EU unlocks a great new source of online innovation
Today the European Parliament voted to formally agree new rules on open data – effectively making a reality of the proposal which I first put forward just over 18 months ago, and making it easier to open up huge amounts of public sector data.
Great news — wonder how it’ll affect the Ordnance Survey of Ireland?(tags: osi mapping open-data open data europe eu neelie-kroes)
UK ISPs Secretly Start Blocking Torrent Site Proxies | TorrentFreak
The next step of cat-and-mouse. Let’s see what the pirate sites do next…
The blocking orders are intended to deter online piracy and were requested by the music industry group BPI on behalf of a variety of major labels. Thus far they’ve managed to block access to The Pirate Bay, Kat.ph, H33T and Fenopy, and preparations are being made to add many others. The effectiveness of these initial measures has been called into doubt, as they are relatively easy to bypass. For example, in response to the blockades hundreds of proxy sites popped up, allowing subscribers to reach the prohibited sites via a detour. However, as of this week these proxies are also covered by the same blocklist they aim to circumvent, without a new court ruling. The High Court orders give music industry group BPI the authority to add sites to the blocklist without oversight. Until now some small changes have been made, mostly in response to The Pirate Bay’s domain hopping endeavors, but with the latest blocklist update a whole new range of websites is being targeted.
(tags: bittorrent blocking filesharing copyright bpi piracy pirate-bay proxies fenopy kat.ph h33t filtering uk)