Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead. BREIN is now expected to take the ISPs to court.

Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics.

The company at the center of the allegations, Adscend Media, denies the charges and said it will fight them vigorously. According to the office of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, the company paid and encouraged scammers to design Facebook pages to bait users into visiting Websites that pay the company. The bait pages would appear in posts that seem to originate from a person's Facebook friends and offer visitors an opportunity to view “provocative” content in exchange for clicking the ‘like’ button on the Facebook page.

By clicking 'like', the user alerts their Facebook friends to the page. From there, the user was directed to complete one of several online surveys and provide information such as their age. Oftentimes, the promised content did not exist, and the duped user was directed off Facebook through a series of prompts that took them to unrelated Websites. In some cases, clickjacking was used to activate the 'like' function and spread spam, according to the state's suit.

Two stuffed animals were stolen from the glass display in front of the Buena Vista Museum Wednesday morning.

Officers said 55-year-old Henry Slivers was found two blocks away at the Jack In The Box with a stuffed dingo.

That's where he was arrested in connection with the break-in.

"I was just bored and decided I wanted to be a cat burglar," Slivers told 23ABC in a jailhouse interview. "So I kicked in the window and tried to steal the lion but it was too heavy, so I stole the cat."

"I took the leopard to my hotel. I then decided I wanted the dingo so I went back and took it. I took it to Jack In The Box because I wanted to have breakfast with it."

23ABC asked Slivers what he was planning on doing with the dingo and he replied, "I was going to take it around town with me."

My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates.

I often criticize companies on this blog so I want to take a moment to recognize Twitter for a model policy and explain why these should be the kind of practices that I hope other Internet companies follow.

In my opinion, with this policy, Twitter is fighting to protect free speech on Twitter as best it possibly can. (It also fits with its business model so I am not going to argue they are uniquely angelic, but Twitter does have a good track record. Twitter was the only company which first fought the US government to protect user information in the Wikileaks case, and then informed the users when it lost the fight. In fact, Twitter’s transparency is the only reason we even know of this; other companies, it appears, silently caved and complied.)

Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform as broadly as possible while making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content, either tweet by tweet or more, all the while giving free-speech advocates a lot of tools to fight censorship.

Twitter has announced it will begin restricting tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.

"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," Twitter wrote in a blog post.

It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries.

"Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," it said.

In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.

However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.

As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.

In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities.

Hanging the machine guns on the wall was a bad idea, but the burglary wouldn’t have happened if we’d just covered up the little decorative window over the front door. If you stood on your toes in the hallway and looked in through the little window, the guns were in plain sight. Almost everything was in plain sight because most of our third-story apartment was a single large room — a shoddy retrofit of a massive early twentieth-century industrial building on Philadelphia’s north side, in Fishtown, where those kind of buildings are common.

The building owner, a tattoo artist we’ll call Daryl, also lived somewhere on the third floor and ran a printing business on the first floor that employed a half-dozen people, most of whom were heavily tattooed tenants. There was plenty of activity around the building during the day and everyone made sure the main doors were always locked, so we had good reason to believe a burglar wouldn’t be able to break into the building in broad daylight, climb the stairs to the third floor, peek into our apartment, force his way in and carry off our machine guns without being caught. That was naïve. We should have covered up the little window.

Swiss police say thieves took a 100kg safe from a youth hostel in a ski resort and apparently used a stolen snowboard to make off with it.

Police in the Swiss canton of Graubünden said someone broke into the building in Valbella, in the south-east of the country, on Monday night or in the early hours of Tuesday.

Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s ‘War on the Internet’ event on Saturday in Melbourne (full video available online here), Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said much of the thinking around the data retention proposal had been integrated into new cybercrime legislation introduced in mid-2011.

Ludlam said the proposal had been narrowed down to a degree to which most people would find ‘reasonable’, in that law enforcement agencies could, for example, request ISPs to keep all available data on people suspected of committing major crimes such as terrorism — a technique he described as “hold that person’s everything, until we tell you not to any more”.

