Business

Changes to business digitisation brings

  • Infosecurity Europe Report: Identity Theft For The Price Of A Ticket in UK

    Identity Theft For The Price Of A TicketResearch carried out on by Infosecurity Europe has revealed that 92% of people were willing to freely dish out all the personal information needed to steal their identity in exchange for the chance to win a theatre ticket.

    The study was conduced on the streets of London of as part of a survey into identity theft.

    The researchers asked passers-by questions about their theatre going habits, telling them that by taking part in the survey they would be entered into a draw for theatre ticket vouchers worth £20.

    In a cunning piece of mind-mending double-think deception, the pedestrians were asked seemingly innocent questions about their attitudes to going to the theatre, sneakily interspersed with questions to find out the details needed to steal their identities, such as date of birth and mothers maiden name.

    The survey of 200 people on High streets across London was designed to act as a “wake up call” to highlight how easy it is for fraudsters to use social engineering to carry out identity theft.

    By revealing how easily people can be duped into giving out personal information, it is hoped that the experiment will raise awareness of the need to be very careful about the information people give to complete strangers, either face-to-face, by post or online.

    Researchers started off asking people their names – a reasonable enough question if someone is potentially going to send you freebie vouchers – and every person surveyed gave their names.

    Next, the researchers dipped into their evil bags’o’deception and devised a simple yet effective means of finding out personal information.

    People were asked a series of questions about their views on the theatre in London, with researchers asking if they knew how actors came up with their stage name.

    Identity Theft For The Price Of A TicketWhen they were told that it was a combination of their pets name and mothers maiden name, they were asked what they thought their stage name would be. Like a bunch of chumps, ninety four percent (94%) of respondees then blabbered out their mother’s maiden name and pet’s name.

    Next up, researchers were tasked with finding out the address and post code of their ‘victims’.

    And, once again, they were like putty in their evil, plotting hands.

    Researchers simply asked for people’s address details so that vouchers could be mailed to them if they won. And like sheep to the slaughter, 98% of those asked obediently barked out their full address and post code.

    Next up, the researchers managed to find out the name of their interviewee’s first school by asking, “Did you get involved in acting in plays at school?” followed by, “What was the name of your first school?”

    Once again, almost all those asked (96%) gave the name of their first school.

    This information, along with the name of a person’s mother’s maiden name, are key pieces of identity information used by many banks.

    Finally, the researchers said that in order to prove they had carried out the survey they needed the interviewee’s date of birth. 92% duly handed over the information along with their home phone number “in case there was a problem delivering the vouchers”.

    At the end of a three minute survey, the researchers were armed with sufficient information to open bank accounts, go on a wild spending spree with credit cards, or even to start stealing their victim’s identity.

    Identity Theft For The Price Of A TicketIncredibly, the researchers did not give any verification of their identity, offering only a trusty clipboard and the offer of the chance to win a voucher for theatre tickets.

    Claire Sellick Event Director for Infosecurity Europe who took part in the research said, “For the past 10 years we have endeavoured to highlight many of the common IT security concerns and vulnerabilities – such as information breaches via employees and consumers.

    This survey showed how easy it is to steal a person’s identity and breach a company’s security – security is only as good as the awareness of the people it protects.”

    Chris Simpson, head of Scotland Yard’s computer crime unit, agreed that the results of the survey were disturbing, commenting: “Preventing the theft of your own identity is relatively simple, but it relies on the individual taking steps to protect themselves i.e. restricting the people to whom you reveal sensitive personal data (whether in the physical or virtual context); shredding or destroying personal correspondence before disposing of it and never sharing passwords to access computer systems.”

    The Home Office reports that more than 100,000 British people every year suffer identity fraud, with online scams such as phishing, forged emails and spoofed Web pages a growing problem.

    There is a happy ending to this story however: all the information collected was destroyed by Infosecurity Europe but – bless ’em – they honoured their word about the draw and three lucky winners were selected at random and sent theatre ticket vouchers.

    Identity Theft UK (Home Office)
    Infosecurity Europe
    Identity theft affecting one in four UK adults (silicon.com)

  • Windows XP Home Edition N: MS and EU Finally Agree Nomenclature

    Microsoft Agrees To Implement EU's Windows ChangesMicrosoft has agreed – with all the enthusiasm of a child being made to eat spinach – to adopt all the “main changes” requested by the European Commission to its new version of Windows without Media player components.

