Category: law

stop the EU from destroying your internet freedom

Post author By n3wjack
Post date September 8, 2018
2 Comments on stop the EU from destroying your internet freedom

The EU Parliament will debate and vote on Article 13 & 11. Time to fire up your email and social media devices and let yourself be heard again, which is why I’m resurfacing this post about the what and the why.
The fight is still not over so sign the petition and let yourself be heard.

Yep. They are at it again, those pesky governments. If it ain’t the US trying to destroy net neutrality it’s the EU trying to setup a link tax and an automated content filter/surveillance/censorship machine.

I’m talking about the copyright reform law the EU is trying to get through in a few days.

Article 11 is bad. It tries to setup a link tax, meaning you cant link or post snippets to e.g. news articles on your site. A similar law was passed earlier in Spain and it causes Google news to simply pull back out of Spain. If the same happens to the whole of the EU, that would suck mayor balls.

Article 13 is far worse though. That’s the content filter, which means any site where content can be uploaded e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur etc will be forced to automatically scan your upload and filter it if it isn’t allowed. The claim is that they want to stop terrorists and bad people from spreading illegal content on the internet. The reality will be that those bad guys will find ways around it and the rest of us will be stuck with a filter that’s going to block our uploads because of flawed algorithms and bureaucratic decisions. Internet memes use copyrighted content, but will the filter be able to detect sarcasm? I don’t think so.

To quote Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the WWW:

Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet, from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.

So please help out and email, tweet or call your MEP’s and make it clear Article 11 & 13 have to go. The freedom of the internet depends on you!

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don’t let the EU censor your internet: stop ACTA

Post author By n3wjack
Post date January 28, 2012
No Comments on don’t let the EU censor your internet: stop ACTA

You might have heard that SOPA got stopped (for now) in the USA, a bill to censor the internet and limit online freedom for everyone. An even worse deal is going down on our EU-side of the globe unfortunately, where ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has already been signed, but not yet approved (luckily).

ACTA – a global treaty – could allow corporations to censor the Internet. Negotiated in secret by a small number of rich countries and corporate powers, it would set up a shadowy new anti-counterfeiting body to allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties — even prison sentences — against people they say have harmed their business.
– avaaz.org

So it’s about time to do something about this before this bill gets voted in the EU Parliament and gets adopted globally.
First you can start by reading about ACTA, find out what’s wrong with it, sign the petition and act against it.

For those in the US, you can go sign the White House petition. Do it, because this deal is worse than SOPA, as it spans beyond the internet and deals even with regulations on medication and food.

The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights, ACTA could also ban lifesaving generic drugs and threaten local farmers’ access to the seeds they need. And, amazingly, t he ACTA committee will have carte blanche to change its own rules and sanctions with no democratic scrutiny.
– avaaz.org

Spread the word, sign the petition, just do something so this is stopped just like SOPA was.

Afterwards, you can get back to your memes and lolcats. :)

belgium geek internet law society

help stop the Belgian data retention rule

Post author By n3wjack
Post date October 28, 2009
4 Comments on help stop the Belgian data retention rule

Green blurry command line shots are so cyber.

The European Union wants that internet traffic, phone calls and generally every form of electronic communication data (e.g. Skype) is logged and kept for 2 years. The logged data has to contain personal information to identify the user and location information such as time, date, place, length of the phone call/internet connection, the text/MMS/email-message itself.

The whole idea is to use this data to stop terrorism and crime but I don’t see how tracking the surfing behavior or a few million innocent people is going to make it any easier in finding that needle in the haystack. Not only is this a huge invasion of each and every civilian’s privacy, it’s also going to cost a lot to set up. In the end it’s the customer of the ISP’s and phone companies that’s going to end up paying for this, as if Belgium isn’t already expensive enough when it comes down to that.

Having this information spread out of a few thousand databases is also prone to abuse or hacking. Think of what spammers could do with this kind of information, or even marketeers. They’d love to get their hands on that kind of information I’m sure.

So if you too feel like this should be put to and end, get over to bewaarjeprivacy.be and sign the petition.

