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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.
It would be something of an understatement to say that encryption
is a hot topic at the moment. But leaving aside deeper issues like the
extent to which the Internet's cryptographic systems are compromised,
there is a more general question about whether Web sites should be
pushing users to connect using HTTPS in the hope that this might improve
their security. That might seem a no-brainer, but for the Wikimedia
Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs Wikipedia and related
projects, it's a more complex issue.
On
Techdirt.
As more and more information about the NSA's global surveillance
capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward
Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card
heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty
much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus
to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage -- here's what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:
On
Techdirt.
We've been reporting for several years about the extraordinary levels of secrecy
surrounding the TPP negotiations, where little information was released
about what was going on, and there were few opportunities for
representatives of civic and other groups to meet with negotiators to
present their point of view. More recently, there have been some
indications that this lack of transparency is fuelling increasing discontent among some of the participating nations.
On
Techdirt.
A couple of years ago, Techdirt carried an article by Andy Kessler
about the difference between entrepreneurs who create value, and those
who lock it up. The former tend to drive prices down constantly,
innovating all the while in order to make a profit; the latter, by
contrast, typically enjoy monopolies that allow them to push up prices without offering anything more in return.
On
Techdirt.
As many have already observed, the detention of David Miranda comes across as an act of blatant intimidation, as does the farcical destruction
of the Guardian's hard drives. But something doesn't ring true about
these episodes: spooks may be cynical and ruthless, but they are not
generally clueless idiots.
On
Techdirt.
As long-suffering readers of this column will know, I've been
following for a while the winding road leading to the European
Commission's proposals regarding net neutrality in Europe. Along the
way, there have been many twists and turns, with hints of first one
direction, then another. But today, the Commission has finally released
its plans - not just for this area, but for the whole telecoms market in Europe:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the recurrent themes on this blog has been the UK government's
use - or failure to use - open source and open data. To be fair, on
the open data side, things are going pretty well. Open source was
previously conspicuous by its absence, and that is finally changing,
albeit rather slower than many of us would wish.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When Stephen Elop moved from Microsoft to run Nokia, many saw this as
part of a cunning plan to prepare the latter for purchase by the
former. There's no real evidence for that, although soon after joining,
Nokia did place the Windows Phone platform at the heart of its future
strategy, despite the many drawbacks of doing so, effectively betting
the company on the success of Windows as the third mobile platform
alongside Android and Apple.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I've pointed out many times in previous posts, one of the key
benefits of mandating network neutrality is that it promotes innovation
by creating a level playing field. Such statements are all very well,
but where's the evidence? An important new study entitled "The
innovation-enhancing effects of network neutrality" [.pdf], commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs from the independent SEO Economic Research unit provides perhaps the best survey and analysis of why indeed network neutrality is so beneficial:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in April, I wrote
about in interesting new venture from the Linux Foundation called the
OpenDaylight Project. As I pointed out then, what made this significant
was that it showed how the Linux Foundation was beginning to move
beyond its historical origins of supporting the Linux ecosystem, towards
the broader application of the important lessons it has learnt about
open source collaboration in the process. Following that step, we now
have this:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last year, I wrote
about some serious issues with Microsoft's Secure Boot Technology in
Windows 8. It seems that the German government has started to wake up
to problems with Windows 8, as this headline in Die Zeit attests:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you'll have noticed that I've been tweeting rather extensively about the NSA's spying, the most recent attacks on Glenn Greenwald and now the Guardian. If you were still wondering what any of this has to do with open source, this latest news might clarify things a little:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As even a cursory glance at articles on Open Enterprise over the last
few years will indicate, open source is a massive success in
practically every market. Except, unfortunately, on the desktop
(famously) and more, generally, for consumers. And as Aral Balkan
points out in an important post from a few weeks ago, that's a real problem:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As I noted in my first TTIP Update
about the current negotiations between the EU and US over a massive
trade agreement that is far from being only about trade, it is probably
true that it will not include many of the more outrageous ideas found in
ACTA last year. But that is not to say that TTIP does not threaten many key aspects of the Internet - just that the attack is much more subtle.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incredible spectacle of the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) attacking Mozilla
on the grounds that the latter had "lost its values" because it
insisted on defending the users' rights to control how cookies were used
on their systems.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in the mists of time - I'm talking about 2000 here - when free
software was still viewed by many as a rather exotic idea, I published a
book
detailing its history up to that point. Naturally, I wrote about
Apache (the Web server, not the foundation) there, since even in those
early days it was already the sectoral leader. As I pointed out:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the long-running jokes in the free software world is that this
year will finally be the year of open source on the desktop - just like
it was last year, and the year before that. Thanks to the astounding
rise of Android, people now realise that the desktop is last decade's
platform, and that mobile - smartphones and tablets - are the future.
