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Category Archives: Freedom of Information
Google to Offer News Going Back More Than 200 Years
Web giant Google is further expanding its online empire with the launch of the Google News Archive Search.
The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning the last 200 years.
Singapore Plans to Make Itself a Mega Wi-Fi Hotspot
According to reports, Singapore is in the process of launching a nationwide Wi-Fi network that will let users receive an network connection to the Internet from virtually anywhere. Chief executive officer for SingTel Bill Chang said that “at the end of the year, Singapore will be one mega hot spot.”
Singapore launched a program last year called the Intelligent Nation program which is aimed at turning the country into one of the world’s leading technology-focused nations. Singapore is focused on becoming a leader in communications technology, and from the looks of the nation-wide Wi-Fi network, Singapore is well on its way to becoming an example for other nations. Singapore says that the mega Wi-Fi network will be based on WiMAX, which is a high-speed, reliable and robust wireless standard being pushed by Intel and other companies.
Google Book Search Now Allows Full PDF Downloads
When Google Print was first unveiled, it was clear that the site would become an amazing resource. It provided full access to books that were already out of copyright, but only if you viewed them online, one page at a time. What people most wanted, though, was the ability to download full PDF versions of the books, which they could read or print at their leisure and on their own machines. Oh, and they wanted Google to provide this free of charge.
Google went ahead and did it. Books no longer in copyright are now available for download from the Google Book Search site. If you’re looking for something tasty, might we recommend an early English translation of Montaigne’s provocative essay “On Some Verses of Virgil”? (Hint: the naughtiest bits are in the Latin epigrams, the worst of which aren’t even translated).
The Newbie’s Guide to Detecting NSA Peeping Your Web
It’s not surprising that an expert hired by EFF should produce an analysis that supports the group’s case against AT&T. But last week’s public court filing of a redacted statement by J. Scott Marcus is still worth reading for the obvious expertise of its author, and the cunning insights he draws from the AT&T spy documents.
An internet pioneer and former FCC advisor who held a Top Secret security clearance, Marcus applies a Sherlock Holmes level of reasoning to his dissection of the evidence in the case: 120-pages of AT&T manuals that EFF filed under seal, and whistleblower Mark Klein’s observations inside the company’s San Francisco switching center.
If you’ve been following Wired News’ coverage of the EFF case, you won’t find many new hard revelations in Marcus’ analysis—at least, not in the censored version made public. But he connects the dots to draw some interesting conclusions:
US threatens trade sanctions against Sweden because of thepiratebay
According to this well done Swedish news piece, the USA has threatened Sweden with trade sanctions through the US dominated WTO if Sweden refuses to close down the file-sharing website “thepiratebay.org”. ThePirateBay has been considered legal under Sweden’s fair use laws, and many Swedish support their right to freely distribute media such as music and movies; similar to their laws which allow them to pick mushrooms and lingamberries on other peoples land. Bowing to international pressure, on May 31st more than 50 Swedish police raided 10 locations and confiscated all the servers which supported the torrent-tracker. Persecution is pending, the site is running at some level, and there is a huge political stink escalating in Sweden over this issue right now. Check out this news report and decide for yourself what’s up…
news report from youtube
Should Government-Funded Research be Free?
Is it fair for the government to fund scientific research, only to have that research locked up in a US$300 academic journal? Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Lieberman (D-CT) don’t think so, and they’ve got a plan to change the current system. That plan is the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (PDF), a new bit of legislation making its way through the senate. The bill mandates that most federally funded research be freely published online after publication in an academic journal.
The bill contains a few caveats, though: such publication won’t take place until at least six months after an article appears in a journal, and it won’t necessarily be an exact copy of the journal article. If the publisher refuses to allow for a copy from the journal, the author’s own copy of the paper’s final version will be used instead.
Colbert Rips On Bush Administration @ White House Press Dinner
We seldom start a week by sending readers away, but we’ll have to make an exception today: If you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert’s appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, go watch it now, or read the transcript.
We shouldn’t have to say that. What Colbert did to the president and the press corps is news: He didn’t shoot anybody Saturday night at the Hinckley Hilton, but he laid them out in just about every other way imaginable. It was as an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment played out with George W. Bush and his court forced to watch, and you ought to have seen it and talked about it and read reporting and analysis on it by now.
It’s not your fault if you haven’t. The Washington Post had a few not-quite-getting-the-point mentions of Colbert’s act, but Colbert didn’t get half the ink the paper spilled on appearances by George Clooney and Morgan Fairchild and other celebrities at Bloomberg’s after-party. The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller wrote almost 1,000 words on the annual dinner this year, but not one of them was “Colbert.”
Why did Colbert matter?
