John Perry Barlow — Grateful Dead lyricist, copyfighter, and co-founder of EFF — conducted an electronic debate with ex-congressman Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America on the BBC’s web site. The exchange is fascinating in that it shows Glickman lives in an information vacuum and doesn’t have a clue about electronic media — via Boing Boing
UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use. Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people. Mr Jamieson also called for Apple – which makes the popular iPod portable music player — to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers
It’s hundreds of times thinner than a human hair but as sensitive as a human finger. Researchers have devised a nanosheet
that can be wrapped around any surface — such as that of a surgical instrument or a robotic hand — to mimic the sensitivity of touch
A Taiwanese company called A-Zone International has given the iPod a retro spin with the iPod Dock Valve Station, a docking station that features an elegant 1940s-style valve amplifier
Toshiba announced a 2.5-inch hard drive with a 200GB capacity, effectively raising the bar for mobile storage. The drive uses a new technology called perpendicular recording
Google has just released the Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox. This extension allows you to save your bookmarks, history and passwords on Google servers, effectively giving you a roaming profile
, which you can sync on any computer running Firefox (and the extension, of course)
The NSA is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in Internet technology — specifically the forthcoming semantic web
championed by the Web standards organisation W3C — to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals — via Slashdot
A recent vote in the US House of Representatives has led to a rejection of the principle of Net Neutrality from the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act), in spite of massive lobbying from prominent businesses
Microsoft is staking its claim in the high-performance computing territory with the launch of an OS specifically designed for computer clusters used by engineers and scientists
iTunes facing fresh legal attacks in several European countries. Government consumer protection agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden want Apple to lift restrictions that prevent customers from playing music they bought through iTunes on devices made by Apple’s rivals.
Microsoft acknowledged that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker. The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction. The EULA is suppose to disclose this daily call-in feature. Lauren Weinstein, who is co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, was one of the first people to notice the daily communications to Microsoft
This week’s launch by Google of an online spreadsheet, which is currently being tested by a limited set of users, has stirred up a lot of controversy around the Internet. There are privacy concerns about users storing financial data on Google’s servers. Just how secure are these servers, and how long will Google guarantee to maintain users’ data?
Queensland Police are to be given power to force suspects to hand over passwords and encryption codes
Those looking forward to built-in Adobe PDF support in the forthcoming Office 2007 productivity suite and Windows Vista operating system might have to go without. Microsoft announced that it will remove support for the electronic document technology after negotiations with Adobe broke down
American trade negotiators have threatened to scuttle Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation unless the country shuts down the AllOfMP3.com website, which sells music under Russian copyright law, despite the ire of the RIAA and its international puppet organisation, IFPI — via Boing Boing
A flood of legislation released by the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to drown whole classes of consumer electronics
A farmer somewhere south of Rotherham and east of Sheffield proves to have even iffier field-based hand-writing than Eddie with his poorly rendered arse (KMZ)
Computer games in the hands of the elderly are shaping up as the latest weapons in the war against Alzheimer’s
Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus’ are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft
The competition regulator yesterday gave its strongest indication yet that Telstra could scrap its proposed AU$2 billion next generation broadband network by the end of this month
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