Official Ares Free Download

Judge allows EMI to personally sue Robertson CNet News
The copyright lawsuit filed by major recording company EMI against Michael Robertson, founder of MP3tunes.com, took an unexpected turn on Friday. A U.S. District judge will allow EMI to file suit against Robertson personally–not just his company, MP3tunes, according to a copy of the judge’s decision. Besides accusing MP3tunes of violating its copyright in a suit filed in November 2007, EMI also named Robertson as a defendant. A year ago, a judge in the case threw out the copyright-infringing charges against Robertson, but on Friday, Judge William Pauley, for the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, decided to let EMI once again name Robertson as a defendant.

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets Wired
America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

School bans hugs between preteen boys, girls Associated Press
An Australian elementary school has banned hugging and other displays of affection between preteen boys and girls to set a good example for younger students, the principal said Tuesday. Students at Largs Bay Primary School in the southern city of Adelaide were spoken to about “inappropriate behaviour” between boyfriends and girlfriends when the new school term opened last week, said Principal Julie Gale. “We set strong standards of behaviour for our Year 6 and 7 students, who are seen as role models by our younger students,” Gale said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press, referring to the school’s oldest students, ages 11 to 13.

Met under fire over picture database Financial Times
Scotland Yard has been accused of “tarring the innocent” with Big Brother-style surveillance after it emerged that it holds at least 1,500 photographs of protesters on a computer database, many of whom have not been convicted of a crime. Lawyers and privacy experts questioned whether the image bank complied with UK privacy and data protection laws, despite police claims that they had culled more than 1,000 pictures in the past four months. Details of the police database, revealed by the Financial Times, come ahead of a protest this weekend at an Eon power station near Nottingham. The disclosure is likely to stoke criticism of police tactics at demonstrations such as London’s G20 protests in April.

Canadians getting ripped off on internet rates NDP
Canada has gone from world leader to world laggard in terms of digital access and its citizens are paying the price, says New Democrat MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay). According to a recent report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Canada has fallen, under the Conservative government, to 20th place in terms of speed and 25th out of 26th terms of affordability among industrialized countries. “Canadians are paying some of the highest costs for some of the lowest speeds. A small cabal of cable giants have been allowed to squeeze out competition and slow down innovation while dinging the consumer for third-rate service.”

Tech CEOs and founders: Keep the Internet open! Google Public Policy
This morning, in an open letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, 24 CEOs and founders representing the world’s leading Internet and technology companies — including Facebook, Sony, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, and Google — threw their support behind the effort to protect an open Internet.

Jury’s $1.8 million verdict a call for privacy rights privacylives Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune has a story about how “pretexting” was used to acquire the personal phone records of a woman who was suing her former employer. “Pretexting” is a fancy word for “pretending to be someone else in order to get his or her phone records.” (In January, I wrote about the first people to face “pretexting” charges under the Telephone and Records Privacy Act of 2006, which was passed after Hewlett-Packard’s phone-record spying scandal was revealed.)

US war resister to take sanctuary in Canada Canoe
An American soldier who deserted the Iraq war has taken sanctuary at a church in Vancouver after being ordered deported. Rodney Watson, 31, said he is the first of at least 40 U.S. war resisters to take refuge in a church after fleeing to Canada.

Copyright Holders Shutting Down University Copy Shops; Libraries Need To Worry About Photocopier Infringement TechDirt
It looks like copyright holders, in their non-stop effort to make themselves look even more evil, are now aggressively going after university copy shops. Up in Canada, Access Copyright hasn’t just won a legal dispute against a Toronto copy shop, but has gleefully seized the photocopiers from the shop. Then, not all that far away in Eastern Michigan, a court found a copy shop to be directly liable for copies made by students.

Cory Doctorow Joins The CwF+RtB Experimental Crew TechDirt
Writer Cory Doctorow has long been a leading thinker/experimenter when it comes to issues of copyright and content creation — having long put his works under very permissive Creative Commons license, and making sure that his books were available in all sorts of different formats. However, for the most part, he kept using the same basic business model. However, it looks like he’s jumping on board our favored “tiered” CwF+RtB model. [...] it’s great to see these tiered direct-to-fan CwF+RtB offerings getting closer and closer to being mainstream.

Medical Records: Stored in the Cloud, Sold on the Open Market Wired
The revelation comes in a recent New York Times article about how so-called “scrubbed” patient data isn’t as anonymous as people think. The piece focuses primarily on how anonymized data can be cross-bred with other publicly available databases, such as voting records, which subverts the anonymity. Buried near the end of the article is the news that medical data is collected, anonymized and sold, not by insurance agencies and health care providers, but by third-party vendors who provide medical-record storage in the cloud.

MPs form select committee over McKinnon decision Inquirer
UFO hacker Gary McKinnon might never be extradited to the US, as the Home Secretary faces a select committee over the decision to try him abroad. Peers are looking to change the “lopsided” (read ‘US friendly’) treaty under which McKinnon, 43, could be sent to America. As the treaty stands, US lawyers need only show ‘reasonable suspicion’ for an extradition warrant to be granted in Britain. But there is no such reciprocal arrangement for the Crown Prosecution Service in America. The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, will be questioned publicly by an all-party committee of MPs on why he is extraditing McKinnon. The committee will investigate whether the Home Secretary should be given discretion to try cases such as McKinnon’s in the UK. Keith Vaz MP, the committee’s chairman, said, “I support calls for a review of this treaty in order to get the best deal for UK citizens.

Red Hat share price passes Microsoft’s – March of the penguin Inquirer
Linux vendor Red Hat hit a milestone yesterday when its share price rose above Microsoft’s.

(Cheers, Marc)

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

October, 2009

Related Articles

 Enjoyed this? Subscribe to the feed.