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#iranelection

I’ve been watching the internet concerning the Iranian elections lately and I have to say that the information being delivered over the net is far more interesting than what traditional media has to offer, plus it’s a lot faster too.

A few things are quite interesting about this whole thing from an geek point of view on how the so called new media is used in the conflict:

1. Easy channels of information = easy channels for disinformation. As bloggers use blogs, Twitter and facebook to spread instant updates on what’s going on inside Iran, the government sets up fake account to spread disinformation using the same channels. Keeping your bullshit filter up when going through the information spread on the various networks is mandatory to not get suckered into the false news.

2. The firewalls have eyes. While the internet is the medium to spread news in a somewhat anonymous fashion, it’s also being actively monitored and partially controlled by the government to try and track down protesters. The same goes for cellphone networks and SMS traffic. Public proxies and anonymizers can help to keep the identity of the bloggers safe, but those are being shut down as well. Governments all over the world are lobbying to limit the privacy of their civilians by forcing ISP’s to track their user’s actions on the net under the excuse of increasing security and fighting the terrorist threat. Once this is achieved there is no turning back and these tools can be used for less noble goals which is now being displayed in Iran. Keep this in mind next time politicians talk about forcing your internet provider to keep logs. Tools like Tor, Freenet, proxies and anonymizers are also imported for this reason.

3. Sometimes helping turns out to be not helping. People all over the world are trying to help the Iranian protesters using all sorts of geeky tricks. Unfortunately these tricks seem to be working more against them in some cases. Some people started DDos’ing Iranian websites. This turned out to be blocking overal internet traffic in Iran, including those of the protesters trying to get the word out. Retweeting messages of legit Iranians for example can blow their cover as Boing Boing mentions. Retweeting false information is another. Which brings us to..

4. Who can you trust? Trust is the major issue here. Can the blogger’s information be trusted? Can a website or forum be trusted, or is it a tool set up by the government to lure in the unwary? The gov has been said to set up so-called anonymous twitter-sites which simply log protesters accounts and IP’s for easy tracking. Trusting your Twitter or GMail account to a malicious website which then uses it to spam your friends is one silly mistake to make. But if your life depends on it you better be damn sure that site can be trusted before you hit the submit button.

5. The internet is supportive. All over the net support is being raised (noticed those green icons on Twitter?), rightfully or not. The underdog is always popular online and I frankly don’t have a clue yet who’s right and who’s wrong in this story, but by making such a fuss the government is certainly not looking like the good guys in this one. One thing I do know is that it’s important to allow free speech and that’s what the Iranian government is now trying to stop by blocking access to the net. It’s cool to see the Swedes at Piratebay have set up a forum which Iranians can use in full anonymity for example. I’m not linking directly to it here as it seems to be down at the moment, probably because of the increased traffic it’s getting right now, so they don’t need those few extra clicks coming from here.

Cyberwar is no longer science-fiction.

Photo by MisterArasmus, copyrighted so I’m going for fair-use here :)

about that riaa trial

I was just reading about the first RIAA trial against Jammie Thomas for downloading pirated music. One of the things that’s pretty mind boggling about it is that the jury is composed out of people who hardly have any computer knowledge at all.

This is something that I’ve seen mentioned before in trials related to computer technology. Being it cyberstalking, websites with illegal content or file sharing. I don’t see how a jury without some, or even better, substantial knowledge of the internet and peer-to-peer networks can get an idea of what this case really is about. What’s worse is that the outcome of this trial will be a precedent for any future piracy trials. In one Belgian case there was a judge who stopped the trial (temporarily) because he couldn’t grasp what the experts called in to testify where talking about. He didn’t know Jack about computers and was going to speak a verdict on a website copyright infringement case. FTW!

In the RIAA case most of the folks on the jury (according to the Wired article) don’t even use the internet ffs. How the hell are they supposed to get a more complex idea of how file sharing works if they don’t even know the basics of surfing the web or sending an email?

Beats me.
A trial to keep an eye on for sure.