The European Commissioners are meeting today to decide the future of EU copyright policy. French Commissioner Michel Barnier is pushing for a set of control measures aimed at ISPs, web-hosts, social networking services, and related services that would force them to act as private police for the entertainment lobby, who would be able to direct them to spy on and block domains and users without judicial oversight or due process:
After the failure of mass-repression against online file-sharers, these same interest groups are now attempting to put repressive policies at the core of the network.
Maria Martin-Prat, who took a leave from her job at the European Commission to work as Deputy General Counsel and Director of Legal Policy and Regulatory Affairs for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI — thee international version of the RIAA, CRIA and BPI, though they're all basically the same companies), has returned to the EC to run its copyright unit. — Read the rest
Ars Technica's Nate Anderson summarizes the crazy House Judiciary Committee testimony of Daniel Castro from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation DC think tank. Castro was testifying on proposals to reduce online copyright infringement, and he suggested that ISPs caps on downloads were a good way to accomplish this goal (much in the same way that you could reduce traffic fatalities by allowing auto-manufacturers to cap the number of miles you were allowed to drive each month!). — Read the rest
Probably Corey's HTML 5 video-game "URL Hunter" takes place entirely in the URL bar of your browser, in which you must chase down rogue "a"s with your mighty "O" and clobber them with the spacebar. I keep running into croggling demos of HTML5's capabilities — last week in Toronto, Mozilla.org's — Read the rest
Icecreamists, an ice-cream parlour in London's Covent Garden, is selling human breast milk ice-cream for £14 a scoop. The breastmilk is purchased from lactating mothers, and the product (called "Baby Gaga") is intended to raise awareness of breastmilk's deliciousness and encourage more breastfeeding. — Read the rest
What happens to an ocean after a massive oil spill? Media attention may have drifted away from the Gulf of Mexico, but scientists are still there, studying the long-term impacts of last year's BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
One of those scientists is Samantha Joye. — Read the rest
What the crap is a tactical pen? A pen that kicks ass, basically. And I don't just mean it's "a kick-ass pen," I mean: this pen could literally kick your ass. — Read the rest
The flipSYNK USB cables are clever little keychain-sized multi-USB adapters (this one's got a micro- and mini-USB tip) that snap together to form a small, easily-pocketed, snag- and tangle-proof fob. Some users have reported difficulty in getting the cables to work as both a charge- and data-conduit (I've had this problem with retractable USB cables before), but others seem to get along fine. — Read the rest
Spotted in the freezer aisle by an alert Redditor, a box containing (test-marketing?) both a frozen, uncooked pizza, and frozen, uncooked cookie dough, all together and ready to be roasted of an evening.
The first big event at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas is CES: Unveiled, a press event designed to show off some of the year's best new items. In practice, it's often a bit of a letdown (Gizmodo's Brian Lam found this year's thin pickings engendered a sense of "crippling cynicism") because the best stuff is announced the next day at individual press conferences. — Read the rest
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Katitza Rodriguez has rounded up the responses of many human rights organizations around the world to the commercial and governmental attacks on Wikileaks. It coincides with EFF's new Say No to Online Censorship campaign.
• On December 10, International Human Rights Day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights addressed this issue in her statement: "While it is unclear whether these individual measures taken by private actors directly infringe on states' human rights obligations to ensure respect of the right to freedom of expression, taken as a whole they could be interpreted as an attempt to censure the publication of information thus potentially violating Wikileaks' right to freedom of expression."
COICA is back: that's the proposed US law that would establish a "Great Firewall of America" used to nationally censor the Internet to block putatively infringing websites. Progress on COICA was suspended during the midterms, but now it's back in the Senate and on the schedule for this Thursday. — Read the rest
Tens of thousands of South Koreans have had their websites censored or been kicked off the Internet by their ISPs on the strength of a single, unsubstantiated accusation of copyright infringement, in a process that has no right of appeal, no right to face your accuser, and no right to see or contest the evidence against you. — Read the rest
Eileen Gunn sez, "The incomparable Rudy Rucker describes his visit to one of the greatest mathematicians of our time. Surreal, philosophic, mathematical."
Mandelbrot is waiting for me at the end of his driveway, he's worried I might not find the house as the address on the curb is covered by snow.
Science writer Steven Johnson's latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is, in some ways, a classic Johnson book: drawing from diverse sources across many disciplines, Johnson recounts historical scientific breakthroughs and draws from them parallels to modern technology, particularly networked computers and the way that they shape the societies around them. — Read the rest
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