Posted by: in Rights Online
Meredith writes “A bill that would penalize companies for assisting repressive regimes in censoring the World wide web may finally be headed to a vote. The Global Online Freedom Act ‘would not only prevent companies like Yahoo from giving up the goods to totalitarian regimes, but would also prohibit US-based Internet companies from blocking on the web content from US government or government-financed web sites in other countries.’ Unfortunately, there’s also a giant loophole: the president would be granted to waive the provisions of the Act for national security purposes.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Rights Online
Lucas123 writes “California’s Riverside County Superior Court’s Web site is serving up document images containing SSNs and detailed medical records relating to civil cases, according to a couple of privacy recommends. All of the documents are free to anyone who knows where to look for them. ‘Searches done on the court’s Web site turned up various documents related to civil cases that contained sensitive information. Included were complete tax filings, medical reports pertaining to cases handled by the court, and images of checks complete with signatures as well as account and bank-routing numbers.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Rights Online
eldavojohn writes “Here’s a short update on the Novell Vs. SCO case we’ve been following. Our good friend Darl McBride made some interesting comments in court yesterday. He said (under oath): ‘Many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers… We’ve evidence System V is in Linux… When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there’s books on “How to Program UNIX” but when you go to the Linux section and look for “How to Program Linux” you’re not gonna find it, because it doesn’t exist. Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them].” This flies directly in the face of what SCO found in extensive investigations in 2002 and contradicts what SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag had just finished testifying earlier that day (testimony that McBride did not hear).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Rights Online
According to Wired, universities in the US are experiencing a “20-fold increase” in the number of takedown notices from the RIAA in the last ten days. Indiana University reports 80 notices a day, but they state their traffic hasn’t increased significantly over the same time period. It will be interesting to see if the affected schools join the legal battle against the RIAA, or cave under the increased pressure. “University of California at Berkeley’s chief information officer Shel Waggener confirmed he’d heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose driving them. ‘Public universities are in a very special position since the industry puts pressure on us through state legislatures to try to impose what are widely considered to be draconian content monitoring measures and turn us into tech police forces in support of a specific industry,’ Waggener said. The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to start installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets, according to Luker.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Services
Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Like to share your photos on Flickr, your videos on YouTube, and your music on whatever the audio equivalent is, but exhausted of uploading files manually? iGliss is a media sharing site that lets you upload photos, videos, and music. You can load your media the old fashioned way by uploading and tagging your files one by one. Or you can use the handy tiny iGliss PC client that can monitor any folders on your Computer for new media files and upload them to your account automatically.
One your files are online, other users can browse your iGliss folders, or you can use the sharing tools to embed your files on any web page. Users get up to 100MB of on the web storage space for free. There’s no such thing as a premium account yet, but the iGliss FAQ states that the company could decide to start charging for additional storage in thefuture.
[via Mashable]
Read
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
superglaze writes “Halfway through the two-month window of opportunity during which OOXML’s ISO standardization can be derailed by a formal objection from a national standards body, the UK Unix Users Group is trying to force the British Standards Institution to do just that. According to the Unix Users Group, the BSI used a flawed decision-making process when they selected to approve OOXML in the ISO vote. ‘The UKUUG is also folding in many other complaints about Office Open XML (OOXML), such as unresolved patent issues and a lack of completion in the specification’s documentation, and is calling for the High Court of Justice to force a judicial review of the BSI’s decision.’ This isn’t the first time a country’s ISO vote has been challenged.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Rights Online
Dorkz brings news of a class-action settlement from Creative Labs over the capacity of their HDD MP3 players. Evidently they calculated drive capacity in base-10 (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base-2 (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB). The representative plaintiff is entitled to $5,000, and everyone else who bought one of the HDD MP3 players in the past several years gets a 50% discount on a new 1GB player[PDF]. They can also opt for a 20% discount on anything ordered from Creative’s on the internet store. Creative has made available all of the necessary legal forms. Seagate lost a similar lawsuit late last year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Rights Online
superglaze writes “Halfway through the two-month window of opportunity during which OOXML’s ISO standardization can be derailed by a formal objection from a national standards body, the UK Unix Users Group is trying to force the British Standards Institution to do just that. According to the Unix Users Group, the BSI used a flawed decision-making process when they chose to approve OOXML in the ISO vote. ‘The UKUUG is also folding in many other complaints about Office Open XML (OOXML), such as unresolved patent issues and a lack of completion in the specification’s documentation, and is calling for the High Court of Justice to force a judicial review of the BSI’s decision.’ This isn’t the first time a country’s ISO vote has been challenged.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Posted by: in Rights Online
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The Pro-IP Act has passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously, thanks to the support of committee chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). We’ve discussed this before — it’s the same bill which would create copyright cops with the power to seize computers, when powers like that have been systematically abused in other areas. But, apparently, they think the bill is just wonderful now, simply because they cut the provision that would’ve increased statutory damages while keeping the rest. This is the same bill that William Patry called the ‘most outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.’” While we’re on the subject of intellectual property, Canadian law professor Michael Geist gave a talk on Monday about “copyright myths.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Share This
Share This
No Comments »
Entries (RSS)