Slashdot – Nov. 15, 2009:

At a UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, anti-censorship group Open Net Initiative was startled by a demand from UN officials to remove a poster mentioning Chinese Net censorship. When ONI refused the request, security personnel arrived and took away the poster. The group was promoting a new book, Access Controlled, a survey of Internet censorship, filtering, and online surveillance. A witness said, “The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many.”

The MPAA and RIAA want ISPs to police their traffic for pirated material. Others wants them to police for child porn. Now this. When are phone companies going to be held liable for chuckleheads drunk dialing when I sleep? When are cable companies going to be held liable for allowing stations to up the volume on commercials or playing bad shows? This is just idiotic, irresponsible, pointless lawmaking on so many levels.

The House Financial Services Committee has approved a bill, the Investor Protection Act, which requires to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block any traffic on their networks which fraudulently invokes the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, Failure to do so will make the ISPs subject to court injunctions and liable for any damages that result from the fraud.

The SIPC’s job is to protect investor assets when a brokerage firm fails. The committee found that fraudulent actors on the Internet and elsewhere sometimes represent themselves as legitimate.
[...]
Note that the rules include any data simply routed through the network. This amounts to a requirement that all data on the network be subject to deep packet inspection and contextual analysis. This is an enormous, potentially crippling burden for ISPs, both large and small. Even if representations are found that someone represents the SIPC, it’s not clear how the ISP is supposed to determine if it’s fraudulent. And the bill doesn’t appear to make any allowances for data encryption, which would probably make the ISPs duties impossible to implement.

---

This article is written from a Canadian perspective, but at the end includes links to reactions from other countries. The talks are designed to create a world wide set of American-style, MPAA & RIAA-wanted (although, of course, not specifically mentioned), draconian and invasive Internet laws that would override many country’s laws. How did we let these two organizations’ lobbyists get so much power that they can get our government to do their bidding on the world?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations continue in a few hours as Seoul, Korea plays host to the latest round of talks. The governments have posted the meeting agenda, which unsurprisingly focuses on the issue of Internet enforcement [UPDATE 11/4: Post on discussions for day two of ACTA talks, including the criminal enforcement provisions]. The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.

Despite the efforts to combat leaks, information on the Internet chapter has begun to emerge (just as they did with the other elements of the treaty). Sources say that the draft text, modeled on the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, focuses on following five issues:
[...]
The Internet chapter raises two additional issues. On the international front, it provides firm confirmation that the treaty is not a counterfeiting trade, but a copyright treaty. These provisions involve copyright policy as no reasonable definition of counterfeiting would include these kinds of provisions. [...] When combined with the other chapters that include statutory damages, search and seizure powers for border guards, anti-camcording rules, and mandatory disclosure of personal information requirements, it is clear that there is no bigger IP issue today than the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated behind closed doors this week in Korea.

Found by Brother Uncle Don.

---

Click pic to embiggen

Read about McCain’s opposition here and below.

Last week, Senator John McCain [Republican-Arizona] introduced his “Internet Freedom Act”. McCain’s press release says the proposed bill “would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from enacting rules that would regulate the Internet.” What McCain should have said in his press release was ‘The lobbyist told me to do it…’

McCain’s bill came on the same day as the FCC [Federal Communication Commission] decided to move forward on an official Net Neutrality policy that would prevent ISPs from making arbitrary decisions.

Senator McCain had been the long time chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, a position he held from 1997 to 2001, and again from 2003 to 2005. This is the committee which has jurisdiction over the US Senate legislation dealing with policy about science, engineering, and technology research and development.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
From Here to Neutrality
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Just out of idle curiosity, how many apps are in Microsoft’s Marketplace app store? I can’t tell since apparently you can’t get to it via their website without a Windows-based phone. Unlike that other company.

This may explain a lot about some of our regular commenters.

Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.

Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.

Found by Brother Uncle Don.

What about those of us with our own domains?

According to the Insurance Information Institute, drivers with lower credit scores file 40% more claims than drivers at the higher end of the credit scale.

