Ten individuals have freely and bizarrely handed over $1,000 each to movie studio Liberty Media in piracy settlements, despite the company having absolutely no idea who they are or if they did anything wrong. Now Liberty have a new amnesty and are offering BitTorrent users the chance to hand themselves in or risk being involved in 36,000 upcoming lawsuits — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Wi-Fi and mobile phone radio network speeds could double after scientists showed radio is able to send and receive over the same frequency at the same time.
The technology would overcome the problem best exemplified by pilots having to say “over” each time they take turns in talking over radio, but it could also be applied to wireless data networks, scientists at Stanford University said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Ben Sheffner, on his excellent Copyrights and Campaigns blog, outlines the story of an Australian photographer Ted Szukalski, who took a picture of a picture of a homeless man shining a woman’s shoes. Much to his understandable chagrin, the photo was later altered, though by whom seems to be unclear, to put Barack Obama’s face on the shoe shiner and Sarah Palin’s face on the woman.
This led the photographer, to file a takedown notice with a blogger, Patrick Frey of Patterico.com, to have the image removed. This despite the fact that Frey was neither the original one to alter the image and was, in fact, using it to discuss the stir the image had caused.
Frey has since refused to remove the post and has actually posted the image again in the discussion about his refusal to remove it.
This case is a classic example of a DMCA notice gone wrong. Such notices are designed to compel hosts and search engines to disable access to infringing material to keep their safe harbor, however that was not the case with this notice — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This keyboard features a mix of polished brass and aluminum in a stepped, layered, Art Deco style which was inspired loosely by the Deco design of the Chrysler Building. The name has a bit of a double meaning because in addition to the Chrysler Building being in New York and acting as an iconic symbol of the city, New Yorker
is also the name of a model of Chrysler car — via Datamancer
The threat of cyber warfare is greatly exaggerated, according to a leading security expert.
Bruce Schneier claims that emotive rhetoric around the term does not match the reality.
He warned that using sensational phrases such as cyber armageddon
only inflames the situation — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, praised the role of social networks such as Twitter in promoting freedom – at the same time as the US government was in court seeking to invade the privacy of Twitter users.
Lawyers for civil rights organisations appeared before a judge in Alexandria, Virginia, battling against a US government order to disclose the details of private Twitter accounts in the WikiLeaks row, including that of the Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, below.
The move against Twitter has turned into a constitutional clash over the protection of individual rights to privacy in the digital age — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Privacy Commissioner has cleared Vodafone of allegations that it allowed the private information of four million customers to be made public.
But Timothy Pilgrim found Vodafone did breach the Privacy Act by failing to take reasonable steps to protects customers’ data — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) and Optus have issued a muted reaction to Telstra’s plans, which were announced early this morning, to upgrade its flagship Next G mobile network to the Long Term Evolution family of fourth generation (4G) wireless technologies, pointing out they were also in trials of the standard — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new international mobile operator called Tru, which provides domestic call charges for calls made overseas, started operating on Australian shores today — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Brian Fitzpatrick, founder of Google’s Data Liberation Front, landed down under yesterday, and wasted no time getting to work preaching the need for companies to be open with customer data. Or else — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Prime Minister Julia Gillard and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key will discuss the issue of high global roaming rates for mobile phone calls between the two countries when the two meet this week — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Telstra is set to become the first Australian telecommunications provider to offer Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile network, planning an upgrade of its Next G network in select cities by the end of 2011 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Shares in eBay have jumped almost 8% after the online auction site’s Paypal unit said its revenues would double by 2013 to between $6bn (£3.7bn) and $7bn — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Late this week, I heard from several anti-spam activists who alerted me to a nice reminder that spammers don’t always win: Spammers have been promoting their rogue pharmacy sites via images uploaded to free image hosting service imageshack.com. In response, the company appears to have simply replaced those images with the above subtle warning — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Bestselling author Neil Gaiman – author of awarded science fiction and fantasy short stories, novels, comic books and more – makes a case for piracy in a recent interview with ORG Zine.
Initially Gaiman got annoyed by people who put his stuff online for free, but later he realized that it’s actually the best promotion an author can get — via redwolf.newsvine.com
After a tip from Crowdleaks.org, The Tech Herald has learned that HBGary Federal, as well as two other data intelligence firms, worked to develop a strategic plan [PDF] of attack against WikiLeaks. The plan included pressing a journalist in order to disrupt his support of the organization, cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics — via redwolf.newsvine.com
URLs are an often overlooked part of web design, yet in many ways they may be the most important aspect of your website as Gawker’s family of sites recently discovered.
Gawker recently launched a multi-site redesign that, no sooner than being unleashed on the web, failed spectacularly, leading visitors to blank pages. The culprit was a misbehaving piece of JavaScript, but when a single line of JavaScript causes your entire suite of sites to fail you no longer have websites, you have, well, nothing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Over the last few months, Google has received more than 100 copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios: most are directed at users of Google’s public Wi-Fi service but others are meant for Google employees. The MPAA is thus warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Readers offer their best tips for adding events to Google Calendar outside your time zone, expanding nested labels in Gmail, and autocompleting arguments in the Terminal — via Lifehacker
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