    The company were found guilty by a court in 2004 of breaking EU monopoly laws, with the ruling compelling Microsoft to sell a stripped down version of Windows XP without all the embedded Media player widgets.

    “Earlier today we contacted the Commission and have informed them that we have accepted all the main changes they have requested we make to the version of Windows without Media Player,” grumbled Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s associate general counsel for Europe.

    According to Gutierrez, Microsoft will make several modifications to the OS including technical changes to registry settings, removing references in product documents and packaging that warn certain products won’t work without Media Player and creating a software package allowing consumers to replace the absent media files.

    In what some may think was a deliberate move to make the reluctantly-created product sound as appealing as last night’s kebab, Microsoft wanted to call the new version of Windows XP “Windows XP reduced Media Edition”.

    The Commission was having none of it, forcing the software giant to use the name, “Windows XP Home Edition N”.

    Microsoft Agrees To Implement EU's Windows ChangesHoracio Gutierrez, a lawyer for Microsoft, was clearly not too happy, telling Reuters that the company has “some misgivings about the chosen name, as we fear it may cause confusion for consumers about the product, but we will adopt the Commission’s name in order to move forward and accelerate the pace of the implementation process.”

    Gutierrez added that the new version would be available to European consumers within a “matter of weeks”.

    Microsoft hasn’t finished battling with the Commission, as they are yet to comply with another part of the EU judgment which stipulates that the company must open up access to server protocols.

    Lawyers are wrangling over terms of the license which was prohibitive to open source software makers.

    Microsoft Agrees To Implement EU's Windows ChangesAnd there’s more! Microsoft are also in disagreement with the EU over plans to appoint a trustee to monitor Microsoft’s compliance (or the complete lack of) – if the company fail to comply with the Commission’s decisions, they could face a daily slapdown of up to US$5 million – the equivalent of a cup of coffee in Bill Gates’ world.

    Microsoft
    EU

  • AFP Sues Google Over News Copyright

    AFP Sues Google Over News CopyrightA large question mark hangs over the future of aggregated news sites supplied by Web companies such as Google after it was revealed that Agence France-Presse had sued the world’s most popular search engine for alleged copyright infringement.

    Google had been making the headline, summaries, and thumbnail photos of news stories available to everyone via a search function. Clicking on the story would then take users to the full story and photos on the original site.

    It was this practice that set AFP into a giant hissy fit and before you could say “avocat”, the French news agency were filing a law suit in a Washington court.

    The action sought damages and interest of at least US$17.5 million dollars (£9m, €13) and an interdiction on the publication of its text and photos without prior agreement.

    “Without AFP’s authorisation, defendant is continuously and wilfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP’s photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News Web pages,” AFP huffed and puffed in their lawsuit.

    The news agency added that it had already asked Google to stop using its copyrighted work, but that the cheeky monkeys “continued in an unabated manner to violate AFP’s copyrights”.

    Since the law suit was announced, Google has embarked on the process of removing all AFP content, but has not released a schedule for when the removal will be complete.

    Already some pundits are questioning the wisdom of AFPs litigious action, with the Political Gateway Web site serving up a damning article denouncing the ‘stupidity’ of the press agency:

    AFP Sues Google Over News Copyright“AFP has over 600 online clients using their news services, sites like Political Gateway. Being blacklisted by the number one search engine in the world is enough to make a news site immediately drop AFP and go to another news service like AP, Reuters, UPI, and the like. We know this to be true because Political Gateway is looking at options right now.

    AFP will lose all its online clients except Yahoo.com (which is a search engine itself). However, Yahoo also syndicates its news out via RSS or ‘XML’ feeds. RSS allows webmasters to place news headlines on their site. This would be an offense to AFP and result in suing of Yahoo.

    When the dust settles we believe AFP, the oldest news organization in the world, will have lost most of their online clients, their reputation, and face the worst Internet backlash a news service has ever encountered.

    As of this week, all AFP news information will be deleted from Political Gateway and hundreds of other sites in protest against the stupidity of AFP.”

    The Google News service was launched in 2002 with the site – still in beta – gathering stories and images from the Web and making them freely available to everyone.

    With Google making the vast majority of its revenue through online advertising, the news service looks to be an important sector in the increasingly competitive online arena.

    If other press agencies follow AFPs litigious route, we could see a premature end to this fledgling service.

    We hope not.

