Nowadays, there are plenty of global conflicts, but they’re largely commercial ventures fostered by business interests and relatively speaking, they don’t employ all that many young men —-

—- or young women, as is increasingly the case.

And that may be one of the reasons you can’t keep a good video game with “blood, drug reference, intense violence and language” from becoming a raging success.

Ask Rockstar, purveyor of the Grand Theft Auto series.

Nonetheless, “Modern Warfare 2 is no longer available in Russia for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners, it seems, despite the game hitting store shelves as scheduled early last week,” says PC World, continuing:

“Noticed by fan site Hellforge on Friday, Russian game site GotPS3 claims Russian officials had threatened to ban the game, prompting retailers to yank copies from store shelves and distributors to shut down the outflow of new stock.

“Apparently the thematic content of the controversial “No Russian” level in which players must choose whether to fire on innocent civilians in a Moscow airport managed to escape broad public notice before launch.”

However, “First-week sales of Activision and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in the United Kingdom are ringing in at £67.4 million ($111.8 million),” says Gamasutra.

“That’s 1.78 million units, according to ELSPA/GfK-ChartTrack data. The title, which launched on November 10, sold 1.23 million units on its first day in the UK, and Activision said combined day-one sales for the U.S. and the UK reached 4.7 million.”

Modern Warfare was one of the games listed in a Craigslist ‘For Sale’ ad by an Xbox owner, pissed off by Microsoft’s decision to  cut off gamers  from Xbox Live for modding their consoles.

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Gamasutra – UK Call Of Duty Sales Hit $111.8 Million, November 16, 2009
PC World – Russia Threatens Modern Warfare 2 Ban, Game Yanked From Shelves, November 16, 2009
modding their consoles – Banned/Modded Xbox 360, loaded- $140, November 12, 2009

Pictured on the right after a discussion with environmentalists, he’s the front man for Big Music and Hollywood plans to use their Three Strikes and you’re Gone scheme to gain control of online product and content distribution by turning governments into copyright agents, the bill footed by local taxpayers, and ISPs into enforcers, acting against their own clients.

In the process, one of his most outstanding achievements has been to pit members of a new independent music coalition against their fans, the people who keep them and their music alive.

Said Mandelson in a letter to Indiana Gregg, recently »»»

We propose to legislate to ensure that consumers whose broadband account has been identified in connection with alleged copyright infringement would be alerted by letter.  This would set out the legal position but also provide pointers for help and information on, for example, how to protect wireless networks properly, where to find legal sources and routes of appeal.  This letter would come from the Internet Service Providers (ISP) concerned, not a law firm.  This should help address many concerns about individuals being wrongly identified, not having the correct information or indeed feeling pressured by the threat of legal action.

For those individuals who choose to ignore the letter, they will receive a number of further warnings before they are ultimately addd to a list of those subscribers most frequently alleged to have breached copyright.  Rights holders will be able to use a court order to obtain the details of these individuals and then take targeted legal action as appropriate. This should ensure that individuals have ample opportunity to change their behaviour, take appropriate action to, for example, secure their wireless connection or indeed appeal.  It would also mean that only those who chose to ignore the warnings and who appeared to continue to infringe copyright on a large scale would face legal action.

In a strange and dangerous (for Featured Artists’ Coalition members)  reversal, the plan, the UK component of a  carefully orchestrated global project, is now also supported by the FAC.

And in a comment post on artists-to-fans-to-artists site a2f2a.com, “It’s a front to weave in a new set of laws which will ultimately lead to legislation towards the personal ID system and ‘internet passports’,” says Gregg, adding:

“And although half the web thought I was a little crazy last year for mentioning it, here we have Kaspersky’s point of view only a year later: http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/security/0,39044829,62058697,00.htm?tag=mncol;txt.”

Now, “Lord Mandelson will become the ‘public face’ of the government by giving regular televised press conferences as it tries to sharpen its message in the run-up to the general election,” says The Independent, going on:

“The Business Secretary is expected to answer journalists’ questions on camera once a week following a review announced yesterday of the way the Westminster lobby system works.”

