The civilized world condemns the US for its 1000th execution

from Reuters :

“Opponents of the death penalty around the world criticised the United States on Friday after double murderer Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th prisoner executed there since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 by the Supreme Court. “

“The European Union condemned the execution and called for the end of the death penalty worldwide.”

“‘We consider this punishment cruel and inhuman,’ the 25-nation bloc said in a statement issued by EU President Britain.”

“in the U.S. a lot of death sentences that are carried out invariably affect people of colour and poor people, “

“Thirty-eight of the 50 U.S. states and the federal government permit capital punishment.”

“Only China, Iran and Vietnam had more executions in 2004 than the United States, according to rights group Amnesty International.”

Internet Character Assassination

Retired journalist John Seigenthaler is understandably upset at the “biography” posting about him on Wikipedia and writes in USA Today about his experience with “Internet character assassination.â€?

The Wikipedia article read in part:

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.â€?

He explains his frustration…

“Major communications Internet companies are bound by federal privacy laws that protect the identity of their customers, even those who defame online. Only if a lawsuit resulted in a court subpoena would BellSouth give up the name.”

He tells us that U.S. law protects corporations like Wikipedia from being treated as publisher or speaker so that unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others.

“And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research — but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.”

Times have certainly changed. Here’s a previous post of mine on “Internet Character Assassination” that dealt a little more with the importance of free speech against corporate interest. This USAtoday story is way more sympathetic than the Forbes article that inspired that post and it begs the question of how to deal with online gossip. Are we gonna be surrounded by gossip for the rest of our lives as if we’re trapped eternally a in a high-school or office from hell ?

How scary.

via: Public Eye , a CBS blog

Sony embedded spyware into their new CDs

Sony embedded spyware into their new CDs and everyone’s pissed. Lawsuits left and right and a public relations nightmare should have taught them a lesson about the futility of resisting file-sharing, but like the other major record companies, they’re in denial about the painful changes ahead.

More than 50 CDs across all kinds of music had the XCP (“Extended Copy Protection”) software that reported back to Sony on the user’s behavior like burning CDs and also exposed the user’s computer to third-party attacks by manipulating basic functions of the operating system; tactics employed by the ‘rootkits’ commonly used by online attackers. All because users thought they were agreeing to “Bonus Content”.
Sony is taking remedial actions (but never really apologizing) and blaming “First 4 Internet”, the software firm that developed XCP. They’ve promised to exchange all the XCP cd’s for safe cd’s and have made available a program to remove the dangerous malware that they installed in consumers’ computers. Of course by then a trojan had already surfaced to take advantage of the weaknesses in users’ systems.
Later it turned out that the uninstaller leaved security gaps in your system. Then it seemed like XCP was made partly with opensource programs whose only condition to be reused and repurposed was to be acknowledged, which of course Sony didn’t do.

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a reccomendation to never install software from sources that you wouldn’t expect to have software like audio CD’s.

Microsoft’s anti-spyware program is incorporating a Sony-rootkit remover.
Artists are posting instructions on their websites for disabling XCP. Texas, Italy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are sueing Sony. EFF is asking Sony to also stop using another DRM (“Digital Rights Management”) software called MediaMax that spies on you.

a comprehensive collection of posts at BoingBoing : Sony anti-customer technology

The Register: Texas puts Sony BMG in its sights

Latest Beta Skype now with Video

The latest beta version of Skype 2.0 now has video conferencing!

Skype lets you make free phone calls all around the world with other Skype users and for very low fees (much lower than regular rates) you can make and receive calls to landlines.

You can even hack your cell phone to use with Skype (or with competitor imtel), through your computer, and avoid spending your preciously expensive minutes.
In Korea you can buy imFone and it’ll do all the work for you, all you have to do is plug the device into your USB port. It uses Bluetooth and gives you a 50 meter radius to use your cell phone.
For those of use without a webcam we can always hope that someone’s already hacking video-enabled cell phones to use with the new video-Skype.