In an effort to censor freedom of speech online, Russia’s very own Deputy Prosecutor General has announced that he wants Big Brother reinstated to help him in his quest against extremism. Well, at least that’s the gist of it.

According to a report by an online Russian Daily, Kommersant, Ivan Sydoruk has claimed that “Legal control over the Internet [is necessary] to step efforts to fight with extremism.”

With such a decision at stake, there has been a much expected public backlash to this latest development. The story reports that while human rights activists have opted for the view that state control over the internet, “will create persecuted cyber-dissidents,” and have urged authorities “not to encroach upon the Internet freedom,” IT specialists have settled with a line of argument which claims that online censorship is pretty much impossible.

In a police conference in the city of Rostov-on-Don yesterday, Mr. Sydoruk opined, “The Internet is often a place for circulating extremist leaning information” further declaring, “We need to work out an effective system to control the data released on the net.” As the debate continues to display its volatility, Nikolay Partushey, in another statement calling for stricter control over the internet said, “There are currently 5,000 web-sites run by extremist organizations and movements.”

Kommersant’s story further states that “State Duma Legislature Committee Chairman Pavel Krasheninnikov came up with a bill last year to sentence Internet extremists to five years in prison. The amendments, however, were not adopted.”

Russia seems a little torn on the issue at this very moment in time. What do you think?

Freedom of Speech or Fighting Internet Extremism? That is the question.

The international clamp down on “pirates” and file sharing websites is going to be increased ten-fold during the coming months as entertainment companies world-wide watch their profits being eaten away by the online underground.

Online Advertiser are also expected to increase their strangle hold on the consumer.

“Illegal music and video downloads” has been a huge, “positive for the phone companies,” but this has all changed, changed utterly, Bob Wright, vice-chairman of GE and chairman and ceo of NBC Universal, parent company of NBC News, is declaring.
“We are in the same boat - that is, we are all in the video business, the distribution business, and in the advertising business - or, rather, the business of aggregating audiences and delivering them to advertisers,” he told NXTComm in Chicago [our emphasis].

Globally the entertainment industry and software MNC’s “have collectively and singly promoted the purely commercial concept of copyright infringement into a major ‘crime’ on a par with robbery and murder,”

p2pnet recently posted a intriguing thought into this ramping up and stigmatizing of this illegal trade;
“But that doesn’t mean intellectual property offences have become far more serious than in the past. Rather, it shows just how easily the cartels are able to manipulate the mainstream press and through it, public opinion. Now they’re using organisations with absolutely no connection to music and movies to further their campaign of abusing international administrations and enforcement agencies as they work to both maintain the status quo, and gain control of how, and by whom, product is distributed online.”

Interestingly at Mipcom last year it was proclaimed by Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney, “We understand now that piracy is a business model,”.
“It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. “We don’t like the model but we realise it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

Wright has a hugely implausible notion that the entertainment industry should have the ability to prosecute every soul who has “illegally uploaded or downloaded content”

Implausible as it may seem Wright believes that projects are now being put in place to make such an outcome possible or even likely? He states that 6 out of 8 internet providers across the US “will have a program in place by the end of the year,” he warns.

Wright posed other problems facing this huge industry moreover the ability to create a global advertising model which could be more effective than “The traditional 30-second spot on television isn’t going to be enough anymore.” Wright finished by mentioning plans to make the advertising industry more and more inter-personal and interactive, “more personalized and interactive advertising,”

The RIAA have chosen Linux as their operating system, it’s ironic because Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are renowned for being a totally anti-independent organization. They detest anything that involves competition or openness yet have moved to Linux, the world’s most used open source operating system!

The RIAA attempted to move their website to 2.2.3 Red Hat last week (www.riaa.com) but the move did not run too well and the site was down for over 5 hours.

I find it quite funny that when you click on the homepage it says “Welcome to RIAA”, this is the American copyright police, you’d swear you were entering France or something “Welcome to France” or “Welcome to England”, but oh no!

The RIAA are also moving their DNS to Mindshift Technologies in an unscheduled Endeavour, they are moving from smaller company (Tomorrow’s Solutions Today) whom they had been with for a number of years. A number of domains apart from the .com domain though have failed to be moved over to Mindshift, so it seems a few problems have been occurring over at the RIAA at the moment.

In all fairness to TST they have been doing a pretty swell job over the past number of years, the RIAA website has to be one the most attacked websites on the net, repulsed by many for obvious reasons!

