Disturbing news from boingboing:

An Australian court has ruled that a posting on someone’s Facebook page can serve as legal notice.

You know, I don’t think Facebook has reached the status of local paper yet. And in my brief experience with it (I joined last month) I don’t think it ever will.

I find it disturbing that the courts would start looking at the Internet, and an Internet based service, as a non-ephemeral institution. The Internet has only been a commercial entity for, what, 15 years? It has so many gaping security holes in it that I have a hard time conceiving why a judge would consider any non-encrypted Internet transaction to have legal standing.  And it would have to be encrypted in a particularly onerous method (physically meet to pass keys).  Given that the major hack found recently had the ability to strip all secured transactions of their security and that it has been in the Internet DNS code from the beginning gives one pause about trusting anything on the ‘net in our lifetimes. And 10% of the servers out there haven’t implemented the patch.

What else is hiding in the basement code, waiting to be exploited?

It’s sort of like thinking all those AAA rated bonds based on mortgages are actually worth something.