Quotulatiousness

December 14, 2022

PayPal channels its inner Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada’s current Prime Minister found a neat work-around to punish peaceful protestors and their small-scale financial backers by getting Canada’s chartered banks to freeze their bank accounts and credit cards. He didn’t bother getting a law or even an Order-in-Council to do this. He merely had the Finance Minister have a friendly chat with the banks’ CEOs and it was a done deal at least for a few hundreds or thousands of Canadians. PayPal clearly admires Justin Trudeau’s forthright moves to crush dissent and — being a financial institution itself — has been doing similar things to wrongthinking individuals and organizations who (used to) use PayPal’s services:

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents — simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)

These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists — the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services”, was meant to empower. 

PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The people who founded PayPal — the so-called PayPal Mafia — include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.

“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice”, Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.” [Justin Trudeau smiles]

When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users. 

“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before”, Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion. 

But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. 

A cynic might say that the original idea, “democratizing financial services”, has been implemented with a capital “D” which makes it all make sense in an American political context.

August 30, 2019

EFF sues Homeland Security over illegal GPS vehicle trackers

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kieren McCarthy on a recent lawsuit by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued the US Department of Homeland Security to find out more about a program where, it is claimed, officers secretly stick GPS trackers on vehicles they are suspicious of as they come through the border.

The EFF has made repeated freedom of information act (FoIA) requests about the program’s policies but has been stonewalled, with Homeland Security’s responses claiming any information would contain “sensitive information” that could lead to “circumvention of the law.”

The foundation’s main concern is that Homeland Security is carrying out its secret tracking without a warrant, or even anything beyond a single officer’s suspicion. And it points to a recent US Supreme Court decision where it ruled that warrantless GPS tracking was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Details of the program came to light last year when customs officers revealed in court filings that they had used GPS trackers without a warrant at the border. Since then the EFF has tried to find out what the policies and procedures are for deciding when a vehicle can be tagged. The relevant authorities have not been keen to go into any detail.

There’s another legal precedent too: a California court ruled that government officials’ use of GPS devices to track two suspected drug dealers without getting a warrant violated the Supreme Court decision, made in 2012, and was government misconduct.

June 20, 2018

Do You Have a Right To Repair Your Phone? The Fight Between Big Tech and Consumers

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 18 Jun 2018

Eric Lundgren got 15 months in prison for selling pirated Microsoft software that the tech giant gives away for free. His case cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own.

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

February 9, 2018

John Perry Barlow, RIP

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Gareth Corfield on the death of John Perry Barlow, author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the US Electronic Frontier Foundation, and also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died aged 70.

Barlow passed away “quietly in his sleep” yesterday, according to the EFF, which he helped set up in 1990.

“It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance,” said the foundation’s executive director, Cindy Cohn.

The BBC reported that Barlow had been ill for several years but “few details were given about his medical problems”.

In the history of the Internet, Barlow will be forever remembered for his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

“I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear,” wrote Barlow, a bold vision of the future that, sadly, did not come to pass.

The EFF defended Barlow against the inevitable criticisms of the Declaration, with Cohn acknowledging that he was “sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism” but insisting that he understood “new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good”.

I wasn’t a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I read his Declaration soon after it was released and found it inspiring (if not particularly realistic, even then). Few people can have a significant role in a single endeavour, but Barlow was undeniably prominent in the music scene and the early internet community. We’re all poorer for his passing.

November 28, 2017

Evergreen headline – “FCC bureaucrats don’t know what they’re talking about”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Nick Gillespie on the heightening panic over the FCC’s reversal of the controversial Net Neutrality rules:

Current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai memorably told Reason that “net neutrality” rules were “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Yet in 2015, despite a blessed lack of throttling of specific traffic streams, blocking of websites, and other feared behavior by internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile carriers, the FCC issued net neutrality rules that gave the federal government the right to punish business practices under Title II regulations designed for the old state-enabled Bell telephone monopoly.

Now that Pai, who became chairman earlier this year, has announced an FCC vote to repeal the Obama-era regulations, he is being pilloried by progressives, liberals, Democrats, and web giants ranging from Google to Netflix to Amazon to Facebook, often in the name of protecting an “open internet” that would let little companies and startups flourish like in the good old days before Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook dominated everything. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which back in 2009 called FCC attempts to claim jurisdiction over the internet a “Trojan Horse” for government control, is squarely against the repeal.

