Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

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Copyright laws threaten our online freedom

Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.

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How Cool Is That?

Well, Wolframalpha has launched and it looks pretty cool. It (and the future copy cats) will only get better as time goes on. I, for one, am excited about it.

Check it out here.

Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?

It follows the Google principle, with a simple input box, but takes a different approach to rendering search results. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, which developed Twine, an ambitious "interest network" Web application based on semantic Web technologies, , said that Wolfram Alpha may be as "important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose."

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As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed. Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the samples were then to be destroyed.

It is odd that most of the news coverage described the tests as “anonymous.” If the tests were truly anonymous, of course, Mr. Rodriguez would still be thought of as a clean player — as he long had insisted he was. But when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous” samples suddenly had clear labels on them.

As a friend put it in an e-mail message: “Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.”

Read more, but remember, they know everything about you.

ESPN to ISPs: Pay for Your Customers to Play Video

"Ultimately, if you carry it to its logical extreme — that's everyone charging for their content, and depending upon where you are and which ISP you're using to connect to the internet, your internet experience is different — that's a really unsettling prospect," says Scott. "I think it undermines the foundational principles that make the internet such an engine of innovation and creativity."

Read more...while you can.

Your ISP is watching you

This is not a novel by Philip K Dick: it is happening right now. The only difference is that it's not happening in the physical world, it's happening online. Since last autumn, BT – under the "Webwise" banner – has been trialling a technology called Phorm, which dials direct into your internet service provider's network and intercepts communications between you and the websites you visit, using information about the sorts of things you are viewing to serve you targeted ads.

Read more. They know everything about you.

Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings'

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

It always starts as "protecting the children".

His plans to rein in the internet, and censor some websites, are likely to trigger a major row with online advocates who ferociously guard the freedom of the world wide web.

You think? Hmmm. I'm already in a "major row".

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

Yep. Definitely in a "major row" now.

Mr Burnham admits that his plans may be interpreted by some as “heavy-handed” but says the new standards drive is “utterly crucial”. Mr Burnham also believes that the inauguration of Barack Obama, the President-Elect, presents an opportunity to implement the major changes necessary for the web.

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U.S. Broadband Speeds Too Darn Slow; Adoption Hits 7-Year Low

The bad news: Broadband adoption slipped to a seven-year low last quarter. The worse news: It could take a century for the United States to catch up to broadband speeds in Japan, given the rate at which services are improving here.

...

The trade group says the average U.S. internet speed was 2.3-megabits per second, up just .4 mbps from last year. Japan, by contrast, boasts average net speeds of roughly 63-mbps range.

Think about that. 63-mbps!

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Source: Protective order will keep Viacom out of sensitive YouTube user data

Google has been ordered to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom. But Viacom will be guilty of contempt of court if it uses that data for anything other than specifically proving the prevalence of piracy on YouTube, a source close to Viacom told CNET News.com on Thursday.

That's serious business. Contempt of court is the sort of thing that can get a lawyer's license taken away.

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Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

WTF?

Read the rest. It gets worse.

Bypass Blocked Usenet

Large ISPs are blocking Usenet
for the possible availability of child pornography. However, the
underlying issue is really one of control -- ISPs can't control people
from using Usenet responsibly, and lack the manpower to police it
appropriately.

Luckily for those of us who are sensible, rational,
responsible, law-abiding adults who embrace Usenet as an invaluable
resource, there are ways to get around these internet restrictions.

Read more.

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license)

In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" -- the right to copy without permission -- means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").

It gets worse:

If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP "reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."

...

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be.

...

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

Read the rest.

WTF!? Internet Addiction Nominated for Entry in the Manual of Mental Disorders

Block cites research from South Korea, where, he says, the affliction is considered a serious public health problem, and the government estimates that 168,000 children may require psychotropic medications.

Trying to get everyone on some type of medication?

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Website Lets You Send a Post-Rapture E-Mail to Friends 'Left Behind'

If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.

For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when -- according to Christian end times dogma -- Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist.

Christ on a cross.

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Comcast Is Hiring an Internet Snoop for the Feds

Wanna tap e-mail, voice and Web traffic for the government? Well, here's your chance. Comcast, the country's second-largest Internet provider, is looking for an engineer to handle "reconnaissance" and "analysis" of "subscriber intelligence" for the company's "National Security Operations."

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Video games cause violence, most children admit to Ofcom

Two thirds of those aged between 12 and 15 said that violence in games had more of an impact on behaviour than violence in television or films, the study by Ofcom found.

...

But despite concerns over children accessing the web unsupervised, a rising number of parents said they had not installed blocking software to stop their sons and daughters watching unsuitable content.

...

Parents said they did not feel the need to instal blocking software because they trusted their children to “self-regulate” their internet behaviour.

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Air Force Aims for 'Full Control' of 'Any and All' Computers

The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is. And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected."

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Ban 'Second Life' in schools and libraries, Republican congressman says

"Sites like Second Life offer no protections to keep kids from virtual "rape rooms," brothels, and drug stores," Kirk said, according to a press release. "If sites like Second Life won't protect kids from obviously inappropriate content, the Congress will."

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Universities Baffled By Massive Surge In RIAA Copyright Notices

But many of the recent notices don't correspond to entries in traffic logs, which also don't show any overall increase in file sharing, Bruhn said.

"We are not sure now what we have is an allegation of copyright infringement or an allegation of possible future illegal behavior," Bruhn said."The whole thing is very concerning, to be frank. We don't know why they are doing this and I'm not sure they know what they are doing."

"They in fact can't know if the files being offered are actually the protected works of their clients -- how would they know if they didn't download and open them?" Bruhn said.

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