However, the Greens Senator warned, that cybercrime legislation could “mutate” into something completely different. “Maybe let’s trap all the data of these categories of people,” he said, appearing to refer to the political activist community, many members of whom had gathered at the Melbourne event. “Or these postcodes of people.”

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world's richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.

Stop ACTA!

Louisville Metro Police apprehended a man the fire department called "very strange" after he was allegedly caught stuffing cash in a washing machine early Sunday morning.

It happened at an apartment complex at the corner of E. Main St. and N. Brook St. The fire department went to the scene after the fire alarm had been activated. When they arrived, they allegedly found 21-year-old Jose Veras of Radcliff, Ky., "running around and acting very strange."

The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.

Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.

The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. “The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,” the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. “We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs. the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs. little Aussie battlers’ sequel.”

Its detractors may end up dubbing it "Dementiaville", but Switzerland is brushing aside a debate raging among geriatric-care experts with plans to build a mock-1950s village catering exclusively for elderly sufferers of Alzheimer's and other debilitating mental illnesses.

The newly approved €20m (£17m) housing project is to be built next to the Swiss village of Wiedlisbach near Bern and will provide sheltered accommodation and care for 150 elderly dementia patients in 23 purpose-built 1950s-style houses. The homes will be deliberately designed to recreate the atmosphere of times past.

The scheme's promoters said there will be no closed doors and residents will be free to move about. To reinforce an atmosphere of normality, the carers will dress as gardeners, hairdressers and shop assistants. The only catch is that Wiedlisbach's inhabitants will not be allowed to leave the village.

PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water for now, but it's worth remembering that the most controversial part of the legislation is something the Australian Government has been thinking about for years.

One of the provisions in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that raised the most amount of anger, and was also one of the first to be quickly removed, was that the US Government would be able to force US-based internet service providers (ISPs) to block overseas websites found to contain copyright-infringing material.

Outrage ensued, the provision was removed, Wikipedia blacked out and the legislation was ultimately shelved.

In Australia, the Attorney-General's Department has reassured us that the government currently has no plans of bringing in any new SOPA-style laws, instead preferring an industry-based model for dealing with piracy.

But website blocking has been on the cards for the Australian Government for many years, in the form of the mandatory internet filter.

Two years after the launch of the iPad, the tablet has a considerable footprint among business professionals – especially in Africa.

According to the results of the IDG's latest “iPad for Business Survey”, African professionals are almost twice as likely as the global average to be supplied with an iPad by their employer.

Forty-seven percent of African respondents said they own a corporate-issue iPad. This is compared to the global average of 24%.

A 40-year-old Melbourne man who told IRS agents he was not subject to man’s laws but instead was an American national who “resided in the Kingdom of Heaven,” pled not guilty this week to charges he filed false tax returns.

Russell P. Gentile also faces one count of obstruction of an IRS agent after a grand jury indicted him.

A Fond du Lac man was arrested after he told police a “ghost” punched and strangled his wife.

Michael F. West, 41, of 281 Fond du Lac Ave., was charged Wednesday with strangulation and misdemeanors of battery, disorderly conduct and resisting or obstructing an officer.

At about 8 p.m. Jan. 15, police arrived at West’s home to find the woman crying and bleeding from her nose.

Mike DeStefano was still on the rise as a comedian when he died of a heart attack at 44. He was one of the finalists on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” and definitely stood out from the pack. He wasn’t always the funniest, but there was something direct and heartfelt about him that made you root for him, and you could feel the weight of his personal story, always. He grew up tough in the Bronx. Had been addicted to heroin. Three months before his death, he spoke with his fellow comedian Marc Maron on the “WTF” podcast. With permission from DeStefano’s family, we’ve edited and condensed the interview and replaced the words that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

...