[…]

Yet the panic over the repeal of net neutrality is misguided for any number of reasons.

First and foremost, the repeal simply returns the internet back to pre-2015 rules where there were absolutely no systematic issues related to throttling and blocking of sites (and no, ISPs weren’t to blame for Netflix quality issues in 2013). As Pai stressed in an exclusive interview with Reason last week, one major impact of net neutrality regs was a historic decline in investment in internet infrastructure, which would ultimately make things worse for all users. Why bother building out more capacity if there’s a strong likelihood that the government will effectively nationalize your pipes? Despite fears, the fact is that in the run-up to government regulation, both the average speed and number of internet connections (especially mobile) continued to climb and the percentage of Americans without “advanced telecommunications capability” dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the FCC (see table 7 in full report). Nobody likes paying for the internet or for cell service, but the fact is that services have been getting better and options have been growing for most people.

Second, as Reason contributor Thomas W. Hazlett, a former chief economist for the FCC, writes in The New York Daily News, even FCC bureaucrats don’t know what they’re talking about.

Hazlett notes that in a recent debate former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who implemented the 2015 net neutrality rules after explicit lobbying by President Obama, said the rise of AOL to dominance during the late 1990s proved the need for the sort of government regulation he imposed. But “AOL’s foray only became possible when regulators in the 1980s peeled back ‘Title II’ mandates, the very regulations that Wheeler’s FCC imposed on broadband providers in 2015,” writes Hazlett. “AOL’s experiment started small and grew huge, discovering progressively better ways to serve consumers. Wheeler’s chosen example of innovation demonstrates how dangerous it is to impose one particular platform, freezing business models in place.”

March 11, 2017

The EFF’s guide to digital privacy at US border crossings

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) provides a quick overview of your rights when entering the United States:

January 25, 2017

The “right to repair” gets a boost in three states

Filed under: Business, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Cory Doctorow reports on a hopeful sign that we might be able to get rid of one of the more pernicious aspects of the DMCA rules:

Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it both a crime and a civil offense to tamper with software locks that control access to copyrighted works — more commonly known as “Digital Rights Management” or DRM. As the number of products with software in them has exploded, the manufacturers of these products have figured out that they can force their customers to use their own property in ways that benefit the company’s shareholders, not the products’ owners — all they have to do is design those products so that using them in other ways requires breaking some DRM.

The conversion of companies’ commercial preferences into legally enforceable rights has been especially devastating to the repair sector, a huge slice of the US economy, as much as 4% of GDP, composed mostly of small mom-n-pop storefront operations that create jobs right in local communities, because repair is a local business. No one wants to send their car, or even their phone, to China or India for servicing.

[…]

Three states are considering “Right to Repair” bills that would override the DMCA’s provisions, making it legal to break DRM to effect repairs, ending the bizarre situation where cat litter boxes are given the same copyright protection as the DVD of Sleeping Beauty. Grassroots campaigns in Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York prompted the introduction of these bills and there’s more on the way. EFF and the Right to Repair coalition are pushing for national legislation too, in the form of the Unlocking Technology Act.

October 29, 2015

Free HTTPS certificates coming soon

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Ars Technica, Dan Goodin discussed the imminent availability of free HTTPS certificates to all registered domain owners:

lets-encrypt

A nonprofit effort aimed at encrypting the entire Web has reached an important milestone: its HTTPS certificates are now trusted by all major browsers.

The service, which is backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco Systems, and Akamai, is known as Let’s Encrypt. As Ars reported last year, the group will offer free HTTPS certificates to anyone who owns a domain name. Let’s Encrypt promises to provide open source tools that automate processes for both applying for and receiving the credential and configuring a website to use it securely.

HTTPS uses the transport layer security or secure sockets layer protocols to secure websites in two important ways. First, it encrypts communications passing between visitors and the Web server so they can’t be read or modified by anyone who may be monitoring the connection. Second, in the case of bare bones certificates, it cryptographically proves that a server belongs to the same organization or person with control over the domain, rather than an imposter posing as that organization. (Extended validation certificates go a step beyond by authenticating the identity of the organization or individual.)

