Richard's Kingdom

Last Friday I travelled to London to see a talk by security visionary and cryptographer Bruce Schneier. The event was a fund-raiser for the Open Rights Group, and was chaired by its Executive Director, Jim Killock. His was not a demanding role. The capacity crowd of disciples, many of whom were also ORG supporters, needed [...]

Flying in the face of reason, evidence, society, human rights, Europe and the conclusions of its own Digital Britain report, the Government yesterday announced legislation to disconnect from the Internet anyone accused of copyright infringement online. No, that isn’t a typo, you read correctly: accused. Not guilty. Accused. There’s more: today Cory Doctorow claimed on [...]

Yesterday I travelled to London to hear Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross talk about resisting the all-seeing eye of the state, private business, and nosy individuals. The event promised to discuss practical measures to protect privacy: With the rise of the database state and firms profiting from user-profiling, it’s vital to resist surveillance and ensure [...]

There has been some consternation in the press and blogosphere about recent changes to Facebook’s terms of use. The crux of the issue is that Facebook, though its terms of use, wrests from you control over the use of any content that you post. Facebook also claims license over any third-party content posted to the [...]

I got ambushed at Lug Radio Live by Craig Smith of O’ReillyGMT and managed to mumble something like “copyright term extension, bad. Public domain, good” into his video camera… Open Rights Group – Copyright Extension from oreillygmt on Vimeo. Like an idiot, I managed to get our own URL wrong, so here are those links [...]