Archive for 2012/04/30

High Court has ruled that several UK ISPs including Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must block The Pirate Bay website

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Blocking, Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Filtering, Illegal File Sharing, Jurisprudence, Litigation, Stats / reports

This means that millions of Internet users will be prevented from accessing the popular BitTorrent site in the weeks to come. The Pirate Bay say they aren’t concerned by yet another court-ordered blockade, and point out that there are plenty of ways to circumvent such censorship

More:
http://torrentfreak.com/uk-isps-must-censor-the-pirates-bay-high-court-rules-120430/

See also:

In November 2011, the BPI asked the group of ISPs to voluntarily block access to the site. The request followed a court order to block Newzbin 2, a site also offering links to download pirated material. The ISPs said they would not block the site unless a court order was made, as is now the case. Virgin Media told the BBC it will now comply with the request, but warned such measures are, in the long term, only part of the solution.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17894176

The PirateBay is currently the 39th most popular website in the United Kingdom:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;1/GB

Rick Falkvinge: A fat bank account can no longer buy belief in a story

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Copyright, Education / Awareness

But it can buy lots of authors

http://torrentfreak.com/the-net-vs-the-power-of-narratives-120429/

The HDMI cable ripoff and why retail is really dying

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/the-hdmi-cable-ripoff-and-why-retail-is-really-dying/533

Google’s harvesting of emails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in Australia and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Education / Awareness, Google, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reports

…but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

The full version [PDF/4.5MB] draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal emails and web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/google-aware-of-data-scoop-20120429-1xsxx.html

The European Court of Justice has built up a wine collection of almost 4,000 bottles worth at least €70,000 but denies claims judges are spending public money on their favourite vintages

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

After two months of gentle and then less gentle prompting, the court agrees to release further details. There are 3,729 bottles currently in the cellar, of which 2,920 are red and 809 are white. The average red was purchased at a price of €21.82, while the average white was worth almost €12. The entire collection, therefore, has a price tag of around €70,000, though some of the bottles are sure to have increased in value over time. Purchases are made via tender once a year. On one recent occasion, only white wine was required as the cellar was considered too heavy in reds. The court spends, on average, around €15,000 a year on wine.

Can we see the wine list? Unfortunately not. Making the list public, according to the court, is not possible as it would in some way compromise the tender process.

More:
http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/1844/the-truth-about-the-eu-courts-70000-wine-cellar

Power really does corrupt as scientists claim it’s as addictive as cocaine

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports

Power has almost identical effects to cocaine and too much of it can produce too much dopamine leading to more negative effects such as arrogance and impatience.

The claims by Dr Ian Robertson may go some way to explain the outlandish and impulsive behaviour of city fatcats, tycoons and celebrities.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph today, he said: ‘Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly.

‘This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power.

‘Conversely, demotion in a hierarchy decreases dopamine levels, increases stress and reduces cognitive function.’

More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2136547/Power-really-does-corrupt-scientists-claim-addictive-cocaine.html

Consumers around the world want a hassle-free way to record free, over-the-air television and play it back on any Internet-connected device. But every time a company creates such a service, it gets sued by copyright holders

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Education / Awareness, Litigation

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/overseas-courts-no-more-friendly-to-tv-streaming-than-us-ones.ars

Why bandwidth caps could be a threat to competition

Posted: 2012/04/30 in Bandwidth Management, Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution

Next article should address the following question: why are internet users still not allowed to upload at a decent speed?

Network providers insist that they are simply trying to cope with rapidly rising demand for bandwidth. But critics charge that the trend toward bandwidth caps is driven by more sinister motives, especially in the residential broadband market. In this story we’ll examine the economics of metering and try to explain why it has suddenly come back into vogue.

One of the first online services to offer a flat-rate option was AT&T’s WorldNet. Tom Evslin, who was running WorldNet at the time, reports that customers would typically switch to the $19.95 flat-rate option when their monthly charges reached about $12 per month. And surprisingly, “their usage (as measured by time online) did not increase, so they were simply paying extra to satisfy their preference.” The flat-rate plan was a win-win deal for both AT&T and its customers.

More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/why-we-should-worry-about-the-decline-of-the-unmetered-internet.ars