Last week, Microsoft released the core of its .net framework under a permissive MIT License, and readjusted its clocks to fit the new millennium. Until recently, Microsoft’s approach toward open source was like its approach to everything else: do what others do, but with our flavor. While most of the world used three major open […]
Privacy By Design [2014] : Plan Your Apps
[Based on my WordCamp 2014 Presentation, Prezi here] 0. Take a look at this video about Woosh Water‘s project. Woosh provide an amazing service, where the ordinary municipal water fountains were replaced by hi-tech fountains, providing clean water for residents, with user experience and less of the dirt and homelessness affiliated with water fountains. Their […]
Israeli Waze hit with GPL class action lawsuit: plaintiff requests source code.
An interesting class action lawsuit has been brought in Israel against Waze, the Israeli navigation company who were acquired by Google last year. The class action raises an interesting question: according to the class action plaintiff, Mr. Roey Gorodish, Waze was first released as GPLv2 licensed software (which require to provide end-users with the original […]
PRISM? Come to Israel to study our surveillance state.
It seems that those who were astonished, abhorred, enraged or outraged from finding out that the National Security Agency (NSA) tracked millions of united states citizens and did so with the cooperation of numerous internet service providers, telecommunication companies and web-based hosting services had not even bothered to read the news in the last decade […]
Israeli Bill to Block Access to Gambling & Child Porn Websites
0. Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill that authorizes police officers to issue warrants to Internet service providers to block or restrict access to specific websites involved either in gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement. The bill itself proposes that such administrative procedures shall be clandestine and that court decisions shall be […]
Putin’s Pussy Scandal may Be Inspiration for Israel
0. A few months ago, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, arrived to Israeli for a brief visit. The President, who receives embarrassing support from Israel’s minister of foreign affair, Avigdor Liberman and almost magical admiration from Knesset member Anastasia Michaeli, also received a warm warm hug from the Israeli government’s leaders, and first and foremost, Benyamin […]
Legislating Surveillance: Was the biometric act needed?
0. Abstract. [This Wednesday I shall lecture at the LiSS working group conference, here is a draft of my lecture] From 2003, and until today, the Israeli Government has been working diligently in order to legislate the biometric database act and the orders and ordinances according to it. However, This biometric database is not the […]
Dr. Klein v. Proportzia: Google is liable for AdWords.
The ruling in C 48511-07 Dr. Dov Klein v. Proportzia ltd will most probably not be in any future cyberlaw schoolbook unless Google, one of the defendants (or actually three of them), will decide do appeal even though such a small amount (around 12,000 US$) was ruled against it and Proportzia. In brief, before we […]
Alis v. Rotter: Israeli District Court rules that linking is not direct infringement
A recent Israel court ruling stated that linking to copyright infringing content does not constitute a direct copyright infringement (CA 567-08-09 ALIS – Association for the protection of cinematic works v. Rotter.net Ltd) was quite an interesting one. Alis, the Israeli equivalent of the MPAA sought a popular forum website, Rotter.net, in regards to user […]
How-to avoid patent-trolling: The only way to win is fight.
Software patents are a problem, not a solution; that’s why when the Israeli Patent Registrar wanted to hear what the public thinks of them, we (at Hamakor, Israel’s Free Software and Open Source Association) wrote a detailed paper about it; in the end, the Israeli Patent Registrar gave a final decision stating that software by […]