Quotulatiousness

November 7, 2011

Another throwback to Victorian views of women as weak and in need of protection

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Brendan O’Neill thinks much better of women than those pushing for censorship (or worse):

One of the great curiosities of modern feminism is that the more radical the feminist is, the more likely she is to suffer fits of Victorian-style vapours upon hearing men use coarse language. Andrea Dworkin dedicated her life to stamping out what she called “hate speech” aimed at women. The Slutwalks women campaigned against everything from “verbal degradation” to “come ons”. And now, in another hilarious echo of the 19th-century notion that women need protecting from vulgar and foul speech, a collective of feminist bloggers has decided to “Stamp Out Misogyny Online”. Their deceptively edgy demeanour, their use of the word “stamp”, cannot disguise the fact that they are the 21st-century equivalent of Victorian chaperones, determined to shield women’s eyes and cover their ears lest they see or hear something upsetting.

According to the Guardian, these campaigners want to stamp out “hateful trolling” by men — that is, they want an end to the misogynistic bile and spite that allegedly clogs up their email inboxes and internet discussion boards. Leaving aside the question of who exactly is supposed to do all this “stamping out” of heated speech — The state? Well, who else could do it? — the most striking thing about these fragile feminists’ campaign is the way it elides very different forms of speech. So the Guardian report lumps together “threats of rape”, which are of course serious, with “crude insults” and “unstinting ridicule”, which are not that serious. If I had a penny for every time I was crudely insulted on the internet, labelled a prick, a toad, a shit, a moron, a wide-eyed member of a crazy communist cult, I’d be relatively well-off. For better or worse, crudeness is part of the internet experience, and if you don’t like it you can always read The Lady instead.

November 2, 2011

The decline and fall of Righthaven

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Ars Technica has what should be the final legal chapter in the Righthaven saga:

Looks like it’s time to turn out the lights on Righthaven. The US Marshal for the District of Nevada has just been authorized by a federal court to use “reasonable force” to seize $63,720.80 in cash and/or assets from the Las Vegas copyright troll after Righthaven failed to pay a court judgment from August 15.

Righthaven made a national name for itself by suing mostly small-time bloggers and forum posters over the occasional copied newspaper article, initially going so far as to demand that targeted websites turn over their domain names to Righthaven. The several hundred cases went septic on Righthaven, however, once it became clear that Righthaven didn’t own the copyrights over which it was suing. Righthaven, ailing, was soon buffeted by negative court decisions as a result.

[. . .]

The appeals court has refused to act on Righthaven’s request to delay its August judgment further, and the money was due last Friday. When it didn’t show up, Randazza Legal Group went back to the Nevada District Court to request a Writ of Execution to use the court’s enforcers, the US Marshals, to collect the money. The court clerk issued the writ today, and Righthaven’s $34,045.50 judgment has now ballooned to $63,720.80 with all the additional costs and fees from the delay.

I spoke to Marc Randazza this evening, who tells me, “We’re going to enlist the US Marshal in marking sure this court’s order has some meaning.” He looks forward to heading over to Righthaven’s offices as soon as possible. Should Righthaven not have the cash in its bank accounts, the writ allows Randazza to “identify to the US Marshal or his representative assets that are to be seized to satisfy the judgment/order.”

The degree of threat that Righthaven and other lawfare groups posed to bloggers and anyone else who quoted material on the internet was discussed back in May.

October 27, 2011

Up next: the Great Firewall of … America

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

The headline on this article says it all: E-PARASITES Bill: ‘The End Of The Internet As We Know It’.

We already wrote about the ridiculously bad E-PARASITES bill (the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act), but having now had a chance go to through the full bill a few more times, there are even more bad things in there that I missed on the first read-through. Now I understand why Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s first reaction to this bill was to say that “this would mean the end of the Internet as we know it.”

She’s right. The more you look at the details, the more you realize how this bill is an astounding wishlist of everything that the legacy entertainment gatekeepers have wanted in the law for decades and were unable to get. It effectively dismantles the DMCA’s safe harbors, what’s left of the Sony Betamax decision, puts massive liability on tons of US-based websites, and will lead to widespread blocking of websites and services based solely on accusations of some infringement. It’s hard to overstate just how bad this bill is.

