A number of European countries see online censorship implemented, including Italy, the Netherlands, Finland and some others. The Internet service providers in those countries are required to block access to several websites like The Pirate Bay. However, WordPress came with a simple solution to the problem – they have released a plugin that allows users to set up a proxy site and be able to access blacklisted domains.

The plugin in question is called RePress. It has been written by the hosting outfit Greenhost and lets everyone having a WordPress blog to launch a proxy for websites included into the ISPs’ blacklist, such as Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay.

After you add this plugin to your WordPress blog, it will begin working as a proxy and unblock any censored site you want. Anyone having a WordPress site and the ability to install new plugins can do that. Afterwards, you will be able to maintain a list of sites you would like to keep open freely available on the Internet. This should be interesting for US citizens as well, as they now face the possibility to see SOPA or PIPA enforced one day. The developers hope that Internet users outside the Netherlands would use the plugin to unblock ...

Once MegaUpload was closed down by the authorities, millions of people found out they lost access to their legitimate files stored on the file-sharing website – from personal information to work-related content. So it is of no surprise that currently people are not happy about the situation and want their files back as soon as possible.
But the hopes of the users to get their content back dropped down with the announcement of the US attorney that MegaUpload’s database may be destroyed by the end of this week. Ira Rothken, MegaUpload attorney, admitted that the company had got a letter last week from the US Attorney. The latter declared that an imminent destruction of the cyberlocker’s user data files could happen this week. The website assured its users that it was doing whatever possible to protect the users’ interests, but there wasn’t much to do without help from the government. In fact, the imminent information loss will be presented as a result of some unpaid bills at hosting companies where some of the cyberlocker’s servers were leased.

Still, the users are hoping that the United States and MegaUpload would unite in attempt to avoid such a consumer protection calamity where innocent Internet users would....

A leaked cable between the American and the Australian governments has revealed how far the United States is having its foreign policy dictated to it by the entertainment industry.

The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed that the embassy of the United States had blessed a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target an Australian communications company iiNet via the local court system. It turned out that the idea was actually to achieve a binding common law precedent that would have made Internet service providers responsible for the illegal file-sharing of their subscribers.

The entertainment industry has selected this country and this ISP carefully. Indeed, if it managed to set a precedent over there, then it would have been influential in all other Commonwealth states. Since Telstra had too many legal resources to see off such a complaint, iiNet ISP appeared to be the perfect candidate.

The cables of the embassy of the United States revealed that the case was originally filed by the Motion Picture Association of America and its international affiliate, known as the Motion Picture Association (MPA). However, neither of them wanted this fact to become widely known. Formally, the case was launched by the local Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft – a consortium of US movie studios with token

Paul Ceglia, the person suing for part ownership of the world’s largest social network Facebook, was fined $5,000 after failing to comply with a court order to provide experts access to his old email accounts.
Ceglia will now have to pay the company’s court costs in attempts to obtain the data, which they claim will expose his case as a fraud. An American judge decided that Paul Ceglia had been delaying the case due to failure to give his 9-year-old email addresses and passwords. Meanwhile, his lawyers insist this was regarded as an affront to his personal privacy.

Nevertheless, the judge wasn’t impressed by such explanation. Paul Ceglia had been fully advised by his attorneys not to do what he was asked and therefore chose to knowingly ignore the orders of the court. According to media reports, the judge said this fine was meant to "coerce plaintiff's future compliance with the court orders". In the meantime, the judge declined to take any disciplinary action against the lawyers, who have since abandoned Paul Ceglia.

BitTorrent Inc. has released a new application – “Share”. It is an alternative to paid cloud-based services and media sharing over various social networks. The application allows transferring files of any size with no restrictions to any number of personal contacts. The sent files get cached in the cloud, so the users don’t have to be online at the same time as you to complete the transfer.
Shahi Ghanem, the BitTorrent’s chief strategist, said that “Share” is a result of more than a year’s research into personal media sharing. BitTorrent has always been one of the fastest ways to transfer large files, and the company realizes that with the modern cameras/video recorders producing high quality, traditional file-sharing really requires concessions. Using the new application, consumers won’t have to crop pictures, reduce resolutions or cut video length to share something with their contacts. Indeed, such sharing became easier and faster than traditional “cloud” solutions for anyone.

If you still remember the Sweden’s latest official religion, which is called the Missionary Church of Kopimism, you might be interested in the way the things are with the religion right now. This church, advocating peer-to-peer piracy, has recently been attacked by the Roman Catholic Church. The accusations are that the Missionary Church of Kopimism is farcical.
According to Bishop Peter Ingham, head of the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong in Australia, the religion in question was actually a send up of religion, that of copyright and of the government to register such a group as religious. He insisted that the religion should be measured somehow, and if it has nothing to do with God, it's just a sham. In other words, the new trend looks like just a way of bypassing the law of piracy and copyright. Indeed, how could a religion promote unauthorized activity?

In response, the file-sharers pointed out that it is more ironic that someone living in a place named Wollongong, disbelieving in having sex, wearing a dress, and believing his boss is infallible labels any religion as farcical. Actually, in Sweden anyone is able to create a religion if the group is organized and the actual content of a religion isn’t examined.