Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead. BREIN is now expected to take the ISPs to court — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.
However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.
As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.
In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s War on the Internet
event on Saturday in Melbourne (full video available online here), Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said much of the thinking around the data retention proposal had been integrated into new cybercrime legislation introduced in mid-2011.
Ludlam said the proposal had been narrowed down to a degree to which most people would find reasonable
, in that law enforcement agencies could, for example, request ISPs to keep all available data on people suspected of committing major crimes such as terrorism — a technique he described as hold that person’s everything, until we tell you not to any more
.
However, the Greens Senator warned, that cybercrime legislation could mutate
into something completely different. Maybe let’s trap all the data of these categories of people,
he said, appearing to refer to the political activist community, many members of whom had gathered at the Melbourne event. Or these postcodes of people
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world’s richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.
The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.
Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.
The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,
the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs little Aussie battlers’ sequel
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water for now, but it’s worth remembering that the most controversial part of the legislation is something the Australian Government has been thinking about for years.
One of the provisions in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that raised the most amount of anger, and was also one of the first to be quickly removed, was that the US Government would be able to force US-based internet service providers (ISPs) to block overseas websites found to contain copyright-infringing material.
Outrage ensued, the provision was removed, Wikipedia blacked out and the legislation was ultimately shelved.
In Australia, the Attorney-General’s Department has reassured us that the government currently has no plans of bringing in any new SOPA-style laws, instead preferring an industry-based model for dealing with piracy.
But website blocking has been on the cards for the Australian Government for many years, in the form of the mandatory internet filter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital has apologised for forcing unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption until the mid-1970s.
The apology came in a Senate inquiry into the forced adoption
practice, which will report its findings next month.
Between the 1940s and 1970s there were about 45,000 adoptions in the state and it is estimated about 5,000 unmarried mothers at the RWH were told to give up their children — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Cosmetic surgery advertising should be banned and annual checks carried out on surgeons, the industry has said.
The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) wants measures including increased regulation of the cowboy
market in the UK.
Prof Sir Bruce Keogh is leading a government review of the trade after the PIP breast implants scandal.
Sir Bruce has said an insurance scheme for the sector, similar to that in the travel industry, could be introduced — via redwolf.newsvine.com
At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He’s become better at handling the media – more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews — but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western intelligence source
, and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? He told me I was fucked,
Assange says.
Are you fucked?
I ask.
Assange pauses and looks out the window. The house is surrounded by rolling fields and quiet woods, but they offer him little in the way of escape. The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on 1 February — but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called red notice
for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in connection with a number of sexual offences
— Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an orange notice
— and the US government has branded him a high-tech terrorist
, unleashing a massive and unprecedented investigation designed to depict Assange’s journalism as a form of international espionage. Ever since November 2010, when WikiLeaks embarrassed and infuriated the world’s governments with the release of what became known as Cablegate, some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables from more than 150 countries, the group’s supporters have found themselves detained at airports, subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, and ordered to turn over their Twitter accounts and emails to authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Megaupload users are crying foul after their personal files, not necessarily copyright-infringing material, stored with the file-sharing service was seized on Thursday along with a trove of illegally distributed copyrighted works.
Some of those users took to Twitter complaining about the loss of their files, as first reported by TorrentFreak. I had files up there…gone forever..and they were personal recordings! No copyright infringement!
said Twitter user J. Amir. Another user complained that her work files were now gone, and others used more colorful language to describe their predicament — via redwolf.newsvine.com
What initially sounded like a somewhat gormless idea — blacking out websites to draw users’ attention to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts before US Congress — has turned out to be dramatic intervention in the battle against SOPA and PIPA.
In particular, Wikipedia blacking out (easily circumvented by turning off javascript, but that’s beyond a lot of users) appears to have acted as a mass distribution mechanism for information on the draconian bills. Plainly it’s not just journalists who rely on the crowd-sourced banalities of Wikipedia; tens of thousands of people took to Twitter to alternately complain, bitch and cheer the removal of what is evidently a key resource for most of the Anglophone world’s students.
