Official Ares Free Download

Internet talks to create copyright police Ottaw Citizen
Canadian officials are taking part in negotiations for a top-secret copyright treaty that could see families barred from the Internet for a year if someone in the household is suspected of illegal downloads. Under the worldwide rules of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Internet service providers such as Bell and Rogers in Canada would be required to become copyright police and filter out pirated material from their networks, hand over the identities of customers believed to be infringing copyrights and restrict the use of identity-blocking software. ACTA would employ a three-strikes policy. People believed to be regularly downloading copy-protected material, such as movie and music files, could have their Internet connection severed for up to 12 months and be forced to pay a fine.

Auditor general’s office says it’s OK to link to, but not host, its reports Winnipeg Free Press
The office of Canada’s auditor general says it’s perfectly OK – and much appreciated – if websites link to reports on its government site, but warns they should not be hosted elsewhere. Advocates for copyright reform expressed concern Thursday when the auditor general’s office demanded the Globe and Mail newspaper remove a copy of a report that had been attached to one of its online articles. The Globe was displaying the report with a web application called Scribd, which allows large documents to be embedded on a web page without the need for an external program like Adobe Reader. It also keeps readers on the same web page, rather than sending them off to another site to read the document.

Fudge Messaging: A new open source encoding for messaging Heise Online
Kirk Wylie and the OpenGamma team have announced the Fudge Messaging Project, an open source message encoding protocol. Fudge (Fast Unstructured Data Generic Encoding) is designed to be a self-describing, type-safe, binary hierarchical encoding suitable for use in messaging layers in middleware. The project is in its early days, but already has Java and C# reference implementations. The Java implementation is in daily use at OpenGamma and is, according to Wylie, “rock-solid in stability and very good in performance”. What is still to come is “polished releases” says Wylie, but the developers wanted to get the code out as soon as they reasonably could.

We couldn’t disconnect clients: Malone The Australian
iiNet chief Michael Malone has told the NSW Federal Court that the ISP’s service agreements did not provide it with sufficient contractual rights to take action against customers who infringe copyright online. Mr Malone made the comments during his third day of cross-examination by lawyers representing a loose coalition of 34 entertainment companies – represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft — pursuing a landmark copyright claim against the ISP. The studios claim that iiNet authorised its customers to illegally share movies on its network by refusing to act on a series of infringement notices the studios’ online piracy investigators began sending to the company in July 2008. However, Mr Malone told the court he believed that laws regulating the way that carriers can use customer information prevented iiNet from helping content owners enforce their copyrights.

Backdoor in top iPhone games stole user data, suit claims The Register
A maker of some of the most popular games for the iPhone has been surreptitiously collecting users’ cell numbers without their permission, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday. The complaint claims best-selling games made by Storm8 contained secret code that bypassed safeguards built into the iPhone to prevent the unauthorized snooping of user information. The Redwood City, California, company, which claims its games have been downloaded more than 20 million times, has no need to collect the numbers.

Gadget problems divide the sexes BBC
Men and women have different approaches to dealing with technology problems, according to a gadget helpline. The service found that 64% of its male callers and 24% of its female callers had not read the instruction manual before ringing up. 12% of male and 7% of female customers simply needed to plug in or turn on their appliance. The company, Gadget Helpline, surveyed 75,000 calls received between 25 September and 23 October 2009.

Confirmed: Skype Founders Settle With eBay And Others, Get 14% Stake In Skype, Not 10% TechCrunch
eBay has just announced that it has reached a settlement with the founders of Skype, clearing the way for the sale of the Internet communication company to a consortium formed by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Index Ventures, a historical investor in Skype, is not going to be part of that buying party after all, and its partner Mike Volpi is definitely out of the picture (no surprises there).

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

November, 2009

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