Cyberculture roundup: “The Copyright Alert System FAQ, Yochai Benkler on Bradley Manning Case, Texting/Fingered Speech, More on Patent Trolls…

The Copyright Alert System FAQ

from EFF.org Updates by Daniel Nazer
It?s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) ? aka ?Six Strikes? ? has finally launched. CAS is an agreement between major media corporations and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe ? via everything from ?educational? alerts to throttling Internet speeds. Unfortunately, the Center for Copyright Information, which is running this ?educational? program, is hardly a neutral information source. So, as the participants finally begin to reveal some details, we?re here to provide an alternative.

Yochai Benkler: The dangerous logic of the Bradley Manning Case

from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
Yochai Benkler, in The New Republic, on an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in January during pre-trial hearings in the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case:

Bradley Manning military trial updates: live-blogs, who to follow on Twitter, and analysis

from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Bradley Manning Admits to Being Wikileaks Source

from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Texting Isn’t Writing, It’s Fingered Speech

from Wired Top Stories by Michael V. Copeland

All the handwringing by 7th-grade English teachers and parents over the tens of millions of grammatically challenged texts sent every day misses the point of what texting is: it’s speech.

Making the cloud more accessible with Chrome and Android

from The Official Google Blog by Emily Wood

If you?re a blind or low-vision user, you know that working in the cloud poses unique challenges. Our accessibility team had an opportunity to address some of those challenges at the 28th annual CSUN International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference this week. While there, we led a workshop on how we?ve been improving the accessibility of Google technologies. For all those who weren?t at the conference, we want to share just a few of those improvements and updates:

Deep Dive: Software Patents and the Rise of Patent Trolls

from EFF.org Updates by Adi Kamdar and Daniel Nazer

 

Beloved podcasts like the Adam Carolla Show and HowStuffWorks are under attack. They and other podcasts are getting sued for, well, podcasting. And they’re not the only victims?developers are being targeted for building mobile apps, and offices around the nation are being attacked for using ordinary networked scanners. These creators are only a few of the thousands of victims of one of the biggest threats to innovation: patent trolls.

Japanese Police Arrest 27 File-Sharers in Nationwide Show of Force

from TorrentFreak by enigmax

Firefox’s new, smarter cookie policy is a privacy win for users

from EFF.org Updates by Dan Auerbach
Mozilla recently announced a change to its default cookie policy for Firefox that will help protect users against unwanted tracking by invisible third parties. In short, a user will have to intentionally interact with a site in order for the site to be able to set a tiny snippet of data used for identification purposes known as a “cookie” on the user’s machine.

China’s Internet Censors for Sale

from EFF.org Updates by Danny O'Brien
What happens when a country’s government censors the entirety of its domestic web, with no oversight or transparency? It turns out that politicians aren’t the only ones with an interest in repressing free expression–and given a lever of control, a black market of censors quickly emerges.

The Rise of The Harlem Shake

from Sysomos Blog by Sheldon Levine

If you keep up to date on what?s hot on the internet, you?ve no doubt stumbled across a Harlem Shake video in the past couple of weeks. The strange videos have quickly become one of the most popular things on the internet and everyone is trying to get in on the action. What?s really interesting about this trend is how quickly it went viral.

 

‘According to Wikileaks’: The journalistic legacy of Bradley Manning

from FP Passport by Joshua Keating

US Trade Office Calls ACTA Back From the Dead and Canada Complies

from EFF.org Updates by Maira Sutton
Major announcements from the US and Canada today give a clear indication that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is coming back with a vengeance. ACTA is an agreement negotiated and signed by 11 countries, carrying intellectual property (IP) provisions that would negatively impact digital rights and innovation by ratcheting up IP enforcement measures beyond existing international standards. It will not take effect until six countries ratify the agreement, and Japan is so far the only country to have done so.

The CISPA Government Access Loophole

from EFF.org Updates by Kurt Opsahl
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act?CIPSA, the so-called ?cybersecurity? bill?is back in Congress. As we’ve written before, the bill is plagued with privacy problems and we?re urging concerned users to email their Representatives to oppose it.

SHIELD Act: The Internet Shows It?s Ready to Smash Patent Trolls

from EFF.org Updates by dm
The Internet is ready for patent reform.
In the days since Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz introduced their patent-troll-smashing SHIELD Act(Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes), there?s been a steady increase in attention and momentum, both in the press and among the public at large, to the issue of vexatious patent lawsuits.

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