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The spam sending company e360Insight lost the court case where they filed a suit against Spamhaus, after they have been included in their block lists. On their website, they have posted the following:

“Today’s ruling is a devastating loss of personal freedom for all U.S. citizens. If the court cannot prevent Spamhaus from violating its order, then Spamhaus will continue to censor and control the email messages Americans can receive.”

Since Spamhaus is based in UK and e360Insight in the US makes it even more amusing. It’s nice to see that good things actually happens these days.

For years and years big companies have accumulated vast amounts of documents and other types of information. It is of course assumed that the documents will remain readable for a long period of time, but since most companies use a proprietary document format where the Microsoft Word document is the leading standard, one can not be certain of being able to read these documents further down the road.

Document management for an individual or a small company is probably a minor issue, and should it be necessary to convert documents down the road it can probably be done given enough manual labor and time set aside for it. Big companies however, have a vast amount of documents which makes this inconceivable as a reasonable approach.

Other services throughout the society does not have this deficiency, and take chocolate ice-cream for example. If one is not satisfied with the current supplier of chocolate ice-cream, just switch to one who can provide a more appealing option while still retaining the o-so-delicious chocolate flavor. Running Microsoft Windows on a computer is very common, and if a computer does not meet one’s standards, it is just a matter of acquiring another computer and continue running Windows on the new machine as usual.

Why can this not be the case with documents?

Why is it impossible for me to write a document in Microsoft Office and if I later find out that I no longer have access to Office or can’t use it, not be able to open the document using another word processor?

Of course you can, using the standardized OpenDocument format. The problem is that its support is not widespread enough and the number one reason is that Microsoft Office does not currently support it out of the box. This will probably not change anytime soon, but it is still important to get the word out to people. These people in turn affect more people, which in turn may affect businesses, public working groups and the government.

In time we will hopefully have a widespread format in use which anyone can read, regardless of their software platform or having enough money to pay for licenses and software.

• ODF alliance
• OpenDocument fellowship

The US has just passed a bill banning banks to approve payments to online gambling sites.

Shares in PartyGaming, which rakes in nearly $4 million a day from its 19 million customers, fell 58 percent by 0905 GMT.

Read more at ABC news.

A journalist at the Swedish news website Aftonbladet has just published an article stating that the member lists of the Swedish pirate party has been leaked. The spokesman Rickard Falkvine could not confirm or deny the accusations, but if they are true, it could lead to a fallout of members and a general distrust of the party. The author of the article on Aftonbladet states that the server may have been hacked, but there is still no proof of this fact. Other news papers have contacted Rickard and asked about this list. They have said that Mikael Viborg had this list on a computer seized by the police in the recent raid on the PRQ premises. If this is true, those lists have been leaked from the police which could make this an even greater scandal.

According to Swedish law, stealing member lists from a political party is extremely serious and may lead to a prison sentence. That is of course a very good thing, since if these lists really have leaked, they will contain names, social security number, phone number, address etc. of all members. There is a thread on the Pirate party forum where this is discussed.

I will update the post when there is more information available.

Earlier today, the servers at The Pirate Bay were seized by the police.

“…The police right now is taking all of our servers, to check if there is a crime there or not (they are actually not sure),” ThePirateBay.org spokesperson “brokep” told Slyck.com.

More can be read at the following sites:

• Slyck news
• Digg
• TV4 (Swedish)

I will post an update later when I have more information.

Google video has a program about the starving children in North Korea. Aid from the Red Cross is sold in the black market, and other horrible things are shown. Do boycott North Korea now for their idiotic behavior!