First up the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA is a rather secretive trade agreement that plans to enforce international standards on intellectual property rights. The jist of the act is that ISPs can give out personal information about “suspected” file-sharers without a warrant. Notice that they have used the term used ’suspected’ but nowhere is this term defined. And because it’s a Trade Agreement it does not have to be passed politically without public opposition.

More Information…

Next up is the Lords Copyright Bill here in the U.K. The Liberal Democrats forced through a surprise amendment to the bill on Wednesday. The new proposal, which was passed in the House of Lords by 165 votes to 140, gives a high court judge the right to issue an injunction against a website accused of hosting a “substantial” amount of copyright infringing material. The judge could potentially even force the ISP to take the entire site offline.

One concern with this bill is that it could become similar to that of America’s controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act which has been accused of encouring companies to file bogus copyright claims to block material they dislike. Due to the costs of dealing with copyright claims in court many web hosts simply take down the material in question without checking whether the copyright case is legitimate. In some cases going as far as to shut down the entire website.

Last week the well-known whistleblower website Cryptome was taken offline when Microsoft issued a copyright claim under the DMCA in an attempt to suppress the publication of its so called “spy-guide”. When the site’s service provider received the request from Microsoft it not only blocked the document in question but also removed access to the entire Cryptome site. Microsoft then retracted its claim in order to let the site, which had stayed online for years despite numerous troubles with other companies and US government agencies, go back online.

This could be a big change for us in the United Kingdom considering at present hosts are under no obligations to remove website content under the terms set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or any other like it.

The new ammendment could also bring dire implications for websites such as YouTube, Justin.tv and uStream where users can upload, or broadcast live, copyright infringing media without the knowledge of the site’s owners. The video sharing site, owned by Google, is already in a $1bn lawsuit by US media giant Viacom but argues that it cannot screen every video that goes onto its site to check whether or not it infringes copyright.

Lilian Edwards, a cyberlaw expert at Sheffield University, said that the new proposals had some benefits but also had sweeping downsides. “For the first time, Sony and the rest can now go to court and demand that every ISP in the UK blocks YouTube,” she wrote.

More information…

If we don’t act quickly on this then we could soon find that the Internet we know and love is no longer open and free. If a country can force every ISP to block a website run by Google then really, who else has a chance?

The new offering dubbed ‘Google Goggles’ allows you to take a picture on your cellular phone and use that picture to search Google. Take a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, send that off to Google’s servers and you will receive search results on guess what… the Golden Gate Bridge!

It’s pretty new technology by the looks of things, and even Google don’t have much to say about it on their website, but this is something to watch over the coming months/years. Will this turn out to be the next big thing, taking Google to new highs whilst Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo come crashing down? Only time will tell.

One thing is for sure, this is interesting stuff that can only get better, find out more at: http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

Requirements:
1x Hot Chick in revealing clothing
1x Song released 1-2 years ago [to remix]
1x Guy [to remix the song]
1x Keyboard [to make cheesy dance sounds]

The end result…

But wait, you ask, what if I’m the hot chick but I don’t have the guy or the keyboard and I can’t pick a popular tune to save myself?
Well, there is still hope!  Get into your underwear, head down to the beach and have your sleaziest mate record you a demo video. Then pop that off to All Around The World records or equivilent dance recordings label and you’re sorted.  Just like 90% of the other tracks released this year.

However PHP 5.3.0 comes pre-installed with Snow Leopard. It’s simply not enabled by default. Enabling it to serve PHP pages is a very simple task just follow the steps below and you’ll be serving PHP pages from your Mac in a few minutes!

Step one
You need to open up the terminal application, located within your applications folder inside a subdirectory called utilities, and issue the following command. You will be asked to confirm your user account password.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Step Two
Locate the line containing php5_module that will look like this one below:

#LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Remove the hash from the line so that it looks like the following:

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Step Three
Locate the line beginning with DirectoryIndex that will look like this one below:

DirectoryIndex index.html

Add index.php to the end of the line so that it looks like this:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Step Four
Exit the text editor and save the file by holding Ctrl and tapping the X key. Tap the Y key to confirm saving and hit the enter key to keep the same filename.

Step Five
Open up System Preferences and choose the Sharing option. Now disable and re-enable Web Sharing.

I’m still customising the design, but for now it should do the trick, and now I’ll shut up about the boring stuff and let the content do the talking