The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use [Google translation]. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid’s users don’t have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,
Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it
— via Slashdot
It looks as though the next meeting of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum is about to descend into another heated debate about US control of key Internet systems. Although the initial purpose of this year’s summit was to cover such issues as spam, free speech and cheaper access, it appears that nations such as China, Iran, and Russia, among others, would rather discuss US control of the Internet. In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday, these nations won the right to hold an opening-day panel devoted to critical Internet resources
. While a number of countries wanting to internationalise Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it — via Slashdot
I am now the proud owner of an RFID passport, complete with a very thick page that says “do not stamp… gadgetry inside”. Apparently this will get me through customs faster, but I’ll still have to shave my beard off if I don’t want my shoes to be randomly selected for chemical swabbing yet again.
Next up, biometrics and DNA samples.
The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices. The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading. It says talks with Microsoft have not resolved fundamental concerns
about academic licensing and about Office 2007 and the Vista operating system
The BBC’s online services will be made available free of charge at thousands of wi-fi hotspots around the UK. The corporation has agreed a deal with wi-fi firm The Cloud, which operates 7,500 hotspots around the country. The news website, programme sites and downloads of TV shows via the currently Windows XP only iPlayer can be accessed freely. The BBC has also confirmed that users of Apple Mac and Linux machines will be able to use its TV catch-up service from the end of the year
The UK government considers possession of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, even though it’s available in Amazon UK, an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000 and is prosecuting a 17 year old boy, in part, for having a copy of the book. The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000. The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year. The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism
A hacker’s diversion of traffic from a California county government Web site to a porn purveyor spiraled into IT chaos yesterday after a countermeasure applied from Washington essentially deleted the ca.gov domain
Google is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers. But the company said it would probably blur people’s faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws
Burma’s bloggers are using the internet to beat censorship, and tell the world what is happening under the military junta’s veil of secrecy
Former defence minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes in the 1980s to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft. The radar on Australia’s US-made Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region — they were set up for European threats — but despite many requests, the codes were not provided, so In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves
. The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made — via Slashdot
The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyse extremist activities online
. The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating ‘anonymous’ content
with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release — via Slashdot
Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai’s police are requiring the city’s 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have your credit card number. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely
— via Slashdot
Members of The Chaser were arrested today after attempting to breach security at the APEC Leaders Conference in Sydney. Chas Licciardello and Julian Morrow were arrested, along with nine crew members (all are now free on bail), just a short distance away from the InterContinental Hotel where President Bush is staying. They had already cleared at least two police checkpoints disguised as a Canadian motorcade. No particular reason we chose Canada,
said Taylor. We just thought they’d be a country who the cops wouldn’t scrutinise too closely, and who feasibly would only have three cars in their motorcade — as opposed to the 20 or so gas guzzlers that Bush has brought with him
— via Slashdot
According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China — including Hong Kong — hosted 44.8 percent of the world’s infected sites in August 2007. The United States ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of Web sites that contain malicious code. The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said that it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August
After recent setbacks in the RIAA’s lawsuits, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has decided to try a different approach in Australia — they want ISPs to do their dirty work for them. Australian ISPs, though, have soundly rejected calls from AFACT to slow down or terminate user accounts that AFACT has determined are being used to distribute copyrighted works. Telstra had this to say: We do not believe it is up to the ISPs to be judge, jury and executioner in relation to the issue when the content owners have any number of legal avenues to pursue infringements
— via Slashdot
Protesters are accusing police of using undercover agents to provoke violent confrontations at the North American leaders’ summit in Montebello, Quebec. Such accusations have been made before after similar demonstrations but this time the alleged agents provocateurs
have been caught on camera. A video, posted on YouTube, shows three young men, their faces masked by bandannas, mingling Monday with protesters in front of a line of police in riot gear. At least one of the masked men is holding a rock in his hand. Late Tuesday, photographs taken by another protester surfaced, showing the trio lying prone on the ground. The photos show the soles of their boots adorned by yellow triangles. A police officer kneeling beside the men has an identical yellow triangle on the sole of his boot. Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protests — via Boing Boing
Wal-Mart has hopped on the DRM-free bandwagon with the announcement that it will be participating in Universal’s DRM-free sales pilot. The quality looks good: 256Kbps MP3 for 94 cents apiece, but customers are likely to be turned off by the retail chain’s continued censorship — via Slashdot
Much of Sydney’s CBD as it appears in the satellite images on Google Maps Australia has been fuzzed out, just weeks before the APEC summit. Google says the imagery was downgraded as a result of a commercial issue
with a supplier, but the move has aroused speculation it was done at the request of police in order to minimise the risk of a terrorist attack during the September summit, where Sydney will play host to 21 world leaders including Bush
ISPs will be forced to filter web content at the request of parents, under a $189 million Federal Government crackdown on online bad language, pornography and child sex predators. The Prime Minister, John Howard, said that the Government would increase funding for the federal police online child sex exploitation team by $40 million, helping investigators to track those who prey on children through chat rooms and sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In a separate development, convicted sex offenders in NSW will have to register their email address with police as part of State Government efforts to stop them using the internet to prey on children
Federal law enforcement agents raided US Senator Ted Stevens’ Alaska home in Girdwood, hauling off undisclosed items from inside and taking extensive pictures and video. Officials wouldn’t say what they were looking for or what they found.All I can say is that agents from the FBI and IRS are currently conducting a search at that residence,
Dave Heller, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Anchorage office
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