Timing is everything, however: the blackout coincided with a tipping point against the bills, with the DNS provisions crashing and burning, the Obama administration rejecting the bill and even Congressional supporters sniffing the wind and backing away from them. Doubtless they’ll try again — they receive too much in the way of bribes donations from movie and music companies not too — but SOPA has suffered a remarkable turnaround in fortunes over the holiday break.
This has plainly made the copyright industry deeply unhappy. And the unhappiness has rippled all the way to Australia, with Dan Rosen, of one of the local branches of the copyright industry, ARIA, writing for The Australian today to attack piracy. Rosen was clever enough not to outright back SOPA, but he backed Rupert Murdoch’s bizarre, straight-out-wrong attack on Google last week, and lamented Google’s lax attitude to intellectual property rights
and the need for a properly functioning market
for content rather than chaos — via redwolf.newsvine.com
German ministers have approved plans to establish a national register of far-right extremists, after revelations of 10 neo-Nazi murders since 2000.
It is thought there are almost 10,000 neo-Nazis in Germany and the database would include information held by all federal and state authorities.
Police and intelligence have been criticised for failing to detect the gang allegedly behind the murders.
The database proposal still has to be backed by the German parliament — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Some of you will have seen Balibo, but many more of you will know vaguely the story: that of five Australian journalists killed by Indonesian soldiers during the invasion of East Timor in 1975. They were Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie. Technically they were two Australians, a New Zealander, and two Brits, but all were Australian residents and working for Australian media in the form of Channels 7 and 9. An older AAP journalist named Roger East went to follow up on their disappearance, at a time when they were yet to be confirmed dead, and two months later was executed himself when the Indonesians took the capital Dili.
For those who haven’t seen it, you should. Just be warned that while the ending of the story is already known, this article still contains a bunch of spoiler — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Facebook and Google told the Delhi High Court today that they cannot block offensive content that appears on their services. The two Internet giants are among 21 companies that have been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, and the Indian government has given the green light for their prosecution. Although India is democratic (in fact, it’s the world’s largest democracy), many fear the country will resort to censorship — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.
The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are evidence-based views or theories
that run contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Um. Yeah. So I’m going to be charitable here and presume that whoever compiled that internet monitoring watchlist at the Department of Homeland Security thought that Miss Thirteen
, at www.msthirteen.com, was a site about the ultraviolent Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 gang, which originated in El Salvador and now operates in a number of US cities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A task force assigned to the grim undertaking of deciding how much to compensate as many as 2,000 living victims of a decades-long North Carolina sterilisation program finally settled on a number on Tuesday.
Each person who was forced to undergo surgical procedures to render them incapable of reproduction under the state’s notorious eugenics programs should receive $50,000, the Governor’s Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board announce — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Draft legislation in Israel would make it a crime in the country to use the word Nazi
or symbols of the Holocaust for purposes other than teaching.
There will be a preliminary hearing in parliament on Wednesday for the bill, which would impose penalties of up to six months in jail and a $25,000 fine.
The move comes a week after ultra-Orthodox Jews dressed in concentration camp uniforms to protest against alleged incitement against them.
The incident sparked outrage in Israel — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Greece’s financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all — their children.
One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.
I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her,
it read. Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother.
In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city’s poor, has found four children on his doorstep — including a baby just days old.
Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.
Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable — and it’s not happening in a country ravaged by war or famine, but in their own capital city
With its colourful band of Muppets preaching tolerance and neighbourly love, the Palestinian version of the children’s television programme Sesame Street had become a beacon of hope for children in a region ravaged by decades of unrest.
But the cast of peace-loving characters have now found themselves in the crossfire of a political dispute between Palestinian leaders and the US Congress, and episodes have been axed for 2012.
Sesame Street — known as Shara’a Simsim in Arabic — is one of many US-funded Palestinian shows suffering after Congress froze the transfer of nearly £130m to the US Agency for International Development in October. The suspension aimed to punish the Palestinians for appealing to the United Nations for membership.
The funding suspension has affected a broad range of services in Palestine relying on American aid, including hospitals, education, government ministries and communications — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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