It seems the judge, presiding the now already famous trial of four men maintaining The Pirate Bay, may have a certain bias. Being apparently an active member of the Swedish copyright lobby it takes not much effort to find a possible conflict in him presiding a case brought about by members of this same lobby.

By this rather blatant display of mixed and vested interests, it goes to show that, although a judge in a court of law is assumed un-biased, outside of the courtroom there is still a life which may well collide with what occurs in the cocoon of the courtroom.

In se this is not such a special point, were it not for the fact that this now will get exposed on a global scale. This is something that will normally not happen if that same judge, being a member of the golf club, decides in favour of a land claim to enable exending that clubs golf field. If that news reaches national newspapers somewhere in a regional section it may get already more than unusual attention.

If the Pirate Bay verdict however runs into a mistrial due to a conflict of interests, this may catch Sweden with it’s pants down, especially after the recent spat of regulations to discourage filesharing (in any form, even legal).

Update:
and here’s the BBC with the story. keeping it below radar will be hard now.

Posted also here

After a lot of extra manual counts of early votes, Democrat Mark Begich seems to take a lead. Thus the man who brought in the pork for Alaska (think of the bridge to nowhere) will be finally ousted.

For those who can stand two and a half minutes of utter rubbish : The famous “The internet is a series of tubes” interview with Senator Ted.

Now youtube starts to introduce high quality/resolution video, now state television broadcasters use bittorrent to multicast episodes of popular shows (Norway, Canada, …) and some deploy their own player (BBC’s iPlayer), the strain on ISPs raises. Not only is BBC eating their (IPTV-)lunch this way, also it burdens their networks with half a nation watching telly from their PC. And the thing is the IPSs have little leverage to revert to their normal scare tactics.

Case in point: the debacle between Comcast and the Canadian broadcast service. CBS launches a bittorrent version of a popular show, viewers complain because Comcast throttles their bandwith when using peer to peer (like bitttorrent) applications, resulting in degraded viewing experience while their non-Comcats using neighbours enjoy full viewing experience.
Now imagine the outrage would British ISPs trying to throttle or ban all together the iPlayer traffic (which they are technically perfectly capable off). So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They will have ot endure the bandwith, but don’t expect them to be albe to raise their prices in a market where internet prices still go down albeit slowly.

Let’s see where this goes …

The campaign is supported by a youtube video featuring Mr. Tim Van Hamel.

(Via Clo)

While the filing states originally asked for oversight untill 2012, the judge leaves open the option to extend it beyond 2009.

(via The Register)

Indeed today when I switched on the news, I got to see the ongoing events in Pakistan. Apparently the president Musharraf suspended (highly contested by the supreme court) the Pakistani constitution and declared a state of emergency.

Off course the return of Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan for the elections a few days ago and her pending return tomorrow, might have to do something with this events. But what most struck me was seeing the army trucks driving around being folowed all over by television cameras and photographers. I mean, really a swarm, just like you would expect paparazzi around celebreties.

And then again, even if it were 5 or 10 trucks driving around with some 50 soldiers in them, you wouldn’t notice. Local television stations are suspended off course, but international newsagents will all air this same images of these trucks driving down some street, each one from a slightly different angle.

On the one hand this provides some sort of international scrutiny on ongoing events. On the other hand it just takes a few carefully staged news “events” to convey a message and stage a revolution or take-over. Just remember the images of the muslim outrage where this one guy keeps popping up in every picture, crying out loud, surrounded by what looks like a mass off people, but actually is no more than 10 or 20.

Similarly protests staged all over the world just require the attention of a television camera, not the big masses of the past.

Here’s a whoops with a capital W.

…

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.

…

Some of the email addresses appear to be transparently fake, but there’s also, much more troubling, a vice_president@whitehouse.gov carbon copied on the email, which is the public email address for Vice President Dick Cheney.

I know: never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but nevertheless. Seen the CC-ed persons reputation and actually that of that entire administration, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out is was done on purpose.

Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we’ve been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.

The companies that are being reported are the following:

* Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
* Emi Music Sweden AB
* Universal Music Group Sweden AB
* Universal Pictures Nordic AB
* Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Atari Nordic AB
* Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
* Ubisoft Sweden AB
* Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

Stay tuned for updates.

The House adopted a resolution with 464 votes in favour, 158 against and 70 abstentions on the restrictions imposed by the EU on liquids that passengers can take on board aeroplanes. MEPs call upon the Commission to review urgently and – if no further conclusive facts are brought forward – to repeal Regulation (EC) No 1546/2006 (introduction of liquids onto aircraft). The particular amendment on the possible repeal was adopted with 382 votes in favour, 298 against and 15 abstentions.

As already explained on a wide range of sites, blogs and in articles gallore, the possibility to blow up a plane by liquids is close to zero. Also the measures add up to nothing:

• a part of the basic ingredients to create a liquid based explosive are extremely unstable. Getting them to the airport without them going unstable is already a Herculean task, let it be that you manage to get them on a plane, lift off and then blend them in the toilet or somewhere else on the plane.
• The process to generate the explosive out of the components requires a temperature controlled environment, same for the mixing and is a precision work. The estimate is that to mix the amount needed to blow up a plane, you will need to spend up to 12 hours mixing the first two ingredients. So unless you have a real long distance flight the plane has landed prior to your first mix.
• While mixing some of the substances you run a real risk to get them instable resulting in poisonous gas, while harmless in low quantities, it is likely to kill you in a closed environment like a plane toilet.
• Now suppose some idiot tries to smuggle in bottles of these substances onto a plane and gets caught by the “no liquids”-brigade at the security check. They confiscate the liquids and then dump them all together in one bin next to the security check point (you know, where there are hundreds of people waiting to get groped by a security goon). Seen the above remark on the substances instability, this would be a highly risky thing to do.

For more explanations on airport and airline security, you can always check on Bruce Schneiers blog and his notions of the TSA rules.

Although officially recognised as a religion in the USA, in Europe the group is marked as a sect by some governments and under scrutiny for its practices.

(source De Tijd)

Update : they are not officially recognised as a religion in the USA. They just managed to avoid paying taxes by swamping the IRS with various lawsuits after the tax department tried to levy taxes on them on the account of the CoS being a profit making business.

An element of surprise for a lot of people might be where he explains that there is also non-controlled use of copyrighted work. This means some use cannot be regulated with the current copyright laws in place. Lots of copyrightholders or their representing groups try to make you forget this by adding ridiculous claims to their copyright notices.

(via BoingBoing)