Friday, June 23, 2006

One year ago this week (that's Sunday and you can browse from there) on A blog doesn't need a clever name: How to make money from podcasting. Internet usage in Iran. A recent academic study has found that few investors can focus on events more than five years ahead, even when those events are very predictable. The Annals of Corporate Misbehavior. Iran Moderate Says Hard-Liners Rigged Election. Low tuition encourages career slackers? The Ahmadinejad effect. Some of the grey areas in copyright. Freakonomics. Maybe it's the librarian in me, but I find something enjoyable about organizing iTunes playlists for my iPod. A glimpse inside Microsoft's rating system from an anonymous Redmond blogger. Prevalence of online newspapers. A new opportunity for those interested in international study: earn a Global Master of Arts in International Relations in just one year while attending classes at the University's European campuses in Vienna, Austria; Geneva, Switzerland; London, England; and Leiden, the Netherlands. Grokster decision expected. Botnet Hunters Search for 'Command and Control' Servers. Blizzard DMCS case. L.A. Times pulls reader-editorial Web sit. Center City Philadelphia braces for BIO 2005 protests. Dial-up Internet going way of rotary phones in U.S. One out of six American adult Internet users (16%) have gone online to view another person or a place via a web cam. That translates into roughly 21 million people who have viewed material on web cams. And on any given day, about two million Internet users are checking out remote places or people by using webcams. Eight percent of adult American Internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online. That represents roughly 11 million people. And on a typical day, about 2 million Internet users are going online to oversee and check on their fantasy teams. Net anonymity case in Maryland (Forensic Advisors v. Matrixx Initiatives). Douglas Rushkoff misses the pre-World Wide Web Internet: the bulletin board conferences, chat rooms, text-only Usenet groups; the 1,200-baud-is- fast-enough situation that formed the fledgling virtual community. Fair Use: use it or lose it. Google resources. IPv6. Indie-Rock Heavy Hitters -- Consumer Guide by Robert Christgau A Right-wing Sesame Street. Do performers need unhampered access to musical material on nondiscriminatory terms? What else could war dollars buy? Federal Government RSS feeds. 4:39:18 PM    comment []

Four from BNA News: FRENCH LAWMAKERS VOTE TO WATER DOWN ITUNES LAW Leading French lawmakers voted yesterday to water down a draft copyright law that could force Apple Computer to make its iPod music player and iTunes online store compatible with rivals' offerings. The changes did not appear to go far enough to satisfy Apple, which dropped the strongest hint yet that it might withdraw from the French download market rather than comply. TORRENTSPY NAMES ALLEGED MPAA HACKER A month after accusing the Motion Picture Association of America of conspiring to commit data theft, the operators of a file search engine presented more details regarding the alleged relationship between the MPAA and a man who admits hacking the small company's network. Valence Media, the parent company of Torrentspy.com, charges that the MPAA paid the Canadian resident $15,000 for information on Torrentspy and its executives. HOUSE PANEL AGREES ON BILL ON BIZ IN NET RESTRICTING SPOTS A congressional bill that would impose strict new obligations on American tech companies doing business with "Internet-restricting countries" like China cleared its first hurdle to becoming law on Thursday. The Global Online Freedom Act, introduced in February by Rep. Christopher Smith, passed by a unanimous voice vote in the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that focuses on Africa, global human rights and international operations. EC COMMISSIONER CALLS FOR COPYRIGHT BALANCE Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internet Market and Services, has issued his annual policy strategy in which he notes that "protection of intellectual property and copyright also raises important questions of their effect on consumers" and calls for balance in that respect. [EC] 10:38:20 AM    comment []

Trust But Verify. "The Sriricha Tiger Zoo in Thailand is trying to boost visitor numbers by teaching domestic animals such as pigs, and wild animals such as tigers, to live together in harmony from an early age," writes Sissy Willis quoting the Animal Liberation Front. There's an amazing pic at the link; and Sissy uses it to illustrate the parallels with humans. [Pajamas Media] 6:39:47 AM    comment []

Paging Jingjing and Chacha: the Rich Guys Are Stealing Everything. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2006/01/image_of_internet_police_jingjing_and_chacha_online_hon.php The name 'ChaCha' probably isn't that funny when you're down at the Shenzhen station house with the rubber hoses Jinging and Chacha are Chinese Internet cops. These fetching Sin-anime cartoons were recently placed on servers in Shenzhen so as to establish an atmosphere of deterrence among Chinese websurfers tempted to get up to mischief on the global Internet. These two digitized chip-surfing cream-puffs may have a job of work on their hands -- not with China's online dissidents, but with its globally-minded bankers. It would seem that about 4,000 Chinese bankers have filled their pockets with fifty billion dollars of embezzled Chinese money and absconded overseas. Who wants to bet they booked those trips by Internet? http://admin.corisweb.org/index.php?fuseaction=news.view&;id=121572&src=dcn  China Global hunt highlights scale of graft in China International Herald Tribune, 19 June 2006 . . . On Oct. 2, 2001, three junior Bank of China managers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong boarded a private jet in Vancouver for a flight to Las Vegas. One of the bankers, Xu Chaofan, was in a generous mood. He tipped the flight operator more than $1,200, according to evidence that Bank of China later presented in a Hong Kong court. The bank testified that Xu then lost $2,368,400 on the tables at the Caesar's Palace and Paris casinos. For a man on a modest salary, this should have been a heavy financial blow. At the time, Xu and his colleagues, Yu Zhendong and Xu Guojun, were earning about $925 a month. [rest of story at BtB] ((( What the USA needs is a couple of little male and female NSA Echelon cartoon cops to sit on top of AT&T's switching stations. Maybe one for the secret police on the American voice traffic, and one for the secret police in the American banking sector!))) ? [Beyond the Beyond] 6:39:28 AM    comment []

Iran: nuclear issue an excuse to topple government. World: West's compromise deal labelled 'a sermon' · US accused of 'wanting to set fire to the region' [Guardian Unlimited] 6:39:19 AM    comment []