And, while its mechanisms are similar to the way China’s Great Firewall works (by putting liability on service providers if they fail to block sites), it’s even worse than that. At least the Chinese Great Firewall is determined by government talking points. The E-PARASITES bill allows for a massive private right of action that effectively lets any copyright holder take action against sites they don’t like. (Oh, and the bill is being called both the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and E-PARASITES (which covers the PROTECT IP-like parts of the bill, SOPA refers to the larger bill that also includes the felony streaming part).

October 19, 2011

Supreme Court rules that linking to defamatory material is not libel

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

The Supreme Court of Canada makes the common sense ruling:

Hyperlinking to defamatory material on the internet does not constitute publishing the defamatory material itself, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Wednesday.

The ruling will alleviate fears that holding someone liable for how they use hyperlinks on websites, personal ones or others, could cast a chill on internet use.

The responsible use of the internet and how traditional defamation law applies to modern technologies were at issue in this case, which was watched closely by media organizations and civil liberties groups.

How someone can protect their reputation in the internet age when content is passed around with the quick click of a button was also considered in the case. On social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, users often share links, and the court’s ruling could have dramatically disrupted that function had it gone the other way.

In its unanimous decision, the court said a hyperlink, by itself, should never be considered “publication” of the content to which it refers. But that doesn’t mean internet users shouldn’t be careful about how they present links. The court says that if someone presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that repeats the defamatory content, they can be considered publishers and are therefore at risk of being sued for defamation.

October 17, 2011

It was “a moment of mass credulity on the part of the nation’s media”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Cory Doctorow points out that no “adult content” filter is a replacement for parental guidance and supervision:

Last week’s announcement of a national scheme to “block adult content at the point of subscription” (as the BBC’s website had it) was a moment of mass credulity on the part of the nation’s media, and an example of how complex technical questions and hot-button save-the-children political pandering are a marriage made in hell when it comes to critical analysis in the press.

Under No 10’s proposal, the UK’s major ISPs — BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin — will invite new subscribers to opt in or out of an “adult content filter.” But for all the splashy reporting on this that dominated the news cycle, no one seemed to be asking exactly what “adult content” is, and how the filters’ operators will be able to find and block it.

Adult content covers a lot of ground. While the media of the day kept mentioning pornography in this context, existing “adult” filters often block gambling sites and dating sites (both subjects that are generally considered “adult” but aren’t anything like pornography), while others block information about reproductive health and counselling services aimed at GBLT teens (gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender).

[. . .]

The web is vast, and adult content is a term that is so broad as to be meaningless. Even if we could all agree on what adult content was, there simply aren’t enough bluenoses and pecksniffs to examine and correctly classify even a large fraction of the web, let alone all of it (despite the Radio 4 newsreader’s repeated assertion that the new filter would “block all adult content”.)

What that means is that parents who opt their families into the scheme are in for a nasty shock: first, when their kids (inevitably) discover the vast quantities of actual, no-fooling pornography that the filter misses; and second, when they themselves discover that their internet is now substantially broken, with equally vast swathes of legitimate material blocked.

October 8, 2011

WIPO head: the Web would be better if it was patented and users had to pay license fees

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

Cory Doctorow reports on remarks by the head of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization:

Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object.

In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

This is a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence. The argument that there wasn’t enough investment in the Web is belied by the fact that a) the Web attracted more investment than any of the network service technologies that preceded it (by orders of magnitude), and; b) that the total investment in the Web is almost incalculably large. The only possible basis for believing that the Web really would have benefited from patents is a blind adherence to the ideology that holds that patents are always good, no matter what.

Just imagine: instead of our current anarchic, idiosyncratic-but-still-amazingly-useful Web, we’d have a bureaucratically regulated superset of the old walled garden models like Compuserve, where innovation was stifled long before it got into the users’ hands.

October 6, 2011

What is a nontrepreneur?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Andrew Orlowski posts some of his comments at a recent (British) Conservative Conference Fringe discussion on digital policy:

You all know what an entrepreneur is. But who has heard of the word nontrepreneur?

There were amused and bemused looks.

Well you’re going to be hearing it a lot.

We’re in an exciting time for the internet. This great wave of utopian rhetoric and getting everyone online, for the last 15 years, has come to an end. Almost everyone who wants to be online is online. Something quite new and interesting has happened in the past three years, people are beginning to pay for stuff.

The internet today lacks markets and it’s half-finished. The platforms and infrastructure that recognise and create value aren’t there.

Now words come to define political eras and philosophies, and the last ten years were defined by words like ‘beaconicity’ and ‘targets’ and all these agencies spending other people’s money. I have a horrible feeling that Cameron’s technology policy, despite being guided by people with strong classical liberal instincts, will be defined by the fluff of Silicon Roundabout.

