Entries about laws and legal matters.
It is with great sadness that I have to agree with this article. When I was growing up, we were taught that the US was the greatest nation on Earth. There was even some evidence that objectively supported it — the Manhattan project (and the fact that we were so collectively horrified at the fates …
Continue reading ‘“NSA Prism: Why I’m boycotting US cloud tech – and you should too”’ »
In which the villains finally get their come-uppance. Remember the scammers I talked about several times last year? They didn’t stop, I just stopped reporting on them. We’ve been averaging a call from them every couple weeks since then, all from the “Windows Support Department” or “Windows Technical Service Department” (of what company, they never …
Ever heard of Elsevier? Unless you’re a scientist, probably not. It’s a scientific and medical publishing company, which takes science research — done by scientists it does not employ, often with public funds — and sells it at exorbitant prices to universities and libraries. The money they make at this, they keep; the original researchers …
Continue reading ‘“Elsevier’s backpedalling not stopping scientist strike”’ »
Good God… someone actually advocating an intelligent solution to movie piracy, in a mainstream business magazine?! Unbelievable! Listen up, Hollywood. As an independent software developer, I’ve been dealing with Internet piracy for longer than you — without a single lawyer, let alone an army of them, and often on a shoestring budget. The facts in …
Continue reading ‘“You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You”’ »
As my US readers may remember from their mandatory high-school civics class, presidential elections in the US are kind of odd. Presidents aren’t elected by the people. Instead, their elected through the Electoral College — the people’s votes tell the Electoral College what candidate the state votes for, and each state has a certain number …
Wow! Maybe the US won’t turn into a technology-driven police state, as all recent indications had pointed toward (and as I had cynically expected, as the “security” apparatus has more money, and thus influence, than ordinary citizens). Between this and the SOPA uprising, my flagging hope for the US has been renewed.
The literary and film genre known as the Western covers a very short period of American history — 1850 to 1900 by the most commonly-accepted definition, but it’s more accurate to say from the end of the Civil War (1865) to maybe 1890, when our forefathers ran out of frontier — a small window of …
Continue reading ‘“Facebook exposes hackers behind Koobface worm”’ »
Remember the SOPA drama last week? It has given MPAA not-quite-lobbyist Chris Dodd a bad case of foot-in-mouth: he publicly threatened politicians who’d taken MPAA money for not doing what the MPAA wanted. On national television, no less. Un-freakin’-believable. And just this side of actually criminal. Dodd is a former senator — he should know …
Wow. I didn’t expect anything like what happened, and apparently neither did anyone else — including the MPAA. From the e-mail I received from FightForTheFuture.org: The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA …
As you may have noticed, this site — along with thousands of others — was blacked out today, to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills. If you’re an American Internet user and haven’t heard of them before, what rock have you been hiding under? Go find out what it’s all about (this page might help), …