Which may be an overly simplistic viewpoint from him on this particular issue. How much do Italians use and like Youtube? How will they react to finding out they can no longer access it due to their government? While Google cutting Italy off may be exactly what Berlusconi thinks he wants, it may end up being exactly what he didn't really want. So I say Google should go for it, losing access to something major may be enough to stir up Italy's populace where no amount of political reporting would.

WRONG. Geohot started taking a look at it because the PS3 Slim didn't allow OtherOS. Once he found the hypervisor exploit, Sony retroactively pulled OtherOS from ALL PS3 systems. Sony started trying to remove OtherOS before Geohot was involved, they just accelerated it and retroactively removed it from all models once he found an actual exploit. I suspect they'd have removed it eventually with or without an exploit, it just gave them a convenient excuse. They obviously had decided somewhere between initial launch and the slim's launch that OtherOS wasn't something they wanted to allow any longer.

It is a shame that the Nazis did that, but it's done and there's no going back. In the US in particular the swastika is almost always associated with the Nazis simply because WWII and the Holocaust are rather major historical events. Not to mention there's plenty of aryan brotherhood groups still using the swastika as a symbol to promote everything wrong the Nazis did. It's very much still in use as a symbol of hate.

Believe it? Sure I do, I've known about it for a long time, doesn't change the fact that most people in the US (also Europe, Canada) associate it with the Nazis. And your argument kinda runs off the rails in that bolded part. We're not dealing with the Indo-Asia area. We're dealing with North America. Even if you try to argue that people from that area use Xbox Live, Microsoft is still a US company. Their policies on acceptable use are going to by and large reflect that.

Personally I've yet to see someone use the swastika online that was trying to promote discussion about it. Every time, without exception, I've encountered it on forums and such it was someone trying to promote the "ideals" of Nazi Germany and/or harassing people. So yeah, people who use it online by and large are doing so to promote the ideas of the Nazis. I'm certain there are exceptions, but they're few enough that it makes sense for site owners to ban it. Besides, if your goal is education, using it as an avatar is a bad idea. Most people would simply see it and never ask you why you used it. Hardly a teaching moment there.

Besides, this is a total non-issue. Xbox Live's Terms of Service forbids this type of thing. You agreed to that ToS when you signed up. So it's not so much about the swastika as it is about violating a contract. (ToS's are a contract between the user and the company.) And really, online games are NOT the place to even try to educate people about this issue. When you're playing a game you want to have fun, to escape reality, not to get a 5 minute lecture on why the swastika's actually a totally cool symbol that the Nazis corrupted.

It (and other controversial items/topics) are banned on most all forums online for a simple reason -- the vast majority of people using them are NOT trying to do so to engender discussion, but to troll/harass/etc. If you want to blame anyone for this, blame all the people out there that think anonymity on the Internet = license to be the biggest asshole they can be.

In the case of the swastika though, it is most commonly associated with Nazi Germany, simply because WWII and the Holocaust are rather major historical events and so everyone learns about them. The Nazis used the swastika quite extensively, so it's quite difficult to disassociate them for purposes of teaching. Even if you could do so, why would you? There are plenty of groups who continue to use it as a symbol to promote Nazi Germany's ideals, including killing off everyone who's not blonde and blue-eyed. People need to know the context behind the symbol because it's still relevant. So here you can blame all those aryan brotherhood folks for keeping the swastika in use as a symbol of hate.

Who am I to say what's in bad taste and not? If you're on a forum that runs on my servers on a domain I own, I'm basically god. It's my site, my rules. If you don't like it, go find somewhere else to discuss it. I'm betting you wouldn't like it much if someone started posting stuff you found horribly offense on a site you owned and controlled either. And this is exactly what Microsoft's saying. It's their service, their rules and you agreed to their Terms of Service when you signed up for the service. That ToS forbids using symbols like the swastika.

This is a complete non-issue. What it boils down to is "user wants to do something that violates the ToS, company doesn't allow it and explains why".

Not exactly the same thing, but the opening of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream starts out with a guy farting his way into creating an interstellar incident. The aliens communicate among themselves partially with scent and he had a device installed in his colon to allow him to dial up insults and such and have the odors emitted. Hilarious book actually.

I certainly think Wikileaks should have released the whole video from the start along with the edited one, but you're not being realistic. In today's world, for better or worse, you just aren't going to get many people to sit through a video with long boring parts to see the parts you want them to see. You have to release an edited version highlighting what you want them to see that's short enough that people's attention spans won't make them give up before they see the important part(s). Wikileaks should definitely strive to do better than Fox News and MSNBC and make the full unedited version available for all who want it to see as well however.

From what I understand their mission is to expose corruption and abuses by pretty much anyone that does them. While I don't really like some of the sensationalism they've used, I don't believe the whole world would know who and what they were without them. Just publishing leaked documents/videos alone won't cut it, you have to get people's attentions, and attention spans are mighty short nowadays with 24x7 news coming at you from numerous sources.

I think it's more that they just want to kill people and don't give a damn what excuse they use. If it wasn't the US they'd find another reason to kill people.

