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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in June we wrote about Hadopi's first and only successful disconnection
case. As we also noted then, in the wake of its abject failure, Hadopi
was being dramatically curtailed. In particular, disconnection is no
longer available as a punishment for those alleged to have downloaded
files without authorization.
On
Techdirt.
Now that Sarkozy has been thrown out of office, France is no longer
producing the steady stream of bad proposals for the Internet that it
once generated. That has left an opening for some other country to take
its place, and it seems that Russia is keen to pick up where Sarkozy
left off. We've been reporting on previous worrying developments there, and TorrentFreak has news on another one:
On
Techdirt.
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