Tag: politics

Last week, my attention was drawn to the fact that people in Bulgaria were protesting on the streets against the appointment of Delyan Peevski as the chief of Bulgaria’s National Security Agency. Peevsky controls the larger part of Bulgaria’s media, has no prior experience with national security, and has also been linked to organised crime. What’s happening in Bulgaria isn’t disconnected, isolated or irrelevant to other European countries. Just a…

It’s now clear that the government wants to control people’s use of the Internet, ostensibly on behalf of the media industry, but more likely in the longer term because (to paraphrase William Burroughs) control always needs more control. For a while now I’ve been thinking whether it might be time to tunnel my Internet traffic over a VPN to somewhere that’s not on my ISP’s network. That way, I absolve my ISP from having to monitor that traffic (be…

… eikoku kopistropi Can I infringe your copyright and use this letter also? Jonathan No infringement necessary: in a rare demonstration of orderly rights management, I hereby grant you non-exclusive use of the the letter in full together with any derivative works, and without attribution. I suppose I should also disclaim any and all liability too. This hereby constitutes the entire agreement in all jurisdictions worldwide….

Hello? Can you hear me? This might sound boring – a technicality. It involves industrial regulation, copyright and law. But it’s important, and we should all be at least concerned, if not angry, about what is now happening in the European parliament. What is more, time is running out and we need to act now. What is this about? The music industry (people who make money from musicians: for example Sony Music, EMI and industry groups that represent …