French lawmakers voted Tuesday to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic, a measure the government says is intended to catch child pornographers. The bill will now go on for a second and final reading. Critics of the catch-all Bill on direction and planning for the performance of domestic security
say that filtering won’t stop the spread of child pornography — but could allow the government to censor other materials. The bill, known as Loppsi II in French, was approved by 312 votes to 214 in a vote in the National Assembly on Tuesday. The government has a large majority in the Assembly; two of its deputies abstained, with the others all voting in favour of the bill
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for improper behaviour in his home
and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines
Google has received federal approval to buy and sell energy on the open market, giving it more options for the way it powers its data centres and opening the door to a potential move into the energy-trading business. Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved its application Thursday, granting Google market-based rate authorisation
, or the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis
An Australian distributor has been ordered to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling video game piracy tool, the R4 mod chip. The Federal Court ordered that RSJ IT Solutions cease to sell the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controlled, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages. The chip allows users to circumvent the technology protection measures Nintendo has built into its DS handheld consoles, enabling illegally pirated games to be downloaded online
Google has opened up its charity wallet once again. This time, the search giant has donated $2,000,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs and maintains Wikipedia. The donation, in true social media fashion, was announced via tweets from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member Mitch Kapor. Neither Google nor the Wikimedia Foundation have made an official announcement yet — it’s supposed to come tomorrow
A leading privacy group has urged US regulators to investigate Google’s new social networking service Buzz, one week after its launch. The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has made its complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It says that Buzz — which is part of Google’s Gmail service — is deceptive
and breaks consumer protection law
The City of Norfolk, Virginia is reeling from a massive computer meltdown in which an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on nearly 800 computers citywide. The incident is still under investigation, but city officials say the attack may have been the result of a computer time bomb planted in advance by an insider or employee and designed to trigger at a specific date
More than 75,000 computer systems at nearly 2,500 companies in the United States and around the world have been hacked in what appears to be one of the largest and most sophisticated attacks by cyber criminals discovered to date, according to a northern Virginia security firm. The attack, which began in late 2008 and was discovered last month, targeted proprietary corporate data, e-mails, credit-card transaction data and login credentials at companies in the health and technology industries in 196 countries, according to Herndon-based NetWitness
Last year was an interesting year in the security industry in a number of ways, but perhaps none more so than the monstrous increase in the volume of malicious spam. In the second half of 2009, the number of spam messages sent per day skyrocketed from 600 million to three billion, according to new research
Michael Atkinson says his family is more at risk from angry video gamers than outlaw motorcycle gangs. The South Australian Attorney-General revealed in an interview aired last night that a threatening note from a gamer
was placed under his door early one morning
But shocked bus passengers were literally attacked with Spam in Sydney’s inner west today. Police say a 32-year-old man was on a city-bound bus on Illawarra Road at Marrickville about 8.40am when he got into an argument with two other passengers. He got off and chucked the tinned meat — and a brick — at the vehicle’s windows, then fled
Senator Conroy’s internet filter has been the cause of much news and action from local residents and the world at large, most recently sparking attacks on government web sites. The filter itself seems mostly incomplete, and while it does filter bad web sites it can also block access to content that is otherwise legal — but it doesn’t block the worst material. The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) have teamed with the Inspire Foundation and both large search engines Google and Yahoo!, who have jointly released a statement to Senator Conroy regarding the internet filter
Within two weeks time, television viewers will be able to use the internet to make complaints about TV programmes. The online complaint form follows the review of the Commercial Code of Practice last year. From Monday March 1st, viewers will be able to use an electronic complaint form via the Free TV Australia web site, similar to the downloadable complaint form it currently accepts via fax and mail
Saying that, We need a bolder vision that starts to break down the barriers to free culture — that starts to break the vise grip the few and powerful have on ownership,
Public Knowledge President and Co-Founder Gigi B Sohn announced a new five-part Copyright Reform Act
In this age of cell phones, text messages and computer keyboards, one Scottish school has returned to basics. It’s teaching youngsters the neglected art of writing with a fountain pen. There is no clacking of keyboards in most classrooms at the Mary Erskine and Stewart’s Melville Junior School, although there is a full range of facilities for computer lessons and technology isn’t being ignored. But the private school’s principal believes the old-fashioned pens have helped boost the academic performance and self-esteem of his 1,200 pupils
Electronic Frontiers Australia today launched a new campaign against the Rudd Government’s mandatory Internet filtering plan. The Open Internet campaign emphasises that Australians want an Open Internet that is free from an impractical and costly policy of Government imposed mandatory Internet filtering
Yet another Australian copyright decision, this one handed down on 10 February, has gone against the pro-copyright owner trend of recent decades. Telstra and Sensis have lost in the Federal Court of Australia before Justice Michelle Gordon in seeking to protect claimed copyright in White Pages and Yellow Pages
SSDs are still overpriced for most average consumers, but the companies responsible for making them are constantly searching for ways to make them larger (in terms of capacity), smaller (in terms of form factor) and cheaper (in terms of real dollars). Toshiba has their own line of solid state drives right now, but just as the company has innovated in the optical storage department, they’re also hoping to innovate in the world of NAND storage. A new partnership between the company and Tokyo’s Keio University has led to the creation of a new technology that could allow SSDs up to 1TB in size to be made with a footprint no larger than a postage stamp
. That’s far, far smaller than even the 1.8″ drives that currently reside in the larger iPod units, and exponentially smaller than the 2.5″ SSDs that are shipping now for existing notebooks
One of the founders of the Pirate Bay is kicking off a venture that aims to help web sites generate cash. Called Flattr, the micropayments system revolves around members paying a fixed monthly fee. At the end of each month that cash will be divided among participating sites a Flattr member wants to reward
A former security researcher turned criminal hacker has been sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for hacking into financial institutions and stealing credit card account numbers. Max Ray Butler, who used the hacker pseudonym Iceman, was sentenced Friday morning in US District Court in Pittsburgh on charges of wire fraud and identity theft. In addition to his 13-year sentence, Butler will face five years of supervised release and must pay US$27.5 million in restitution to his victims, according to Assistant US Attorney Luke Dembosky, who prosecuted the case for the federal government. Dembosky believes the 13 year sentence is the longest-ever handed down for hacking charges
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