The tiny island of Malta rarely pops up in my rss reader but when it does I usually pay the news more attention than it deserves. Malta is a tiny island with about 400 000 inhabitants and like most islands is fairly big on introspection. What makes Malta special (for me) is the fact that [...]

Wikipedia continues to experiment with access and control in relation to the most frequently vandalized pages. Previously it would simply “lock” the pages, removing the ability of anyone to just edit the page. This loses the advantage of dynamic creation which made Wikipedia great and now changes are afoot to enable editing. Instead of locking [...]

Google has developed a very nice tool to illustrate requests from government agencies to remove content from their services, or provide information about users of our services and products. Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about [...]

An interesting thing happened at a conference I was attending last week. The were three speakers giving talks to all the attendants (c:a 300 people). First up was the minister of communication (unexciting but well formulated explaining new broadband policy), the was James Boyle discussing Cultural Agoraphobia (an excellent presentation on the public domain). Finally [...]

In what is an incredible attempt at Copyfraud and general corporate bullying the nasty International Olympic Committee once again attempts to use its power of intimidation to stamp on an individual photographer (via BoingBoing). On August 12, 2008 Richard Giles posted the photo Beijing Olympics Water Cube below onto his flickr account under a Creative [...]

In 2006 Warner Media Group became the first major media company to form a strategic relationship with YouTube. They launched a business model based on user-generated content. It looked really good. But… The arrangement with YouTube required that royalties be paid based on the number of views that videos featuring music from WMG artists received. [...]

From Torrentfreak Last Friday The Pirate Bay moved to Ukraine after its Swedish bandwidth supplier was forced to stop servicing the tracker. In the new setup, traffic to TPB is routed through The Netherlands, but anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now asked ISP NForce to stop handling TPB’s traffic. As a result the site is now [...]

For eight years the Swedish journalist Dawit Isaak has been detained without a trial in a prison in Eritrea. It is difficult to imagine what that must be like. He was imprisoned on the 23 September 2001. Here is an excercise in perspective: One month after his imprisonment the first iPod was launched (23 October [...]

Wikipedia is planning to add a feature called “flagged revisions” which will fundamentally alter the basic philosophy of WIkipedia. The plan will effect the articles of now living people and will require trusted voluntary Wikipedia editors to accept changes made to any article. Prior to acceptance the changes will not be visible. The New York [...]

Martin Rundkvist is an unusual combination he is an archeologist and a wikipedia watcher. His recent blog post discusses censorship on Wikipedia in an article Wikipedia Cracks Down On Cult Propagandists. The article b eginning with Wikipedias decision in May to bar all Church of Scientology users from editing CoS articles on wikipedia. But the [...]

In case anyone missed it President Sarkozy recently decided to attack the Burka In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said to applause in the parliament’s ceremonial Versailles home. The burka is not a religious sign. It [...]