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Submission + - EU privacy watchdog to ICANN: Law Enforcement WHOIS demands "unlawful" (domainincite.com)

Submitted by benyacrick
benyacrick writes: WHOIS was invented as an address book for sysadmins. These days, it's more likely to be used by Law Enforcement to identify a perpetrator or victim of an online crime. With ICANN's own study showing that 29% of WHOIS data is junk, it's no surprise that Law Enforcement have been lobbying ICANN hard to improve WHOIS accuracy.

The EU's privacy watchdog, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, has stepped into the fray with a letter claiming that two of Law Enforcement's twelve asks are "unlawful". The problem proposals are data retention — where registrant details will be kept for up to two years after a domain has expired — and re-verification, where a registrant's phone number and e-mail will be checked annually and published in the WHOIS database.

The community consultation takes place at ICANN 45 in Toronto on October 15th.
The Media

Submission + - A Suicide Goes Viral on the Internet

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Will Oremus reports that Fox News showed a grisly spectacle Friday afternoon during a live car chase when the suspect got out of his car, stumbled down a hillside, pulled a gun, and shot himself in the head. As the scene unfolded, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith grew increasingly apprehensive, then yelled “get off it, get off it!”, belatedly urging the show’s producers to stop the live feed as it became obvious the man was going to do something rash. Fox News cut awkwardly to a commercial just after showing his death and after Fox aired the on-air suicide, Smith apologized to viewers, saying, “We really messed up.” However BuzzFeed immediately posted the footage on YouTube, where it garnered more than 1,000 “likes” in under an hour sparking immediate blowback. “Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?” posted the Columbia Journalism Review. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan called his site’s decision to post the video “ethical,” because “it is news” but research suggests that graphic depictions of suicide in the media can spur copycat suicides, especially among young people, and the World Health Organization’s guidelines warn against sensationalizing it. Virtually everyone who has studied it agrees that, at a minimum, suicides should be covered with a modicum of sensitivity and context (PDF). "Of course it’s news that Fox News accidentally aired the video. And you can make a good case that Fox was inviting this type of debacle with its habit of airing live car-chase feeds. But Fox couldn’t have known that it was about to air a suicide. BuzzFeed, by contrast, knew exactly what it was doing," writes Oremus. "That might be good business for BuzzFeed, but it’s hard to see the benefit for anyone else.""

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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. Seek simplicity and distrust it. -- Whitehead.

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