HAX

Author: HAX

  • Snowden & Doctorow on the future

    The Verge: Watch Edward Snowden and Cory Doctorow imagine our hopeful, dystopian future »

  • 11 Ways to Secure Your Social Media Accounts

    The VPN Guru: 11 Ways to Secure Your Social Media Accounts »

  • EDRi on EU copyright reform and AVMSD

    Youtube »

  • EU Copyright: Experts say no to link tax and censorship machine

    Julia Reda, Pirate MEP: Experts unanimously slam EU copyright expansion plans – but are politicians listening? »

  • Is there an ongoing cyberwar, unknown to the public?

    What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don’t tell the rest of us? I think there’s something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate.

    Schneier on Security: Who is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why? »

  • No reasonable ground to uphold arrest warrant for Assange

    It is now the last day in April, five months since Assange was questioned about the rape allegations in Britain. However there is no word from Sweden either of the case against him being dropped or of the rape charges against him being pressed.

    Meanwhile the European arrest warrant been not been cancelled, and the extradition request to Britain has not been dropped, even though their purported purpose – to have Assange questioned about the rape allegations – has been fulfilled in Britain.

    Meanwhile the British authorities have taken no steps to review their grant of the Swedish extradition request notwithstanding that the purported purpose of that request – to return Assange to Sweden so that he could be questioned about the rape allegations there – has been fulfilled in Britain.

    The Duran: The Swedish and British case against Julian Assange grossly abuses his human rights and basic principles of justice »

  • Turkey blocks Wikipedia

    This morning, Turkey decided to censor the entire Wikipedia in all its editions. Work is ongoing by local activists to establish the exact technical scope.

    Falkvinge: Wikipedia censored from the Internet in Turkey: Government rejects the world’s reality and substitutes its own »

  • Barrett Brown back in custody

    Journalist and writer Barrett Brown, who was imprisoned after exposing private sector surveillance – has been detained again. The Intercept:

    Brown quickly became a symbol of the attack on press freedom after he was arrested in 2012 for reporting he did on the hacked emails of intelligence-contracting firms. Brown wrote about hacked emails that showed the firm Stratfor spying on activists on behalf of corporations. Brown also helped uncover a proposal by intelligence contractors to hack and smear WikiLeaks defenders and progressive activists. (…)

    According to his mother, who spoke with Brown by phone after his arrest, Brown believes the reason for his re-arrest was a failure to obtain “permission” to give interviews to media organizations. Several weeks ago, Brown was told by his check-in officer that he needed to fill out permission forms before giving interviews.

    The Intercept: Formerly imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown taken back into custody before PBS interview »

  • EU AVMSD: It’s not censorship to censor legal content

    The EU is in the process of updating the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD).

    As one could expect, this opens the floodgates when it comes to regulating and censoring content such as video (and even animated GIF:s) on a number of platforms. This includes otherwise legal content.

    Today the EU E-Commerce Directive gives service providers and platforms some reasonable protection. EDRi explains…

    That Directive protects freedom of expression by ensuring that internet companies are not unduly incentivised to delete content. It does so by limiting liability to situations where they fail to act diligently upon receipt of a notice of the illegality of the content in question.

    But with the revised AVMSD things might change…

    The Council and the Parliament want a wide variety of content to be regulated – anything that (based on the wisdom of the provider, in the first instance) might impact the physical, mental and moral development of minors. At the same time, video-sharing and (some) social media platforms are expected to restrict content that is an “incitement to violence or hatred” by reference, for example, to sex, racial or ethnic origin, disability, age, or sexual orientation.

    The content that the providers will be required to regulate is not, or not necessarily, illegal. As a result, it is argued that this privatised regulation of freedom of expression does not breach the E-Commerce Directive, because the obligation is to regulate content. In short, restriction of legal content is not a breach of rules that cover illegal content.

    So… according to EU logic, it’s not censorship if you censor legal content?

    The Council also wants video-sharing and social media platforms to regulate live-streamed video.

    This revision is turning into a mess. And for once it’s not the copyright industry that is pushing the changes. It’s politicians – aiming to regulate what you can or cannot say (or even joke about).

    If this becomes law, platforms like Youtube and Facebook will have to introduce new terms and conditions narrowing down the scope of what is acceptable for users to upload. Doing so, they most certainly will be overly cautious – to stay on the safe side when it comes to EU regulation.

    It all boils down to the EU – once again – pushing private companies to use their terms and conditions to limit in other ways legal free speech.

    EDRi: AVMS Directive: It isn’t censorship if the content is mostly legal, right? »

    / HAX

  • Unroll and information hygiene

    It was a perfect service: sorting your mail and not just removing all spam for you, but also unsubscribing you from all of that spam garbage going forward. It kept your inbox perfectly clean. But behind the curtains, it also sold your inbox to the highest bidder.

    Falkvinge: De-spamming service “Unroll” selling your inbox to Uber shows the importance of information hygiene, yet again »