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Archive | Internet
So, what is Truth?
UK lawmakers prepare to increase the maximum penalty for “cyber bullying” from six months in prison to two years.
Under the act, which does not apply to Scotland, it is an offence to send another person a letter or electronic communication that contains an indecent or grossly offensive message, a threat or information which is false and known or believed by the sender to be false.
If so, shouldn’t we begin with deciding on what it is that can be considered as offensive? Or should we make that up as we go..?
And what is false information? What about satire, travesty and irony? What is true and what is false when it comes to political issues? Are there absolute truth in culture? And who is to decide?
Naturally, the proponents of these rules will point out that it’s just about cyber bullying, threats and harassment. But with the definition above–any government could use this law to curb free speech and to stifle opposition.
Don’t give the ruling political class such tools. Sooner or later they will be misused.
/ HAX
Doctorow, on pressing issues
How to break the Internet: Cory Doctorow at TEDxOxbridge.
What’s wrong. And what to do about it.
Just because mass surveillance is possible, it doesn’t mean it’s right
Here is a piece over at TorrentFreak that you ought to read:
UN Says Mass Surveillance Violates Human Rights »
So true.
Mass surveillance is bad for business
The quote of the day comes from Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith at the Silicon Valley panel discussion on NSA surveillance, organized by Senator Ron Wyden (D – Oregon).
“If you’re a consumer or a company, you own your email, your text messages, your photos and all the content that you create. Even when you put your content in our data centers or on devices that we make, you still own it and you are entitled to the legal protection under our Constitution and our laws. We will not rebuild trust until our government recognizes that fundamental principle.”
Money talks. Mass surveillance erodes customers confidence in the tech industry. Business is lost when customers shy away from US Internet based services.
And it’s not just about business. Google’s Eric Schmidt warned about a fragmented, balkanized Internet. Wired sums it up…
“The cost will be huge in terms of shared knowledge, discoveries, and science. It will also be expensive, since the cost of running data centers in every country where they have customers may be too much for some firms to handle.”
The Civil Rights movement, Internet activists and the tech industry–now they all seems to stand together against US Government, its’ security bureaucracy and the security industry.
This might be the tipping point in our fight for a free and open Internet.
Some links: Wired » | CNet » | WP » | PC World » | The Register »
/ HAX
Intellectual property and trade agreements vs. a free and open internet
Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights is often included in various international trade agreements.
Sometimes this is done in general terms, not making any distinction between e.g. patents, copyright, trademarks and geographical indications. Politicians just look at the supposed value of IP–and decide that they want to protect it. (A rather blunt approach.)
In other cases IP issues are very specific, like in the (rejected) ACTA agreement. In ACTA the text suggested “voluntary cooperation” between copyright holders and internet service providers (ISP:s) to curb online piracy. This would, had the agreement been approved, have led to ISP:s having to police the net. And to police the net, you need to inspect and analyze all internet traffic.
Both approaches are problematic. Especially as international trade agreements normally are negotiated by bureaucrats behind closed doors–in effect impossible to influence for the general public and our elected representatives. This is a serious problem, as these agreements often will have the same impact as laws.
Naturally, you must be able to distinguish between different sorts of IP.
And you must make sure that international trade agreements are in line with important legal principles–as mere conduit in the EU E-Commerce Directive, ensuring that internet service providers are not liable for the information transmitted.
The next international trade agreement that might try to enforce IP rights is the EU-US free trade agreement, TTIP.
Naturally, free trade as in free trade is commendable. And if the interested parties are serious about setting up a transatlantic area of free trade–they ought to go easy on the IP chapter (or leave it out all together).
Any new attempts to enforce certain IP rights by trade agreements will backfire the same way ACTA did.
