Weekly roundup: Agcom

It seems that Italian regulators understand just enough of the Internet to craft meaningless measures. The recent proposal for arbitrary removal (without the intervention of a judge) of content from Italian websites would extend the YouTube doctrine to all Italian websites: after a suspect violation of copyright, the related pages have to be cautionarily deleted (or the website's ip and domain name be blocked, if you're wondering how); after a controversy, maybe someday you'll get your content back. Maybe.
This regulation is either a a) copyright protection gone bad or b) a censorship act. In the former case, is like sending SWAT teams to expropriate children tapes, because they may contain copied songs (or they may not; but we'll confiscate them just in case.) In the latter, it's just a way to take down everyone that does not lick the government's ass and transforming the Internet in Mediaset. I don't know which is worse.
To make an international comparison, we are on the level of absurdity of the DMCA, although this issue is not related to DRM systems; the DRM system here is simply blocking Internet addresses.

By the way, here are my articles published this week (unless some prankster says I have infringed his trademark on the Self-Initializing Fakes term and they are taken down):
A week without Flash
Practical PHP Refactoring: Introduce Explaining Variable
Self-Initializing Fakes in PHP
Practical PHP Refactoring: Split Temporary Variable

Image of the Students for Free Culture movement.