It looks like my home state of Indiana on target when it comes to protecting its citizens from e-crime. As this press release reveals, there are two (actually, three, the third deals with credit history and insurance eligibility) interesting new public laws that have recently been enacted.

The first expands the definition of identifying information and facilitates easier recovery from theft scenarios. Of course, all librarians should have a vested interest in protecting vulnerable patrons from identity theft, so this can be viewed as a positive development.

I was more intrigued by the second law, which requires spammers to identify their unsolicited emails with a code in the subject line, as in {ADV} or for adult-oriented mail {ADV:ADLT}. Failure to comply will result in fines under the state’s deceptive consumer sales laws, which carry penalties of up to $500 per offense. I love this concept and wonder if it’s truly enforcable. I’m no expert on law, particularly e-law, but it seems to me that a single state enacting this kind of legislation will have virtually no effect as most traffic is likely to be interstate. Am I wrong? Seems like it’s time for Congress to catch the wave, no?

Courtesy of BeSpacific.

Update: According to this Slashdot post, Michigan is following suit submitting similar anti-spamming legislation with even harsher penalties.

Anyone happen to catch the news report on ABC tonight about libraries and their response to the PATRIOT ACT? It was nicely supportive of the library position with clips of the gag order workarounds and some quality soundbites from Bernie Sanders. Pretty good stuff.

The latest issue of Network News, a online publication of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine - South Central Region, features a very brief article about blogs in its Technology Notes section. I’m not pointing to the article because you stand to learn anything from it, but because they used a screen shot of, you guessed it, Open Stacks as their exemplar.

In recent weeks, some people have been wondering what became of Erica’s Librarian Avengers site. Fear not, she was simply lackadaisical about updating her registry, so she has a new domain (and a new look): www.librarianavengers.org

Following up on some earlier commentary, Darci Chapman reports that the Passaic system is delaying its vote on privatization. Let’s hear it for inertia!

Ed Felten has a reasonable suggestion to help libraries deal with accommodating the CIPA decision: open-source censorware. Hopefully, this idea creeps into the development community…and I mean soon!

Since Amazon never got around to providing syndication for new product info, Lockergnome did it for them. There’s more than 160 new feeds covering almost all of Amazon’s product categories. Now I too can keep up to date on the latest in baby travel systems.

And Tasha says BBC News is doing it too.

As an update to an earlier post, I report with displeasure that due to the predictable budget cuts, the MLK, Jr. Middle School blogging experiment is no more. Best wishes to the project’s originator, Pat Delaney at his new cross-town gig. One library’s trash will undoubtedly prove to be another’s treasure.

Via The Shifted Librarian

I was looking at my referral logs and saw a number of hits from Netbib, a premier German blog. Following the clues, I discovered a very gracious mention of Open Stacks. I love the idea of an international readership, so those arriving here through Netbib: “Willkommen. Dank zum Besuchen meines blog.” Ist das richtig?

Update: Check the comments for authorized German (Thanks, Daniel!).