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Telecoms package prob must be sorted or snuffed out in 8 weeks
European Parliament obliged to get a shift on with reform The European Parliament has until the end of the year to agree a new telecoms reform deal with the EU’s Council of Ministers. It will announce Thursday the start date for negotiations which can take no longer than eight weeks.…
Continue reading »Major Hollywood ‘anti-piracy’ shake up
“Hollywood fears that the pirating of movies will become as common as the illicit sharing of music files.” Clearly, the auld grey heads who run Time-Warner, Fox, Disney, Columbia, Paramount and MGM haven’t been near the P2P networks, lately. There, the sharing of movies continues to be prolific, thanks to a significant extent to Hollywood insiders who supply screeners, work prints, preview releases and other ‘product’ for online consumption. On top of that, the many millions of DVDs routinely pumped out for retail sale serve as templates for organised criminal counterfeiters and duplicators who sell the results on underground and black markets, as well as the street corners and flea markets of the world.
Continue reading »Do-Not-Call List: One year old …
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Canada’s do-not-call list. Over the past 12 months, millions of Canadians have registered their numbers on the list and filed hundreds of thousands of complaints with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the law. While the CRTC has found itself subject to considerable criticism for investigating only a small percentage of complaints and levying just a handful of fines for do-not-call violations, a review of tens of thousands of complaints obtained under the Access to Information Act reveals a potentially bigger problem.
Continue reading »‘Geeky young males’ and file sharing
“The Net isn’t revolution,” I’ve just posted in a comment to the apparent sinking of The Pirate Bay ship. “It’s evolution. “Whenever a site such as TPB goes down for whatever reason, if something doesn’t already exist to take its place, something new quickly evolves.
Continue reading »Hacking the DefCon 17 Badges
Several of the Defcon badges shown with an iPhone for scale. LAS VEGAS — For the last four years DefCon’s badges have been designed with circuit boards that attendees have been encouraged to hack as part of a contest. This year, the badge hackers were competing to win a black über badge, which gives the recipient free entry to DefCon for life.
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