Skype Deliberately Crippling Functionality of iPhone and WinMo and Verizon Apps?
There's something anti-competitive afoot in the 'VoIP over 3G' space this year. Let me run you through a timeline, and see if you can't spot the dirty pool:
Kathryn Bigelow was a punk rocker
French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD
For 50 years, residents of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit have tried to understand the "cursed bread" incident, a moment of terrifying mass insanity and hallucinations that left at least five dead and dozens in asylums. Now the mystery is solved: the CIA secretly spiked the bread from the bakery with enormous quantities of LSD as part of its cold war mind-control experiments, at least according to recently uncovered documents.
Leaked Documents Show UK Web Censorship Proposal Written By Record Labels
Lobbying groups and activists write proposed legislation all the time -- it's part of how the process works. But with controversial legislation, you would at least think that politicians would be sensitive to some of the concerns of others before essentially doing a copy-and-paste on what the lobbyists give them. Not so when it comes to copyright in the UK, apparently.
Story of Bottled Water (from "Story of Stuff" folks)
Brazil Moves Forward With Plan To Ignore US Patents And Copyrights After US Refuses To Abide By WTO Ruling
Two years ago, we noted that Brazil had
asked the WTO for permission to ignore certain US patents and copyrights as a retaliation against the US's refusal to abide by a WTO ruling. This is, of course, typical of the US.
Hugh Hefner, teenage cartoonist, 1943
Note the conspicuous lack of smut! Frame from a Seattle Post-Intelligencer gallery of Playboy founder hugh Hefner's teenage doodles, sent to his high school sweetheart friend Jane Sellers in the early 1940s.
Turkish Reporters Finally Point Out That The Gov't Should Drop Its Silly YouTube Ban
Turkish courts have been really quick to ban various websites for flimsy reasons. A few years ago it went back and forth a
few times before banning YouTube entirely, just because of a juvenile video on the site. However, it's now been nearly two years since the last YouTube ban was put in place, and it hasn't been lifted.
London Olympics: police powers to force spectators to remove non-sponsor items, enter houses, take posters
The Olympics are coming to London, so our civil liberties are going out the window: because nothing epitomises the spirit of global competition and cooperation like corporate bullying and unfettered truncheon-waving.
Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.
"I think there will be lots of people doing things completely innocently who are going to be caught by this, and some people w
Remarks by the President at the Export-Import Bank's Annual Conference
11:30 A.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. And thank you, John, for that generous introduction. Congratulations to you and Fabienne and Luis for the recognition your companies so richly deserve. And thank you to the Chairman of the Export-Import Bank, Fred Hochberg, for having me here today, and for all the important work the Ex-Im Bank is doing to help American businesses sell their ideas to the world. I also want to recognize the Secretary General of the OECD, Angel Gurría, for his leadership at that institution. (Applause.)