    Agence France-Presse
    Google news
    “Google shows AFP who is boss” (PoliticalGateway.com)

  • UK Is Fourth Most Digitally-Aware Nation In Europe

    UK Is The Fourth Most Digitally-Aware Nation In EuropeThe UK’s mass adoption of digital TV and broadband has helped make the country the fourth most digitally-savvy nation in Europe, according a new report by Jupiter Research.

    Calculated using 40 different variables including Net use, digital TV adoption, wireless, mobile and digital device usage, the European Digital Life Index revealed that consumers adopt different digital products and services in different countries.

    Not surprisingly, the digi-savvy Scandinavian countries Sweden, Denmark and Norway came out top in the report, with Greece deemed the digital dunce, rating a lowly 17th place in the index.

    “The European Digital Life Index demonstrates that digital lifestyles are common today, but across Europe there is no single digital lifestyle,” said Nate Elliott, Jupiter analyst.

    He went on to predict that the trend for gadgets and technologies, such as digital video recorders (DVR), broadband, and video-on-demand will continue across Europe.

    Currently, more than six million UK households have broadband Net access and that figure is expected to rise to with 50% of all UK net users by the middle of 2005.

    Although the UK is currently dragging its boots in terms of broadband speeds compared to other countries, faster technologies – such as NTL’s ADSL2+ high speed – are expected to significantly improve access speeds.

    UK Is The Fourth Most Digitally-Aware Nation In EuropeUK consumers will need that super-fast connectivity if they wish to enjoy bandwidth-hungry services such as high-definition TV (HDTV) and video-on-demand, already popular in France and other European countries.

    In a separate survey by GMIPoll last week, it was revealed that the appetite for technology, gizmos and gadgets shows no sign of abating around the world.

    The poll of 20,000 people in 20 countries found that 59% slavishly desired more technology, with the computer being the “must-have” gadget for most people (75%).

    The trusty old TV set came in at second place (67%), with mobile phones ranked at third position with 54%.

    According to the survey, the most popular choice of gadget for 2005 was the digital camera, with nearly 40% choosing this over wireless, home printing and DVR technologies.

    UK Is The Fourth Most Digitally-Aware Nation In EuropeIn Britain, however, only 25% of Britons said a digital camera would be their top gadget purchase of the year. Almost a quarter, 22%, said they would be buying some sort of wireless device with the largest percentage – 42% – declaring that they would be buying something “other”.

    This mysterious “other” result probably reflects the growing consumer interest in digital music players or gaming devices like the Nintendo DS, Sony’s PSP and Gizmondo, but seeing as the survey didn’t bother to ask them that, they could be hell bent on buying electronic cuckoo clocks for all we know.

    GmiPoll

  • Yahoo Buys Flickr

    Yahoo Buys FlickrYahoo has whipped out its wildly wedgified wallet and snapped up the online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after launching a beta test of its new blogging tool.

    Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers, PDAs and camera phones, create their own photo albums, post photos to blogs, and store, sort, search and share your photos online.

    Joanna Stevens, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, confirmed the deal Sunday: “We look forward to working with them for their innovation and product development across the Yahoo Network in the coming months,” she said.

    Stevens said Flickr will remain a standalone site for now. The company’s employees, however, will have to up sticks to Sunnyvale later this year.

    Yahoo’s existing photos hosting and sharing service, Yahoo Photos, will gain features from Flickr, although the two services will remain separate “for the foreseeable future.”

    Yahoo Buys FlickrThere will be some early integration, however, with the ability to log into Flickr using a Yahoo ID and password.

    According to Caterina Fake, Flickr’s vice president of marketing and community, users of the company’s free and paid-for services will get more space, while prices for professional accounts are expected to fall.

    This announcement comes less than a week after Yahoo announced Yahoo 360. This service combines a new blogging tool, along with long-established Yahoo products such as instant messaging, photo storage/sharing and Internet radio.

    The service also includes social networking tools for sharing recommendations about places to eat, favourite films, fab music, great clubs (like London’s Offline, for example!) and so on.

    The acquisition of Flickr (and parent company Ludicorp Research & Development) and the development of the Yahoo 360 service reflects a growing interest in social networking and blogging services.

    Microsoft added a blog product for its MSN Web service in December, called MSN Spaces. Google, meanwhile, owns the hugely successful Web log service Blogger and social networking site Orkut.

    Flickr
    Yahoo 360

  • Ask Jeeves Sold To Diller’s InterActive Corp?

    InterActive Corp Set To Buy Ask JeevesThe wires are buzzing with rumours that Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp (IAC) is set to buy the Internet search engine service Ask Jeeves for almost $2bn.

