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open source, open genomics, open creation
25 January 2012
Is Using A Piece Of Existing Music In A Film To Underline An Emotion 'Rape' - Or Just The Way Cinema Works?
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" The Artist " may have won several Golden Globes, but there's at least one person who apparently hates the film because of s...
20 January 2012
OK, So SOPA And PIPA Are Both On Hold: Where Do We Go From Here?
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There is a rather odd atmosphere within the parts of the online community that fought so hard against SOPA this week – relief that all th...
EU Politicians Send Letter To US Congress Warning Of 'Extraterritorial Effects' Of SOPA And PIPA
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Since SOPA and PIPA are US bills, the focus has naturally been on the US response to them – notably in the list of major sites that parti...
Welcome to the World of Open Source Domotics
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Canonical pulled off something of a coup at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) when it announced its Ubuntu TV – inevitably dubbed...
19 January 2012
File Sharing Without The Internet: The Saharan Bluetooth Experience
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A couple of months ago, Techdirt wrote about an EU politician's plan to build Internet surveillance into every operating system. As ...
A 'Trustworthy' Social Network For The Occupy Movement: Even If They Build It, Can They Ever Trust It?
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The role of technology in the wave of protests that swept the world last year is a matter of debate. While some claim that social network...
Yet More Collateral Damage From SOPA/PIPA: Activism Through Satire
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Among the many high-profile organizations that are joining the SOPA blackout today is Greenpeace. That's great, except that you can...
17 January 2012
Argentina Building Huge Biometric Database For Use With Police's Face Recognition Technology
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One of the more unfortunate consequences of Moore's Law is that technologies that erode privacy are becoming cheaper every year – and ...
Two Fatal Flaws in the O'Dwyer Judgment
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So the long-awaited verdict on the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer has finally arrived, and, as feared, it's ridiculous. There are m...
13 January 2012
Indian Judge Tells Google And Facebook To 'Check And Remove Objectionable Material' Or Be Blocked
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A few weeks back, Techdirt reported on an Indian minister asking Internet companies to do the impossible: On Techdirt .
German Court: ISP Must Not Block Access To Foreign Sites, Even If They Are Illegal
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Against a background where some European courts are telling ISPs that they must block access to certain sites (in Finland and the UK , for...
Why Apple Will Not Be Part Of The Real Tablet Revolution
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You don't have to be a marketing genius or industry pundit to foresee that tablets will be an extremely hot sector in 2012. The launc...
12 January 2012
Is Microsoft Blocking Linux Booting on ARM Hardware?
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Back in September last year, there was a bit of a to-do about Microsoft's UEFI Secure Boot technology in Windows 8, when a Red Hat eng...
11 January 2012
"An Open-Source World"? Where's The Open Source?
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If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that i...
10 January 2012
How "Throwing One Away" Makes Open Source Better
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There's a wonderful line in Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical Man-Month", where he says that when writing a program, plan ...
Jazz Pioneer 'Jelly Roll' Morton's Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe -- A Hundred Years Too Late
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A recent Techdirt post reminded us that thanks to its crazy copyright laws, the US won't be seeing anything new in the public domain...
09 January 2012
UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed
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Just before Christmas I wrote a fairly strongly-worded condemnation of what I saw as the imminent betrayal of open standards by the UK Ca...
07 January 2012
Why SOPA Would Be A Disaster For Scientific Publishing
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One of the many dangerous aspects of SOPA/PIPA is that its backers seem to have given no thought to what the unintended consequences might...
06 January 2012
Will The Food Industry Ever Swallow Transparency's Bitter Pill?
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A fascinating trend in recent years has been the gradual move from a presumption of secrecy to one of openness, transparency and sharing. ...
05 January 2012
If Libraries Didn't Exist, Would Publishers Be Trying To Kill Book Lending?
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Against the background of today's war on sharing, exemplified by SOPA and PIPA, traditional libraries underline an inconvenient truth:...
Is Monmouthpedia The Future Of Wikipedia?
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One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is: What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it ...
German Court Decisions Make Everyday Use Of The Internet Increasingly Risky There
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Perhaps there's something about the German legal system that encourages judges to push their interpretation of the law to the limit, w...
04 January 2012
Of Open Source and the European Commission
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At the end of last year I reported on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its support for truly open standards...
Beyond The Internet Of Things Towards A Sensor Commons
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Already it's clear that one of the hot tech topics of 2012 will be "The Internet of Things" – the idea that even the most mu...
03 January 2012
What should free software do in 2012?
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In my last column , I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order to promote the Open Web and openness in genera...
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