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Archive | June, 2017

Committee vote on EU Copyright: No to the censorship machine. Yes to link tax.

By on June 8, 2017 in Big Entertainment, Big Media, Censorship, Copyright, EU, Free Information, Intellectual Property, Internet, Link wars, social media

Today the European Parliaments committee for the internal market (IMCO) has voted on the new EU copyright package.

The »censorship machine« (demanding that net platforms and ISP:s should filter all user uploaded content) fell. This is a victory for a free and open Internet.

(But still, the proposal is not quite dead. It can be re-tabled for the main vote in plenary.)

However, the »link tax« (license fees for linking to mainstream media content) still stands.

This terrible idea must be stopped in plenary!

It ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings.

Update » A more detailed report » IMCO Vote on Copyright in the DSM: crying tears of…? »

Update 2 » Pirate MEP Julia Reda » 5 takeaways from the first important copyright reform vote in the European Parliament »

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So, what else can Facebook do?

By on June 8, 2017 in Big Brother, Big Data, Data Protection, Facebook, Privacy

Facebook has presented a function for generating »heatmaps« of users at e.g. natural disasters. Techcrunch explains:

A new initiative from Facebook will provide aid organizations with location data for users in affected areas, such as where people are marking themselves safe and from where they are fleeing. It shows the immense potential of this kind of fine-grained tracking, but inescapably resurfaces questions of just what else the company could do with the data.

Naturally, it is a good thing if Facebooks collected data can be used for saving lives.

But you should remember that this sort of technology also can be used for surveillance and that similar data can be sold for commercial purposes, without your explicit consent.

Techcrunch: Facebook will share anonymized location data with disaster relief organizations »

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The rise of crypto-anarchism

By on June 7, 2017 in Bitcoin, Blockchain, decentralization, Democracy, disruptive, Free Markets, Hacktivism, Internet

At some point, and probably sooner than we think, the current left and right offerings of the major parties, including (perhaps especially) the populist, will start to appear ludicrous and unworkable. New political movements and ideas will arrive before long for this industrial revolution, especially once the majority of the population will soon have grown up online. It will be a politics that offers solutions to the challenges society will face, and be bold enough to steer technology rather than be led by it, to harness it rather than dismiss it, to see it as a motor of social change, not just a job maker.

The Guardian: Forget far-right populism – crypto-anarchists are the new masters »

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Theresa May should blame herself, not the Internet

By on June 5, 2017 in Big Brother, Big Government, Civil liberties, Civil rights, Deep State, Democracy, Free Information, Freedom of Speech, Human rights, Internet, Privacy, Rule of law, surveillance, UK, War on Terror

To nobody’s surprise also the London Bridge assassins were known to the authorities. One of them has been in a tv-documentary about jihadism. And he was reported trying to convert children he met in a park to Islam. According to himself, he would be prepared to kill his own mother in the name of Allah.

Responsible for the authorities that are supposed to handle things like this was – between 2010 and 2016 – now Prime Minister Theresa May.

Today her only comment is that she would like to censor the Internet.

Censoring information and maximizing surveillance of the people is not the way to defend democracy. That would rather be to support the terrorists strive to destroy our open and free society. And it would do very little to stop religious radicalization.

To Theresa Mays defense, it should be said that it is not all that easy to know what to do. You can hardly lock people up who have not (yet) committed any crime. You cannot jail people because of their skin color, their cultural background, their faith or their political beliefs. And you should not punish entire ethnic groups because of the deeds of a few.

There must be better ways to defeat terrorism.

/ HAX

A few links:

London Bridge terrorist ‘was in Channel 4 documentary about British jihadis’ »

Theresa May Blames The Internet For London Bridge Attack; Repeats Demands To Censor It »

‘Blame the internet’ is just not a good enough response, Theresa May »

Tim Farron warns of win for terrorists if web is made surveillance tool »

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Paging Theresa May

By on June 5, 2017 in Big Brother, Cryptography

Aaron Swartz once said, “It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.”

BoingBoing: Theresa May wants to ban crypto: here’s what that would cost, and here’s why it won’t work anyway »

This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:

• All Britons’ communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to interceptAny firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

• All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

• Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

• Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease — security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one’s findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

• All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

• Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

• Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

• Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

• Free/open source operating systems — that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors — must be banned outright

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Political micro targeting – did you consent?

By on June 5, 2017 in Big Brother, Big Data, Data Protection, Privacy, social media

Further, there is something disturbing in this apparent ubiquitous acceptance of profiling by political parties. After all, did you ever consent for the content you post online, the words you type in your messages, the “likes” you post, the website you browse, the places you go, the things you buy, and the other “data points” that companies have on you to be used to profile you for political purposes? And are you confortable for this vast array of data (often seemingly irrelevant crumbs of our personalities) to be used to pigeonhole (and predict) your political leanings?

Privacy International: Hiding in plain sight — political profiling of voters »

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Romanian parliament rebuff EU Copyright proposals

By on June 5, 2017 in Civil rights, Copyright, EU

A particularly interesting discussion has been unfolding over the past months in the Romanian Parliament, where, on 15 March, the IT&C Committee of the Chamber of Deputies organised a debate on the proposed Directive, in order to collect the views of different stakeholders. After the event, the Committee produced an opinion addressed to the European Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, which is the group responsible for drafting the final report of the Parliament on the package proposal. The members of the IT&C Committee unanimously voted against the European Commission’s Copyright proposal and advised to withdraw it in its entirety.

EDRi » Romanian Parliament: EU Copyright reform does more harm than good »

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Bruce Schneier on NSA and WannaCry

By on June 2, 2017 in Big Brother, Cyberwar, Internet, IT security, NSA, surveillance

People inside the NSA are quick to discount these studies, saying that the data don’t reflect their reality. They claim that there are entire classes of vulnerabilities the NSA uses that are not known in the research world, making rediscovery less likely. This may be true, but the evidence we have from the Shadow Brokers is that the vulnerabilities that the NSA keeps secret aren’t consistently different from those that researchers discover. And given the alarming ease with which both the NSA and CIA are having their attack tools stolen, rediscovery isn’t limited to independent security research.

Bruce Schneier in Foreign Affairs: Why the NSA Makes Us More Vulnerable to Cyberattacks »

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