Verbo.se

A new home for The Pirate Bay?

Slate: In the wee hours of an early Saturday morning several weeks ago, about half an hour before Congress left for its pre-election recess, it passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The act tries to bar credit-card payments to Internet gambling sites, and there has been much speculation about its wisdom and likely efficacy. What has been less noted, though, is that through this bill and a handful of similar missteps, the government has put itself in a position to be taught a sharp lesson about the nature of power in a globalized marketplace. Unless Congress and the Bush administration begin to pay a little more attention to how they handle Internet gambling, they could well end up creating an entirely avoidable headache for some very powerful constituents—holders of U.S. copyrights and patents—by punching a hole in the international web of agreements that protects them. Taken as a whole, these efforts offer a veritable master class in how not to regulate a 21st-century economy.

(For those of you living in the past/dark, you can read about TPB on Wikipedia.)

British Passports Cracked

The Guardian reports that British passports have been cracked, and have detailed the technology involved. I’m still reading this, I’ll post a comment later.

Universal Music: MP3 Player Owners Are Thieves

UMG chairman and chief executive Doug Morris says that: “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.”

Here’s a UMG artist from each letter of the alphabet (ok, except for ‘x’), including a few from Ireland. U2, for example. Full ‘featured’ list here. You know what not to do.

• 50 Cent
• Amy Winehouse
• Black Eyed Peas
• Cardigans
• Def Leppard
• Elvis Costello
• Feeder
• Gwen Stefani
• Herbie Hancock
• INXS
• Junior Senior
• Kiss
• Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Mos Def
• No Doubt
• Ocean Colour Scene
• Portishead
• Queens Of The Stone Age
• Rubyhorse
• Snow Patrol
• Texas
• U2
• Van Morrison
• Will Smith
• Yasmeen
• Zed

Dems Seek to Restore Habeas Corpus

In a follow-up to this post, it seems the Democrats are working to restore habeus corpus rights to “enemy combatants” now too, thank god. Of course this is only part of the problem, as the Bush administration had granted itself the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant, including American citizens, thereby suspending habeus corpus across the board. That needs to be revoked too.

Does this sound familiar America?

Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State

On the basis of Article 48 paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the German Reich, the following is ordered in defense against Communist state-endangering acts of violence:

§ 1. Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom [ habeas corpus ], freedom of opinion, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

It’s the Reichstag Fire Decree, which was thrown together by Göring the day after the… uh… ‘convenient’ fire at the Reichstag on February 27 1933. Less than a month later the Enabling Act was passed by parliament, giving the Nazis dictatorial powers over Germany.

The new Democrat congress looks likely to ignore the Bush administration’s attempt to legalise it’s formerly secret – and very illegal – warrantless wiretapping regime, but there’s a lot of pretty nasty stuff left to undo yet.

I just hope the Democrats don’t screw up this next two years. They’re very much the other side of the Republican coin, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in them. America is a long way off the country I wanted so much to visit only a few years ago.

South Korea hits 100Mbps

arstechnica: Those stuck with slow broadband connections have another reason to look across the Pacific with envy. Some South Korean cable Internet subscribers are now able to get 100Mbps connections thanks to deployment of pre-DOCSIS 3.0 hardware by cable operator ARRIS.

Skanger me Banger

Can’t embed this one – effing bebo, look at the comments if you want a level of intelligence on the site – but it’s well worth a visit. Very funny.

Flying Spaghetti Monster in Germany!

All hail the all-powerful FSM!

Firefox 2 inline spellcheck

Firefox evangelists and automatic spellchecks are actually pretty high up on my list of pet hates, but I know that some people like both, and this was something I Did Not Know, and had to fiddle with to get working. See my post #25 on page 2 if you find yourself scratching your head too.