Micro-blogging site Twitter is developing technology that will prevent government censorship after Iran and China moved to censor its users. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams said the company was working on hacks
to stop any blocking by foreign governments
More than 150 people have approached consumer publication Which? Computing claiming to have been wrongly targeted in crackdowns on illegal file-sharing. ACS:Law has sent thousands of letters to people claiming they have illegally downloaded material and offers them a chance to settle by paying around £500. Which? says it has been approached by some — including a 78 year-old accused of downloading pornography — who have no knowledge of the alleged offence
Five Web sites run by Chinese human rights activists were attacked by hackers over the weekend, as a separate row continued between Google and China over political cyberattacks. The Web site of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that lasted 16 hours starting Saturday afternoon, the group said in an e-mailed statement on Monday. A DDoS attack involves the attacker ordering a legion of compromised computers all to visit a certain Web site at once, overwhelming its server with requests for communication and leaving the site inaccessible to normal visitors. The group said it could not confirm the origin of the attackers but called the Chinese government the most likely suspect
Condemning a $US2 million fine meted out to a Minnesota woman for illegally downloading music over the internet as monstrous and shocking
, a judge has slashed the penalty to $US54,000 ($59,800). US District Court Michael Davis said the fine imposed by a jury on Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from the town of Brainerd, veered into the realm of gross injustice
. In a high-profile music piracy case, Thomas-Rasset was found liable in June of violating music copyrights for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network to download 24 songs. A jury ordered her to pay $US1.92 million or $US80,000 per song to six record companies: Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros Records and UMG Recordings. The judge slashed the fine to $US54,000, or $US2250 per recording, and complained in his ruling on Friday, a copy of which was obtained by AFP on Monday, that he was constrained from reducing it even further
Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defence Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible
Australians are paying the highest prices in the world for text messages, which cost the mobile networks practically nothing but earn them millions in profit each year. Australians are expected to send 20 billion texts this year, more than 20 per cent higher than last year. While the cost of mobile phone calls has declined in the past five years, the standard flat rate for a text message at Telstra and Optus has remained unchanged at 25 cents. At Vodafone, a text is 28 cents. According to research done for Fairfax newspapers, that is more than 10 times what it costs in many parts of Asia and almost a third higher than in Europe and Canada
Last year, Radiohead expressed their growing discomfort with record labels that abuse copyrights for their own benefit, while harassing their fans. In a recent interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said that he doesn’t believe piracy is killing the music industry, but that the industry will kill itself if it doesn’t adapt to the digital age
The BBC has been granted provisional approval for the BBC to introduce copy protection for content on the Freeview HD platform. With Freeview HD closing in on a commercial launch, focus has continued on what level of copy protection should be put in. The BBC believes that having no copy protection provides a barrier for getting content on to a platform, and believes that content makers will not be prepared to go the extra mile for Freeview HD unless they feel their intellectual property is protected
The FBI was so cavalier — and telecom companies so eager to help — that a verbal request or even one written on a Post-it note was enough for operators to hand over customer phone records, according to a damning report released on Wednesday by the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. The 289-page report details findings of the DOJ’s investigation into the FBI’s policies for requesting phone records from 2003 through 2006. It found that in many cases the FBI issued written requests for telephone information, saying that it had secured the proper legal authority to make such requests, even though it didn’t. Also, the report found that the FBI used far more casual methods to obtain records, including verbal requests and requests written on Post-it notes. When the FBI did use formal written requests, it did not track their use or keep copies of them, the report found
CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in US exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the terrorist threat posed by radicalised Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated
. Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes. If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims. It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. Muslims and their leftist dhimmi allies
respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. But perception is not reality. The data simply does not support such a hasty conclusion. On the FBI’s official website, there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on US soil from the year 1980 all the way to 2005
The Gmail accounts of foreign reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing have been hijacked, a journalists’ group in China said Monday. The news comes just one week after Google said it had been targeted by recent cyberattacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The US search giant cited the attacks as one reason it has decided to stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may ultimately close its China offices, a threat China has dismissed. The hijacked Gmail accounts used by the journalists in Beijing had been set to forward all e-mails to a stranger’s address, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said in an e-mail to members. The group did not name the news organizations hit by the attack or say when the hijacking occurred
Private details of more and more people are finding their way on to databases used by the nation’s police. Information about licensed drivers and car owners are to be added to a network that already holds nearly 9 million police records. Police say it makes their job faster and safer, but critics warn of the potential for the misuse of such mountains of information
Most consumers are aware that they’re entitled to have goods replaced if they prove faulty early in their life after purchase, but just how long does that period last? In the case of Vodafone and mobile phones, the answer now turns out to be more than two weeks
thanks to an ACCC court ruling that should help everyone who owns a mobile phone. The ACCC has sought and received court enforceable undertakings from Vodafone that it will not automatically tell consumers that they are entitled only to a repair on faulty phones any time two weeks after purchase, a policy apparently adopted by some 3 stores prior to its merger with Vodafone and one which violates the Trade Practices Act. The decision is interesting even if you’re not a Vodafone customer, as it essentially defines reasonable periods for demanding a replacement phone (as opposed to a repair) when things go wrong
Privacy is no longer a social norm, according to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg commenting on the rise of social networking
The Spanish cabinet has today passed legislation that will enable the authorities to shut down file-sharing sites more rapidly. The new legislation gives in to the demands of the US and local copyright lobby, who see Spain’s lenient copyright law as a thorn in their side
A US student who was fined $675,000 for illegally downloading music has asked a judge to reduce the damages or offer him a retrial. Joel Tenenbaum said that the costs awarded were grossly excessive
. The court case focused on 30 tracks that Mr Tenenbaum admitted downloading. He was fined $22,500 per song
A web site that was taken offline by the domain name regulator .au Domain Administration, is now back online and continuing its protest against the Government’s internet filtering policy. The site stephenconroy.com.au, which takes aim at the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy for his policy on what it deems as internet censorship, was taken down by auDA at the end of last month less than two days after it went live
The United States has lifted a 22-year ban preventing anyone with HIV or AIDS from entering the country. President Barack Obama says the measure was not compatible with American ambitions of becoming a world leader in the fight against the disease
Belarus’ authoritarian leader is promising to toughen regulation of the internet and its users in an apparent effort to exert control over the last fully free medium in the former Soviet state. “We will identify any person who disseminates lies and dirt, and will make them answer strictly to the law,” said President Alexander Lukashenko
The rules of political speech on the Internet are usually pretty simple. In America, almost anything goes. In places like China, the censors call the shots. But in India — a boisterous democracy that’s riven by religious and ethnic tension — the game is far trickier, as Google is discovering. In September, lawyers at Google’s New Delhi office got a tip from an internet user about alarming content on the company’s social networking site, Orkut. People had posted offensive comments about the chief minister of India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who had died just a few days earlier in a helicopter crash. Google’s response: It removed not just the material but also the entire user group that contained it, a person familiar with the matter says. The Internet giant feared the comments could heighten tensions at a time when thousands of mourners of the popular politician were emptying into the street
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