statism watch

You’re no longer even to be trusted with this kind of information. How long before the image of a building’s facade is copyrighted? How long before the public commons dissolves entire? Keep it up UK, show us how it’s done.

Flashback: Winnipeg police confiscate documentary filmmaker’s camera | Guardian reporter detained for taking picture of sea near Bilderberg conference | Police seizures of cameras prompts B.C. complaint | Police erased cellphone video of fatal shooting, witness alleges | Pre-Olympic transit ads encourage citizen surveillance | UK: Calling the police to account for anti-photography law | UK Terror Law To Make Photographing Police Illegal | Australian Citizen Journalist Charged for Filming Police under Anti-Terror Law | Charges laid after Winnipeg street blocked off for hours

Daily Mail
December 2, 2009

An amateur photographer taking pictures of Christmas lights was questioned by police under anti-terror laws.

Andrew White, from Brighton, was taking pictures in a busy town centre in nearby Burgess Hill when he was spotted and followed by two Police Community Support Officers.

They stopped him and asked why he had been taking pictures and if he was a professional photographer.

Mr White, 33, asked why they wanted to know and was told it was to do with counter-terrorism legislation.

Police said he was stopped for ‘taking too many photographs in a busy shopping area’.

The PCSOs demanded his personal details, including his name and address.

Mr White said: ‘I had nothing to hide so I just provided the details. Now I’m concerned about where those details are going to end up.

‘I only took one or two photos but even if I had taken more, who are they to say what is too many?

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Farewell, information transparency. At least temporarily. While it’s odd that Google was able to reach behind private paywalls to aggregate information, the idea is laudable – complete access to information. When you come right down to it, any idea or news story may be expressed by a number once you put it on the Internet. It’s a bitstream that has detached from physical objects, and this number could as easily be carved in stone, expressed (against all expectation) by the momentary lapping of waves in the middle of the ocean, or encoded on flash media. It certainly raises the question of whether ideas should be copyrightable at all when not banged into matter, but in either case the market will pass judgement on the news sites of Rupert Murdoch and his kind. High quality specialty information that could be enabling human progress if placed in the public domain (such as the content of industry and academic journals) has already suffered from arbitrary exclusion online, having been embargoed by similar paywall schemes for years. This journal suspects that in the end, this fight is more about maintaining a dying distribution business model than any real moral concern for a creator’s ownership of their ideas.

Flashback: FOX News owner’s media empire could block Google searches entirely | Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists” | Reuters Steps Up; Says Linking, Excerpting, Sharing Are Good Things For The News | Associated Press Tries To DRM The News | Should linking be illegal?

Jane Wardell, Associated Press
December 2, 2009

Company makes concession to increasingly disgruntled media industry

Google Inc. (GOOG-Q587.51-2.36-0.40%) is allowing publishers of paid content to limit the number of free news articles accessed by people using its Internet search engine, a concession to an increasingly disgruntled media industry.

There has been mounting criticism of Google’s practices from media publishers – most notably News Corp. chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch – that argue the company is profiting from online news pages.

In an official blog posted late Tuesday, Josh Cohen, Google’s senior business product manager, said the company had updated its so-called First Click Free program so publishers can limit users to viewing no more than five articles a day without registering or subscribing.

Previously, each click from a user of Google’s search engine would be treated as free.

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What are some of possible risks? In the past, success on the market and accumulation of capital would allow you to increase the volume of your trades, and thus influence the course of markets by funding (voting on) stocks you considered to be candidates for continued success. The hope of free market economists would have been for this to drive innovation, and so it has. This recent rise of high frequency and ‘ultra-high-frequency’ trading firms offers clients the additional power of always being able to get their say in first to the markets – for a price. The question occurs to one, does this additional power have any market utility? Is it positive, neutral, or negative to the transparency of markets? And if there are any risks, are they just part of a transitional phase as this technology spreads – as the article indicates, the barriers to entry in this market are little more than the ability to purchase a server farm, and hire some data mining stats grads willing to pore over stock trades. But (and it’s a big but) for the government connections and consequent heavy capital artillery of the largest Wall Street firms, there’s no coercion in any of these relationships, it’s all trades. The market utility of ever-faster trading could very well be to level the field of who’s benefiting from transaction fees. Or the one firm with the best real estate and most expensive supercomputer could stage an exchange coup by monopolizing its brokerage trade – similar to what the Federal Reserve accomplished by granting itself a monopoly in the US currency market. What do you think?

Flashback: Arrest Over Software Illuminates Wall St. Secret | The Lords of Time: Goldman Sachs and low-latency trading | Record quarterly profits and bonuses: Goldman Sachs makes out like a bandit on taxpayer’s dime | Goldman-Sachs: Pilfered trading code could be used to ‘manipulate markets’

Jonathan Spicer, Herbert Lash, Reuters
December 2, 2009

Inside the offices of Tradeworx, an emerging player in the secretive and controversial world of high-frequency trading, it’s dead quiet as staffers pore over the “tape,” financial industry speak for the record of the day’s transactions.

