Official Ares Free Download

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Kicks-off Small Business Week OPC
[Series of Guidance Documents aimed at small businesses (and their customers) with links to various info. Covers: * Privacy Guide for Small Businesses: The Basics, *Your Privacy Responsibilities: A Guide for Businesses and Organizations, *Privacy Questionnaire: Is Your Business Ready?, *Guidelines for Processing Personal Data Across Borders, *Privacy Legislation in Canada, *Privacy Breaches, *How to deal with privacy breaches, *Private Sector *Other Links]

CRTC Indecision on Net Neurtality (”Throttling”) Excess Copyright
With respect, I cannot share the enthusiasm of Michael Geist, etc. for today’s CRTC decision on Net Neutrality (”Throttling”). True, the CRTC agreed with the overall principles of net neutrality propounded by its exponents, which allows for network management subject to rational, justifiable and not overly restrictive network management by the ISPs. But the decision basically leaves the effective responsibility of enforcement of these principles in the hands of consumers via a complaint mechanism, ensuring years more of litigation, delay and full employment for the lawyers involved. One can be reasonably confident that individual complaints by individual users will not easily or quickly move the huge edifice of the CRTC and the major ISPs. In the short term, the only thing that will change for Canadian consumers will be they will learn with more transparency more details of why they have some of the worst internet service in the world at some of the highest prices. More transparency will not promote more competition in the market because there is no real competition in an essentially duopolistic market with now virtually insurmountable barriers to new entry. The CRTC once again accepted at apparent face value that congestion was a fact. This should have required extensive review of the extensive evidence, much of which was cloaked with confidentiality. This should have been a key and reasoned conclusion. Once again, network congestion has been regarded as a premise. Moreover, once again, the fact that most Canadian consumers are faced in reality with a choice between two duopolists was glossed over. The third party independent ISPs who must depend on one of the duopolist’s backbones cannot compete on service in any meaningful way.

Disney Close To Unveiling New “DVD Killer” SlashDot
“The Wall Street Journal reports that Disney is close to releasing a new system that will sell permanent, multi-device access to digital media. The system, dubbed Keychest, is being positioned as an answer to consumer concerns about purchasing digital media that are locked to a small number of devices, and thus as a way to finally shift media sales from an ownership model to an access model. They claim that such a service would reduce the risk of losing access to content as a result of a single vendor going out of business, as purchased content would remain available from other vendors. However, they do not seem to have addressed the question of what happens to customers’ access to purchased content if the Keychest service itself is discontinued.”

Iconix Brand Group Settles Charges Its Apparel Web Sites Violated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act FTC
Iconix Brand Group, Inc. will pay a $250,000 civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC’s COPPA Rule by knowingly collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children online without first obtaining their parents’ permission.

Clinic’s medical files vanish – Privacy commission launches probe Edmonton Journal
The Information and Privacy Commissioner is raising a red flag for doctors after a Fairview clinic lost two years worth of electronic patient records. … The clinic had permanently lost two years worth of health files that include patient information on visits, prescriptions, lab reports, doctor’s notes and other information. The loss happened when the clinic switched from one electronic medical records system to another. … The investigation found no proof that the complainant’s privacy had been breached by an employee of the clinic, but the loss of records has created concerns.

Canada Adopts Comcast/Bitorrent Standard For Network Management Public Knowledge
On the eve of the FCC’s upcoming Network Neutrality rulemaking, Canada has now settled its definition of “reasonable network management” and set rules for traffic throttling. Amazingly, the rules the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) settled on for “reasonable network management” look a lot like the standard our own FCC settled on in the Comcast/BitTorrent Order, but even stronger on the notice and transparency side. Hopefully, the FCC is paying attention here as it considers its own rulemaking on the definition of “reasonable network management.”

Advocates Warn Against ‘Monsantosizing’ Of Global Food Sources IP-Watch
As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food prepares to present his report today at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a global appeal is being filed by farmers and environmental organisations against patents on plants and animals derived from conventional breeding. In his report, Olivier de Schutter said that the commercial seed system may jeopardise the farmer seed system, and intellectual property rights on seeds might threaten biodiversity and food security.

Music label learns from ‘pirates’ Inquirer
An independent record label has decided that the only way to win the filesharing war against ‘pirates’ is to use their methods. Hobbledehoy’s Tom Majerczak insisted to The Age that “if you can’t beat them join them” was the way forward for his fledgling independent rock label. His label offered several albums for free via digital download in late July. He said that there had been a surge in physical sales – not just CDs but T-shirts and vinyl as well.

Revenue Canada steps up hunt for eBay tax dodgers CBC
The Canada Revenue Agency is stepping up its efforts to track down eBay merchants who haven’t paid taxes on profits made from selling goods on the popular auction website. To date, only 50 Canadian eBay merchants have come forward to pay their back taxes since July, when Revenue Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn gave high-volume eBay sellers one last chance to pay their taxes without penalty. Under Canadian tax law, profits on goods someone sells are considered income, no matter what the venue. A recent court decision forces eBay to hand over the names, addresses and sales records of its high-volume merchants to tax officials. Citing privacy concerns, eBay wouldn’t reveal the number of merchant records it has sent to the Canada Revenue Agency but did confirm it’s in the thousands. The company says it informed its users ahead of time that their records were being passed on to tax authorities. The federal agency told CBC News it has processed only nine of the proactive voluntary disclosures and that those nine represent about $275,000 in previously undeclared income. The agency also says it has begun launching audits of merchants whose names were released by eBay but have not come forward.

China authors says Google violated copyrights Reuters
A group representing authors in China has accused Google of violating copyrights with its digital library, a claim that Google denies by saying the service complies with international law. Many major publishers and authors have taken up lawsuits against Google for its digitization of their works, accusing Google of copyright infringement. Google has already digitized 10 million books. The China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) believes Google scanned thousands of books, by over 500 Chinese authors, into its digital library without their permission or compensation, said spokesman Chen Qirong.

Belgacom: hacker published authentic login details of customers – Remove the Dracronian B/W cap or else! Tweakers
[Dutch translation] Belgacom has confirmed that the hacker “Vendetta” actually published login details of thirty-Belgacom Skynet customers. The hacker wants the current and future Belgacom forced BandWidth limits to be removed. If the requirement for the lifting of the data limits are not met, the hacker threatens every week until October 30 to publish one thousand login information. After that date, ‘Vendetta’ exploit will be release on the Internet. Per the story, The exploit affects Belgacoms B-Box2 Modem firmware. Apparantly 285,000 logins have been exploited to date and waiting to be released in the wild. The ISP contact some of the affect users, but this changes nothing since the exploit will jst recapture their new login details. [A comment to the above story claims this is the exploit that allows remote access to all of the modems via this exploit http://milw0rm.org/exploits/4744 and even various takes of this exploit.] Per dutch translated http://www.nieuwsblad.be/Article/Detail.aspx?articleID=DMF20102009_027 dozens of confirmed user-names and passwords were put online already… The editors of ZDNet has managed to log on the administrative profile page made by some random user. There they got access to personal data, and they had the additional opportunity for extra volume blocks of 5 euros to buy. [Free B/W usage!]

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

October, 2009

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