Have you ever made a phone call, sent an email, or, you know, used the internet? Of course you have!

Chances are, at some point over the past decade, your communications were swept up by the U.S. National Security Agency. The NSA then shares information with the UK Government's intelligence agency GCHQ by default. A recent court ruling found that this sharing was unlawful. But no one could find out if their records were collected and then illegally shared between these two agencies… until now!

Because of our recent victory against the UK intelligence agency in court, now anyone in the world — yes, ANYONE, including you — can find out if GCHQ illegally received information about you from the NSA. Join our campaign by entering your details below to find out if GCHQ illegally spied on you, and confirm via the email we send you. We'll then go to court demanding that they finally come clean on unlawful surveillance.

One insider at a major US technology firm told the Guardian that “politicians are fond of asking why it is that tech companies don’t base themselves in the UK” ... “I think if you’re saying that encryption is the problem, at a time when consumers and businesses see encryption as a very necessary part of trust online, that’s a very indicative point of view.”

This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those 10 real plots.

Newly designed protocols should prefer encryption to cleartext operation. There may be exceptions to this default, but it is important to recognize that protocols do not operate in isolation.  Information leaked by one protocol can be made part of a more substantial body of information by cross-correlation of traffic observation.  There are protocols which may as a result require encryption on the Internet even when it would not be a requirement for that protocol operating in isolation.

We recommend that encryption be deployed throughout the protocol stack since there is not a single place within the stack where all kinds of communication can be protected.

This is due in part to huge growth in the data volumes and data traffic that is transported over our network, which has exceeded our forecasted growth. We are making a number of improvements to our international connectivity which will add significant capacity and this work will be completed in the next two or three weeks.

Perceiving the different ways in which players approached the game led Bartle to consider whether MMO players could be classified according to type. "A group of admins was having an argument about what people wanted out of a MUD in about 1990," he recalls. "This began a 200-long email chain over a period of six months. Eventually I went through everybody's answers and categorised them. I discovered there were four types of MMO player. I published some short versions of them then, when the journal of MUD research came out I wrote it up as a paper."

The so-called Bartle test, which classifies MMO players as Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers or Killers (or a mixture thereof) according to their play-style remains in widespread use today. Bartle believes that you need a healthy mix of all dominant types in order to maintain a successful MMO ecosystem. "If you have a game full of Achievers (players for whom advancement through a game is the primary goal) the people who arrive at the bottom level won't continue to play because everyone is better than them," he explains. "This removes the bottom tier and, over time, all of the bottom tiers leave through irritation. But if you have Socialisers in the mix they don't care about levelling up and all of that. So the lowest Achievers can look down on the Socialisers and the Socialisers don't care. If you're just making the game for Achievers it will corrode from the bottom. All MMOs have this insulating layer, even if the developers don't understand why it's there."

Last year we interviewed Oleg Moskalenko and presented the rfc5766-turn-server project, which is a free open source and extremely popular implementation of TURN and STURN server. A few months later we even discovered Amazon is using this project to power its Mayday service. Since then, a number of features beyond the original RFC 5766 have been defined at the IETF and a new open-source project was born: the coTURN project.

"O Cormac, grandson of Conn", said Carbery, "What is the worst pleading and arguing?" "Not hard to tell", said Cormac. "Contending against knowledge, contending without proofs, taking refuge in bad language, a stiff delivery, a muttering speech, hair-splitting, uncertain proofs, despising books, turning against custom, shifting one's pleading, inciting the mob, blowing one's own trumpet, shouting at the top of one's voice."

Unfortunately for us, the traditional and most widespread method for clock synchronisation (NTP) has been caught up in a DDoS issue which has recently caused some ISPs to start blocking all NTP communication. [....] Because the DDoS attacks are so widespread, and the lack of obvious commercial pressure to fix the issue, it’s possible that the days of using NTP as a mechanism for setting clocks may well be numbered. Luckily for us there is a small but growing project that replaces it.

tlsdate was started by Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor project in 2012, making use of the SSL handshake in order to extract time from a remote server, and its usage is on the rise. [....] Since we started encountering these problems, we’ve incorporated tlsdate into an over-the-air update, and have successfully started using this in situations where NTP is blocked.

In its briefs filed last week, the US government said that content stored online doesn't enjoy the same type of Fourth Amendment protections as data stored in the physical world. The government cited (PDF) the Stored Communications Act (SCA), a President Ronald Reagan-era regulation.

