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Web-Lockers Next in Line on UK Politicians’ Black List
Engaged in an overwhelming battle against online piracy they are planning to win, the UK government has not been taking the best decisions lately as we already noted in a previous post this week. After the politicians’ intention to alter the Digital Economy Bill by introducing a regulation that empowered judges to block access to a specific website if suspected to promote copyright infringement caused a wave of public discontentment, the UK government tried to fix things but only managed to come up with yet another outrageous solution. In fact, the “reassessed” proposal announced by politicians may have an even more pronounced negative impact on perfectly legitimate online resources, as Cory Doctorow describes in his write up in The Guardian : “As our routine media files have increased in size – multi-megapixel images, home videos, audio recordings of meetings and so on – it's become increasingly difficult to use email to share data privately with family, friends and colleagues, because most email servers croak over really big files.
Continue reading »ISP Stands Up For Torrent Site Owner’s Privacy
In conjunction with the local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån, three movie companies took legal action last year in an attempt to obtain the personal details of the owner of the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker. They asked the Södertörn District Court to demand that TeliaSonera give up the information because SweTorrents was infringing on their copyrights. The application was made under the IPRED legislation introduced earlier that year, which was put in place to make it easier for copyright holders to track down and identify potential copyright infringers.
Continue reading »Are You Ready for a Real Google Phone?
In yet another of the seemingly endless stream of new products coming from Google this year , this week has seen the confirmation of rumors that the search engine giant is about to get more directly involved in the mobile phone space. Google has already made a major step into thesmart-phone world through its creation of the Android phone OS, a product that has exploded in 18 months from one phone with little application support to virtually dozens of phones from different manufacturers and carriers, and with a market of over 20,000 applications. However, it appears that Google is ready now to go to market with their own phone, known as the Nexus One , built by HTC, and sporting some quite impressive specs including a Snapdragon 1GHz chip, a 3.7-inch AMOLED display, and a 5 megapixel camera. More revolutionary than the specific technology of the Nexus One itself would be Google’s unusual retail strategy, at least for the US market. Unlike virtually every other phone today that is sold for a subsidized price in exchange for a long-term carrier contract, the Nexus One would be sold directly by Google unlocked and without a contract. Nexus One owners theoretically would be able to shop around to find the best deal for themselves, and pick their own carrier. Combined with other Google products like Google Voice, that essentially makes SMS-texts free, this new business strategy would be quite revolutionary in the US, and could disrupt the status quo for handset manufacturers and mobile network operators enormously. Naturally, since much of what we know about the Nexus One is fragmentary and unconfirmed , there are possible hold-ups that may prevent Google from being quite as innovative as some are hoping. First, if the phone is, as is likely, limited to GSM networks only, then the actual flexibility of it is severely reduced. Some carriers like AT&T are supposed to already be balking on this point. Also, without knowing the exact retail prices and Google’s selling strategy it’s impossible to really gauge how the Nexus One might stack up against its competitors, including the Apple iPhone of course, but also other Android phones, like the Verizon Droid. Nonetheless, according to some sources, the Nexus One will be available already by the first week of January, so we won’t have long to wait to find out if Google is truly aiming to turn the US mobile phone market on its head in 2010.
Continue reading »Aussie Pirate Party To Shake Up Politics Down Under
2009 has been a disastrous year for several well-established torrent sites, with The Pirate Bay and Mininova losing in court against the entertainment industries. Not completely unrelated, this year has been a very successful one for the political Pirate Party movement. The Pirate Party currently holds two seats in the European Parliament thanks to the massive support from Swedish voters.
Continue reading »Novell Strips BitTorrent DHT Technology from openSUSE
Sponsored by Novell, openSUSE is a free and Open Source operating system, based on Linux. Following in the footsteps of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE recently decided to include Transmission as the default BitTorrent client. However, the addition of Transmission to openSUSE was not straightforward.
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