23 November 2013
UK Government Study Tries To Gloss Over TAFTA/TTIP's Problems With Impossibly Precise Figures
As Europe gets back down to business after its traditional summer break, the second round of the negotiations for the proposed TAFTA/TTIP treaty is beginning. And so is the pro-treaty propaganda. Here, for example, is a 70-page document entitled "TTIP and the Fifty States: Jobs and Growth from Coast to Coast" (pdf). It comes from the British government, and is aimed at convincing the US states that TAFTA/TTIP will be good for their economies and citizens.
On Techdirt.
Nigeria Closer To Bringing In Comprehensive Internet And Phone Spying System, Probably Complete With Third-Party Backdoors
One of the unfortunate consequences of the revelations about NSA spying on just about everyone is that it creates a false impression that such activities are really quite normal these days, and nothing much to worry about. This probably encourages nations that don't carry out such comprehensive snooping on their populations to think about doing so. In Nigeria, for example, a proposal is making its way through the legislative process that would grant the Nigerian government wide-ranging surveillance powers, as reported here by Premium Times:
On Techdirt.
Turkish Government Aims To Create 6000-Strong Social Media Propaganda Squad
In the recent demonstrations in Istanbul, the Turkish government may have had superior police and security forces on the streets, but one area where it lost the battle was on social networks, which anti-government protesters used adroitly to get their viewpoint out to the world. It seems the Turkish government has learned its lesson, and has decided to fight back according to this report in the Wall Street Journal:
On Techdirt.
Brazilian President Blasts NSA Spying In Front Of World Leaders -- Including Obama -- At UN
It was expected that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, would raise the issue of NSA spying when she addressed the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York this week. But few would have predicted that her speech would be quite so excoriating (pdf), especially since it was given in the presence of President Obama, who spoke immediately after her.
On Techdirt.
Surprise: Paywalls Cause Massive Falls In Number Of Visitors - And Boost Competitors
As Techdirt has been pointing out for years, newspaper paywalls make no sense. By stopping people from reading your stories unless they have a subscription, you diminish your influence in the media world, drastically reduce the number of readers and thus make it much harder to generate revenue from them. Paywalls are also a gift to your competitors, as this story in the Guardian indicates:
On Techdirt.
The Start of the Counter-Attack Against Hargreaves?
As I noted a couple of years ago, one of the most important legacies of the Hargreaves review of copyright in the digital age was its insistence that policy must be based on evidence, not dogma. There were some heartening signs that the UK government was indeed following through on that, notably in terms of a series of reports from Ofcom that explore in detail many aspects of the online use of copyright materials - something that was simply unavailable before.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Time to Fight Against a DRM'd Web - by Forking It
At the beginning of the year, I wrote abut a shameful move by the BBC to support adding DRM to HTML to control the playback of video content. This scheme has now moved on, and the news is astonishingly bad:
On Open Enterprise blog.
Richard Stallman on the Painful Birth of GNU
Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where he first encountered and came to love the hacker world and its spirit. That idyllic period came to an end as a result of the commercialisation of the AI Labs' computer system, called the Lisp Machine, which led to the destruction of the unique environment that created it in the first place, and to its re-birth as the GNU project.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Richard Stallman on the Hacker Spirit at MIT
Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.
On Open Enterprise blog.
The Birth of a GNU Era
Exactly 30 years ago, a hacker posted an unusual message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup:
On Open Enterprise blog.
European Privacy Lost - and How to Get it Back
At the beginning of this year, I discussed a report written for the European Parliament, which warned that the US legal framework allowed the authorities there to spy on EU data held by any US cloud computing service. I also noted as an interesting fact that the NSA was building a huge new data centre, and that encryption might not offer the protection we thought.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Android and the Tesco Effect
When the first Android smartphones came out, the consensus view among certain "experts" was that Google didn't stand chance. The dogma was that the iPhone was so perfect, and its hold on the market so strong, that there was no way that Android could displace it. I think we can say that hasn't proved to be the case:
On Open Enterprise blog.