    Ask Jeeves is currently the fifth-largest search-engine provider on the Internet and the company also owns the popular ask.com, Bloglines and Excite Web sites.

    In the UK, Ask Jeeves is the seventh most popular search site with 1.9 per cent of total searches, dwarfed by Google who weigh in with a mighty 63 per cent of total searches.

    IAC already owns assorted Web properties including CitySearch, Expedia, Hotels.com, TicketMaster, dating site Match.com and the Home Shopping Network.

    CitySearch offers localised search results for businesses, bars, cinemas and restaurants.

    The reported US$1.9 billion price tag is something like 35 times AskJeeves’ 2004 earnings from continuing operations of US$52.4 million, and is 27 times its 2004 pro forma earnings from continuing operations of US$71.1 million (this excludes items like depreciation and amortisation).

    About US$1.2 billion of the purchase price will be in cash, the New York Times reported (although we don’t think they mean used wads of dollars stuffed in suitcases).

    Today’s expected announcement shows that search sites are still attracting investors and that there’s rich pickings to be gained with Microsoft recently following Google and Yahoo into paid-for-search advertising.

    InterActive Corp Set To Buy Ask JeevesWe tried to check the story by visiting Ask Jeeves and typing in, “are you being bought by InterActive Corp?”

    Disappointingly, the search engine failed to find the answer.

    AskJeeves
    InterActive Corp

  • 3G: Adventures In Compelling Content – Pt 3

    3G Networks Still Missing Compelling Content - Pt 3 With a lucrative mobile market hungry for content, it’s not surprising to find a host of companies getting their thinking caps on.

    Conker Media, Mersey TV’s digital development and production division, has already created mobile content for teen-tastic TV soap Hollyoaks, but it’s aware of the challenge ahead:

    “It’ll be interesting to see whether we can develop something which is effectively stand-alone and which doesn’t have a TV property with it,” said Lee Hardman, head of Conker Media in an interview with Peter Keighron at Broadcastnow.

    “If you can crack that it will be seen as a breakthrough.”

    Conker’s latest idea is “textual intercourse” (stop tittering at the back) which gives new writers and directors the opportunity to tell a story on slides with 160 characters.

    “In a strange way it’s going back to quite traditional storyboarding,” says Hardman. “I think it’s going to require somebody with good storytelling skills – traditional skills – in order to get the audience’s attention five days a week, 52 weeks a year.”

    Last year, Nokia introduced its “Nokia Shorts” competition which invited ‘film-makers’ to enter movies created on consumer level digital video cameras.

    The shorts had to be no longer than 15 seconds long, with the winning entries being screened at the Raindance festival, a leading British independent film event.

    The winning filmmaker was given the opportunity to make a longer film with a professional crew and a training course at Raindance.

    3G Networks Still Missing Compelling Content - Pt 3 In addition, the winner and two runner-ups each received filmmaking training courses courtesy of Raindance.

    Meanwhile, Channel 4 has commissioned cutting-edge animators Empire Square – creators of the Gorillaz music project – to create a series of 90-second to three-minute clips to work on a mobile platform.

    In an interesting reversal, the animations will also be shown on TV channel E4.

    Although it’s clear that there’s no lack of enthusiasm from creatives to get involved with the mobile industry, the big problem for the network owners is how to extract some revenue out of the content.

    Although ventures like the ‘Nokia Shorts’ competition are great for attracting favourable PR and showcasing the potential of 3G, they’re not going to get the network cash tills ringing.

    In the next instalment, we’ll look at the problem of raising revenue streams from mobile content.

    Nokia Shorts
    Raindance Festival
    Conker Media
    broadcastnow (reg required)

  • Cell Phone Porn On The Way Up

    Cell Phone Porn On The Way UpThrill-seeking mobile phone users around the world slapped out US$400 million on pornographic pictures and video in 2004 – an amount that is expected to rise to US$5 billion by 2010, according to a report by research group Strategy Analytics.

    Surfers seeking saucy smut contributed to the fast growth of the adult entertainment sector on the World Wide Web.

    Media industries were fast to take advantage of the new medium, with porn connoisseurs among the first to get high-speed Internet access for downloading X-rated films.

    In the squinty-small screen of mobile communications, however, pornography might not do as well, with high telecommunications charges and tiny displays reducing the thrill.

    “In 2010 we estimate that expenditure on mobile adult content will represent just 5 percent of total end-user spend on mobile content services,” said analyst Nitesh Patel.

