… to help people in other countries route around gov censorship. Once you get past the irony, do you get the sense that the fedgov will rue the day that it created these? (NY Times link. Tip o’ hat to PT.)
Category: Computers & Technology
I said I was going to de-focus on bad news and its attendant blogistic knee-jerking. But once in a while the reality checks are too stunning to ignore. Here’s how bad it’s getting: The U.S. Department of Education sends a S.W.A.T team to kick down a door and terrorize a family — for defaulted student loans. (NOTE: Original link is now 404. Thanks to dsd in the comments, here’s another link, with photos. Check his other links, too.) Facebook is at it again. Keep your photos OUT of Facebook, guys. How you’re going to prevent Granny or your best buddy…
We all know John Gilmore’s famous dictum: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” True, but with governments doing what they do (and with more bandwidth being centralized in the hands of fewer, larger ISPs), routing around damage isn’t necessarily an automatic thing. From C^2 comes word of a new book (available free in HTML, pdf, and epub, available for purchase in dead tree format): How to Bypass Internet Censorship. Forgive it for opening with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights; to some people in the world, that’s an improvement over what they’ve got locally. I haven’t…
O. sent this to me with the comment, “If this is true, it does not portend good things for freedom, in general, or firearms, given Facebook’s reach on the net.” Facebook’s managers are deploying a new software upgrade that will dismantle myriad groups of like-minded political activists unless they get a special software-key from the company. But Facebook managers are providing very limited information about which groups are being favored with the new key, prompting some activists to complain about possible political favoritism among Facebook managers, and many other activists to experiment with techniques and tricks to get the needed…
S.W.A.T. magazine (which I so mind-bogglingly write for) now has a digital edition — as well as a jazzy new look to its website. I hear that an online store is also on the way. The digital edition includes only selected articles. But the setup is very nice and publisher Rich Lucibella (who himself uses an “alternative” browser and operating system) has laid down the law to his techies that everything must be cross-platform compatible. Good for Rich. (Oh, how often we non-Microsofties get a front-row seat in the theater of terrible web design! It’s amazing how many companies apparently…
Yegads. It’s enough to drive even a dedicated “creators’ rights” person into the anti-IP camp. From W.K. (who also wonders if one can make a living coming up with euphonious acronyms for bad laws) — meet the proposed “PROTECT-IP” Act. You can just call it (as they do on Ars Technica’s Law & Disorder Blog) the Revised Net Censorship Act: The PROTECT IP Act makes a few major changes to last year’s COICA legislation. … But what the PROTECT IP Act gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. While the definition of targeted sites is tighter, the…
Read this account of an Anonymous hacker with a full shaker of salt at hand, says C^2. It’s interesting, but you do get the feeling the author took everything in uncritically. I’ll bet every dog lover already knows this. (NY Times free subscription link.) But this display of loyalty amid disaster might still surprise — and bring a tear. (Tip o’ hat to P.T.) And from Jim B. in a recent comment section: very cool temporary shelter.
One of the things I hate, hate, hate about being aware is that every time you think you’ve heard it all, that you’re as cynical as you can get, that no level of governmental depravity could possibly surprise you … you learn something new. Something worse. Sometimes it’s just a little thing you can laugh off. Like Newt Gingrich expecting Christian broadcasters to believe that he cheated on his wives out of patriotism. Or, for that matter hearing commentators claim with straight face that Newt Gingrich is the R-party’s great intellectual light. I mean, you hear these things and it…
… That’s the title of a New York Times article about a proposal by Columbia law professor Eben Moglen to “rebuild the Internet” (without government this time) for greater privacy and individual control. Moglen has created the Freedom Box Foundation to help develop this ideas. I’d love to hear comment from you tech-oriented readers on how (or whether) you think this would work and how it might change the Netiverse. —– I’ve got three article deadlines this week, followed by a very special project. So blogging might be “lite” for the next few weeks. To keep the silence from getting…
The Swiss vote to keep their guns. Sounds as if their nannifying hoplophobes are just as bad as ours, though. NAFTA North. For “security” this time. Complete with more plans for biometric ID and tracking. Sigh. But don’t worry. The fedgov’s rushing to the rescue to protect our online privacy. I especially like the part about all those levels of government that are above the proposed law. Kevin Wilmeth, Rifleman Savant, gets it exactly right on Egypt. The future’s still dangerous (isn’t it always?). But the NOW has been magnificent. And zownds! — the Empire was irrelevant to it all.…