HADOPI Blamed for ISP Rate Hikes in France

Found on Zeropaid on Monday, 03 January 2011
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The goal of The High Authority for the Protection of works on the Internet (HADOPI) is to stop piracy, but French internet users are learning that the only thing HADOPI has effectively stopped is low rates for an internet connection.

What's ridiculous is the fact that, now, those who aren't pirating material are also being punished for these laws as well. Meanwhile, pirates are migrating to more secure sources, so the only people HADOPI is really punishing are non-pirates and pirates who don't know what they are doing.

You don't even need Captain Obvious for that. Hadopi costs up to $64 million each year, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who will pay for it. Of course it will not stop filesharing at all: I guess many now will decide not to buy from the entertainment industry anymore to compensate for the rising ISP costs they have caused by forcing a completely useless law into reality.

Hotmail Users Report Blank Inboxes

Found on PC Mag on Saturday, 01 January 2011
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According to multiple postings on Microsoft's official support forum for Windows Live, a number of users are reporting that their entire Hotmail accounts have been completely deleted without warning.

Users can still log in sans issue. However, they arrive at empty inboxes: No custom folders, no messages in "Sent" or "Deleted," nothing.

Users sign up with a free service and then wake up one day to find out that they lost data. Relying on the "cloud" is a wrong approach: never trust a single point and always store important data somewhere else. It's so simple to set up a standard email client to download messages while leaving them online. So if anything goes wrong, no problem, you have your local backup. Maybe that will be a lesson to some people.

Google eyes 'cloaking' as next antispam target

Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 28 December 2010
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Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted over the past week that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users.

Still, it's rare for Cutts and Google to announce this type of algorithmic shift so publicly, which implies they're giving Webmasters a warning shot in order to reexamine their sites before the ranking changes go into effect, and that rankings may be a little fluid as it rolls out.

That shouldn't be that new. Cloaking has been frowned upon for years and it's always been said that doing so will hurt your pagerank.

Chinese leader googled self, got mad at Google?

Found on CNet News on Saturday, 04 December 2010
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A New York Times report intimates that WikiLeaks cables reveal that Li was rather taken aback that he could put his own name in that helpful Google search box and, within a mere breath-length, up would pop entries that were not uniformly supportive of his politics or being.

If the WikiLeaked cables are accurate, they might well reflect the notion not merely that when a Chinese leader googled himself, he saw a threat to political hegemony.

Lol, u mad?

Peter Sunde attempting to create p2p alternative to ICANN

Found on geek.com on Monday, 29 November 2010
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Sunde has lost a domain in the past because of the way ICANN acted. It was taken without any consultation on their part, instead the organization relied on information from recording industry group IFPI to change the domain ownership.

His plan involves the creation of a DNS root server to begin with that uses peer-to-peer technology and is secure. It will be quite basic, but open and secure which is what Sunde wants.

Well what do you know. Three days ago I called for a P2P DNS system and now Peter seems to build one.

WikiLeaks Under Denial of Service Attack

Found on SecurityWeek on Saturday, 27 November 2010
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The attack comes around the time of an expected release of classified State Department documents, which the Obama administration says will put "countless" lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies. The expected released of State Department documents is expected to be seven times the size of the 400,000 Iraq war documents released in October.

It's pretty easy to guess who is behind that DDoS against WikiLeaks. Easy and obvious. Of course the government doesn't want this information to be public and we learned from the previous release that the reason is not so much the protection of "countless" innocent people, but keeping the dirty sides of those wars hidden. Civilians will support a war easier if it is clean, without major losses and for a noble cause. Torture, high colateral damage and securing resources is not what they want to see.

Google to delete U.K. Street View Wi-Fi data

Found on CNet News on Sunday, 21 November 2010
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Google has been given the go-ahead by the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office to delete the data it collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as part of its Street View operation.

Google said it intends to erase the data as soon as possible. It told ZDNet UK that it is not subject to any outstanding legal proceedings in the U.K. over the data harvesting.

Google deleting data? Now let's be serious.

Facebook readies an email service

Found on The Inquirer on Saturday, 13 November 2010
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The website is also reporting that analysis of events, photos and friends on Facebook can be used to analyse email and sort messages by what it believes is the highest priority, something that doesn't seem creepy at all.

The majority of Facebook users who don't care one bit about their privacy are unlikely to give a passing thought about the ramifications of giving the firm access to their emails.

Plus, emails will probably shared with world and dog; after all, Zucky doesn't seem to like privacy at all.

Botnet takedowns curb spam volumes

Found on The Register on Wednesday, 10 November 2010
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In October, authorities in the Netherlands took down several servers associated with the Bredolab botnet. The action followed the September closure of spamit.com, a key player in the unlicensed pharmaceuticals spam racket, and arrests in the US, UK and Ukraine of scores of suspected members of a ZeuS phishing Trojan ring.

A similar study by Kaspersky Lab, published on Wednesday, also reports a drop in spam volumes in Q3 2010 to around 82.3 per cent. It credits the disabling of control nodes for the Pushdo / Cutwail botnet (blamed for one in 10 junk mail messages worldwide) and the closure of Spamit.com for the decline in spam volumes.

Not for long though. It won't take long until the other botnets fill the gap and supply inboxes with constant information about the latest pills.

Cooks Source Editor Finally Responds... Makes Things Worse

Found on Techdirt on Thursday, 04 November 2010
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Cooks Source magazine had been caught pulling a story off the internet and republishing it, without permission. Making matters worse, when called on it, the editor, Judith Griggs tried to lecture the original author, Monica Gaudio, with a hilariously wrong explanation of copyright and the public domain, and even (condescendingly) suggests Monica should pay her for the editing she needed to do on the story.

Nowhere in this is there any attempt to actually explain how she thought it was okay to repeatedly copy articles and photographs into a magazine while presenting them as if they had been specifically commissioned or licensed for the magazine.

That's the wet dream of every lawyer. Now I don't really mind if things are shared for personal use without making money of it, but a magazine should at least know how to handle this. I bet Griggs would start lawsuits within minutes if her work gets copied and sold.