"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Save the Internet!
Topic: Politics and Law
9:30 am EST, Mar 7, 2008
To be perfectly honest with you, I think this is bunch of fucking bullshit.
The internet is not neutral, and has never been neutral, and none of these people who are arguing about net neutrality are willing to acknowledge what that really means nor do they have any interest in it actually happening!
Around the turn of the decade I used to make (completely futile) arguments that we should have symmetric technologies like IDSL rather than things like cable modems in our homes. They would provide an infrastructure where consumers REALLY had the ability to serve content and peer to peer networks would work well. No one cared. There were no lawyers arguing that the phone companies ought to provide more upstream bandwidth. There was no "grass roots" effort to advocate that symmetric links be made available in the marketplace at consumer prices. I couldn't even convince people in the hacker scene that I was right. Literally, no one cared.
Now, because we built this asymmetric infrastructure, you can't effectively serve content from your home; you have to use a service provider, or you have to buy an artificially expensive symmetric link. You can't even get a static IP address from AT&T for a residential connection at any price! For some people, like me, that want to host a full website, this means we have to spend a lot of money on colocation in a place where static IP addresses and symmetric connections are available. I've spent enough on hosting MemeStreams over the years that I could have bought a car at this point. For others, with, well, more mainstream kinds of content that they want to host, there are services available, like YouTube, Blogger, and MySpace. Those services are making hundreds of millions of dollars selling advertising on the content that their users are creating! And NOW all of a sudden there are all these people who claim to care about "net neutrality."
It is those hundreds of millions of dollars that are funding this "grass roots" effort! All this emotion and advocacy is NOT actually defending network neutrality. Its defending the status quo architecture which is not neutral, to protect the exclusivity of that revenue stream. That video, in then end, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Its overtly manipulative. Does Vint Cerf think Net Neutrality ought to mean that AT&T is required to sell me a static IP?
Furthermore, have online services like AOL and Compuserve ever been a problem? Are we suggesting that it ought to be ILLEGAL for them to offer a special closed garden specifically to their customers? If not, than what, specifically, are we suggesting? I don't understand the difference between that and most net neutrality proposals. No one can articulate exactly where they draw the line between these two things. The difference seems to be that AOL is OK because it started out that way, but services that currently only provide internet access cannot add closed gardens on to what they are currently offering, particularly if those gardens are constructed by third parties. That doesn't make any sense, but somehow these "grass roots" advocates have managed to convince a large number of people to be very emotional about it.
Can the phone companies do wrong? Yes, of course they can. Blocking or degrading service to existing customers who have already agreed to pay for "Internet" access should not be legal. But if they want to bring up a new low latency link to a particular online video provider I don't see what is different about that than that provider dropping a local copy of their content on the network via a service like Akamai. Are these net neutrality advocates saying that Akamai ought to be free? Why weren't they saying that 9 years ago when Akamai was being created?
Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier | Threat Level from Wired.com
Topic: Computer Security
10:39 pm EST, Mar 5, 2008
According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a "Rapid Deployment" team hired to revamp security on the carrier's internal network. He noticed that the carrier's officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" -- a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party.
Quantico, Virginia, is home to a Marine base. But perhaps more relevantly, it's also the center of the FBI's electronic surveillance operations.
"The circuit was tied to the organization's core network," Pasdar writes in his affidavit. "It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions."
I hope the feds put a firewall on the other side, otherwise....
Three propose wind farms off Jersey Shore | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/05/2008
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:12 am EST, Mar 5, 2008
An established utility, a wind-farm developer, and a consortium of commercial fishermen each have proposed building giant turbine-driven power plants off the Jersey Shore, hoping to demonstrate the viability of the ocean breeze as a clean source of electricity.
The three proposals vary widely - locations, for example, are between three and 16 miles off Atlantic or Cape May County - and timelines are iffy. Theoretically, however, within five years 100 spinning turbines could be generating 350 megawatts, enough to power 125,000 homes.
Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.
Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.
Dan Froomkin - Why Immunity Matters - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Civil Liberties
10:41 pm EST, Mar 4, 2008
And indeed, beyond the hyperbole, the Bush administration is articulating a more measured, three-part argument for immunity, based on concerns about fairness, secrecy and future cooperation.
It just so happens that all three parts of this argument are flawed.
This is good coverage of the FISA battle. It ends on a sour note:
Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "The signs are unmistakably clear that what was always inevitable -- full compliance by the House Democratic leadership with Bush's demands on warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty -- is now imminent. . . .
"This is, of course, everything except surprising. No rational person who has watched Congressional Democrats since they took over Congress could possibly have expected them to do anything but what they always do: namely, whatever they're told to do by the White House."
Other information: Ghosts I-IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.
An exciting partnership and experience regarding this release will be announced soon.
Wow. I just learned about Still last weekend, and I haven't listened to the remixes of Year Zero, and now they make 36 new tracks available for 5 bucks! Looks like I've got a lot of listening to do!
A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears - New York Times
Topic: Internet Civil Liberties
7:59 pm EST, Mar 4, 2008
It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them.
This raises an interesting question. U.S. law prohibits U.S. persons from doing business with embargoed companies or persons. But what if that business primarily facilitates a speech activity? Does the first amendment supercede?
The FY2000 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1202) directs the Secretary of Defense to submit a report "…on the current and future military strategy of the People’s Republic of China. The report shall address the current and probable future course of military-technological development on the People’s Liberation Army and the tenets and probable development of Chinese grand strategy, security strategy, and military strategy, and of the military organizations and operational concepts, through the next 20 years."
