Showing posts with label want. Show all posts
Showing posts with label want. Show all posts
Friday, April 26, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request
In a comical display of meta-censorship several copyright holders including 20th Century Fox and NBC Universal Movie Studios have sent Google takedown requests asking the search engine to take down links to takedown request they themselves sent.
Photo: Kimihiro Hoshino / Getty Images
Torrent Freak
April 5, 2013
Google refused to comply with the movie studios requests and the “infringing” DMCA notices remain online. Meanwhile, the number of takedown notices received by Google is nearing 20 million per month.
There’s a dark side to Google’s transparency efforts, especially when it comes to publishing DMCA requests it receives from copyright holders.
With more than 100 million links to pirated files Google is steadily building the largest database of copyrighted material. This is rather ironic as it would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available.
Indeed, the DMCA notices are meant to make content harder to find on the Internet, but in the process they create a semi-organized index of links to infringing material.
This problem is illustrated by several takedown requests that were sent on behalf of movie studio 20th Century Fox recently. Usually these notices ask Google to remove links to pirate sites, but Fox also wants Google to remove the DMCA notices they sent earlier.
Below is an example, with Fox stating that this DMCA takedown request is “infringing” itself.
Meta-censorship
The movie studio is not the only copyright holder going after their own takedown notices. Other Hollywood studios including NBC Universal and Lionsgate have done the same, and Microsoft too.
We expect that the notices are just another byproduct of the automated tools that are used to find infringing URLs. However, it’s a “mistake” that signals one of the key problems of automated censorship, and one that can lead to an endless loop of DMCA notices.
Thus far the infringing takedown notices remain accessible through Google search. Apparently Google has white-listed the Chillingeffects domain because it doesn’t see these indirect links as infringing.
While this may seem logical, Google is no stranger to removing non-direct links to links. If we take a look at the text pasting service Pastebin we see that Google removed 82,937 URLs from its index. These indirect links are all non-clickable and no different from the DMCA notices.
The standards are shifting in other ways too. No longer is Google merely asked to remove direct links to copyrighted material as the DMCA prescribes, but also links to links to links to copyrighted material.
The above shows the growing mess the current DMCA procedures are creating and for now there is no end in sight. Both Google and the copyright holders agree that something has to change, but understandably the solution they envision is quite different.
In the meantime, copyright holders continue to push the search engine to its takedown limits at a rate of 20 million URLs a month.
To be continued.
Intellihub.com
Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request
Saturday, February 23, 2013
How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer informed hundreds of tech workers at its Connecticut R&D facilities that they’d soon be laid off. Before getting their final paychecks, however, they’d need to train their replacements: guest workers from India who’d come to the United States on H-1B visas. “It’s a very, very stressful work environment,” one soon-to-be-axed worker told Connecticut’s The Day newspaper. “I haven’t been able to sleep in weeks.”
Established in 1990, the federal H-1B visa program allows employers to import up to 65,000 foreign workers each year to fill jobs that require “highly specialized knowledge.” The Senate’s bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act of 2013, or “I-Squared Act,” would increase that cap to as many as 300,000 foreign workers. “The smartest, hardest-working, most talented people on this planet, we should want them to come here,” Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) said upon introducing the bill last month. “I, for one, have no fear that this country is going to be overrun by Ph.D.s.”
To be sure, America’s tech economy has long depended on foreign-born workers. “Immigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google,” writes Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior VP of “people operations,” which, along with other tech giants such as HP and Microsoft, strongly supports a big increase in H-1B visas. “In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $ 63 billion in sales.”
How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer informed hundreds of tech workers at its Connecticut R&D facilities that they’d soon be laid off. Before getting their final paychecks, however, they’d need to train their replacements: guest workers from India who’d come to the United States on H-1B visas. “It’s a very, very stressful work environment,” one soon-to-be-axed worker told Connecticut’s The Day newspaper. “I haven’t been able to sleep in weeks.”
Established in 1990, the federal H-1B visa program allows employers to import up to 65,000 foreign workers each year to fill jobs that require “highly specialized knowledge.” The Senate’s bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act of 2013, or “I-Squared Act,” would increase that cap to as many as 300,000 foreign workers. “The smartest, hardest-working, most talented people on this planet, we should want them to come here,” Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) said upon introducing the bill last month. “I, for one, have no fear that this country is going to be overrun by Ph.D.s.”
