Tag Archives: sopa

The President’s challenge – Nat Torkington

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As SOPA looks shakier, the President handed a challenge to the technical community:

“Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue Web sites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders,” reads Saturday’s statement. “We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.”

All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi–hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

via radar.oreilly.com

Excellent.

To recap, stop asking the “technical community” to solve your niche issue, one, because there isn’t a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, and two, “we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard.”

Author of U.S. online piracy bill vows not to buckle

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“It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don’t mind taking that on.”

Smith stressed the bill would only affect websites based outside the United States and criticized opponents for failing to cite specific sections, saying many have failed to read it and were disguising their economic interests with rhetoric about Internet freedom. “There are some companies like Google that make money by directing consumers to these illegal websites,” Smith said. “So I don’t think they have any real credibility to complain even though they are the primary opponent.”

via reuters.com

Smith’s list of supporters is not amazing to me, tediously typical.

 

Poisoning DNS perhaps a bad idea – Operations and other mysteries

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The caf?????s upstream ISP is ???Optus???, one of the major Australian carriers. To my astonishment I found that Optus???s DNS servers are interfering with Google searches, stealing their DNS lookups and serving results pages on their own (shitty quality) branded search instead! Try https:? No connection; and Google+ wouldn???t load either.

Obviously as soon as realized what???s going on I immediately changed DNS servers to something reliable. Before I did I found a tiny ???about this page??? link at the bottom of the heinous Optus search results page, where I was told how great this was for me, but how I could opt out of their ???default??? search engine if I wanted to but was warned this was an ???advanced setting???.

Seriously, what do Optus think they???re doing? From a commercial standpoint, do they really think that their captive audience matters to anyone advertising on the web? Of course not, but in the mean time they???re certainly going to alienate customers who just maybe actually do want to use (in this case) Google sites.

There???s a bigger issue, though. Unaltered answers to DNS queries is a backbone of net neutrality. That???s our problem, but once carriers start poisoning nameservers in their own favour it will be but a blink before everyone is doing it to each other and lookups will become worthless. While I???m sure the morons in Marketing who thought that sabotaging DNS queries would be a good idea won???t be worried about the wreckage that will cause for everyone else, such a war wouldn???t be good for any of the companies involved, either. And meanwhile, if they really want everyone to learn how to install an app to ???fix??? the internet???

via blogs.operationaldynamics.com

Corruption is everywhere.

File-Sharing Darling Dan Bull Publishes Anti-SOPA Rap

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???As an internet geek, a musician, and a non-evil person, SOPA is abhorrent on several fronts,??? Dan told TorrentFreak. ???It threatens the future of the internet, which is something far more valuable both commercially and socially than the entertainment industry ever has been, or ever will be.???

Dan recognizes that everything we do is influenced by something else, and richer cultural landscapes can be achieved through remixes, mashups and sharing.

???Creativity is all about interpreting and re-imagining what you see and hear around you. The idea that creativity exists in some kind of vacuum, and that you???re not a real artist unless you can make something ???completely original??? is not only stupid, it contradicts the most fundamental axioms of how the universe works,??? he adds.

???Thirdly, the internet is an amazing new forum for free speech and holding those in power to account. The idea that governments and even private corporations can police the internet and decide what people on a global scale are allowed to say and hear is tyrannical.???

via torrentfreak.com

SOPA on the ropes? Bipartisan alternative to ‘Net censorship emerges

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One promising alternative was unveiled today by a bipartisan group of 10 senators and representatives. It ditches the ???law and order??? approach to piracy and replaces it with a more limited, trade-based system. 

And the legislators behind it have put out a draft of the idea for public comment before they even begin drawing up actual legislation. (Does the Smoky Back Room industry know about this threatening behavior?)

via arstechnica.com

Alternative, or the pre-planned fall back. A comparative voice of sweet reason after the extreme first position was advanced as a stalking horse?

European Parliament warns of global dangers of US domain revocation proposals

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This situation is now turning critical, with legislative proposals such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act claiming worldwide jurisdiction for domain names and IP addresses. The definitions in SOPA are so broad that, ultimately, it could be interpreted in a way that would mean that no online resource in the global Internet would be outside US jurisdiction.

via edri.org
via Donald Clark

The Privatization of Copyright Lawmaking

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the companion bill to the Senate???s PROTECT IP Act, would further privatize adjudication and punishment. Title I of that law (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a ???market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.??? It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a ???good faith belief??? that they are being ???harmed by the activities??? of a website to send a notice to the site???s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.

via torrentfreak.com

Is TPP worth this?