A new study from Sweden has found that just over half of all young people admit to obtaining movies and TV shows from the Internet without paying, a figure that rockets to 70% among young men. With The Pirate Bay about to be blocked by one ISP with more to follow, can piracy rates be controlled?
TorrentFreak » Study: 70% of Young Swedish Men Are Video Pirates »
CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) has just released its report on encryption and it comes to the same conclusions many other reports have: encryption is good for everyone and law enforcement fears are overstated and mostly-unrealized.
The underlying principle is that a government trojan is only allowed to operate in ways that have been explicitly authorized by an Italian judge’s signed warrant.
And there are lots of security requirements.
Techdirt: Italy Proposes Astonishingly Sensible Rules To Regulate Government Hacking Using Trojans »
The New Zealand High Court today ruled that Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the US, but it won’t be on copyright grounds. After months of deliberation, Justice Murray Gilbert agreed with the US Government’s position that this is a fraud case at its core, an offense that is extraditable. Dotcom says he will fight on.
It’s a political case.
It’s a political judgement.
I told you I can’t be extradited for Copyright and I was right.
What is this? Sharia law?— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) 20 februari 2017
TorrentFreak: Kim Dotcom Extradition to Go Ahead, But Not on Copyright Grounds »
BBC: Kim Dotcom can be extradited, New Zealand High Court rules »
The United Kingdom’s Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority is not part of an agency tasked with fighting terrorism. It’s a licensing body that “regulates businesses who provide workers to the fresh produce supply chain and horticulture industry, to make sure they meet the employment standards required by law,” according to its mission statement.
Nevertheless, under a new mass surveillance law, high-ranking officials in this agency will have as much access to the private internet information of British citizens as agencies that actually do fight terrorism. So will officials in the U.K.’s Department of Health, its Food Standards Agency, and its Gambling Commission, along with dozens of other government bodies.
Reason: Big Brother in the U.K. »
Poorly crafted court orders threaten the open Internet, Cloudflare says. (…)
“This is part of the danger you get into when you start to censor the Internet or you get orders to pull things down,” Kramer said. “It may not be so easy to limit access to a specific domain,” or to make sure a block applies only in a certain country.
Ars Technica: A court order blocked pirate sites that weren’t supposed to be blocked »
TorrentFreak: Cloudflare Puts Pirate Sites on New IP Addresses, Avoids Cogent Blockade »
Cryptocurrency will cripple governmental ability to collect taxes, and they won’t see it coming. When it’s already happened, expect major changes to take place in how society is organized on a large scale – but also expect governments to act in desperation to retain control. (…)
The deployment of cryptocurrency is to tax collection what deployment of end-to-end encryption is to mass surveillance.
Rick Falkvinge: How cryptocurrency will cripple today’s governments – and they won’t see it coming »
New AI Can Write and Rewrite Its Own Code to Increase Its Intelligence:
• A company has developed a type of technology that allows a machine to effectively learn from fewer examples and refine its knowledge as further examples are provided.
• This technology could be applied to everything from teaching a smartphone to recognize a user’s preferences to helping autonomous driving systems quickly identify obstacles.
Futurism: New AI Can Write and Rewrite Its Own Code to Increase Its Intelligence »
“However, there is one right that young people are less keen on extending to others: the right to say what you want. Overall, fewer than half of those polled agreed that people should be allowed to express non-violent opinions even if they offend minorities. In Britain and Germany, for instance, only 46% and 48% did.
The right to free speech is not absolute, as anyone who shouts “fire” in a crowded theatre will soon discover. At the same time, the recent polling data bolster the view that today′s youth are embracing a right not to be offended, which threatens to squelch necessary debate. Time will tell whether this group starts to dedicate itself to winning arguments rather than to preventing them from occurring.”
The Economist: Young people and free speech »
The decentralized marketplace Openbazaar has been continuously building its platform since inception. Now the Bitcoin-powered marketplace has finally merged Tor integration into the Openbazaar platform adding a long-awaited layer of privacy to the program.
Openbazaar Integrates Tor – The Platform’s Most Requested Feature »