On Friday Russia's parliament passed a law "which bans online businesses from storing personal data of Russian citizens on servers located abroad[.] ... According to ITAR-TASS, the changes to existing legislation will come into effect in September 2016, and apply to email services, social networks and search engines, including the likes of Facebook and Google. Domain names or net addresses not complying with regulations will be put on a blacklist maintained by Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications), the organisation which already has the powers to take down websites suspected of copyright infringement without a court order. In the case of non-compliance, Roskomnadzor will be able to impose 'sanctions,' and even instruct local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to cut off access to the offending resource."

a Java implementation of an MQTT 3.1 broker. Its code base is small. At its core, Moquette is an events processor; this lets the code base be simple, avoiding thread sharing issues. The Moquette broker is lightweight and easy to understand so it could be embedded in other projects.

one of the world’s leading news organizations giving itself a rigorous self-examination. I’ve spoken with multiple digital-savvy Times staffers in recent days who described the report with words like “transformative” and “incredibly important” and “a big big moment for the future of the Times.” One admitted crying while reading it because it surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years.

That leaves the remaining six [consumer ISPs peering with Level3] with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content. Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.

A bill passed by the Russian parliament on Tuesday says that any blogger read by at least 3,000 people a day has to register with the government telecom watchdog and follow the same rules as those imposed by Russian law on mass media. These include privacy safeguards, the obligation to check all facts, silent days before elections and loose but threatening injunctions against "abetting terrorism" and "extremism."

An anonymous tip from a highly reliable source: "There are checkpoints in Syria where your Facebook is checked for affiliation with the rebellious groups or individuals aligned with the rebellion. People are then disappeared or killed if they are found to be connected. Drivers are literally forced to load their Facebook/Twitter accounts and then they are riffled through. It's happening daily, and has been for a year at least."

...because it doesn't stop attacks. Turning it on does nothing but slow things down. You can tell when something is security theater because you need some absurdly specific situation in order for it to be useful.

I stand in awe of their talent and dedication, that of Stephen Henson in particular. It takes nerves of steel to work for many years on hundreds of thousands of lines of very complex code, with every line of code you touch visible to the world, knowing that code is used by banks, firewalls, weapons systems, web sites, smart phones, industry, government, everywhere. Knowing that you’ll be ignored and unappreciated until something goes wrong. The combination of the personality to handle that kind of pressure with the relevant technical skills and experience to effectively work on such software is a rare commodity, and those who have it are likely to already be a valued, well-rewarded, and jealously guarded resource of some company or worthy cause. For those reasons OpenSSL will always be undermanned, but the present situation can and should be improved. There should be at least a half dozen full time OpenSSL team members, not just one, able to concentrate on the care and feeding of OpenSSL without having to hustle commercial work. If you’re a corporate or government decision maker in a position to do something about it, give it some thought. Please. I’m getting old and weary and I’d like to retire someday.

The mass surveillance methods employed in [the UK, USA, and India], many of them exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information. How will so-called democratic countries will able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?

With Cogent and Verizon fighting, [peering capacity] upgrades are happening at a glacial pace, according to Schaeffer.

"Once a port hits about 85 percent throughput, you're going to begin to start to drop packets," he said. "Clearly when a port is at 120 or 130 percent [as the Cogent/Verizon ones are] the packet loss is material."

The congestion isn't only happening at peak times, he said. "These ports are so over-congested that they're running in this packet dropping state 22, 24 hours a day. Maybe at four in the morning on Tuesday or something there might be a little bit of headroom," he said.

in a world where Netflix and Yahoo connect directly to residential ISPs, every Internet company will have its own separate pipe. And policing whether different pipes are equally good is a much harder problem than requiring that all of the traffic in a single pipe be treated the same. If it wanted to ensure a level playing field, the FCC would be forced to become intimately involved in interconnection disputes, overseeing who Verizon interconnects with, how fast the connections are and how much they can charge to do it.

Just under half of children said they access the internet from their own bedroom on a daily basis with 22pc saying they do so several times a day.

In this sense, doge really is the next generation of LOLcat, in terms of a pet-based snapshot of a certain era in internet language. We’ve kept the idea that animals speak like an exaggerated version of an internet-savvy human, but as our definitions of what it means to be a human on the internet have changed, so too have the voices that we give our animals. Wow.