It still leaves us with one question however, why are they moving from a company that had done such a good job? Probably because the sue frenzy RIAA found a problem with the provider however it would be much funnier if the hosting provider was kicking the RIAA’s butt onto the lawn for a change!

Pornographers have decided its time to close ranks with the entertainment cartels after being their scapegoats for so long.

According XBIZ.COM “adult industry members have announced the formation of the global anti-piracy agency, a non-profit trade organisation dedicated to combating content theft, from illegally downloaded internet content to illegally reproduced DVD’s”.

XBIZ.COM says “initial funding has been provided by Sureflixx Digital Distribution INC parent company of gay distribution network Maleflixx”.

“This is really in recognition of a problem that everyone is aware of and is affecting everyone in the industry” according to G.A.P.A interim executive director Caryn Goldberg.

According to a story, the adult industry, producers, distributors, retailers, cable operators, VOD and mobile providers loses nearly $2 billion a year in revenue. This left Goldberg declaring, that “we’re not talking so much about a guy that downloads a couple of videos illegally, although that is a problem. It’s the all the file-sharing services. Look what the recording industry did to Napster. It’s gross infringements, like file-sharing and bittorrent”

The recording industry indeed was responsible for the closure of napster.

According to XBIZ.COM, Goldberg is currently running a one-woman operation and is looking to staff up within the next few weeks adding that this organization is dedicated to the industry as a whole. “We’re here and I’d say that we’ll be in full operation by September, that’s when you’ll really see some action from us.” Goldberg said

Porn stars lobbying Washington politicians. Well they may be a chance that they already know them from personal standpoint.

Fred Reichert, Allofmp3.com watcher checks in from Holland, he was the one who at the start of the year accurately prophesied the demise of the Russian site that was hated and despised by both the entertainment cartels and the Bush Administration. He is now wondering, who left the back door open? As the memory of Allofmp3.com does much more than just lingers on despite it being gone.

They news about the shutting down of Allofmp3 and its successor MP3Sparks will more than please the Russian authorities. However, were they responsible for this? In addition, if so, why did Allofmp3 leave the back door to their servers open?

The Alltunes application is still working as before according to reports from the Allofmp3 FAQ at Museekster.com. Alltunes is a ‘third party’ download manager for the presently defunct Allofmp3 website. You can still order and download music using your Allofmp3 login, pass and, of course, your existing Allofmp3 balance as soon as you have Alltunes installed.

The Allofmp3 server which allows you to get your music in just about any format and bitrate still delivers despite even the unsurpassed online coding. You can even top-up your account with a Master Card if you are lucky. However, this does not work for all accounts for some strange reason. Users who get a link to Chronopay as payment processor end up at a dead end because that link is dead. However, the lucky ones are those who get a link to eCentru for handling the payment as they are able to get more credit to continue downloading.

The fact that all the other Russian MP3 sites remain untouched and new sites keep showing up all over like scavengers trying to rip the remains of the supposedly-defunct Allofmp3 is another thing that makes action by the Russian authorities unlikely.

The Pirate Bay is again under attack from Hollywood, its long time nemesis. This time around, Hollywood is utilizing its political influence to pressure Sweden’s elected and appointed authorities into a stage ultimately pointed at shutting down The Pirate Bay.

Hollywood is using child pornography as its weapon against The Pirate Bay in this instance. Major studios have exhausted every tactic, up to and including making outrageous claims, using Swedish police in raids and seizing computer equipment in an effort to kill the site. With a strategy that’s extremely successful in the United States in particular, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney have turned to one of their favorite tactic, which is raising the issue of child pornography. Politicians ‘friendly’ to Hollywood use the specter of kiddie’s porn as an excuse to try to close down sites that studios don’t like. Those same politicians also use it to introduce vested interested legislation. In the name of corporate profits, the impossibly wealthy corporate movie clan tries to hold back the tide when they become terrified by a handful of people with limited resources that operates an online indexing site. The studios take it for granted that they can snap their fingers and have national police forces, funded by taxpayers, immediately placed at their disposal similar to their counterparts in the music industry, dominated by EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US).

They’ve been able to turn a wholly civil concept, copyright infringement, into a new crime, file sharing, and through the mainstream media, elevate it to the level of rape and murder using propaganda techniques refined by Nazis during World War II.

According to a post on Sweden’s Pirate Party site, “this Friday, it became known that the Swedish Police Board will shut down The Pirate Bay, the popular file sharing site, by classifying it as a pornography site in the block list that Swedish Internet Providers respect”.