WASHINGTON -- The staid folks at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been caught in a political flap after they linked to a -- gasp! -- site that advocates a "positive attitude towards sexuality."
That was enough to spur a conservative physicians group to complain to the CDC and some Republican politicos to tell The Washington Times that "this message conflicts with the message that millions of parents try to reinforce in their children each day."
CDC said it is reviewing the link and may remove it.
The site in question is Positive.org, which gives frank, straightforward advice about sex phrased in language that teens can understand. It's run by the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, a not-for-profit group.
The letter came from the Physicians Consortium, which joined with Focus on the Family's James Dobson last summer to complain that the CDC was giving advice about safe sex rather than only promoting abstinence from sex.
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Dot-evil: The U.S. government has refused to bless .god and .satan as top-level domains.
In a letter this week, the chief counsel for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said the feds will ignore an Internet entrepreneur's claim to .god and .satan.
Joe Baptista had written the Commerce Department, saying he wanted to lay claim to .god and .satan as possible future domain names to supplement .com, .org and .net. (Some new suffixes that have been approved include .biz, .info and .museum.)
"We want to make clear to Commerce and ICANN, your subcontractor, that it is forbidden to be carrying either .GOD or .SATAN in the legacy roots without our permission," Baptista said. "I expect you to address and comply with our demand in your reply correspondence."
NTIA's Kathy Smith wrote back with a remarkably polite brush-off. "With respect to your assertion of intellectual property rights in either a '.god' or '.satan' top-level domain, I direct your attention to Examination Guide No. 2-99, 'Marks Composed, in Whole or in Part, of Domain Names.'"
Translated: fat chance.
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FTC snoops: The agency responsible for protecting privacy is being forced to do exactly the opposite.
On Friday, the Federal Trade Commission sent e-mail to everyone who attended its "Get Noticed" privacy workshop last December, telling them their personal information was about to become public.
The message said that because an unnamed person had filed a Freedom of Information Act, "the commission is required to disclose to the requester the names and contact information of those who registered to attend in their professional capacity. This includes information you provided when registering for the workshop, such as your name, company, phone number, e-mail address, and if you provided it, your fax number."
We suspect that a surprising number of "John Does" will attend the next FTC privacy event.
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EU glitch: Across the Atlantic, the European Union's "Working Group on Data Protection" has a far more innovative way to reveal personal information.
On Friday, the EU's Eva Salger-Kuhn accidentally sent e-mail to everyone in the working group's database -- on one long "To:" line. This is, remember, the European bureaucracy charged with creating and enforcing safe data-use practices.
Salger-Kuhn's e-mail said: "We are in the process of updating our database. Therefore, we should like to ask you to provide us with your contact details, such as address, telephone number, telefax number, etc. Thank you very much in advance for your cooperation."
Representatives of Intel, Disney, Sabre and a passel of Washington law firms had their e-mail addresses exposed, according to a copy of the message obtained by Wired News.
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Anti-piracy encore: On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing titled "Is the Marketplace Working to Protect Digital Creative Works?" The committee says the witness list has not been finalized. This comes after members of the Senate Commerce Committee wondered last week if copy protection schemes should be mandatory in PCs and consumer devices.
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RIAA redux: The Recording Industry Association of America's communications director has decamped to spin reporters on behalf of Al Gore's political action committee. Replacing Jano Cabrera at the RIAA is Jonathan Lamy, a former aide to another Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
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Kiddy domains: A House subcommittee has endorsed the idea of a set of kid-safe domains. This week, the House Commerce's Internet subcommittee voted for a bill (PDF) to create a .kids.us, or similar domain, with material "suitable for minors and not harmful to minors." That's clear enough -- right?
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Microsoft in D.C.: Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie is speaking at a Center for Strategic and International Studiesevent on Monday. Think of it as part of Microsoft's cozying-up-to-D.C. strategy: It's no coincidence that a Redmond, Washington, security exec just decamped for the National Security Council, and John Hamre, the president of CSIS, is an ex-deputy defense secretary. Mundie will co-chair the group's "Working Group on Authentication and Identity."
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More Microsoft: The ex-Microsoft guy now at the NSC is Howard Schmidt, the company's former chief security officer. He's speaking at a Network World Fusion forum on Monday. Schmidt, incidentally, rose to public prominence when he testified in 1996 in support of the Communications Decency Act. Schmidt was working for the Air Force at the time, and showed the judges how easy it was to find naughty Web pages through search engines.
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While across town: Meanwhile, Microsoft's antitrust case isn't quite over; some state attorneys general have refused to settle. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was supposed to preside over a hearing next week in those proceedings, but has delayed the proceedings until March 18.