Paradoxically, it’s possible that the widespread use of digital tools facilitates capabilities in some domains, such as organization, logistics, and publicity, while simultaneously engendering hindrances to [political] movement impacts on other domains, including those related to policy and electoral spheres.

Sky still appears to be blocking code.jquery.com and all files served via the site, and more worryingly is that if you try to report the incorrect category, once signing in on the Sky website you an error page. We suspect the site was blocked due to being linked to by a properly malicious website, i.e. code.jquery.com and some javascript files were being used on a dodgy website and every domain mentioned was subsequently added to a block list.

The debate and letter confuse legal, illegal and potentially harmful content, all of which require very different tactics to deal with. Without a greater commitment to evidence and rational debate, poor policy outcomes will be the likely result. There's a pattern, much the same as the Digital Economy Act, or the Snooper's Charter. Start with moral panic; dismiss evidence; legislate; and finally, watch the policy unravel, either delivering unintended harms, even to children in this case, or simply failing altogether.

If the full European Court of Justice (ECJ) accepts the opinion of its advocate general in a final ruling due early next year – and it almost always does – it will prove a huge vindication of Ireland’s small privacy advocacy group, Digital Rights Ireland (DRI).
Its case against Irish retention laws, which began in 2006, forms the basis of this broader David v Goliath challenge and initial opinion.
The advocate general’s advice largely upholds the key concerns put forward by DRI against Ireland’s laws. Withholding so much data about every citizen, including children, in case someone commits a future crime, is too intrusive into private life, and could allow authorities to create a “faithful and exhaustive map of a large portion of a person’s [private] conduct”.
Retained data is so comprehensive that they could easily reveal private identities, which are supposed to remain anonymous. And the data, entrusted to third parties, is at too much risk of fraudulent or malicious use.
Cruz Villalón argues that there must be far greater oversight to the retention process, and controls on access to data, and that citizens should have the right to be notified after the fact if their data has been scrutinised. The Irish Government had repeatedly waved off such concerns from Digital Rights Ireland in the past.

Sherlock’s record is spotty at best when it comes to engagement. Setting aside the 80,680 people who were ignored by the minister, he was hostile and counter productive to debate from the beginning, going so far as to threaten to pull out of a public debate because a campaigner against the ['Irish SOPA'] SI would be in attendance. His habit of blocking people online who publicly ask him tough yet legitimate questions has earned him the nickname “Sherblock”.

In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of TCP in of ShenZhou Online, a commercial, mid-sized MMORPG. Our study indicates that, though TCP is full-fledged and robust, simply transmitting game data over TCP could cause unexpected performance problems. This is due to the following distinctive characteristics of game traffic: 1) tiny packets, 2) low packet rate, 3) application-limited traffic generation, and 4) bi-directional traffic.

We have shown that because TCP was originally designed for unidirectional and network-limited bulk data transfers, it cannot adapt well to MMORPG traffic. In particular, the window-based congestion control mechanism and the fast retransmit algorithm for loss recovery are ineffective. This suggests that the selective acknowledgement option should be enabled whenever TCP is used, as it significantly enhances the loss recovery process. Furthermore, TCP is overkill, as not every game packet needs to be transmitted reliably and processed in an orderly manner. We have also shown that the degraded network performance did impact users' willingness to continue a game. Finally, a number of design guidelines have been proposed by exploiting the unique characteristics of game traffic.

These companies and their technologies are built on data, and the data is us. If we are to have any faith in the Internet, we have to trust them to protect it. That’s a relationship dynamic that will become only more intertwined as the Internet finds its way into more aspects of our daily existences, from phones that talk to us to cars that drive themselves.

The US’s surveillance programs threaten to destroy that trust permanently.

America’s tech companies must stand up to this pervasive and corrosive surveillance system. They must ask that difficult question: “Is it worth it?”

In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the "natural laws of the Internet" and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.
Unfortunately, as we know, that's not how it worked out. Instead, we have seen the rise of the feudal Internet:
Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. These companies [like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook etc.] act in their own self-interest. They use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. They act arbitrarily. They make mistakes. They're deliberately changing social norms. Medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we’re seeing the same thing on the Internet.

Modern telecommunications technology implied the development of modern telecommunications surveillance, because it moved the scope of action from the physical world (where intelligence, generally seen as part of the military mission, had acted) to the virtual world—including the scope of those actions that could threaten state power. While the public line may have been, as US Secretary of State Henry Stimson said in 1929, “gentlemen do not open each other’s mail”, you can bet that they always did keep a keen eye on the comings and goings of each other’s shipping traffic.