June 19, 2015

The EFF’s Privacy Badger

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Earlier this month, Noah Swartz exhorted the Mozilla folks to put some energy and effort behind the Firefox Tracking Protection technology. While we wait for that to come to fruition, he also recommends the Electronic Frontiers Foundation’s Privacy Badger for Firefox users:

In her blog post, [Monica] Chew flags the need for Mozilla’s management to ensure that this essential protection reaches users, and to recognize that “current advertising practices that enable ‘free’ content are in direct conflict with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns.” Since advertising industry groups flatly refused to respect the Do Not Track header as a privacy opt-out from data collection, the only line of defense we have against non-consensual online tracking is our browsers.

Safari and Internet Explorer have taken important steps to protect their users against web tracking: Safari blocks third party cookies out of the box, and IE offers a prominent tracker-blocking option. But mainstream users of open source browsers are out of luck. Until that changes, our Privacy Badger add-on for Firefox and Chrome remains perhaps the only one-click solution for users who want to protect their privacy as they browse the web. Since Privacy Badger requires no configuration, we encourage any user who is concerned about online tracking to add it to their browser.

EFF Privacy Badger

January 15, 2015

Why the EFF can’t do an iPhone version of their mobile app

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s Corynne McSherry had to break the sad news to Apple iPhone users that due to Apple’s incredibly restrictive developer rules, the EFF cannot produce an iPhone version of their mobile app:

As we have been saying for years now, the [Apple] Developer Agreement is bad for developers and users alike. Here are a few of the terms that we are worried about:

Ban on Public Statements: Section 10.4 prohibits developers from making any “public statements” about the terms of the Agreement. This is particularly strange, since the Agreement itself is not “Apple Confidential Information” as defined in Section 10.1. So the terms are not confidential, but developers are contractually forbidden from speaking “publicly” about them.

Ban on Reverse Engineering: Section 2.6 prohibits any reverse engineering (including the kinds of reverse engineering for interoperability that courts have recognized as a fair use under copyright law), as well as anything that would “enable others” to reverse engineer, the software development kit (SDK) or iPhone OS.

App Store Only: Section 7.3 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you’re prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia.

No Tinkering with Any Apple Products: Section 3.2(e) is the “ban on jailbreaking” provision that appears to prohibit developers from tinkering with any Apple software or technology, not just the iPhone, or “enabling others to do so.”

Apple Owns Your Security: Section 6.1 explains that Apple has to approve any bug fixes or security releases. If Apple does not approve such updates very quickly, this requirement could put many people in jeopardy.

Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can “revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time.” Steve Jobs once confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.

We have some other concerns as well, but these top the list.

September 7, 2013

TPP negotiators actively concealing their tracks

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

The EFF on the now even-more-secret negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty:

This week, trade delegates met in San Francisco to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement’s e-commerce chapter. It’s likely that this secret chapter carries provisions that whittle away at user data protections. But we weren’t able to say so at this meeting. Not only have they neglected to notify digital rights groups — including EFF, which is based in San Francisco — about the meeting, we could not even discover where it was taking place.

Delegates from TPP countries are right now holding these secretive “inter-sessional” meetings here and in other undisclosed cities around the world. Trade reps for specific issue areas are hammering out “unresolved” issues that are holding up the conclusion of the agreement, and doing so by becoming even more secretive and evasive than ever.

We only heard about a TPP meeting on intellectual property in Mexico City in September through the diplomatic rumor-mill, since the US Trade Rep is no longer bothering to announce the dates or locations of these closed-door side meetings. During this round in Mexico, countries that have been resistant to U.S. demands to sign onto highly restrictive copyright enforcement standards may ultimately be strong-armed into doing so.

It’s probably safe to assume that the reason they’ve become so secretive is that they don’t want any of us to know what they’re doing until it’s a fait accompli and we can’t do anything about it. That’s how much they trust us.

August 6, 2013

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on reforming the NSA

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:36

The EFF has a few suggestions on how to go about reining-in the NSA:

While we still believe that the best first step is a modern Church Committee, an independent, public investigation and accounting of the government’s surveillance programs that affect Americans, members of Congress seem determined to try to enact fixes now. Almost a dozen bills have already been introduced or will be introduced in the coming weeks.

While we’re also waiting to see what the various bills will look like before endorsing anything, here’s — in broad strokes — what we’d like to see, and what should be avoided or opposed as a false response. We know full well that the devil is in the details when it comes to legislation, so these are not set in stone and they aren’t exhaustive. But as the debate continues in Congress, here are some key guideposts.

This first post focuses on surveillance law reform. In later posts we’ll discuss transparency, secret law and the FISA Court as well as other topics raised by the ongoing disclosures. In short, there’s much Congress can and should do here, but we also need to be on the lookout for phony measures dressed as reform that either don’t fix things or take us backwards.

