The very scary future of state control, censorship, and totalitarianism in the age of the internet. A presentation from Amesys, a subsidiary of Bull S.A. "explained the significance of Eagle to a government seeking to control activities inside its borders. Warning of an “increasing need of high-level intelligence in the constant struggle against criminals and terrorism,” the document touted Eagle’s ability to capture bulk Internet traffic passing through conventional, satellite, and mobile phone networks, and then to store that data in a filterable and searchable database. This database, in turn, could be integrated with other sources of intelligence, such as phone recordings, allowing security personnel to pick through audio and data from a given person all at once, in real time or by historical time stamp. In other words, instead of choosing targets and monitoring them, officials could simply sweep up everything, sort it by time and target, and then browse through it later at their leisure. The title of the presentation -- ”From Lawful to Massive Interception” -- gestured at the vast difference between so-called lawful intercept (traditional law enforcement surveillance based on warrants for specific phone numbers or IP addresses) and what Amesys was offering."

'We talk a lot about what the world of music and artists will look like five or ten years from now. But for changes to happen then, the conversations need to happen now. We believe that the next big thing in music is not going to ever appear on a stage. After the record industry (music 1.0) and the live music industry (music 2.0), it's time to pay more attention to innovation (music 3.0) and what can come from constructively disrupting how the music industry operates.

It's time to open up the shop. It's time for unvested interests to see if they can use existing data and ecosystems to make a better music business. For far too long, music has been a conservative sector which views the influence of outside forces with abject suspicion and rank horror. Chalk this down to some bad experiences over the last 15 years due to misunderstandings with and ignorance of the tech and telecoms worlds. Chalk this down to rampant music industry egos which lead folks to believe no-one else can sell music bar music players. Chalk it down to fear of disruption.

So, it's time for change. You can't keep doing the same things in the same way and hope you won't make the same mistakes again. It's time to listen to and learn from smart people in other areas. It's time for people who have innovative ideas or even just the stirrings of innovative ideas to take stock from people who operate in other areas and who deal with ideas, technology and the valuable currency of innovation every single working day. It's time for some different talking which is going to lead to some very different make-and-do experiences.'

Looks excellent. (via Jim Carroll)

'we have Boards.ie and Politics.ie, for me frankly that doesn't amount to free speech what it amounts to is legalised subversion of the state. I think it's fundamentally wrong.' Incredible quote

'Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate. The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review. “Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.'

'In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That's the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.' Very good point from Cory Doctorow

'at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain [specifically gambling site bodog.com] operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US). This is no longer a doom-and-gloom theory by some guy in a tin foil hat. It just happened.'

'I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.'

'The clear implication from [Adrian's] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity -- as well as jeopardising fundamental rights -- will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.' -- this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland's judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton's performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).

Hackerspace Global Grid -- 'We want to understand, build and make available satellite based communication for the hackerspace community and all of mankind.' Space is the place!

well, this is bizarre -- it seems T-Mobile UK are blocking encrypted email submission and OpenVPN traffic in their mobile internet access products. Why? Who knows -- but at least filtering RST packets evades the block, as in the Great Firewall of China

'According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys.' I love this. The data is, of course, filled with potential inaccuracies -- and that's the point

'For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.' A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)

'access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. ... The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.' Incredible (via Danny)

'Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.' well said

still fantastic advice, even after 4 years.  I think it's time for a re-read

'some first thoughts on how the just-published coalition agreement (Fine Gael and Labour) in Ireland proposes to deal with issues of interest to cyberlaw and media law.'

Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through '3 Strikes' by the outgoing one: 'Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn't worked in France. It hasn't worked in Britain. And it certainly won't work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.'

anti-bandwidth-cap arguments from a Canadian campaign

incredlble -- way ahead of his time on this one

DHS/ICE domain seizures suffer a serious false positive problem, resulting in the seizure and shutting down of 84,000 subdomains of a free DNS provider, replacing them with a banner accusing the site of trafficking in child porn. whoops!

Jesus H. Christ, this is incredibly nonsensical. Green Party candidate Eamonn Ryan proposes replacing the TV license fee with an internet tax -- 'some small charge on the volume of data.'  WTF

from Malcolm Hutty, Head of Public Affairs at LINX (UK ISP organisation). insightful and a good summary of the state of the art in ISP-hosted filtering/blocking solutions.  The final few slides are especially useful

'the [large] buffers are confusing TCP’s RTT estimator; the delay caused by the buffers is many times the actual RTT on the path.' [..] 'by inserting big buffers into the network, we have violated the design presumption of all Internet congestion avoiding protocols: that the network will drop packets in a timely fashion.'  QoS traffic shaping avoids this -- hooray for Tomato firmware

used by UPC for deep packet inspection, according to the EMI v UPC judgement

opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though

scary stuff. East Texas patent-troll court has ruled that EchoStar must remotely disable customers' DVRs due to patent infringement, which they are (thankfully) refusing to do and are now held in contempt for $200M -- the blog suggests this could happen due to the Google-Oracle suit, to Android phones

'In the blink of an eye, this real-life Johnny Mnemonic keys in his encrypted, top-secret passcode and enters the fortified binary area from which all his personal communiqués are sent forth in a dizzying array of ones and zeroes.' brilliant pisstake of mid-'90s tech journalism (via Walter Higgins)

wonderful; our world's economies are now more networked than ever, and vulnerable to the attacks which that enables. Have we learned nothing from the last few years?

it's the perfect 'gateway' to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. 'Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.' Via TJ McIntyre

'it becomes clear that for some time now the Department of Justice has been proposing the introduction of internet blocking in Ireland – and has been doing this under the radar, without any public consultation or legislative approval. Indeed, it is clear from the list that the Department is not planning on introducing legislation but instead intends to introduce this new form of censorship without any legal basis, based on the now discredited Norwegian and Danish models.' This is very bad news indeed

Ireland's Dept of Justice is investigating setting up a "Great Firewall" filtering the country's internet, a la China and Australia. “Blocking involves censorship taken on no legal basis. There is no judge, no jury and no right to be heard if you are blocked,” says [DRI's TJ] McIntyre. “The chances are it also will be used in unaccountable ways by unaccountable organisations.”

ASF's Paul Querna: 'Security on the Internet sucks, and it is only getting worse. The problem is systemic, with security researchers and developers not producing viable ways for the average user to live on the Internet in a secure fashion without excessive paranoia.'

so, it seems the wireless ISPs don't have sufficient IPv4 space for their customers, and are filtering access to the internet via NAT; unfortunate side effect is that this breaks data retention as defined in the UK. wonder if the same applies here?

+1

how the Great Firewall of Oz breaks so much more than the web browser

great line: 'In the future perhaps every artist will be famous for 15 comments'

'MAAWG [..] says that spam and malicious emails dropped to 89 percent in the second quarter from 90.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.'

massive fail. 'By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to [...] dump the router’s configuration file [...which] included the administrative login and password in cleartext.'

'Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: "data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."'

'Britons will choose to cut back on almost anything other than food before economising on electronic communications services. Crucially, we will even cut spending on their mobile phone and TV package before foregoing Internet access'