A Just Reward?

Baronet's son awarded £5.60 in £2.5m family castle sale row

The son of a baronet embroiled in a bitter legal dispute with his father over the sale of the family's £2 million estate was yesterday awarded just £5.60 a year by the High Court.

Philip Howard, 51, had sued his father Sir John Howard-Lawson, 78, four times in eight years over the sale of the 13th century Corby Castle estate in north Cumbria 18 years ago.
The business consultant launched his latest legal fight against his elderly father earlier this year over claims he had been duped out of his rightful “inheritance”.
The estate had been in the family for 400 years before it was sold owing to financial difficulties.
The Grade I listed mansion, set in park and farmland on the bank of the River Eden near Carlisle, was bought in 1611 by William Howard.
He was the third son of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who was beheaded for treason under Elizabeth I in 1572 after scheming to marry Mary, Queen of Scots.

When It’s Not Your Day?

French Basketball?

What A Shame!

EU officials: We were hacked at Web conference

A European official says her staff members were hacked when they joined her for a conference on Internet security in Azerbaijan.

European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said in a blog post Saturday that her advisers' computers were compromised as they attended a meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Baku, the Azeri capital.

Her spokesman, Ryan Heath, said the attack occurred while they were in their hotel.

Heath said he and a colleague got messages from Apple Inc. warning them that their computers had been accessed by an unauthorized party, something he said he believed was an attempt to spy on him.

"I'm presuming it was some kind of surveillance," he said in a telephone interview. "What we're going to do is to get the computers forensically analyzed to see what if anything was taken out of them."

He declined to say who he thought might be responsible.

Kroes was critical of her hosts when speaking before the forum on Wednesday, attacking the Azeri government for allegedly spying on activists through the Internet and "violating the privacy of journalists and their sources."

In her blog post Saturday, Kroes cited the hacking as one of several violations which she said highlighted the "harsh" reality of political life in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich nation on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Kroes said that Azeri authorities reneged on a deal to allow her to see political prisoners, and she claimed that activists at the Internet conference were harassed.

"So much for openness," she wrote.

Get A Life!!

Lord of the Rings fan builds life-size Hobbit hole out of 2,600 balloons

Lord of the Rings fan and dad-of-three Jeremy Telford has built a spectacular Hobbit hole out of 2,600 balloons, a feat that's taken him 40 hours over three days.

Mr Telford, 34, inflated the balloons using a hand-pump to bring JRR Tolkien's world to life in his living room.
The Utah father-of-three's children can be seen helping the professional balloon artist, who is part of the group Balloon Guy Entertainment, in a YouTube video as he creates his own version of Bag End.
After carefully planning with his wife, they set up a camera to take pictures every 18 seconds for a time-lapse video.
The detail of the creation can be seen right down to a fireplace with balloon lamps, a pantry with working doors and a fruit bowl filled with balloon apples.
Mr Telford, from Pleasant Grove, Utah, said: ‘I've been wanting to build something from The Hobbit for a while now.
'My wife and I sat down and picked out a few days to set aside for the build.
‘We figured out how to get most of the furniture out of our living room and planned out how to build around the rest.’
He said all three children - aged seven, five, and two - helped him along the way.
Mr Telford says he has been a Tolkien fan since he first read The Hobbit in Junior High School.
He spent hours Googling 18th-century English furniture to find the right style, then he designed the layout and estimated how many balloons he would need.

Once finished, it stayed up for three days.
'After three days we let the kids demolish it for another two,' said Mr Telford.
'They were sad when it was finally time to reclaim the living room for living.'
Mr Telford has also created life-size replicas of a stegosaurus, a complete T-rex skeleton, and a motorcycle.
He also performed his balloon act during the 2002 Winter Olympics and wrote a book about his skill, called Balloonology.

Idiot??

Teen Used 'Old Man' Disguise In Armed Robbery

Sixteen-year-old Miles Alura used Hollywood-style facial prosthetics, make-up and a hair piece to commit an armed raid in Kent.

Brandishing two handguns and dressed up as an old man, 16-year-old Miles Alura and his two teenaged accomplices were caught following a raid on a Kent jewellers.
The trio used handcuffs and a dog lead to tie up terrified staff, before making off with £50,000 worth of jewellery. But an onlooker called the police and all three boys were arrested.
Alura was found in a nearby garden having dumped the gang's haul and removed his facial prosthetics, make-up and hairpiece.
Following their capture, detectives from the Met's Flying Squad linked the July 3 robbery to an earlier raid on June 7 at a jewellers in Mayfair, central London.
Alura had committed that robbery along with one of the two boys - who cannot be named - and while wearing false waist-length dreadlocks.
They jumped over the counter and threatened the staff, intimating they had a gun. Workers were tied up and they escaped with jewellery worth £100,000.
Fingerprints belonging to both boys was found on paperwork - including school history coursework and a drawing of the plan of the store - left at the scene.
Alura was sentenced at Kingston Crown Court to a total of five years in prison. His accomplice in the Mayfair robbery, 'Boy A', also 16, of Stoke Newington, was jailed for three years.
Fifteen-year-old 'Boy B', of Holloway, received a 12-month detention and training order. Reporting restrictions were lifted for Alura, but not for the other two boys.
Detective Constable Vicky Bailey, from the Met's Flying Squad, said: "These were violent armed robberies during which innocent members of staff were terrorised and genuinely feared for their lives.
"It is even more shocking to know that this level of violence was inflicted by three schoolboys who went to extraordinary lengths to research, plan and get away with these offences, demonstrated by Alura's sophisticated disguise."
All three defendants had earlier pleaded guilty at Kingston Crown Court to conspiracy to rob relating to the Kent robbery.
Alura and 'Boy B' had pleaded guilty to possession of an imitation firearm regarding that raid. Alura and 'Boy A' had also pleaded guilty to the Mayfair robbery.

