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In dueling tradeshow keynotes this week, Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates laid out their competing visions for digital convergence. To Messaging and Collaboration editor Steve Gillmor, Apple now holds the lead position.

In back-to-back keynotes in San Francisco and Las Vegas, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates this week underlined the vanishing difference between consumer and enterprise markets. Convergence has been the password for at least the past two Comdex and CES events, and both Apple and Microsoft are rolling out products loosely based on the notion of a home information hub. Microsoft's chief software architect was uncharacteristically off-center on Wednesday here as he let Jay Leno and an MSN product manager entertain the theater-sized crowd at the Consumer Electronics Show keynote. He stumbled frequently as he winged it in a presentation revolving around "consumer" experiences in the home and on the move. Even the demos had a slap-dash feel to them.

However, don't mistake these surface messages for a lack of preparation. If anything, the technologies Microsoft is readying represent the culmination of years of planning, investment and R&D. But the results somehow fell flat—becoming only small flashes of brilliance buried in miles of cable and duct tape across Microsoft's splayed divisions. At MacWorld Expo San Francisco on Tuesday, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs made the best of a largely transitional set of announcements. The iPod Mini has some form-factor appeal, limited price incentive, and some momentum-building for Apple's cross-platform iTunes-iPod strategy. But the headline was Apple's move into the music creation space, via the company's new GarageBand sequencer and recorder add-in to its iLife software bundle.

News source: eWeek

Opponents of the law are asking the judge to strike down the law because it is "well-intentioned but technologically misguided." During three days of sometimes heated arguments in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology, the attorney general's procedure for identifying and blocking offending sites was attacked.

The attorney general's staff searched the Internet for child pornography and also set up a Web page that allowed Pennsylvania residents to report instances of child pornography.

The office then "sent about 500 informal notices to the ISPs through whose services the offending material had been accessed, asking the ISPs to disable their subscribers' access to the sites. The ISPs generally wrote in response that they had complied with the notice," the attorney general's office said in a brief.

After receiving notice, an ISP has five days to block users' access to the website. Failure to comply carries fines of up to $30,000 and jail terms of up to seven years.

But attorneys for the CDT argued that over 1 million websites that do not contain child pornography have also been blocked since the attorney general's office started sending out notices to ISPs in April 2002.

"It's not as simple as telling an ISP to stop people from accessing www.zzz.com. Each domain name can have several IP addresses attached to it and each upper level domain name can have hundreds of subdomains below it," said networking consultant Mike Sweeney. "It would equivalent of nuking a city block when all you needed was the flyswatter to kill the fly.

"The idea of Pennsylvania blocking sites was a misguided attempt of censorship by clueless public service officials," Sweeney added. "If they had taken the time to talk to knowledgeable technical people, all of this would have been explained at some level and the state of Pennsylvania would have been spared the embarrassment of looking like a bunch luddites who are technically inept. Trying to block sites this way is doomed to failure."

Sean Connolly, spokesman for acting state Attorney General Jerry Pappert, said that that the technology exists to allow ISPs to block only the specific site housing the pornography. There is also technology to block the site only from Pennsylvania state residents, although Connolly admitted that such solutions are complex and costly to implement.

Some ISPs, including America Online, Verizon and Worldcom, claimed in depositions that, given technical issues and the time frame they were given to comply with the attorney general's request, they had no choice but to block the access to sites that did not contain child pornography. In some cases, these blocks denied access to the sites for all North American subscribers.

"The attorney general cannot disavow responsibility for the blocking of more than 1 million entirely innocent websites by pointing fingers at the ISPs," argued John B. Morris, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.

"He seeks to blame the ISPs' decisions to use IP and DNS filtering as the cause of the massive overblocking of websites, not any action of the state. But the blocking of those sites is a direct result of ISPs' attempts to comply with the statutory scheme enacted by the Pennsylvania legislature and the informal notice scheme developed by the attorney general."

The law in question reads in part: "An Internet service provider shall remove or disable access to child pornography items residing on or accessible through its service in a manner accessible to persons located within this Commonwealth within five business days of when the Internet service provider is notified by the Attorney General pursuant to § 7628 (relating to notification procedure) that child pornography items reside on or are accessible through its service."

"From reading that law, It appears that the Pennsylvania district attorney has been anointed prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner," said attorney Harvey Jacobs, who specializes in Internet law.

"I didn't see any provision for judicial determination of whether certain website content is kiddie porn. I did not see any due process procedures for website owners to challenge the determinations," Jacobs said.

Arguments in the case are expected to conclude on Friday. U.S. District Judge Jan E. Dubois, who is hearing the case, is then expected to rule within a week or two. Some legal experts worry that if the Pennsylvania law is allowed to stand it could pave the way for other states to pass similar laws, blocking access to sites that the states deem illegal or immoral.

"While no civilized human being could defend child pornography, it's important to look at the big picture here," Morris said.

"There are better ways to stop child pornographers than blocking access to their sites and pretending they aren't there ... ways that solve the problem without creating an avalanche of censorship and technology issues."