Caroline Criado-Perez Twitter abuse case leads to arrest

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29 July 2013
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A man has been arrested after a feminist campaigner was deluged on Twitter with abuse and threats of rape, Scotland Yard has confirmed.

The 21-year-old was detained earlier in the Manchester area on suspicion of harassment offences.

Caroline Criado-Perez faced abuse after successfully campaigning for a woman’s face to appear on UK banknotes.

Labour has complained to Twitter about what it says was an inadequate response to the abuse.

Ms Criado-Perez, who had appeared in the media to campaign for women to feature on banknotes, said the abusive tweets began the day it was announced that author Jane Austen would appear on the newly designed £10 note.

She reported them to the police after receiving about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours and said she had stumbled into a nest of men who co-ordinate attacks on women — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Court Says Broadcasters Can’t Use Copyright To Block Commercial Skipping

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27 July 2013
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In Business, Rights, Technology
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This morning there was a huge victory for common sense in the Ninth Circuit appeals court ruling in the Fox v Dish case over Dish’s AutoHopper technology. As you may recall, pretty much all the major broadcasters sued Dish a year ago, claiming that its AutoHopper technology with the PrimeTime Anytime feature — which would record the entire primetime lineup, and allow Dish customers to watch everything (starting the next day) while automatically skipping the commercials — was infringement (and breach of contract). As we noted at the time, the broadcasters’ arguments made very little sense. The basis of the argument was that skipping commercials is a form of copyright infringement. We couldn’t see how skipping commercials violated the copyright in any way at all, and while Fox pretended it won the initial ruling at the district court level, the reality was that Dish won big.

Fox immediately appealed, and Dish has won big yet again with this latest ruling, which is a huge victory for common sense. The court makes a number of important findings, nearly all of them good and sensible. To be specific, the nature of this ruling was over whether or not the broadcasters could get an injunction to block Dish from offering this technology while the case was ongoing, but the court rejected it, saying that the broadcasters did not demonstrate a likelihood of success. This means the full trial can still go forward, but the technology can still be offered during that trial. However, the fact that both the district court and the appeals court have clearly stated that they don’t see a likelihood of the broadcasters succeeding shows that the broadcasters are likely to be wasting a lot of time and money only to lose.

The key point in this case: skipping commercials is not copyright infringement. For years, Hollywood has tried to claim that skipping commercials is a form of copyright infringement. All the way back in 2002, a TV exec claimed that skipping commercials was a theft (even merely going to the bathroom during a commercial). A couple years later they even tried to get Congress to pass a law explicitly banning commercial skipping (sponsored by Orrin Hatch, of course). Without that, they’ve just been pretending that commercial skipping must be illegal. In court, the TV networks have argued that anything that hurts their business model must be illegal — via redwolf.newsvine.com

UK internet filtering plan re-energises Australian censorship crusade

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27 July 2013
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It was only a matter of time after news came out that UK internet service providers (ISPs) would begin filtering internet services of adult content by default before the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) would again ask for Australia’s internet to be filtered.

The political lobby group [consisting of three obnoxious, bigoted and racist white men], which claims to represent the Christians in Australia [they don’t] and says it has approximately 10,000 supporters [names culled from the obituary columns don’t count], has often called for freedom of speech in regards to religious groups being able to speak out against homosexuality. However, it has long backed broad censoring of the internet since 2007, when the Rudd and Gillard governments had planned on introducing a mandatory ISP-level internet filter into Australia.

In 2008, then-ACL managing director Jim Wallace described the filter as vital to protect society’s most vulnerable.

Obviously, the internet industry is going to continue to fight this important initiative, but the interests of children must be placed first, he said.

Claims the government will impose China-style curbing of free speech are ridiculous, given Australia’s robust parliamentary democracy, something China does not have, Wallace said in another release.