In trying to describe what Colbert did Saturday night, we have a little sympathy for the reporters who didn’t do it themselves. In the core of his performance, standing just feet away from the president, Colbert adopted Bush’s phony or just feckless “from the gut” style of talking and thinking, then revealed it for the international embarrassment that it is. You can’t say something like that without sounding strident and heavy-handed; if you’re a reporter for a major American newspaper, you can’t really say it at all. But over the course of 10 minutes or so—for the president, it must have seemed much longer—that’s what Colbert did. He put the lie to the Bush presidency: Iraq, domestic spying, the outing of Valerie Plame and all the the folksy, consistency-and-character crap that’s so often used to legitimize it all.
Canadian Recording Industry: P2P Isn’t Bad For Business
The Canadian Record Industry Association (the Canadian version of the RIAA) has released a study in which they conclude that P2P downloaders buy lots of music, and that P2P doesn’t particularly harm their industry.
Particularly noteworthy findings in the 144 page study report include:
* The survey asked for the sources of music on people’s computers. Among those who download music from P2P services, the top source of music was ripping copies of their own CDs (36.4%), followed by P2P downloads (32.6%), paid downloads (20.1%), shared music from friends (8.8%), downloads from artist sites (5.6%), and other sources (2.9%). In other words, even among those who download music from P2P services, the music acquired on those services account for only one-third of the music on their computers as store-bought CDs remain the single largest source of music for downloaders (page 53).
* For all the emphasis on the teenage downloaders, it is interesting that the 35 to 44 age group had the largest spread between CDs and P2P as the source of music. Among that demographic, 31 percent of their music comes from P2P services and 27 percent from ripping their own CDs (page 69).
* Consistent with many other studies, people who download music from P2P services frequently buy that same music. The study found that only 25% of respondents said they never bought music after listening to it as a P2P downloaded track. That obviously leaves nearly 75% as future purchasers, including 21% who have bought music ten times or more. Note that demographically, the lowest percentage of non-buyers actually belonged to the 13 to 17 year old demographic (page 70).
Also see this bashing of the MPAA for pulling chinanigans.
The Click That Broke a Government’s Grip
The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.
Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper’s computer system attacking the Communist Party’s propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters’ pay if their stories upset party officials
No one told the editor in chief. For 90 minutes, he ran the meeting, oblivious to the political storm that was brewing. Then Li announced what he had done.
The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li’s memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e-mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China’s most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.
The government’s Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief’s plan to muzzle his reporters.
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives’ open shelves.
NASA Climate Expert Says US Tried to Silence Him
NASA’s top climate scientist has accused the Bush administration of trying to stop him from speaking out after he called in a lecture for swift cuts in emissions of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
James Hansen, director of the US space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his forthcoming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard website and requests for media interviews, the New York Times reported Sunday.
“They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” said Hansen, who told the paper he would ignore the restrictions.
“Since 1988, (Hansen) has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore,” the Times reported.
Hansen told the Times that “efforts to quiet him” had begun in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on December 6, 2005, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
“In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth ‘a different planet’,” the Times said.
Gore Lays The Smack Down
Today, Al Gore delivered one of the great speeches in American history, in which, in decrying the dire Constitutional crisis created in the US by President George W. Bush, he often quoted the founders of our country.
One day, we will all look back to Mr. Gore’s speech, and either be proud that we listened and understood and fought for the sanctity of the US Constitution…..or be embarrassed and shocked that we didn’t comprehend the utter seriousness of the predicament of the United States of America in 2006.
Al Gore’s lengthy, blunt-spoken plea for our American democracy was orated in the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall in Washington DC, before a standing-room-only crowd that gave Mr. Gore numerous standing ovations. It was attended by both Democrats and Republicans, and was specifically endorsed by Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), who was quoted in Gore’s speech.
In his speech, Mr. Gore articulated to thunderous applause and cheering, ”...the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and presistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government….Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows.”
Mr. Gore continued, ”...the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and… the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.
The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.”
Mr. Gore concluded by calling for six immediate reform steps to be taken, including comprehensive “hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President.”
Video on c-span
With transcript below.
Swedish File Sharers Form Political Party
A political party has been set up in Sweden that plans to participate to the upcoming national elections. Piratpartiet plans to remove all immaterial rights, including copyrights and patents and also hopes to stop Sweden’s participation in international copyright organizations, including WIPO and WTO and to make it illegal to put any restrictions on distribution of digital content.
“Pirate Party” also aims to push even further the privacy laws and to make it illegal to track or monitor citizens’ communications online and offline.
To register an official party in Sweden, they need to get 1,500 signatures to support its cause. The organization managed to gather over 4,000 signatures in first 24 hours and is in process of validating the signatures.
The party says that it is against seeing the developing world starve because the developed world refuses to share its intellectual property.
Age of Information Overload
Books are being scanned to make them searchable on the Internet. Television broadcasts are being recorded and archived for online posterity. Radio shows, too, are getting their digital conversion—to podcasts.
With a few keystrokes, we’ll soon be able to tap much of the world’s knowledge. And we’ll do it from nearly anywhere—already, newer iPods can carry all your music, digital photos and such TV classics as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” along with more contemporary prime-time fare.
Will all this instantly accessible information make us much smarter, or simply more stressed? When can we break to think, absorb and ponder all this data?