Many of us consider the changes made by the PATRIOT act and others to be pretty damn illicit. We've almost to the point where you have to show papers to travel by air inside the country for example, and how many times have we heard that audits show the FBI has abused the national security letters powers the PATRIOT act gave them? Since 9/11 it's become very common practice by law enforcement at all levels to use "combating terrorism" as an excuse to restrain civil liberties. Check out Carlos Miller's Photography is not a Crime blog for lots and lots of examples of that. These are things that are most definitely forbidden by custom, some of them by the law. So yeah, typo on the poster's fault, but sadly, it still works. Al Queda used terror to get the US government to introduce lots of illicit changes to the country.

By that logic isn't what the US Copyright Group the same thing? Their large-scale lawsuits against file sharers is definitely meant to instill at least some fear (to stop the sharing), and is highly aggressive in nature. They're also using the threat of a massive judgment as a way to coerce as many people as possible into settling to earn money.

While I agree the bomb threat was a hideously bad idea, I think law enforcement going after anonymous full-scale would be an enormous public relations disaster. Even if you discount the bad publicity of hauling lots and lots of college students and high school students into court (and if they do raids, being taken at gunpoint) for downloading and running an application, I don't think it's guaranteed they'd be able to get convictions. No one person individually is denying the attacked sites' services, it's only in aggregate that it's a problem and becomes a DDoS. The only people they might be able to prosecute for this would be if only a handful of people was deciding the attack targets and times, then those people would be easy targets for law enforcement and since they were organizing the attacks, definitely prosecutable (and they could win the case). But I kinda doubt anon's that organized, it's probably just whoever manages to convince enough people to go along who decides each target, and it's probably new people every time.

Besides, I'm quite sure if law enforcement started trying to crack down on anon that some of them would start finding open proxies and stuff to add lots of false positives into the IPs being used in the attacks. Trying to sort out the real attackers versus open-proxies/hacked PCs would be a total nightmare.

I agree with you for the most part, but I'm not sure this is a given. There's plenty of people who think pot is horribly dangerous, and there's many of those people who more or less make it their life's work to spread terror about how bad marijuana is to the public at large.

That said, most people are starting to see that the current policy (no pot for anyone, it's has no medicinal value) is totally out of line with reality. The government continuing to insist marijuana is so dangerous it can't have medicinal uses is hurting them in their efforts to keep it banned. Any rational person realizes after even a bit of thinking that nearly every drug has medicinal value in some settings. Hell look at Thalidomide, even it has beneficial uses and if there was ever a drug that strikes fear in people's hearts it's that one. I think if the people had their say marijuana would be legal with prescription, or at least legal to grow yourself as long as you had a doctor's prescription allowing it.

Mostly it's due to two reasons: 1. the ISPs don't want to actually spend any money upgrading their networks, because that'd lower their profits in the short term (although they're going to pay for this dearly at some point in the future) and 2. it's an easy way to make more money off your customers both without upgrading, and most importantly, without raising the regular fees. By hiding the extra costs in overage charges, and marketing it so it sounds like only evil people (pirates, bandwidth hogs, etc.) will go over their limits, they can charge people more without raising the basic fees.

The really, really sad thing is, when karma finally comes to bite them on the ass over the lack of network upgrades, they'll probably go whine to congress and manage to get them to pay for most of it. So we get screwed along the way (by being charged more and having lower connection speeds/bad latency/etc.) and then we'll get screwed again by having to pay for what should have been done all along with some of those profits. Meanwhile the people who actually pocketed all the profits will have moved on to pillage another industry (or two, or three...)

No he won't, they'll still claim those going over their quotas are evil pirates because that's easier to justify publicly than saying they just watch too much online video. Limits as small as Rogers is using have nothing to do with stopping the top 1% of users (another saying ISPs are fond of trotting out) "abusing" their bandwidth and everything to do with padding the company's bottom line while trying to make it look like they aren't raising the actual monthly bill. (Since all the extra money gets hidden in overages, but the basic amount charged is the same.)

What will probably happen is that in a year or two so many people will be going over their quotas thanks to online video, and raising such a fuss about it, that Rogers will be forced to raise their caps. But even then they won't say that's why they're raising them. No, it'll be something about "improving our service" or some other marketing twist.

The hosting company told him they weren't allowed to give him his data. So it's been seized by the government, they're the only ones that could order the hosting company not to give him a copy of his data. And no, it's unlikely that the hosting company simply didn't want to bother doing so, they'd just have said that (every hosting company I've dealt with has policies where they don't have to give you a copy of your data if you're terminated for TOS violations, although most of them will still do so).

It's very unusual for a domain to be taken down like this. Even in cases of definite, repeated long-term copyright violations the government doesn't order the site taken down, order the hosting company that they can't give the customer a copy of the data and also order them to not tell the customer why they took it down in the first place (beyond a "we had no choice"). Even the recent domain seizures the US government did against sites that were streaming new-release movies illegally they got warrants for. And the court gave them the power to seize the domain names as well as the servers in those cases.

Here there's apparently no warrant and a seal of secrecy The whole thing sounds like one of the FBI's national security letters, which they don't have a very good track record on using correctly.

And their ability to deal with a technology industry like videogames is put into serious question. If they can't handle basic E-mail technology, how can they understand videogames?