Nanotechnology, the use of subatomic materials as microscopic building blocks for thousands of consumer products, has turned into a big business so quickly that few are monitoring its effects on health and the environment. So the government of Berkeley, California, is intending for the city to be the first to step into the breach and try to regulate this industry
German Minister of the Interior, Gunther Beckstein, is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players. The draft law, a reaction to a school shooting that shook German public opinion last month, will come before the upper house of parliament next year. But it is already sending shockwaves through the 2m-strong German online gaming community
Thousands of Australians who use iPods and other digital music players will no longer be acting illegally after a major overhaul of copyright laws passed parliament today
Providers like Skype, Yahoo, Net2phone, Dialpad, etc, will not be able to offer VOIP in India under the proposed government clampdown. BPOs and other call centres will face the axe if they use any of the VOIP services provided by the above companies. It is not clear if this clampdown will affect regular home users
The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. The technique is called a roving bug
, and was approved by top US Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organised crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him
The Queensland government has started seeking expressions of interest for the construction of a high-speed, open access broadband network across Brisbane. In a statement, the state’s Premier Peter Beattie said his government had already received responses from a number of parties interested in the proposed network, dubbed Project Vista
, which was first flagged in October
The NSW state government will in early 2007 go shopping for suppliers to establish universal coverage
of free Wi-Fi in Sydney’s central business district (including North Sydney), in addition to the suburbs of Parramatta, Penrith and Liverpool and outlying cities Newcastle, Wollongong and Gosford
Starting next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office
A law is being rushed through the Australian legislature that will criminalise great swaths of the citizenry. The Internet Industry Association of Australia is posting warning scenarios spelling out how far-reaching this law would be
Steve Bracks has seized on a secret deal the Liberal Party has struck with fundamentalist hate preacher Danny Nalliah not to decriminalise abortion. The Premier said the Liberal action was odd and that party leader Ted Baillieu should not have his policy constructed behind the back door
by other groups
Wikipedia has become accessible in China after being blocked for more than a year, attracting applause from free media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders
Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people), discovered that the electronic voting system hadn’t registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him… because he cast it himself. The machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36 — via Slashdot
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, has some concrete suggestions on how to reform the UK’s dated intellectual property laws. The starting point for its deliberations is the notion that knowledge is both a commodity and a public good, and it recommends that the UK move from a model where knowledge is ‘an asset first and a public resource second’ to one where knowledge is primarily a public resource and secondarily an asset. Is that an anti-business attitude? The report’s authors don’t think so — via Slashdot
Providing some information is better than giving none at all, search giants are saying, but human rights groups warned that filtering of web content is increasing in developing countries
In a stealth manoeuvre, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act, helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions
China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering — via Slashdot
China has partially unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools — the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents. Readers in China report having problems getting to the Chinese language version, and English-language articles on certain subjects, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 — via Boing Boing
President Bush, again defying Congress via a signing statement, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists
Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin’s actions in Chechnya, has been found dead in Moscow. The 48-year-old mother of two was found shot dead in a lift at her apartment block in the capital. A pistol and four bullets were found near her body and a murder investigation has been launched — via Warren Ellis
The US government is loosening its grip on the domain name system and is edging closer to giving ICANN a greater measure of autonomy in making decisions about the future of the Internet
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