To be sure, America’s tech economy has long depended on foreign-born workers. “Immigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google,” writes Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior VP of “people operations,” which, along with other tech giants such as HP and Microsoft, strongly supports a big increase in H-1B visas. “In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $ 63 billion in sales.”
How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
Friday, February 22, 2013
Cover Ups, Corruption and Death: What Private Prison Co. Doesn"t Want You to Know about Its Stadium Sponsorship
This week, Florida Atlantic University announced a deal to rename its football stadium after GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the world. The deal came with a $ 6 million dollar price tag, the “largest one-time gift in the history of FAU athletics.”
But GEO Group has a history of human rights abuses that it would rather keep secret, especially once 30,000 screaming football fans begin seeing the company"s corporate sponsorship. So, in all the excitement surrounding the announcement, GEO took to quietly covering up parts of its shady past–by scrubbing its Wikipedia page.
As Brave New Foundation’s Jesse Lava reported, a GEO Group employee deleted the entire “controversies” section of the company’s Wikipedia page and replaced it with some glowing propaganda. Before GEO’s lackey doctored the article, it outlined a slew of horrific abuses in the company’s prisons, including reports of squalid conditions and the deaths of dozens of prisoners.
Wikipedia editors quickly noticed the changes and restored it to its original form Wednesday evening. The highly educational, yet alarming article is available for your perusal—controversies and all—here. And just before they changed it back, Wikipedia took a jab at the company that tried to game its netizen-dependent editing process, posting this delightful disclaimer on the top of the page:
“The article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links.”
But the Wikipedia cover-up is just the beginning of this story"s deceit. Details are emerging on how the GEO’s stadium buyout is only part of a university-prison circle jerk of unprecedented proportions. As the New York Times notes, GEO Chairman George Zoley, and several other employees in the ranks, are all alumni of Florida Atlantic University. And GEO Group’s headquarters sits only four miles away from campus. GEO and university officials laughably claim that the deal is strictly philanthropic, and in no way, shape or form a corporate sponsorship, or, worse, a way to recruit new employees and desensitize people to the horrible private of for-profit prisons.
But marketing professionals have trouble taking that claim in good faith. They say slapping your name in huge letters over an ocean-view stadium hosting America’s most revered sport is probably more than an act of compassion.
“If it"s pure philanthropy, you don"t ask for your name to go on the stadium,” Don Sexton, a Columbia University marketing professor told The Huffington Post. “The only reason you want your name on the stadium is because you want to get something back.”
HuffPost’s Chris Kirkham reports a potential ulterior motive for GEO’s $ 6 million dollar deal with FAU. Private prison critics say the public university donation is part of a grand plan to “gain influence with state and local public officials who decide whether to hand out contracts.” Kirkham notes that GEO has a rich history of shelling out for favors:
“For the last three election cycles, the GEO Group has donated more than $ 1.2 million to the Florida Republican Party. Republicans in the state legislature last year came close to approving a massive expansion of private prisons in south Florida, a deal that the GEO Group mentioned frequently in calls with investors.”
Unfortunately, the local press has swallowed the prison company"s propaganda. The Florida Sun-Sentinel praised the deal for going “a long way toward addressing the financial challenges facing FAU"s athletics program.” The paper even made a suggestion for the new, $ 6-million name: “Owlcatrez”– a pun on the university"s mascot.
But many civil rights groups say that universities shouldn"t prop up a company soiled by human rights abuses simply to support oversized football stadiums. GEO Group runs a string of for-profit prisons that violate basic human rights. As SB Nation reports, ”The company was the operator of the infamous Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, a prison for 13- to 22-year-old inmates convicted as adults for crimes committed as juveniles. A 2012 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, as detailed by National Public Radio, found that prison personnel engaged in “systemic, egregious and dangerous practices,” from failing to provide educational and medical services to actively assisting and engaging in gang fights. The report found that prison staff had engaged in sexual activity with inmates “among the worst that we"ve seen in any facility anywhere in the nation,” activity which included the prison warden taking an inmate out of the facility to a motel for sex.”
Fri, 02/22/2013 – 09:17
Cover Ups, Corruption and Death: What Private Prison Co. Doesn"t Want You to Know about Its Stadium Sponsorship
Thursday, February 21, 2013
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