Censorship and Privacy on the Web

"Censorship and Privacy on the Web" is the title to a presentation I made (in Portuguese) for "Crime in the XXI century" 2 days event, as ANSOL's Vice-President. Here's the presentation (yes, I'm trying Google Drive for the first time).

Source, images and resulting PDF can be used and re-used, here.

"Piracy" - the polls are over.

I'm taking the polls regarding alleged copyright infringement down. After what happened, the votes got back to be on Google. And they were messed up again. I was suspecting something for a long time, but now here's "proof":

Screenshot of the results, taken in September:

and today (December):

 votes are disappearing, huh?

Well, I don't really care anymore, I assume my point as taken. If anyone wants to dispute the results, well, I really would like them to make a "real poll", and study this seriously.

For the record, the results are:

• 18% don't do so-called "piracy"
• 2% would buy everything they "pirate", if they couldn't pirate it
• 54% would buy some of the things they "pirate"
• 16% "pirate" stuff but they wouldn't buy it otherwise anyway

So, for one of the possible uses of this numbers... remember: being the most conservative possible, 34% of the population aren't "taking money from artists", in any possible sense.

Piracy talking? Hush! (Or how Google doesn't like what I have to say)

Last month I wrote about "piracy" - you know, the non-authorized download of copyrighted content - in this blog post. For it, I made a poll, using blogger tools (that uses a Google service to create polls), where I was asking questions about "what would you do if you couldn't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content". The options were something like this:

• I don't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content
• If I couldn't do it, I would buy everything I now download
• If I couldn't do it, I would buy some things I now download
• If I couldn't do it, I wouldn' buy anything I now download anyway

I now came to my blog to see something else (don't ask me what, I can't remember), and I just noticed the big 404 you probably see on it:

I don't know why the poll was deleted, I heard nothing from Google regarding it, but I'm surely not going to quit doing this just because Google doesn't like my polls. No, I'm creating another poll. For the record, and I have nothing but my word on this, last time I've checked more than 40 votes where in it, and 0 of them were in the "I would pay for everything I download if I couldn't download it" option.

So, here's the poll, again. If you had voted previously, please vote again, and help spread the word... Thank you.

[UPDATE:] And then, the Google poll is back online. Just to be sure, please vote on both...

Microsoft acting as a censor?

One comment from this anti-DRM petition [1] says:

Oh and guys signing this petition.. try saying http://freethebbc.info on MSN - the message send will fail! Microsoft are filtering the website on UK MSN at least, so this has loads of attention ;-) keep signing!

Can please someone confirm this behaviour?

UPDATE: OK, seems that they "censor" everything that has .info and profile.php . How pathetic this "security measure" is?

[1] - http://freethebbc.info