Introducing a Social Media platform that enables people to tell their story through the eyes of their most cherished possessions
Month: January 2015
Je Suis Charlie attempted trademarked
An, er, enterprising individual has attempted to register the phrase “Je Suis Charlie” as a trademark in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
The Benelux Trademarks Office told El Reg on Tuesday that it had received an application in Dutch to register the slogan just one day after the staff of Charlie Hebdo were murdered in an extremist attack last Wednesday.
Je Suis Charlie was quickly picked up globally as a cry of solidarity in defence of freedom of expression.
Many have been quick to condemn the attempt to cash in on the atrocity, although this is not the first such attempt, as T-shirts bearing the slogan were for sale in Paris just days afterwards.
Belgian resident Yanick Uytterhaegen’s trademark application covers multiple products including laundry and cleaning products, printed matter, clothing, footwear, toys, decorations for Christmas trees, fruit juices, and even beer.
Faux News
Google Porn Takedowns Carpet Bomb Github
Every single week thousands of copyright holders and anti-piracy companies demand that Google removes links to allegedly infringing content.
The effort required to deal with this deluge is considerable. Google has received as many as 11 million requests in a single week and in 2014 alone the search giant processed some 345 million URL takedowns.
While it’s believed that most takedown requests are accurate, Google still does its best to ensure that erroneous notices don’t negatively affect legitimate online services. Google regularly rejects overbroad and inaccurate notices but like everyone else, the company isn’t perfect.
The latest head-shaker arrives courtesy of anti-piracy outfit Takedown Piracy (TDP). Acting on behalf of porn outfit Wicked Pictures, TDP sent Google a notice containing thousands of URLs targeting dozens of well and lesser-known file-sharing sites.
Sadly, however, the notice also targeted coding site Github – over and over and over again. And Google complied.
“The materials reported in this notice are the copyrighted DVD/videos of Wicked Pictures,” the notice begins.
Not exactly.
What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps
Encrypted communications will be backdoored or banned in the UK if the Conservatives win the next election, Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged.
The UK government has always had the power, “in extremis,” to read Brits’ personal post and eavesdrop on electronic chatter, he repeatedly insisted on Monday in a speech to the party faithful in Nottingham.
Roca Labs, Lacking A Hornet Nest Into Which It Could Stick Its Dick, Has Sued Marc Randazza
This crazy litigant goes to 11.
Roca Labs, you may recall, is the weight-loss-goo purveyor that is belligerent, litigious, and sensitive to criticism to a pathological degree. Last month I wrote about how they require their customers to sign no-criticism contracts, and had sued PissedConsumer.com for carrying negative reviews. Yesterday I lit the Popehat Signal to seek help for customers Roca Labs has targeted with vexatious litigation — including, in what no doubt is just a big coincidence, one of the witnesses against them in their first litigation.
Can Roca Labs push the envelope more? Yes they can.
Today Marc Randazza — counsel for PissedConsumer.com in Roca Labs’ frivolous suit — filed an updated notice of related cases in the PissedConsumer case. That updated notice revealed that Roca Labs has now sued Randazza himself for his activities defending PissedConsumer.com.
The Corrupt Philanderer Who Built the CIA’s Black Sites
Bureaucrats love secrets. If they are given unchecked power to create secrets, they will find the temptation to use this power irresistible. They will use it to cover justified cases, for example, to preserve diplomatic and military secrets that are important for national security, or to protect the privacy of individual citizens (the information contained on tax returns, for instance). But at the same time bureaucrats use secrecy to obscure from public sight anything that might embarrass them or reduce their political power and influence, for instance, innocent mistakes, evidence of incompetence, evidence that the policies they have made or implemented do not work or have unforeseen negative consequences, corruption, or even evidence of criminal conspiracies and dealings.
Democratic deliberation rests on the premise that ideas, once exposed to the public—unfolded, challenged, tested, and disputed—will stand or fall on their own merit. The bureaucratic drive for secrecy rests, in many cases, on a need to keep information out of the hands of individuals who could use it to harm the bureaucracy. The bureaucrat will invariably say that an enemy could use the information to harm the country, but more often than not the real concern originates with the bureaucrat personally or the office where he or she works.
The bureaucrat may fear that the exposure of a mistake will damage his chances for promotion or undermine the prestige and influence of the bureaucratic institution where he works, making it vulnerable to bureaucratic rivals. To the extent this is the case, secrecy produces a government that is more poorly informed, dull-witted, and more corrupt than would be the case if the power of classifying secrets were stripped away. This is because information stamped “secret” cannot be tested and challenged in the forum of democratic debate; it goes unquestioned and tends to be accepted as truth. If the secret is nonsense, it will likely be revealed as such once exposed.
Dianne Feinstein, Strong Advocate of Leak Prosecutions, Demands Immunity For David Petraeus
If it wasn’t already clear that the US government was unhappy with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden—and the feds want him extradited, President Obama denounced him—it is now. Today, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers (R-MI), both emphasized there would be no mercy coming from Washington.
“He was trusted; he stripped our system; he had an opportunity—if what he was, was a whistle-blower—to pick up the phone and call the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and say I have some information,” Feinstein told CBS’ Face The Nation. “But that didn’t happen. He’s done this enormous disservice to our country, and I think the answer is no clemency.”
The lust for “justice” changes somewhat when it’s one of “their own” that is under scrutiny:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) urged the Department of Justice not to bring criminal charges against former CIA Director David Petraeus over his handling of classified information.
“This man has suffered enough in my view,” Feinstein said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, explaining why she doesn’t think Attorney General Eric Holder should seek an indictment.
Petraeus “made a mistake,” added the senator, who is vice chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “But … it’s done, it’s over. He’s retired. He’s lost his job. How much does the government want?”
NYPD Pouts And Refuses To Do Their Duty; Residents Split Between Applauding And Failing To Notice
As you may be aware, things have gotten weird with the NYPD over the past several weeks. In what amounts to the police force in our nation’s largest city throwing a temper tantrum over either the brutal murder of 2 officers or the sudden attention being paid to how police officers treat the city’s minority residents in the wake of the stop and frisk scandals and the death of Eric Garner, the NYPD’s numbers are all down. Arrests are down somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%, and citations appear to have plummeted to a fraction of the norm, resulting in arraignment numbers dropping by nearly a third. While the NYPD has denied that this is any kind of coordinated lack-of-effort, that claim is laughable and it’s obvious that the police officers have banded together to show us how much New York City needs them and how horrible life will be when they stop performing the duties they swore to perform.
Too bad most people are barely noticing and that those who have noticed are thrilled.
Few managers in the court system expect the current downturn to last. Many public defenders, however, said they hope the steep decline in minor arrests will become permanent. They noted felonies did not rise over the last three weeks as arrests for low-level crimes plummeted.
“This proves to us is what we all knew as defenders: You can end broken-windows policing without ending public safety,” said Justine M. Luongo, the deputy attorney-in-charge of criminal practice for the Legal Aid Society.
Prominent YouTube Personality Locked Out Of His Account After A Bogus Copyright Claim (by Outfit7)
Firing up an app to talk to a bot isn’t copyright infringement. The app will talk to whoever will chat with it (and vice versa, in terms of CleverBot). Recording this interaction doesn’t violate Outfit7’s copyright anymore than someone recording their siblings/kids talking to it. The app exists to talk and presumably Outfit7 would like more people to download the Talking Angela app because in-app purchases is a numbers game. The more people that try it out, the more likely the chance that some of them will start tossing money into the company’s revenue stream.