China still surfs free as Green Dam is halted

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There were parties in the street late last night in Beijing as Chinese students celebrated the last-minute halt of the Green Dam plan.

The meet up was originally planned to discuss censorship, debate other studenty matters and generally fill in time while the web went down for 24 hours to apply the Chinese government’s much criticised content filter.

The students, in the green protest t-shirts, arrived at the event instead to find an unlikey partial victory over their leaders with the news that the roll out of the project has been pushed back – at least for now. It’s unclear how long it will be before Green Dam does come into action, or if indeed it will be moth balled perminantly, but, at least for now, the students of China have the result they were looking for.

CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith, instructs protest group

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The government is rather keen on the idea of creating a massive database that will store all your emails, texts, calls and internet use. It’s an idea that’s understandably raised a few eyebrows, even outside of privacy and consumer-based pressure groups. Even I’m a little alarmed about this one, despite generally not being that fussed about privacy issues.

In protest, some enterprising sorts have created a campaign called “CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith day”. On one day – June 15th – they want you to copy all your email correspondence in to [email protected], the idea being that they get so overwhelmed by a mountain of correspondence, so much of it inane and useless, that they realize it’s a rubbish idea.

Of course, it could backfire. On the FAQ section of the site under ‘is this legal?’, the organizers claim: “This is unclear. You personally are certainly at no risk from prosecution. But it is possible that if the volume of emails crashes the servers, it could be seen as a Denial of Service attack – although there is no precedent for such an attack coming from multiple people sending a small number of emails.”

There’s also a Facebook group, though as the Register points out, they’re fairly keen on keeping all your private data themselves, so you might just want to plump for the email option. Sign up on the website, right here.

“CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith day”

Spore fans in uproar create DRM protest species

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Users within Will Wright’s latest game, Spore, have been creating creatures protesting the game’s draconian DRM measures. The animals, pictured above, are rapidly populating the Universe of user-generated-creatures online. Although it’s certainly not the strangest thing we’ve seen within the menagerie of creatures brought to life by the game, there’s a certain charm to these shambling monstrosities…

YouTube Video of the Day – John Kerry questioner gets tasered by US police

It happened a couple of days ago, but this video is already causing a big stir on YouTube. A student at a John Kerry forum asks a few testy questions and as a result, is arrested by US police and tasered. Remember when US colleges were the hotbed of political debate? Not anymore. For a news report on the incident click here and for another angle from someone in the attendance, click here.