Billy and Jill got married on Sunday. The wedding was wonderful and several of us had the honor of witnessing the beautiful event.

Billy and Jill tie the knot

John Young
Cryptome Org
251 West 89th Street
New Yor, NY 10024

RE: www.cryptome.org

Dear Mr. Young,

This letter is to notify you that we are terminating your service for violation of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective Friday May 4, 2007. We are providing you with two week notice to locate another service provider.

Sincerely,

VERIO INC.
an NTT Communications Company

!! Absolutely no explanation given. The site is EXTREMELY slow right now, I suspect a number of people are attempting to mirror it prior to it's disappearence. Cryptome is one of the most important anti-censorship resources on the Internet. Its existance on the net is certainly a canary in the first amendment rights coal mine. Expect a widespread reaction when it finally goes away this Friday.

Press coverage at IDG, and on Slasdot.

Update: OK, if I was a Verio customer I'd now be hopping mad. I don't agree with JYA's interpretation that this is a government conspiracy. This sounds like yet another authoritarian fool who got a job in the abuse department of an ISP and thinks they're the center of the universe.

We do not provide the customer with any details regarding the termination of our AUP - we can refer them to the AUP and more than likely they already know why -

Best Regards,
Danna Thompson
Legal Department
NTT/VERIO Inc.

Danna Thompson has obviously never run a website. No, we don't always know everything that happens on our sites and we certainly can't predict what sort of arbitrary offense might be taken to a particular piece of content. Furthermore, as JYA has proved time after time, complaintants aren't always in the right. Message: Don't do business with Verio/NTT.

Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT

The court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site.

MemeStreams could generate agent based music under the compulsary license!

Slashdot | Court Rules Playlist Customization Is Not Interactive

k wrote:

The University of Portland handed a one-year suspension to engineering major and Air Force ROTC member Michael Maass after he wrote a computer program designed to replace and improve Cisco Clean Access (CCA).

Its worth mentioning here that this "vulnerability" isn't really a bug or flaw in the software, nor was this "discovery" particularly new. This is how CCA is designed to work. It keeps honest people honest. It is not "secure" against people who lie about their setup, nor could it be, without some sort of "trusted computing" system installed non-consentually on student computers that kept them from controlling the software they were running through cryptographic integrity checks controlled by the University.

RE: Student suspended for bypassing network security - News

Essentially, the devices plug "directly into the processor socket of dual- or quad-socket servers" in order to provide "high performance application acceleration ranging from 10x to 100x compared to processors alone, while simultaneously reducing overall system power consumption."

I've been talking about this for years. Cool announcement.

Xilinx, Altera showing off FPGA coprocessors at IDF - Engadget

--timball

billy's bachelor party

In May, London-based Hip Hop artist M.I.A. revealed that she was denied a visa to come work with American music producers on her next album. News reports indicate that the Sri Lankan-born artist was excluded because government officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

American Civil Liberties Union : U.S. Government Increasingly Blocking Entry at the Border Because of Ideology, ACLU Says

Meanwhile, the U.S. Government is using the "ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot act to bar perfectly peaceful people from the United States because they may express points of view that the administration dislikes. These are the actions of a totalitarian state.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It’s a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government’s use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

The Two Malcontents » U.S. Border Patrol Bars Canadian Psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar

Snoop Dogg has been barred from entering Australia after failing a character test, Australia's government said on Thursday.

Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, was told his visa would be cancelled after he pleaded no contest to gun and drug charges in the United States earlier this month.

"He doesn't seem the sort of bloke we want in this country," Andrews told local radio.

While Snoop Dog is perhaps a less sympathetic character than the psychotherapist who wants to visit his children, this is another datapoint in the encroaching international information sharing and travel control regime that appears to present significant threat to people's right to travel and associate freely. Snoop Dog may be a pain in the ass but he isn't a terrorist and he isn't gunna overstay his visa and take a job under the table. There are fundamental human rights being ignored here.

Australia bars Snoop Dogg | Entertainment | Reuters

A respectable Vancouver psychotherapist who took a few rides on the Technicolor express back in the 1960s has been orbidden from entering the United States after a border guard googled him and turned up some trippy writing the therapist published in 2001. Andrew Feldmar, was accustomed to traveling to the U.S. five or six times a year to visit his children...
"Persons with AIDS, tuberculosis, infectious diseases are inadmissible," Milne said. "Anyone who is determined to be a drug abuser or user is inadmissible. A crime involving moral turpitude is inadmissible and one of those areas is a violation of controlled substances."

You can be barred entry to the United States because U.S. Customs thinks you are immoral based on your writings on the Internet.

U.S. Customs brings the culture war to the border.