Pirate Bay co-founder to be deported from Cambodia

One of the Pirate Bay founders may actually serve jail time after being arrested in Cambodia. Officials there say they are prepared to deport him, though they can’t confirm if and how he will wind up in his native Sweden.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was among four men convicted of copyright offenses by a Swedish court in 2009 over their Pirate Bay site and sentenced to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay heavy damages to entertainment companies alongside the site’s financier.


The men did not attend their original trial and were out of the country at the time. In 2010, the other three founders took the case to appeal. Their convictions were upheld but their jail terms reduced to between four and 10 months while their court fines were increased. They were later refused permission to take the case to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

Svartholm Warg did not appear at the appeal, claiming ill-health. That meant his case was put on hold until last October when his time limit for appeal ran out and the original sentence became binding.

Cambodian officials announced yesterday that Svartholm Warg was arrested in the country on Thursday by officers executing an international arrest warrant on behalf of Sweden. Svartholm Warg appears to have been living in the country since 2008.

A police spokesman confirmed today that Svartholm Warg will be deported under Cambodian law which allows it to force foreigners with a criminal conviction out of the country. However, the spokesman said it is up to Sweden to decide where he will be sent. The matter is somewhat complicated by Cambodia and Sweden not having an extradition treaty.

I’d like to report whether Svartholm Warg or his colleagues have commented on the Pirate Bay site’s blog, but I live in the United Kingdom where the entire site is blocked by ISPs under a court order. What a joke.

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Bruce Willis battling Apple over iTunes collection

Bruce Willis is, according to sources, considering legal action against Apple to ensure his offspring inherit his iTunes music collection. But the law isn’t fully understood, and the story not exactly watertight.

The Daily Mail claims Willis want to leave his huge digital music collection, built up over many years, to his daughters. However, and I quote, he has discovered he “does not actually own the tracks but is instead ‘borrowing’ them under a licence.” Willis is said to be considering a number of legal options, including establishing a family trust, and supporting existing legal challenges in five U.S. states related to the issue.


The law seems to be confused on this score, or perhaps it;s just the people reading up on it. The newspaper quotes a solicitor as saying, “Lots of people will be surprised on learning all those tracks and books they have bought over the years don’t actually belong to them. It’s only natural you would want to pass them on to a loved one. The law will catch up, but ideally Apple and the like will update their policies and work out the best solution for their customers.” But commenters across the Web have different ideas about the situation.

This all points to an ambiguity that needs to be rectified in no uncertain terms. Consumers of all kinds, right down to mainstream technophobes should be made aware of the true extent of their ownership over digital content. Even physical media doesn’t escape untouched, as evidenced by the video games industry. Publishers hate the used game industry and argue that selling a game on is illegal due to the actual content on the disc being copyrighted.

I very much doubt whether Willis is going to be the champion of consumer rights some are making him out to be, but this story, however legitimate or not it is, should at least start the conversational ball rolling. The law needs to be made clearer and less ambiguous, as digital content is only going to grow in popularity from this moment on.

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Clint Eastwood and his empty Obama chair go viral on the InterWebs

I’m not sure Clint Eastwood has even ever been online before, but he’s now succeeded in going viral and kick-starting several memes after his RNC speech.

As you may have already seen or heard, veteran Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood made a surprise appearance at the Republican National Convention on Thursday (Aug. 30) to throw his support behind presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It was a sad, shambling performance from an 82-year-old man, and I suspect the GOP is already regretting the booking.


However, the best and worst thing about the speech was Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair he claimed represented President Obama. He poked fun at the empty chair, asked it questions, and generally used the prop as a tool to entertain and enthrall the assembled Republican members. While everyone on the outside looking in watched in open-jawed astonishment.

One quick-witted wag immediately set up a Twitter account with the name @InvisibleObama, which gained over 20,000 followers in just 45 minutes. At the time of writing that follower count has more than doubled to 45,000. There are also other Twitter accounts trying to mock the bizarre sketch, but none have got quite as much attention.

A meme has since sprung up around Clint Eastwood and his conversation with an imaginary President Obama. It’s called ‘Eastwooding’, and involves nothing more than Photoshopped images of Eastwood and his empty chair. Mashable has already pulled together some of the finer examples, including sad Keanu sitting on the chair, and Eastwood as Dirty Harry threatening an abandoned armchair.

Even Obama himself got in on the fun by tweeting a picture of himself sitting in the presidential chair with the accompanying line of, “This seat’s taken.”

Clint Eastwood and his empty Obama chair go viral on the InterWebssrc="https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/2325704772/wrrmef61i6jl91kwkmzq_normal.png" />Barack Obama
✔@BarackObama


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The Internet is a law unto itself, and it has decided to mock Eastwood’s performance at the RNC. Whatever your political views, that can’t be good for the GOP, Mitt Romney, or indeed Clint Eastwood.

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Facebook ads get even more targeted/creepy

A new program will mean companies advertising on Facebook can pick their
 targets even more efficiently. What makes the new tool so effective (or unsettling) is that it is based on information that users haven’t explicitly added to Facebook itself.

The tool allows companies to explicitly target people they know have already used their services or bought their products outside of Facebook. They can do this by bringing their own customer lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses and have Facebook cross-reference them with the details users have listed for their accounts. If there’s a match, the user becomes eligible to see the ad.


It’s a perfect example of how aggregated data can produce unexpected and sometimes unwanted results. Any user who sees these ads will have voluntarily provided their address or number to Facebook and voluntarily provided the same details to the business. However, they likely won’t even have conceived of the idea that could result in the business effectively hunting them down in Facebook.

