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Judge sides with censored blogger against Chinese ISP - Ars Technica

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Jacqui Cheng - May. 26 (News Report) - Do not adjust your monitors: a Chinese government critic has won a court case against his ISP in Beijing for taking his website offline. Economics professor Hu Xingdou's website was shut down by Beijing Xin Net for containing "illegal" content earlier this year, but a Daxing district court ruled last week that the ISP could not provide proof for its claims and ordered Xin Net to repay Hu's service fees from the past two years.

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Harvard prof tells judge that P2P filesharing is "fair use"

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - May. 19 (News Report) - Should Nesson win, he will essentially legalize the sharing of all digital goods, copyrighted or not, by noncommercial users. Given that he wants to make the case about big principles like fair use and the applicability of statutory damages—and not about whether Joel Tenenbaum did what he is accused of doing—the music industry is likely to fight even harder to ensure that Nesson's preferred outcome is not realized.

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Trying to solve the long-term nuclear waste storage problem

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By John Timmer - Jun. 14 (Review) - Despite the uncertainties, the authors argue that there are very real reasons to start using Yucca Mountain: 60,000 metric tons of waste, currently stored in 72 sites, "many adjacent to metropolitan areas and all next to rivers, lakes, or the ocean." It's easy to default to inertia while waiting for greater certainty about Yucca Mountain or hoping something better comes along, but the authors argue that the current storage system creates far too much risk for this to be an acceptable path.

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Maybe a little evil: Google outs Indian man to authorities

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Jacqui Cheng - May. 19 (News Report) - An Indian man was arrested over the weekend for allegedly posting derogatory and vulgar content about Indian politician Sonia Gandhi on Google's social networking site, Orkut. 22-year-old Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid had posted his comments in an Orkut community called "I hate Sonia Gandhi" through an Orkut account associated with his Gmail account. With Google's help, local authorities were able to verify Vaid's identity and make the arrest.

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Global warming hitting hops hard

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Matt Ford - May. 07 (News Report) - In a Nature news article this week, Nature staff writer Rex Dalton reports on how the warming climate in Northern Europe is adversely affecting the hop crop. According to Peter Darby, a hop grower in the UK, the warm springs and mild winters have caused the hop vines to sprout early, stagnate, and produce little. On Monday a group of plant scientists met at a hop conference at the Hop Museum in Wolnzach, Germany to discuss ways to combat the impact of higher temperatures.

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FCC sets 700MHz auction rules: limited open access, no wholesale requirement

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:08:49 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Jul. 31 (News Analysis) - As Commissioner Michael Copps put it, the FCC needs to set "ground rules for how some of the most valuable spectrum on earth will be used." Around 80MHz of high-quality spectrum is being auctioned off early next year, and the FCC has devised two separate plans to deal with those frequencies. The agency wants to create a national broadband network focused on public safety that will bring true interoperability to all public safety agencies around the country. But the FCC also wants to spur commercial wireless innovation, especially when it comes to creating a "third pipe" for broadband that can provide an alternative to cable/DSL duopoly that prevails in most of the country.

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Venezuela's counter-revolution won't be televised... but it will be on YouTube

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:50:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Jun. 01 (News Report) - An opposition Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license has not been renewed by the government is now turning to YouTube to get its message out after its transmitter was taken over by a state-run channel. Hugo Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" has no time for media groups that criticize his government; Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) is now off the air, and another channel, Globovision, could be next, according to CNN. RCTV journalists and producers have not been arrested or stopped from working, but their main link to the public has been removed. Rather than giving up, the station has turned to YouTube, where it now has its own channel for the show El Observador. A Colombian channel is also broadcasting RCTV content into Venezuela.

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Disney: iTunes movie sales prove potency of format, pricing

Wed, 09 May 2007 08:09:17 -0700

Ars Technica - By Eric Bangeman - May. 09 (News Analysis) - That's the piece that the other major studios that have feared when it comes to Apple's movie prices--$12.99 or $14.99 for new films and $9.99 for older content--on the iTunes Store. As a result, most of them have eschewed the iTunes Store in favor of Wal-Mart's recently launched download store. Even though Wal-Mart's digital reach falls far short of Apple's (and its movies won't play on iPods or Macs, natch), the studios were comforted by Wal-Mart's DVD-style pricing for downloads: new releases will cost up to $19.98 each with the rest of the catalog is priced somewhere between that figure and $9.99.

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Experts Rate Wikipedia's Accuracy Higher Than Non-experts

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:18:33 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Nov. 27 (News Report) - A new salvo has been fired in the perennial war over Wikipedia's accuracy. Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion.

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Google Actively Aiding Intelligence Agencies?

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:05:00 -0800

Ars Technica - By Nate Anderson - Oct. 30 (News Report) - Former intelligence officer Robert David Steele recently appeared on the Alex Jones show to make the provocative claim that Google is currently cooperating with secret elements in the US government, including the CIA. Steele, who now runs OSS.net and is a proponent of open source intelligence, said that "Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government—that is a huge mistake and I'm hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off." In his view, Google's attempt earlier this year to avoid turning over information to the Department of Justice was little more than a hypocritical charade. Steele has made these claims for some time; back in January, he said the same things at a conference organized by his company at which several sources came forward and spoke about the alleged cooperation. According to security site HSToday.us, which had a reporter in attendance at the conference, one unnamed security contractor "said three employees of an intelligence agency he declined to identify are in Mountain View, Calif. where Google is based, working with the company to leverage the search engine company's user data monitoring capability in the interests of national security."

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