In what has  to be at least a partial explanation for his continuing blunders, as well as becoming unofficial ‘Minister for Information’ and heading the department for business, he’s an adviser to Gordon Brown, “and sits on 35 Cabinet committees.”

Thirty-five committes?

No need to stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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Indiana Gregg – ‘Three strikes’ Mandelson to Indiana Gregg, November 9, 2009
carefully orchestrated global project – Three strikes world-wide, and a global DMCA, November 4, 2009

Now, “Citigroup Inc. rejected a request from Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. to reduce EMI Group Ltd.’s debt by 40 percent in return for a 1 billion-pound ($1.7 billion) cash injection, two people familiar with the talks said,” says Bloomberg News, going on:

“Guy Hands’s (right) private equity firm offered to provide the extra money if Citigroup agreed to reduce the record label’s 2.5 billion-pound debt by a similar amount, said the people, who declined to be named because the talks are private. Citigroup spurned the offer because it would have forced it to write off some of the debt just as EMI’s profit rises, one person said.”

And that’s left EMI “to be run by its own executives, although Hands-appointed non-executives like Lord Birt and former Northern Foods chief executive Pat O’Driscoll remain in place,” says the London Evening Standard, adding:

“Since the takeover, EMI has suffered along with its rivals from the downturn in the music industry and the growth of online piracy.

“It has also been hit by feuding with a string of stars unwilling to be managed by ’suits’, with Joss Stone the latest to hit out at her own recording label.”

So, have things finally come unglued at EMI / Terra Firma?

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p2pnet – Terra Firma, EMI: out of tune? -  October 29, 2007
Bloomberg News – Hands’s Bid to Cut EMI’s Debt Said to Be Rejected by Citigroup, November 16, 2009
London Evening Standard – Citi snub for EMI plan, November 16, 2009

“Denmark has unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, sunscreen lotion, and moisturizing cream,” says a Slashdot post, going on »»»

A picture is emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminizing male children all over the developed world. Research at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes. ‘The amounts that two-year-olds absorb from the [preservatives] parabens propylparaben and butylparaben can constitute a risk for oestrogen-like disruptions of the endocrine system,’ says the report. The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies.

Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls,” says the piece, adding, “it is thought to be nature’s way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict.”

A much earlier Telegraph item, quoted by Slashdot, cites a Canadian First Nations community on the eastern tip of Lake Huron, “hemmed in by one of the biggest agglomerations of chemical factories on earth”, as an example.

The band “gives birth to twice as many girls as boys,” says the story, adding, “It’s the same around Seveso in Italy, contaminated with dioxins from a notorious accident in the 1970s, and among Russian pesticide workers. And there’s more evidence from places as far apart as Israel and Taiwan, Brazil and the Arctic.

“Yet gender-benders are largely exempt from new EU regulations controlling hazardous chemicals. Britain, then under Tony Blair’s premiership, was largely responsible for this – restricting their inclusion in the first draft of the legislation, and then causing even what was included to be watered down.Confidential documents show that it did so after pressure from George W Bush’s administration, which protested that US exports ‘could be impacted’.

Now, “the Danish government is planning to lobby to have the rules toughened up. It is particularly concerned by other studies which show that gender-bending chemicals acting together have far worse effects than the expected sum of their individual impacts. It wants this to be reflected in the regulations, citing its discovery of the many sources to which the two-year-olds are exposed — modern slings and arrows, as it were, of outrageous fortune.”

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Slashdot – Environmental Chemicals Are Feminizing Boys, November 15, 2009
Telegraph – Why boys are turning into girls, October 23, 2009

Do you believe teh world will end in 2012? just like the LHC, Y2K,

Oh and What happened to the world-network-crippling Conficker?

heh

And Who can forget ‘The day after Tomorrow’ where the world began an ice-age from an idiot who managed to drill a hole into the Antarctic ice and half the shelf broke off (huge block of ice moving towards civilization pushing all the water) — and somehow was linked to “Climate Change”

I don’t think its healthy for h-wood to profit from people’s paranoia

But thats Show Business, baby!

