Sony’s battle to block the distribution of a hack for its PlayStation 3 (PS3) has been won in an Australian court but lost on the internet.

The court ruled on Friday that a ban on distribution of the PS3Jailbreak “dongle”, first issued on 27 August, would be made permanent.

However, on Thursday the software code behind the hack was released on the internet as “open-source”.

The hack permits homemade games to be played on the console.

It has also already been modified by other hackers to permit the playing of pirated games.

The ban prevents OzModChips, Mod Supplier and Quantronics from importing, distributing or selling the device in Australia, although it names the “supplier” as Chinese firm China Sun Trading Limited.

The court order demands that the distributors hand over any stocks of the dongles.

Distributors in other countries have received substantially similar court documents banning the sale of the dongles.

However, the court’s action was pre-empted when another group of hackers decided to develop and release PSGroove, the code behind the hack, on the internet.

Mathieu Hervais told BBC News he is one of about 20 hackers involved in the development of PSGroove.

“We want people to run the software they like on the system they paid for without it having to be licensed by Sony,” he said.

“We released it on the internet because we believe in openness, choice and innovation from everyone.

“We understand (games console makers’) point of view as well when it comes to protecting their income or business models, we just believe compromises could be made to keep everyone happy.”

Sony declined to comment on the court case or the release of the open-source code.

?R-Force Says:

I don’t always agree with the whole commercial aspect of jailbreaking, however I was more than surprised to see the teams stepping back into old school style of releases,  as an Open Source hack. Most people in the scene recognise that Sony want to keep control of their hardware, but let’s be realistic here this is going to make Sony million’s on the increase of sales.

Or is it a case as suspected, that in fact Sony are producing the PS3 at a loss and instead making their money by licensing? If this is truly the case then it becomes more understandable why they are so determined to stop such dongles.  However Sony are very short sighted as usual. The fact is, no matter how much games are pirated, jailbreaks do not kill consoles (The PS1) was a good example of this. It’s sales survived long past its hardware capabilities.

Original Article with Courtesy of: news.bbc.co.uk

Your account has not been added on our system yet!

Ever since the buy out of Alliance and Leicester by Santander. They have been openly promoting their high streets branches as being accessible, both to Satander and Alliance and Leicester customers. There is only one problem with this claim.

It’s not actually true, unless you happen to be one of the chosen few that have had their accounts migrated onto the Santander Systems.

What does this mean for Alliance and Leciester customers?

Well quite simply. Other than using a Visa  ATM which is available just about everywhere now. You cannot carry out any transactions on your account through Satander branches. As the reply will be “Your account is not on our system yet!

Just today I had the privilege of this happening me, it would not be so bad however we where just paid £250 conciliatory payment for the last screw up. On top of that the Visa Debit card ran out of date in June 2010 and we are still waiting for a new one.

So what did we do, we ‘Switched’ on the computer, logged into the account and ‘Switched’ all the money to another bank.

A web hosting company has said it shut down a blogging platform that was home to over 70,000 bloggers because a “link to terrorist material” and an al-Qaeda “hit list” was posted to the site.

BurstNet said Blogetery.com also posted “bomb-making instructions”.

The company said it acted after receiving “a notice of a critical nature from law enforcement officials”.

But the move has angered bloggers who use the platform and say they were given no notice of the shutdown.

In response Blogetery.com said its server had been “terminated without any notification or explanation.”

The site added that it is trying to resolve the situation.

BurstNet defended its position.

“The posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNet acceptable use policy” said the web host firm.

BurstNet also claimed that the site had a history of previous abuse.

The news blog Cnet.com reported that officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told BurstNet on 9 July that al-Qaeda materials had been found on Blogetery’s servers.

It also claimed that material allegedly found on the server included “the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda” as well as messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organisation.

BurstNet’s chief technology officer, Joe Marr, said that the FBI sent a “Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information” request to the firm.

Sources have confirmed to the BBC that this was the case but FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the bureau does not comment on active investigations.

However he did say that the FBI had not asked for any websites to be shut down.

The FBI does not have the power to remove content from websites or to take them down. That can only be done with the authority of a judge.

Calls to BurstNet were not returned.

Rumour mill

For days bloggers have speculated as to the cause of the shut down at Blogetery.com.

Theories ranged from the FBI using the Patriot Act to silence bloggers to a belief that perhaps child pornography had been found on one of the blogs.

On one forum, a number of users were upset about not getting any advance warning to back up information they had stored on the server.

One frustrated user wrote “so BurstNet can “kill” your server and give you BS reasons about some “law enforcement officials”.

“Who needs a hosting service that does not fight for their clients?” wrote another.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology has also expressed concern about what happens to the 70,000 plus bloggers who have had their blogs terminated

“As a free speech advocate, I certainly think it is unfortunate that what I assume are many thousands of perfectly innocent blogs were taken down here,” John Morris, the head of the Centre for Democracy & Technology’s free expression project told BBC News.

“I hope our society is able to figure out a way to address one bad apple in a pool of content without collateral consequences for the innocent speakers. This (case) highlights the fragility of speech on the internet when thousands of speakers have their speech removed.”

Plot thickens

Adding to the mystery is the news that another online service that helped users create web message boards was taken offline a week after Blogetery.com.

While there has been no official link between the two cases, iPBFree.com said they are “gone for good” and had “absolutely no warning” and that the reasons are “tied up in legalities”.

On a temporary forum called the unofficial iPBFree refuge a statement said “the main site, all the thousands of forums, and the iBPFree Facebook and Twitter pages are gone.”

While the site has been unable to reveal why it has gone dark, users have been equally frustrated as those at Blogetery.com about at the potential loss of material.

One wrote “I’m personally devastated. My forum was a blogging forum and many of my members used it to keep a record of what they do from day to day. May not sound like much, but it was very important to them and me.”

Another suggested that while the shut down poses more questions than answers “one thing about the internet is that nothing is really kept hidden away forever”.

R-Force says:

This is looking more and more like another example of  the FBI riding roughshod over basic rights and the rights of commercial companies.  Why shut down an entire server without any real warning over very specific content?

Something just does not add up?

The site has made a series of changes to its privacy settings in recent monthsFacebook has begun to roll out changes to the site in its efforts to appease critics of its privacy practices.

The change means that games and applications installed on a person’s profile must specify what personal information they will access and use.

The changes were first announced in 2009 in response to work with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner.

In May 2010, the site was forced to overhaul its privacy settings in response to user concerns.

The moves were welcomed by privacy advocates.

“It is encouraging to see Facebook act on its stated commitment to providing users with simple but real control over their information,” said the US Center for Democracy and Technology. “The changes Facebook announced today represent an important and positive step for the company.”

Single control

The changes will apply to all third-party applications and games that a user installs on their profile.

“With this new authorisation process, when you log into an application with your Facebook account, the application will only be able to access the public parts of your profile by default,” said the firm’s Bret Taylor in a blog post.

“To access the private sections of your profile, the application has to explicitly ask for your permission.”

A user will be presented with the permissions box every time they install a new application or first log in to an external website with their Facebook account.

The social network currently offers more than 550,000 applications, including games such as the popular Farmville.

The site says that more than 70% of its 500 million users use an application every month.

Last month it was forced to simplify its privacy settings after storms of protest from users and privacy groups.

The new system brings all of the site’s settings into one page, with suggested default settings.

When they were introduced, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted the older settings had become too unwieldy and difficult for users.

“The number one thing we’ve heard to that the settings have gotten complex and hard for people to use,” he said at the time.

The FCC wants all data to be treated equally

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

The stage has been set for what many predict will be an ugly fight over broadband plans for US citizens.

The Federal Communications Commission has taken the first formal steps towards tougher rules for broadband.

It asked for public comment on three different plans, igniting an expensive lobbying campaign by all sides.

