links for 2008-08-19

• The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » Help ORG respond to UK consultation on illicit p2p
  "We’ve put the Executive Summary of the consultation document online. Please use our interactive consultation tool to tell us what you think of the Government’s options for combating illicit filesharing. The Government’s “preferred” option is to have codes of practice designed by ISPs and rightsholders in collaboration with OfCom, which oblige ISPs to take action against subscribers to their network believed to infringing copyright over p2p. This includes taking action against “repeat infringers”, although the document is short on detail about what such action might entail."
  (tags: openrightsgroup copyright government)
• BarCamp wiki / BarCampOxford
  "It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the cancellation of Barcamp Oxford on September 20-21. Here's why: i) the primary sponsor, who we were in the final stages of negotiation with (and who were ready to pay for 90% of everything), have ceased trading and brought the administrators in. Having talked with the administrators, there is no money. For anything. Evidently the company in question were VC-funded and blew too much money without keeping track. ii) the secondary sponsor, who were initially willing to be a primary sponsor until they had marketing cutbacks, have had further marketing cutbacks and are now unable to assist with the current economic climate."
  (tags: oxford barcamp conferences)
• JavaScript standards wrangle swings Microsoft's way | The Register
  "After several months of wrangling, ECMA technical committee (TC) 39 - responsible for JavaScript standardization - has agreed to abandon plans for an ambitious new standard dubbed ECMAScript (ES) 4 and concentrate on evolving the current standard ES 3.1 under the new name ES Harmony. The move is seen by some as a blow to Adobe, which had based ActionScript - the language that underpins its Flash platform - on ES4."
  (tags: javascript microsoft adobe actionscript)