Condemning a $US2 million fine meted out to a Minnesota woman for illegally downloading music over the internet as monstrous and shocking
, a judge has slashed the penalty to $US54,000 ($59,800). US District Court Michael Davis said the fine imposed by a jury on Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from the town of Brainerd, veered into the realm of gross injustice
. In a high-profile music piracy case, Thomas-Rasset was found liable in June of violating music copyrights for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network to download 24 songs. A jury ordered her to pay $US1.92 million or $US80,000 per song to six record companies: Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros Records and UMG Recordings. The judge slashed the fine to $US54,000, or $US2250 per recording, and complained in his ruling on Friday, a copy of which was obtained by AFP on Monday, that he was constrained from reducing it even further
Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defence Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible
Australians are paying the highest prices in the world for text messages, which cost the mobile networks practically nothing but earn them millions in profit each year. Australians are expected to send 20 billion texts this year, more than 20 per cent higher than last year. While the cost of mobile phone calls has declined in the past five years, the standard flat rate for a text message at Telstra and Optus has remained unchanged at 25 cents. At Vodafone, a text is 28 cents. According to research done for Fairfax newspapers, that is more than 10 times what it costs in many parts of Asia and almost a third higher than in Europe and Canada
Last year, Radiohead expressed their growing discomfort with record labels that abuse copyrights for their own benefit, while harassing their fans. In a recent interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said that he doesn’t believe piracy is killing the music industry, but that the industry will kill itself if it doesn’t adapt to the digital age
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will share about $US5.5bn ($6.1bn) in cash under plans revealed at the weekend to lighten their stake in the internet search giant. Under a five-year stock trading plan, Mr Page and Mr Brin, who met at Stanford University in the US in 1995 before starting Google, each intend to sell about 5 million shares. The plan would cut their combined holding from about 18 per cent to 15 per cent and reduce their voting stake from 59 per cent to about 48 per cent
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its new spam report which looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries, throughout the EU (26/27 EU Member States); and 80 million mailboxes managed. The survey analyses how e-mail service providers combat spam in their networks, and identifies the state of art in the fight against spam. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports
The BBC has been granted provisional approval for the BBC to introduce copy protection for content on the Freeview HD platform. With Freeview HD closing in on a commercial launch, focus has continued on what level of copy protection should be put in. The BBC believes that having no copy protection provides a barrier for getting content on to a platform, and believes that content makers will not be prepared to go the extra mile for Freeview HD unless they feel their intellectual property is protected
New malware is exploiting the Internet Explorer security hole used in attacks against Google and other companies. The new Trojan.Malscript!html targets web pages and APIs and suppresses warnings about malware downloads. Versions of IE6 not patched with Microsoft’s emergency update are at risk. The furor is pushing attacks into the spotlight
A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has determined that using WHOIS privacy on domains may be considered material falsification
under federal law. The defendants in US vs Kilbride (9th Cir, 2009) were convicted under the CAN-SPAM Act in a case that involved criminal charges of intentional email spamming. Enacted by the US Congress in 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act prohibits false or misleading transmission information, deceptive headers, and requires email solicitations to give an easy opt-out method and be labeled as an advertisement, including the senders physical post address. Commercial emails that use false or misleading headers, or violate other CAN-SPAM provisions, such as falsified registration information, are subject to fines of up to $11,000 for each unsolicited email sent
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser, and adds further performance improvements to the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here — via Slashdot
The FBI was so cavalier — and telecom companies so eager to help — that a verbal request or even one written on a Post-it note was enough for operators to hand over customer phone records, according to a damning report released on Wednesday by the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. The 289-page report details findings of the DOJ’s investigation into the FBI’s policies for requesting phone records from 2003 through 2006. It found that in many cases the FBI issued written requests for telephone information, saying that it had secured the proper legal authority to make such requests, even though it didn’t. Also, the report found that the FBI used far more casual methods to obtain records, including verbal requests and requests written on Post-it notes. When the FBI did use formal written requests, it did not track their use or keep copies of them, the report found
Biblical citations inscribed on US-manufactured weapon sights used by New Zealand’s troops in Afghanistan will be removed because they are inappropriate and could stoke religious tensions. The inscriptions on products from defence contractor Trijicon of Wixom, Michigan, came to light this week in the US where Army officials said Tuesday they would investigate whether the gun sights — also used by US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq — violate US procurement laws. Australia also said Thursday its military used the sights and was now assessing what to do
Ordinary cotton and polyester fabrics have been turned into batteries that retain their flexibility. The demonstration is a boost to the nascent field of wearable electronics
in which devices are integrated into clothing and textiles
Microsoft said it will issue a patch to fix the old version of its Internet Explorer browser that allowed recent attacks on Google’s network in China. The patch, due out tomorrow, addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and a small subset of corporations,
said Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager at Microsoft. Once applied, customers are protected against the known attacks that have been widely publicised
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering. Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge
This seems like a harmless tube. In fact, it was harmless: Israeli farmers used the first version to scare birds from crop fields. Then, somebody converted it into a crowd dispersion mechanism. And then, they discovered it could kill. The Thunder Generator uses mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in return generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 metres away. At that range, the weapon is absolutely harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten metres, the Thunder Generator could either cause permanent damage or kill any person
Aurochs were immortalised in prehistoric cave paintings and admired for their brute strength and elephantine
size by Julius Caesar. But despite their having gone the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth, there are plans to bring the giant animals back to life. The huge cattle with sweeping horns which once roamed the forests of Europe have not been seen for nearly 400 years. Now Italian scientists are hoping to use genetic expertise and selective breeding of modern-day wild cattle to recreate the fearsome beasts which weighed around 2,200lb and stood 6.5 feet at the shoulder. Breeds of large cattle which most closely resemble Bos primigenius, such as Highland cattle and the white Maremma breed from Italy, are being bred with each other in a technique known as back-breeding
. At the same time, scientists say they have for the first time created a map of the auroch’s genome, so that they know precisely what type of animal they are trying to replicate
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy
comes a sudden realisation of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were loaned
last year by a cabal of organisations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself. From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book lending
takes place in libraries
. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a card
. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material
CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in US exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the terrorist threat posed by radicalised Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated
. Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes. If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims. It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. Muslims and their leftist dhimmi allies
respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. But perception is not reality. The data simply does not support such a hasty conclusion. On the FBI’s official website, there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on US soil from the year 1980 all the way to 2005
A deep-sea snail shell’s ability to withstand heavy blows could inspire new generation of body armour. Crysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as the scaly-foot gastropod, was discovered in 1999 in the Kairei black smoker
field on the Central Indian Ridge, at a depth of 2420 metres
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