The looming battle follows a court ruling questioning the FCC’s right to regulate internet service providers after one throttled traffic to users.

That court ruling dealt a major blow to a central plank of the FCC’s broadband plan called net neutrality which demands that all data traffic be treated equally.

The five commissioners on the FCC board were split 3-2 in putting out for public comment proposals on new regulations for the broadband industry.

‘Third way’

One of the three plans the public is being asked to comment on, and which is favoured by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, is called the “third way”.

This would involve reclassifying broadband so it went from being a lightly regulated service to one with more vigorous oversight.

The US is rated 15th in the world for high speed internet access

In return for this tightening up, Mr Genachowski has proposed the new classification would not regulate on how much people pay for their broadband. It would also shy away from overseeing internet content, services, applications or electronic commerce sites.

The other two options include leaving the existing regulatory framework in place or imposing the full force of stricter regulations.

ISPs, such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, prefer the status quo and have come out against the “third way” proposal.

“This is impossible to justify on either a policy or legal basis and we remain confident that if the FCC persists in its course – and we truly hope it does not – the courts will surely overturn their action,” said Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs.

Verizon said the FCC’s move was “a terrible idea”.

By contrast, web giants such as Google and Amazon extol the value of free-flowing web traffic and an open internet.

“Broadband infrastructure is too important to be left outside of any oversight,” said Richard Whitt, Google’s telecom and media counsel in a blog posting.

‘To the death’

The political dynamics of the FCC board, two Republicans and three Democrats, imply that the “third way” looks almost certain to be the plan it adopts.

Some suspect this will provoke more lobbying and may draw legal challenges.

“There is a very big fight brewing and it’s the carriers versus everybody else,” said Erik Sherman, analyst with BNET.com, part of CBS’s digital business network.

The FCC has said broadband was "the greatest infrastructure challenge"

“There is little doubt it’s going to be a right data Donnybrook and I am not sure the consumers are winners in any circumstances. These companies are not fighting for the little guy. They are fighting for themselves and higher profit margins.”

That view was echoed by Public Knowledge, a Washington based public advocacy group.

“It’s a tough road ahead and the telcos are going to fight this to the death,” communications director Art Brodsky told BBC News.

“AT&T in the first quarter of this year spent $6m on lobbying. That is one company. One quarter. Compare that to Google which spent $4m in the whole of last year.”

The Computer and Communications Industry Association said the “third way” option is the only realistic option.

“Without deliberate FCC action, consumers, entrepreneurs, small businesses and non-profits will be left completely powerless against the corporate commercial interests of their unregulated internet access providers,” said Ed Black, association president.

‘Misguided’

A research paper released ahead of the FCC vote warned that net neutrality rules could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the USA .

The report argued that a 10% reduction in investment by broadband providers would cost more than 500,000 jobs before 2015.

“These regulations severely restrict the ability of network companies to manage their own network traffic, what technology and what techniques they will use to get a robust service and will close off important new business models in this new world we live in,” Bret Swanson, president of technology research firm Entropy Economics told the BBC.

Fellow author Charles Davidson of the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute at New York Law School said: “With the US economy still in a fragile state, imposing restrictive regulation on one of the country’s most dynamic sectors is misguided.”

Original Article with Courtesy of : news.bbc.co.uk

Some ethnic Uzbeks were seen returning from Uzbekistan

The UN has announced a $71m (£48m) flash appeal for Kyrgyzstan, where it says some 400,000 people have been displaced by inter-ethnic fighting.

The Central Asian state’s interim leader believes the number of people killed since violence erupted just over a week ago may be as high as 2,000.

Up to a million people are said to have been affected by fighting between the Kyrgyz majority and minority Uzbeks.

Many of those who fled their homes are staying in Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan’s government has asked the UN to launch a similar appeal for its own camps next week.

Having accepted tens of thousands of refugees, it fears its capacity to help them will soon run out, reports the BBC’s Tom Lane from the UN in New York.

