Vulnerability Renders MPAA/RIAA Copyright Warnings Useless TorrentFreak
In a bid to educate pirates, copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP to track down people who share their titles on P2P networks. The alleged infringers then receive a warning and are given the opportunity to resolve the issue. However, this system is vulnerable to abuse and therefore completely useless. Companies like BayTSP have the honorable task of joining BitTorrent swarms and other file-sharing networks looking out for copyright infringers. When someone shares a piece of a copyrighted file with them, they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out a copyright infringement notice automatically. These notices usually list details about the infringing file, the person’s IP-address and the time the infringement was recorded. In addition, BayTSP includes a link to a response form where you can indicate whether or not you will comply and remove the file from your computer. The problem with these response forms is that they are not very secure. If you get a notice from BayTSP, someone else can easily find it through Google for example, and fake a response in your place. There is no way for them to tell who responded to the complaint unless the response originates from the IP-address linked to the infringement.

Twitter’s Spectacularly Awful 24 Hours TechCrunch
Twitter just went through an awful 24-hour stretch. It included taking away a feature some people loved, probably being misleading about it, getting a huge amount of backlash, halfway bringing the feature back, and getting railed by the press for it all — with bouts of downtime mixed in for good measure. This is hardly the first time Twitter has had everyone up in arms, and it won’t be the last, but it’s pretty astonishing how the company seemed to solve one problem by creating two more. Sure, it’s easy to play desk-chair quarterback, and probably a bit unfair — but it’s also fun, and a good cautionary tale, so let’s do that.

House Committee OKs radio payments to music labels Reuters
Broadcast radio stations may finally be forced to pay music labels for playing their songs, as proposed U.S. legislation moved a step closer toward approval on Wednesday. While newer media such as satellite, cable and Internet stations pay music companies to broadcast their music, terrestrial U.S. radio stations have resisted for decades. The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted 21 to 9 on Wednesday to send the Performance Royalties Act to the full House for a vote.

State Of Alaska Threatens CrackHo After Confusing Redirect With Hijacking… TechDirt
It’s always bad news when the technically illiterate start filing lawsuits over technology issues. A few folks have sent in the news that the state of Alaska, under Sarah Palin’s governorship, has (we’re not making this up) sent a cease and desist letter to the website CrackHo.com supposedly for hijacking a page from the state’s website and using the official seal of Alaska without permission — which the state claims violates both state laws (fines up to $500 or six months in prison) and federal copyright laws. So what did the site CrackHo.com do to deserve this? Well, it simply redirected anyone who went to Crackho.com to Sarah Palin’s website on the state webpage. Yes. A simple redirect.

Ontario’s high-tech driver’s licences pose privacy risk: watchdog CBC
The technology behind Ontario’s new enhanced driver’s licences will allow people to secretly track other people’s activities and movements unless privacy protection is added, warns the province’s privacy commissioner. “The radio frequency identity (RFID) tag that will be embedded into the card can be read not only by authorized readers, but just as easily by unauthorized readers,” Ann Cavoukian said in a statement accompanying the release of her 2008 annual report Wednesday. Cavoukian called on Ontario’s minister of transportation to include an on-off switch that will provide better privacy protection with the new licences, which are scheduled to start rolling out June 1.

Man builds a dream out of CDs CTV
The 55-year-old Internet entrepreneur has photographed a portrait he made of MAD magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman’s head using junk mail CDs and DVDs and sent it to the magazine, a feat that landed him in the magazine’s 500th issue, published in April.

Germany shuts down Wikileaks – Australian censorship is wimpy compared to what we do in the Fatherland Inquirer
The idea that whistleblowers exposing Australia’s great rabbit-proof fence of Internet censorship might be okay if they publish their results overseas has been dealt a blow. German coppers have raided the offices of Wikileaks.de and transferred the control of the domain to government authorities. The raid was triggered by WikiLeaks’ publication of Australia’s proposed secret Internet censorship list. The list showed that far from censoring kiddie porn sites, the list also included many tame sites that were opposed to Aussie government policy. The publication of the list probably means that the great rabbit-proof fence plan will no longer enjoy much parliamentary support. According to Wikileaks, it was because the Germans are working on their own Internet black list and they don’t want any German whistlebowers doing the same thing to them. Currently Germany and China are the only two countries that are censoring a WikiLeaks domain. We guess that if Germany goes down this censorship route Wikileaks will not be the last news agency or publication that will be banned for writing things that the government prefers not be reported.

