West tightens Internet censorship, says China

West tightens Internet censorship|Americas|chinadaily.com.cn: "Western countries are tightening Internet censorship and implementing tougher cybermonitoring policies.
While governments tend to play the national security card to defend plans for wider state access to email and digital communications, analysts and Internet users are concerned that unwatched cybermonitoring might tip the delicate balance between online security and state surveillance." 'via Blog this'

Evidence of online copyright infringement? Proof or disproof

ORG Zine | Evidence of online copyright infringement? Who did that...: "Ultimately, without the NAT information, the subscriber is, on a technical level, not able to disprove the accusation that the infringement was committed by a computer within the household, or more precisely, their own computer. In a court, the copyright owners would have to prove their case, it is not the subscriber who has to disprove the allegation. But the small number of cases against consumers for infringement involving peer-to-peer filesharing that have been brought in UK courts have not been fully fought." 'via Blog this'

Twitter Joke Trial: Appeal Judgment Sees the Joke

Twitter Joke Trial: Appeal Judgment Sees the Joke: "The Divisional Court has given judgment in the appeal of Paul Chambers against his conviction under the Communications Act 2003, s 127. The Court of Appeal gave judgment on 27 July in Chambers v DPP [2012] EWHC 2157 – the much publicised 'Twitter joke' case. The appeal against conviction was allowed on the basis that this 'tweet' did not constitute or include a message of a menacing character.
The full judgment can be downloaded.
Lord Judge LCJ gave the judgment of the Court. He did not deal with each aspect of the wide-ranging questions posed by the Crown Court for decision but did agree with the Crown Court judge's analysis that a tweet was indeed a message capable of supporting a charge under the Act. However, he was clearly impatient with the support given by the magistrates and the Crown Court to the view that the message was menacing."
'via Blog this'

Dean Bubley: Reverse-engineering Ericsson's mobile data numbers

Reverse-engineering Ericsson's mobile data numbers: "If I assume that growth in traffic for 2011-2012 falls to 80% from 99% the previous year, and taking their 15x growth from 2011-2017, brings down the global 5-year CAGR figure from 2012-2017 to 53%
- This compares with Cisco's 2011-2016 Mobile VNI forecasts [5 year] of 18x traffic growth
- In general, Cisco's forecasts are considerably more aggressive than Ericssons. The difference (hat-tip to Tim Farrar here) is mostly in the assumptions on average smartphone data use towards the end of the period
-  Then, reconstructing the regional breakdowns from the piecharts & reformulating the CAGRs, I reckon we have my best estimates as:
"Western Europe Mobile Data Traffic CAGR 2012-2017 = 45%
North America Mobile Data Traffic CAGR 2012-2017 = 42%
Other global regions are 56-62% CAGR"'via Blog this'

Search engines' plans to help combat piracy seek extra safeguards that existing EU law does not provide, expert says

Search engines' plans to help combat piracy seek extra safeguards that existing EU law does not provide, expert says: "Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have drawn up a series of "principles" to guide how rights holders should act when issuing them with requests for the removal of infringing content from search indexes as well as the responsibilities search engines themselves should be required to conform to. The plans were published (4-page / 43KB PDF) by digital rights campaign group the Open Rights Group (ORG) who obtained details of the proposals via a freedom of information (FOI) request to the Government."
'via Blog this'

Will FCC act? Observing traffic prioritization in Comcast’s network

berg'd: Bryan Berg's tumblr — Observing traffic prioritization in Comcast’s network: "What I’ve concluded is that Comcast is using separate DOCSIS service flows to prioritize the traffic to the Xfinity Xbox app (so that I’m using consistent terminology, I’m going to call this traffic “Xfinity traffic” in the rest of the post). This separation allows them to exempt that traffic from both bandwidth cap accounting and download speed limits. It’s still plain-old HTTP delivering MP4-encoded video files, just like the other streaming services use, but additional priority is granted to the Xfinity traffic at the DOCSIS level. I still believe that DSCP values I observed in the packet headers of Xfinity traffic is the method by which Comcast signals that traffic is to be prioritized, both in their backbone and regional networks and their DOCSIS network." An election year problem for the FCC and their 2 new commissioners? 'via Blog this'

Finnish Court: Open WiFi Owner Not Liable for File-Sharing Copyright Infringement | Turre Legal

Finnish Court: Open WiFi Owner Not Liable for File-Sharing Copyright Infringement | Turre Legal: "In a landmark ruling, a Finnish District Court (*Ylivieskan käräjäoikeus*) has today clarified the legal status of WiFi owners for internet file-sharing in the light of various pieces of EU legislation.
Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre, a coalition of entertainment industry rights-holders, had sued a Finnish woman for copyright infringement, demanding compensation of circa 6000 euros for internet file-sharing conducted with the Direct Connect (DC++) protocol through her internet connection.
The applicants were unable to provide any evidence that the connection-owner herself had been involved in the file-sharing. The court thus examined whether the mere act of providing a WiFi connection not protected with a password can be deemed to constitute a copyright-infringing act."
'via Blog this'