So what got Andrew aka Comeoncomecast all wired?

A post by Benjamin Radford, LiveScience’s Bad Science columnist, on 10 forecasts of doom that didn’t come to pass.

Number 1? »»»

The Prophet Hen of Leeds, 1806
History has countless examples of people who have proclaimed that the return of Jesus Christ is imminent, but perhaps there has never been a stranger messenger than a hen in the English town of Leeds in 1806. It seems that a hen began laying eggs on which the phrase “Christ is coming” was written. As news of this miracle spread, many people became convinced that doomsday was at hand — until a curious local actually watched the hen laying one of the prophetic eggs and discovered someone had hatched a hoax.

In the middle »»»

Pat Robertson, 1982
In May 1980, televangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson startled and alarmed many when — contrary to Matthew 24:36 (”No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven…”) he informed his “700 Club” TV show audience around the world that he knew when the world would end. “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world,” Robertson said.

And Number 10 »»»

God’s Church Ministry, Fall 2008
According to God’s Church minister Ronald Weinland, the end times are upon us– again. His 2006 book “2008: God’s Final Witness” states that hundreds of millions of people will die, and by the end of 2006, “there will be a maximum time of two years remaining before the world will be plunged into the worst time of all human history. By the fall of 2008, the United States will have collapsed as a world power, and no longer exist as an independent nation.” As the book notes, “Ronald Weinland places his reputation on the line as the end-time prophet of God.”

Now you don’t know.

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LiveScience – 10 Failed Doomsday Predictions, November 8, 2009

“The attacks, which researchers say are the world’s first iPhone worm in the wild, target jailbroken iPhones that have SSH software installed and keep Apple’s default root password of ‘alpine.’ In addition to showing a well-coiffed picture of Astley, the new wallpaper displays the message ‘ikee is never going to give you up,’ a play on Astley’s saccharine addled 1987 hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.”

“Tricking victims in to inadvertently playing the song has become a popular prank known as Rickrolling.”

And, it’s a lot more than a joke, confirms Peter Hansteen on That grumpy BSD guy

“The rickroller is about bad passwords, no more, no less,” he says, going on, “this incident only underscores what we’ve been repeating until your eardrums wear thin an my vocal cords swell from exhaustion: Publishing your username and password is a really bad idea. It’s almost as bad as picking a guessable password.

“Add to this that the fact, as we’ve noted here earlier, there is a whole cloud of hijacked machines out there beavering away at guessing passwords right now, and they have been at it for quite a while.”

Finally, he adds, “some words of advice for those of you who want to avoid both rickrolling and getting cracked by other password guessing” »»»

You should at least consider setting a password policy and enforcing it with something like John the ripper, which more than likely is available at the cost of a few keystrokes from your package system. And of course there is the fine art of sshd configuration. Some of the things you could do are, in no particular order:

• disable root logins over the network
  
• use packet filtering or other means to restrict where users can log in from
  
• disable password logins entirely allowing only key-based logins
  
• set up your sshd to listen on a non-standard port

… whatever your users can bear to live with.

Now you know.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The Register – World’s first iPhone worm Rickrolls angry fanbois, November 8, 2009
That grumpy BSD guy – Rickrolled? Get Ready for the Hail Mary Cloud!, November 15, 2009

Its response is always, Problem? What problem?

But now, for the first time, Google is actually being sued by a government agency.

“Privacy regulators in a number of countries, including Italy, Germany and Japan, have raised concerns about the service but Google has been able to negotiate measures that have reassured them,” says the Financial Times, going on »»»

In Japan, it agreed to lower the height of the cameras taking pictures of the streets by 40cm to ensure they did not take images of people’s private gardens, while in Germany it agreed to erase the raw, identifiable photos of people and property from its system if individuals requested it.

Google also faced a private lawsuit in the US over the service, which was ultimately dismissed.

Google met Swiss data protection authorities in the run-up to launching Street View in Switzerland in September and was initially given the green light.