    “We expect services that are built around sports, music and media to perform better, because they appeal to a wider audience of users,” he added. In addition, there is value in offering news bulletins or a recently scored goal on a mobile screen.

    Cell Phone P0rn On The Way UpThe US$5 billion forecast for 2010 represents a huge upward shift from Strategy Analytics’ earlier predictions, with the company noting that adult entertainment businesses are aggressively building services and customers appear happy to shell out for them.

    Playboy and rival Private Media Group have ramped up their offerings, and many mobile phone makers are busy implementing strategies to make sure no subscribers aged under 18 years will be able to access X-rated services.

    Additionally, the growth in colour screens (one in every two phones sold in 2005, predicted to rise to four out of five by 2010) along with enhanced video capability is expected to increase the ‘value’ of mobile-delivered porn.

    Elsewhere, anecdotal evidence from countries that have a technological edge shows a throbbing interest from consumers, with adult content registering over 23% of the traffic over South Korea’s SK Telecom in late 2003.

  • Lose friends The Apple Mac Way

    Lose friends And Disenfranchise People The Apple Mac WayEven the most die-hard Mac hugger is having problems defending the company’s recent litigious spree, where Apple seems determined to become ‘The Man’ and use its corporate power to crush all before it.

    We find this action particularly strange given the inevitable rise of competition in the portable digital media space. As we’ve saw at CeBIT, the Chinese and Taiwanese MP3-player producing companies have embraced design to good effect. Apple’s iPod crown for the future is now a lot less certain, and given this we’d have thought this would be a time they would be trying to maintain their current friends and make new ones. Instead they appear hell bent on irritating everyone.

    First off, there was the case of the bloggers at Apple Insider, PowerPage and Think Secret, mercilessly pursued though the courts after they leaked snippets of Apple’s future plans to their excited audience of Mac users.

    Wielding their big white shiny Apple Mac stick, the company successfully won a judgement from the Santa Clara County Superior Court forcing the bloggers to admit to their sources.

    The court also granted Apple powers to root around the blogger’s e-mail records in their near-religious quest to track down the culprit.

    A wave of international protests followed the ruling by Judge Kleinberg that the laws covering the divulging of trade secrets “outweighed considerations of public interest” with the Guardian newspaper arguing “Was Enron’s off-balance sheet funding structure a “trade secret”, for instance?”

    Business Week was equally unimpressed: “Apple has the right to use the legal system to help it punish those who have misappropriated its trade secrets, or to identify employees or partners who may have broken confidentiality agreements.

    Lose friends And Disenfranchise People The Apple Mac WayBut going after the Web sites or forcing them to divulge their sources will put the company in the middle of a freedom-of-speech firestorm that will be a costly distraction for management, and could tarnish the Apple brand.”

    Not surprisingly, the EFF was also deeply concerned about the ruling:

    “We’re disappointed that the trial court ignored the Supreme Court’s requirement that seeking a journalist’s confidential sources be a ‘last resort’ in civil discovery,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Instead, the court asserts a wholesale exception to the journalist’s privilege when the information is alleged to be a trade secret.”

    “This is a broad-brush ruling that threatens journalists of all stripes,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.

    Writing in The Scotsman, long time Mac user Stewart Kirkpatrick was equally unchuffed, “In California at least, Apple has destroyed journalism by undermining the most vital tool of our trade: the ability to receive information without having to shop the person who told you.”

    Meanwhile, Mac was busy flexing its bully boy corporate muscle in the UK, successfully squashing a smaller company holding prior rights on the iTunes.co.uk domain.

    The company registered the name in November 2000 – four years before Apple launched its UK service – with the URL redirecting to their music search engine on CyberBritain.

    Apple initiated the complaint because it secretly applied for a UK trademark for the name iTunes on October 27 2000. This application was confidential – known only by Apple, its filing agents and Her Majesty’s Patent Office – and was not published in the TradeMarks Journal until December 6 2000.

    After being asked to issue a decision on a complaint through its Dispute Resolution Service, UK domain service registry Nominet has decided that the domain should be handed to Apple.

    The owner of iTunes.co.uk, Benjamin Cohen, expressed his frustration. “I must admit that we were not expecting this decision by Nominet’s appointed expert. Apple chose to launch the UK brand of ‘itunes’ within the UK with the knowledge that we had owned the name for three years before their US launch and four years before their launch within the UK,” he said.

