Have you attended a peaceful protest recently? The Guardian reported at the weekend that the Metropolitan police are storing the details of protestors on the criminal intelligence database, in some cases even where the person concerned has no criminal record and is not suspected of any offence.
via Corinna Ferguson: Public trust eroded by police surveillance of protestors | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
[ Just a few days after Yvonne Singh: Why are we fingerprinting children? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk ]
newspicks 1984, newspicks, yro
word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA.
via Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?.
[ I think when I started using last.fm again recently, I asked someone if it wasn't just a very convenient way of giving the MAFIAA a nice index to sue users based on, and the idea was dismissed as insane 
]
Russ comments:
Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for. [1]
Update 2009-02-23: RIAA has denied this as well. Which is why I’m seriously considering the chance that such a leak occurred… 
newspicks newspicks, privacy
Four weeks after birthing a nationwide Wikipedia edit ban, Britain’s child porn blacklist has led at least one ISP to muzzle the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – an 85 billion page web history dating back to 1996.
via Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history • The Register.
newspicks censorship, newspicks
Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary on the news that the MPAA has asked Obama to spy on the entire Internet, and to establish a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection
via MPAA to Obama: censor the Internet, kick people off the Internet, break other countries’ Internet – Boing Boing.
newspicks mafiaa
Australian newspaper The Age reports that both Telstra and Internode have declared they will not participate in the trials. iiNet said it wanted to take part to show that the filters do not work and Optus would only work with a scaled back plan.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Net firms rebuff filtering plan.
newspicks censorship
Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.
IWF statement regarding Wikipedia webpage
newspicks censorship
AUSTRALIA’S mandatory net filter is being primed to block 10,000 websites as part of a blacklist of unspecified “unwanted content”.
Australian web filter to block 10,000 internet sites | Herald Sun
newspicks censorship
We see all sorts of ridiculous patent applications and patents, but my favorites tend to be the patents that have to do with patents themselves (such as the patent app on a method for filing a patent). However, the folks over at Patently-O have highlighted a fascinating patent application from an attorney at Halliburton, which appears to be an attempt to patent the process of patent trolling.
Techdirt: Halliburton Tries To Patent Form Of Patent Trolling
newspicks
China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently however, several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu.
China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites | TorrentFreak
newspicks
Not-so-surprising news from UK:
Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.
Internet black boxes to record every email and website visit – Telegraph
newspicks privacy, runforthehills