DeStefano: She’s holding the pole! Marc, it was a pole with four wheels on the bottom, and we’re riding around this hospice, and you could hear the goddamn wheels jangling and banging; it was insane.

And then I pass the front door, and all these nurses are standing out front, and they’re all crying. They’re watching us, and they’re crying. And I didn’t know why they were crying. I was like, Why are they crying? I didn’t get what they were seeing. I didn’t know. Because I was just in it; I was living it. I knew my wife who had suffered, she was a prostitute, she was a freakin’ heroin addict, she was beaten by pimps — this was her past — and then she ends up with AIDS, and she’s dying, and all she wants is a goddamn ride on my motorcycle.

So the next thing you know we’re on I-95, because women, it’s never enough for them. We’re on I-95, and she unhooks the pole, and she’s holding the morphine bag over her head with her gown that’s flying up in the air so you could see her entire naked, bony body with the morphine bag whipping in the wind, and we’re passing by these guys in their Lamborghinis, and I’m looking at them like, What the hell kind of life are you living? Look at me, I’m on top of the world here.

An Australian technology startup that aims to make reporting of website faults easier and more visual for non tech-savvy people today announced an investment of $500,000 from Melbourne-based venture capital firm Starfish Ventures.

The startup, BugHerd, was created in 2011 after Melbourne co-founders Alan Downie, 35, and Matt Milosavljevic, 29, were unable to find a bug tracking product suitable for logging and managing visual website issues. Websites owners generally welcome users' reports of faults - or bugs - so they can fix them.

Twitter has acquired Internet security firm Dasient, the Sunnyvale, California startup said on its blog on Monday.

Dasient, which describes itself as a cloud-based Web antimalware technology company, introduced in 2010 a service to protect advertisement networks and publishers from malicious ads.

Northern Territory Police are questioning a man after he allegedly tried to rob an off-duty police officer before being pulled out of Darwin Harbour naked.

The man allegedly demanded cash from the officer outside the Woolworths supermarket at the northern suburb of Nightcliff before running off when the officer told him he was a policeman.

Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital has apologised for forcing unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption until the mid-1970s.

The apology came in a Senate inquiry into the "forced adoption" practice, which will report its findings next month.

Between the 1940s and 1970s there were about 45,000 adoptions in the state and it is estimated about 5,000 unmarried mothers at the RWH were told to give up their children.

A mother and daughter told a court only God had the authority to order them to pull down an illegal extension to their South Golden Beach property, but the magistrate took a different view.

In a hearing at Mullumbimby Local Court on Thursday, Byron Shire Council argued the downstairs area of the property was not approved to live in as part of the original development consent and it should be demolished.

The council's governance manager, Ralph James, said despite several requests over the past two years, the property owner had not taken any reasonable steps to get the downstairs development approved or cease use of the area.

Los Angeles-based Web hosting firm DreamHost reset the FTP and shell access passwords for all of its customers on Friday after detecting unauthorized activity within one of its databases.

"One of DreamHost's database servers was illegally accessed using an exploit that was not previously known or prevented by our layered security systems in place," said DreamHost's CEO, Simon Anderson, in a blog post on Saturday.

Even though it couldn't be blocked, the unauthorized access was detected by one of the company's intrusion detection systems (IDS), allowing its security team to react quickly and take the necessary mitigation steps.

The company notified its customers about the security breach via email and informed them that only passwords used for FTP and shell access were affected by the breach. Billing or personal information was not exposed, DreamHost said.

After snatching a notorious copyright troll's name at auction, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com into a web hosting service. The intended customers? Publishers worried about the kind of abusive legal threats spewed out by the domain's previous owner.

"The Swiss courts don't play games and registrars here cannot be scared," said Stefan Thalberg of Ort Cloud, an ISP based in Zürich. "Frivolous plaintiffs will find little comfort here."

With hosting in Switzerland and planned in Iceland, the new Righthaven promises "infrajuridsictional infrastructure" — in other words, uptime that would require international co-operation to bring down.