The W3C has ruled DRM in-scope for their HTML standard. A lot of big businesses have supported advancing the Encrypted Media Extension, including Google, Microsoft, and Netfix. The BBC calls for a solution with legal sanctions. The EME could well be used to implement a DRM HTML engine. A DRM-enabled web would break a long tradition of the web browser being the User’s Agent, and would restrict user choice and control over their security and privacy. There are other applications that can serve the purpose of viewing DRM video content, and I appeal to people to not taint the web standards with DRM but to please use other applications when necessary — via Slashdot
There’s an unspoken pact scientists make with the public. In the same way that doctors and police are held by law and by honour to tell the truth and protect, a scientist is entrusted with performing research with integrity and transparency. The research is carried out, the process painstakingly recorded in laboratory books. The results are scrutinised by peers, often repeatedly, until the work is published in a journal, where readers trust that the work is done accurately and without disguise.
Publications are the key to science: they are a public acknowledgement and record of what has been done and how it can be repeated by other scientists. This ability to replicate is the key to truth and integrity: if the results can be replicated, they are valid. A new fact, a new discovery, has been made.
Given the importance of validation and publication, you would think access to this vital, new information would be relatively easy. Scientists ought to be shouting their discoveries from the rooftops. And they are? — ?but they’re also often paying to publish their own work behind a paywall.
In practice, the information in peer-reviewed publications is not freely available to the public. It’s not even freely available to other scientists. Journals have been around for hundreds of years but in the last quarter of the 20th century, academic publishing increased exponentially. The costs used to come from the physical processes of typesetting, printing and binding but access is now primarily electronic. Our largest databases are now closing in on 50 million articles and a library like that isn’t just a wealth of knowledge? — it’s a wealthy profit source, too — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A propaganda video from the North Korean authorities has been removed from YouTube following a copyright claim by games maker Activision.
The clip showed a young man dreaming about a North Korean space shuttle destroying a city that resembles New York.
But the footage of burning buildings was taken from Activision’s top selling game, Call of Duty.
North Korea insists its space programme is for peaceful purposes.
But the country’s intent — particularly towards South Korea — has raised concerns leader Kim Jong-un has plans for a ballistic missile system.
The video was posted on Saturday by North Korea’s official Pyongyang YouTube channel — via redwolf.newsvine.com
An MP has called for an investigation into the death of an elderly woman from hunger and dehydration after bureaucratic confusion between the UK Border Agency and Surrey county council.
Gloria Foster, who was in her 80s, was alone for nine days after the company that she paid to take care of her was closed by the UKBA for employing illegal immigrants. The council was given the company records but apparently failed to go to Foster’s aid. Foster’s MP, Crispin Blunt, described her ordeal as horrific
.
He said: Clearly there are questions to answer and I would expect a comprehensive investigation between all of the agencies involved. I said last week that I would certainly not like to pre-judge any more of the narrative before it is formally established. Yesterday’s desperately sad developments can only increase the salience of that need
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
US democracy has been hacked
by big business and needs to be reclaimed using the power of the internet to hold politicians to account, according to former US vice-president Al Gore.
Offering a blunt assessment of the extent to which private companies influence decision-making in the US, he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: American politics has fallen into a state of disrepair,
in an interview to mark the publication of his new book, The Future.
Gore added: It can be fixed, but we need to recognise that our democracy has been hacked … It has been taken over … and is being operated for purposes other than those for which it was intended
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.
The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.
There is something inherently wrong with that,
David Cahn, an education activist who regularly attends county school board meetings, said before the board’s vote to consider the policy. There are better ways to do this than to take away a person’s rights.
If the policy is approved, the county would become the only jurisdiction in the Washington region where the school board assumes ownership of work done by the school system’s staff and students — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Federal Magistrates court has ordered Railcorp to pay Australia’s Disability Discrimination Commissioner $10,000 for failing to provide regular and audible announcements on trains.
Commissioner Graeme Innes is blind and took Railcorp to court in a personal capacity alleging the company’s failure to provide appropriate announcements was in breach of federal disability discrimination laws.
Mr Innes alleged there had been 57 breaches of law since he began the case and was claiming $1,000 per breach in compensation.
Railcorp argued that a failure rate of around 15 per cent for announcements did not equate to discrimination.
