Its all quite shocking.
Fourth , when I explained that the blog publisher had received music from the industry itself, a government attorney replied that authorization was an “affirmative defense” that need not be taken into account by the government in carrying out the seizure. That was stunning.
A House subcommittee has passed the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), which would require disclosure from companies about their human rights practices and limit the export of technologies that “serve the primary purpose of” facilitating government surveillance or censorship to countries designated as “Internet-restricting.”
Eric Lawrence describes the new security features of IE10.
Hmmm
“This rather embarrassing issue was pointed out to the committee, the fact that there were three votes too many, and that these three votes determined the outcome. When this was done, along with formally requesting a re-vote, that re-vote on the points in question was denied.”
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
Fascinating anecdotes on criminal investigations involving game consoles.
FTA: “Three mountain ranges, four lakes and a fucking Sound. That’s a geographical feature your hometown hasn’t even heard of.”
‘to avoid getting taxed as “dolls,” rather than lower for “toys”’
FTA: “Nick Bilton put the FAA’s claims regarding Kindles and airline avionics to the test. The result? They emit less EM interference than planes are required by law to withstand.” Much less, apparently.
“One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. … The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.” Wow, that sounds like almost reasonable and understandable copyright law.
Draw ShapeCatcher a symbol and ShapeCatcher shows you the characters in Unicode that look similar. Try a smiley face. (via Eric Lawrence)
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