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Comment Re:Gigaton Fail - (Score 3, Interesting) 420

Oh, most people here would agree that police states are bad. But on the other hand they would say that there are exceptions (child pornography, terrorism etc.). And of course "our politicians would never do something really wrong!!!"

People in Germany live in a rich land which has last experienced war 64 years ago - so most people see it for granted that they will always live in a democracy, where their freedom is guaranteed.
Intellectually they know that in other countries this isn't so, but if you personally never experienced something else, then it is hard to imagine that this might change. And because they fail to grasp the fact that their freedom and their rights could be endangered they see no reason to defend it.

Censorship

A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany 420

Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."
Censorship

Submission + - The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany (netzpolitik.org) 2

tmk writes: "Germany is on the verge of censoring its Internet. On Thursday the German parliament Bundestag will adopt a law to block Internet sites in order to fight child pornography. In the last months the German net community tried to stop the new law, spreaded the word from Twitter to the mainstream media that the new law won't help against child abuse. The netizens started the biggest parlamentary petition in Germany which was supported by 130000 citizens and fought with wikis and internet memes against the established political structures. Activists even helped to remove over 60 websites containing child pornography in 12 hours — proving that internet blocking is an ineffective method to fight child pornography. But the net community didn't succeed at last. The German Federal Police will soon begin to distribute a blacklist to German providers."
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available 100

cperciva writes "FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE, the fourth release from the highly successful 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
Privacy

Interview With Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge 515

mmuch writes "In the wake of the recent copyright debate in Swedish mainstream media, the P2P Consortium has published an interview with Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. He comments on the mainstream politicians starting to understand the issues, the interplay between strict copyright enforcement and mass surveillance, and the chances for global copyright reform." Some choice Falkvinge quotes: "What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy — forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance — realized they were under a serious attack... for the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle. And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is 'thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief'... Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding... When the Iron Curtain fell, all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around."
Television

Submission + - Blu-ray won't play Profile 2.0 Discs 4

Reservoir Hill writes: "Blu-ray may have taken a commanding lead in the next-generation format war but Betanews is reporting that early supporters of Blu-ray will be left out in the cold when the Blu-ray Disc Association introduces BD Profile 2.0, expected to arrive in October. Unlike HD DVD, which mandated features such as local storage, a second video and audio decoder for picture-in-picture, and a network connection from the very beginning, the companies behind Blu-ray took a different approach to keep costs down. "We should have waited another year to introduce Blu-ray to the public, but the format war changed the situation," said one manufacturer. Representatives at the Blu-ray booth at CES said that the PlayStation 3 is currently the only player they would recommend, due to upcoming changes to the platform. Asked if they were concerned about a backlash from early adopters who supported the format from the beginning, one representative said: "They knew what they were getting into.""
Privacy

Submission + - Gmail Reveals Browsing History to Contacts as Ads

em8chel writes: "We all know that Gmail scans your email messages for key words to display related ad links right next to your correspondence if you use the browser to access your Gmail account. However, it looks like Google might be doing more than just scanning your email messages. It's suspected that your googling history is also being converted to ad links, displayed not (just) to yourself, but also to your Gmail pals.

More details can be found here. Can someone please contact Google to get a confirmation about this?"
Google

Submission + - Google selling search terms to spammers? (209.85.165.104)

An anonymous reader writes: A few months ago I searched for a very unique string (with letters,
numbers and shift-number characters) on Google.co.uk. No search terms
were returned. The other day I searched again, and there were three spam
results — one was spam added as hidden comments on a seemingly innocent
tech site, the other were blogspot.com spams (i.e.
yjumdfjsdhsd.blogspot.com).

A couple of other people I know have reported the same thing. Their
quotes:
"I think google sells the search strings to companies. I typed in a
search maybe 3 years ago, and I did a partial search using some of the
same keywords a few months ago. I was surprised to see my exact phrase
that I used years ago, but on a spam site."

"I had an idea of an adult dating site name for a story I was writing,
googled it, and nothing existed. Now it's a couple months later and I
regularly get that search term in the subject line of spam to me.
There's a break in the chain somewhere I guess. "

Does Google sell the terms that people search for?

Notes: I might have used either google.co.uk directly or maybe Firefox's
in-built Google search box. I always use Firefox with RefControl to hide
the referer, NoScript and AdblockPlus turned on with Google adverts
hidden, Google History is disabled, I use OpenDNS but have Google's IPs
hardcoded into my hosts file in case I'm ever DNS-poisoned (and also
because OpenDNS reroutes Google via their own server), I have never had
mal/spyware, I use NOD32, and regularly check for odd TCP connections
and run Rootkit Revealer, etc.

Here are google searches to some of the sites full of search terms. Most
of these need the google cache, as the blogspot sites seem to have been
removed (numbers are easiest to search for because the search strings
are all concatenated):
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=4764958132
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=6126270270
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22121+2319310%22&filter=0

Note that because I use NoScript and AdBlock Plus, I have no idea if any
of these pages are laden with malware. Be careful.

Sometimes Google returns different results for different countries, so
here are some Cache links. You can find other blogspot domains and
hidden comment spam sites by searching for some of the unique keywords
found on these pages:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:Yz-jU4KyWDQJ:rddfedardmb.blogspot.com/+%22121+2319310%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:4MlXZFoTDzIJ:qsschhtrcy.blogspot.com/+%22121+2319310%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:Yg4b30AX8vIJ:crjospiyh.blogspot.com/+%22121+2319310%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:ECWdBoe5QAkJ:crjospiyh.blogspot.com/2007/11/this-website-will-help-you-to-find-out.html+%22121+2319310%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:e7FRCXG68DQJ:srjugojiz.blogspot.com/+%22121+2319310%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:IJFLnDocQNMJ:qbgickstiwu.blogspot.com/2007/12/id-trade-million-pretty-words.html+%22121+2319310%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:Zw_nJFZNLPYJ:sjapeqgyvsru.blogspot.com/+%2297+29950071%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:4Got9ZG1D_YJ:gzymsthst.blogspot.com/+%2297+29950071%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=uk&lr=lang_en
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:hATOYFipUhYJ:ghwsvpzsqddg.blogspot.com/+%2297+29950071%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=uk&lr=lang_en

The only things I can think of is that either someone is sniffing search
queries destined to Google, Google reveals search words to anyone who
wants to buy adverts (as opposed to advertisers saying "I want to buy a
million searches of the keywords "suntan lotion"), or someone working at
Google sells search terms to SEO companies, or an enterprising SEO
person has found a backdoor to see Google search terms.

Censorship

Submission + - YouTube censoring atheists. (youtube.com)

Metaleks writes: 'Tis the season to be jolly. But all is not well. It would seem that YouTube is censoring those who lack Christmas spirit. One after another, atheists on YouTube are being removed from Top 100 lists, and having their channels stripped of any honours. To prove this wasn't some sort of YouTube glitch, one atheist went as far as creating another account. As soon as he was "discovered" of being an atheist his videos were stripped of any honours and his name taken off of the Top 100 lists. Why is YouTube censoring atheists?

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