US Government Checking Up On Vista Users?

This article at Whitedust displays some very interesting logs from Vista showing connections to the DoD Information Networking Center, United Nations Development program and the Halliburton Company; for no reason other than the machine was running Vista. From the article 'After running Vista for only a few days — with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection — so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking. The two images below show graphical depictions of what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state'.
MPAA to FCC

The MPAA is concerned that network neutrality rules might bring an end to such beloved technologies as digital watermarking, deep packet inspection, acoustic fingerprinting, and content filtering of all kinds.
The MPAA's concern is not with winning any sort of broad ideological ground in the debate over how the Internet should work, but to make sure that ISPs can "manage their networks to protect intellectual property in order to best serve the interests of content creators and the content-consuming public."
Going beyond the specific technologies listed above, the MPAA believes that ISPs need to have the right to control traffic shaping, quality of service guarantees, latency, and bandwidth hogging—all of special concern when it comes to regulating P2P traffic.
Google Still Using E.U. Data Retention Ruse

Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer continues to mislead the public about why Google keeps detailed logs on its customers searches and internet activity.
Google's policy is a complicated beast that keeps personally identifiable logs for all of its services globally 18 months, at which time Google attempts to anonymize the data by losing a few digits of the IP addresses of entries in the logs.
But let's reiterate: There is no United States or E.U. law that requires Google to keep detailed logs of what individuals search for and click on at Google's search engine. It's simply dishonest to continually imply otherwise in order to hide the real political and monetary reasons that Google chooses to hang onto this data.
Google is keeping the data because its engineers love mining the data and because holding onto the data makes law enforcement agencies happy. How often do law enforcement agents or lawyers in divorce cases show up at Google HQ with subpoenas?
For instance, it could stop issuing cookies to anonymous users that last for decades.
For instance on the user sign-up page, Google currently automatically enrolls users in to a system that records and analyzes everything they do on the Web, with zero explanation that the "feature" involves recording, in perpetuity, every url visited while logged into their Google account.
Google hack creates peer-to-peer network

A video posted to YouTube in April offers a primer on how to use Google to pilfer music and video files in less time than it takes to download them from a peer-to-peer service.
The how-to video focuses on what is known as an "index of" search and shows users how to direct Google's search engine to locate files from unprotected computer systems, many of which are found on college campuses. University students around the country often store music on their schools' computer networks.
Ruska's formula also worked at Yahoo and other search engines, according to the FT. Record labels have always maintained that downloading unauthorized music files violates copyright law.
Spammers defeat Captchas

According to security vendor BitDefender, spammers have defeated a system designed to differentiate humans from machines when registering new accounts online. Known as Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), the system won't allow users to advance until distorted characters in a box are correctly entered. BitDefender says a new threat, Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using more than 15,000 automatically generated bogus Microsoft Hotmail accounts to spread, and is registering 500 new accounts per hour, suggesting the Captcha system has been defeated.
Russia Shuts Down Allofmp3

The RIAA's always-intense lobbying efforts paid off when it got the US government to threaten Russia that unless it shut down the site, it wouldn't be admitted to the World Trade Organization. They've now gotten
what they paid fortheir wish, as Allofmp3.com has now been shut down, after pressure from the Russian government. But in a move to highlight the utter pointlessness of all of this, the company behind Allofmp3 -- which has shown little concern for the flap over the WTO -- has already set up another site, Mp3sparks.com, which appears nearly identical to Allofmp3. The company says it's setting aside 15 percent of its revenues to pay royalties to record labels, and is considering paying another 5 percent on top of that, even though it's not legally required to do so. Of course, that's not likely to matter to the labels, which sued Allofmp3, even though it had apparently been trying to pay royalties to them, in accordance with Russian law.
Google wants to protect you from Moore's Sicko

Taking a break from reading the wall-to-wall iPhone coverage on TechMeme, I ran across a post from Lauren Turner, who works for Google as an account planner selling ads to the healthcare industry. In the post on what is called the Google Health Advertising blog, but only contains two posts, she assures potential advertisers that Google can help protect them from the negative impact of Michael Moore's just released film "Sicko," which does to the U.S healthcare system what Fahrenheit 9/11 did to the Bush administration.
I saw "Sicko" last night, and while the film doesn't include the point of the view of U.S. healthcare industry executives (I assume they didn't relish being on film with Moore) and over rotates in spots, who can deny that the U.S. healthcare system, and the U.S. government that won't fix it, is deeply flawed.
Moore makes his points best in the film in chronicling some of the tragedies resulting from our healthcare system, and in documenting how people who live Canada, the United Kingdom and France have nationalized, socialized health care systems and have longer lifespans than the U.S. population.
Google flirts with online OS

It's only a matter of time before Google unveils a full-fledged online operating system. This week, Microsoft's biggest rival rolled out a new version of Docs & Spreadsheets - its online answer to Word and Excel - adding Windows-like folders, an improved search engine, and an all-around prettier interface.
Previously, Docs & Spreadsheets organized files using a tagging method reminiscent of Gmail, Google's web-based email client. With the addition of folders, the service feels much more like a classic desktop GUI. You can even move documents from folder to folder via drag and drop.
Google may close Gmail Germany

Spiegel a german news site is reporting that Google is threatening to shut down the german version of its Gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it’s new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, googles german privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any german citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.
ISPs Inserting Ads Into Your Pages

Some ISPs are resorting to a new tactic to increase revenue: inserting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users. They use a transparent web proxy (such as this one) to insert javascript and/or HTML with the ads into pages returned to users. Neither the content provides nor the end-users have been notified that this is taking place, and I'm sure that they weren't asked for permission either.