Emma Woollacott reports: Britain’s House of Lords has approved a bill allowing the government to shut down illegal file-sharers. Music companies are delighted. But British Telecom, Google and Facebook aren’t: they think illegal file-sharers should be fined, rather than cut off. Last week, in a letter to the Financial Times, they said the proposed amendment…
Category: Featured News
Fight Crime with a Universal DNA Database?
Ronald Bailey writes: Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a provocative op/ed by Yale law student Michael Seringhaus in which he advocated that the DNA profiles of every American be kept in a central forensic database. The goal of such a database is to help the police fight crime by better enabling them…
Federal judge approves Facebook ‘Beacon’ class-action settlement
Jessica Guynn reports: After reviewing objections, a San Jose federal judge has approved a $9.5-million settlement of a class-action lawsuit over social networking site Facebook’s program Beacon that published what users were buying. Facebook denied any wrongdoing but agreed to end the Beacon program last November. Read more on the L. A. Times. David Kravets…
When tweets can make you a jailbird
Richard Lardner reports: Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle , where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges. Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list,…