More than six months after it first launched, Google+ is set to finally allow users to create accounts using pseudonyms. Google announced that it planned to do so back in October in response to complaints from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, who said pseudonyms are necessary to ensure freedom of expression for people in danger of retribution for speaking out on controversial topics[......]
IFPI's music map of legal services In order to protect itself from piracy, the worldwide recording industry needs a few favors from governments and corporations around the globe, and a major new digital music report (PDF) from the industry's worldwide lobby IFPI lays them out. [......]
It was big week on the Internet. Many popular sites spent an entire day protesting SOPA, which resulted in both it and PIPA being put on life support. Good job, Internet! Megaupload was also taken down by the feds, leaving us wondering why we really need a law like SOPA[......]
The Rapidshare booth at the Leipzig Games Convention While customers of Megaupload, both legitimate and otherwise, try to figure out where to turn next, other file sharing companies are ready to step up to fill in the gaps—at least for legal uses. And RapidShare , the next largest "digital locker" service, claims to be unconcerned about the MegaUpload case's precedent. [......]
Another NinjaVideo admin, 24-year old Matthew David Howard Smith, was just sentenced to 14 months in prison and must pay $172,387. Read More: The first NinjaVideo sentence Read the comments on this post [......]
Former speaker Newt Gingrich The swelling coalition against the Stop Online Piracy Act gained three new members on Thursday night: Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. The fourth debate participant, Rep[......]
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is putting the PROTECT IP Act on hold. [......]
The filesharing site Megaupload.com has been taken down by the FBI as the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging seven people associated with the site. The 72-page indictment, handed down by a federal grand jury in Virginia on January 5, charges the seven people, including Megaupload's founders Kim Dotcom and Mathias Ortman, with conspiracy. [......]
Two security issues have been identified in McAfee's SaaS Total Protection anti-malware software suite, one of which could allow an attacker to misuse an ActiveX control to execute code and turn affected PCs into spam servers. [......]
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. In a 6-2 ruling, the court ruled that just because material enters the public domain, it is not “ territory that works may never exit .” (PDF) The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists who urged the justices to reverse an appellate court that ruled against the group, which has relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods. They claimed that re-copyrighting public works would breach the speech rights of those who are now using those works without needing a license[......]
Occasionally, in this line of work, I need to have a slight freak-out moment where I rave about the fact that things like this OrcaM "reconstruction sphere" actually exist. [......]
The special interests behind the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are in full retreat, throwing the bills' most controversial provisions overboard in a desperate attempt to stop the entire bill from sinking. Realizing that proposals to create a DNS-based blacklisting scheme had become politically radioactive, the bills' sponsors—Rep[......]
Best Ultrabooks: 15 of the best Is 2012 going to be the year of the Ultrabook? The term Ultrabook is a marketing term dreamt up by Intel but like Centrino and unlike Viiv , it's starting to stick as a catch-all term for thin and light laptops, or ultraportables as they're sometimes classified. The best way to think of an Ultrabook is a MacBook Air that isn't made by Apple, a netbook that isn't underpowered or a laptop that's been on a crash diet[......]
Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli hackers are waging a cyber street-fight in a tit-for-tat exchange of posturing, threats of mass credit card exposures, and denial-of-service attacks. [......]
Another day, another patent lawsuit between Apple and an Android phone manufacturer. Apple has filed a new lawsuit against Samsung in Germany targeting 10 of the company's smartphones, including the Galaxy S Plus and S II. According to court spokesperson Peter Schetz speaking to Bloomberg , the suit is based on Apple's European design registration for (presumably) the iPhone. [......]
