Omnia Mutantur

OK, more freedom stuff, because getting my blood boiling keeps me warm.

New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act assumes that you’re guilty the moment you’re accused because, well, that’s easier.

I kid you not, that’s a quote from a former MP. The burden of proof would of course be switched to the accused, since they’re the ones with an active interest in it.

Boy, I should look into moving into New Zealand. Sounds like it’s becoming a swell place. Can’t wait for this principle to be applied to other aspects of the law.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics copyright, Freedom

You may have noticed that the number of posts related to freedom and privacy has decreased significantly. That’s because I’ve mostly given up on people caring about their own privacy, and it feels significantly like I’m preaching to the choir, with the eyes of the mostly apathetic congregation glazing over.

Still, what the fuck.

Free software is an issue I mostly stay away from, since a lot of the free software rhetoric comes from either a very commie point of view or simply misguided mantras like information wants to be free! (no, information doesn’t want anything), but this sort of Apple nonsense is an excellent example of what pushes people to the extreme of claiming that all software should be free. If I own a device, for which I paid with my own money, it is my property. I should be allowed to run whatever the hell I want in it. That doesn’t mean that I can necessarily redistribute Apple’s code, but come on, insisting on turning customers into criminals just because they want to use software other than that blessed by Apple on their devices is idiotic at best and corrupt at worst. They still haven’t learned that extremism on one side will engender extremism on the other.

Listen to Lessig, people. It’s a fight you can’t win, and you’ll only end up alienating those who so dearly wish to give you their money. ProTip: that’s not so smart a move in a recession.

Non-ranting information at the EFF link above, as well as the Free Your Phone site.

Ricardo Freedom, Science and Technology Apple, Freedom, iPhone

An almost obligatory post, but I’ll keep it short. Ledger’s Joker is a brilliant gene-splicing of Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Forrest Gump – all that energy with a completely child-like lack of impulse control. He’s that kid who sets your dog on fire, finds it hilarious, and quickly moves on to even funnier stuff. There is some short, but very direct commentary on warrantless spying and what actions are acceptable in order to stop a madman; as well as what a true leader does when his fight with a lunatic gets out of control and the people get scared and demand someone’s blood. It was just as good as I expected but unexpectedly political, and its timing couldn’t be better.

Oh, and Batman’s in it too.

Ricardo Books, music and film, Freedom batman, Freedom, movies, politics

A disgruntled employee locks the city of San Francisco out of their network. There were so many fuck ups on the city’s part that the news article almost reads like a play-by-play on how not to handle this.

he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him

Tried to fire him? And what, missed and fired the wrong person? Even in this socialist country you can fire people pretty much at will, if you’re willing to pay them severance (I don’t think he would qualify for the single exception – you’re employer knowing that you are a pregnant woman).

OK, so there’s some law stopping you from firing him. Is there a law stopping you from revoking his network access and paying him to read the newspaper, from home, while you figure out how to get rid of him?

Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.

Authorities have searched Childs’ home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.

Like.. a computer? Thank god they couldn’t find such a specialized tool anywhere.

Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.

Heh. So you not only keep him on board, but pay him extra because the stability of your system depends on this employee you don’t trust anymore.

Authorities say Childs began tampering with the computer system June 20. The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.

The most basic rule when firing people with access to your organization’s brain is that you fire them on the spot – even if you have to pay them extra to do so. Failing to fire someone and then keeping him with the exact same access rights is just plain stupid, and now San Francisco will pay through the nose for it.

As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.

Of course. Such network sniffing tools are readily available, and are at their most usable when in the hands of a person with network-wide access. Like Mr. Childs here.

If the city employees had used something as simple as Skype or Pidgin with OTR, it would probably have been harder for him to track them, forcing him to install a key logger or using some more invasive methods that could have been detected earlier. But of course, only criminals could possibly see some use in encryption.

Ricardo Freedom, Science and Technology

The internet is full of assholes, there’s no denying that. It’s not as much a statistical anomaly – the whole world is full of assholes – but a combination of having said bastards on a medium that allows them easy reach to the whole wide world, with enough range that they don’t get punched in the nose. I guess it’s all John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory at work.

