Japan is road testing new traffic lights that can be seen by people who are colour-blind as well as drivers with perfect vision.
The signals have been developed by Taro Ochiai, a professor at Kyushu Sangyo University, with the first set of traffic lights installed in the southern city of Fukuoka. A second month-long test is to be started in Tokyo before the end of February
Big Monopoly has learned in the past century that when they look like a little spoiled brat having a tantrum, politicians will throw taxpayer money their way to shut them up. Therefore, this is a behaviour they emulate as soon they are given a good enough excuse. It’s simply a reinforced, learned behaviour.
A boycott against Big Monopoly will not work. Any noticeable drop in profits will cause them to throw a tantrum at policy makers and complain how their profits are dropping due to piracy, and request harder enforcement of their copyright monopolies at the expense of our civil liberties and the freedom of the net.
Buying more of their products (yeah, right) will not work. Any noticeable raise in profits will cause them to commission reports to policy makers illustrating their grandiose importance to the economy as a whole, suggesting that they are the direct reason for at least several hundred per cent of the gross national product. Therefore, they will argue, they need additional protection as a national interest.
Doing nothing will not work either, as we are constantly on the retreat in civil liberties — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it’s worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won.
It can’t, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling. As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead.
But what’s clear is that legislation is not the answer. Piracy is already illegal in the US, and most places around the world, yet it persists underground, but more often in plain sight. Short of passing a law that allows the actual blacklisting of websites like China and Iran, there is no legislative solution. That’s what SOPA and PIPA were attempting to do, but it so obviously trampled on the First Amendment, it was laughed out of existence as the entire internet protested it. The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Department of Defence (DOD) is working on contact lenses that would enhance soldiers’ vision to improve intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) activities without the need for specialised equipment that is currently used in the battlefield.
The Defence Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) agency is doing work at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks to create wearable eye lenses with tiny, full colour displays onto which digital images can be projected to give the wearers better situational awareness, according to the agency.
The lenses would allow users to focus simultaneously on images that are both close up and far away, which would improve their ability to use portable displays while still interacting in real time with the environment around them, according to DARPA. A graphic on the agency’s website shows the basic design of the lenses — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers have discovered a malware engine that appears to be able to break the CAPTCHA security used by Yahoo’s webmail service after only a handful of attempts.
There is nothing new in malware that tries to break CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) — a low-level war has been ongoing since this type of security was first implemented almost a decade ago – but what matters is how quickly and invisibly this can de done.
Websense has posted an online video showing the effectiveness of the engine it found working as part of the Cridex banking Trojan malware in breaking down Yahoo’s CAPTCHA process — via redwolf.newsvine.com
They are well organised. They pay close attention to product quality, working hard to make it effective and scalable. They are all about customer service, providing after-sales support. They even solicit the help of their customers in product development.
All admirable qualities. But all in the service of theft.
They are malware merchants; in the business of helping others steal from legitimate businesses and innocent consumers. And they have evolved to the point where they operate much like the legitimate software industry. It is possible to buy malware from what amounts to an app store, or to contract for Malware as a Service (MaaS) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yesterday the news broke that personal files of MegaUpload’s users are at risk. Late Friday MegaUpload received a letter from the US Attorney stating the data of users could be deleted coming Thursday.
While MegaUpload’s legal team is negotiating with the US authorities find a solution, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched a campaign to assess the scope of the issue.
A few minutes ago the MegaRetrieval website went live. On the site MegaUpload users can contact the EFF for legal help to retrieve their personal files — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Customers hosted at Primus Telecom’s Melbourne datacentre experienced outages this morning, with several sites forced offline.
Among those confirmed to be affected were security software vendor AVG and Mirvac’s chain of sites, including Mirvac Hotels.
These sites were not responding, or were experiencing intermittent delays, from 9.45am AEDST this morning. The outage has resulted in several other sites on the same hosting service being taken offline, but Primus has not indicated the scale of the outage, or how many were affected.
Initial customer reports indicated that the problem was caused by a routing issue with Primus’ upstream providers, but the company later clarified that some of its core switches were having issues. Most outages were resolved almost immediately, and all issues were resolved by 11.35am, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry’s mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning.
