| Home | Recent Comments | Categories |
Holland Considers Banning DRM, Legalizing Filesharing
[Quote:]
Last year the Dutch tried to tax all MP3 players, but that proposal didn’t make it into law. But not to worry, they have other brilliant ideas. Earlier this week, Dutch politicians suggested that it might be a good idea to tax Internet traffic, and use this money to compensate the music industry. This, under the condition that DRM is abandoned, and people can’t be charged for downloads. Say what?
Recently Dutch Record Companies decided to no longer use copy protection on CDs because the costs didn’t outweigh the benefits. Politicians are now looking for alternative ways to compensate the Music Industry.
Martijn van Dam, a member of one of the bigger political parties in The Netherlands said, “Taxing Internet traffic is great way to compensate the Music Industry for the loss in sales by illegal filesharing?. He added that a prerequisite would be that DRM and copy protection should be abandoned. The battle against piracy is lost according to Van Dam, he says that the Music Industry has to accept that their products will be traded over the internet.
Surprisingly, Van Dam is not alone in this. Nicolien van Vroonhoven, a politician from the leading party (CDA) in the Netherlands, also thinks that this pirate tax would be a good idea. She adds that this could only work if people can’t be charged for downloading music anymore.
The statements (Dutch source) from these leading politicians basically say that piracy should be condoned, as long as Internet traffic is taxed.
Trust politicians to find a new way to tax. I have no interest at all in downloading any music, but they’re going to tax me anyway.
Sony BMG settles FTC charges
[Quote:]
U.S. regulators said Tuesday Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to reimburse consumers up to $150 for damage to their computers for selling CDs with hidden anti-piracy software.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, which announced the settlement with the big media company, its anti-piracy software limited the devices on which music could be played to those made by Sony Corp. or Microsoft Corp. It also restricted the number of copies that could be made and monitored consumers’ listening habits to send them marketing messages.
The FTC said the software also “exposed consumers to significant security risks and was unreasonably difficult to uninstall.”
The settlement requires the company to allow consumers to exchange through the end of June the affected CDs purchased before Dec. 31, 2006, and reimburse them up to $150 to repair damage done when they tried to remove the software. It also requires Sony BMG to clearly disclose limitations on consumers’ use of music CDs, bars it from using collected information for marketing and prohibits it from installing software without consumer consent.
Malware penalty, per computer: $150
Copyright penalty, per song: $2000
Calling it “the justice system”: priceless
Rep. Cooper: White House Barred Negroponte From Saying ‘Global’ And ‘Warming’ In Same Sentence
REP. JIM COOPER (D-TN): Second, let me mention a dinner party I attended about two months ago here in Washington. The honoree was John Negroponte. He was then the director of national intelligence. He was there to receive an environmental award.
It was very interesting because in anticipation of his remarks, word slipped through the crowd he was not allowed to utter the words “global warming,? at least not in the same sentence. Apparently, he was allowed to say the word “global? in a separate sentence, and “warming? in a separate sentence, but not together. So it became a little parlor game during his remarks, to see how closely he would fit the words “global? and “warming? and not incur the wrath of the White House.
I thought this was a sad statement of the current condition of our scientific community when a very eminent statesman like John Negroponte would be so hamstrung by the administration that he would not be allowed to utter the two words in conjunction. I thought that was an indignity to Mr. Negroponte and a sad comment on the level of the Bush administration to so hamstring its talented and capable appointees.
Gates Crash!
Woman jailed after reporting rape
[Quote:]
A woman who told police she had been raped was jailed for two days after officers found an old warrant accusing her of failing to pay restitution for a 2003 theft arrest.
While she was behind bars, according to the college student’s attorney, a jail worker refused to give her a second dose of the morning-after contraceptive pill because of the worker’s religious convictions.
The 21-year-old woman was released Monday only after attorney Vic Moore reported her plight to the local media.
“Shocked. Stunned. Outraged. I don’t have words to describe it,” Moore said. “She is not a victim of any one person. She is a victim of the system. There’s just got to be some humanity involved when it’s a victim of rape.”
Moore said the woman was not allowed to take the second emergency contraceptive pill until Monday afternoon, a day late, after reporters called police and jail officials.
Cartoons
Milk meets Coffee
More photo’s here.
Gotcha!
Apple pays sites’ legal fees in free speech victory
[Quote:]
The Mac News Network is reporting that Apple has declined to to appeal its loss in last year’s Apple v. Does decision. MacNN, which is affiliated with Apple Insider, one of the sites targeted by Apple, says that Apple has paid nearly $700,000 to cover the sites’ legal fees.
