children
Microsoft & pals to ‘educate’ Middle East kids
p2pnet news view Kids & Kartels | Politics:- Children in the Middle East will soon become the targets of ‘educators’ invading schools to implant The Corporate Word on filesharing and intellectual property, together with other essential scriptures. The League of Arab States, Microsoft and Khasawneh & Associates (?) say their new Arab Intellectual Property Centre will, “provide a central hub for best practice sharing and legal resources on intellectual property in the Arab region”. “The site aims to provide the Arab region with assistance in its efforts to promote the protection of intellectual property by providing a central database on intellectual property and internet crime issues within the region, including an extensive collection of regional laws and regulations, international treaties and agreements and intellectual property case law from around the Middle East region,” says a joint statement .
Continue reading »Kids’ chat data sold to marketeers
This comes as Big News to the Associated Press . But it’s no surprise to us. “Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids’ online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children’s chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered,” says AP, going on: “Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games.” Great! But not so great because, “The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids,” it says, quoting Parry Aftab (right), “a child-safety advocate,” as saying, “This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology.
Continue reading »Aussie Opposition: “End Mandatory Internet Filtering Farce”
Says it’s time for Senator Conroy to release the results of live trials, but that he’s “too embarrassed” to admit their failure. Australian Senator Nick Minchin, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and leader of the opposition in the Senate, says its time for Senator Conroy to end plans for “ mandatory voluntary ” Internet filtering once and for all. In case you’ve forgotten, Minister Conroy is the one behind the country’s much criticized efforts for “mandatory voluntary” filtering of “ offensive and illegal material ,” pornography , P2P , gambling websites, and even the recently disclosed online gaming sites , per his ill-conceived plan to “ protect the children.
Continue reading »We all copy — all the time
Often, apologists for things like trade secrets, patent and copyright law, or the corporate media oligarchy itself, claim such structures are ‘understandable’, because ‘why help potential competitors?” It’s — supposedly — taken as axiomatic that those within a given field of endeavor inevitably regard all others in that field as adversaries … in other words, zero-sum thinking. If one of your ‘competitors’ gain (say, by having fans come to their shows, or being able to produce a comparable medication in the case of pharmaceutical companies) — they it follows logically, that *you* lose, by that same amount. The only problem with this, is that it’s completely wrong.
Continue reading »Global Gaming debts threaten Pirate Bay deal
That unpleasant gurgling sound you hear is the Good Ship Pirate Bay foundering. The supposed sale of TPB to Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory has been reported by some TPB supporters as golden, as all-but done, despite early warnings that everything in the garden wasn’t perhaps as rosy as company CEO Hans Pandeya wanted people to believe. Other people have, however, been far less sanguine.
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