I’m a big proponent of anonymity, which is one of the components of Gabe’s evil brew – people just need to exercise better judgement when dealing with someone who they don’t know at all. On a case in the U.S., a woman signed up on MySpace under a fake name and harasses a girl, who then kills herself feeling she was being taunted by a boy she liked. Let’s leave aside the fact that the girl trusted this person she didn’t know, and then took such a rash decision based on their remarks. The woman who was taunting her was just convicted of charged with several felonies. She’s a immoral bastard for sure, but the problem is that the reasons they’re charging her with felonies amount to her breaking not the law, but MySpace’s terms of service.

There’s a pretty good analysis of the decision at SecurityFocus.

“Yet, legal experts argue that charging a person for violating computer-crime statutes because they broke the terms-of-service agreement of an online site could lead to the ability to charge nearly anyone with computer crime. Using residential broadband for business purposes? A violation of the terms of service and, thus, potentially a crime. Checking sports sites while at work? A violation of corporate policy and, thus, potentially a crime.”

While the discussion over at Technocrat sometimes veers off too much into someone oughta do something, Jim Hill asks a very good question:

The thing I can’t figure is why the ordinary homicide statutes don’t apply. “A person is presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his voluntary act.” That’s why we can and do outlaw “Fire!” in a theater and fighting words in a bar: you’re presumed to have intended the consequences.

If elaborately befriending a depressed 13-year-old girl by pretending to be the boy of her dreams, spending weeks earning her trust and adoration, and then publicly humiliating her with the kiss-off line “the world would be better off without you” isn’t an indicator of intent, then neither is pulling the trigger knowing which way the bullet’s going to go.

Why indeed? Maybe the prosecutor thought he couldn’t just win a manslaughter case with the evidence. Or maybe there’s a cherry on top for someone if the case was decided this way. From the same SecurityFocus analysis:

Making a violation of such agreements a crime would allow prosecutors the ability to investigate nearly any Internet user, Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense attorney, stated in an online analysis.

“Violating a website’s ‘TOS’ is carte blanche to an imaginative prosecutor,” Greenfield said. “We are all felons if this flies.”

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.

That’s from a Bruce Schneier article on The Guardian advising people on the invasions of privacy they will be subjected to while crossing customs, and what they can do about it.

He goes on to provide people suggestions on how to avoid their data being taken by random officers. You know that things are really bad when a very public mainstream figure like Schneier is advising people on how to avoid and deceive their “protectors”.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

I’m reading Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, one of those hip this-changes-everything books, this time detailing how remix culture and digital technology is forcing the market to either adapt and compete with those it labels as pirates for modifying their intellecutual property, or die attempting to fight a distributed, faceless enemy that in many cases does nothing but promote their products.

It’s very readable, and I’m all for anything that promotes adapting quickly to changing times, but at least on the technical side of things it all too often gets the details dead wrong. The errors go from saying Half-Life is a mod of Warcraft, to confusing Stallman’s free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom in an analogy (and ignoring the more important one), to saying that Linus Torvalds founded a company named Linux (ironically ignoring the fact that great things can and do come from outside corporate structure). It gets so many things wrong on the areas I have good knowledge of, that I have to wonder how many of the stories on graffiti or hip-hop are wrong too.

I was suspicious that a book with a title closer to Who Moved My Cheese or The monk who sold his Ferrari would be more style than substance, and it’s unfortunate to have those suspicions confirmed. You’re better off reading Larry Lessig’s Free Culture. On a good example of practicing what you preach, Lessig’s book is available for you to read and distribute online.

Mason’s answer? He lets you remix his logo.

Ricardo Books, music and film, Freedom, Science and Technology

I read this page a few weeks ago and I don’t agree with a lot of the things the author seems to pine for, like paddling kids, but the examples he uses of the “current alternative” would be amusing if they weren’t so appallingly likely to happen. For instance:

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Heather. Heather hugs him to comfort him.

1967 – In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.

2007 – Heather is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces three years in state prison. Johnny undergoes five years of therapy.

A few days later he published a message he got about the post, a rather depressing note from a high school teacher. The teacher in question said,

I am a (male) high school teacher and I have a daughter. If I see a child or (worse) a pre-teen crying on the beach I change my direction and put as much distance as possible between us. It’s too dangerous even to take a picture, imagine TOUCHING them!

