No regular user will get punished for uploading banned pictures, as the list is not available to them.
Auto Approval uploaders will get punished since they have full access to the list.
With the exception of Titan Media which we fully ban, the picture ban for some studios only applies to stuff posted on the site and in the forums. You can include them in a torrent without issue.
I like "Swimmer" builds, but I didn't need this to tell me what it was called.
hXXp://extratorrent.com/article/681/closure+of+73+000+blogs+discussed+on+aussie+radio+show.html
Closure of 73,000 Blogs Discussed on Aussie Radio Show
Of course, it couldn’t remain unnoticed that 73,000 blogs got shut down. The news were everywhere, making international headlines, and recently Australia’s radio show “The Fourth Estate” introduced an interview with Drew Wilson on this issue.
The host of the show approached Wilson to discuss the situation after the reason of closing blogs was confirmed by Burst.net, which said it was terrorist related activity. During 17 minutes appearance he expressed his opinion on the question why the closure of 73,000 individual blogs had such a significant impact all over the globe.
The main issue he highlighted was that because it had happened in the US, there were already some implications when it came to hampering free speech, as it’s a highly valued freedom in the country. In addition, when combined with censorship online, it made a storm of controversy, as free speech is the very core basic freedom making the Internet tick.
Drew Wilson was also asked if this story could set a kind of precedent for the future of the digital world and he argued that it really hadn’t been given that Burst.net was the one pulling the plug on the operations of Blogetery. If it was the FBI that ordered the closure of the website in the first place, it could set a precedent, but it was more an administrative thing than anything else.
It doesn’t mean that Burst.net had been incompetent in any way. Imagine yourself a website admin or a host in the United States, facing the FBI saying that somebody or something under your watch seems to be fueling terrorist activities. What would you do in such stressful situation hearing your government knocking on the door?
On the other hand, it doesn’t justify the threat of censorship online, if you recall the recent news from Italy there the local government is clamping down on bloggers and journalists. And that one does have a chance to set a very bad precedent.
However, the rest of the hosting services and other discussion forums in the country should think over this case and decide what they would do if this happens to them. The incident should be edificatory in some way, and the companies are recommended to take the decisions in its light. Of course, it’s great to consider yourself an advocate of free speech, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the US entities have to operate within the frames of US laws.
hXXp://extratorrent.com/article/683/eff+launches+new+webpage+to+help+mass+lawsuit+targets.html
EFF Launches New Webpage to Help Mass Lawsuit Targets
EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) launched a new webpage titled “US Copyright Group vs. The People” which is aimed to help people understand the claims made against them more clearly and view possible ways out. The major intention of the source is to help the targets find legal counsel to help them.
The EFF has always represented public interest groups willing to help thousands of BitTorrent users who have appeared to be targets of a mass P2P lawsuit filed by the US Copyright Group.
To remind you, the USCG, a DC-based law firm, targeted initially over twenty thousand users, accusing them of illegally uploading the indie films “Far Cry,” “Gray Man,” “Uncross the Stars,” or “Call of the Wild 3D,” with adding the Academy Award-winning picture “The Hurt Locker” later, after convincing its producers to join the mass litigation. The law firm offered the targets quick $2500 settlements if they wanted to avoid trial.
Right after the start of the litigation, the EFF issued a call for arms looking for the lawyers willing to help people defend themselves. It later teamed up with Public Citizen and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in order to file briefs with DC court, asking the judges to quash subpoenas sent by the USCG. Their main argument was that the US Copyright Group had yet to prove that DC court had jurisdiction over the unidentified defendants.
Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation takes another step in its effort to help those accused by setting up a resource page intended to help people understand what they are being accused of and explore possible ways out. The page “USCG vs. the People” answers many questions asked by the users supposing they are listed in the USCG’s lawsuit or receiving the warning letters from the law firm. The list of lawyers interested in assisting is also posted on the page.
