Dutch courts have smacked Mininova in the face and told them to clean up their site as there is illegal software on it. For the nazi’s of Brein it’s quite a victory. Will Google be next? It also publishes links to illegal material and profits from it…

Mininova Ordered to Remove All ‘Infringing’ Torrents | TorrentFreak.

Between 12:00 and 24:00 customers of UPC internet will only be able to download at 1/3rd of the possible speed as UPC will be QOSsing them.

UPC voert toch afknijpbeleid in | Webwereld.

It turns out that CCTV cameras all over the place don’t really help much at all: for every 1000 camera’s, one crime is solved. That’s a very very expensive way to go about invading people’s privacy.

Instead of getting rid of the camera’s, the Metropolitan police is saying they need to figure out how to use the footage better. Hmmm.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | 1,000 cameras ‘solve one crime’.

It turns out that Palm wants your data – as much as possible! The Pre sends the following information home daily:

• Location
• Which apps you’ve used and for how long
• App crash logs
• Installed apps

Apparently Palm says you can turn it off, but they don’t tell you how. You OK it by agreeing to their privacy policy (so – who here has ever read a privacy policy / eula they’ve agreed to?).

More and more companies (Apple, Google, to name a few) feel they have ownership of the devices they sell you, and feel that collecting this kind of private data is fine.

Of course, some of the apps on the phone need this kind of data in order to work (eg apps that show things close to you in Google Maps) but does Palm need this data too?

via FYI: The Pre Reports Your Location to Palm | PreCentral.net.

Of course only in the jolly old UK:

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

The best bit? They’ve allready put 2000 families through this!

via Daily Express | UK News :: Sin bins for worst families.

David Pogue is waging war on those carriers that make you listen to a stupid canned message from them after you listen to a personal voicemail message. Those 15 seconds of canned bullshit are there to make you rack up mobile expenses.

One way to avoid them is to press:

*-1-# in a row

This is because the secret skip the message code is different for each carrier and this should get them all.

How to bypass stupid voicemail instructions

There are loads of ways to complain in the US to your carrier – we should start this in Europe as well!

‘Take Back the Beep’ Campaign – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com.

The Pirate Bay has been told to block access to Dutch users in some magical fashion during a court session in which the subpoena’s were delivered via Twitter and Facebook and the defendants were not able to come to the courtroom to defend themselves. They sent a written response, but this was ignored due to their non presence.

Is this the beginning of the end of free speech on internet in the Netherlands? If it’s up to the SS like stichting Brein it is: and they’ll be the arbiters of what we are and aren’t allowed to see.

Dutch court rules that The Pirate Bay should be blocked | Security and the Net.

In a blow to freedom and privacy, the Dutch have passed a law requiring ISPs and telco’s te retain all kinds of personal data about a person’s online and telecomunications transactions for the period of at least 12 months, despite not having been able to prove that this helps at all against terrorism (which is why the law was enacted in the first place)..

In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means. A British police detective who recently won the Orwell Prize for his excellent political writing used his blog to write highly critical accounts of police activities and unethical behavior, making very powerful enemies in the process. A well-funded newspaper with powerful connections quickly heard of his blog and decided it was absolutely vital to expose his identity using an investigative journalist. Like any good newspaper, the blogger anonymized the people and the locations in all the cases he discussed on his blog, but the newspaper alleges these were not sufficiently anonymized and complains that they could work out the identities, though British newspapers don’t complain that they are allowed to publish the identities of men who are falsely accused of rape and cleared in court. The newspaper also helpfully contacted the blogger’s employer, and his job is now threatened.

via Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | British Court Rules Against Blogger Anonymity.

Why, simply issue short questionaires and call your pub a “Smoking Research Centre”!

After Merkel’s reich has allready raided wikileaks headquarters, they have now managed to get DENIC (the German registrar) to take down the wikileaks.de domain citing vague nonsense.
What is it with Germany and it’s antipathy to free speech?