A Real “Dead Drop” Perhaps??

Denver mailman mistakes corpse for Halloween decoration

The United States Postal Service acknowledged on Friday that one of its mail carriers did not report a corpse at a Denver home because he mistook the body for a Halloween display.
"We do know the carrier delivered mail to the house that day, and he remembered seeing something he thought was related to Halloween," the postal service said in a statement. "When the carrier learned that was not the case, he was shocked and extremely upset."
The local ABC News affiliate reported that the dead man, Dale Porch, 46, collapsed and died November 2 on his porch steps after returning home from his night shift job.
Relatives of Porch could not be reached for comment by Reuters.
The postal service called the incident "an unfortunate situation" that probably would not have happened any other time of year.
"Our carriers have a long history of assisting customers in neighborhoods across the country each and every day, and that holds true for our letter carriers here in Denver," the statement said.
The unidentified carrier is a "conscientious and dedicated employee" who remains on the job, the post office said, and any action that may be taken against him will be handled internally.

Dotcom Never Defeated?

Kim Dotcom to Support Pacific Fibre Cable

Apparently, Kim Dotcom’s defeat hasn’t forced him to stop his business. Actually, the shut-down of MegaUpload file-hosting service only drove Dotcom to fight back and defeat a corrupted system which can only undermine innovation and free speech. Thus far, Kim has already announced his plans to restart the cyberlocker under a new name Me.ga, and went further to encourage the relaunch of a failed project named The Pacific Fibre Cable.
The latter was under management of Chairman Sam Morgan and Director Rod Drury. Dotcom has offered them to restart the project of a fiber link cable, which would connect Australia, New Zealand and the US. Moreover, it seems that Dotcom is going to chip in with an impressive amount of money. This past summer, Sam Morgan had to admit that the project in question would be dropped because of the insufficient funds. They needed $400 million to set up 13.000 km of cable, which would be able to provide an impressive speed of 12.8 TB/sec and connect Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles. However, Dotcom isn’t all happy with the result, particularly taking into account that he is going to open an entirely new service.

The project’s chairman might b? hyped about the idea, but it is next to impossible to imagine that the US would approve this plan, particularly if Dotcom’s name appears on the papers. In fact, American authorities are still trying to deport Dotcom.

But it seems that Dotcom’s will can’t be easily broken – the speculations are that he is going to finance the subsea cable project, saying that since ISPs control the last mile and provide routers, they would still charge a small fee, but it might be 5 times less than the current price, with 5 times faster speeds.

If Dotcom pulls this off, it would prove that nothing can stop him from going back into the business. Still, his biggest problem remains the US, which would never agree with the project’s restart, despite the fact that the country would really benefit out of this move. Taking into account the stance of the RIAA or the MPAA, it is impossible that the United States would somehow give the thumb up.

The industry experts agree that the only thing we can do is wait and see what happens. Some of them believe that Dotcom is planning on a rightful vendetta, but the others claim that this project would change a whole lot of things online.

Twitter Tows The Line!!

Twitter Started Filtering for Content Industry

One of the most popular social networking websites in the world – Twitter – has recently started taking down tweets that are in breach of copyright legislation.

It seems that the content industry has been leaning on the social service to pull messages that violated copyright. It is still unclear how it can be technically possible, as a 140-character message would be well within what any court would regard as “fair use”.

Apparently, the tweets are targeted where people provide links to content which the entertainment industry says is pirated. Twitter has published a new policy, saying that it isn’t actually censoring the publications – it is just “withdrawing” them and revealing why they go missing. In fact, this puts some handy spin on the microblog’s actions – instead of standing up to the content industry’s insane censorship campaign, the website can argue that it’s just bringing in new transparency to the DMCA process. The matter is that earlier the complaints caused posts to disappear without a trace, and now users can see where the tweet used to be.

However, thus far Twitter hasn’t provided any explanations to the users, so they are still wondering how the tweets could actually be taken down under the DMCA legislation. The matter is that the DMCA grants online entities like Twitter or Google immunity for copyrighted content posted by their users. Nevertheless, the companies have to remove their members’ content if they receive a notice from a rights holder. In response, the target of the notice can send a counter-notice and demand to reinstate their tweet. Microblog is supposed to withhold the post until it gets a valid counter-response from its author. Previously, Twitter just removed the tweet without any explanation, and then manually reposted it in case of receiving a valid counter response.