But  as p2pnet said last week, Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) Hanspeter Thuer llater complained about clearly visible faces and license plates.

“Google announced that it would primarily be filming urban centres, but then put comprehensive images of numerous towns and cities on the internet,” says the FT, going on:

” ‘In outlying districts, where there are far fewer people on the streets, the simple blurring of faces is no longer sufficient to conceal identities,’ said Mr Thür.

Now Thür says Google hasn’t done enough “to make faces and vehicle number plates unrecognisable on the service, which provides panoramic, street-level photos,” says the story, continuing:

“He has filed a motion seeking to freeze any expansion of Google’s activities under a temporary injunction. This would prevent Google from taking any further photography but would not require it to shut down the service entirely.”

Detailed online coverage

One also wonders if freedom groups will pick up on the possibility that Gargle’s Street View may also be acting as a kind of online racial profiling application.

p2pnet reader Marc “spent hours surfing Street View and p2pnet ran the results in what’s probably the only detailed online coverage of easily visible Street View images,” p2pnet reported for the first time on Saturday.

The story went on »»»

However, that’s not all he found.

Said Eric in a Reader’s Write to our latest post on Google’s  apparent intransigence, “I doubt those three guys sitting on the wall were having an abortion. ”

He was referring to one of the Google Street View pix showing an abortion clinic in Switzerland  identified by Marc and which we’d miniaturised for a 32-item montage. However, as we pointed out, “even at these very considerably reduced sizes, some of the people might still be recognizable”. So we obscured them in red.

Marc told Eric »»»

Nope, they were just sitting there about 1 block away from the abortion clinic. Sitting in front of their slum homes across the street.

What *is* significant is that most black people are not blurred at all. Most every black person I came across is in the same unblurred state.

A few things that I noticed that causes the “blur” to *not* kick in:

1. If you are non-white
2. If you wear shades or glasses
3. If you have a hat on (ie baseball cap)

From all the time I spent looking into this, the above 3 conditions are true, regardless of what anyone, or thing, has to say.

Check it out. You will also find this to be true.

The above 3 conditions hold true for gargle Swiss and boogle Canada (I only looked at these two in depth for many, many, hours).

It also holds true for Billboards, hence the billboard example in the pic above.

In the story, we’d included a spoofed KFC pic to illustrate a statement made by assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

“We’ve found many instances where people’s faces aren’t blurred”, she said, according to the Canwest News Service, which went on, “In some cases, the face of KFC’s Colonel Sanders or faces on billboards captured in shots are blurred instead.”

Meanwhile, “Color/race determines if you are blurred with gogle,” said Marc. “It cannot be denied.”

Stay tuned.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Financial Times – Swiss act on Google Street View pictures, November 14, 2009
p2pnet – Switzerland to sue over Google Street View, November 13, 2009
faces and license plates – No Street View! Switzerland tells Google,   August 25, 2009

p2pnet – Does Google Street View racially profile people?, November 14, 2009

The demand came  Davenport Lyons, hired by ‘protection’ companies in Europe, and which also fronts for DigiProtect’s in Britain.

Davenport Lyons was fired by Atari after making a gross mistake by targeting a completely innocent UK husband-and-wife.

And British consumer rights lobby Which? filed an official complaint against Davenport Lyons for its, “campaign of letters alleging illegal filesharing,” said The Register.

Now, “German news-outlet gulli.com has received information from inside DigiProtect/Davenport Lyons about so called ‘Cease&Desist’ letters, says WikiLeaks, going on »»»

“The most likely audience will be filesharers, who received a cease & desist letter by Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law, Kanzlei Kornmeier or any other lawyer, who works together with DigiProtect & Davenport Lyons. The leak happened through an unknown source from within DigiProtect / DavenportLyons.

The documents are the basis of the latest stories on gulli.com about Davenport Lyons/DigiProtect.

In this document, you can see correspondence of german lawyer Dr. Udo Kornmeier with Brian Miller from Davenport Lyons. The content of this fax is focused on managing: money. Who gets it, how much, and how is it all handled.

