Tag Archives: Some

UK Continues To Criminalize Bad Taste And Stupidity In Online Postings

In the wake of the Twitter joke trial fiasco, which saw Paul Chambers dragged through the courts for two years before being acquitted, the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions announced that there should be an “informed debate”
about the boundaries of free speech for social media. That really
can’t happen soon enough, as the UK continues to arrest and punish
people for the crime of posting stupid and tasteless messages online.
Here are some of the latest developments.

On Techdirt.
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German Gov’t Inadvertently Reveals Police Monitor Gmail, Skype, Facebook & Use Snooping Malware

Transparency is worth having for itself, since governments often tend
to behave a little better when they know that someone is watching. But
occasionally, requests for data turn up something big and totally
unexpected because someone failed to notice quite what the information
provided implies.

On Techdirt.
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Before and After ACTA – the Video

In the last year I’ve written what some might have felt were rather too many thousand words about ACTA.
But I’d argue that it was an important moment, not least because of the
European Parliament’s refusal to ratify the treaty, which was quite
unprecedented for an international agreement of this kind.

On Open Enterprise blog.
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Fighting Lack of Transparency And Engagement With Parliamentary Openness

A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the persistent lack of transparency
during the drafting of new laws or the negotiation of new treaties.
Most governments, it seems, retain the view that they know best, that
the electorate shouldn’t worry about all those tiresome details being
discussed in secret backroom negotiations, and that since the public
will be able to see the result once it’s all finished, what’s the
problem?

On Techdirt.
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Creepy Smartphone Malware Re-creates Your Home For Stalkers

It’s become something of a cliché that anyone with a mobile phone is
carrying a tracking device that provides detailed information about
their location. But things are moving on, as researchers (and probably
others as well) explore new ways to subvert increasingly-common
smartphones to gain other revealing data about their users. Here’s a
rather clever use of malware to turn your smartphone into a system for taking clandestine photos — something we’ve seen before, of course, in other contexts — but which then goes even further by stitching them together to form a pretty accurate 3D model of your world:

On Techdirt.
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German Pirate Party Makes Some Shockingly Unshocking Proposals For Copyright Reform

As Techdirt has reported, after a year of amazing successes, the German Pirate Party is going through something of a bad patch
at the moment. One reason is that it seems to spend more time
squabbling in public than on crafting policy documents that will win
over the public. That makes the recent appearance of proposals for
copyright reform particularly significant.

On Techdirt.
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California To Commission 50 Open Textbooks For 2013; Finnish Teachers Write One In A Weekend

Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major initiative in the US:

On Techdirt.
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