Shocked and appalled’

John Holmes, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is meeting donor member states, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.

The focus of the Kyrgyz appeal will be food and shelter, with the hope that the aid will last at least six months.

Workers briefly walked out on strike at a Honda factory in Guangdong

By Chris Hogg
BBC News, Shanghai

One of China’s most influential newspapers, the official People’s Daily, has called for workers’ incomes to be raised.

The paper says wages need to rise to protect stability and transform society.

It warns that what it calls the “made-in-China” model is facing a turning point.

The article did not mention a series of strikes which have been causing problems for foreign businesses.

Walkouts have paralysed several factories across China, including Honda factories in Tianjin and near Guangzhou, in Guangdong.

The strikes are a sensitive topic for the ruling Communist Party.

‘Narrow the gulf’

The People’s Daily is the party’s official newspaper. Analysts look for clues within its pages to what those who rule China really think.

Earlier this week, Premier Wen Jiabao called on officials to take greater care of migrant workers.

This commentary goes further. It says they should be paid more.

“The time has come to narrow the gulf between rich and poor which is stifling consumer demand here,” the paper declares.

The All China Federation of Trade Unions says nearly a quarter of Chinese employees have not had a pay rise in five years.

But some of the workers who have gone on strike for higher wages in recent weeks have accused this organisation of colluding with local officials and factory managers to try to force staff back to work before their demands have been met.

It has been reported that the Chinese media have been banned from covering some of the recent strikes.

Certainly, the coverage there has been has focused on trouble at foreign-owned firms.

That could be because savvy workers feel they have more chance of getting a result by striking at a foreign firm, as the companies are concerned about their image in China and abroad.

Local firms may not care so much about what people think about the wages they pay their staff.

Or it could be that the censors are more willing to allow news about problems at foreign-owned firms to leak out, to create the impression that there are far fewer problems in Chinese-owned factories.

R-Force says: Many Western companies do financially exploit workers in countries where the incomes are lower. In fairness to some of the larger companies, their wages (with the obvious exclusion of Wal-Mart) is often much higher than the given regions normal levels. This however does not justify failure to raise wages for up to 5 years. Especially given that inflation has risen in China much like it has in the rest of the World.

Lets be honest, we all like our cheap goods, but how many of us would be so happy with that cheap price when we learn what the cost is to others?

Original Article with Courtesy of:news.bbc.co.uk

by Richard Stallman — last modified June 16, 2010 16:36 (Free Software Founadation)

ACTA (1), a treaty designed to attack the rights of computer users in some 40-odd countries — and others later — is encountering increasing opposition. ACTA threatens, in a disguised way, to punish Internet users with disconnection if they are accused of sharing, and requires countries to prohibit software that can break Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), also known as digital handcuffs (2).

In advance of a secret meeting of government representatives to plan the attack, New Zealand citizens organized their own public meeting, PublicACTA, to criticize it. The attendees published the Wellington Declaration, calling on the ACTA negotiators to reject several injustices that they suspected might appear in the treaty.

This event was a milestone in the fight against ACTA. But even though I would support each of the declaration’s objections to ACTA, it makes two major concessions that I cannot put my name to.

The Wellington Declaration properly condemns the plan for ACTA to prohibit devices that can break digital handcuffs. It then undermines that position by suggesting that a limited prohibition, along the lines of Article 11 of the WIPO Internet Treaty, might be acceptable. This limited prohibition would give government backing to certain kinds of digital handcuffs. To accept this much — without even a fight — almost begs the ACTA negotiators to try for more.

The decision might have been intended to minimize the alteration requested in ACTA. That approach would be appropriate for a different kind of situation, but not for this one.

When we ask a favor of someone that doesn’t owe us one, it behooves us to make it as small and easy as possible. That also usually increases the chance it will be granted. But that is not the case here. When we oppose ACTA, we are not asking our governments for a favor. Defending our freedom is their reason for being, and we demand it by right. We should not “compromise” by volunteering to cede some of our freedom so that they have less to do.

