If you’re into keeping tabs on irony, check this out. Amazon apparently sent out its robotic droogs last night, deleting copies of the George Orwell novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without explanation, then refunding the purchase price. As you can imagine, a lot of people caught in the thick of Winston and Julia’s love story aren’t very happy — and rightfully so — the idea that we own
the things we buy is pretty fundamental to… ownership. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but it seems that the publisher of said novels, MobileReference, has changed its mind about selling content on the Kindle, and poof! Amazon remotely deleted all previously purchased copies. It’s all a bit Orwellian, is it not?
Popular social networking site Facebook is breaching Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal information indefinitely, a report has concluded. An investigation by Canada’s privacy commission found the US-based website also gave confusing or incomplete
information to subscribers. Facebook says it is aiming to safeguard users’ privacy without compromising their experience of the site
Senator Stephen Conroy is a man on a mission. Undeterred that his absurd plans to filter the Internet have earned him the dubious title of Internet Villain of the Year, he is now promising to find a solution to the file-sharing problem
by bringing parties together who are already at war, or have little respect for him and his plans
The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime. Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran
The French Senate has once again approved a reworked version of the country’s controversial three strikes
bill designed to appease the Constitutional Council. Instead of a state-appointed agency cutting off those accused of being repeat offenders, judges will have the final say over punishment. Meanwhile, New Zealand is ready to reintroduce the three-strikes
rule that says that everyone in your household will be denied Internet access (and all that goes with it, from education to civic engagement to health information) if one person is accused of infringing on copyright
Stephen Conroy’s mandatory internet filtering plans have earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year at the 11th annual Internet Industry Awards. The Internet Villain category recognises individuals or organisations that have upset the Internet industry and hampered its development — those whom the industry loves to hate. As Australia’s communications minister, and supporter of one of the world’s most ambitious internet censorship plans, Senator Conroy beat out tough competition from the likes of the European Parliament and French President Nicolas Sarkozy
After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a 3-strikes
regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn’t breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise
It was the story of an e-mail heard around the world. You may remember Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim who expressed opposition in an e-mail to his member of parliament. That e-mail went back to his employer, TF1, who then promptly fired him because of his political views back in May. Now, Bourreau-Guggenheim is suing TF1 for discrimination
Alan Johnson, home secretary, has ruled out making ID cards compulsory for UK citizens, signalling a significant retreat by the government on its flagship ¬£4.8bn national scheme. In his first big policy announcement, Mr Johnson said: Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport
An Indian court today decriminalised homosexuality — but only in the country’s capital, Delhi. The Delhi high court ruled that treating consensual gay sex as a crime was a violation of fundamental rights protected by India’s constitution. The ruling is the first of its kind in the deeply conservative country
This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register’s article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free
— via Slashdot
The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block web sites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds. Separately, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has been nominated by the British ISP industry for its annual internet villain
award, competing alongside the European Parliament and French President Nicolas Sarkozy
The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections. Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts. The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia, the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed
Threatened with losing the HP Wright Library to state budget cuts, volunteers from across Ventura County are coming together and pulling out all the stops — and, next weekend, literary icon Ray Bradbury — in their campaign to keep the Ventura library open
The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said
Personal data including the signatures of recipients has been exposed to those tracking deliveries on the Parcelforce web site, the BBC has discovered. A failure in the system allowed people using the mail tracing service access to the name, postcode and signature of various addressees. The breakdown put Parcelforce at risk of breaching data protection rules. The delivery service, part of the Royal Mail Group, apologised. It said the problem had been resolved
In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means. A British police detective who recently won the Orwell Prize for his excellent political writing used his blog to write highly critical accounts of police activities and unethical behavior, making very powerful enemies in the process. A well-funded newspaper with powerful connections quickly heard of his blog and decided it was absolutely vital to expose his identity using an investigative journalist. Like any good newspaper, the blogger anonymized the people and the locations in all the cases he discussed on his blog, but the newspaper alleges these were not sufficiently anonymised and complains that they could work out the identities, though British newspapers don’t complain that they are allowed to publish the identities of men who are falsely accused of rape and cleared in court. The newspaper also helpfully contacted the blogger’s employer, and his job is now threatened — via Slashdot
Caving to public pressure, China on Tuesday said that use of its controversial Green Dam Youth Escort
software is not required, though all PCs sold on the mainland will come with it pre-installed. China’s turnaround comes as public outcry over the Green Dam Web filtering software struck a nerve both inside and outside China. Last week, the Chinese government mandated that as of 1 July, all PCs sold in the country must have the Green Dam software to block pornographic and violent Web sites. The public fought back, claiming the software could also block users from viewing political content and censor other content. Some opponents also contend that the software can create security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. An official with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology who wouldn’t reveal his name told The Associated Press that the use of the Green Dam Youth Escort software is not compulsory
Security firms Symantec and McAfee have both agreed to pay $375,000 to US authorities after they automatically renewed consumers’ subscriptions without their consent. The firms have agreed to settle the case with the New York Attorney General, who says the companies must be more up front about subscription renewals in the future
The Constitutionnal Council, highest jurisdiction in France gave its decision1 concerning the HADOPI three strikes
law, final stage before the promulgation of the law. It decided that presumption of innocence is more important than the idiotic schemes from the entertainment industries to artificially prolong their obsolete models. All sanctioning power (ie. disconnecting internet users) has been removed from the HADOPI
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