I am sorry, but I have a hard time taking serious the bill proposal from Californian congressman Howard Berman that would give the entertainment industry the right to hack computers and networks to stop people from downloading music and movies off the Internet. What has he been smoking?

Before the ridiculous no-linking cases in European courts, I would have said it couldn't have happened anywhere else than America.

Wired News has an interesting article that highlights the "dark side" of the hacking bill. The way the bill is written it could allow for interpreations that would allow any joe-hacker to use the bill to justify his hacking.

Dave Winer has also written an article about the bill that goes into some other parts of it, and also suggests what american voters should do with representatives such as Howard Berman:

Politicians who are openly corrupt must pay the ultimate penalty, lose their jobs, so no government leader ever again dares go against the interests of his or her constituency, as these representatitves have.

Robin Debreuil has started an interesting discussion of the Flash Comm Server and Bandwidth Costs. Its about the not so cool part of adding cool new broadband services to a web site. (Bandwidth cost).

[Via John Dowdell]

New tutorial from Macromedia: Using the Google web service in Macromedia Flash MX. A nice tutorial of how you can implement Google search with Flash MX and ColdFusion MX.

There are several things that bug me though. First, why is it that Macromedia is only able to provide the tutorial as a PDF file? I can't see any good reason why the tutorial couldn't have been delivered online by HTML with the PDF download optional. And, why is it that the files are distributed as "windows source files", I get that the Dreamweaver MX for Mac does not support web services (I purposely did not use the word understand, because I don't understand why Macromedia aren't supporting web services in Dreamweaver MX for Mac) but the files should be usable even on Mac, and should even be deployable directly on your machine if you have OSX and have taken the time to fix your own installation of ColdFusion MX (again I am amazed that Macromedia has failed to deliver a OSX distribution of ColdFusion MX).

Its weird really, this new tutorial from Macromedia for hooking into web services with ColdFusion MX and Flash MX showcases Macromedia's understanding and lack of understanding of the web all at the same time.

[Via Mike Chambers]

Behind the typeface: Cooper Black is a cool presentation based on VH1's Behind The Music concept. Its made by Cheshire Dave and was a made as a "birthday present" for his site Mastication is normal. I think its a well made and funny presentation, and hope that Chesh will follow up with other presentations of other typefaces.

[Via Chris MacGregor]