And here I thought we staties were the ones on the cutting edge of cruel and unusual copyright penalties!
Seems that the French Parliament bowed to corporate interest and enshrined their 180 degree turn from their anti-discriminatory copyright stance I talked about a bit earlier.
The long and short of it is that the lawmakers in France […]

We don’t often get random metal detector shakedowns here in the states.  I think bringing commerce to a standstill is the bane of American living.  See the situation over on the ports.
But over in Britian they’re big on the whole metal-detector-runthrough thing.  Funny as that part of the article over at El Reg is, it’s […]

Ignoring the reality of the situation, Massachusetts politicians are hammering down on.. er.. a document format. That’s right folks. You’re paying them to be incenssed over a format.
A format which, I might add, is perfectly usable and doesn’t really have any downside. Only it doesn’t restrict the user to Microsoft’s software.
Anyone can […]

Looks like the Chinese .gov is planning even tougher regulations on internet use for the mainland.
They want to control all forms of communication. What they plan to do with this is anyone’s guess… it doesn’t really seem necessary to prop up the dictatorship and definatley pisses off the populace.
So. Looks like we’ll have […]

It seems that Microsoft can’t violate the antitrust ruling against it from the EC.  They’re set to crack down with fines on MS for not following through on opening up their server protocols to competitors as part of an anti-trust ruling.
This one’s pretty pat really.  They were supposed to document their server protocols to allow […]

ICANN’s rulership of the internet is once again being brought up for redecision. In a nutshell
Currently, those domains are under the control of ICANN, which is in turn empowered to administer the directories under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with National Telecommuncations and Information Administration, a branch of of the United States Department of […]

Check me if I’m wrong here.  When you release a game, and it gets rated by some standards body to suggest who should or shouldn’t play it, that effectively says who’s hands the game should go in, right?
It’s then the responsibility of parents, kids, game owners, etc. to make sure that it gets carried out.
Now, […]

What would you call outpouring a donation almost equivelent to the cumulative total of your past five years of donating to one state on the eve of their voting to mandate open standards?
Trying to buy a state, of course. And who better to purchase off state senators with *ahem* charitable donations than Microsoft.
After all, […]

Now, this is just a suggestion. But I think Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB needs some sort of “persuasion device” to deal with congress.  Either that or we need to replace her with someone with the IQ of a turnip that won’t actually take their job seriously, but will stoicly dissemble to the congress […]

Whichever senate sub comittee this article concerns is filled with easily led fools.  They appear to be under the same disconnect from reality that occurs in think tanks sponsored by large corporations.
Not only are they not aware in this hearing as to what they’re discussing, they blatently lie about the Rockstars GTA and it’s “hot […]