If everyone works as advertised, it’s unlikely that any laws are being broken, however creepy it might seem. That said, there are some gray areas. For example, if you have given a company your phone number but later told it not to call you again, it’s illegal for that company to make telemarketing calls to you (once 30 days have passed.) For the company to then use your number to target you via Facebook wouldn’t break the letter of the law, but certainly seems to shatter its spirit.

The good news is that Facebook promises it won’t gain any data in this way. The companies running the ads will provide their marketing lists for cross-referencing in a way that means Facebook can’t see the numbers or addresses that don’t match, and their copies of the lists are automatically wiped once the checking is complete.

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Obama Reddit Q&A shows crowdsourcing format

President Barack Obama took part in an “Ask Me Anything” question and answer thread yesterday. The event was prestigious in itself for the site, but also proved a great advert for the site’s format.

The whole point of Reddit is that the positioning of content, whether that be images, comments or links to news stories, is determined by the votes of users. In theory at least, the site has a critical mass of users that means the prominence goes to content with mass appeal rather than stuff that is put there by cranks, promoted by special interest groups, or simply boosted by people trying to game the system for their own amusement.


That concept came under test with the selection of questions for Obama. While such online Q&As are usually heavily moderated, the site’s Erik Martin told the Los Angeles Times that Reddit used its standard procedure for selecting the queries:

“Your question can be seen by the president based on the votes of those in the community regardless of how many followers you have or if your question is picked by some sort of moderation team.”

At the moment it appears that is indeed what happened here and the 10 questions presented to Obama were all relatively sensible while still covering a range of topics: eight of the ten are what you’d think of as politically relevant, with only two softball questions on sport and beer.

That’s not to say the associated comment threads didn’t have any wackiness, the most well-received among Reddit regulars being a painting of Obama (pictured above) posted by a user with the self-aware name shitty_watercolor.

The event also brought some neat irony with Reddit’s servers struggling to cope with traffic and some users having trouble accessing it. That’s a change from the more common issue of a highly cited mention on Reddit causing another website to crash.

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McAfee aims to prevent Facebook photo theft

If you absolutely don’t want strangers to see, use or steal your photos, don’t put them on Facebook. But for a less drastic action, a new Facebook app might do the trick.

McAfee Social Protection is billed as giving users complete control over who can and cannot see their photos on Facebook. In theory you should be able to do that through Facebook itself, but that often turns out to be a crapshoot with the site changing its privacy policies without warning (although this has now been barred through an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission.)


Even if you do get the privacy settings right, you still have to trust your chosen viewers won’t try to share them. If one day you wind up running for public office, your former friends can easily try to make a few bucks by downloading, printing or otherwise getting hold of a copy of your more embarrassing pics and selling them to the tabloids.

The McAfee solution works by keeping Facebook out of the loop. Once you’ve installed the app, any pics you upload are actually stored on McAfee servers rather than Facebook itself. The friends that you do allow to see the picture on Facebook are therefore looking at an external link, the same way as if you hotlinked to a news site’s photo in a status update.

The image on McAfee’s servers is coded in a way that means viewers can’t do anything with it other than see it. Take a screenshot and the pic is replaced with a blank space; try to hover over it to do a right-click save and it turns into a picture of a padlock; send a direct link to somebody else and they’ll just see a blurred version of the image.

One practical drawback is that with everything handled outside of Facebook, the people you give permission to view the image will have to install the app themselves. That works well for McAfee as it quickly spreads adoption of the app and in turn promotion of its brand.

This does have a massive limitation however: the app only works if you are running Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 8. That means not only are you out of luck if you are running Chrome or Safari, but if any of your friends run those browsers you’ve got a problem too.

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A resurrected LiftPort is kickstarting its space elevator project

Actually the Kickstarter project is only raising money to build a proof of concept experiment that is called the “Climb to the Sky-A Tethered Tower”. The idea is to build a robot that will then climb up two kilometers to the high altitude balloon platform.

According to href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elevator-science-climb-to-the-sky-a-tethered?ref=search">its Kickstarter page, the project will cost $3 million total. LiftPort the company behind the space elevator project was spun out of a NASA program started in 2001. The company wound up going dormant in 2007 for the same reason so many other businesses went bust, the economic crisis. The $8,000 Kickstarter program is a way to advertise that the company is back and is continuing its research and experimentation to eventually build a space elevator.


Michael Laine, the man behind the company and the current project, explains that the technology to build a space elevator from earth doesn’t exist yet, but the technology to build a Lunar elevator does. So rather than go from the earth out to space, the company would first work on going from outer space to the Moon.

The Kickstarter program has more reward levels than most projects. There are 14 rewards that can be earned between $1 and $51. The top tier is $10,000. For that kind of money you get a wide variety of options. You can name the robot. You get access to internal documents about the company. You get to ride the balloons two kilometers up and then parachute back down. For the rest of the offers you really need to check out Kickstarter.

At the lower levels you go from email notifications to bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and t-shirts. There will be a “Group Talk”, a two hour chat with the team, several “Meet-Ups” in select cities and a lot of social media interaction. Clearly, this project is designed more to start people talking about the project than to raise any serious funds.

LiftPort isn’t the only group that thinks a space elevator is possible. Back in February, I reported that the Japanese were planning a space elevator. Their elevator is expected to rise 36,000 kilometers into Geostationary Orbit. The counterweight for the elevator would be 96,000 kilometers high. The project is expected to be several decades away from completion and in the early stages.

Both space elevators would use carbon nanotubes to build the structure for the elevator to ride. LiftPort envisions it more as a ribbon. The Japanese visualize it as more of a column.

Give the project a look and then pitch in a few bucks. If nothing else, your great great grandchildren can say that their ancestors were among the first investors in the space elevator.

The illustration is from the Kickstarter page created by Michael Laine of LiftPort
.

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