The Washington Post has an article about Creative Commons, featuring interviews with Lessig and Cory Doctorow. This seems to be the watershed that demonstrates that the movement has become mainstream. The article emphasises the many commercial uses of the movement. Does this mean that Creative Commons is not cool any Read more…
Lessig has claimed that he will never again publish in a journal that is not published through some sort of open access licence, preferably a CC BY-NC licence (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial. This raises an interesting point. Why should we academics give away our copyright when publishing in “traditional” paper journals? Read more…
Search engine optimisation is an art, and people get paid a lot of money to do it. There are now some firms that offer all sorts of services to make sure that your website can be found near the top in Google and other search engines. Why is it so Read more…
An article in today’s Guardian warns about the growing dangers of cybercrime. From phishing to eBay fraud, organised crime is increasingly using the internet to promote some criminal activities. Although this is a growing development, there seems to be a certain luddite stream running through these articles. It is almost Read more…
Here is the list of contents: Editorial: – Laureation for Honorary Degree of LL.D: Professor W R Cornish, Professor Hector MacQueen, p.1. Special feature: – Identifying Risks: National Identity Cards, Wendy M. Grossman, pp.2-17. Peer-reviewed articles: – The Significance of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on the Human Genome & Human Rights, Read more…
Phishing, you ask? Phishing is soo 2004. Pharming is the latest craze amongst the trendy cybercriminals. Pharming is an attack that resembles a virus, it changes the host files in a computer – files that interpret the URL that you input in the browser. The site then takes you to Read more…
The main Scottish universities have signed the Scottish Declaration on Open Access, organised by OATS (Open Access Team for Scotland; what a great acronym). Timothy O’Shea, the Principal at the University of Edinburgh, said that “The University of Edinburgh wants to ensure that its research is as visible as possible Read more…
It seems like the story about virtual sweatshops is true after all. Romanian workers play computer games for 10 hours a day to produce virtual goods in MMORPGs which are later sold through eBay or through other websites such as Gamersloot. In those places you can buy powerful accounts, virtual Read more…
(Warning: the article is entitled “Patently absurd”, I had never seen that title before!) This is an article by John Naughton about software patents (yes, I know I promised that I would not write about software patents again, but I can’t stop myself). Although the article is an adequate introduction Read more…
Swedish police have raided servers belonging to the ISP Bahnhof Internet. They discovered 23 Terabytes of infringing content. Apparently, one of the servers in the ISP was the largest file serving machine in Europe! This case highlights an interesting question about ISP liability. Apparently, two employees are now suspected of Read more…