Scott Loftesness

In the amorphous war on terrorism, government officials believe they have a new weapon: the growing number of financial institutions that use powerful technology to monitor confidential customer activity and report suspicious behavior to law enforcement and intelligence officials.

Driven by little-known provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terror legislation that was approved after Sept. 11, banks, securities firms and other companies are deploying computer systems that draw together millions of transactions, sometimes automatically, in searches for money laundering, terrorist financing or other unusual patterns.

The Liberty Alliance has provided information on its new Associate and Affiliate membership levels.

GeoButton does a quick lookup based upon the IP address you’re using to attempt to identify your location, for example:

http://map.geoup.com/geoup?template=welcome

Esther Dyson writes about digital identity — how it’s a lot harder than money.

A lot of techies and marketers will be spending a lot of time and money to develop technology that manages identity. The winners in this game will be the ones who understand that people want to control their own information, without being confused by the tools that help them do it.

Aggie is an open source .NET-based news aggregator. It has an interesting usage for Radio Userland users:

If you are a Radio user you can use Aggie to read your news when you are away from your main computer. Radio publishes your list of news sites into a file called mySubscriptions.opml that is uploaded to your gems directory. Set the channel list to http://radio.weblogs.com/NNNNNN/gems/mySubscriptions.opml, where NNNNNNN is your Radio site number. Aggie will then use that same list of channels when it gathers the news.

This is cute! Quickly add a mini-message board to your website. I also like the way the wish list is maintained!

Speaking of to-do lists, here’s another way to maintain one (using OPML).

Want to know what to do with all those books you’ve got stacked up around the house? Try BookCrossing — “read and release”!

Here’s a Sunday story from the Wichita Eagle about BookCrossing. And another from Book magazine.

It works like this: Every book registered at BookCrossing.com receives a unique ID number and a registration card, which can be printed out and attached inside the front cover. The card briefly explains the BookCrossing.com mission and directs anyone who finds a book toward its dedicated online journal page. There, recipients can post where they came across the book and˜if they read it˜what they thought of it.

Household’s home town newspaper discusses criticism of the company as a predatory lender.

Fascinating juxtaposition…the owners of the Carmel Valley Airport want to close it and divide the acreage for housing. They can’t do it — at least not quickly. Caltrans requires a hearing prior to agreeing to the closure.

It’s sad when small airports close — and Carmel Valley is the smallest of the small. Yet, it’s also amazing how the State of California gets its hands on almost every decision of property owners. Somewhere there’s a better balance to be found!

Ron Cahill, a partner specializing in intellectual property law at Boston law firm Nutter McClennen & Fish LLP, writes about a recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co.

In seeking to balance fairness to inventors with clarity in patent scope, the Supreme Court in this case upheld a rule of law known as the doctrine of equivalents. This doctrine allows patent rights to extend beyond the exact claims defined in a patent to cover slightly modified devices that perform the same function in the same manner. The court recognized that reliance on a strict literal interpretation would greatly diminish the value of patent rights, thereby not fulfilling their constitutional purpose of promoting “the progress of science and useful arts.”

The IEEE, which has a resource page on the issues in the case, was pleased with the decision. The full text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is available online.