Kent J. Dawson … granted court orders for the seizure and transfer of hundreds of domain names belonging to websites alleged by luxury goods company Chanel to be selling counterfeit merchandise. He also required that “all social media websites” and “all Internet search engines” (specifically listing Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Yahoo) remove these domain names from any search results.
Proponents of the latest disastrous IP bill , the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) insist it only targets the “worst of the worst”: so-called “rogue” foreign websites that profit from pirating U.S. intellectual property. But the broad definitions and vague language in the bill could place dangerous tools into the hands of IP rightsholders, with little opportunity for judicial oversight. One very possible outcome: many of the lawful sites you know and love will face new legal threats. …
Anybody who thinks about SOPA for more than 15sec will realize it’s an idiotic idea.
… It’s a power play from big corporate media companies — the sort of legislation that nearly everyone strenuously opposes but which might pass because the money is on the wrong side. …
Daring Fireball by John Gruber
American legislators are mostly bought off by old media. How does that happen. Here’s one painfully obvious example just brought to light by 60 Minutes, a show that aired Nov. 13, 2011:
… The next national election is now less than a year away and congressmen and senators are expending much of their time and their energy raising the millions of dollars in campaign funds they’ll need just to hold onto a job that pays $174,000 a year.
… Most former congressmen and senators manage to leave Washington – if they ever leave Washington – with more money in their pockets than they had when they arrived …
(Peter) Schweizer says he wanted to know why some congressmen and senators managed to accumulate significant wealth beyond their salaries, and proved particularly adept at buying and selling stocks.
Schweizer: There are all sorts of forms of honest grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy. So it’s not illegal, but I think it’s highly unethical, I think it’s highly offensive, and wrong.
Steve Kroft: What do you mean honest graft?
Schweizer: For example insider trading on the stock market. If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply.
Implicated are Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner and many other heavy hitters. If they were anyone other than the group of people writing the laws, they’d be in prison.
His newest publication is Public Parts, the book. It touts the societal benefits of sharing:
… A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension between privacy and publicness that is transforming how we form communities, create identities, do business, and live our lives.
Thanks to the internet, we now live—more and more—in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. New tools let us share our photos, videos, purchases, knowledge, friendships, locations, and lives. …
What does your ISP or Phone company charge YOU / GB?
In Canada, folks are charged as much as $10 per gigabyte. (Companies try to convince that there is a shortage of electrons traveling over wires or fibre. That’s a lie.)
Once the wires are in place, the cost for extra electrons is almost zero.
Internet service providers are normally sneaky, or downright evil. One of the most hated industries.
But SHAW in Canada is garnering a wee bit of praise in the Tech community for this:
“We’ve created a non-cap kind of regime. If you’re always going over, we’re going to ask you to go into a package that really fits you.”
The immediate result is that the download limits on existing plans will at least double, so that high speed jumps to 125 gigabytes from 60 and Extreme to 250 gigabytes from 100 at the current price.
The company will also offer a number of new plans that provide choice in download and upload speeds, as well as increased data limits, including two unlimited options.
Those will become available next month, with new additions rolling out over the next 16 months as the analogue to digital TV upgrade happens and capacity is created.
“It should provide sufficient choice for our customer” …
Those packages are still way over-priced. But it’s the right direction.
The BIGGER issue is whether or not SHAW and the other Canadian oligopoly carriers will be able to convince the new FREE ENTERPRISE Conservative government to stiffle competition …
He’s attending the first e-G8 summit on the internet gathered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy this week in Paris.
I. We have the right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak.
III. We have the right to assemble and to act.
IV. Privacy is an ethic of knowing.
V. Publicness is an ethic of sharing.
VI. Our institutions’ information should be public by default, secret by necessity.
VII. What is public is a public good.
VIII. All bits are created equal.
IX. The internet must stay open and distributed.
Jeff makes the point that the internet “frightens institutions of legacy power”. That’s why they keep trying to regulate and limit “using convenient masks — privacy, security, civility….”
The last one is the internet’s best protection: its own structure. To the leaders gathered in Paris, I say of that architecture: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.
If you have no legacy power to protect, you should be fighting to keep the internet as free as possible. It’s our best hope for the future.
… a private company that provides global Wi-Fi services at more than 125,000 325,000 Boingo hotspots worldwide – including hundreds of airports, thousands of hotels, and tens of thousand cafes and coffee shops. …
Though signup is seamless, canceling the service requires a call into customer services. …
It works. But there are some deceptive billing practices. At times you THINK you are logging into your Boingo account, but in reality it’s some ‘premium’ partner. … At the end of the month you find you’ve been billed extra. Without warning.
UPDATE:
Baochi from Boingo responded instantly to this post. (They really do have superb customer support.)
Due to complaints like mine, Boingo has improved the notification that you are going to get DINGED for an extra (unknown) amount. It now looks like this:
The premium locations that incur additional charges are available by default. … Perhaps they should be OFF by default, and only turned on by two or three clicks.
Certainly every month Baochi gets complaints from customers charged more than their expected monthly total. Most cannot recall clicking on any premium locations. They were in a rush, and didn’t pay attention to that text.
If you travel, you could get good value. … On the other hand, since Starbucks went free, I’ve not needed a paid subscription. And don’t plan to get one in future. Starbucks has a strong WiFi signal 99% of the time. Many Boingo hotspots cannot stream a YouTube video.
However, Boingo’s now released a brilliant FREE service that I recommend for everyone.
A FREE app that helps you find and locate FREE and Boingo hotspots at thousands of locations worldwide.
Every time you open up your computer in a new location, the app will tell you if there’s free Wi-Fi available.
Brilliant.
After testing it the past couple of weeks in California and Nevada, I’m getting about 70% false positives. The app says there is free WIFi … but that’s not true. I’ve deleted the app on my laptop.
__________________________
For example, in the case of Starbucks (log-in required) it gets it wrong.
screen grab
I have to find the Starbucks log-in page. And log-in, as usual.
Clifford Nass is a professor of communications at Stanford University and a renowned authority on Human Computer Interaction.
I was quite alarmed by a radio interview with him on CBC Spark.
Are you wondering why you can‘t seem to get the important things in your life done?
… “Chronic multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them. They can’t ignore things, can’t remember as well, and have weaker self-control,” writes Stanford University communications professor Clifford Nass in a report that’s not well received in nearby Silicon Valley where buildings are full of computer experts who get lost in cyberspace. …
In expensive Canada, 