Forget “red” state, “blue” state… certain states also have higher credit scores than others. The Dakotas and Wisconsin lead the country while Texas and Nevada have the lowest average credit scores.

We found another intriguing credit score correlation, email address domains. Based on a sample of 20,000 credit scores, our data shows that there is a difference of average scores based on what email service users prefer. Interestingly, Gmail and Comcast users came out the top with a higher average, while AOL and Yahoo users had the lowest average credit scores.

What does it all mean?

RTFA to find out.

Slashdot – October 17, 2009:

“Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of well-known computer security company Kaspersky Labs, is calling for an end to the anonymity of the Internet, and for the creation of mandatory ‘Internet passports’ for anyone who wishes to browse the Web. Says Kaspersky, ‘Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport … the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public, and it was wrong … to introduce it in the same way.’ He calls anonymity ‘the Internet’s biggest security vulnerability’ and thinks any country that doesn’t follow this regime should be ‘cut off.’ The EFF objects, and it’s likely that they won’t be the only ones.”

Slashdot – October 17, 2009:

“New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently allow spyware to be installed without authorization. ‘The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means.’ There have also been proposals to extend the exemptions granted to telecom providers to include the installation of programs without the user’s express consent, which Geist says will ‘leave the door open to private, surreptitious surveillance.’”

Garth Brooks is back. I never knew he went away. But apparently he’s out of retirement and back in the news. He’s complaining that the government is not doing anything to crack down on file sharing, which is allegedly killing the music industry, even though it’s not. (See also here, and here, and here.)

To the government he complains,

You’ve ignored us, because there’s 50,000 of us and 300 million voters. You’ve ignored us.

Think about that. Brooks is admitting that the use of file sharing is widespread. He acknowledges that everyone is doing it. But yet he wants the government to crack down on every single person in the US so that he can earn a few million more a year.

That’s some fricken balls! I almost feel like I should give him some credit for being so completely self-centered. It’s one thing to complain, “My family is starving so I need government help to feed my kids.” It’s another thing to complain, “Why won’t the government help me so I can buy my fourth fricken mansion?!”

Apparently Garth doesn’t know this, but it’s common knowledge to the rest of the world that it’s already against the law to use P2P to infringe copyrights. The punishment for such use goes way beyond any physical crime. If I go to Walmart, stick a gun in someone’s face, and steal a CD, the most I’ll have to pay monetarily is for the price of that one CD, about 20 bucks. However, if I download a CD worth of music, I’d have to pay millions of dollars.

But yet that draconian law is not enough for Garthy. He wants more! Does he want incarceration? For all 300 million of us? Apparently so. Apparently, his “lost” money, which has nothing to do with P2P, is worth more than the liberty of every citizen in the US.

But this isn’t the first time Brooks put his bank account above the rights of citizens. He also claims that selling used CDs is stealing. I’m not making this up. According to Brooks, the simple act of selling a used CD is a criminal act. Of course he’s wrong. But your right to sell your stuff is nothing compared to Brooks’ right to buy a mansion.

Of course the main reason he’s having trouble selling CDs is that his time in the spotlight is over. When rock and roll killed off the careers of the vocalists from the 50s, Sinatra, Mathis, Cole, to name a few, those guys didn’t ask the government to stop the switch to rock music. They graciously accepted their time was over and moved on. It’s time for washed up has-beens like Brooks to do the same.

Artists of today realize that the net is not a hindrance to making great music, but is actually a great tool for connecting with fans.

DARPA, Microsoft, Lockheed team up to reinvent TCP/IP • The Register — This development is flying under the radar as it were.

Arms globocorp Lockheed Martin announced today that it has won a $31m contract from the famous Pentagon crazy-ideas bureau, DARPA, to reinvent the internet and make it more suitable for military use. Microsoft will also be involved in the effort.

The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer “improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level”.

Found by Anthony Fox.

Slashdot 10/11/09:

“T-Mobile’s popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers.”

---