ZDNet.com gives a scathing review of the RIAA settlement with the Santangelo family.

After four years of battling Patti Santangelo and her children over alleged P2P downloading, the RIAA has settled with the family for a paltry $7,000 – to be made in payments, AP reports.

They also give a curse assessment of the RIAA enforcement business, written by the outspoken Paul Sanders

Under normal rules, managing your resources irresponsibly and doing things that are not worth the time money and effort, let alone the loss of goodwill and the distraction from normal business, are surely grounds for instant dismissal. I certainly couldn’t run my businesses if I took a similar approach to my major cost centres.

Here is an interesting case of detection, mentioned in the Krakow Post

A recent seizure has put a new meaning behind the phrase “a killer pair of shoes.” On April 22nd, customs officials on the western border of Poland seized 32,000 pairs of flip-flops – plastic sandals with only a strap in the front – that were made of carcinogenic substances. The footwear had been imported from China for sale in the country.

Is it just me or is there more humor in the English versions of European news sources than in America? Killer fashion? Good one.

The carcinogenic material in the shoes was originally detected by the border guards due to a strong odor coming from container. Tests at the Wroc?aw Customs Laboratory confirmed the presence of carcinogenic substances, which become active when exposed to heat. The shoes were shipped back to China before a single pair made it to the Polish market.

Were these guards trained in smelly shoes? Haha. The odor must have been something unmistakable like burning plastic, or maybe the guards automatically suspect Chinese export controls are lax and opened the shipment for special attention.

Moscow News attempts to explain how propaganda is related to presentation of facts, with a look at their own history of reporting.

The newspaper under Lomko’s editorship gives off an eerie feeling of having been transported to a parallel universe. The language is English, so you don’t immediately envision a propaganda machine like Pravda. It looks like a newspaper, it feels like a newspaper.

It has pictures and headlines and cartoon illustrations. It has facts, figures and commentary. In fact, you would be hard pressed to argue with Lomko when he insists that he was producing an informative and objective newspaper.

[…]

Reading the newspapers long enough, one notices a glaring absence: there are no negative facts about any aspect of life in the Soviet Union. Problems are not “challenges to be overcome,” as they are in Western-style political correctness. They are simply never mentioned.

This simple omission is what defined propaganda in general and Soviet newspapers in particular, and it is key in understanding the task that lay before Lomko in producing the paper after Khrushchev’s thaw and Brezhnev’s stagnation. Only the relevant facts are revealed, and the right conclusion is always drawn.

Such insight is essential to security reporting and data analysis. The ability to report on all the facts must be allowed by management, else they run the risk of instilling a propaganda-like view of their environment.