feed on feeds - 2017/09/30 - items 0 to 15

Authorities end march early after self-professed National Socialists clash with anti-fascists and police.

UN Human Rights Council agrees to send investigators to examine alleged human rights violations in the war-torn country.

Vortex.com is one of the oldest domains on the internet -- one of the first 40 ever registered, writes Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. So why does Google sometimes block the email he sends? Here's why. First, my message had the audacity to mention "Google Account" or "Google Accounts" in the subject and/or body of the message. And secondly, one of my mailing lists is "google-issues" -- so some (digest format) recipients received the email from "google-issues-request@vortex.com"... Apparently what we're dealing with here is a simplistic (and frankly, rather haphazard in this respect at least) string-matching algorithm that could have come right out of the early 1970s...! [A]t least in this case, it appears that Google is basically using the venerable old UNIX/Linux "grep" command or some equivalent, and in a rather slipshod way, too. In addition, the article concludes, "I've never found a way to get Google to 'whitelist' well-behaved senders against these kinds of errors, so some users see these false phishing warnings repeatedly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Son of American missionary parents worked on more than 300 films, including both Hindi and international productions.

An anonymous reader quotes the EFF: In the past few years, the sale of pre-configured Kodi boxes, and the availability of a range of plugins providing access to streaming media, has seen the software's popularity balloon -- and made it the latest target of Hollywood's copyright enforcement juggernaut. We've seen this in the appearance of streaming media boxes as an enforcement priority in the U.S. Trade Representative's Special 301 Report, in proposals for new legislation targeting the sale of "illicit" media boxes, and in lawsuits that have been brought on both sides of the Atlantic to address the "problem" that media boxes running Kodi, like any Web browser, can be used to access media streams that were not authorized by the copyright holder... The difficulty facing the titans of TV is that since neither those who sell Kodi boxes, nor those who write or host add-ons for the software, are engaging in any unauthorized copying by doing so, cases targeting these parties have to rely on other legal theories. So far several legal theories have been used; one in Europe against sellers of Kodi boxes, one in Canada against the owner of the popular Kodi add-on repository TVAddons, and two in the United States against TVAddons and a plugin developer... These lawsuits by big TV incumbents seem to have a few goals: to expand the scope of secondary copyright infringement yet again, to force major Kodi add-on distributors off of the Internet, and to smear and discourage open source, freely configurable media players by focusing on the few bad actors in that ecosystem. The EFF details the specific lawsuits in each region, and concludes that their courts "should reject these expansions of copyright liability, and TV networks should not target neutral platforms and technologies for abusive lawsuits."