OverPlay
Many broadcasting companies now provide TV shows over the Internet but you’re unable to watch most of them unless you live in their country of origin. For example, you can’t watch Hulu unless you live in the United States, you can’t watch BBC iPlayer unless you live in the United Kingdom and you can’t use the RTE Player unless you live in Ireland.
Fortunately that’s no longer a problem thanks to a solution from OverPlay. continue reading…
From New Scientist
We reported last week on plans to enforce copyright law by forcing internet service providers to spy on consumers to detect and report every piece of copied music, movies, e-books, games and software.
Now one UK ISP, Virgin Media, is trialling some of the technology needed to do that on about 1.6 million of its customers.
Awhile ago I was thinking about how to make a website that couldn’t be taken down by censors. I immediately thought of using Usenet to store the HTML and other page content since it’s a distributed system. The HTML, images, movies and other media could be stored in Usenet articles. Since Usenet servers connect to each other and synchronise news articles it would mean that the information would be spread world-wide with no single take-down point, and the information would be accessible to anybody as long as they had access to a Usenet server, and software that could interpret the articles correctly. continue reading…
Originally posted on Friday, 16 May, 2003, 16:51 GMT 17:51 UK 
at BBC News.
Officials in the UK are routinely demanding huge quantities of information about what people do online and who they call, say privacy experts.
Police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year, according to figures compiled from the government, legal experts and the internet industry.
The findings were announced at a public debate into government proposals to widen powers for internet snooping held in London this week.
But a Home Office spokesman disputed the figures, telling BBC News Online it estimated that the number of requests were half that suggested.
The requests include telephone billing data, e-mail logs and customer details, which privacy experts estimate could amount to a billion individual items of data, ranging from credit card numbers to numbers dialled.
Read more here.
Originally posted on Wednesday, 17 July, 2002, 09:15 GMT 10:15 UK at BBC News.
From August net service providers in the UK will be obliged to carry out surveillance of some customers’ web habits on behalf of the police.
Controversial laws passed in 2000 oblige large communications companies to install technology that allows one in 10,000 of their customers to be watched.
The information gathered about what people look at on the web, the content of e-mail messages and their phone conversations will be passed to the police or a government monitoring station.
The demands have been criticised by experts who say the law conflicts with basic guarantees of privacy and that the government is not doing enough to help pay for the installation of the surveillance systems.
Read more here.
I’ve just been banned from mmorpg.com for a discussion about Star Wars Galaxies. Here’s the ban e-mail I received… continue reading…
On October 13th I got a message from PayPal to let me know that they’d frozen one of my businesses accounts as it had received over $3,300 in total turnover. Despite already proving I’m not a fraudster, robot, child and whatnot, and that my bank account is mine and that I do answer if they ring my telephone number, they’ve now decided that they need to verify my land address.
In order to do so they’ve decided to send me a code in the mail. No problem. I’ll just wait for the mail and put the code in to their website when I get it… Right?
So I’m waiting. It’s now October 29th and my funds are still frozen for that business. The clock is ticking as it won’t be able to pay it’s suppliers soon unless PayPal restore the access or it’s bailed out by Director’s funds while they dick around. As it turns out, the reason it’s taking so long is that despite me living in the UK, my business being based in the UK, and the PayPal account being managed by PayPal UK, they’ve decided to send the letter from Nebraska, USA. Presumably surface mail too from the looks of it. Seriously wtf?
I wonder how much interest they make on all their customers funds when they pull that little scam…
Time to look at other payment processors while that little bit of paper floats across the Atlantic methinks!
My wife and I bought the Aion collector’s edition and managed to get in to head-start before the main horde of players joined in later on in the week. It’s a great game so far, I must say. The attention to detail is very nice and the fights feel fast paced and dynamic. continue reading…
I’ve been pulling my hair out for the last hour, while trying to copy files from my iMac to my Macbook Pro across my network. continue reading…
Occasionally I need to edit system files that belong to root and I found that it can be quite annoying as I always end up using nano in the terminal as it doesn’t seem possible to elevate the privileges of an application from Finder. For example if I wanted to edit my /etc/hosts file then usually I’d have to drop to a shell and type:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
The problem with that is that I have a nice looking graphical operating system here and although I love the fact that it uses unix under the bonnet, I really much prefer to edit my files in TextEdit rather than a console based application like nano. continue reading…