Remote Kill Flags Surface In Kindle Slashdot
Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely.

Smokes: First you’ll feel green, and then you’ll die – Cigarette company touts environmental package The Star
Cigarette companies are promoting health – for the environment. In a full-page advertisement inside Toronto Life magazine, du Maurier Canada boasts of its new “greener” cigarette packages, which, at this rate, may soon be safer to smoke than the products they contain. Parent company Imperial Tobacco has replaced foil wrapping with paper and uses external cardboard packaging that “meets standards supporting sustainable forest management,’ according to the ad. “Small steps make the difference,” it reads. [Comment: Tobacco kartel propaganda? Meanwhile in Quebec...] Quebec to sue tobacco companies- A bill that would allow the province to sue tobacco companies to recover health-care costs related to diseases caused by smoking is to be introduced in the National Assembly today. http://www.montrealgazette.com/Health/Quebec+tobacco+companies/1593080/story.html

Creative Labs Charges “Maintenance Fee” For Rebate Consumerist
Creative Labs has found a great new way to minimize the risk that a customer will actually benefit from a rebate offer. In Rick’s case, they sent him the rebate in the form of a $10 debit card that was supposed to be good until July 2009, but when he went to a Best Buy to use it last month, it was denied. The reason? He’d been charged a $3 “maintenance fee” every month since January.

AT&T Prevents 3G Access To SlingPlayer While Secretly Working On A Similar Service Ohgizmo
AT&T stated that such streaming would cripple their infrastructure and cause major issues for customers, however, that’s not the whole truth. Many people just like me were skeptical of AT&T’s answer, mostly because there are plenty of other ways to stream video to your iPhone. What makes the SlingPlayer so different? Apparently the issue is that AT&T has been hard at work on their own app that essentially provides the same functions, only using their own U-Verse recorder at home instead of a SlingBox. [Comment: Ah, as if this is a surpise. No Competition watchdog in the USA? Or they must be similar to the Canadian do-nothing watchdogs?]

Guatemala: Twittering I.T. Worker Arrested for “Inciting Financial Panic,” First Arrest of This Kind in Central America’s History BoingBoing
Amid protests in the streets and on social networks calling for Guatemala’s president to step down after the assasination of a whistleblower attorney, a Twitter user has been arrested by Guatemalan police for “inciting panic.” Above, the tweet for which “jeanfer,” aka Jean Anleu, was arrested. The Guatemalan bank Banrural is at the center of Guatemala’s current political crisis: the slain attorney represented a finance expert who was said to have refused to participate in corrupt transactions involving that bank. That client, Khalil Musa, was assasinated in March, and after refusing to keep silent about alleged government complicity in that killing and in the financial crimes, the attorney, Rosenberg, was himself assassinated this past Sunday. “Jeanfer” was arrested today for suggesting via Twitter that people who had funds deposited in Banrural should remove those funds, and in doing so “break the bank” of the control that “corrupt entities” had.

Breathlyzer source-code sucks BoingBoing
After a long legal wrangle, some defendant-side attorneys have audited the source-code of Alcotest, the breathalyzer used in New Jersey DUI stops. Turns out it was programmed by muppets who don’t know how to calculate an average and who throw out error messages by the dozen. Like voting-machine vendors, breathlyzer vendors go crazy when defendants ask to have their source-code audited, claiming that there’s a bunch of top-s33kr1t stuff in there that their competitors would steal. And, just like voting-machine software, breathalyzer software appears to have been written by squirrels dancing on the keyboard until they got something that would compile. 2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly…. 4. Catastrophic Error Detection Is Disabled: An interrupt that detects that the microprocessor is trying to execute an illegal instruction is disabled….

(Thanks, Marc)

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May, 2009