Will CyanogenMod Get the Business Blues?
Last week, I wrote an article pointing out that the NSA's assault on cryptography, bad as it was, had a silver lining for open source, which was less vulnerable to being subverted than closed-source applications produced by companies. However, that raises the question: what about the mobile world?
On Open Enterprise blog.
Linux Foundation on the Foundations of Linux
One of the many valuable things that come out of the Linux Foundation is an annual review of Linux kernel development. It's just released the 2013 edition (freely available upon registration), and the news is resoundingly good. Here are the key points.
On Open Enterprise blog.
UK Gov's Latest Move on Copyright: Exactly Wrong
Remember the Digital Economy Act? Surely one of the worst pieces of UK legislation passed - or rather, rammed through - in recent years, as readers may recall. This was inspired (if that's the right word) by the French Hadopi scheme brought in by Nicolas Sarkozy, whereby people were threatened with being disconnected from the Internet if they were accused of unauthorised sharing of digital files.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Twenty-Year-Old Requirement For 'Real-time, Full-time' Eavesdropping On Canadian Mobiles Revealed
Even if it now seems likely that Linus Torvalds wasn't approached to add a backdoor to Linux, there are plenty of others that were asked and acquiesced, as this story from The Globe and Mail in Canada makes clear:
On Techdirt.
Linus Torvalds Admits He Was Approached By US Government To Insert Backdoor Into Linux -- Or Does He?
At the LinuxCon meeting in New Orleans, Linus Torvalds was asked if he had ever been approached by the US government to insert a backdoor into the Linux kernel. Here's his characteristic answer:
On Techdirt.
Lavabit's Levison Now Avoids Email Altogether, Has Turned Into A 'Political Activist' Thanks To The NSA
A couple of weeks ago, Mike reported on the extraordinary turn of events involving Edward Snowden's email supplier, Lavabit. The company's owner, Ladar Levison, preferred to shut down the service rather than hand over to the US government something that it wanted really badly -- exactly what, we don't know because of a gag order. We then learned that the mere act of shutting Lavabit down threatened to land Levison in big trouble anyway.
On Techdirt.
More NSA Spying Fallout: Brazilian President Snubs Obama Invitation, May Trigger Internet Balkanization
A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)
On Techdirt.
China's New Censorship Plan: Three Years In Prison If You Get 500 Retweets Of A 'Harmful' Post
As we've noted before, the online community is kept on a pretty tight leash in China, with information deemed subversive or just embarrassing disappearing quickly from the networks. But it seems that's not enough. Global Voices is reporting that yet another approach is being tried to discourage "offenders" from posting in the first place:
On Techdirt.
Does The 'Three Strikes' Approach Work, In Any Sense? Here's The Evidence
Last week we reported on the suspension of Hadopi's one and only suspension, as France moved away from using Internet disconnection as a punishment. That manifest failure of the scheme that pioneered the three strikes approach makes a new paper from the Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, called "Evaluating graduated response", particularly timely. As its title suggests, this is a review of the three strikes approach in the light of the experiences in the five countries that have adopted it: France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea and the UK -- even though the latter has still not put it into practice.
On Techdirt.
Ex-MI6 Deputy Chief: 'Serious Actors' Already Knew About NSA's Techniques Before Snowden
One of the key issues in the debate surrounding Snowden's leaks is whether they might be threatening our security by letting the bad people know what the NSA and GCHQ are up to. Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of the UK's foreign intelligence agency, MI6, doesn't think so:
On Techdirt.
Latest Casualty Of NSA Spying Revelations: Web Advertising Based On Tracking Users
As we've noted before, Edward Snowden's revelations about the globe-spanning spying being conducted by the NSA are have all sorts of interesting knock-on consequences. Here's another: people are starting to worry about being tracked by online advertisers, and taking action to avoid it, as this story in Adweek explains:
On Techdirt.
Why The NSA Must Be Reined In -- For Democracy's Sake
In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University, tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?
On Techdirt.
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