SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If Read more…
Anyone who has ever heard me speak about Internet regulation will know of my barely contained scepticism with regards to Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, and all that it represents. In fact, the Declaration speaks of a more innocent time in Internet history, and it is usually considered to Read more…
The final draft of the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released to the public (unlike previous drafts, which were leaked). Previously we had looked at the possible changes that the agreement would bring to UK copyright law. I am happy to say that at least the worst case scenario Read more…
I loved this version of the BSD open source licence in rhyme so much that I thought I would have to reproduce it here. NOTE: The author does not like the poem to be reproduced anywhere other than in his page (the poem is ironically posted with All Rights Reserved). Read more…
Finished reading yet another semi-Luddite piece against e-books in today’s Guardian. The author says: “The valedictories for what is now disdainfully called “dead tree publishing” may be similarly premature. The lessons from history are that technological progress is uneven, that consumers are often sceptical of techno-hype, and that new technologies Read more…
For years, xkcd’s map of the online communities has been my favourite graphical representations of the Internet, and it has been immortalised as the cover of Edwards and Waelde’s Law and the Internet. Now there is an update, and what a beautiful update it is: Desert of Food Updates. River Read more…
On the back of the ACS:Law debacle, there has been a lot of interest in the way in which firms like ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons obtained customer information from internet service providers linking IP addresses to broadband account holders. The information was obtained in English courts through what is known Read more…
Very interesting news from the land of gallo pinto, the Costa Rican constitutional court (Sala IV) has declared that the Internet is a fundamental right in ruling 2010-012790. The case is actually a seemingly straightforward recurso the amparo (literally, writ of shelter, a measure against administrative abuses) which asks the Read more…