The ACL didn’t want consumers to be able to make a choice on whether the filter should be on or off, as is the case with the UK scheme. In 2010, on the question of whether a software-based filter would be better, the organisation said that ISP-level filtering would be more effective for protecting the community as a whole — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson

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26 July 2013
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Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speak — more what you would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the genre-vanquishing hero he has become since the publication of his first novel, the hallucinatory hacker thriller Neuromancer, in 1984. Gibson resists being called a visionary, yet his nine novels constitute as subtle and clarifying a meditation on the transformation of culture by technology as has been written since the beginning of what we now know to call the information age. Neuromancer, famously, gave us the term ­cyberspace and the vision of the Internet as a lawless, spellbinding realm. And, with its two sequels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), it helped establish the cultural figure of the computer hacker as cowboy hero. In his Bridge series — Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), each of which unfolds in a Bay Bridge shantytown improvised ­after a devastating Pacific earthquake transforms much of San Francisco — he planted potted futures of celebrity journalism, reality television, and nanotechnology, each prescient and persuasive and altogether weird.

Neuromancer and its two sequels were set in distant decades and contrived to dazzle the reader with strangeness, but the Bridge novels are set in the near future — so near they read like alternate history, Gibson says, with evident pride. With his next books, he began to write about the present-day, or more precisely, the recent past: each of the three novels in the series is set in the year before it was written. He started with 11 September 2001.

Pattern Recognition was the first of that series. It has been called an eerie vision of our time by The New Yorker, one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century, by The Washington Post Book World, and, by The Economist, probably the best exploration yet of the function and power of product branding and advertising in the age of globalisation. The Pattern Recognition books are also the first since Mona Lisa Overdrive in which Gibson’s characters speak of cyberspace, and they speak of it elegiacally. I saw it go from the yellow legal pad to the Oxford English Dictionary, he tells me. But cyberspace is everywhere now, having everted and colonised the world. It starts to sound kind of ridiculous to speak of cyberspace as being somewhere else — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Design, History

Einstein Tower / Erich Mendelsohn

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26 July 2013
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The Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany, designed by the German architect Erich Mendelsohn, is one of the best-known examples of German expressionist architecture. Designed as an amorphic structure of reinforced concrete, Mendelsohn wanted the tower to represent as well as facilitate the study of Einstein’s radical theory of relativity — a groundbreaking theorem of motion, light and space — via ArchDaily

Gang tattoo leads to a murder conviction

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25 July 2013
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The process was routine. LA County Sheriff’s homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was flipping through snapshots of tattooed gang members.

Then one caught his attention.

Inked on the pudgy chest of a young Pico Rivera gangster who had been picked up and released on a minor offence was the scene of a 2004 liquor store slaying that had stumped Lloyd for more than four years.

Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.

As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias Chopper was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.

Lloyd’s discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia’s arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff’s detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Former primary school teacher David Kramer jailed for sexually assaulting students at Yeshiva College

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24 July 2013
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A former teacher at a Jewish primary school in Melbourne has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail for sexually assaulting four students.

David Kramer, 52, pleaded guilty to five charges of indecent assault and one of an indecent act with a child under 16.

The offences were committed against four boys aged between 10 and 11 at the Yeshivah College in St Kilda East between 1989 and 1992 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google Reader replacement Old Reader crashes

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24 July 2013
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The Darwinian derby to determine which RSS-reading service would replace Google Reader as the world’s dominant feed-wrangler may just have produced its first extinction event, after theoldreader.com choked on its recently-enlarged database and crashed.

The Old Reader’s schtick is that it looks and behaves pretty much exactly like Google Reader, which made it a nice alternative for refugees.

As the graphs below (taken from the service’s blog) show, user numbers have surged from around 10,000 in March to over 375,000 today.

Google Reader replacement Old Reader crashes

That 5 July post also says the outfit uses … this amazingly cheap but somewhat unreliable hosting provider that has led to some issues with our database servers and outages.

Old Reader seems to have decided to do something about that, but the something has failed — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Belarus internet infested with spammers

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24 July 2013
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Almost 30% of all net addresses in Belarus are blocked by anti-spam firms because of the amount of junk mail passing through them, says a report.