As previously reported here at Ars, last summer’s decision by a California appeals court was a major victory for free speech online. Apple had asked the courts to compel two Mac rumor sites, Apple Insider and O’Grady’s PowerPage, to disclose the names of their sources for a series of stories on an an unreleased Apple audio device. In its lawsuit, Apple argued that amateur websites are not eligible for the legal protections afforded to professional journalists under the First Amendment and California’s shield law. But the court rejected this argument, ruling that “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” and that the the rumor sites appear “conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently.”
In an email interview with MacNN, EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote that like their print counterparts, online journalists “must be able to promise confidentiality in order to maintain the free flow of information. Without legal protection, informants will refuse to talk to reporters, diminishing the power of the open press that is the cornerstone of a free society.”
The court awarded the two sites more than twice their actual legal expenses in order to deter companies like Apple from harrassing journalists with lawsuits. Not only does the decision set an important precedent regarding freedom of the press online, but the financial award will also enhance EFF’s ability to defend free speech online.
Canada’s Good Example
[Quote:]
Canada set an important example of decency when it offered a formal apology and compensation worth millions of dollars to a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was a victim of President Bush’s use of open-ended detention, summary deportation and even torture in the name of fighting terrorism.
Last week’s announcement by Prime Minister Stephen Harper came more than four years after the nightmare began for the Canadian, Maher Arar, a 36-year-old software engineer. On his way back from a family vacation, he was detained by U.S. officials at Kennedy Airport on the basis of unsubstantiated information from the Canadian police. After being held in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and interrogated without proper access to legal counsel, he was sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned for nearly a year and tortured.
It was all part of a legally and morally unsupportable practice known as extraordinary rendition, the deportation of terrorism suspects to countries where the regimes are known to use torture and to disdain basic human rights protections.
Four months ago, a Canadian government panel concluded that Mr. Arar had never had a terrorism connection, and that Americans had misled Canada about their plans for him. The Bush administration stonewalled the inquiry. It has responded to a new Canadian request to remove Mr. Arar from a United States security watch list by rudely telling Canada, its democratic northern neighbor and strategic ally, to mind its own business.
Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation
[Quote:]
President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.
It’s all about giving business a free hand:
Business groups welcomed the executive order, saying it had the potential to reduce what they saw as the burden of federal regulations. This burden is of great concern to many groups, including small businesses, that have given strong political and financial backing to Mr. Bush.
And ignoring experts in the field:
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said: “The executive order allows the political staff at the White House to dictate decisions on health and safety issues, even if the government’s own impartial experts disagree. This is a terrible way to govern, but great news for special interests.?
Cartoons
Bathroom
Duck!
Password checker
Test the strength of your password here.
“Password1″
Nice, strong, easy to remember.
Just trying to help…
It’s nice to see Microsoft doing everything it can to help out the hacker/virus/malware community. I mean, if not Microsoft, who else?
Well, actually Password1 fullfills all the criteria made up by security folks
Would be better if an AI and a complete set of dictionaries would be loaded into the system, so it would not give the strong rating to Jelszo1 for example.Why do we think that the computer should absolutely save us from our own stupidity?
The algorithm only checks the recommended rules: capital letter, number small letter in the password.
You can’t expect it to actually check the meaning, usage frequency and such of everysingle word it meets.actually if I write iwasborninbudapest that is a weak password. Even budapestenszulettem is a weak password.
http://www.securitystats.com/tools/password.php will rate Password1 a strong password
https://cuweblogin2.cit.cornell.edu/cuwl-cgi/passCheck2.cgi will rate everything as not strong unless you use *!_ or such.
But it checks the dictionary at least, though I could pass a handfull of dictionary words through it - like megyer, mogyoró and so on. And 1975_majus_24 is a strong password for the site.These stuff can help you. But if you really are that stupid so you woulduse Password1 then nothing can help you.
And hackers don’t really break your password. They ask for it, and you give it to them. For a piece of chocolate.
‘There is no war on terror’
[Quote:]
The director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, put himself at odds with the home secretary and Downing Street last night by denying that Britain is caught up in a “war on terror” and calling for a “culture of legislative restraint” in passing laws to deal with terrorism.
Sir Ken warned of the pernicious risk that a “fear-driven and inappropriate” response to the threat could lead Britain to abandon respect for fair trials and the due process of law.
[..]
He said: “London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ’soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.
“The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.”
Sir Ken, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, told members of the Criminal Bar Association it should be an article of faith that crimes of terrorism are dealt with by criminal justice and that a “culture of legislative restraint in the area of terrorist crime is central to the existence of an efficient and human rights compatible process”.