The EFF insists that the law firm is abusing copyright legislation trying to get quick paydays from users with scanty financial resources. The outfit has been concerned about this mass P2P lawsuit since it first emerged this spring, noticing at once that the USCG prefers to ignore or sidestep the fundamental legal protections all the defendants are supposed to be granted. As the copyright legislation is intended to be used largely against commercial infringers, it’s clearly not fair to shake out settlements from common users having few resources to defend themselves.
hXXp://extratorrent.com/article/685/riaa+justifies+spending+millions+to+collect+thousands.html
RIAA Justifies Spending Millions to Collect Thousands
The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) insists that tax returns make a wrong and misleading conclusion on its strategy of “suing-them-all,” as its major intent of defending the rights of musicians and making people to acquire the content legally is very successful.
Couple of weeks ago it was revealed that the industry has been spending millions of dollars every year to target file-sharers, while the fines they manage to recoup rarely exceed 2% of the total expenses.
The statistics say that the entertainment industry spent about $20 million annually recouping $400,000, and these are only figures from 2006 to 2008, so it’s unknown how much it spent in the previous decade, within the heydays of peer-to-peer networks.
After the public became aware of the figures and couldn’t praise the RIAA for spending so much money to gain so little success (considering that sales of legal content are still declining and peer-to-peer is still rampant), the Record Industry Association of America understood it’s time to defend the expenses.
The outfit argues that the figures revealed are misleading, because the cost of legal fees covers a wide range of costs, such as royalty litigation, DMCA warnings, and lawsuits against unauthorized file-sharing services. Moreover, very often the legal fees span over years, with any resulting victory being calculated later on.
The RIAA explains that drawing any larger conclusions about the efficiency of its anti-piracy attempts would be inaccurate and misleading if based on the single line in its tax documents. Their main goal is not to earn money for the rights owners, but to foster a respect for them and to increase awareness, forcing fans to buy the content legally. Looking from this point, the RIAA thinks its efforts make a real difference.
This explanation sounds rather reasonable, but the RIAA’s expenditures are still very high compared to the amount it recoups, and that is the reason why critics say the astronomically high penalties the industry usually seeks in the legal battle have nothing to do with real damages, but are rather targeted at sending a message to similar infringers.
The only conclusion both the industry and the file-sharers can draw out of this is that the RIAA spends too much on legal fees while recouping so little because it just scares tactics.
That's pretty cool for him to do that.
Well, just because they lean a certain way before they become a Supreme Court justice, doesn't mean they will continue that.
I saw this on the news in the UK and the guy from Google was to slimy for words.
The Google "spokesman" was more interested in doing a Google info-mercial than answering the reporter's questions.
The Supreme Court went against the will of the people in Loving v Virginia, by allowing interracial marriage. A majority of Americans supported banning interracial marriage at the time and now that support is virtually nil.
That being said, the Supreme Court is very much far right centric now, so I don't hold out much hope of a decision in our favor.
hXXp://extratorrent.com/article/675/italian+bloggers+in+danger.html
Italian Bloggers in Danger
If you aren’t Italian, the words “paragraph 29? will most likely mean nothing to you; but if you are, then you should know that it’s a part of a very controversial legislation putting the county’s blogging in danger.
Italian media seem to have been facing major challenges recently. Just another month the Italian press went on a 24h strike protesting so-called “gagging law,” intended to forbid publishing transcripts of listening devices and phone talks. This is combined alongside with anti-wiretapping legislation looking like a positive way to protect privacy. However, many consider the legislation a double-edged sword.
Lately, the protests arose in the Internet against resembling laws that are suspected to harm freedom of the media. For example, the Wiretapping Bill contains a provision in section 1, paragraph 29 saying that written journalists, including bloggers, could face penalties of up to 25,000 euros in case they fail to comply with complaints. In details, people responsible for information sites would be requested to correct posts (and also comments and whatever else there’s on the site) within 2 days from any complaint concerning the site content.
If you at least have a personal blog receiving the slightest feedback, you can instantly understand what kind of effect it would have on journalism in the Internet. You don’t like the content – just send a complaint and it will have to be removed. The Italian news sections like ours will undoubtedly die the next day, because even now if the site gets complaints of any news published, it’s in most cases about being anti-copyright and supporting pirates rather than artists. Once the law is enacted, the damaging effect would be seen at once, as the copyright owners will clamp down the pirate news with their complaints, arguing that the criticism is incorrect and the authors would have to either censor themselves completely or face penalties for “non-compliance.”
The critics also point out that there was supposed to be an amendment, suggesting to lengthen the time and lower the size of penalties ten times, but it never came to be.
Italy is now seeing a movement taking root named “No Gag Law to the Net”, arguing that the Article 1, paragraph 29 violates the free speech right. We’ll hope this kind of legislation neither becomes law in Italy nor spreads around the world.
hXXp://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/tot_killer_tough_guy_RVaUtbHJcYvTIC2JRgtn4M
'Tot killer' a 'tough' guy
The boyfriend of a Shinnecock Indian brutally beat her toddler son to death while trying to toughen him up Sunday night, according to cops.
Pedro Jones, 20, pleaded not guilty to a first-degree manslaughter rap yesterday in Southampton Town Justice Court.
Police said he punched the unidentified 17-month-old to death on the tribe's Southampton reservation. Jones told cops he was "trying to make him act like a boy instead of a little girl."
The victim's grandmother lashed out at Jones yesterday, shouting, "I hope you rot in hell!"
HOLY SHIT!!!! Up to $30,000 to get a boyfriend?!
The odd thing is they are a US that deals solely in $$$$, but they are using a UK bank to process their transactions.
You can find out more here;
hXXp://prop8trialtracker.com/2010/08/04/breaking-prop-8-ruled-unconstitutional/
The homophobes have already started the appeal process.
Asking for or trading invites is not allowed, per the rules.
I have no idea who 90% of them are.
It's a hit and miss sort of thing.
Not all people mind when you post their uploads to other sites, while others hate it with a passion. Just check to see if they said something in the torrent description about it. If they do not say in the description that they do not want you to do it, then go ahead and repost it elsewhere.
As for giving credit, this is another unclear situation. Most people that you get the upload from are not the original uploaders to the internet. While it's nice to ask for upload credit, I never do because I don't want my name associated with countless files floating around the internet so it's easier for me to get busted.
Using all capital letters is considered shouting and it's extremely rude.
I knew he was gay the minute I saw him on the show.
I seriously doubt he's only realized he's gay in the last few weeks.
The problem with this case is that if she was white and supported racism against blacks, she would have been thrown out and no one would have dared question that decision.
HOWEVER, because she hates fags, people are creaming that her rights are being taken away.
Here's an interesting article on the topic;
**Gay genetics
Straight, gay or bisexual, most of us believe that we were born that way. So is sexual orientation in our DNA? JV Chamary goes in search of the gay gene**
“WANTED! Gay Men with a Gay Brother,” reads the banner. It’s held aloft by Dr Alan Sanders and a group of colleagues from NorthShore University near Chicago who are attending a gay pride festival. They’re recruiting volunteers for a groundbreaking study that sets out to answer fundamental questions about who we are.
“We’re trying to locate genes that may influence variation in male sexual orientation,” Sanders says. Volunteers from over 700 families responded. Researchers asked them questions about their sexuality, the size and structure of their families, and took DNA samples. Sanders is now analysing that data and the results could tell us once and for all whether there’s such a thing as a ‘gay gene’.
“The people participating in our study are interested in contributing to this kind of scientific knowledge and want to understand at least part of how they came to be the way they are,” Sanders says.
The search for ‘gay genes’ goes back to 1993, when a US team led by Dr Dean Hamer described a region of DNA located on the X chromosome called Xq28. The region also goes by another name: GAY-1, a genetic marker linked to male homosexuality.
The discovery caused Hamer to be attacked from all sides. “Conservative, right-wing people hated it because they felt that it was saying that being gay is like being black, that it was in-born, that it would somehow ‘excuse’ gay people or give them more rights,” says Hamer. “On the other hand, gay people hated it too because, at that time, there were fears that the discovery would be misused to abort gay babies and wipe gay people off the face of the Earth.”
Although these fears remain, in recent years the search for ‘gay genes’ has become more accepted by the gay community, in no small part because a biological explanation would undermine arguments that being gay is a social or lifestyle choice. Conservative attitudes remain unchanged, however. “They continue to be vehemently opposed to any notion that homosexuality is something natural,” says Hamer.
Despite their objections, there’s a lot of evidence that homosexuality has a biological basis. While there hasn’t been much research on lesbians, there has been on gay men. For instance, identical twin brothers (siblings derived from the same fertilised egg) are more likely to both be gay than fraternal twins (twins that develop from separate eggs). The fact that identical twins have the same DNA and fraternal twins share 50 per cent suggests that male homosexuality is hereditary.
The gay gene
It was scrutinising family trees to see how homosexuality is inherited that led Hamer to the discovery of Xq28. Now chief of the gene structure and regulation section at the US National Cancer Institute, his study revealed a curious pattern: gay men tended to have more gay uncles and gay male cousins on their mother’s side of the family than on their father’s.“For geneticists that’s fascinating because it suggests it could be due to X chromosome linkage – those types of traits tend to run on the female side for males,” says Hamer. This is because males inherit their X chromosome from their mother.
To track down the DNA region linked to the gay trait, Hamer used a technique called ‘linkage mapping’, an approach that lets geneticists find a gene even when they don’t know what it does or where it’s located. Linkage mapping works because close relatives like brothers share not only a particular trait, such as homosexuality, but also the genes underlying the trait. When comparing bits of DNA from two brothers, the sequences will, on average, be the same 50 per cent of the time. So, if you study many pairs of gay brothers and find a DNA region that’s the same in more than 50 per cent of cases, it’s likely to be linked to homosexuality. In this case, Hamer compared the X chromosomes from 40 pairs of gay brothers, and Xq28 stood out.
Inheriting the gay version of Xq28 won’t necessarily make you homosexual. “Our studies showed that it significantly increased the odds of being gay, but it was not determinative,” says Hamer. “Many people who are gay don’t have any history of homosexuality in their families.” He points out that some heterosexual men in his 1993 study also had the so-called gay gene. A subsequent study in 1999 failed to replicate Hamer’s results and other researchers are sceptical that Xq28 is linked to homosexuality at all.
Big brothers, immune mothers
Many scientists believe that exposure to hormones during pregnancy heavily influences sexuality. Hormones are chemical messengers, released by certain cells to affect the growth and development of other cells in the body. During pre-natal development, for example, the sex organs in a foetus can recognise testosterone, which will switch on genes to make it male.Aside from a few superficial differences (among them penis and ring-finger length – both longer in homosexuals), gay and straight men’s bodies appear the same. The exception is homosexual men’s brains, which show remarkable similarities to the brains of heterosexual women, suggesting that sexual orientation depends on the effect hormones have on the developing brain.
But these two factors only go so far in explaining how homosexuality develops. “People assume that all of the biological influence on sexual orientation is either genes or hormones,” says sexologist Ray Blanchard from the University of Toronto. “They might account for the lion’s share of variance in sexual orientation, but it looks like there’s some other bit that requires a third biological mechanism.”
In 1996 Blanchard and Professor Tony Bogaert revealed a peculiar phenomenon: the more older brothers a boy has, the greater their chances of being homosexual. This ‘fraternal birth order effect’ meant that each subsequent brother increases the odds of being gay by 33 per cent. An only child has a two per cent chance, but with 10 brothers the odds are over 20 per cent. But why the increasing odds? Blanchard believes it’s related to how a mother’s body protects itself when pregnant with a son.
“There’s only one system in the mother that would have the ‘memory’ to know how many male foetuses she’s previously carried: the immune system,” says Professor Blanchard. According to his theory, a mother’s immune system keeps track of the number of sons she’s already had, producing antibodies to protect her against male-specific proteins entering her bloodstream, which often occurs during childbirth. As the mother’s level of immunisation increases with each son, so too do the chances of variation from typical sexual orientation as, in theory, the mother’s antibodies could cross the placenta and neutralise proteins that her son needs for normal sexual development.
Many of these male-specific proteins are found on the Y chromosome, DNA that’s foreign to females. “A lot of male-specific proteins are preferentially expressed in the testes and have a crucial role in sperm development,” says Blanchard. “Some are expressed in the foetal brain for reasons that no-one has established, but you wouldn’t expect them to be expressed without a reason.”
Blanchard believes that homosexuality is “100 per cent biological”, and estimates that the fraternal birth order effect accounts for 15-30 per cent of gay men in the population. So what explains the rest?
Fertile females
Professor Andrea Camperio Ciani at the University of Padova in Italy has tested various hypotheses by studying 100 families of gay men. Not only did he replicate Blanchard’s birth order effect, he also detected inheritance of homosexuality on the mother’s side, supporting Hamer’s idea of a gay gene on chromosome X. The maternal inheritance effect seems most important too.“Genetics explains 20-25 per cent for the moment,” says Camperio Ciani. “The rest is unknown. A part is environment; a part can be other genetic elements that we cannot perceive with our study.” In principle, the genetic component might even be the Xq28 region.
Regardless of which regions of DNA are linked to homosexuality, the very existence of ‘gay genes’ creates a Darwinian paradox. How would genes that cause homosexuality pass from one generation to the next, given that gay people reproduce less than heterosexuals? Natural selection opposes anything that might cause even a small reduction in the number of offspring you produce, so a gay trait would soon disappear from the gene pool. “If you carry a trait that reduces your fecundity [the number of offspring you produce] by 10 per cent, in seven to eight generations your trait and all your descendents disappear,” says Camperio Ciani.
The paradox was finally resolved by his 15-year-old daughter. After Camperio Ciani described the observed patterns in pedigrees of homosexuality – the effects of maternal inheritance and birth order – his daughter suggested that he re-check his data to see if the female relatives of gay men had more children on the mother’s side. When Camperio Ciani went back to the lab, that’s exactly what he found. “Mothers and aunts on the maternal line of homosexuals had around one-fifth to one-fourth more kids than the heterosexual comparison, and also than the paternal line.”
He thinks that the evolution of homosexuality is driven by a process called sexually antagonistic selection. It’s where a genetic factor confers an advantage when expressed in one sex, but incurs an evolutionary cost in the other. In this instance, the ‘gay genes’ don’t exist to make men homosexual, instead they’re a consequence of ‘fertility factors’ that help women reproduce.
Nipples are another example of a sexually antagonistic trait: they’re needed for feeding babies, but developing nipples in men is a waste of the body’s resources and allow errors leading to breast cancer.
The search for sexuality
Even if Camperio Ciani’s fecundity factors are the same as Hamer’s gay genes, it doesn’t tell us what the specific genes actually do. Hamer speculates the genes might boost the size or connections from parts of the brain used in reproduction – such as the hypothalamus – to make people more libidinous.Alan Sanders’s study at NorthShore University could finally reveal the identity and function of ‘gay genes’. Sanders, director of the Behavior Genetics Unit, is comparing DNA from gay brothers to find shared genes that underlie sexual orientation. He’s initially using linkage mapping to find candidate regions. The large sample size – over 700 families – provides huge statistical power for detecting regions significantly linked to homosexuality. Sanders will then use sequences from databases like the Human Genome Project to pinpoint which genes are in these regions.
So what happens if ‘gay genes’ are found? While they may confirm the idea that homosexuality has a biological basis, many people fear that the results could be used to discriminate against gay people. “It is a valid concern,” says Sanders. “People we talked to at gay pride festivals have designer-baby kind of worries – a genetic test employed in a pre-natal way, or for employment and insurance discrimination, maybe in the military too. It’s not just an issue in sexual orientation, but intelligence or disease screening .”
A test for gay genes also has a flipside: homosexual couples might exploit reproductive technology to have gay kids. “This has been a huge debate in other areas, like deaf parents wanting to have deaf children,” says Hamer, who has fathered a daughter with a woman from a lesbian couple. “One of them said, ‘If I had my choice, I’d select the sexual orientation of my child’. But this is all theoretical for now, as it’s not actually happening yet.”
Genes that influence our sexual orientation further fuel the debate over what makes us who we are. For Hamer at least, sexual orientation is determined at birth. “It’s mostly biological,” he says. “The way a person acts is altered by culture, society and individual choice, but that’s a different issue than the underlying deep-seated orientation.”
Dr JV Chamary is reviews editor of Focus
hXXp://www.bbcfocusmagazine.com/feature/life/gay-genetics