    “We now face two decisions, whether to appeal to Nominet directly or refer the matter to the High Court. Both of these options are expensive and are not necessarily within the means of a small business. However, the recent High Court victory of Phone4U.co.uk against the major retailer, Phones4U – owned by the Caudwell Group – leads me to think that our case may be extremely strong.”

    It’s clear that the Apple self-destruct PR offensive isn’t over yet, with The Register reporting the mysterious case of Google’s vanishing Mac OS X-style interface.

    Designed as a tribute to all things Mac, a software engineer had replaced the main text navigation bar on the Google home page with a Mac OS X-style dock sporting a row of eight icons zooming and shrinking as the mouse hovered over them.

    The coder was clearly so enamoured with Mac that he included a loving poem above the copyright notice on the Google page: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you”. (sickbag please!)

    Sadly, it appears that litigious Apple don’t find anything funny these days, and the design promptly vanished off the Web completely with neither Apple nor Google offering any explanation.

    It does seems strange that a company that prides itself for ‘thinking differently’ seems to have embarked on a mission to appear as unpleasant, as ruthless and as willing to crush the little fella as its Redmond neighbours.

    With a scathing report in The Guardian concluding that Apple is effectively, “asking to be loathed and subverted”, some pundits are wondering why Apple should actively seek to alienate the people who are its fans and customers.

    Put simply, such actions don’t make much business sense.

    Google’s X Files disappear
    Apple is ‘real loser’ in Think Secret battle
    How Apple lost its groove
    Nominet backs Apple iTunes domain claim
    Blogger lawsuit peels Apple’s shine

  • Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 Legislation

    Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 LegislationMP3-player supplier Jens of Sweden and Jonas Birgersson (founder of broadband supplier Bredband2) have reported the Anti-Piracy Agency to the Swedish Data Inspection Board (SDI).

    The complaint to the SDI was precipitated by the Anti-Piracy Agency’s introduction of computer software enabling them to register thousands of Swedes on a daily basis (IP-numbers and surf behaviour on P2P-networks), register illegal behaviour and prompt the ISP’s to send warning letters or add them to the 136 complaint cases with the police.

    Jens and Jonas have filed their complaint on the basis that it is illegal to archive information that purports to, and can be linked to, individual data (i.e. IP-numbers that can be linked to subscribers) and to try to link this to criminal actions.

    Perhaps getting a little carried away, Jens and Bredband have labelled the authority’s “vigilante behaviour” to be “the equivalent of Stasi registration”.

    The accusers see the current “witch-hunt” and the severe breach of personal integrity as a serious problem, which threatens the growth of digital media in the long run.

    Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 LegislationBredband2 has already received queries from the police based on the agency’s registrations.

    “As society becomes ever-more digitised and everyday activities are increasingly being pursued over the Internet, individuals need strong integrity protection,” says Jonas Birgersson, CEO of Bredband2.

    “We take our lead from the serious attitude of the former national telephone company, Televerket, regarding ‘tele-confidentiality’.

    One of the cornerstones of a functioning society is faith in authorities and businesses, with the principles of transparency for authorities and integrity for individuals.

    Is it right for a lobby organisation to undermine this by hunting and registering thousands of citizens every day – which they freely admit in their press releases?

    Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 LegislationBesides, we think that terrorizing and persecuting the users is the wrong method. Instead, we should popularise and support all the great Swedish companies that develop unique digital services. Stop the witch-hunt and support the legal alternatives.”

    Jens Nylander, founder and CEO of Sweden’s largest supplier of digital media players, Jens of Sweden was equally outraged:

    “We have every opportunity for explosive growth, cheaper products and new jobs in the digital media, but that won’t happen until a handful of giant companies stops trying to tie down consumers to their own products and prices with heavy-handed methods.

    The Anti-Piracy Agency’s method of spying on, secretly registering and threatening people may have been encouraged in the former East Germany, but must be banned in modern Sweden.”

    In Sweden, the Data Inspection Board is responsible for enforcing the Personal Data Act of 1998, which heavily restricts the right of individual players to register citizens without their express consent.

    Jens Nylander and Jonas Birgersson have contacted the Data Inspection Board, which encouraged them to register a formal complaint.

    Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 LegislationThe Swedish police have prosecuted 136 people for illegal file sharing after complaints from the AP-agency, and the agency has vowed to increase the number.

    The complaint will be turned in within a week.

    Jens of Sweden
    Swedish Data Inspection Board
    Bredband2