Monday, April 18, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

China's housing bubble: ghost malls, ghost highrises, and ghost cities

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:57 AM PDT

Here's an Australian TV documentary about China's housing bubble which has given rise of bizarre ghost malls, ghost highrises, and even ghost cities. It's symptomatic of the growing divide between China's rich and poor, which has left many Chinese without adequate housing. Unlike the US bubble, the Chinese property bubble isn't founded on cheap credit, which makes the analyst hosting the show believe that it won't burst in the same way as American one.

China's Ghost Cities and Malls

NZ MP votes for anti-piracy law hours after tweeting about her love of pirated music

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:26 PM PDT


A reader writes, "In a beautiful twist of irony, New Zealand parliament member Melissa Lee has been caught in a copyright quagmire. It turns out that just hours before she spoke out in support of the controversial new copyright law being rushed through parliament, she tweeted how pleased she was with a compilation of K-Pop songs a friend copied for her."
Surprised by the call-out, Lee defended herself by saying that the songs were downloaded legally and paid for. But unfortunately for her that doesn't mean much. As the National Business Review points out, when a friend makes a copy of songs that were legally bought, the recipient of the 'gift' is still guilty of copyright infringement.

So it appears that Lee got her first strike already, and since the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer under the new legislation, it's up to her to prove that she's innocent. That's only fair, right?

Although it's easy to call Lee's mistake out as hypocrisy, it might be even worse than that. What if she truly believes that copying a legally bought song for a friend is okay? That would mean that even legislators who vote on copyright legislation don't fully grasp what they're doing.

Kiwi MP Called Out As Pirate After Passing Anti-Piracy Law

Choco-Thulhu is real!

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 11:01 AM PDT


I lamented the fact that the chocolate Cthulhu was just an April Fool's joke. Now, they are real. And green!

CHOCOLATE CTHULHU IDOL (Thanks, Lovecraftsman!)

Save Google Video before it goes dark!

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:50 AM PDT

Google Video is shutting down and all the video uploaded to it will go dark. R3Dux writes:
Archive Team are in a race to scrape as much Google Video content as they can before the viewing deadline (29/04/2011) and the download deadline (13/05/2011) - and you can help! Archive.org have kindly donated 100TB for storage, but first we need to index the videos and scrape them.

If you have a lot of bandwidth you can help scrape the videos themselves, but even if you don't you can help with the indexing effort by running a simple, resource and bandwidth light Linux script and just leaving it running!

Google Video (Thanks, R3Dux!)

Shit Harper Did: Canada's Prime Ministerial ignominy

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:37 AM PDT


Shit Harper Did is a website that sums up the greatest misses of Canada's corporatist lickspittle PM Stephen Harper, who is up for re-election. Harper's tenure has been marked by scandal after scandal, and this site is a good aide-memoir for anyone who can't remember exactly why the man has been a disaster for Canada.

Shit Harper Did (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Righthaven copyright trolls never had the right to sue, have their asses handed to them by the EFF

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 09:21 PM PDT

Righthaven is the extortion racket spun out by the Las Vegas Review-Journal: they received a license from the Review-Journal for its copyrights, then attempted to make the license pay by threatening any blogger who quoted the newspaper with expensive lawsuits and domain confiscation. They firehosed these legal threats around without regard for their legal merits (and attracted more desperate, unethical newspapers to their client roster in the process) and so it was inevitable that eventually they'd misfire at someone who got pissed off enough to do something about it.

That someone is Democratic Underground, a political site that contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation for legal help. EFF's lawyers got a court to force Righthaven to reveal the terms of its license with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and discovered that Righthaven's license only gives it the power to sue on the Review-Journal's behalf (that is, Righthaven doesn't actually control the Review-Journal's copyrights in any meaningful way). And that is illegal -- a license to sue is not sufficient to have standing to use the courts for redress. Democratic Underground is now seeking recovery of legal fees, which the Review-Journal and other newspaper clients may be liable for. Joe Mullin writes:

So what began as a business deal in which there was no downside for Stephens Media now looks like a situation where the company could be on the hook for a serious chunk of change. It's worth noting that the contract actually has a specific clause (see Section 11) in which Righthaven indemnifies Stephens Media in the event that attorneys' fees need to be paid to an opponent. But could Righthaven really fulfill that obligation? What assets does Righthaven really haven? Likely not much; it's a company set up just to file lawsuits. One generous estimate is that the company has made a couple hundred thousand dollars of gross revenue in the single year it's been in business. That's surely been distributed to attorneys and staff. That means that a situation where newspaper companies ultimately end up on the hook for payments is a real possibility.

Righthaven wanted to keep these documents sealed, but they utterly failed to convince the U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt to take their side. Other defendants, and the public at large, should have a right to view the contracts, as well as DU's arguments that they are a sham, which were sealed until Friday. "Because these cases have generated a great deal of public interest, particularly in the media and on the internet, that there is a right of the public to this information which overrides any claimed confidential commercial rights," Hunt wrote in his order.

Hunt also shows how peeved he is at Righthaven's litigation behavior. (The company truly seems to have a knack for angering judges.) Judge Hunt criticizes how Righthaven has attacked opposing counsel, writing: "There is an old adage in the law that, if the facts are on your side, you pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, you pound on the law. If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, you pound on the table. It appears there is a lot of table pounding going on here."

Righthaven's Secret Contract Revealed: Will Its Strategy Collapse? (via /.)

Zero Punctuation cosplayers

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:24 AM PDT

Cosplayers at Toronto's Anime North masquerade dressed up as Yahtzee's cartoon avatar from the screamingly funny Zero Punctuation game review videos.

Anime North 2010 Masquerade HD - Entry 75 (via Super Punch)

TSA considers being upset at screening procedures to be an indicator of terrorist intentions

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:21 AM PDT

CNN has discovered that the TSA considers "complaining about TSA procedures" to be a profiling marker for potential terrorists. They explain that one terrorist (the "twentieth hijacker") complained a lot about TSA screening, and so that means "getting angry about TSA screening procedures" goes in the "signs of terrorist intent" bucket.

However, CNN also notes that intelligence analysts say that Al Qaeda official policy is for its operatives to be meekly cooperative when pulled over for TSA screening. Strangely, "cooperating with the TSA" has not been added to the TSA's profiling screen.

"Expressing your contempt about airport procedures -- that's a First Amendment-protected right," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who now works as legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We all have the right to express our views, and particularly in a situation where the government is demanding the ability to search you."

"It's circular reasoning where, you know, I'm going to ask someone to surrender their rights; if they refuse, that's evidence that I need to take their rights away from them. And it's simply inappropriate," he said.

TSA security looks at people who complain about ... TSA security (Thanks, AirPillo!)

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive