Related Posts

• How A Man Lives
• The Lobby Bar lives on … elsewhere
• Foundphotos – peek into their lives

Related Posts

• Copyright Application Tutorial
• A9.com -Yellow Pages – Copyrighted Buildings?
• All Around Cork In August

Before I go any further, here’s how you can help. Sign this petition or use this contact form or this list to contact your local TD to express your misgivings and anger at this law being pushed through so quickly.

From the stopsopireland.com website:

SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, recently proposed in the US. It caused an Internet-wide outcry due to its far-reaching implications; way beyond simply closing access to outlaw file sharing websites, it would have enabled law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage.

A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.

Instead, the law is being enacted by ministerial order. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.

As I mentioned in my Wikipedia post, this law might already be illegal:

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a landmark case for protecting free speech in the fight against online piracy. In a decision issued today on the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, the Court stated that web filtering systems used to prevent illegal downloading on peer-to-peer networks was incompatible with fundamental human rights.

Minister Sean Sherlock will be on drivetime (RTE Radio 1) after 6pm this evening to talk about this law. I hope he comes to his senses.

Oh, it is very easy to bypass any spying the music and movie industries force on Irish ISPs. All you need is an encrypted tunnel to a remote host outside the country. If Irish ISPs ban users from using tools like that then you can say goodbye to a huge number of IT jobs. I rely on these tools every single day of the week to do my work.

More links:

• Ireland’s SOPA FAQ plus comments here
• An Irish SOPA: More haste, less speed?
• Boards.ie: Possible Irish SOPA Law? :/
• Stop SOPA Ireland WordPress plugin
• NoSOPAIreland on Twitter and follow the #stopsopaireland hashtag.
• SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy
  

  No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation. If we could wave a magic wand and have less piracy, obviously that would be good. But in the real world, where enforcement has direct costs to the taxpayer, regulation has costs on the industries it burdens, and the reduction in piracy they’re likely to produce is very small, it seems important to point out that the credible evidence for the magnitude of the harm is fairly thin.

  On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.

Next in the firing line of laws that will limit consumer freedoms is ACTA but let’s get one bad law stopped before we move on to the next one, ok?

The image above taken from No Shit, Sherlock website. Thanks Sean Sherlock.

Related Posts

• Sherlock and Smith and copyright images
• [stop] design – the guys behin …
• Labour – Stop the War on Iraq …

The other night my wife showed me a local paper pointing at a picture of Ray D’Arcy and Jenny Kelly that sat next to a report about their recent engagement. Great! We’re fans of the show, they’re nice people, lovely!

Only thing is, that photo looked familiar. I searched and found it in my US Book Launch Party post from way back in 2005. I’m used to websites borrowing stealing my photos but it saddens me when commercial newspapers like The Cork News do it too. I found their Twitter account too and guess what? I’m not the only photographer who’s had a problem with them.

So… @TheCorkNews- can you address this? MT @ElishaClarke Don’t appreciate my photo being used without my permission. http://t.co/tCqnTTKk

@TheCorkNews did reply positively which is good.

@DeclanMadsen Sure, we’ll be in touch with the photographer.

But the fact remains that they used another photo without permission, my photo. Leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

The Cork News, I don’t want payment for the photo, or reimbursement for the 100 Euro train fare to Dublin, or the 40 Euro it cost to stay in a local hotel that night. If you want to make this good, please make a donation to Matt’s charity water campaign for his birthday. Thank you.

Related Posts

• Making healthy babies with WoodysGamertag
• Craic agus ceol ar an gCeadaoin
• News from the beaches of Cork

Related Posts

• I joined a private match organised by Ni…
• Very interesting feature of Ne …
• Bizzare. I just joined a game of Hardcor…

Good interview with Richard Dawkins during the year too.

Related Posts

• The survivors guide to unemployment

I saw this on reddit a few days ago but this morning Rick O’Shea retweeted this 2fm tweet announcing the sale of a poster with the image above:

The Citizenship Test Poster! On sale now & with all profits going to Médecins sans Frontières, the world’s… http://fb.me/1ySOHnDU5

You can buy the poster here where “€4.50 from the sale of every poster will be donated to Rick and RTÉ 2fm’s nominated charity, Médecins sans Frontières, the world’s leading medical humanitarian organisation.”

Click on the image above to get a slightly bigger and more readable version. You’ll still have to squint a bit but it’s worth it. Well done to everyone who contributed a tweet!

Now, where’s the Cork Citizenship Test? (You knew I had to bring this up didn’t you?)

Related Posts

• RoystoN BRADY WOZ `ERE
• Microsoft Interview..
• I want to test the PHP Asserti …

It’s a wonderful documentary to listen to, especially as they interviewed his family and people who met him who all had their own stories about the actor.

