Bill Blinks: The White House, apparently taking to heart a presidential advisory committee’s recommendation to abandon export controls on Net-related encryption software, seems poised to lift most export restrictions on communications-related encryption. This comes a year after VP Al Gore announced the first relaxation of export controls. (New York Times, 9/14/99)* Nortel Networks becomes the first company to sign a deal with the FBI to provide wiretapping software to the telecom industry. (Congress allotted $500 million for this stuff back in 1994.) (NY Times, 9/15/99)* Bugspotter Georgi Guninski nails another Hotmail bug. Turns out that Hotmail allows Web-page embedded Javascript to run automatically, giving unscrupulous types the ability to wreak havoc on the unwary. Microsoft needs to fix the way Hotmail interprets the command. (Sm@rt Reseller, 9/13/99)* The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group of net.art.activists, was among the presenters at the InfoWar Con ’99 conference held earlier this month in Washington, DC. The conference is attended mostly by military and law-enforcement officials. An EDT member characterized the culture clash as successful: “Being at a conference of hyperparanoiacs hell-bent on demonizing the work of many of our cohorts and comrades is not the way we’d like to spend all our time, but for a brief glimpse at their mind-set and worldview it was certainly well worth it.” http://www.thing.net/ ~rdom/ecd/ecd.html, 9/15/99)And, from the archives of Wired:”Tired: virtual communities; wired: distance families.”—Patrick Naughton, Java coinventor and former Go Network executive who was charged recently with allegedly crossing state lines with the intent to solicit sex from a minor. (Wired, August 1999)