And in German »»»

(de) Das deutsche News-Portal gulli.com hat einige Information aus den Reihen von DigiProtect/Davenport Lyons in Bezug zu P2P-Abmahnungen erhalten. Sie ist am interessantesten fuer Filesharer, die ebenfalls von Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law, der Kanzlei Kornmeier oder jeden anderen Kanzlei, die mit DigiProtect zusammenarbeitet, abgemahnt wurden. Der Leak geschah durch eine unbekannte Quelle innerhalb DigiProtect / DavenportLyons.

Die Dokumente bilden die Grundlage der Artikelserie zu Davenport Lyons/DigiProtect auf gulli.com.

In diesem Dokument sieht man Korrespondenz zwischen dem deutschen Anwalt Dr. Udo Kornmeier sowie Brian Miller von Davenport Lyons. Der Hauptdiskussionspunkt des Faxes ist Geld. Wer bekommt es, wie viel und wie wird alles verrechnet.

Well done, Gulli.

(Cheers, Firebird77)

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

fronts for DigiProtect – Davenport Lyons attacks Wikileaks, February 19, 2009
Davenport Lyons – UK attack lawyers Davenport Lyons sued, December 10, 2008
The Register – Regulator to probe Davenport Lyons’ P2P porn cash demands, December 10, 2008
Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law – ACS:Law — copyright breakers, May 29, 2009
WikiLeaks – Davenport Lyons and Kornmeier Monetary and Working Correspondence, 19 Mar 2008, November 14, 2009

It goes on:

“The directionality of the LRAD device reduces the risk of exposing nearby personnel or peripheral bystanders to harmful audio levels.”

LRAD is short for long-range hailing and warning, directed acoustic device.

Clearly,  “reduces the risk” of exposure to “to harmful audio levels” means the risk does exist.

The quotes come from the site of LRAD maker the American Technology Corporation and now it seems LRAD is coming to British Columbia and,  “Vancouver police won’t rule out using a new crowd-control device as a weapon capable of emitting loud, painful blasts of sound that are potentially damaging to hearing,” says the Vancouver Sun, continuing:

“But police spokesman Const. Lindsey Houghton insisted Tuesday that the Long Range Acoustical Device was bought principally to replace ‘antiquated hand-held megaphones’ as a tool to communicate in emergencies and for crowd control.

Asked whether police would ever use it for anything more than communication, Houghton said, “We can’t rule out anything.”

In another story, “Aside from what happened in Pittsburgh at the G-20 conference a month ago, it was only repressive regimes in the Third World that were making use of this,” the Canadian Press has Robert Holmes, president of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, saying.

It goes on, “The long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, emits sound waves strong enough to cause intense pain, damaged hearing and temporarily disrupted vision. There has been no safety testing of the weapon in Canada, Holmes said.”

And the story has Houghton protesting the LRAD is “nothing new since the force has long had access to noise-emitting devices that can subdue crowds”.

They’re “the sirens on our police cars,” he said.

With a Taser in one hand and an LRAD in the other …

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Vancouver Sun – New hailer is a loudspeaker, not a crowd-control device, police say, November 11, 2009
Canadian Press – Vancouver police’s new weapon could pose risk, November 11, 2009

Or not.

But wherever he is, he’s long gone. And now it looks as though the studio, in the hole to the tune of $3.7 billion, may itself may be on its way.

Now, among those “mentioned as potential candidates to buy MGM”, says BusinessWeek, are Warner Brothers, Fox and (appropriatey ) Lions Gate.

The studios are “said to be primarily interested in getting their hands on MGM’s 4,000-title film library, the Bond franchise and MGM’s rights (along with Warner) to make the Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit”.

Other potentially interested buyers could be former News Corp. president Peter Chernin and one-time Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, a former Warner Brothers studio chairman, the story adds.

(Cheers, Andrew aka Comeoncomcast )

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BusinessWeek – MGM Creditors May Press for an Auction, November 11, 2009