Internet shoppers to get duty relief for Christmas: “Internet shoppers who wait until December to look for a Christmas bargain may save more money than they thought when HM Revenue and Customs eliminates customs duty on personal purchases costing less that £105.”
(Via OUT-LAW News.)
NEWS.com.au: Rudd Government’s internet filter to block up to 10,000 ‘unwanted’ sites
By Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson, November 13, 2008 10:44am
AUSTRALIA’S mandatory internet filter is being primed to block 10,000 websites as part of a blacklist of unspecified “unwanted content”, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy revealed in Federal Parliament.
The 10,000 blocked websites would include 1300 websites already blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Senator Conroy revealed details of the Rudd Government’s proposed web filter as he called for expressions of interest from internet service providers for a live trial of the technology.
As part of the trial, ISPs will test different methods of filtering the web with subscribers who volunteer. The trial is expected to last six weeks and will start before Christmas.
“The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA blacklist of prohibited content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content,” Senator Conroy told Parliament.
Unlicensed P2P Value: $69 Billion in 2007: “If you could total the quantity of unlicensed tracks within the vastness of the P2P community, then apply a reasonable fee to those tracks, you would end up with a very large monetary number. $10 billion? $50 billion? Just how much untapped money, relevant to the music industry, is circulating in the P2P community? MultiMedia Intelligence, who recently stated P2P growth will top 400% in 5 years, has pegged a monetary number to unlicensed music. The number: $69 billion.”
(Via Slyck.com File-Sharing News And Information.)
US Justice Department free to track mobile phone users: “
The American Civil Liberties Union has revealed that the FBI no longer feels the need for judicial or operator oversight when deploying base station-faking technology to detect mobile phones.…
“
(Via The Register - Comms.)
Local Wikipedia Blocked by German MP - OhmyNews International
Left-wing politician obtains injunction in light of Web pages on his Stasi past
Published 2008-11-16 11:14 (KST) Reported by Hartmut Kaiser
[See further the English entry for Lutz Heilmann through Wikipedia]
Wikipedia is very popular in Germany. With some 825,000 articles, it is the second biggest edition after the English version. However, this weekend started with a shock for all German Wikipedia lovers.
Those who typed in www.wikipedia.de were redirected to a Web site which read:
“The county court of Luebeck (North Germany) has issued an order in the name of Lutz Heilmann, Member of Parliament (left party/post-communist) that the German Wikipedia (Wikimedia e.V.) must not allow linking its domain wikipedia.de to the Web site wikipedia.org, as long as the German language version of wikipedia.org makes certain statements.”
The county court of Luebeck has announced that wikipedia.de will be inaccessible for about four weeks.
The controversial statements include Heilmann’s past as a member of the infamous East German Secret Service — the Stasi — and allegations that he has threatened an ex-boyfriend.
The irony is that the servers of wikipedia.org , in all of its many language versions, including German, are hosted in Florida under United States law. The constitution of the US grants freedom of speech. The controversial article is still accessible to anybody who wants to see it, and has received many more clicks due to the publicity that the decision of the court of Luebeck has caused.
Clearly, these days attempts trying to hold back information from the Internet community by taking legal action seems to backfire.
Part of Heilmann’s legal studies were conducted at the Luebeck court, so some bloggers speculate that those judges wanted to do him a favour. Heilmann could have tried to solve his case the “Wikipedia way” by appealing to Wikipedia admins or by starting an edit war.
He chose another way: legal action.
This is not the first time that the post-communist “left party” has used lawyers to try to pull Wikipedia off the Internet.
Katina Schubert, vice-president of the left party filed a complaint against Wikipedia because she felt offended by the display of swastikas in Wikipedia articles dealing with the Third Reich.
It is ironic that the Web site of the left party www.sozialisten.de showed Neo-Nazi skinheads with swastikas. The left party had better cleaned up their own Web site before complaining about Wikipedia.
Extremism on all sides (communist, post-communist, skinheads and neo-nazi) has become very popular in Germany recently, due to economic problems (see my 2006 OhmyNews article Fading Fortunes Gives Rise to German Extremism).
The future will show which forces will prevail in Germany, the power of the Internet to give free and abundant access to information or the attempts of extremist politicians to attack the freedom of speech.
Personally, I am quite optimistic. As the saying goes, “Three things cannot hide for long: The sun, the moon and the truth.”
Age verification, Cross media rating and classification and Social networking: “(Europa)
The European Commission launched a public consultation on Age verification, Cross media rating and classification and Online social networking. Download summary report on social networking (155 KB)and an expert report on age verification solutions and cross media rating and classification, including the results of the public consultation on these topics.”
(Via QuickLinks Update.)
YouTube pulls Columbine videos: “YouTube removes a selection of videos glorifying the Columbine school killers, following a BBC investigation.”
(Via BBC News.)
Web providers to be named and shamed over offensive content
Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material.
The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content.
Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube, as occurs at present on MySpace. She admitted there was growing chaos out there on the internet, and order needed to be brought.
She has also admitted barriers aimed at preventing children from accessing over-age material on the internet are not just porous but leak like a sieve. ‘People can get straight through it, or straight by it.’
Follett warned: ‘We must teach children of the dangers of the internet. It is sad to make children more scared than interested, but fortunately the internet is so interesting that children tend to overcome their fear.’
