A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/index.html

Ah...

Shocking news....  She has to pay a big amount for a song which cost only 99 cent..

Regards

Shadab

The French magazine Books prints an excerpt of a new book by Spanish philosopher Joaquin Rodriguez Lopez, "Edicion 2.0. Socrates en el hiperespacio". Lopez compares Socrates' concern about the loss of the oral tradition of sharing knowledge through the introduction of writing, with the new forms of knowledge dissemination through the Internet. And he looks at the frequently asked question: Does the Internet make you stupid?

"Indeed the key points of any self-respecting article today are identical to those made by Socrates: memory, the transferral of knowledge and the nature of knowledge. Just as Socrates was opposed to the written word, we are against cyberspaces and its mass application. (...) But, like Socrates, we lack the critical distance to really get to grips with a development which is taking place under our eyes. The great philosopher couldn't or wouldn't recognise the advantages of the written over the spoken word, much less foresee the major cognitive changes that followed the invention of the Greek alphabet. We, too, are only going on suspicions and speculations. (...) But it is very likely that our brains are in the process of undergoing a change that is at least as significant as the one that happened in antiquity; our poor old analogue brains might just be changing into digital ones." http://www.signandsight.com/features/1890.html
 

Digital Dissent Without a Trace

...Maybe, at that point, you use Tor, one of several Internet anonymity systems that encrypt data or hide the accompanying Internet address, and route the data to its final destination through intermediate computers called proxies. This combination of routing and encryption can mask a computer’s actual location and circumvent government filters; to prying eyes, the Internet traffic seems to be coming from the proxies. At a time when global Internet access and social-networking technologies are surging, such tools are increasingly important to bloggers and other web users living under repressive regimes. Without them, people in these countries might be unable to speak or read freely online. ...

Oppressive regimes?

From http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/are_we_naked_in_the.php:

A reader sends in a link to this recent post by law professor Orin Kerr, on a ruling about how 4th Amendment protections against "unreasonable search and seizure" apply to email. The central question is whether the government needs to inform individual email users when their messages are seized and read -- or whether it is sufficient to notify their internet service provider or mail service, like Google or Yahoo. According to the logic of the ruling, by the sheer act of sending email, a user has transferred custody of the messages to a third party. Thus notifying the third party -- Google, Yahoo, et al -- is enough, with the sender left in the dark.

As that post describes, the legal comparison-drawing goes in many directions. Is "giving" an email to Yahoo like putting a package in a public storage locker? Is it like putting an envelope in a regular mailbox? Does it matter if the message is encrypted? Etc. But the reader's point is less about the ins and outs of this ruling than about the broader legal/privacy implications of storing information "in the cloud." When you're working in Google Docs, as opposed to using a spreadsheet or document that lives on your computer, have you essentially surrendered custody and control of that information? What if you rely on online "cloud" systems -- Carbonite, SugarSync -- to back up or sync your files? Have you given up custody of those files too? ...

More from the US government: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102703743.html

As the spread of the H1N1 flu keeps more Americans away from work and school, a federal report warns that all those people logging on to the Web from home could overwhelm Internet networks.

The Government Accountability Office reported earlier this week that if the flu reaches a pandemic, a surge in telecommuting and children accessing video files and games at home could bog down local networks.

And if that were to happen, it is not clear whether the federal government is prepared to deal with the problem, the GAO said.

The Department of Homeland Security is in charge of communications networks during times of national emergency. But it doesn't have a strategy to deal with overloaded Internet networks....

Oh.. Thanks for information.

Bad guys in Brussels curbing corporate freedoms again!

http://euobserver.com/9/28929

In 2006 and 2007, Phorm, a US-based advertising software outfit, trialled a behavourial advertising service on the internet customers of service provider BT that it marketed to clients as a way to farm data about their shopping predilections.

And it did so in secret without the users' permission.

At the time, Phorm claimed that deals it was making with major internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK would have given them access to the surfing habits of 70 percent of British households with broadband.

"As you browse we're able to categorise all of your internet actions," boasted Phorm executive Virasb Vahidi. "We actually can see the entire internet."

BT and Phorm's move provoked such an outcry - World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee attacked Phorm for its activities - that the advertising firm has had to abandon the UK marketplace.

Despite complaints by MEPs to a range of UK government departments and the police, British authorities refused to act, believing the company to have won implied consent from users.

In April of this year however, the EU executive warned that this constituted a breach of privacy rights and EU law and that if action was not taken to prevent such activity, Brussels would take the UK government to court.

http://www.utne.com/How-Many-Words-on-the-Internet-5717.aspx?utm_content=11.05.09+Media&utm_campaign=Media&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

According to a post on the Guardian's digital technology blog, "news sites average around 450 links on their homes pages, whereas 10 years ago they averaged just 12 links per home page." And you're probably clicking on those links. What does it all mean? The New York Times interface specialist and lead researcher, Nick Bilton, spells it out:

If you pick up a US or UK newspaper you'll see four to six stories on the front page and maybe eight to 10 refers to other stories, that's an average total of 12 headlines on one page. In contrast, the average news website has 335 story or section links on their homepage. So we're showing people online 300 more options on one page than we show them in print. And we wonder why people have information overload of content.

…It is a fascinating fact is that if you go online and visit 200 web pages in one day—which is a simple task when you could email, blogs, Youtube, etc.—you'll see on average 490,000 words; War & Peace was only 460,000 words.

The dark side of the internet