The other point I cannot bring myself to accept is the declaration’s praise of WIPO as a “public, inclusive and transparent” forum for negotiating agreements about copyrights and various other unrelated laws. I don’t recall seeing WIPO become a force for good in the world.

It is true that WIPO’s procedures are not as bad as ACTA’s mostly secret negotiations, but that’s the best thing one can say about WIPO. Its use of the propaganda term “intellectual property” (3) reflects its tendency to frame issues with a view towards restricting people more. Its actions follow that tendency: WIPO treaties about copyright in recent decades have specifically targeted the freedom of people who use published works. To transfer the ACTA negotiations to WIPO would perhaps make the result less bad, but would hardly ensure it is good. Let us not ask to be taken out of the fire and put back into the frying pan.

Any time there is a proposal to change things for the worse, the obvious way to oppose it is to campaign for the status quo. To campaign for the status quo suggests the approach of singing its praises; thus, praising WIPO is a natural way to highlight how ACTA is a step for the worse.

However, where there have been previous changes for the worse, lauding the status quo tends to legitimize them. The past 20 years have seen global waves of harmful changes in copyright law — some promoted by WIPO. To confront a further assault by presenting the status quo as ideal means we stop fighting to reverse them. It means that our adversaries need only propose a further affront to our rights to gain our acceptance of their last affront.

Instead of making the status quo our ideal, we should demand positive changes to recover freedoms already lost. For instance, many countries already have laws restricting devices that can break digital handcuffs; these must be repealed. WIPO treaties demand such laws; countries that have signed these treaties must withdraw from them. To stop ACTA from requiring such laws is just one battle in the fight to eliminate them.

The two points mentioned above are the only substantive points I disagree with, but they are very important points.

Aside from these points of substance, there are also points of wording. The Wellington declaration repeats some of the copyright industry’s propaganda terms; it says “protection” for restrictions, for example referring to digital handcuffs as “technical protection measures”. In spelling out the official name of WIPO, it repeats the term “intellectual property” without anything to reject its implications. These points of terminology are not as important as the substance, but they influence the public’s thinking, and that makes a difference.

They also affect the tone of the declaration. Use of these terms caters to the way the supporters of a repressive ACTA frame the issues. The overall tone avoids a forceful confontation with the politicians who seek to impose unjust laws through ACTA.

Those politicians serve the big music and movie companies. They intend to impose what those companies want — first on 40-odd countries, then on the world. They won’t heed civic-minded suggestions offered in a reasonable spirit that assumes their good will; their response to the Wellington Declaration shows that. We will have to stop them. To build a movement to stop them, we need to say, “Join us and fight!” Therefore I have written a firm and clear declaration of opposition to the aspects of ACTA that threaten our freedom.

Whether or not you have signed the Wellington Declaration, I invite you to sign this declaration calling for firm, simple limits on ACTA.

Part of ACTA is intended to take stronger action against commercial international trade in goods that infringe copyrights or trademarks. I am not in general opposed to that. Other parts of ACTA propose repression against the public. That must not be allowed.

Current copyright law is too restrictive, and so in some fields is patent law. They interfere with or prohibit activities that ought to be allowed. We must aim to abolish these restrictions, but if ACTA stays away from these issues, we can let it pass.

Thus, this declaration calls for removing the repression from ACTA, or rejecting it entirely.

See and sign the declaration here.

Footnotes:

1. ACTA’s official name is “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”, but the term “counterfeiting” in this context is a distortion of the word and a misrepresentation of the issues. Copies of files made when users share may be prohibited unjustly in some countries, but they are not “counterfeit” in any sense. We should not legitimize that misrepresentation by referring to ACTA by its official propaganda name. Therefore I refer to it only as “ACTA”.
2. For the campaign against Digital Restrictions Management, see DefectiveByDesign.org.
3. For an explanation of the propaganda term “intellectual property” and why we should reject the term, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.Original Article with Courtesy of : www.fsf.org
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