President Nicolas Sarkozy has a new target: Internet pirates. According to Reuters, France is set to punish illegal downloaders by cutting off their broadband. Apparently, they will receive warnings, and at the third their ISP will be forced to cut them off. I am sure that many people will make Read more…
Back in August we reported on a surprisingly visionary paper from the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, which requested urgent government action against cybercrime. Last Friday Blogzilla commented that the official government response was disappointing. The government’s response has been that all is well, all legislation is Read more…
The Washington Post reports on action being taken by some ISPs in the United States to curb high traffic. Comcast is reportedly terminating users’ accounts based on high bandwidth usage, although it seems like there is no specification of how much is too much. I’m surprised by the move, as Read more…
I have been meaning to to write about this column by Marina Hyde in The Guardian, but I wanted to keep some distance from it. While I welcome all sorts of articles that criticise technologies, I have been distraught by certain tone emerging in the supposedly more progressive sectors of Read more…
(via net.wars) The official Second Life blog has announced that it will ban gambling from the popular virtual world. The new policy bans all games of chance through random-number generators that provide a payout in Linden dollars or any real life currency. This includes all sorts of casino games (such Read more…
The idea that the Internet is filled with sexual predators has received a boost as MySpace has admitted to having found and removed 29,000 registered sex offenders on its site. The admission comes amongst attempts by North Carolina’s Attorney General to change the law so that social networking sites require Read more…
The amazing Peer to Patent system is now live. The system is the creation of New York Law School Professor Beth Noveck, and it is an extremely interesting system of involving the online community on the review of patent claims in pending patent applications. I believe this is an interesting Read more…
I’ve read an interesting article in The Independent by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and while I don’t agree with it, I’ve been noticing an increase in cyber-scepticism and technophobic criticism against all things online. While some of the protestations can be classed as the typical grumbling against change from the Luddites, some Read more…
The BBC Technology News and the Today programme have been talking today about the great robot debate. Experts, academics and other assorted folk will discuss tonight about the potential threats arising from increasing numbers of robots, a discussion organised by the Dana Centre and the Science Museum. While at first Read more…
(via Wiebke Abel and other sources) The blogosphere has exploded once more in collective cries for or against a proposed code of conduct for bloggers. Tim O’Reilly has made a call for the imposition of a self-regulatory set of rules that bloggers will post under. The proposed code is: Take Read more…