How silly is that then? You can’t have a drawing of a child in the neighbourhood of sex? Well, that makes the drawer of Bart Simpson with a penis a criminal. As well as I guess quite a bit of humor that has children walking into their parent’s bedroom as they’re having sex. As though that only happens to paedophile parents.

A Dutch forum – internetoplichting.nl – where you can post if you’ve been scammed or otherwise treated badly by an internet shop, has been held responsible for the posts depicting Trendylaarzen as a crap shop.
Even though the court didn’t rule there were any inaccuracies in the posts, they did say that there was malicious intent because some of the site admins were writing on the topic and were participating in building up the pressure on Trendylaarzen.
For me, I fail to see the difference between a site admin and a regular visitor: as long as there was no libel, they should be able to post whatever they like.

Thus they can use adsense equipped sites to mainly show you the stuff they think you’re interested in. Privacy? Anonymous web surfing? No thank you! Fortunately they have a page where you can see what categories Google thinks you’re interested in and you can opt out of interests or opt in to new categories. The system is cookie based, so you have to do this on each and every browser you use.

The SIDN – the Dutch .nl zonefile owners – have decided they want only large registrars and have decided to give owners of > 100.000 domain names up to 8% discount.
Becoming a registrant is subject to an annual fee, which is the same for all registrars, so the smaller registrars, that have to make more costs due to them not being able to afford automated systems, are being pushed out pricewise.
Basically SIDN is saying “screw you” to all it’s smaller registrars.
Fortunately there is a protest. After unsuccessful negotiations with SIDN, group of registrars has protested to trade standards, complaining that SIDN is a monopoly and is taking advantage of its position for no real reason.
Come on SIDN, you’re one of the largest zones in the world, thanks in large part to small registrars. Stop kicking them in the face!

This has just been put into law, without any debate whatsoever, in response to a high court judge’s ruling that MP’s adresses should be published.
This from the house that pushes the wide eyed innocent “but if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” argument all over the place. Are they afraid, because they’re hiding something? Or do they really know, deep in their hearts, that this is a total bullshit irrellevant argument.

“Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently being debated by the UK Parliament, would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose64. Personal information arbitrarily used without consent or even knowledge: the very opposite of ‘Data Protection.’ An ‘Information Sharing Order’, as defined in Clause 152, would permit personal information to be trafficked and abused, not only all across government and the public sector %u2014 it would also reach into the private sector. And it would even allow transfer of information across international borders.

Slashdot | UK Government Wants To Bypass Data Protection Act

I sense the evil hand of J Smith in this.

You could be thought of as performing reconnaisance for terrorist (hey! that word again – what does it mean, nowadays?) acts. Especially don’t take any pictures of the police. No, not even if they’re committing atrocities. You’ll get busted with a 10 year incarceration or unspecified fines.

Using warrantless wiretaps, this shows you who gets targetted when you allow the police state to run amok.

With airline personell being able to dictate what they think is ‘terrorist’ behavior without any training qualifying them to do so, what we get is at least 208 people being prosecuted as terrorists for raising their voice, spanking their children or basically causing the crew any kind of headache whatsoever.

Showing that there is no limit to how far the US is willing to push people around, they’re now forcing convicted sex offenders to submit their online email adresses and passwords. They’re allready forced to walk around and tell everyone in their environment they’re sex offenders, they have limited movement and that after they’re supposed to have served the punishment for their crime. If you don’t find it enough punishment, then keep them in jail longer! If you do, then lay off them. Especially the 19 year olds who are branded sex offenders for having had sex with their 16 year old girlfriends. And if you don’t believe that serving time is a good way of changing someone’s attitude, then reform the penal system! But lay off these people. Treating them worse than released murderers and persecuting them like WWII jews just seems a bit harsh>

This experiment took the top science students of this year and gave them 1965 exams. They all failed miserably, showing the dumbing down of education quite graphically. An interesting side effect was that the girls did worse than the boys did, even though other research puts girls ahead in current exams. This clearly shows something that is quite taboo in today’s society to put into words, but has been shown again and again: current education is built up to favour girls and make boys do badly.