But this morning the court agreed Mr Innes had been disadvantaged and ruled in his favour — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A controversial plan to store information about personal internet and telephone usage in Australia has been criticised by the world wide web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Internet service providers and telecommunications companies would be asked to store data that passes through their networks for up to two years under plans being considered by the Federal government.
Law enforcement agencies want the data retained to help fight crime.
Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday, Berners-Lee said that although it is important that technology is used to help fight crime, data retention laws could result in a nation where Australians are trapped by their own information — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Anyone who visited Soverain Software’s website could be forgiven for believing it’s a real company. There are separate pages for products
, services
, and solutions
. There’s the About Us
page. There are phone numbers and e-mail addresses for sales and tech support. There’s even a login page for customers.
It’s all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn’t made a sale — ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyk, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its webpage? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.
Thank you for calling Soverain technical support,
says Wolanyk, if you press option 2. If you are a current customer and have a tech support question, please call us at 1-888-884-4432 or e-mail us at support@soverain.com.
That number, like the customer support
number on Soverain’s contact page, has been disconnected.
Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war — via redwolf.newsvine.com
As of Saturday, unlocking a cellphone is against US law.
The process, which allows you to use your handset with a network other than the one you bought it from, has just become illegal again as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Unlocking was formerly allowed under an exemption to the act, ABC News explains, but in October 2012 the the US Copyright Office and Library of Congress decided not to renew the clause and it expired on Jan. 26.
Now, you must obtain your carrier’s permission to unlock your phone or face a potential fine of up to $2,500. Anyone found unlocking handsets for profit could be forced to pay up to $500,000 and may even go to jail, according to ABC — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The rapid rise of facial recognition technology has prompted widespread privacy concerns. But now Japanese researchers have developed a tool aimed at countering the surveillance tactic — the world’s first privacy visor
.
In recent years facial recognition has been integrated into security cameras and databases and Facebook, even used to covertly monitor consumers and track shopping habits.
Isao Echizen, an associate professor at Tokyo’s National Institute of Informatics, and Seiichi Gohshi, a professor at Kogakuin University, were wary of these developments—and decided to take action. After months of research, the duo invented a pair of high-tech glasses that emit a near infrared light to block face recognition cameras. It was their goal to counter what they call the invasion of privacy caused by photographs taken in secret
.
The glasses, currently in prototype form, are hardly what you would term stylish. They are essentially a pair of clunky-looking lab goggles. Attached to them are small circular lights that, when turned on, are visible only to cameras. They are connected to a wire and a battery that you have to carry in your pocket. But though the design might require a few tweaks, the concept has been attracting significant attention in Japan, where it has been featured on TV — via redwolf.newsvine.com
People in power have always tried to prevent the common folk from obtaining knowledge that threatens their power. This happened in the 16th century, and it is happening now.
Information advantage has always equalled power.
The group in society that can control what the other groups know and don’t know will rise to power in every other aspect. Therefore, information technology has always been policed and even militarized to some extent, by any group that obtains the ability to control it.
It has been the case since the dawn of civilisation that some group has told everybody else what the world looks like, how it works, and what happens in it. (Usually, that group is placed at the centre of that particular world view in one way or another.) This continues today, with governments all over the world trying to put their spin of events on the news flow, putting themselves in a good light to literally get away with murder.
The quest for the net’s liberty is not a fight for some silly right to download free music. It is much larger than that: it breaks a hegemony that has stood for millennia — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Much of the discussion following the death of Aaron Swartz relates to the issue of disproportionate prosecution.
Legal heavyweights and online activists discuss whether Massachusetts prosecutors were pursuing him overzealously, and the nature of Swartz’s alleged crimes when he downloaded 4 million articles from JSTOR, an archive to which he had legitimate access. Swartz faced up to 35 years in jail for downloading the articles. The prosecutor responsible for the pursuit of Swartz, Carmen Ortiz, last week tried to wash her hands of responsibility for his death.
Whatever the legal and procedural merits of Ortiz’s pursuit of Swartz, aggressive over-prosecution is normally the fate of anyone deemed to be an online activist.
Bradley Manning faces life imprisonment for leaking evidence of US war crimes, should the US military ever cease regularly delaying his trial. Manning was even found by a US military judge to have been systematically mistreated while in custody.