Silicon Roundabout is, essentially, a prank on the media. Let’s see who’s involved. You’ve got what I call faux capitalists — people who want to be thought of as capitalists but are terrified of risk and don’t back ambitious high-risk ventures. You’ve got entrepreneurs who can’t run a business. And you’ve got programmers who can’t program. All looking for each other. Then there’s a vast army of hangers-on: mentors, facilitators. And they all socialise endlessly, instead of doing any work. The socialising is work.

This does not create wealth.

As soon as we start to “un-fetishise” this myth of two guys in a garage, and start to think more seriously about, say, payment platforms or credit systems that make buying stuff nice and easy, as easy as real life, then we’ll create markets. You won’t get this from Shoreditch.

September 21, 2011

Tories drop “lawful access” provisions from omnibus crime bill

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

That’s a bit of good news on the civil liberties front:

A controversial Internet surveillance bill has been omitted from the federal Conservative party’s proposed crime legislation.

Today, Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Rob Nicholson held a press conference to introduce the Conservatives’ promised omnibus crime act, titled The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which focuses on crime and terrorism. However, an expected component of the act regarding Internet surveillance known as “Lawful Access” legislation was nowhere to be found.

The set of Lawful Access bills would have warranted Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies the power to acquire the personal information and activity of web users from internet service providers (ISPs). ISPs would also be required by an additional provision to install surveillance equipment on their networks.

The legislation would essentially give law enforcement the ability to track people online without having to obtain a warrant. The federal NDP and Green parties, and civil liberties groups among others decried the bill as overly-invasive, dangerous and potentially costly for internet users.

That’s the good news. The rest of the bill, as Grace Scott points out, is awash with “tough on crime” noises:

The Safe Streets and Communities Act will increase penalties for sex offenders, those caught with possession or producing illicit drugs for the purposes of trafficking, and intends to implement tougher sentencing on violent and repeat youth crime. It also plans to eliminate the use of conditional sentences, or house arrest, for serious and violent crimes.

September 8, 2011

New .xxx top level domain will allow permanent blocking

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

Although the new .xxx domain is available for registration, you probably won’t find a google.xxx or a microsoft.xxx domain:

Businesses in the adult entertainment industry — and outside of it — from today have the opportunity to register or block .xxx domain names that match their trademarks.

ICM Registry, which has operated .xxx since it signed a contract with ICANN earlier this year, has launched a three-pronged “sunrise period” that will run for the next 52 days.

The pre-launch phase is designed to allow trademark owners to either snag a .xxx domain if they’re in the porn business, or to pay to have their brands blocked forever if they’re not.

While the sunrise has been characterised by many critics as a “shakedown”, ICM is doing things a little differently to domain registries that have launched in the past.

As we have previously reported, a big chunk of the 15,000 names ICM has reserved match the names of celebrities — actors, politicians, sportsmen, singers — to prevent embarrassment.

It did not extend the same courtesy to big corporate brands.

However, uniquely to .xxx, any non-porn company wishing to take their .xxx name out of circulation permanently needs only pay a one-time fee, rather than paying up-front and renewing annually.

August 18, 2011

Omnibus bills: Canada’s equivalent to “riders” on US legislation

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

An omnibus bill is a collection of several individual bills that may or may not have been able to pass muster individually. It’s (from the government’s point of view) a great way to get a lot of legislative changes through parliament in relatively short order, but it encourages legislators to include their pet projects and special causes because of the decreased opportunity for opposition. The Conservative government’s proposed omnibus crime bill is a good example of this, as it is likely to incorporate warrantless data searches for police:

When Canada’s Conservatives took the most votes in the May 2011 federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that an “omnibus” security/crime bill would be introduced within 100 days. The bill would wrap up a whole host of ideas that were previously introduced as separate bills — and make individual ideas much more difficult to debate. A key part of the omnibus bill will apparently be “lawful access” rules giving police greater access to ISP and geolocation data — often without a warrant — and privacy advocates and liberals are up in arms.

Writing yesterday in The Globe & Mail, columnist Lawrence Martin said that the bill “will compel Internet service providers to disclose customer information to authorities without a court order. In other words — blunter words — law enforcement agencies will have a freer hand in spying on the private lives of Canadians.”

