MEGAN BOLER

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be back to work in the new year with or without writers. The Writers Guild of America (both Colbert & Stewart are members) is accusing Comedy Central of forcing the two hosts back to work, here is what the two fake news casters had to say:

“In a statement, the two hosts said they would prefer to return to work with their writers. “If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence,” they stated.”

By disclosing video rental information of Facebook users through Beacon, some are arguing that Blockbuster violated the 1988 Video Privacy Law in the U.S.

Norwegian based Opera is accusing Microsoft of antitrust violations in an EU court in an attempt to sever the dominant Internet Explorer from Windows and also to force Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.

Good luck Opera.

Some of the Toronto members of the Fair Copyright for Canada group are planning a demonstration against the legislation next Tuesday. With the legislation dead (for now at least), this might just turn into a celebration! Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Queen’s Park
Street: 1 Queen’s Park Crescent E
City/Town: Toronto, ON

BoingBoing has the whole debacle archived

According to BuzzMachine a German media magazine, Medium, named a blogger as its journalist of the year because of the work this journalist/blogger (journalogger?) does on keeping tabs on Germany’s largest tabloid style paper.  Jarvis worries that this might fuel the fires of the blogger vs MSM debate people still want to keep the words journalist & blogger mutually exclusive.

Google is testing a new internet site for information sharing that is similar Wikipedia, except that users will be able to include in their posts if they agree to share the revenues with Google. Think: you’re reading up on something new and you get to be advertised at, I am definitely going to stop using Wikipedia.

More: Google is releasing some info on the mystery that is AdSense, don’t expect them to tell you  how much of the ad revenue the keep for themselves

Minister Jim Prentice is hosting an open house in his office where people can discuss the draconian copyright law the Canadian government is attempting to pass.  If you can’t make it out to Calgary here are some things you can do according to Cory Doctorow:

Not in Calgary? NO PROBLEM! Plan on calling the Minister tomorrow or on dropping him an email, expressing your regrets that you can’t attend the open house, but letting him know how you feel. Here are the numbers:

Ottawa office – (613) 992-4275
Calgary office – (403) 216-7777
Minister office – (613) 995-9001

His email address is: Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca. Once you send an email, print it out and mail it (no stamp needed!) to:

Jim Prentice
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

“The word is that the Minister’s office is reeling from the overwhelming, national response to this badly written, badly planned bill.”

IRSeek is a service that logs IRC chats and posts them in a public searchable database, some of the logs date as far back as 2005.  Some people are understandably a bit concerned about this (slashdot).  IRSeek explains themselves in their official blog.