The real reason that surveillance in the context of state intelligence was limited until recently was because it was too expensive, and it was too expensive for everyone. The Westphalian compromise demands equality of agency as tied to territory. As soon as one side gains a significant advantage, the structure of sovereignty itself is threatened at a conceptual level — hence Oppenheimer as the death of any hope of international rule of law. Once surveillance became cheap enough, all states were (and will increasingly be) forced to attempt it at scale, as a reaction to this pernicious efficiency. The US may be ahead of the game now, but Moore’s law and productization will work their magic here.

In the fight against the unauthorised sharing of copyright protected material, aka piracy, Dutch Internet Service
Providers have been summoned by courts to block their subscribers’ access to The Pirate Bay (TPB) and related
sites. This paper studies the effectiveness of this approach towards online copyright enforcement, using both a
consumer survey and a newly developed non-infringing technology for BitTorrent monitoring. While a small
group of respondents download less from illegal sources or claim to have stopped, and a small but significant
effect is found on the distribution of Dutch peers, no lasting net impact is found on the percentage of the Dutch
population downloading from illegal sources.

I'm not saying mesh networks don't work ever; the people in the wireless mesh community I've met are all great people doing fantastic work. What I am saying is that unplanned wireless mesh networks never work at scale. I think it's a great problem to think about, but in terms of actual allocation of time and resources I think there are other, more fruitful avenues of action to fight Internet censorship.

There appears to be a problem affecting a number of users where SSL verification errors will be shown saying "pypi.python.org" does not match "addvocate.com". As Best we can tell this appears to be related to the ISP. It seems to be affecting folks using O2 or O2 related companies. We've also reports of it affecting people using Free.

Cause appears to be one of the IP addresses returned in the Geo DNS for Europe returning a certificate for addvocate.com. It's not clear at this time *why* that IP address is returning a certificate for addvocate.com.

The issue of access to age-inappropriate content is not a new matter and it is important not to have “knee-jerk” reactions which don’t solve the perceived problem and have major implications for the public’s right to access information in general. Notably the European Commission, as stated by vice-president Nellie Kroes [jm: sic], has come out strongly against blocking of the Internet, seeing it as an important platform for freedom of speech and she intends to “guarantee access without restriction.”  We in Ireland would do well to consider carefully the impact that any rash adoption or attempted copying of UK measures might have here in the light of current and future EU legislation and policy.

Mr Rabbitte says that legal concerns attached to mandatory filters, as well as a fear of imposing censorship, have persuaded him against trying to force ISPs to impose mandatory pornography-blocking internet filters. "I remain to be convinced that blanket censorship or a default-on blocker is the correct or workable response," he said. "Even if it were possible to ensure that such measures were not easily circumvented or didn't inadvertently block perfectly acceptable content, the principled question of whether the State should be encouraging service providers to filter or block content to all users, regardless of whether there are children resident, would still arise."

When we argued our case to the vendor's representative, he was categorical: any nudity, anywhere on [Boing Boing], makes it into a "nudity site" for the purposes of blocking. The vendor went so far as to state that a single image of Michelangelo's David, on one page among hundreds of thousands on a site, would be sufficient grounds for a nudity classification. I suspect that none of the censorship advocates in the Lords understand that the offshore commercial operators they're proposing to put in charge of the nation's information access apply this kind of homeopathic standard to objectionable material.

Web surfing is putting impulses of packets, without congestion avoidance, into FIFO queues where they do severe collateral damage to anything sharing the link (including itself!). So today’s web behavior incurs huge collateral damage on itself, data centers, the edge of the network, and in particular any application that hopes to have real time behavior. How do we solve this problem?

The reason for the copyright industry to push for surveillance is simple: any digital communications channel can be used for private conversation, but it can also be used to share culture and knowledge that is under copyright monopoly. In order to tell which communications is which, you must sort all of it – and to do that, you must look at all of it. In other words, if enforcing the copyright monopoly is your priority, you need to kill privacy, and specifically anonymity and secrecy of correspondence.

James Welch, Legal Director for Liberty, said:
 
“Those demanding the Snoopers’ Charter seem to have been indulging in out-of-control snooping even without it – exploiting legal loopholes and help from Uncle Sam.
“No-one suggests a completely unpoliced internet but those in power cannot swap targeted investigations for endless monitoring of the entire globe.”

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue. We can't fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don't see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.