On 8 December, Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts, author of the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight, was crossing the US/Canadian border at Port Huron, Michigan when he was involved in an altercation with US Border Patrol agents. According to Watts, he was beaten, left half-naked in a cold cell, and finally dumped on the Canadian side of the border with no coat. A legal consultant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was successful in helping a civil rights lawyer in Michigan free Watts. Watts faces US charges of assaulting a federal officer. Based on the accounts, one can assume Watts did so by hitting the officer’s hand with his face. If convicted, Watts faces two years in a US Federal prison — via Slashdot
A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind
A worldwide coalition of Non-Governmental Organisations, consumers unions and online service providers associations publish an open letter to the European institutions regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently under negotiation. They call on the European Parliament and the EU negotiators to oppose any provision into the multilateral agreement that would undermine the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens in Europe and across the world
As promised, Facebook has begun rolling out new privacy options to its 350 million users. Watch out for the Everyone
setting. On Wednesday morning, users began seeing a message offering a new, simplified privacy settings page and the ability to set specific options for every post made to Facebook. The changes, first announced this summer, again promised last week, and available today, give users much tighter control of who sees what, down to the individual reader, if desired
One of the country’s leading architectural photographers was apprehended by City of London police under terrorism laws today while photographing the 300-year old spire of Sir Christopher Wren’s Christ Church for a personal project. Grant Smith, who has 25 years experience documenting buildings by Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, was stopped by a squad of seven officers who pulled up in three cars and a riot van and searched his belongings under section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which allows police to stop and search anyone without need for suspicion in a designated area
Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3. Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don’t want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3’s improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements — via Slashdot
Google and several other Internet giants are lobbying the UK government to drop a proposal that would allow the secretary of state to introduce new changes to copyright law. The proposal is part of Britain’s Digital Economy bill, a comprehensive package of legislation that contains other controversial measures, including a requirement for ISPs to track illegal file sharing and possibly suspend the accounts of repeat offenders. Last week, Google along with Yahoo, Facebook and eBay sent a letter to Peter Mandelson, first secretary of state and head of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), asking the government to drop the 17th clause of the bill
Facebook is enhancing privacy controls and eliminating its regional framework for online communities as the internet’s most popular social networking service tops 350 million users. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes and the milestone in a blog post, saying new privacy features will let users determine who gets to see pictures, comments, videos and other material in profiles
German federal president Horst Köhler has refused to sign a law to block child pornography that passed Parliament earlier this year, stating that he needs more information
. In Germany, the federal president has the right to reject a law only if its passage violated the order mandated by the constitution, or if it is obviously unconstitutional — he can’t veto a law simply because he disagrees with it. The law was passed under a coalition government, but a different coalition took power before the law reached the president’s desk. Political observers guess that the political parties would like to get rid of the law without losing face, but since it has already passed the Parliament, they can’t simply abandon it — via Slashdot
Police officers in England and Wales have made arrests just to get people on to the DNA database, a retired police superintendent has claimed. He told the Human Genetics Commission (HGC) this was the norm
. It wants new guidance for police to regulate when it is appropriate to take a sample of DNA
After the report last week that Brazil’s e-voting machines had withstood the scrutiny of a team of invited hackers, reader ateu writes with news that a hacker has shown that the Linux-based voting machines aren’t perfectly safe; he was able to eavesdrop on them (translated from Portuguese) by means of Van Eck phreaking — via Slashdot
Australians who believed their home phone numbers were permanently protected from unsolicited marketing calls by joining the Do Not Call database may find themselves receiving fresh phone sales pitches next year, as the first entries on the national register expire. More than 4 million telephone numbers will be registered on the government database by the end of this year if growth patterns continue. But the three-year time limit on registrations will lapse for more than 1 million numbers, initially listed when the database opened in May 2007
Lord Mandelson will present the Digital Economy Bill to the public, which among other things is aimed at reducing illicit file-sharing. According to parts of the bill that leaked today, the legislation could lead to jail terms for file-sharers and unprecedented power for the entertainment industries
After discovering the Pirate Bay logo hadn’t been registered with the patent office, a Swedish company took the opportunity to claim it as their own in order to commercially exploit it. After bloodless negotiations, the company now seems prepared to play nice and let their application slide. But they don’t go away empty-handed
Seen by millions of people worldwide, the ship design used by The Pirate Bay is one of the most recognisable logos on the Internet today. But after discovering that the iconic emblem had not been officially registered, a Swedish company has hijacked the trademark as their own, with an eye on commercial exploitation
BBC plans to copy protect Freeview high definition (HD) data have been dealt a blow by regulator Ofcom. It has written to the BBC asking for more information about what the benefits would be for consumers. Initially it looked as if Ofcom would approve the plans but, during its two week consultation, it has received many responses opposing the plan
Record industry trying to fight ability of music fans to make private digital copies of physical CDs. The German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe recently upheld provision 53 of that country’s copyright law against a legal challenge by the record industry whom have against the provision for allowing digital copying of CDs for private use
Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government. The Home Office confirmed the Big Brother
scheme had been delayed until after the election amid protests that it would be intrusive and open to abuse. Although ministers publicly insisted yesterday that they remained committed to the scheme, they have decided not to include the contentious measure in next week’s Queen’s Speech, the Government’s final legislative programme before the election
Censorship of the internet is open to challenge at the World Trade Organisation as it can restrict trade in services delivered online, a forthcoming study says. A censorship case at the WTO could raise sovereignty issues, given the clear right of member states to restrict trade on moral grounds — for example, by blocking access to child pornography websites. But a WTO ruling could set limits on blanket censorship and compel states instead to use more selective filtering, according to the study, to be published this week by think-tank the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE)
Norwegian ISP Telenor doesn’t have to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, according to a ruling from the district court for Asker and Bæ?¶rum on Friday. The entertainment industry has been trying to get Telenor to block The Pirate Bay since February, when it sent a warning letter to the operator. But Telenor has maintained that there is no legal basis for any ISP to act in the interests of digital intellectual-property rights holders by blocking individual web sites, and now the district court has sided with that notion
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