The Netherlands

Amsterdam plane crash – photo on Twitter minutes later

Sophie Team Observers — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:53:29 +0100

A Turkish airline plane has crashed while coming in to land at Schiphol airport. The number of victims is yet to be known. Minutes after, a Twitter user posted this photo of the aircraft:

Credit @diederikm.

Sentenced for a virtual crime

Sophie Team Observers — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:45:26 +0100

A crime scene in the virtual world, Second Life.

Two Dutch youths were sentenced for stealing virtual goods last week, while a Japanese piano player was jailed for killing her virtual ex-husband.

The 14 and 15-year-old boys forced, in reality, a 13-year-old to open his "RuneScape" account and hand over a virtual amulet and mask to the elder boy's account. Although the pair beat and allegedly threatened the victim, the boys were only charged with the theft of the imaginary items, and not for any physical abuse. In a rare case, the Leeuwarden District judge ruled early last week that "goods don't have to be material for the law to consider them stolen", and sentenced the pair to 160 and 200 hours community service respectively.

Meanwhile, a 43-year-old Japanese woman was jailed last Wednesday on suspicion of hacking into her virtual ex-husband's identity and deleting him, as he had recently divorced her virtual self on "Maple Story". If convicted, she could face a five-year prison sentence, despite having no plans to harm the real-life man behind the virtual character. The cases have highlighted a shift in the application of law in non-real scenarios and caused bloggers to question the emotional value of virtual goods and identities.

Fitna is just a really bad film

Julien — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:50:52 +0100

A few months ago we announced that Dutch politician Geert Wilders was preparing an anti-Islamic film that would "add fuel to the fire". Yesterday, the long awaited video made its debut online. We ask our Observers what effects it might have in their countries, from Holland to Pakistan. After all the fuss, maybe not that much.

The film was supposed to be released on a specially created website, but the American company Network Solutions, which manages domain names worldwide, refused to allow Wilders to use Fitnathemovie.com. So the rightwing party leader decided to use the viral method instead. The film was released at 7pm last night on several internet platforms. "Non-censored" video sharing site LiveLeak was the first to host it, followed by Google Video. Rightwing blogs then posted the URLs so that people could find it. Wilders knew to use peer to peer networks (Kazaa, eMule etc) so that the video was soon all over the Internet in various formats. His was a clever move, as such networks are notoriously difficult to censor. In just three hours, the film had been watched more than a million times on LiveLeak alone, and three million by the following afternoon, which probably makes it one of the fastest selling videos on the net.

A film to fuel the fire

Julien — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:29:10 +0100

An image of the Koran taken from the film. The text says: “Warning: this book contains shocking images”. Published 26 Jan. 08 by De Telegraaf

Article compiled with the help of our Observer in Holland, Carl Konigel.

This Friday the Pakistani authorities ordered a countrywide block on YouTube. According to an official quoted by AP, this radical measure was put in place to stop anyone from seeing the trailer of Geert Wilders' new film. However, not one shot of the film is available on YouTube. Only Dutch daily De Telegraaf has received the images, and they have so far only published a few screenshots on their site. So, despite no one having yet seen the film, every one from Holland to Pakistan is dreading it and the fuel it will add to an already-raging fire.