But I'd argue that there is something even more important these, and
that is the widespread deployment of open source in China.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Techdirt has reported, the attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom from New
Zealand to the US have turned into one of the most catastrophically
bungled legal cases in a long while. One of the biggest scandals to
emerge was that New Zealand citizens had been wiretapped
in an effort to gain evidence against Dotcom, since domestic spying was
forbidden there just as it is in the US (oh, wait...). Unfortunately,
rather than rapping knuckles and telling the local spooks not to do it
again, the New Zealand government has instead just brought in new legislation to make it legal in the future.
On
Techdirt.
As more and more countries start introducing Web blocks, some people
console themselves with the "at least there's always Tor" argument.
Politicians may be slow, but they are not all completely stupid, and
they are beginning to get the message that Tor and other anonymous
services potentially render their Web blocks moot. It's then not a huge
leap for them to move on to the next stage -- banning or blocking Tor
-- as Russia now seems to be contemplating, according to this article on Russia Today:
On
Techdirt.
When Techdirt wrote recently about yet another secure email provider opting to close down
its service rather than acquiesce in some future US government demand
to spy on its users, we noted that Cryptocloud has promised something
similar for a while -- what it terms "corporate seppuku":
On
Techdirt.
Two years ago, Techdirt reported on a very troubling ruling
in the UK courts that BT had to block access to the Usenet service
provider Newzbin2. At the time, many feared that this would be the thin
end of the wedge, giving copyright companies an easy way to shut down
other sites. And with that power, of course, would come the inevitable
errors, blocking completely unrelated sites. Just how seriously those
mistakes could be is shown by this recent case of massive overblocking, reported here on PC Pro:
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has published a number of posts that explore the issue of whether art organizations
can stop people sharing images of works in their collections when the
latter are indisputably in the public domain. Even if museums might be
able to claim copyright in their "official" photographic images, the
more important question is whether they ought to. The good news is that
some institutions are beginning to realize that using copyright
monopolies in this way contradicts their basic reason for existing -- to
share the joy of art. Here, for example, is a wonderful statement of
that principle from the Getty Museum entitled "Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come":
On
Techdirt.
You may remember a rather wonderful court case from 2012 that pitted
copyright lawyers against patent lawyers over the issue of whether
submitting journal articles as part of the patenting process was fair
use. Well, we now have the judge's decision, as GigaOm reports:
On
Techdirt.
The use of Web blocks -- usually "for the children"
-- is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many
people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After
all, the logic presumably goes, we can't do much about it, and anyway
surely it's a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff? Techdirt
readers, of course, know otherwise, but for anyone who still thinks that
well-intentioned blocking of "unsuitable" material is unproblematic,
the following cautionary tale from the British blogger W.H. Forsyth may prove instructive:
On
Techdirt.
A couple of months back, Techdirt wrote about Australia's proposals to shift from the current fair dealing approach to fair use
as part of wide-ranging reform of copyright there. When something
similar was mooted in the UK as part of what became the Hargreaves
Review, it was shouted down by the copyright maximalists on the grounds
that it would lead to widespread litigation.
As Mike pointed out at the time, that's nonsense: the existence of a
large body of US case law dealing with this area makes it much easier to
bring in fair use without the need for its contours to be defined in
the courts.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has noted the increasing demonization of hackers (not to be
confused with crackers that break into systems for criminal purposes),
for example by trying to add an extra layer of punishment on other
crimes if they were done "on a computer." High-profile victims of this
approach include Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown and of course Edward Snowden.
On
Techdirt.
One of the central problems of laws that deal with copyright is that
they are essentially products of a time when the distinction between
creator and audience was clear-cut. The move to digital and the rise of
the Internet has changed all that, allowing hundreds of millions of
people to become new kinds of creators. They may not write entire
symphonies or paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but what they
lack in scale and intensity they make up for in frequency and
spontaneity.
On
Techdirt.
Around the world, we have been watching the gradual taming
of social media, especially in countries where governments keep
mainstream media on a tight leash. But even against that background,
this news from the Bangkok Post about Vietnam's latest moves to censor online content is pretty extraordinary:
On
Techdirt.
Last week we wrote about how the Russian equivalent of SOPA had been amended in order to ban swearing
online. Although that was worth noting for its entertainment value,
probably more important is the fact that the same law -- originally
brought in to take down sites about drugs, suicide and child pornography
-- has also been widened to include copyright infringement, as TechWeekEurope reports:
On
Techdirt.