Links:
Cato Institute on Intellectual Property in Trade Agreements »
The ACTA demon rises. Again. And again. And again… »
Electronic Commerce Directive (EU) »
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) »
/ HAX
Bahnhof Gigabit – Epic Secret Police Scam
Based on a true story…
Some interesting papers…
I can strongly recommend the European Digital Rights collection of papers on digital rights, human rights, copyright, data protection, surveillance etc.
Link: The EDRi Papers »
The enemy stands at our gates
Twitter, TOR, encryption and P2P-solutions for safe communications have been important tools for democracy activism in many far away countries. And now we in Europe must realize that a free and open Internet might be of the utmost importance–for exactly the same reason–for us.
Government is getting more and more non-transparent. War on terror is eroding democracy. War on drugs is wearing down the rule of law. The close cooperation between some European countries and the NSA is undermining our civil rights.
And in some places authoritarian tendencies are now being hailed to become official policy. For example in Hungary, where prime minister Viktor Orbán recently declared that the era of liberal democracy is over. Now he points to countries like Russia, Turkey, Singapore and China as successful role models.
This is serious stuff. We didn’t stop the ruling political class from obtaining very strong and far reaching tools for mass surveillance. And now–an EU nation is actually deliberating to leave the road of democracy and civil liberties.
Actually, most tools for surveillance and censorship that are used to control people in dark places are not created exclusively for those countries. It is the default configuration for practically all our telecoms systems, placed there on request from our own police forces, our own intelligence bureaucrats and with the blessing from our own politicians.
And then, suddenly the political system changes towards authoritarian and totalitarian standards.
Oups.
We urgently need to reinforce our systems for encryption, anonymity and safe communications. The enemy stands at our gates.
/ HAX
The coming revolution must be user friendly
I’m into privacy issues and the fight for a free and open Internet from a political background. Even though I’m not a complete technical idiot, I really don’t know what’s going on under the hood. Show me a command line, and I will freeze without a clue what to do about it.
So, I’m like most people.
At the same time, the world badly needs some tech-based change. We need to build platforms for digital currencies, as alternative to government fiat-money. We need to rise the prize for surveillance by building decentralized systems, by making encryption the default option and by developing various P2P solutions.
At present, this is far beyond the ordinary user.
Ergo: We need to make privacy orientated technology user friendly.
Last year international information activist Smári McCarthy made this very point in his keynote at FSCONS 2013. A few extracts…
“Most people don’t care about technology, they care about doing the things that are meaningful to them. They don’t want to spend all day fiddling with GnuPG’s parameters or figuring out whether their XMPP session is being transferred over SSL. They don’t want to know about IPSec or AES.”
“No. They want to be farmers, or merchants, or dentists or doctors. They want to teach our children languages and mathematics. They want to build houses or spaceships or plumbing or bridges or roads. They don’t have time to work with bad technology that we made badly because we didn’t care about them.”
“What’s worse: when companies that don’t care about those people either give them highly usable software that doesn’t respect their fundamental rights, most people will go for it because despite its failings, it at least gets the job done. If what we offer them as an alternative is not at least as good in terms of getting the job done – from the perspective of a nontechnical user, it does not matter at all how ideologically pure our offering is.”
Spot on.
I like to believe that I’m at least as smart as people in general. Still, I prefer to have some qualified guidance when diving into these things.
As a matter of fact, I had Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge to install everything on my Linux laptop. And to guide me into PGP. And Swedish Internet icon (and 5 July chairman) Oscar Swartz to get my Mac to act in a reasonably safe way. I might have managed myself. But it would have been a slow and very painful process.
But people in general don’t give a fuck. They choose user friendliness before privacy. They are happy if whatever they get from the Mediemarkt shelfs works, no matter how exposed it is to government surveillance.
To fight back, privacy oriented options and solutions supporting an free and open internet must be the best ones. They must be ordinary peoples natural and carefree choice.
This said with the greatest respect for all the fine people who are putting their time and energy into fighting Big Brother command line by command line.
/ HAX
Smári McCarthy at FSCONS 2013: Engineering Our Way Out of Fascism »