Many of the firm’s 30 employees are not yet 25. They were hired straight from college to ensure their thinking and work habits are untainted. Now they’re making Wall Street’s latest fortune, a fraction of a penny at a time.

The only clue that Tradeworx, a six-year-old hedge fund based in Red Bank, New Jersey, is a financial outfit at all are two giant screens that break up the monotony of white walls and grayish carpets. The physics and computer science graduates are crafting complex computer codes to exploit trading patterns revealed by the tape.

Tradeworx and other firms like it use such algorithms in the lightning-quick trading approach that is altering the landscape of U.S. markets, driving broker-dealers out of business and changing how money managers invest.

High-frequency trading now accounts for 60 percent of total U.S. equity volume, and is spreading overseas and into other markets. These traders stand ready to buy and sell shares at all times, providing the liquidity that keeps markets moving. As a result, trading is now cheaper and easier than ever.

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Flashback: Flaherty, USA say no to global financial tax, yes to continued ’stimulus’ at G20 | G20 to pledge continued ’stimulus’, examine international reserve fund | Aspiring government economists must reveal views on stimulus plan | Fund me or axe me, parliamentary budget officer says | Carney says G20 must stay the course on stimulus | G20 agrees to continue economic stimulus measures; Geithner shops international reserve accord | Budget officer ‘can’t tell’ if stimulus plan working | G8 leaders see no early end to stimulus | Flaherty looks for way to end stimulus | Harper lays out stimulus spending in progress report | Stimulus needed now, Bank of Canada says | US Congress reaches deal on economic stimulus package | $12B for infrastructure forms key pillar of stimulus package | Brace for a big, ‘comprehensive’ budget: Harper | Transport Minister Baird calls for dramatic action on stimulus package | Obama calls for ‘dramatic action’ on stimulus package | UK PM unveils ‘New Deal’ plan to create 100,000 jobs | Flaherty vows short-lived deficit, consults corporate chiefs on spending initiatives | Harper government plans deficits as deep as $30 billion | Britain to introduce massive stimulus package | Deficits ‘essential,’ Harper says | Flaherty lauds Keynesian global ‘economic stimulus’ strategies

Martin O’Hanlon, The Canadian Press
December 2, 2009

OTTAWA–The Harper government’s latest report card on economic stimulus spending is “fiction,” opposition parties say.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s update Wednesday boasts that the government has committed 97 per cent of this year’s stimulus spending, up from the 90 per cent it cited in September.

And it says about 8,000 of more than 12,000 approved projects are underway.

But the government considers a project underway as soon as it has been put up for tender, and the Liberals insist that’s not a proper assessment – it should be when construction starts.

In fact, they say, only about 12 per cent of the stimulus projects had started as of September.

“It’s full of weasel words,” Liberal finance critic John McCallum said of the update. “In terms of creating or saving jobs, it’s shovels in the ground and construction work that counts, not commitments.”

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Sadly, the reason isn’t some principled stand, but rather the same position as our Federal government has – they’re waiting for the USA to jump first.

Flashback: Jim Prentice: Implement A ‘North American Climate Change Regime’ | The great carbon credit con: Why are we paying the Third World to poison its environment? | U.N. ‘Climate Change’ Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy | U.N. Environment Head Wants Global Warming Tax

Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press
December 2, 2009

Throws a central plank of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s minority government into disarray

Australia’s Parliament defeated legislation to set up a greenhouse gas emissions trading system on Wednesday, throwing a central plank of the government’s plans to combat global warming into disarray.

The Senate, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s government does not hold a majority, rejected his administration’s proposal for Australia to become one of the first countries to install a so-called cap-and-trade system to slash the amount of heat-trapping pollution that industries pump into the air.

The 41-33 vote followed a tumultuous debate in which the conservative main opposition party at first agreed to support a version of the government’s bill, then dramatically dumped its leader and switched sides after bitter divisions erupted within the party.

The new leader, Tony Abbott, said Australia should not adopt an emissions trading system before the rest of the world.

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Flashback: Google PowerMeter to track home energy usage in Toronto test drive | ‘Smart meters’ set to boost prices, track your power consumption by time of day in Toronto | Google to enter market for energy use tracking

BBC News
December 2, 2009

Energy suppliers are to be responsible for installing smart meters in all households in the UK by 2020.

Plans for smart meters for millions of homes have been unveiled with trials suggesting the £8bn scheme may help people save £28 a year.

The Department for Energy and Climate Change wants to see 47 million meters in 26 million properties by 2020.

It is hoped the technology will help people cut their energy bills by paying more attention to usage.
Smart meters have a visual display allowing customers to see exactly how much electricity and gas they are using and relay the data to energy firms automatically.

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