Pauvre Henri! C'est comme de Truffaut et Sartre. Les personne n'est pas understand le plight de le chat.

Henri 2, Paw de Deux - YouTube

You can easily find examples of this by searching twitter.

I recall conversations about the Titanic with older relatives when I was young. It was one of the great mysteries - a giant ship lost forever in the ocean. It seemed amazing that with all our modern technology we could not even find it - it spoke to a world that was beyond our control. One which our greatest accomplishments could not master.

They found it in 1985. I would have been 9. Those same older relatives were riveted. That was almost certainly the most read issue of National Geographic.

Then it was a movie, in 1997, and aspects of that movie become pop culture touchpoints. Media literate children certainly know some of the scenes in that movie even if they've never bothered to watch it, because they are constantly referenced.

But no one tells them the actual story of the Titanic. There is no mystery any more. Man seems a much greater threat to us in this era than nature.

The New Aesthetic — Twitter users discover the Titanic was real.

The Center for Democracy and Technology has a much more sane position on CISPA than the EFF. More here...

There is widespread agreement that ISPs and other operators of computer networks need clearer legal authority in order to be able to share with each other – and with the government – signatures and other information about suspected attacks on their networks. However, since we are talking about privately-owned and operated networks that carry personal communications, any sharing of information must be carefully controlled.

Lungren Cybersecurity Bill Takes Careful, Balanced Approach | Center for Democracy & Technology

I am seriously disappointed in this essay from the EFF about CISPA.

Under the proposed legislation, a company that protects itself or other companies against “cybersecurity threats” can “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property” of the company under threat.

The intent of these bills is to enable the government to work with private companies to share information about APT and other internet security issues so that those companies can take action to protect themselves from attack by blocking those attacks on the network. Why is this a problem?

The EFF equates CISPA with SOPA and then engages in what I can only describe as a wide eyed conspiracy theory in which efforts to contain APT run off the rails and turn into a censorship system for the MPAA due to gross misinterpretations of words like "cybersecurity threat."

There are three problems with this.

1. The EFF's analysis bears so little resemblance to the actual intent of this bill that we cannot trust them. I don't know if this bill is good or bad, but I'm sure the EFF is totally wrong about it, which leaves me in a difficult position vis-a-vis both the bill and their analysis of future bills.

2. As the EFF's concerns bear no relationship to the intent of the bills, they could offer constructive suggestions for wording changes that would help contain the concerns they have without impacting the intent of the supporters of the bills. This ought to be a no brainer, but this kind of constructive discussion is evidently not happening.

3. SOPA supporters are out in force accusing those who opposed SOPA of spreading disinformation. By equating CISPA to SOPA, and spreading disinformation about CISPA, the EFF is playing right into the hands of those who support SOPA.

In other words, in one fell swoop, the EFF is damaging both the important work that has been done to oppose SOPA and the important work that needs to be done to protect the Internet from spies, and they have abandoned an opportunity to contribute constructively in doing so.

If the EFF becomes the kind of shrill activist group that you wish wasn't on your side, advocates of online civil liberties have got a serious problem.

The EFF is shooting everybody in the foot.

"It is my strong view that exceptions and limitations are just that -- they are important but they must be applied narrowly so as not to harm the proprietary rights of the songwriter, book author, or artist. Copyright is for the author first and the nation second."

How Can You Be Register Of Copyrights If You Don't Even Understand Copyright's Most Basic Purpose? | Techdirt

Under Customs authority, the Department of Homeland Security could inspect what enters and exits the United States in cyberspace. Customs already looks online for child pornography crossing our virtual borders.

Does it? I'm fairly certain that FISA requires a warrant to spy on International telecommunications. Certainly, warrant in hand, customs might look for child pornography, but that is quite a different thing than the wholesale surveillance that Clarke is calling for. I think he is simply wrong here.

After all the hand wringing over the past few years regarding warrantless wiretapping of international telecommunications I can't imagine the Obama administration would call for it during an election year.

However, it remains the case that either its not OK for customs to go rummaging through hard drives when they are carried across the border or it is OK for customs to go rummaging through the same data when it crosses the same border over a wire. The idea that one of these things requires a warrant and the other requires absolutely no standard of suspicion makes absolutely no sense.

I think the problem is with the "anything goes" policy at the physical border and not the warrant requirement at the virtual one.

If the government wants to help fight APT on private networks they could, you know, start actually coordinating information with the private companies who protect those private networks from attack. No constitutional hang wringing would be required. So far, that isn't happening.

Richard Clarke calls for spying on the Internet to combat APT

Test PAC, the Reddit-based PAC founded to raise money to support opponents of Lamar Smith, the author of SOPA, has placed its first billboard and is set to run its first advertisements. The materials direct people to unseatlamar.com.

I donated to this.

I'm tired of hearing content industry executives say things like the following:

“Right doesn’t always prevail,” Attaway said of SOPA and PIPA. “This time, it didn’t, because our opponents were able to energize a grassroots response. In my view, and I think all of us would agree, [the protest against SOPA and PIPA was spread] primarily through disinformation and spinning their interest in a way that captured the attention of a number of consumers.”

The people who protested SOPA did not do so because everything is cool and there is no problem. Until content industry executives acknowledge that there is a problem and create policy proposals that respect the nature of the problem there will be no progress on these issues through dialog.

If we cannot make progress through dialog, we will make progress through other means.

Reddit-based PAC takes aim at SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith - Boing Boing

A new law - which may be announced in the forthcoming Queen's Speech in May - would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant.

But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited.

...

But Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis said it would make it easier for the government "to eavesdrop on vast numbers of people".

"What this is talking about doing is not focusing on terrorists or criminals, it's absolutely everybody's emails, phone calls, web access..." he told the BBC.

"All that's got to be recorded for two years and the government will be able to get at it with no by or leave from anybody."

...

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, added: "This is more ambitious than anything that has been done before. It is a pretty drastic step in a democracy."

Is this an April Fools Joke? Its impossible to tell anymore. :-/

BBC News - Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws

Do not miss this!

Google Maps 8-bit for NES - YouTube

Paul Vixie:

We still don't know the identities of any of the criminals who foisted Conficker on an unready world back in 2008. But we do know that the victim population has not dropped below six million (6,000,000). So we still collect the "sinkhole" data about these victims, we still report on it to network operators, and every year we buy another rack of disk drives to hold the next year or so worth of data. We're out of ideas for how to get people to care that their computers are infected with Conficker. These victims seem to feel that have more important things to worry about. My gut feeling is that they're wrong, but I can't seem to prove it. My other gut feeling about all this is that we, as a digital society, are doing this all wrong.

DNS Changer