He quotes former Conservative public safety minister Stockwell Day, now retired, as swearing off warrantless access. “We are not in any way, shape or form wanting extra powers for police to pursue [information online] without warrants,” Day said—but there’s a new Conservative sheriff in town, and he wants his “lawful access.”

How bad were the last set of “lawful access” proposals? This bad:

Even the government’s own Privacy Commissioner is upset about the lawful access idea. On March 9, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart sent a letter to Public Safety Canada in which she and other provincial privacy officials said the bill would “give authorities access to a wide scope of personal information without a warrant; for example, unlisted numbers, e-mail account data and IP addresses. The Government itself took the view that this information was sensitive enough to make trafficking in such ‘identity information’ a Criminal Code offence. Many Canadians consider this information sensitive and worthy of protection, which does not fit with the proposed self-authorized access model.”

“In our view, law enforcement and security agency access to information linking subscribers to devices and devices to subscribers should generally be subject to prior judicial scrutiny accompanied by the appropriate checks and balances.”

H/T to Brian Switzer for the link.

How unique (and therefore how easy to track) is your web browser?

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

The good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have a new tool you can use to find out how easy it would be for third parties to track your browser usage, based on how it differs from others:

As you can see from my test (on a brand new machine), I have a unique browser configuration among the 1.7 million tested so far. My browser would be easy to track.

August 17, 2011

The source of all those kitten videos

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:40

H/T to Ace.

August 16, 2011

Charles Stross on the future of network security

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Charles isn’t a professional in network security, but he has a good track record of exploring the consequences of new technology in his science fiction works. He was invited to give the keynote address at the 2011 USENIX conference.

Unlike you, I am not a security professional. However, we probably share a common human trait, namely that none of us enjoy looking like a fool in front of a large audience. I therefore chose the title of my talk to minimize the risk of ridicule: if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.

So what follows should be seen as a farrago of speculation by a guy who earns his living telling entertaining lies for money.

The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?

I’d like to start by making a few basic assumptions about the future, some implicit and some explicit: if only to narrow the field.

August 8, 2011

Another technical problem? Must be a day with a “y” in it

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 21:44

Last week, you’ll recall that I was bewailing the failings of the Microsoft Windows Easy Transfer utility. Having given up on that and managed the transfer of files by the traditional tools of Brute Force and Ignorance (BF&ITM), I thought I was done.

All the necessary files now reside on the new laptop, and the old laptop has been dedicated to a new life as a genealogy workstation for Elizabeth. Today’s problem was network connectivity.

But not just network connectivity for the laptop, as I discovered when I tried turning on my desktop machine a little while ago.

At some point while we were away, the wireless router seems to have had some hiccoughs, because now it seems to imagine that it’s actually two separate machines. When I tried to connect to the internet this morning (from the new laptop), it insisted that I was connected to both a public network and our own named private network. But because it thought the public network was the primary, it refused to actually interact with our named network. It took several iterations of running diagnostics and power-cycling the router before the phantom “public” network disappeared and I was able to connect to the internet normally.

This evening, I had a similar problem with my desktop, except that my desktop machine is connected by ethernet cable, not wireless. That phantom “public” network re-appeared, and nothing I could do would get rid of it. The physical connections were fine, but nothing could persuade my desktop that it actually had a connection to the router and it was unable to get an IP address.

Having just bought a new laptop, I’m hoping that these symptoms do not imply that I need to also buy a new router, as you can imagine.

China discovers that “You can’t stop the signal” again

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Strategy Page looks at the way news was disseminated about the high speed rail crash despite the Chinese government’s attempts to quash the story:

Since July 27th, China got another reminder that it no longer can control the news. On July 27th, China’s high-speed “bullet train” had a fatal accident, leaving over 30 dead and many more injured. The cause was inadequate safety and communications systems. In this case, one train was halted by a flaw in the signalling system and another came up from behind and there was the collision that sent four train cars off the tracks, and a bridge. The government immediately tried to keep the accident out of the news. This effort failed because of the ingenuity of Chinese Internet users, despite the government ban on Twitter in China. The ban was meant to impede the rapid spread of news the government wanted to control. Given enough time, the state controlled media could get out a story the government could live with. But blog, RSS and other Internet tools have been tweaked to do the same thing Twitter does. This was especially true of “micro-blogs” that quickly distribute the same 140 character messages Twitter does. Not as well, but good enough, and the news the government wanted to control spread uncontrollably. This included pictures and video of the accident, which the government planned to keep out of the news.

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