UK surveillance plan to go ahead BBC
The Home Office says it will push ahead with plans to ask communications firms to monitor all internet use. Ministers confirmed their intention despite concerns and opposition from some in the industry.The proposals include asking firms to retain information on how people use social networks such as Facebook. Some 40% of respondents to the Home Office’s consultation opposed the plans – but ministers say communication interception needs to be updated. Both the police and secret security services have legal powers in the UK to intercept communications in the interests of combating crime or threats to national security.

Stanford Historian Robert Proctor vs. R.J. Reynolds: A Lot on the Line Center for Media and Democrcy
History is unkind to tobacco companies, and never more so than since a federal court in 2006 found the industry guilty of perpetrating 50 years of fraud and deceit upon the American people. It’s a sordid history to live down, and maybe that’s why R.J. Reynolds is harassing one of the few historians who has been willing to step up and testify in court about the real history of the tobacco industry’s behavior: Professor Robert N. Proctor of Stanford University. Dr. Proctor specializes in the history of 20th- and 21st-century scientific controversies, including the history of tobacco and “agnotology,”, the study of the cultural production of ignorance and doubt — a field familiar to tobacco companies. After all, Brown & Williamson wrote in a 1969 proposal that

NY case spotlights Dead Sea Scrolls, fake e-mails Associated Press
Students and university officials started getting e-mails last year in which a prominent Judaic studies scholar seemed to make a startling confession: He had committed plagiarism. The messages, it turned out, were a hoax. Prosecutors filed criminal charges, saying a lawyer sent the messages to tarnish the professor, his father’s rival. The court case has drawn attention to issues both ancient (the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and decidedly modern (phony online identities).

Internet provider is latest Twitter hack victim Guardian.
Australian internet provider BigPond has become the latest internet company to be targeted by hackers on Twitter, after one of its accounts was hijacked as part of a phishing scam. The company, a subsidiary of Sydney-based telecommunications giant Telstra, said that the BigPondTeam Twitter account – which is used to provide information and support to customers – had been infiltrated by unknown criminal and used to trick users into handing over their passwords. Affected users received a private message from BigPondTeam saying “Hey, look at this,” and directing them to follow a link that asked them to enter their Twitter password.

WIPO Rules in Favor of Glenn Beck Parody Site PC Magazine
An intellectual property organization has denied a request by Glenn Beck to take down a Web site with a domain name that the talk show host claimed improperly used his name and defamed his name. An arbitration panel for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an agency within the United Nations, found that Isaac Eiland-Hall registered the URL glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com as a political statement and not as a bad faith effort to profit from Beck’s name. Eiland-Hall “appears to the panel to be engaged in a parody of the style or methodology that [Eiland-Hall] appears genuinely to believe is employed by [Beck] in the provision of political commentary, and for that reason [Eiland-Hall] can be said to be making a political statement.” In a Friday letter to Beck, Eiland-Hall said he pursued the case simply as a means to “help preserve the First Amendment” and provided Beck with the username and password to his site so that Beck could remove it at his discretion.

Baguette-toting bird stalls atom smasher CNN
This is too weird: A bird reportedly has dropped a “bit of baguette” onto the world’s largest atom smasher, causing the machine to short out for a period of time. It’s just the latest mishap for the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which scientists plan to use to get insight into the universe’s origins. The LHC, which has a 17-mile track to circulate protons and is located underground on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest particle accelerator in the world and cost about $10 billion.

Outrage over wall blocking free U2 Berlin concert U2 News
Irish rockers U2 returned to Berlin for a free mini-concert Thursday in front of the Brandenburg Gate, playing its classic singles and a duet with Jay-Z even as the show was obscured from public view by a nearly 6-1/2-foot (two-meter) high metal barrier.

Murdoch may block Google searches BBC
Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies. The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes, including Google News. Mr Murdoch’s News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites. He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. “There’s a doctrine called ‘fair use’, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,” Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. “But we’ll take that slowly.”

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November, 2009

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