Greenpeace Parody Site Censored Using Copyright Infringement Claim

One of the the reasons why legislation like SOPA and treaties like ACTA are so dangerous is that their loose definitions allow measures intended to deal with copyright infringement to be used to censor inconvenient opinions. Unfortunately, that's not just a theoretical problem with future legislation, but one that is already happening, as this post from Rick Falkvinge makes clear: 

On Techdirt.

Why IPv4 Addresses Are Like Oil

IPv4 addresses are an increasingly rare resource. But I'd not spotted the parallel with oil until this:

the US was still the largest user of new IPv4 addresses in 2008 with 50.08 million addresses used. China was a close second with 46.5 million new addresses last year, an increase of 34 percent.

Although China and Brazil saw huge increases in their address use, suggesting that the developing world is demanding a bigger part of the pie while IPv4 addresses last, what's really going on is more complex. India is still stuck in 18th place between the Netherlands and Sweden at 18.06 million addresses—only a tenth of what China has. And Canada, the UK, and France saw little or no increase in their numbers of addresses, while similar countries like Germany, Korea, and Italy saw double-digit percentage increases.

A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now.

In other words, the greediest countries - the US and China - are rushing to burn up all the oil while there's some left, and to hell with what happens afterwards....

Expensive Oil and the Analogue World

Fascinating stuff:

We usually think about technological improvements in productivity as benefiting the highly skilled and educated, and disenfranchising the poorly skilled and uneducated, but what I find most interesting about globalization in an era of $127 dollar-a-barrel oil is that blue-collar workers who make physical things in the West will stand to benefit, newly protected from foreign competition by energy tariffs, while white-collar workers who live off their wits will still feel the immense pressure of competing with everyone else in the world.

Irony in the Blood

Well spotted:

To recap:

1. In all likelihood, fossil fuel emissions are one of the primary causes of global warming;

2. global warming has melted the Arctic ice cap faster than any time on record; so

3. Russia, Denmark, Canada, and the United States are racing to make a no-more-land grab in the Arctic; in order to

4. claim fossil fuel drilling rights for the Arctic seabed.

Fidei Defensor: Oh, Look, Another One

A little while back, I wrote about the amazing coincidence that two very similar articles defending Microsoft against the European Commission had been published a few days apart. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across yet another one:

If there were truly a demand for options other than the Microsoft operating system, companies would not hesitate to specialize in meeting this demand. On the contrary, if Microsoft retains a "dominant position," it is because it offers today's best alternative in consumers' eyes.

I won't even bother refuting the arguments of the article (exercise left to the reader), since the writer either doesn't understand the issues of technological lock-in (APIs, anyone?), or pretends not to. What interests me more is who exactly is behind this third defence.

The author comes from the Institut economique Molinari, which at least has the virtues of avoiding obvious weasel words like "innovation" or "competition". But a closer examination of the Institut reveals some interesting positions.

Take this one, for example:

il faut réaliser qu’il faut de l’énergie pour se protéger des aléas climatiques, froids ou chauds, et qu’un individu qui peut en déployer beaucoup est sûrement mieux protégé qu’un individu qui n’a que peu d’outils, de capital, de ressources pour s’adapter. L’économiste Julian Simon souligne que si l’énergie devenait extrêmement bon marché, il serait probablement possible d’irriguer et de cultiver les zones désertiques. Il est par conséquent évident que nous pouvons aussi nous adapter face à un climat plus chaud ou à une augmentation du niveau des océans.

The incredible logic seems to run like this. Rather than trying to do something about global warming, which might mean - quel horreur! - cutting back on that lovely black stuff, we should actually increase our dependence on oil and use it to irrigate the desert areas created by global warming. Of course, that will raise temperatures even more, creating even more deserts, but the solution is simply to use even more oil. Clever, huh?

As far as I can tell, there are no statements on the website about who funds this Institut. Of course, it couldn't possibly be someone like, say, oil companies? No, surely not. Equally, I presume that Microsoft has made no donations, directly or indirectly. The spirited defence of that company's actions is obviously offered pro bono publico - just like the desert irrigation scheme.

Radio Spectrum More Valuable Than Oil?

Hm, now here's a thought:

Martin Sims, of the UK organisation Policy Tracker, asked the regulators and ministers in attendance to ponder if radio spectrum is as important for economic growth in the 21st century, as oil was in the 20th century.

Does that mean soon we'll have wars fought over wavelengths? And what are the implications for the open spectrum movement? (Via openspectrum.info.)