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The Internet

Submission + - Yes, Stickam does monitor your private video chats

thefickler writes: Stickam, a social networking site that places emphasis on chatting with friends by means of a webcam, states in its Terms of Service (TOS) that it retains the right to "monitor the content of any messaging that occurs on or through the instant message service;" however, it may come as a shock to learn that they regularly do monitor the webcam chats, including private, friend-to-friend chats. Neil Hotkiewicz learned the hard way.
Censorship

Submission + - Movie Industry Censoring Itself by Mistake?

Dak RIT writes: It seems that in its zeal to stop the distribution of copyrighted materials on YouTube, the movie industry has just inadvertently censored itself. Alliance Atlantis has apparently sent a takedown notice to YouTube for a video clip from the movie Rush Hour 3 that was uploaded to YouTube by New Line Cinema, and linked to from the Rush Hour 3 home page (at the bottom of the page, click on the Special Sneak Peek — The Nun Clip). Rush Hour 3 is distributed by New Line Cinema in the US, although it appears that Alliance Atlantis may be responsible for distribution in Canada and the UK.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - e-voting outlawed in Netherlands (www.nrc.nl)

joost writes: "After rallying for over a year, e-voting is now outlawed (Dutch) in the Netherlands. The country's only e-voting manufacturer Nedap has been told it's machines are fundamentally hackable. Upcoming elections will be performed with the red pencil, but a different e-voting apparatus is under development. This new machine will always feature a paper trail. More Dutch information on the group's website who started all this."
The Internet

Submission + - Demonoid shut down by CRIA?

L. VeGas writes: "For twenty-four hours, Demonoid has been offline.

The popular Dutch news site, nu.nl is reporting that the world's second largest torrent tracker, Demonoid has apprently been shut down by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA)

This happens just three months after Demonoid moved its servers to Canada under pressure from BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy organization.

Wonder why> the Demonoid folks thought Canada would be a good safe-haven to begin with."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Chinese MMO Bans Males From Playing Female Charact

Cap'n.Brownbeard writes: ""Players of the Chinese MMORPG, King of the World, may have found themselves unable to log into their accounts this past weekend. The game's publisher, Aurora Technology, has apparently frozen the accounts of all male players choosing to play as a female characters. Now, only female players can play female characters, and they're required to prove their gender via a webcam. Females wanting to play males are still allowed though." http://news.filefront.com/chinese-mmo-bans-males-from-playing-female-characters/"
Privacy

Submission + - 15000 protest against data retention, in Berlin (vorratsdatenspeicherung.de)

jonas writes: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/96385 reports a demonstration, mainly organized by http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/, that was held against the upcoming telecommunicatons data retention in Germany. 15,000 people protested against a law, that, once passed, will require telecommunications providers to keep all connection and location data for all subscribers for 6 months and will allow the government unrestricted access. The government claims this to be neccessary to protect Germans against terrorism. Many people fear the degredation of ther civil rights, of which there is one that assures the privacy of telecomunication. This civil rights movement gains momentum, with only 200 protesters a year ago, and 2000 this spring.
Media

Submission + - MediaDefender Leaks Saga : unexpected outcomes (p2pnet.net) 4

ShakaZ writes: Following the leaks of all the internal emails and later the source code of all the anti-p2p software of MediaDefender, the boss and an employee of the company have been arrested by the LA police. They are charged for illegal uploading with intent to deceive, bandwidth theft, and grievous misrepresentation.
More handcuffs there : http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13397

Due to the released emails, ThePirateBay have proof of infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, for which they filed a complaint to the Swedish police. 10 companies of the music, movie and gaming industries are listed in the complaint.
More pirates here : http://thepiratebay.org/blog

The Courts

Submission + - New Attorneys Fee Decision Against RIAA 1

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA has gotten slammed again, this time in Oregon, as the Magistrate Judge in Atlantic v. Andersen has ruled that Tanya Andersen's motion for attorneys fees should be granted. The Magistrate, in his 15-page decision, noted that, despite extensive pretrial discovery proceedings, "when plaintiffs dismissed their claims in June 2007, they apparently had no more material evidence to support their claims than they did when they first contacted defendant in February 2005....." and concluded that "Copyright holders generally, and these plaintiffs specifically, should be deterred from prosecuting infringement claims as plaintiffs did in this case." This is the same case in which (a) the RIAA insisted on interrogating Ms. Andersen's 10-year-old girl at a face-to-face deposition, (b) the defendant filed RICO counterclaims against the record companies, and (c) the defendant has recently converted her RICO case into a class action"
Privacy

Submission + - MediaDefender gets source code cracked!

