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Friday, May 24, 2013

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Skype No Longer Willing To Claim That Its Calls Are Untappable By Law Enforcement

For years, we've noted that various governments have sought to be able to wiretap Skype -- and the company has always insisted that its peer-to-peer architecture made it impossible. Last year, however, some hackers suggested that there was now a backdoor in Skype. And now when a reporter for Slate, Ryan Gallagher, is pushing the company on this issue, it refuses to make a clear statement onto the ability to wiretap Skype calls . You can draw your own conclusions.
It is, of course, possible that this is just the tighter-lipped way of Microsoft, now that the software giant owns Skype, but it certainly is raising questions for those who believed that Skype was a safe way to hold conversations away from the ears of increasingly intrusive government surveillance. It seems like there's new incentive for others to work on truly secure voice communications.
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Sweded Movies: The Fans Talk Back

One of the defining characteristics of the digital world -- and one of the problems for copyright law, which was conceived in an analog age -- is the importance of being able to build on the work of others not just indirectly, but directly, through mashups or the re-use of existing material. Stig Rudeholm points us to a fascinating feature in the Guardian about "sweded movies" : home-made tributes to Hollywood titles that adopt precisely this approach of creative re-interpretation. The name apparently comes from the film "Be Kind Rewind", where DIY imitations of studio favorites are passed off as Swedish editions.

As the article's author, Ben Walters, writes, beyond the surface humor, there's something interesting happening here: sweded movies are a form of talking back to Hollywood. Along with recut trailers and "supercuts" of familiar tropes, they represent a fledgling digital moving-image culture that presents a radical...

Courts Losing Patience With Clearly Bogus Trademark Claims; Dismissing Them Early

Eric Goldman has a post about a district court (Eastern District, NY) dismissing a trademark claim against the site PissedConsumer , by a company that was upset about what people were saying about it on the site. Of course, that's a pretty clear abuse of trademark law, which isn't about letting trademark holders block any usage -- especially not reviews or criticism. Instead, trademark law is supposed to be about protecting consumers against confusion over products and services for sale. That is, it's about stopping Bob's Cola from pretending to be Coca Cola -- not necessarily because it protects Coca Cola, but because it protects the consumer doing the buying.
In a case like this -- which we've seen all too often -- Devere Group got upset about what people were saying about them on PissedCustomer, and tried to pretend that was a trademark violation. Similar...

DailyDirt: Un-chained Bikes

Bike enthusiasts do a lot of kinda crazy things (like developing human flight ), so it's not that unusual for bike designers to come up with some interesting innovations in transportation every so often. If you've ever been annoyed by a bike chain eating your pant leg or just getting you greasy, here are a few solutions that completely eliminate the need for those pesky metal links.

Hungarian bicycle designers made a chainless bike that uses high density polyethylene (HDPE) strings in a pulley system. This design also lets cyclists (or potential thieves...) remove the rear bike tire very easily since no chain is attached to the rear wheel. [ url ]
Dynamic Bicycles sells a chainless bike with a drive shaft with shielded internal gears that aren't exposed to the elements. No strings or chains in this design, just some gears turning a shaft connected to a Shimano transmission...

Rocker Creates App To Better The Bootleg Video Experience

Techdirt has been writing about artists and bands enabling concert-goers' use of smart phone video since its article URLs still ended in numbers. But this has always been something of a gray area, where for every band that likes amateur films promoting them, there's another band (or copyright holder) who hates it.
Perhaps that's about to change. Business Week has a fascinating story of a new smart phone application being created by Joe Sumner, bassist for the rock band Fiction Plane, to sync multiple crowdsourced movies into a single experience . The idea came to him when his band was touring Lithuania and he noticed that there was a ton of amateur video of the previous night's concert up on YouTube. A ton as in 450 or so videos. And, rather than freak out about people being able to see the band for free on the video site, he created...

Sally Ride Takes Her Final Flight

fructose writes "Sally Ride, America's first woman in space died today at age 61. She succumbed to pancreatic cancer according to her office in San Diego. Here's to wishing her a safe trip on her final journey."...

Discovery Channel Telescope Snaps Inaugural Pictures

eldavojohn writes "Two decades ago ... Discovery Channel teamed up with Lowell Observatory and embarked upon a $53 million adventure: the fifth largest telescope in the United States funded entirely without state or federal money. The very first photos snapped with its 16 million pixel camera are in and they look beautiful. Yet to be seen are the simultaneous spectroscopic and imaging observations that should be provided to researchers by the DCT's Ritchey-Chretien instrument cube. Located near a dark-sky site (Coconino National Forest), scientists hope to use this new telescope to answer many research questions including how our solar system formed and how dwarf galaxies evolve. For more telescope porn, check out the DCT's photo tours. Luckily 'the process of planning and building the telescope is due to be featured in a one-hour Discovery Channel documentary set to air in September 2012.' Perhaps there is hope for Discovery Channel to...