Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project.

Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening!

A friend just alerted me to this call for responses regarding New York State's official document standard for all state agencies. The more well-written responses that advocate for genuine open standards/formats the better. The State just extended the deadline to Jan 18th.

• NYS request for public comment
• Open Document Format Alliance
• Slashdot article background

The main issue here is that Microsoft is attempting to have their fraud "OOXML" declared an Official New York State Standard for all state government documents stored on computers. OOXML is not a standard format. Indeed today, no software writes OOXML, and no software reads OOXML. OOXML has no published documentation, despite Microsoft's claims. But even if, one day, some Microsoft software writes and reads files claimed to be in OOXML format, New York State should not accept any format controlled by a private interest. New York State should not force any format which, in practice, can only be manipulated by source secret software, on any resident.

The call for comments, which is a long two part document, gives evidence that Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart will take seriously careful clear comments. I ask defeatists on our side to consider that Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart refers to Groklaw in the Call for Comments.