DragonTHC writes: "Slyck news is reporting that MediaDefender has been cracked again and this time, their source code for anti-freedom efforts against p2p and bit torrent. The fifty megabyte download is by the same group that brought you the MediaDefender emails, MediaDefender-Defender."
Censorship

Submission + - MediaDefender and the Streisand Effect (arstechnica.com)

Foldarn writes: It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity, has instead done the opposite (also known as the Streisand Effect) and made it even more widespread. The folks over at Ars Technica have an article about a few popular BitTorrent sites MegaNova and IsoHunt that are being demanded to remove the ever incriminating emails. What's more, Ars is reporting that it appears that MediaDefender, in response to IsoHunt's decline to remove, may be behind a massive denial of service attack against IsoHunt.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Tries to Stop RICO Class Action 1

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Last month an Oregon woman, victimized by the RIAA for two years, retaliated by bringing a class action for fraud, RICO, malicious prosecution, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, misuse of copyright law, civil conspiracy, and other assorted wrongs, against the record companies, the RIAA, their investigators, and their 'enforcers', in Andersen v. Atlantic. The opening gambit of the record companies, the RIAA, and the enforcers (Settlement Support Center LLC), all of whom are being represented by the same law firm, has been to file a motion to dismiss Ms. Andersen's complaint. The RIAA's unlicensed "investigators", MediaSentry/Safenet, presumably represented by separate counsel, have yet to respond to the amended complaint. Ms. Andersen is the disabled single mother, who together with her 10 year old daughter, had been pursued by the RIAA for two (2) years, despite the fact that neither of them had ever engaged in file sharing."
Encryption

Submission + - To find DMCA violations you must violate the DMCA (ucsd.edu)

meese writes: staple is a tool that cryptographically binds data using an All-or-nothing transform. Why might that be interesting? Because it might allow for this scenario: to check for DMCA violations, a content owner would have to violate the DMCA themselves.

The basic transformation is keyless, but all the data is required to reverse it. The tool can also throw away part of its internal key, making the data decipherable only with the key or via brute force attack. If a content publisher, Alice, wants to check for copyright violations by another party, Bob, she could be thwarted: Bob could staple Alice's file with one of his own and discard part of the key. To check for copyright violation, Alice must brute force the stapled file (possibly violating the DMCA), which protects Bob's file. The FAQ has some more detail.

Censorship

Submission + - Wordpress.org blocked in Turkey (webgeekworld.com) 2

unity100 writes: "Wordpress.org domain has been blocked by monopoly infrastructure backbone provider Turkish Telekom in Turkey. Turkish internet users are not able to reach anything with wordpress.org domain extension due to DNS filtering. The move is due to a recent court order, in which a controversial religious sect leader, Adnan Oktar have sued wordpress.org for many blogs, containing criticizm about him. Since wordpress.org did not respond, Turkish courts have taken the 'Turkish' way and totally blocked wordpress.org domain instead of blocking the blogs in question one by one. Read more in below links :

http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/08/19/why-were-bloc ked-in-turkey/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func =viewSubmission&sid=2883"

Censorship

Submission + - Anonymous Coward or Corporate Troll? (alternet.org) 1

grcumb writes: "In a recent article on Alternet, Annalee Newitz writes to report that our perception of the typical anonymous poster as a fat, half-naked basement dweller with a grudge is nearly 100% wrong. Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner site exposes the surprising truth: The majority of dishonest edits and omissions on wikipedia derive from corporate and government IP addresses. In Annalee's words: 'It turns out that the people who are hiding behind anonymity online for nefarious or selfish reasons are not little guys in pajamas but the very bastions of accountability that haters of the Web have deified.'"
Privacy

Submission + - Man Arrested for Post on craigslist.com (grupthink.com)

davidthedrake writes: "Kevin Zimmerman posted his eye-witness account of an arrest by Kalispell police (which occurred on July 28th, 2006) on a Montana craiglist.com site. The official police report stated the prank-pulling kids, whom Zimmerman witnessed, were arrested without incident. Zimmerman's post on craigslist.com painted a different picture saying police:

"...yanked the boy down, twisted him sideways, then grabbed his arm and cuffed him. He then kicked the boy in his leg twice, patted him down then shook the boy really hard." Zimmerman went on further in his post to insult the officers associated with the arrest.

Nearly a year later, police showed up at his door and arrested him for 'criminal defamation.' The police obtained Zimmerman's information by first sending a subpoena to craigslist.com and then sending a subpoena to Zimmerman's ISP."

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