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RAIN 11/06 C: Weekend Update
San Francisco Examiner 11/05/00
Quantifying the Internet
Bay Area archivists try to figure out how big the Net is and what's on it.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/2000/11/05/BU
SINESS8112.dtl
by Alan T. Saracevic
HOW BIG is the Internet? Well, it depends on whom you ask.
If you ask Hal Varian of UC-Berkeley, he'll tell you the Net consists of 2.5
billion documents, growing at a healthy clip of 7.3‚million pages a day.
Across the Bay, Net archivist Brewster Kahle simply points to the basement of
his Presidio of fice space. The whole Internet fits in there.
The different answers belie the complexity of the issue. Varian and Kahle are
just two of the in formation miners out there trying to get their heads …
and their hard drives … around the circum ference of the Net. It's an arcane
world inhabited by high-powered thinkers, throwing around cyber space jargon
like so many ""exa bytes,'' ""terabytes'' and ""crawl ers.''
Varian and Kahle represent two of the biggest hitters in the field, but their
approaches are vastly different. Varian does his work at UC-Berkeley, where
he presides as dean of the School of Information Management & Systems. His
goal is to quantify the Net.
The Daily Yomiuri 11/06/00
Prosecutors may copy juvenile crime papers
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/1106so02.htm
The Justice Ministry plans to allow district public prosecutors offices to
keep copies of documents relating to juveniles whom they have sent to family
courts, ministry officials said Sunday.
Under the Juvenile Law, all cases involving juveniles must be sent to family
courts. Therefore, investigation documents, evidence and other materials are
sent to the courts once investigations are completed.
However, this practice has been criticized because without the related
documents on hand it is difficult for public prosecutors offices to clarify
points as requested by the courts.
Portland Press Herald 11/05/00
Tribes' right to autonomy surfaces in legal battle
http://www.portland.com/news/state/001105penobscotside.shtml
by Roberta Scruggs
The 20-year-old Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement is now at the heart of a
legal battle between Maine's Indian tribes, the state and three paper
companies.
This disagreement, like those in the past, centers on where the settlement
draws the line between the state's jurisdiction and the tribes' inherent
power to govern themselves.
For example, the state has won the right to regulate or reject gaming on
tribal lands. But other rulings have said the tribes aren't subject to state
anti-discrimination laws and can give tribal members preference in hiring.
The latest dispute began over water-quality regulations. The towns and
companies that discharge wastewater into Maine's waters are now licensed by
both the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state. The state is
seeking sole authority, in an effort to streamline the process.
Sri Lanka Daily News 11/05/00
Dangers in e-commerce without proper legal framewrok
Can e-signatures, e-messages be admissible in courts?
http://www.lanka.net/lakehouse/2000/11/05/bus01.html
By Asiff Hussein
A leading legal expert recently sounded a word of caution against resorting
to electronic commerce in the absence of a proper legal framework covering
it.
K.Kanag-Iswaran (PC) said that apart from the practical problems encountered
in dealing in electronically processed transactions such as fraud relating to
bills of lading transmitted this way and the recovery of insurance claims,
there were also a number of legal issues that could arise from the use of
electronic data interchanges (EDI) instead of paper.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 11/05/00
Clinton letters missing from UALR archives
http://www.ardemgaz.com/week/Sun/ark/A_23xualr5.html
by Andrea Harter
It was a small file, B-43, a collection of a half-dozen or so papers, letters
to voters from a young upstart seeking a seat in Congress or a role as
Arkansas' attorney general.
The file's still there, but Bill Clinton's letters are gone from the
University of Arkansas at Little Rock's library archives.
"I don't have any idea what could have happened to it," Linda Pine, head of
special collections, said last week. She said the contents could have been
misfiled or stolen, and she was visibly worried that the file folder still
existed but was empty.
Electronic Telegraph 11/05/00
Cardigan warned that Charge of the Light Brigade was folly
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000140326706927&rtmo=gjkVSZ7u&atmo=gjkVSZ7u&p
g=/et/00/11/5/nbrg05.html
by Catherine Milner
A LETTER describing the Charge of the Light Brigade, written by Lord Cardigan
who led the disastrous attack, has been unearthed from the archive of his
rival, Lord Lucan.
The letter, which has never been published, was written to Lucan - the
general commanding the cavalry division - two days after the charge on
October 25, 1854. It describes Cardigan's misgivings at being told to charge
against the Russian gunners - a move which left 247 men dead or wounded in
the "Valley of Death" at Balaclava during the Crimean War.
The News Journal 11/05/00
Justice records remain cloaked
Privacy ruling restricts access
http://www.delawareonline.com/news/2000/nov/05justice.html
by Mary Allen
For more than a decade, Delaware officials have been putting everything they
know about the state's criminal justice system into electronic data banks.
Researchers tapping that information could find which judges give the
toughest punishments, whether any police departments arrest more minorities
than others, or how successful the state is in prosecuting drug crimes.
But Delaware has yet to decide how much of the Criminal Justice Information
System should be available to the public -- and the state Supreme Court
recently heard debate on the issue.
Some newspaper and government officials said such debates will continue as
the digital age makes it possible to study vast amounts of information that
once would have taken months or years to collect.
Washington Post 11/05/00
Thieves take more than laptops
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9633-2000Nov3.html
By Arthur Santana
The notes were not on paper. They were in the guts of Leon Herndon's laptop,
on a disk. The keynote speaker of a medical conference was hoping to use
Herndon's machine to project the disk data on a screen, but with only minutes
to speech time, the laptop was . . . where? Not at the podium, where Herndon
had left it while he made a phone call.
Swiftly came his dawn of realization: A nimble thief was at work in the
Washington Convention Center, pilfering not merely an expensive computer,
which could be replaced easily, but data that couldn't be. Along with the
speaker's conference notes had vanished a list of Herndon's patients back
home in North Carolina and their medical histories.
"There was a huge sense of loss," Herndon said of that day this summer,
adding that the keynote address was delayed two hours as the speaker
scrambled to replace his lost bytes.
Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
pakurilecz@aol.com
Richmond, Virginia
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