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A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry
that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and
that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent
high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent
revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage
at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been
the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the
US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)
On
Techdirt.
Last week we reported on the suspension
of Hadopi's one and only suspension, as France moved away from using
Internet disconnection as a punishment. That manifest failure of the
scheme that pioneered the three strikes approach makes a new paper from
the Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, called "Evaluating graduated response",
particularly timely. As its title suggests, this is a review of the
three strikes approach in the light of the experiences in the five
countries that have adopted it: France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea
and the UK -- even though the latter has still not put it into
practice.
On
Techdirt.
One of the key issues in the debate surrounding Snowden's leaks is whether they might be threatening
our security by letting the bad people know what the NSA and GCHQ are
up to. Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of the UK's foreign
intelligence agency, MI6, doesn't think so:
On
Techdirt.
In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most
commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the
enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of
the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University,
tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?
On
Techdirt.
Back in June we wrote about Hadopi's first and only successful disconnection
case. As we also noted then, in the wake of its abject failure, Hadopi
was being dramatically curtailed. In particular, disconnection is no
longer available as a punishment for those alleged to have downloaded
files without authorization.
On
Techdirt.
Now that Sarkozy has been thrown out of office, France is no longer
producing the steady stream of bad proposals for the Internet that it
once generated. That has left an opening for some other country to take
its place, and it seems that Russia is keen to pick up where Sarkozy
left off. We've been reporting on previous worrying developments there, and TorrentFreak has news on another one:
On
Techdirt.
It would be something of an understatement to say that encryption
is a hot topic at the moment. But leaving aside deeper issues like the
extent to which the Internet's cryptographic systems are compromised,
there is a more general question about whether Web sites should be
pushing users to connect using HTTPS in the hope that this might improve
their security. That might seem a no-brainer, but for the Wikimedia
Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs Wikipedia and related
projects, it's a more complex issue.
On
Techdirt.
As more and more information about the NSA's global surveillance
capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward
Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card
heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty
much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus
to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage -- here's what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:
On
Techdirt.
We've been reporting for several years about the extraordinary levels of secrecy
surrounding the TPP negotiations, where little information was released
about what was going on, and there were few opportunities for
representatives of civic and other groups to meet with negotiators to
present their point of view. More recently, there have been some
indications that this lack of transparency is fuelling increasing discontent among some of the participating nations.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of years ago, Techdirt carried an article by Andy Kessler
about the difference between entrepreneurs who create value, and those
who lock it up. The former tend to drive prices down constantly,
innovating all the while in order to make a profit; the latter, by
contrast, typically enjoy monopolies that allow them to push up prices without offering anything more in return.
On
Techdirt.
As many have already observed, the detention of David Miranda comes across as an act of blatant intimidation, as does the farcical destruction
of the Guardian's hard drives. But something doesn't ring true about
these episodes: spooks may be cynical and ruthless, but they are not
generally clueless idiots.
On
Techdirt.
As long-suffering readers of this column will know, I've been
following for a while the winding road leading to the European
Commission's proposals regarding net neutrality in Europe. Along the
way, there have been many twists and turns, with hints of first one
direction, then another. But today, the Commission has finally released
its plans - not just for this area, but for the whole telecoms market in Europe:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the recurrent themes on this blog has been the UK government's
use - or failure to use - open source and open data. To be fair, on
the open data side, things are going pretty well. Open source was
previously conspicuous by its absence, and that is finally changing,
albeit rather slower than many of us would wish.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When Stephen Elop moved from Microsoft to run Nokia, many saw this as
part of a cunning plan to prepare the latter for purchase by the
former. There's no real evidence for that, although soon after joining,
Nokia did place the Windows Phone platform at the heart of its future
strategy, despite the many drawbacks of doing so, effectively betting
the company on the success of Windows as the third mobile platform
alongside Android and Apple.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I've pointed out many times in previous posts, one of the key
benefits of mandating network neutrality is that it promotes innovation
by creating a level playing field. Such statements are all very well,
but where's the evidence? An important new study entitled "The
innovation-enhancing effects of network neutrality" [.pdf], commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs from the independent SEO Economic Research unit provides perhaps the best survey and analysis of why indeed network neutrality is so beneficial:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
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