A.P. Moving to Halt Use of Newspaper Articles on Web Sites New York Times

The Associated Press and its member newspapers will take legal action against Web sites that use newspaper articles without legal permission, the group said on Monday, in a clear shot at aggregators like Google. In a speech at The A.P.’s annual meeting in San Diego, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the group, said, “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.” In a statement, The A.P. said it will develop a system to track news articles online and determine whether they are being used legally. The statement did not mention Google or any other adversary by name, but many newspaper executives have spoken recently about their concern that Google and other major aggregators and Web portals are making money from the newspapers’ work, by selling ads on news pages that turn up their articles.

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Swedish national library reported for child porn The Local

The Swedish national library will on Monday afternoon be reported to the police for the possession and distribution of child pornography. The police report will be made by two Swedish child protection groups, Hand i Hand (’Hand in Hand’) and the Föreningen Anhöriga Till Sexuellt Utnyttjade Barn (ATSUB – The Association of Relatives to Sexually-abused Children). Birgitta Holmberg at ATSUB told The Local on Monday that the purpose of the police report is two-fold. Firstly to put a stop to the distribution of the National Library’s collection of child pornography, and secondly to expose how much of the library’s collection has been copied. “We want the report to demonstrate that the same laws apply for all regardless of whether it is a state institution,” Holmberg said. The existence of the National Library’s collection of child pornography emerged after a visit by the writer Valentin Bart in November 2008. Bart, who spent a year working in a pornographic book shop in central Stockholm in the 1970s, told The Local that he wanted to see if the law which requires the library to archive a copy of everything printed in Sweden, also applied to child pornography. He found that not only did the library hold large quantities of pornography, featuring children as young as 10-years-old, but access to the material was straightforward.

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Internet records to be stored for a year The Telegraph

Details of every email sent and website visited by people in Britain are to be stored for use by the state from tomorrow as part of what campaigners claim is a massive assault on privacy.

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Bill Would Grant President Unprecedented Cyber-security Powers eWSeek

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.

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High-tech cheaters jailed in China Reuters

Eight Chinese who used high-tech communications equipment, including mobile phones and wireless earpieces, to help their children cheat at university entrance exams have been jailed on state secret charges, local media said. The eight, from the wealthy eastern province of Zhejiang, got together in 2007 to plot how to help their children as “they knew their achievements were not ideal,” the official Legal Daily said. One of the parents hired university students to provide answers which were sent to the children via wireless earphones while they were in the exam room, the report said.

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Sun following the IBM deal collapse: Customer confusion en route CNet news

Sun Microsystems won’t be acquired by IBM after all. Now the explaining—mostly to customers and shareholders—really begins. Sun will tell its customers that the IBM deal was just a slight detour and that the company’s plan to be a pivotal hardware, cloud computing and software provider remains intact. The big question is whether customers will buy Sun’s talk—not to mention Sun’s gear. For shareholders, Sun has to explain why it split over the IBM offer.

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Cyberbullying ‘affects 1 in 10 teachers’ The Guardian

More than one in 10 teachers are bullied by pupils and colleagues through text messages, emails and social networking sites, new research shows. Schools are increasingly expected to teach pupils about new technologies – but the findings suggest students are using their skills to hound staff. A former music teacher in the south-west of England said: “Nasty text messages full of abuse may be little things in themselves but, after time, they meant I couldn’t face going into school.” Of those who had suffered cyberbullying personally, 63% had received unwelcome emails, 26% had offensive messages posted about them on social networking sites such as Facebook or Rate My Teacher, and 28% were sent unwelcome text messages, according to the survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the Teacher Support Network.

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Consumer group asks FCC to probe AT&T, Apple on Skype Bloomberg News

A consumer group urged the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether AT&T is violating the agency’s Internet guidelines by limiting customer access to Skype’s free phone service on Apple’s iPhone. AT&T’s deal with Apple regarding the iPhone appears to be “designed to cripple applications or hinder consumer choice for anticompetitive purposes,” Washington-based Free Press said Friday in a letter to Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps. The letter cited reports that iPhone users can’t use phone software provided by eBay’s Skype to make calls through AT&T’s fastest wireless network, known as 3G.

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Hungarian government goes 50 per cent open source Heise Online

The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to acquiring open source products as to proprietary products. The move was announced at a press conference on April 2nd. This means that a budget of around 40 million euros will be available to be tendered for by open source vendors as part of the centralised tendering process. The vendors will be able to begin the process of tendering for open source based projects in public sector and higher education establishment in a few weeks.

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Pentagon to cut major weapons programs Associated Press

Defence Secretary Robert Gates is proposing deep cuts to some big weapons programs such as the F-22 fighter jet as the Pentagon takes a hard look at how it spends money. Mr. Gates announced a broad range of cuts Monday to weapons spending, saying he plans to cut programs ranging from a new helicopter for the president to ending production of the $140 billion F-22 fighter jet. The Army’s modernization program would be scaled back, while a new satellite system and a search-and-rescue helicopter would be cut.

April, 2009

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