Tuesday, June 17, 2008 Limpag: Mobile phone scandals By Max Limpag Celltalk
HOUSE BILL. Voyeurs and those who love to collect and share sex videos take heed. They face a penalty of six years of imprisonment and a fine of P500,000, if a House bill is enacted into law.
Buhay party-list legislators have filed a bill criminalizing the “recording of private acts and other violations of the privacy of an individual.” Under the proposed legislation, recording your intimate sessions with your lover without his or her consent is now a crime.
And even if your lover consented to the recording, spreading it is also a crime.
According to an Inquirer.net report, the legislators described the recording and spreading of videos and photos of “private acts” as “the highest form of invasion of privacy” that should be “penalized in its highest degree.”
VIRAL. Files spread so fast in these days of cheap broadband Internet connection and mobile phone ubiquity that after the initial sharing, copies are quickly replicated in a variety of networks: website downloads, peer-to-peer Internet connection and mobile phone sharing through Bluetooth, infrared, and multimedia messaging.
Just try searching for [put any place name here] and scandal, and you will have pages and pages of search results listing video files for download.
A few months back, somebody posted in a local web forum several cameraphone videos of a student from a southern Cebu town. One video had her posing naked. Two others were more explicit.
What was intriguing about its spread was that as soon as the web forum poster shared the link to the Multiply site that hosted the videos, the site was immediately deleted, presumably by the subject of the recording.
MULTIPLE SITES. But the web forum poster was unrelenting, he then posted a link to another Multiply site that hosted the same set of videos. As soon as this got deleted, he then posted another link to another website containing the videos. This went on for a few cycles.
I pity the poor college girl. I’m sure the videos have now spread widely, especially among those who know her, that I won’t be surprised if she has dropped out of school.
The bill, if enacted into law, will help give legal framework for victims to act against those who spread, posses, or host recordings of their intimate moments. It would be easier, for example, to seek takedown notices of website files from hosting companies, with the spread of the files considered as a crime.
SMART BRO PREPAID CORRECTION. I wrote about how the Smart Bro Prepaid USB modem now works with the stock Asus Eee PC and its default customized Xandros Linux system in my column last week.
There was a mistake in the column---the Asus Eee PC unit that I tested turned out to be a bundled unit with the Smart Gold plan for the newsroom’s base cell phone. All Asus Eee PC units issued by Smart as part of its promotion have the Smart Bro dialer pre-installed, Smart staff told me. But if you want to use an Eee PC unit you bought from a shop with your Smart Bro Prepaid account, you can download the dialer from the Smart Bro website. The dialer is a .deb file and you can just click on it to install it into your Eee PC.
I will be testing the dialer with Ubuntu Linux and update you in next week’s column whether it also works for the popular distribution. If you can’t wait to know whether the Smart Bro installer works with Ubuntu, you can visit my blog.