He said: “We wouldn’t get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions. On the contrary, it is obvious that the process of winning convictions ought to be in keeping with a consensual rule of law and not detached from it. Otherwise we sacrifice fundamental values critical to the maintenance of the rule of law - upon which everything else depends.”
Here, here. First bit of common sense I’ve heard in a while. Would be nice if Blair and Bush could get the message though.
Microsoft threatens licence dodgers
[Quote:]
Microsoft will take a new approach toward mid-size companies it suspects of using unlicensed software, sending a series of letters culminating in a threat of legal action from the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a company official said today.
By involving the BSA, which is an advocate for copyright and intellectual property issues, Microsoft is hoping to “spark off the engagement” with its customers, said Ram Dhaliwal, Microsoft’s licensing programs manager in the UK.
“If they are using our software, we are simply going to ask them to pay for it,” said Dhaliwal, whose group runs the company’s Software Asset Management (SAM) programme.
In the past, Microsoft contacted companies by phone or email and asked to come in and audit their software. Microsoft contends companies have an incentive to have legally licensed software, and its audit and asset management teams also can look for ways the company can save money, he said.
It all sounds very reasonable until you read this story and see what the BSA considers “proof”:
[Quote:]
Many clients are dismayed to discover what does and does not constitute valid proof of purchase according to the BSA.Not Considered Valid Proof
- Copies of Checks to Software Vendors
- Dated Purchase Orders
- Undated Software Licenses
- Credit Card Statements Evidencing Software Purchases
- Certificates of Authenticity
- Media, Manuals, or Key-Codes
- Invoices Bearing and Entity Name Other than the Entity Named in the BSA’s Initial Letter
Valid Proof of Purchase
- Dated Invoices in the Name of the Audited Entity
- Soft Records (online account statements) from Recognized Resellers
- Signed and Dated License Agreements
- Soft Records from BSA Member’s such as Microsoft Licensing Statements
- Cash Register Receipts for Retail Sales where Product, Version, Quantity and Price Paid are Included.
Most people don’t add the costs of maintaining these records to the costs of using Windows, and companies in the “up to 250 seats” category are a notoriously easy target for these audits, even if they’ve bought every single piece of software they use. It’s much better to go with Open Source if you can, and tell the BSA to go stuff itself. It would be impossible to run a business if every industry sector behaved in the same way as the BSA.
*knock knock*
“Hello?”
“We’re from the Business Furniture Alliance, representing Office World, Staples, and several other major furniture retailers. According to our clients’ records, you haven’t purchased enough office desks to run a business of this size. We suspect you’ve been stealing your office furniture from one of our clients.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but we got a local carpenter to run up some desks for us…”
“A likely tale. We’re going to have to audit your furniture. I hope you have a few days free.”
“Kindly bugger off and d– hang on, who’s that?”
“Good morning sir or madam, I’m from the Business Carpeting Alliance. Our records show that…”
Priceline, Travelocity, and Cingular fined for using adware
[Quote:]
Priceline, Travelocity, and Cingular, three high-profile companies that advertised through nuisance adware programs have agreed to pay fines and reform their practices, according to the New York Attorney General.
“Advertisers will now be held responsible when their ads end up on consumers’ computers without full notice and consent,? Andrew Cuomo said. “Advertisers can no longer insulate themselves from liability by turning a blind eye to how their advertisements are delivered, or by placing ads through intermediaries, such as media buyers. New Yorkers have suffered enough with unwanted adware programs and this agreement goes a long way toward clamping down on this odious practice.?
In a lawsuit filed in April 2006, the Attorney General alleged that Direct Revenue installed adware programs onto millions of computers worldwide that delivered a steady stream of advertisements, monitored web sites visited by users, and collected data typed into web forms — without adequate notice or the consent of consumers.
World scientists meet to finish up long-awaited global warming report
[Quote:]
Scientists from around the world gathered in Paris on Monday to finalise an authoritative report on climate change, expected to be a grim warning of rising temperatures and sea levels worldwide.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to unveil its latest assessment of the environmental threat posed by global warming on Friday.
As the panel meets, the planet is the warmest it has been in thousands of years - if not more - and international concern over what to do about it has grown.
Early drafts of the document look rosier than the last report, in 2001, foreseeing smaller sea level rises than previously predicted.
But many top scientists reject the new figures, saying they are not new enough, as they do not include the recent melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations - Greenland and Antarctica.
Warp drive
« Older Entries
Where was this picture taken?
Source: http://factum.blogspot.com/2007/01/bathroom-business.html