SOPA & PIPA - Jan 18 Day of Action

In this post on boingboing Cory Doctorow writes everything I have thought about the SOPA and PIPA legislation currently before the US Congress. I quote in full ...

"On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to say something reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it."

But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don't think that any amount of "piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place -- as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

SOPA Strike is compiling a list of sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us on it.

Thank you."

 We have also opted to "go dark" tomorrow (if the code on the SOPA Strike site works).

Reply from MAFIAA Fire

Hey Angus,

Thanks for contacting MAFIAAFire!

Sure, we are most happy to answer questions about the addons, and tech people can check them out for themselves as well as it's open source.

>   The immediate impact of this is that I cannot select a country-specific proxy, for example a UK proxy allowing me to view BBC programming via the BBC iPlayer 

No you cannot, and for good reason. It would make it easier for particular countries to stomp down on proxies, this way they dont even know if their countries proxies will be used for sure.

UK proxies are anyway avoided because we want to make sure everyone can get to sites like Newsbin if they need to, which is supposed to be banned in the near future.

We do not use French proxies for the same reason.

>  A repressive regime, China or Syria or Israel, can set up a proxy server (or many) and MAFIAA Fire selects it randomly  

It is possible, but unlikely.

The reason it's unlikely is we will "cycle" the proxies, so even if one of their proxies end up on our list, it wont be there long because on the next cycle a new bunch of proxies end up on the list and the old are out.

We randomly chose our proxies from many places of the internet (which we don't disclose where), the chance that the Chinese setup a proxy, put it in the right place for us to find it, it passes all our tests and beats out the other 1000s of free proxies to come on our list are pretty tiny.

But yes, it is possible just as given enough time a monkey sitting at a typewriter can accidently type out one of Shakespeare's entire plays.

>   is MAFFIA Fire selecting its proxies randomly Or is it filtering which countries, ISPs etc are legitimate for hosting proxies - in which case which countries and which ISPs? 

Yes, we do pick proxies randomly and yes we do filter proxies depending on which country they are hosted.

France, Denmark, Italy, UK and a few others cannot come on our list. If SOPA passes the US proxies will also be excluded.

Basically, the countries that offer proxies to the full, uncensored internet end up on our list.


Whats your blog address?

Cheers!

Ze

SOPA,MAFIAA Fire, Mobile Phones and more

Lots has been happening on Internet access and censorship in the last few months.

Western/Northern governments have been praising the attributes of social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, in the last few months as northern African and Middle Eastern goovernments topple and fall.

These very governments tacitly support the efforts of organisations and activist groups, such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), Anonymous etc in their work to set up proxy networks which allow users in "non-democratic regimes" to read Western/Northern "propaganda" websites.

The efforts of EFF through its promotion of Tor, Privoxy etc have been admirable in the extreme. The latest offering is MAFIAA Fire which allows you to connect to any Internet site anonymously and automatically via proxies. It avoids the configuration difficulties of the Tor/Privoxy solution but has the disadvantage that you cannot choose your proxy. The immediate impact of this is that I cannot select a country-specific proxy, for example a UK proxy allowing me to view BBC programming via the BBC iPlayer (see previous posts) ... but I see problems here. A repressive regime, China or Syria or Israel, can set up a proxy server (or many) and MAFIAA Fire selects it randomly ... is MAFFIA Fire selecting its proxies randomly Or is it filtering which countries, ISPs etc are legitimate for hosting proxies - in which case which countries and which ISPs?

The very same networking sites are being used by activists in the cities of the Americas and Europe in the current Occupy Wall Street protests, in the UK to avoid police kettling strategies (Sukey), by international relief organisations in natural disasters (Ushahidi).

As the police and other other security agencies across the world, from Western/Northern governments to those "repressive" regimes the former express the wish to do away with the latter, all are increasingly dependent on gathering intelligence from social networks as their own "secure" communications networks are failing ... we learn that the UK police network's whistle-and-bells new VHF radio system failed dismally during the recent disturbances and individual police officers had to use their personal mobile phones ,,,

"Among the failings highlighted by the [Police] federation, which represents 136,000 officers, were chronic problems, particularly in London with the hi-tech digital Airwave radio network. Its failings were one reason why officers were "always approximately half an hour behind the rioters". This partly explained, it said, why officers kept arriving at areas from where the disorder had moved on.

The Airwave network was supposed to improve the way emergency services in London responded to a crisis after damning criticism for communication failures following the 7 July bombings in 2005.

It is being relied upon to ensure that police officers will be able to communicate with each other from anywhere in Britain when the Olympics come to London next summer. The federation wants a review into why the multibillion-pound system collapsed, leaving officers to rely on their own phones.

"Officers on the ground and in command resorted, in the majority, to the use of personal mobile phones to co-ordinate a response," says the report.


Ironic that during the July 2005 London Underground terrorist attacks large sections of the London mobile telephone network were shut down.

As Alex saays "And it's the UK, for fuck's sake. We do radio." http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2011/12/can-you-hear-me-now.html

At the same the Western/Northern governments want to curb internet freedom, under entertainment (film, music, sex etc) industry (RIAA and MPAA to name just two of hundreds) pressure.

So the Western/Northern governments seem to be in a Catch 22 and cannot resolve it.

The latest is this ...


"The New America Foundation's Open Network Technology Initiative, a US State Department-funded project to build an "Internet in a suitcase" that can be dropped into repressive zones where protesters need network access and the state is trying to take it away. The project -- a very complex piece of technology -- has gotten to the point where it needs a live test, and lucky for the Open Technology engineers, Occupy DC is just down the street, and that's a great testbed.

The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up. Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection, everyone on the network can connect. If that connection disappears, users can still try to update an application like Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network finds another connection to the greater net.

That’s harder to pull off in practice, even under ideal conditions — as anyone who’s tried to link even two Wi-Fi access points in their own home could attest. Now throw in the variables that the access points should work in urban and exposed environments, as well as protest zones like Tahir Square. You’ll want to protect dissidents with encryption and deniability. And you don’t want your beta-testers to be arrested or even killed because of a software bug. All together it’s the kind of challenge engineers like to call “non-trivial”.

“Finding a place to use the system is difficult,” Meinrath said. “Thank God for the Occupy movement.”

So the USG  is using its democratically legitimate Occupy Wall St movement which it diametrically opposes to testdrive cyberweapons it can use against countries/regimes it opposes? And if I am in Egypt, Syria, China, I can then bittorrent download what the fuck I like ...

... but hang on wasn't the US just getting heavy with China about "intellectual piracy"?

Oh and I forgot the Stuxnet virus...! Backfire!

Tides

It is easy peasy to forecast the times and heights of the tides at any location in the world using computers. Online applications such as the UK's Admiralty EasyTide make this a click away.

But it wasn't always so easy ...

Originally, it had to be done by compex manual mathematics but then William Thomson,, later Lord Kelvin (i.e. of the temperature unit), built a mechanical tide calculator in 1872.

This was crucial to the planning of D-Day, the Allied invasion of continental Europe in June 1944. The man in the photo above is Arthur Doodson of the Liverpool Tidal Institute who led the planning team. This article in Physics Today explains.

This takes me back to pre-calculator schooldays of slide-rules and Log Tables ...

Thanks to boingboing.