Romanians jailed in Minority Report style (Ireland.com)
Top billing today is the story that 4 Romanian men were found guilty for commiting a crime they have yet to commit. Yes, in Ireland we are way ahead of the times, who needs Minority Report when you have the real thing here in Ireland. Because 4 Romanian guys were acting suspiciously in a Wicklow shop, they were arrested, charged and then jailed because it could be "reasonably inferred" that they would commit a crime.
This beggars belief, there has been practically no response to this in the Irish media, does this not set a dangerous precedent? Does this not demonstrate how racist a country Ireland is?
Let us be clear, 4 Romanians each got 6 months in jail. The judge admitted they stole nothing, but jailed them because they might have stolen something? I mean this means that I could be arrested and jailed for walking into a shop and acting 'suspiciously' - "we are arresting you Gavin because we believe you may commit a crime". Straight out of science fiction.
The story is in Fridays Irish Times, subscription only, but may be on the news section of RTE too.
Sharks face extinction (ITN)
ITN is reporting that shark populations are down over 50% on the last 15 years, a staggering figure by any means. Hammerhead sharks are worst affected with an estimated 75% reduction in stocks. This is truly amazing reading, the full report will appear in the journal Science.
Weird story about a stone slab (Pravda)
Apparently a 120 million year old stone slab with writing on has been discovered in the Ural mountains. This would turn all ideas about humans evolution on their head and as you might imagine I remain extremely sceptical, if not cynical about this story.
Even fomatting that drive won't help (New Scientist)
Two MIT student have found that hard drives can reveal lots of information about their previous owners. In a study they found that most hard drives still have information on them even after deletion or formatting. So next time you sell a hard drive to somebody make sure you write over all that porn.
Poisoning my Kazaa (The Register)
A guy who once worked for the RIAA, has revealed their methods for monitoring peer to peer networks like the now defunct Napster, and new Gnutella, Morpheus and Kazaa programs. He admits that he suggested poisoning the networks with bogus files so as to disrupt and frustrate file sharing on the Internet. Interesting reading.
Rumsfeld tightens arse (The Register)
The .mil domain is to be locked down so as to prevent terrorists gaining acces to sensitive information, Donald Rumsfeld has said. I hope they tighten it up good because there is an awful lot of information available at defenselink.mil.
DMCA vs Garage Door (Politech)
"In the latest bit of DMCA lunacy, copyright guru David Nimmer turned me onto a case that his firm is defending, where a garage door opener company (The Chamberlain Group) has leveled a DMCA claim (among other claims) against the maker of universal garage door remotes (Skylink). Yet another case where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are being used to impede legitimate competition, similar to the Lexmark case. Not, I think, what Congress had in mind when enacting the DMCA."
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