“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

― Malcolm X

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On Saturday, after extending his life for years using an immunotherapy of his own design, Canadian-born researcher Ralph Steinman died of pancreatic cancer.

Three days later, Steinman was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine.

Steinman shares the $1.5 million award with American Bruce Beutler and French biologist Jules Hoffman, for their work on the body’s immune system, which has led to new vaccines and cancer treatments.

But Steinman may not get to keep the prize. Nobel Prizes are not usually given out posthumously, and Nobel committee member Goran Hansson said the Nobel committee had not known Steinman was dead when he was chosen. The committe is now looking through its regulations to decide whether to rescind it.

Oh, fuck off – let the guy keep it!

Update:

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The Nobel Foundation said on Monday a decision to award the 2011 Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology to Canadian scientist Ralph Steinman would remain unchanged despite his death.

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Unconcerned about the insidious impact of Digital Rights Management? You may want to think again when you hear about the many Apple TV owners who found they couldn’t play legitimately acquired movies this weekend.

There you are, you’ve paid for a film through iTunes. You own it. But you can’t play it.

Many Apple TV owners are blaming an outage of Apple’s DRM server, seemingly a result of the company’s data centre re-jiggery pokery ahead of the imminent roll-out of its iCloud online service.

It may also be related to the roll-out of the Apple TV 2 to Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which is expected to take place this week too.

Apple’s support boards are filling up with complaints from punters that their boxes are asking for iTunes passwords all over again. Key in the password, in order to authorise the device for iTunes content playback, and movies still don’t play.

DRM assumes that everybody is a thief, and you need to prove the opposite to be allowed to use the content.

Why on Earth would you do business with a company whose basic assumption is that you’re trying to steal their stuff? Hollywood can go kiss my ass.

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When the German politician Siegfried Kauder introduced a two-strikes model to beat online piracy a few days ago, his own actions with regard to copyright were weighed carefully.

It didn’t take long before people spotted Kauder’s first infringement on his personal website, which was quickly followed by another one.

In what has now been dubbed Kaudergate, the pro-copyright politician was hosting at least two photos on his website which were taken from a photo sharing site without permission (1, 2).

When blogs and news sites picked up this ‘mistake’ the photos were quickly removed, but by then it was already too late.

Confronted with the blatant copyright infringements, Kauder tried to turn the tables in an attempt to use his failure to support his plans. He told the German news outlet Der Spiegel that this is a perfect example of how effective a two-strikes policy would be.

“I’m grateful that I got the opportunity to show how the warning model works. The use of the two copyright-protected photographs was brought to my attention. The photos were then removed, so the warning model works,” he stated.

An interesting attempt at spinning things around, if it weren’t for the fact that the copyrighted photos are still hosted on the server of Kauder’s website. So even after being outed by hundreds of blogs and the mainstream press two days ago, the politician – who is also a lawyer – continues to infringe copyrights (1, 2).

Even worse, Kauder claimed in the press that he had somehow “licensed” the photos after he realized his mistake. However, the photographer who owns the rights denies this and commented that the politician hasn’t been in contact at all.

One has to wonder that when a politician who wants to introduce a two-strikes anti-piracy system doesn’t even know how to stop breaking the law, how can he demand that others should?

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In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

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Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.

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A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

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Sally Barnes-Soliz, who’s now an investigator for the State Department of Labor and Industries in Washington, says that when she worked for Koch, her bosses and a company lawyer at the Koch refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, asked her to falsify data for a report to the state on uncontrolled emissions of benzene, a known cause of cancer. Barnes-Soliz, who testified to a federal grand jury, says she refused to alter the numbers.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she says. “They were really kind of baffled that I had ethics.”