Archive for 2012/04/22

Mediafire Starts Blocking FilesTube Search Traffic. Index Tells The Tale

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Blocking, Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Filtering, Stats / reports

But, as information about legal and illegal information “wants to be free”, Filestube has already communicated a workaround

With millions of daily visitors FilesTube is among the most frequently visited websites on the Internet.

Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated site is the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers such as Hotfile, 4Shared and Mediafire. FilesTube refers a significant amount of traffic to these sites, but not all of them are very happy about it.

In fact, Mediafire don’t want to be indexed at all, and a few hours ago took action to block all incoming traffic from FilesTube.

“As a private service MediaFire was never designed to be indexed which is why we don’t have an index,” Mediafire co-founder Tom Langridge explains to TorrentFreak.

More:
http://torrentfreak.com/mediafire-starts-blocking-filestube-links-120422/

RapidShare Overtures Snubbed, “Must Do Better” Say Labels

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, File Sharing, Illegal File Sharing, Stats / reports

This week, file-hosting service RapidShare published an anti-piracy manifesto with guidelines on how cyberlocker and cloud hosting sites should conduct their business going forward. But the proposals from the Swiss-based service, which go far beyond their requirements under the law, received a lukewarm reception from rightsholders who say they don’t go far enough. RapidShare believes that they do, and that rightsholders should focus on sites that deliberately generate revenue from infringement.

http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-overtures-snubbed-must-do-better-say-labels-120421/

Soldier’s wife learns of his death via Facebook

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/soldiers-wife-learns-of-his-death-via-facebook/12031

101 Million USD For Telling People: “Don’t Be Evil”

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Google

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-20/google-chairman-schmidt-got-101-million-in-compensation-in-2011

Asteroid Miners Inc? Cameron backs ‘real-life Avatar’ space project

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution

Apart from Cameron, the venture managed to attract such backers as Google’s billionaire co-founder Larry Page, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and director K. Ram Shriram. There is also the chairman of Perot Systems, Ross Perot, Jr.

Last but not least, ex-Microsoft top executive Charles Simonyi is listed as both an investor and executive at Planetary Resources. In addition to being a billionaire, he is a private space explorer, who has twice bought his way to the International Space Station.

http://rt.com/news/asteroid-cameron-space-resources-630/

How governments and utilities are blindly merging the power grid with the Internet, and effectively without any protection, is insanity at its finest

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Future Developments?, Public Policy, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution

There is not a power meter or device on the grid that is protected from hacking, if not already infected with some sort of Trojan horse than can cause it to be shut down, damaged or completely annihilated.

“Unless we wake up and realize what we’re doing, there is 100% certainty of total catastrophic failure of the entire power infrastructure within 3 years,” said Chalk.

“This could actually be worse than a nuclear war, because it would happen everywhere.”

http://www.infowars.com/100-certainty-of-total-catastrophic-failure-of-entire-power-infrastructure-within-3-years/

Aspect, along with his colleagues Jean Dalibard and Gerard Roger discovered that under certain conditions subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution

It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing

http://www.messagetoeagle.com/holograuniv.php

Researchers from Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute and Harvard University have found that greater consumption of sugar-sweetened and low-calorie sodas is associated with a higher risk of stroke

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

Conversely, consumption of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee was associated with a lower risk

Much more:
http://www.infowars.com/study-finds-soda-consumption-increases-overall-stroke-risk/

Six Reasons Why Recorded Music Should Be Free

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution

1. Record labels want too much money
2. Musicians Already Get Paid More by Touring Anyway
3. The Music Business Is Too Slow and Partially Broken
4. Grooveshark is modeled on early YouTube (the one that got sued)
5. Grooveshark complies with takedown notices
6. Grooveshark’s Ad Platform Can Boost an Unknown Band to 500K Views in Three Weeks

And there you have it: the six reasons Grooveshark co-founder and CEO Sam Tarantino thinks music should be free.

In the world he envisions, Grooveshark would make perfect sense – a point he hopes to prove using reason number six.

Whether that’s the world we actually live in is a different matter entirely.

Much more:
http://gizmodo.com/5903937/six-reasons-why-recorded-music-should-be-free

Facebook Ends the Careers of an Entire Generation of Future Politicians

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

http://gizmodo.com/5904022/facebook-ends-the-careers-of-an-entire-generation-of-future-politicians

Two studies by psychologists from the University of Surrey show that men who flirt at work don’t do it with romantic intentions, but out of pure boredom. It also seems that they are emotional dimwits

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

http://gizmodo.com/5904062/male-office-flirters-do-it-out-of-boredom-and-not-for-sex++what

TeamViewer found that women were far more emphatic than men when it came to such concepts as organization, speed, respectfulness, fairness, decisiveness, and, well, brains

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution

Which might lead some HR directors, CFOs, and CEOs to wonder: “Why on earth should we hire men ever again?”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57418385-71/why-women-prefer-online-meetings/

Meet the ‘Mann’ who registered 14,962 domains in 24 hours

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

“I’m just really greedy,” said Mann, a man no one would describe as modest. “I want to own the world.”

Mann went on to become one of the most aggressive domain speculators in a world that was — and still largely is — the digital Wild West. In the early years, registering good names wasn’t that hard, and some people made many, many millions doing just that.

But as time went on, it became far more difficult. The shrewdest (or craftiest) of the so-called domainers went to great lengths to bag their URL prey. They wrote scripts to pound on the registrars, working in the dark of night to “catch” names the nanosecond they expired, or “dropped.” (The king of the “drop catchers” was a mysterious man named Yun Ye, who built a portfolio he sold to the now-public Marchex in 2005 for $164 million.)

Much more:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57418250-93/meet-the-mann-who-registered-14962-domains-in-24-hours/

If your computer is infected with the DNSChanger virus, your summertime Internet activities will be seriously curtailed

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement

The FBI is warning that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their Internet connections come July, unless they take steps to diagnose and disinfect their computers

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57418276-83/web-could-vanish-for-hordes-of-people-in-july-fbi-warns/

Instagram follows Tumblr, Pinterest; bans self-harm posts

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Filtering

Anybody care to start a discussion about censorship and the slippery slope? Or is that only relevant in relation to (child) porn and pirated files?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57418395-93/instagram-follows-tumblr-pinterest-bans-self-harm-posts/

German magazine says intellectuals rejecting Pirate Party

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, File Sharing, Illegal File Sharing, Public Policy, Stats / reports

Not really surprising considering the fact that some friends of these pirates do not particularly like intellectuals

Take the case of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, an award-winning 82-year-old essayist, poet and author, who has been at the forefront of many German political movements in recent decades.

“Political? No, politically there’s nothing there,” he “growled over the telephone,” in his interview with Der Spiegel. “And certainly nothing revolutionary. It’s actually surprisingly bourgeois. Like our grandparents, who were happy when they could get something for free.”

More:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/german-magazine-says-intellectuals-rejecting-pirate-party.ars

French presidential candidate François Hollande: “[Hadopi] has shown its ineffectiveness and its injustice”

Posted: 2012/04/22 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Legislation, Public Policy, Stats / reports, Three Strikes

“Further, I don’t consider piracy to be a minor problem: that’s why I’m proposing to replace Hadopi by voting on a law based on Act 2 of the Cultural Exception which will guarantee financing of French cinema and protection of authors’ rights. I want to break with destructive simplism that has not solved anything and which has uselessly contributed to separating artists from their audience. There is no simple solution, but a new model to be invented.”

Much more:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/french-presidential-candidate-against-three-strikes-law-kinda-sorta.ars