HomeWeekly News Roundup (March 12, 2017)
So autumn is finally here in Melbourne, and the weather seems to be getting hotter, after our relatively mild summer. It’s getting harder and harder to make sense of the weather, I don’t know if it’s climate change or something else, but the weather here is almost a complete reverse of what it was like here fifteen years ago.
There’s finally some more news to go through this week, which means that the next week will probably be very quiet. Which is just as well, as weddings and other events means next week’s WNR might be delayed or cancelled entirely depending on how much news there is and how much time I have left. But I have time this week, and there are news this week, so let’s get at it.
Google and Bing now committed to jump through many hoops for rights-holders … Bing probably just happy to be included, to be honest
So this week, we know a bit more about the somewhat secret agreement between Google, Bing and rights-holders, thanks to freedom of information requests by digital rights groups EFF and Digital Rights Ireland. And the more we know, the more we don’t like about the so called “voluntarily” agreement.
So from sharing user data, to manipulating search results even for “neutral” search phrases, to domain registrant data spying, it’s got a bit of everything. Except everything is all about Google and Bing appeasing rights-holders so they won’t demand them implement some kind of “take down and stay down” regime. Good luck with that!
Meanwhile in crazy old Germany, it seems the job of educating today’s youngsters about the dangers of piracy still lies with parents, who if they don’t give their kids the old “piracy is bad, mmmkay” speech, they may find themselves liable for their kid’s downloads.
I mean, I just don’t see how this is enforceable in any way. How are parents supposed to prove that they’ve had “the talk” (well, the other talk) with their kids, in order to prevent liability? Should they record it, along with a time stamp, maybe with a live broadcast being shown in the background, but all of this is easy to fake anyway. And what’s to prevent parents from making the speech (and they having proof of it), and then when the camera is turned off, to tell their kids to download at their heart’s content now that liability has been removed as a threat.
Maybe the safest thing to do, from a copyright law perspective (and from the perspective of a rights-holder), is not have kids at all, or to give them up for adoption at your earliest convenience. It’s the (copy)right thing to do!
I never thought I would be writing about the CIA and VLC in the same news story
I don’t get the chance to write about the CIA a lot in this roundup, but when I get the chance, I plan to make the best of it. So a real opportunity came this week when it was revealed that VLC, the video player that everyone should have a copy of on their computer, has been used by the spy agency for other uses other than to play pirated Homeland episodes.
To be fair, the VideoLan Team was quick to explain that, while the software did contain a vulnerability that allowed malware to piggypack on to its code, to allow the execution of a CIA made computer scanning program, the vulnerability no longer exists in the latest version and future versions will be more “CIA proof”.
I guess it’s also a testament to the popularity of the free, open source media player (that can play almost all video formats without the need for any installed codecs) that it’s a tool of choice for not only the CIA, but also for the targets of the CIA, which may include enemies like IS/ISIS/Daesh/Whateveritscalledthesedays, frenemies like Pakistan, and friends like Germany and Australia (or are we frenemies now? Can’t keep track with Trump’s foreign policy tweets).
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So the CIA, child rearing advice, rights-holder appeasement, a bit of everything really for this WNR. See you next week.