The big news on the interwebs a couple of weeks ago centered around this small little attack on Google by some nefarious hackers originating outside of the county. After some digging around, the general consensus is that it came from China, more importantly the Chinese government. Even a few weeks later, the whole Google/China scene is a cluster and actually finding the people responsible has proven to be quite difficult even for someone with pretty extensive resources...
Joining the likes of Metalica’s Lars Ulrich and U2 manager Patrick McGuinness, U2 frontman Bono is starting off 2010 showing his incompetence and complete lack of understanding of the music marketplace in the digital age. In an article in the NYT, Bono claims the entire world needs stricter web copyright policies and more policing. This is the exact opposite of what really needs to happen. The real solution is simple — change your decades old business model...
Every time I hear the words DRM, censored, “it’s for the children”, and so on, I get the urge to vomit. So many times in the short time span of the last 10 years, we’ve seen various groups and individuals alike trying to safety proof the world — sanitizing our daily lives because a select few feel it is their duty to encroach on other peoples’ lives. If I were ever thinking of moving to Australia, my hopes, dreams, and ambitions would be...
In what was one of the worst ideas yet in regards to censorship and “safety”, the forced install of the Green Dam Youth Escort software that was mandated to be installed on every PC in China has been dealt another and potentially fatal blow. The last three major manufacturers whom also started shipping or installing the software from the factory are now backing down as well. Lenovo no longer installs the software from the factory, though, they will provide an...
In case you don’t remember the UK’s plans for a central database of epic proportions, for a quick refresher, it was a database that would store every email, phone call, and web page visited by UK natives. Scared? You should be. Why the extreme evesdropping and invasion of privacy? It was all in the name of “national security”. Because somehow taking the needle in a haystack idea and multiplying it one thousand fold will make it soooo easy to...