Discussing the internet and video games at a Westminster debate and facing suggestions that the industry is lax about controlling content, Follett said: ‘We agree information about take-down times and levels of search need to be much clearer.’ Asked if she supported league tables of take-down times by internet service providers, she said ‘name and shame can sometimes can work very well indeed.’
Follett said: ‘Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later.
‘We need the service providers to come forward and show that they are the sort of responsible organisations whose services we can trust to our children.’
She added: ‘We must ensure that search engines have a clear link to child safety information and safe search settings on the front page of their website.’
She also said she saw ’some value in some form of age identity card for the internet. It is useful when it comes to alcohol and cigarettes and it is certainly useful when it comes to buying video games and other material on the internet.’
She added parents needed ‘control software to communicate automatically with websites’ age verification systems to prevent children from signing up to sites with false dates of birth.’
In theory social networking sites are not supposed to be accessed by anyone under 13, but this guideline is totally ignored. She said she was interested in some form of ‘age identification card’, or requiring banks to specify on credit card statements that the card had been used to access internet sites or games, so parents could be warned of their child’s activities.
She also said she backed pre-screening of user-generated internet content saying she was glad this was being carried out by MySpace. ‘It is that kind of responsible action that we are looking for, as it means people can trust a company.’ Ministers and politicians have been locked in battle with Google, the owners of YouTube, who claim that there is too much material going onto its site for it to be pre-screened.
The proposal for a ‘take-down’ league table is backed by Vaizey. He said: ‘The government is in a position to put out the information, and it is up to the internet service providers to react to it. If they are happy to be 55th in a league table of take-down times so be it.’
Overall, Follett’s remarks suggest she will be more interventionist than some other ministers, although she has stressed she favours the internet and largely thinks self-regulation is best option.
She also insisted there was not yet compellingly persuasive evidence of a link between watching violent video games and subsequent acts of violence.
Ministers have just set up a new child internet safety council following the review conducted for the Department of Children, Schools and Families by Dr Tanya Byron, the psychologist.
(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)
Post from: TorrentFreak
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Canadian Anti-Camming Laws Net First Conviction: “
Canada has its first conviction under the controversial Bill C-59. A man has been found guilty of ‘camming’ the movie ‘Sweeney Todd’ in Calgary on its opening day. The 21 year-old was given a $1,495 fine and placed on probation for a year. During this time he is also excluded from all theaters and is forbidden to possess any video recording equipment, even that on a cellphone. He avoids jail.
Early in 2007, Twentieth Century Fox announced that Canada had a major movie ‘camming’ problem, claiming that 50% of all such copies of movies originated from the country. The controversial claims caused panic and before long, theater staff were commonly being equipped with night-vision goggles in a bid to catch pirates.
On December 21 2007, Richard Craig Lissaman of Calgary hid a camcorder in his clothing and went to the Empire Studio 16 theater. There the 20 year old joined the matinee performance of the Johnny Depp movie ‘Sweeney Todd’ on its opening day. Sitting at the left of the theater at the back, Lissaman hid the camera in a sock and hid the tell-tale LED lights on his camera with duct tape to avoid being spotted.
Unknown to Lissaman, an investigation financed by the Canadian and US movie industries had been underway for months - and his luck was about to run out. According to Crown prosecutor Rob Bassett, ‘The house lights were turned on and the movie was shut off and Calgary police arrested him. The accused (later) admitted he had recorded the picture.’
Charged with one count of the unauthorized recording of a movie, Lissaman became the second person in Canada to be charged under new legislation designed to crack down on camcorder pirates. Previously, under Canada’s laws the authorities had to prove that any camcorder movie recording was destined for sale, rental or other distribution to get a conviction. But with changes that took effect on June 1st 2007, any image recorded without consent could result in a prison sentence of up to 2 years.
Yesterday, Lissaman, now 21, pleaded guilty as charged and was sentenced by Judge Catherine Skene to $1,495 in fines and 12 months probation. During this period, Lissaman is excluded from going into any movie theater and is banned from owning or possessing any video recording equipment, including video-enabled cellphones.
Virginia Jones, a director of policy and legal affairs for the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association said: ‘We would have liked to see jail time, sending a stronger message. We hope this is just a starting point.’
Post from: TorrentFreak
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China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites: “
China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently however, several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu.
Just a week ago, reports came in that China had started to ban 10 video hosting sites, allegedly because of ‘regulations violations’. Other sites, including China’s largest eDonkey indexing site, VeryCD, received warnings. A few days later, however, VeryCD users found that their favorite eDonkey site was redirected to the Chinese search engine - Baidu.com.
It soon became apparent that VeryCD was not the only P2P website to be hijacked. A host of BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were also affected. People in the Beijing area who attempted to access the sites were promptly redirecting to Baidu, China’s Google.
The domain hijacks continued for more than two days straight, but were lifted yesterday. According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems. This doesn’t seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe. Also, DNS issues can’t explain why all the P2P sites were suddenly redirected to another website.
Mininova co-founder Niek, whose domain was also redirected to Baidu told TorrentFreak: ‘We had the questionable honor of joining Wikipedia and YouTube on the list of websites that (at some point) were censored in China. Fortunately the people in charge made the right decision, and realized that blocking a search engine like Mininova wasn’t such a good idea.’
‘I’m happy to see that the block is removed now, though it would be nice to talk to the people who made this decision so we can understand their motives,’ Niek added. The true reason behind the hijack attempt will probably never come to light. Most importantly, the ‘problems’ are resolved now, and all BitTorrent sites are accessible again.
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