries to enact fair use or liberal fair dealing provisions designed to genuinely further innovation and creativity, rather than, as is currently the case, merely to give lip service to those concepts as the scope of copyright is expanded to were-rabbit size."

Well, there's a few linky bits, anyway.  I had a number of actual thoughts I intended to put here.  But they all seem to have escaped me amid the bustle of getting kids off to school.