Between 12:00 and 24:00 customers of UPC internet will only be able to download at 1/3rd of the possible speed as UPC will be QOSsing them. UPC voert toch afknijpbeleid in | Webwereld.

It turns out that CCTV cameras all over the place don’t really help much at all: for every 1000 camera’s, one crime is solved. That’s a very very expensive way to go about invading people’s privacy. Instead of getting rid of the camera’s, the Metropolitan police is saying they need to figure out how to Read more about Finally UK CCTV figures[…]

It turns out that Palm wants your data – as much as possible! The Pre sends the following information home daily: Location Which apps you’ve used and for how long App crash logs Installed apps Apparently Palm says you can turn it off, but they don’t tell you how. You OK it by agreeing to Read more about The Pre Reports Your Location to Palm[…]

Of course only in the jolly old UK: The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Private security guards will also be sent round Read more about This is where CCTV leads to![…]

David Pogue is waging war on those carriers that make you listen to a stupid canned message from them after you listen to a personal voicemail message. Those 15 seconds of canned bullshit are there to make you rack up mobile expenses. One way to avoid them is to press: *-1-# in a row This Read more about ‘Take Back the Beep’ Campaign[…]

The Pirate Bay has been told to block access to Dutch users in some magical fashion during a court session in which the subpoena’s were delivered via Twitter and Facebook and the defendants were not able to come to the courtroom to defend themselves. They sent a written response, but this was ignored due to Read more about Dutch courts go nuts again[…]

In a blow to freedom and privacy, the Dutch have passed a law requiring ISPs and telco’s te retain all kinds of personal data about a person’s online and telecomunications transactions for the period of at least 12 months, despite not having been able to prove that this helps at all against terrorism (which is Read more about NL passes data retention law[…]

In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means. A British police detective Read more about British Court Ditches Internet Anonymity[…]

Why, simply issue short questionaires and call your pub a “Smoking Research Centre”!

After Merkel’s reich has allready raided wikileaks headquarters, they have now managed to get DENIC (the German registrar) to take down the wikileaks.de domain citing vague nonsense. What is it with Germany and it’s antipathy to free speech?

The bill, as it stands, would make it a criminal offence to possess (cartoon) pictures of children participating in sexual activities, or present whilst sexual activity took place How silly is that then? You can’t have a drawing of a child in the neighbourhood of sex? Well, that makes the drawer of Bart Simpson with Read more about Cartoons of children and sex to be illegal in the UK[…]

A Dutch forum – internetoplichting.nl – where you can post if you’ve been scammed or otherwise treated badly by an internet shop, has been held responsible for the posts depicting Trendylaarzen as a crap shop. Even though the court didn’t rule there were any inaccuracies in the posts, they did say that there was malicious Read more about Dutch courts going the way of shut the fuck up[…]

Thus they can use adsense equipped sites to mainly show you the stuff they think you’re interested in. Privacy? Anonymous web surfing? No thank you! Fortunately they have a page where you can see what categories Google thinks you’re interested in and you can opt out of interests or opt in to new categories. The Read more about Google starts using your search history for contextual advertising[…]

The SIDN – the Dutch .nl zonefile owners – have decided they want only large registrars and have decided to give owners of > 100.000 domain names up to 8% discount. Becoming a registrant is subject to an annual fee, which is the same for all registrars, so the smaller registrars, that have to make Read more about NL Zonefile wants to kill small registrars[…]

This has just been put into law, without any debate whatsoever, in response to a high court judge’s ruling that MP’s adresses should be published. This from the house that pushes the wide eyed innocent “but if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” argument all over the place. Are they afraid, Read more about In the UK only the MPs have privacy[…]

“Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently being debated by the UK Parliament, would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose64. Personal information arbitrarily used without consent or even knowledge: the very opposite of ‘Data Protection.’ An ‘Information Read more about UK Government Wants To Kill Data Protection Act[…]

You could be thought of as performing reconnaisance for terrorist (hey! that word again – what does it mean, nowadays?) acts. Especially don’t take any pictures of the police. No, not even if they’re committing atrocities. You’ll get busted with a 10 year incarceration or unspecified fines.

Using warrantless wiretaps, this shows you who gets targetted when you allow the police state to run amok.

With airline personell being able to dictate what they think is ‘terrorist’ behavior without any training qualifying them to do so, what we get is at least 208 people being prosecuted as terrorists for raising their voice, spanking their children or basically causing the crew any kind of headache whatsoever.

Showing that there is no limit to how far the US is willing to push people around, they’re now forcing convicted sex offenders to submit their online email adresses and passwords. They’re allready forced to walk around and tell everyone in their environment they’re sex offenders, they have limited movement and that after they’re supposed Read more about Sex offenders a US Subclass of human[…]

This experiment took the top science students of this year and gave them 1965 exams. They all failed miserably, showing the dumbing down of education quite graphically. An interesting side effect was that the girls did worse than the boys did, even though other research puts girls ahead in current exams. This clearly shows something Read more about Schools: more sexist and more stupid[…]

Yes, these fantastic guys in the UK keep on building huge centralised databases: The NHS has had data of around 10,000 patients compromised in around 135 seperate incidents – last year alone! In the Netherlands, they’ll be starting a system like this in 2009. Fortunately you can opt out here If you live in NL, Read more about NHS loses patient data[…]

A Chinese lawyer is suing Microsoft for hacking his PC by installing Windows Genuine Advantage on it without his permission. Too bloody right! Well done and hopefully we can make this a class action suit in Europe!

But how they got their hands on the Dock patent is a true mystery, considering the amount of prior art there is, reaching back before 1981!