Governance
Pirate Bay loses IFPI domain
Kopimists around the world are grieving the loss of the IFPI.com domain (which stands for International Federation of Pirates Interests) in a WIPO dispute over its ownership. The owner, as such things stand, was the Pirate Bay. The International Federation Read more…
Networks
ISPs acting on Bittorrent
(via Ars Technica) EFF has released a report outlining several practices at Comcast, a popular American ISP. This is controversial, because some ISPs sell themselves as high-speed with no restrictions, which would be violated by bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping. Read more…
Creative Commons
Case against Creative Commons dropped
Those of you interested in Creative Commons may remember that the organisation was sued by a family in Texas as a result of a Flickr image that got misused by Virgin Mobile Australia (more details here). The complaint against Creative Read more…
Conferences
Virtual week
Last week I was rather quiet for several reasons. On Wednesday I presented a paper entitled “Build Your Own World” at the beautiful Glasgow venue called The Lighthouse (available from the awesome Slideshare website). I was very impressed with the Read more…
P2P
France set to punish pirates
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 Read more…
Cybercrime
Another academic scam
I’ve just received a second academic scam. My comments in green: From: un.academicawards@katamail.com [this would be more convincing if it was masked as a UN addres] UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY AWARDS COORDINATOR [actually, there is such thing as the UN University!] Read more…
Feeling silly
Second Life PI
Is your wife cheating you on the virtual world? Do you want to check on the extra-curricular activities of a future employee? Hire SL(eye) Investigations! Their services include: • Vetting & Pre-Employment Screening• Asset Tracking• People Tracing• Theft & Fraud Read more…
Cybercrime
Research grants: the new identity fraud scam
We have all become used to identity fraud scams coming from the daughter of the late Prime Minister of Burkina Faso; or lottery winning addresses for the UK National Lottery mysteriously coming from Yahoo Hong Kong addresses. I have just Read more…
Litigation
High Court to review software patents
(via press release) Four UK technology companies have appealed a ruling from the Intellectual Property Office denying them patentability over a computer implemented invention. The self-styled High Tech Four ( Astron Clinica, Software 2000, Surf Kitchen and Cyan Holdings) had Read more…