Archive
The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom
Corbis
On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.
If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and Read more…
Mass Surveillance and No Privacy Bill is ‘For the Children’
By Ms. Smith
What happens when stupid non-geeks write bills like SOPA and HR 1981? Rep. Lamar Smith says it’s for the children, of course, and if you object to being spied upon online then you are some kind of guilty pro-child-porn lowlife pond scum sucker. Where does the stupidity stop?
It’s for the children, of course, and if you object to online spying then you are some kind of guilty lowlife pond scum sucker. No wonder so many of us hate stupid people. Rep. Lamar Smith, infamous to geeks as the author of SOPA, is sponsoring the bill H.R. 1981 which is better known as “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act.” H.R. 1981 isn’t exactly as easy to spit out as SOPA and is closer to something out of Orwell’s 1984. The EFF summed it up like this, “This sweeping new ‘mandatory data retention’ proposal treats every Internet user like a potential criminal and represents a clear and present danger to the online free speech and privacy rights of millions of innocent Americans.”
More or less, much like the just-in-case your data trail eventually reveals you are a terrorist, this bill presumes you are guilty until proven innocent of being a child porn dog as it would require ISPs to store your data for
Security Slackers Risk Internet Blackout on March 8
Companies and home users whose computers or routers are infected by the DNSChanger Trojan risk being unable to access the Web come March 8, 2012. That could represent a substantial number of users, too, as half of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies are infected with the malware, according to a new report.
Back in November, the feds famously took down the DNSChanger botnet network, which a cyber criminal gang was using to redirect Internet traffic to phony websites that existed simply to serve up ads. The feds replaced the criminals’ servers with legitimate ones that would push along traffic to its intended destination.
That surrogate network was supposed to be temporary — in operation just long enough for companies and home users to remove DNSChanger malware from their machines. Said network is slated to be unplugged on March 8. Once the surrogate server network is unplugged, computers infected with DNSChanger will not be able to access the Internet: The malware will send requests to servers that will no longer be online.
Unfortunately, the cleanup process has Full article here
Bill Would Allow Total Surveillance of all Canadians
JASON MAGDER
THE MONTREAL GAZETTE
February 14, 2012
Police will get much easier access to the web-surfing habits and personal information of all Canadians if a new law – expected to be introduced in the House of Commons next week – passes.
Privacy watchdogs caution if the so-called Lawful Access law is passed, it would give police access to webbrowsing history and sensitive personal information, and would grant greater permission to track the cellular phones of suspects – much of it without the requirement of a warrant.
The bill, which is on the order paper for this week, would require Internet service providers and cellular phone companies to install equipment that would monitor users’ activities so that the information could be turned over to police when requested.
It would also grant greater permission to law enforcement authorities to activate tracking mechanisms within cellphones so they can follow the whereabouts of suspected criminals. If there is a suspicion of terrorist activity, the law would allow such tracking to go on for a year, rather than the current 60-day limit.
This isn’t the first time this law has been introduced. The most recent incarnation of the Lawful Access bill died on the order paper when the federal election was called last year.
Democrats to continue Internet coup with new cyber bill
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, following a recent anti-piracy legislative debacle with SOPA and PIPA, will lead his second effort of 2012 to push Internet-regulating legislation, this time in the form of a new cybersecurity bill. The expected bill is the latest attempt by the Democrats to broadly expand the authority of executive branch agencies over the Internet.
Details about the bill remain shrouded in secrecy. Clues available to the public suggest that the bill might be stronger than President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity proposal, which was released in May 2011. Reid said that he would bring the bill — expected to come out of the Senate Homeland Security and Read more…
Digital Privacy and the Fifth Amendment
The Internet has vastly changed society. It’s one of those things that we can’t imagine living without, and we can’t imagine how we got by without the Internet just a few decades ago. However, something that changes society as drastically as the Internet has also alters legal boundaries, laws, and interpretations. The 5th Amendment, which protects American citizens’ right to due process and against self-incrimination, among other things, is no exception.
A federal judge in Colorado recently ruled that your computer is not granted those protections under the 5th Amendment. Even encrypted data that’s stored on your computer or an external hard drive would be subject to investigation, and giving up that information is equivalent to complying with a search warrant. The question of the 5th Amendment, privacy, and the law has always been a muddy one. How much digital privacy do people actually have? Is handing over our digital information, such as Read more…
Alex Breaks Down Big Brother Internet (VIDEO)
SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, & H.R. 1981 Vs Internet Freedom
Is your smartphone telling every website you visit your telephone number?
O2 mobile users in the UK are venting on Twitter today, fuming at their discovery that their phone number is being shared with every website that they visit over the network.
I found a colleague who owns an iPhone on the O2 network, and we tried it out for ourselves. Making sure we turned off his WiFi connection, we used the O2 mobile network to access the web. Read more…
Study says humans now use the internet as our main ‘memory’ – instead of our heads
Helping hand? Harvard researchers found that we now use the internet to remember 'for us' - and decide not to store facts if we think we can Google them later
The Internet is becoming our main source of memory instead of our own brains, a study has concluded.
In the age of Google, our minds are adapting so that we are experts at knowing where to find information even though we don’t recall what it is.
The researchers found that when we want to know something we use the Internet as an ‘external memory’ just as computers use an external hard drive.
Nowadays we are so reliant on our smart phones and laptops that we go into ‘withdrawal when we can’t find out something immediately’.
And such is our dependence that having our Internet connection severed is growing ‘more and more like losing a friend’.
Researchers from Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University in the U.S. carried out four tests to check their theory.
They involved giving test participants a trivia quiz and then seeing whether they recognised Read more…
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