We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products,
said Hed.
We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy.
Hed explained that Rovio sees it as futile
to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans.
When that’s not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead. BREIN is now expected to take the ISPs to court — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics.
The company at the centre of the allegations, Adscend Media, denies the charges and said it will fight them vigorously. According to the office of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, the company paid and encouraged scammers to design Facebook pages to bait users into visiting Websites that pay the company. The bait pages would appear in posts that seem to originate from a person’s Facebook friends and offer visitors an opportunity to view “provocative” content in exchange for clicking the ‘like’ button on the Facebook page.
By clicking like
, the user alerts their Facebook friends to the page. From there, the user was directed to complete one of several online surveys and provide information such as their age. Oftentimes, the promised content did not exist, and the duped user was directed off Facebook through a series of prompts that took them to unrelated Websites. In some cases, clickjacking was used to activate the like
function and spread spam, according to the state’s suit — via redwolf.newsvine.com
My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates.
I often criticise companies on this blog so I want to take a moment to recognise Twitter for a model policy and explain why these should be the kind of practices that I hope other Internet companies follow.
In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can. (It also fits with its business model so I am not going to argue they are uniquely angelic, but Twitter does have a good track record. Twitter was the only company which first fought the US government to protect user information in the Wikileaks case, and then informed the users when it lost the fight. In fact, Twitter’s transparency is the only reason we even know of this; other companies, it appears, silently caved and complied.)
Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform as broadly as possible while making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content, either tweet by tweet or more, all the while giving free-speech advocates a lot of tools to fight censorship — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twitter has announced it will begin restricting tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.
As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,
Twitter wrote in a blog post.
It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries.
Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there,
it said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.
However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.
As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.
In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s War on the Internet
event on Saturday in Melbourne (full video available online here), Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said much of the thinking around the data retention proposal had been integrated into new cybercrime legislation introduced in mid-2011.
Ludlam said the proposal had been narrowed down to a degree to which most people would find reasonable
, in that law enforcement agencies could, for example, request ISPs to keep all available data on people suspected of committing major crimes such as terrorism — a technique he described as hold that person’s everything, until we tell you not to any more
.
However, the Greens Senator warned, that cybercrime legislation could mutate
into something completely different. Maybe let’s trap all the data of these categories of people,
he said, appearing to refer to the political activist community, many members of whom had gathered at the Melbourne event. Or these postcodes of people
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world’s richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.
The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.
Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.
The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,
the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs little Aussie battlers’ sequel
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water for now, but it’s worth remembering that the most controversial part of the legislation is something the Australian Government has been thinking about for years.
One of the provisions in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that raised the most amount of anger, and was also one of the first to be quickly removed, was that the US Government would be able to force US-based internet service providers (ISPs) to block overseas websites found to contain copyright-infringing material.
Outrage ensued, the provision was removed, Wikipedia blacked out and the legislation was ultimately shelved.
In Australia, the Attorney-General’s Department has reassured us that the government currently has no plans of bringing in any new SOPA-style laws, instead preferring an industry-based model for dealing with piracy.
But website blocking has been on the cards for the Australian Government for many years, in the form of the mandatory internet filter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Two years after the launch of the iPad, the tablet has a considerable footprint among business professionals — especially in Africa.
According to the results of the IDG’s latest iPad for Business Survey
, African professionals are almost twice as likely as the global average to be supplied with an iPad by their employer.
Forty-seven percent of African respondents said they own a corporate-issue iPad. This is compared to the global average of 24% — via redwolf.newsvine.com
An Australian technology startup that aims to make reporting of website faults easier and more visual for non tech-savvy people today announced an investment of $500,000 from Melbourne-based venture capital firm Starfish Ventures.
The startup, BugHerd, was created in 2011 after Melbourne co-founders Alan Downie, 35, and Matt Milosavljevic, 29, were unable to find a bug tracking product suitable for logging and managing visual website issues. Websites owners generally welcome users’ reports of faults — or bugs — so they can fix them — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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