Barrett Brown currently faces 45 years in prison for, inter alia, posting a URL and quoting a Fox News threat to kill Julian Assange in a tweet.
Hacker Jeremy Hammond faces life in prison for allegedly breaking into the emails of self-promoting alternative CIA
Stratfor, a global intelligence company. Hammond’s case is in the hands of a judge who is married to one of the hack’s victims.
Then there’s the case of Julian Assange, who is either the victim of an international conspiracy to keep him permanently entangled in criminal prosecution, or who has a strange capacity to induce irrational and obsessive overreactions from governments.
The list goes on and on? — ?there’s the over-the-top raid on Kim Dotcom in New Zealand, which turned out to be illegal, along with the spying on Dotcom by a New Zealand intelligence agency that is now the subject of an inquiry — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A judge has found that two news organisations improperly used images that a photojournalist had posted to Twitter in one of the first big tests of intellectual property law involving social media.
Agence France-Presse and The Washington Post infringed on the copyrights of photographer Daniel Morel in using pictures he took in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan ruled.
While AFP had argued that once the pictures appeared on Twitter they were freely available, the judge said that Twitter’s terms of service did not give the news agency a license to publish the images without Morel’s permission.
The judge, in a decision released late Monday, partially granted Morel’s summary judgement motion but also limited damages he could potentially recover. Several other issues in the case were left to be decided at trial. A trial date has not been set — via redwolf.newsvine.com
You could call it the quintessential Newcastle summer snapshot: a lone surfer walking across the rocks near Merewether beach in search of a wave.
In fact, it was such a good shot that the photographer, Gateshead’s Naomi Frost, believes someone stole the image, printed it on thousands of T-shirts and sold them through menswear giant Lowes — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Spy agency ASIO wants to hack into Australians’ personal computers and commandeer their smartphones to transmit viruses to terrorists.
The Attorney-General’s Department is pushing for new powers for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to hijack the computers of suspected terrorists.
But privacy groups are attacking the police state
plan as extraordinarily broad and intrusive
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The family of celebrated internet activist Aaron Swartz has accused prosecutors and MIT officials of being complicit in his death, blaming the apparent suicide on the pursuit of a young man over an alleged crime that had no victims
.
In a statement released late Saturday, Swartz’s parents, Robert and Susan, siblings Noah and Ben and partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said the Redditt builder’s demise was not just a personal tragedy
but the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach
.
They also attacked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for not supporting the internet activist in his legal battles and refusing to stand up for its own community’s most cherished principles
.
The comments came a day after the 26-year-old killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday night — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Businesses will not be able to use pre-ticked boxes to gain user consent for the processing of their data under changes proposed by the European Parliament to new EU data protection laws.
In a new report, Jan-Philipp Albrecht, a rapporteur for the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee on the proposed EU data protection reforms, said that consumers should not have to opt out from automatic settings in order to avoid businesses deeming that they have given consent to their personal data being processed — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The building developer Meriton stands to lose a caretaker contract at World Square worth more than $2 million a year after a dramatic falling out with tenants.
The owners’ corporation of the World Tower residential apartments at World Square has accused the builder of breach of contract over building defects and maintenance issues worth more than $1 million.
A Fairfax Media investigation has discovered the owners’ corporation has served Meriton, its building caretaker, with at least 15 official breach notices and formal complaints in the past two years.
Some of the breaches include fire safety defects and Meriton’s failure to provide security swipe card details amid concerns over overcrowding in the building.
Meriton awarded itself the building management contract for World Tower after it completed the development in 2004 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The same week that a leaked video out of Steubenville, Ohio showed high school boys joking and laughing about an unconscious teenager in the next room who had just been raped — They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson!
— House Republicans let the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expire. They opposed an expanded version of the legislation that had increased protections for the LGBT community, immigrants and Native American women.
This week we’ve also seen mass protests in India after a woman was brutally gang raped and died from her injuries. American media covering the Indian protests have repeatedly referenced the sexist culture, reporting how misogyny runs rampant in India. The majority of mainstream coverage of what happened in Steubenville (primer), however, has made no such connection. In fact, the frequent refrain in discussions of Steubenville in comment threads is that these boys are sociopaths
, shameful anomalies. We’d rather think of them as monsters than hold ourselves accountable as a nation and tell the truth — these rapists are our sons — via redwolf.newsvine.com
RSS – Posts