Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Reporters Without Borders is appalled by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov's decision to withdraw the accreditation of 10 journalists who staged a silent protest at a cabinet meeting to draw attention to the impunity enjoyed by those responsible for an attack on two reporters during street demonstrations on 18 May. “The allocation of press accreditation should not be used to ‘cherrypick' journalists and eliminate those who ... Full story

Kim Dotcom has announced that he is the inventor of the so-called two-step authentication system and has a patent to prove it. The Megaupload founder says the security mechanism, which has just been introduced by Twitter, is being used by U.S. companies more than a billion times every week without permission. Dotcom says he doesn't want to sue, but might if the likes of Google ... Full story

To mark the occasion of 20 million URL takedown notices sent to Google by RIAA member companies, the organization has complained that search engines still aren't doing enough to reduce the piracy problem. The RIAA says it is using a bucket to deal with "an ocean of illegal downloading", one in which content is replaced and re-indexed in a never-ending loop. Notice and takedown procedures ... Full story

Reporters Without Borders is appalled to learn that three employees of Dainik Ganadoot, a local Bengali-language daily based in Agartala, the capital of the northeastern state of Tripura, were stabbed to death at the newspaper's headquarters by two unidentified intruders on 19 May. “We are shocked and horrified by this targeted triple murder of news professionals and we call for immediate measures to protect the ... Full story

Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by the frequency with which the Obama administration has reacted to leaks by bringing prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act. Six whistleblowers have been prosecuted under this law since President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Previously, the Espionage Act had only been used three times in response to leaks: in 1973 (for the high-profile Pentagon Papers case during the Vietnam War), ... Full story

A trial of the alleged attackers of Lukpan Akhmedyarov (Лукпан Ахмедьяров), begun on 14 May, was scheduled to resume on 22 May in the special regional court of Uralsk, in northwest Kazakhstan. Attackers tried to kill the high-profile dissident journalist in front of his home on the night of 19 April 2012. The initial investigation of the crime was a “farce,” Reporters Without Borders said. ... Full story

New tax records reveal that the RIAA has made heavy employee cuts after revenue dropped to a new low. Over the past two years the major record labels have cut back their membership dues from $33.6 to $23.6 million. RIAA staff plunged from 107 to 60 workers in the same period. The IRS filing further shows that the music industry group paid $250,000 to the ... Full story

Case provides valuable guidance to judges on how to responsibly handle social media connections and communications. Judge sent defendant to prison for assaulting defendant’s girlfriend. Defendant appealed his sentence claiming, among other things, that the judge was not impartial, given that the judge was Facebook friends with the girlfriend-victim’s father, and that the two of Full story

22.05.2013-IRAN - Crackdown on news Websites blocked, journalists and netizens under pressure Reporters Without Borders condemns a week-old wave of censorship targeting Iranian and international websites in the run-up to the 14 June presidential election. Websites that support various presidential candidates and online services such as Google and Yahoo! have been blocked. The site blocking was indicative of the tension among the various conservative factions ... Full story

The file-sharing activities of BitTorrent users have become the input mechanism powering an art installation currently underway in Canada. The Pirate Cinema, a control room featuring three large screens and viewing area, is displaying a mashup of content pulled from the top 100 torrent swarms indexed by The Pirate Bay. Its creators inform TorrentFreak that with a little help from an encrypted connection to Sweden, ... Full story