I did not know that he was practically forced out of the United States because the authorities there suspected he was a communist. They let him back in the 70′s, but only for 15 days. He joked that they were still afraid of him!

I installed the RTÉ DocOnOne app but it’s stuck on the “Loading” page so best to not use that if you’re on Android. Does the iPhone version works better?
Then I was left wondering how do I subscribe to an itunes podcast without itunes but thankfully searching for “documentaries on one” in Podkicker worked!

Related Posts

• Kerry, Kerry, Kerry..
• I love Charlie Harper
• Charlie Harper Sucks

The adults and older kids watched a 3D Makerbot printer demo. I love the open wooden case the printer is made from and when it started making a replica of St. Anne’s Church all eyes were glued to it as layers of plastic were laid down layer by layer. I posted some more photos here too.

Thanks Ann for tweeting about this on Saturday morning and reminding me it was on! Hopefully I’ll get to more Coderdojo events in the future!

Related Posts

• Red Hat 9
• Phishing Scams – 3 stories
• Ubuntu Linux and the Canon MP492 printer

Today Ireland goes to the polls to elect a new president. The job isn’t as important as in other countries, but one of the primary roles of the President is to veto new laws if they are unconstitutional. Nevertheless the election campaign has been downright dirty and negative as the hopeful candidates can’t really attack each other on policy issues.
It was the same last time. Skeletons are dragged out of closets, old events rehashed and exposed to the light of day again. There must be a better way of electing the first citizen?

I know who I don’t want to vote for: Dana, Sean Gallagher, David Norris, Martin McGuinness or Mary Davis. The remaining candidates, Gay Mitchell and Michael D Higgins, haven’t made any impression on me. A random number generator would make more sense than trying to decide among that lot.

Last I heard Sean Gallagher was in the lead, contrary to opinion on Twitter, and to this ballot taken by expats.

What’s more important for the country are the two referendums. There is the referendum website but since I guarantee that it will be gone by this time next year here are the two questions being asked of the Irish populace:

Referendum on the pay of judges

This referendum is about whether the pay of judges can be reduced in certain circumstances. At present the Constitution does not allow for the reduction of the remuneration of sitting judges.

Referendum on inquiries by the Oireachtas

This referendum proposes to give the Houses of the Oireachtas (the Dáil and Seanad) express power to conduct inquiries into matters of general public importance and, in doing so, to make findings of fact about any person’s conduct.

I think I’ll be voting no to the first amendment, and possibly no to the second one but I’m undecided about that. That’s the amendment I’m most interested in but have heard the least debate about on radio. This post seems quite clear on the changes, admitting that some aspects are still vague and letting the chair of a committee decide the rights of witnesses is worrying. Will this second amendment bring us “broadly” in line with other countries?

Here are the two amendments, for history:

Proposed amendment – judges’ pay

At present, Article 35.5 of the Constitution states:
“The remuneration of a judge shall not be reduced during his continuance in office.”

It is proposed to replace this with the following wording:
5 1° The remuneration of judges shall not be reduced during their continuance in office save in accordance with this section.

2° The remuneration of judges is subject to the imposition of taxes, levies or other charges that are imposed by law on persons generally or persons belonging to a particular class.

3° Where, before or after the enactment of this section, reductions have been or are made by law to the remuneration of persons belonging to classes of persons whose remuneration is paid out of public money and such law states that those reductions are in the public interest, provision may also be made by law to make proportionate reductions to the remuneration of judges.

Proposed amendment – Oireachtas inquiries

At present, Article 15.10 states:
“Each House shall make its own rules and standing orders, with power to attach penalties for their infringement, and shall have power to ensure freedom of debate, to protect its official documents and the private papers of its members, and to protect itself and its members against any person or persons interfering with, molesting or attempting to corrupt its members in the exercise of their duties.”

It is proposed to renumber this as 15.10.1° and to insert the following subsections:

2° Each House shall have the power to conduct an inquiry, or an inquiry with the other House, in a manner provided for by law, into any matter stated by the House or Houses concerned to be of general public importance.

3° In the course of any such inquiry the conduct of any person (whether or not a member of either House) may be investigated and the House or Houses concerned may make findings in respect of the conduct of that person concerning the matter to which the inquiry relates.

4° It shall be for the House or Houses concerned to determine, with due regard to the principles of fair procedures, the appropriate balance between the rights of persons and the public interest for the purposes of ensuring an effective inquiry into any matter to which subsection 2° applies.

(First image via this Reddit thread)

Related Posts

• Libertarian Presidential Candidate Michael Badnarik Answers
• Irish Blogs and Bloggers
• Irish Law Updates – A weblog f …