East European nations top the list of countries with the largest percentage of blacklisted net addresses, said security firm Cloudmark.

It said Belarus had become popular among spammers as other nations cracked down on junk-mail senders.

The US was still the single biggest source of spam, it said,

Belarus (27.4%), Romania (22.3%) and Russia (3%) filled the top three slots of a list of nations that have IP addresses known to be sources of spam, said Cloudmark researcher Andrew Conway.

Now, he said, data traffic from just over three million Belarusian IP addresses was being blocked in an attempt to stem the flood of junk mail passing through them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Voting for Kevin Rudd makes me sick, but here’s why I’ll do it anyway

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24 July 2013
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On the weekend, I shivered in the rain with a thousand other Melbournians to protest Kevin Rudd’s new plan to dump refugees boat-bound for Australia onto Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea is still struggling to fight the consequences of colonialism; corruption and poverty have created conditions in which minorities have to face ongoing violence and hardship; its own government is struggling to prosecute people who torture women for witchcraft. The Australian government’s own travel advisory website cautions Australians that sexual assaults, including gang rapes targeting foreigners, can occur.

And so on election day, I shall be one of many who have Rudd’s moral betrayal in mind while their hand prepares to stab a first preference indication on their ballot paper. In my case, that 1 will be for the Greens — a vote executed, this time, with slightly more force than that with which Van Helsing stakes Dracula in a Hammer Horror movie.

Bizarrely, the Greens refugee policies are currently the most traditionally conservative of those on offer from the major parties in this election. They demand Australia simply accord to the UN refugee convention this country signed in 1951; to end offshore processing, meet humanitarian obligations and provide sanctuary to those fleeing persecution. Their policies seek to obey the rule of international law, and are founded on notions of family integrity and community inclusion.

Alternatively, the Rudd government’s radical, sudden, forced resettlement of vulnerable people has made me so angry I shall additionally preference the Australian Magical Moonbeam party, The Coalition for People Who Look Like Cats or the Australians For Putting Melons in Their Pants party — if their refugee policies are at all critical of Labor’s own. Such are both the promptings of my conscience, and the moral luxury of preferential voting.

But the curse of any voting system is that no matter who you vote for, someone has to get elected. And voting Greens hoping that their leader Christine Milne will be prime minister is comparable to convincing yourself that you’ve meaningfully moved on from a terrible high-school boyfriend because you’ve scribbled I HEART JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE!!! onto your maths textbook — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Faster Than the Speed of Light?

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23 July 2013
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Harold G White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.

He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer. So sensitive is their measuring equipment that it was picking up myriad earthly vibrations, including people walking nearby. So they recently moved into this lab, which floats atop a system of underground pneumatic piers, freeing it from seismic disturbances.

The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possibles — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Calls widen for GCSB law probe

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23 July 2013
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The Privacy Commission has joined calls for further investigation into proposed new spying powers.

Commissioner Marie Shroff says the Law Commission should be asked to examine legislation and oversight of intelligence agencies.

The Government is proposing the Government Communications Security Bureau Amendment Bill to make it legal for the agency to spy on New Zealanders on behalf of other law enforcement bodies.

It says it is necessary to clarify the law after the GCSB was found to be illegally intercepting communications.

But the bill has met opposition, including from the Law Society and the Human Rights Commission — via redwolf.newsvine.com

New Zealand Government About To Legalise Spying On NZ Citizens

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23 July 2013
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After admitting they have illegally spied on NZ citizens or residents 88 times (PDF) since 2003, the government, in a stunning example of arse covering, is about to grant the GCSB the right to intercept the communications of New Zealanders in its role as the national cyber security agency, rather than examine the role the GCSB should play and then look at the laws. There has been strong criticism from many avenues. The bill is being opposed by Labour and the Greens, but it looks like National now have the numbers to get this passed. Of course, the front page story is all about the royal baby, with this huge erosion of privacy relegated to a small article near the bottom of the front page. Three cheers, the monarchy is secure, never mind the rights of the people. More bread and circuses anyone? — via Slashdot

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