May 19, 2013

IP lawyers whine about patents and 3D printing

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow appears to have been plagiarized by real life:

Two minor characters from my novel Makers have apparently come to life and written an article for 3D Printing Industry. These two people are patent lawyers for Finnegan IP law firm, Washington, DC, which I don’t recall making up, but this is definitely a pair of Doctorow villains (though, thankfully, I had the good sense not to give them any lines in the book — they’re far too cliched in their anodyne evil for anyone to really believe in).

These patent lawyers are upset because the evil Makers (capital-M and all!) are working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to examine bad 3D printing patents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The problem is that 3D printing is 30 years old, so nearly all the stuff that people want to patent and lock up and charge rent on for the next 20 years has already been invented, and the pesky Makers are insisting on pointing out this inconvenient fact to the USPTO.

This breaks the established order, which is much to be preferred: the UPSTO should grant all the bullshit patents that companies apply for. The big companies can pay firms like Finnegan to file patents on every trivial, stale, ancient idea and then cross-license them to each other, but use them to block disruptive new entrants to the marketplace. The old system also has the desirable feature of arming patent trolls with the same kind of bullshit patents so that they can sue giant companies and disruptive startups alike, and Finnegan can be there to soak up the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees generated by all this activity.

April 21, 2013

“Fatally flawed” CISPA bill passed by US congress

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

The BBC reports on the unwelcome CISPA bill and its progress through the legislative machinery:

The US House of Representatives has passed the controversial Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act.

Cispa is designed to help combat cyberthreats by making it easier for law enforcers to get at web data.

This is the second time Cispa has been passed by the House. Senators threw out the first draft, saying it did not do enough to protect privacy.

Cispa could fail again in the Senate after threats from President Obama to veto it over privacy concerns.

[. . .]

The bill could fail again in the Senate after the Obama administration’s threat to use its veto unless changes were made. The White House wants amendments so more is done to ensure the minimum amount of data is handed over in investigations.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also opposed Cispa, saying the bill was “fatally flawed”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and the American Library Association have all voiced similar worries.

March 26, 2013

“It’s as if Doctorow … figured out how to be a novelist and a blogger in the same book”

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

At Reason, Tom Jackson reviews Cory Doctorow’s Homeland, the sequel to 2007’s Little Brother:

By day, Yallow works within the system, taking a job as a webmaster for an independent candidate for the California senate. By night, he’s a part of a guerrilla WikiLeaks-style operation, trying to deal with goons who are out to get him and hackers trying to control his computer and his information. Life gets even more complicated when he starts participating in large outdoor demonstrations that attract the attention of the police. The story should resonate with any reader who worries about online privacy and the government’s ability to use the Net as a tool for political repression.

Although Yallow and his buddies are fictional, Homeland is studded with educational bits. One early chapter, for example, includes a recipe for cold-brew coffee. A librarian delivers a lecture on copyright reform. While at Burning Man, Doctorow meets four heroes of the Internet — Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, Wil Wheaton, and John Perry Barlow — and the reader is duly educated on how they relate to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the creation of Lotus. The infodump continues after the novel ends, with an afterword by Jacob Appelbaum of WikiLeaks and another by the late Aaron Swartz. (Swartz, facing a federal trial and possible prison on felony charges for downloading academic documents, committed suicide on January 11. His exhortations here not to give in to despair and a feeling of powerlessness make for sad reading, but he also explains how political movements to preserve the Internet from censorship have a chance to succeed.) There is also a bibliographic essay on the topics the book covers. It’s as if Doctorow, well-known both as a science fiction writer and as a contributor to Boing Boing, figured out how to be a novelist and a blogger in the same book.

The encounter with Kapor and company isn’t the only way the novel intersects with reality. Yallow logs on to his laptop using the Paranoid Linux operating system, created to maximize the user’s privacy. Paranoid Linux was fictional when Doctorow invented it in Little Brother, but it inspired the creation of a real, albeit short-lived, Paranoid Linux distro. And if you Google “Paranoid Linux,” you’ll learn about current Linux distributions that emphasize security, such as Tails and LPS. As Doctorow notes in his afterword, Googling terms in the book that might be unfamiliar to the reader — “hackerspace,” “drone,” “Tor Project,” “lawful intercept” — provides many of the novel’s educational experiences.

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