Even more heartbreaking was a friend’s comment about an article he remembered reading some time ago, about a man in the U.K. who saw a 4-year-old crying in a park but did not help because he was scared to be arrested as a pedophile – the child was later found dead.

But what really made my blood boil an article I saw on the New York Times article, about how
the original Sesame Street episodes are now advertised as intended for grown ups only.

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street� that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,� she said.

Looking back, I can’t even imagine a kid-oriented show nowadays like The Muppet Show putting on a sketch with Roger Moore about all the evil muppets ineptly trying to murder him, or Alice Cooper offering Kermit a contract to sell his soul to the devil. Those were the shows I grew up with, shows that had imagination, where doing something offbeat was not extraordinary, but just business as usual. The shows that gave me a sense of wonder, and taught me that everything was valid.

Popular culture has been castrated.

Not all change is bad, of course. We’ve made advances in this time. Science has progressed significantly, and will continue to do so now that Sony sucks at putting out games and PlayStation3s everywhere are massively increasing the number of Folding@Home operations. It doesn’t escape me that you’re reading this on a medium that wasn’t accessible to most people 15 years ago.

But for me some things are fundamental, and cultural progress is one of them. North America has always had the great advantage of sheer mass: on such a large body of people, the strangest, most interesting things keep popping up. And yes, that’s how I define progress in culture – anything new, anything different that inspires people to experiment: I will not become a vegan decaf skin-brander like you, but I am glad your crazy movement sprung up. This trend risks being squashed by the homogenization of culture that’s going on in the U.S.

In short, I worried that I wouldn’t see the next Darkest of the Hillside Thickets appear (yes, they’re Canadian, but Canada is playing catch-up with the U.S. on so many things already).

My first consolation was that we have the Internet now. Soon bandwidth large enough for good quality video streaming will be commonplace, and applications such as Miro will make television and the FCC irrelevant once and for all.

And then I ran into this brilliant TED Talk conference with Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, about read/write culture and how extremism in the part of the copyright owners has engendered extremism on those who would use the content.

Near the end he makes a very lucid point: this age of prohibitions has had the effect of ordinary people knowingly living their life against the law, knowing that they’ve been branded criminals. While I’m sure that this (as he calls it) corrosive reality will have the effect of making some people feel more at home with real crimes, it will eventually end up with more and more regular folks seeing governmental and institutional impositions as irrelevant.

As an Ars Digita article mentions, referring to a study by an Utah professor who calculated he accumulates about $12.45 million dollars a day on copyright liability:

What better way could there be to create a nation of constant lawbreakers than to instill in that nation a contempt for its own laws? And what better way to instill contempt than to hand out rights so broad that most Americans simply find them absurd?

The more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems will slip through your fingers, to get really geeky.

That’s something to be hopeful about.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics

Ars Technica reports that a new law going into effect today make it a criminal offense to refuse an order to decrypt your own data.

Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.

The article itself points out that part of the idiocy is that this gives criminals an easy way out.

Yet the law, in a strange way, almost gives criminals an “out,” in that those caught potentially committing serious crimes may opt to refuse to decrypt incriminating data. A pedophile with a 2GB collection of encrypted kiddie porn may find it easier to do two years in the slammer than expose what he’s been up to.

Wrong country to live in if you care about your privacy.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

Technocrat carries two informative articles on the current savage military lockdown in Burma.

The Risk of Journalism discusses Courage against the Junta, an article I found painful to read.

We disguised his identity before putting the interview to air. Later, I learned he had been arrested by secret police. For telling the world about Burmese political prisoners, he was jailed for seven years. I was shocked someone had been jailed for something I had done. It made me acutely aware of how many thousands of Burmese must feel when their relatives are arrested or killed by the regime. It’s the sense of powerlessness against injustice that is most dehumanising.

It did give me a bit of hope for this age:

The use of mobile phones to capture images of the protests are showing the world what is happening. They are fed back via the internet and opposition television stations run from as far afield as Oslo.

The inaccurately named Profits Trumps Freedom links to several articles regarding how foreign businesses are feeding Burma’s dictatorship, but misses the fact that the central problem are not the corporations that keep doing business with them, but the customers that don’t care and keep giving money to those specific companies. Corporations are not hulking behemoths hell-bent on Evil – they’re hell-bent on profits. Show them that certain business partners have a negative effect on their bottom line, and they’ll change their tune in a blink.

Then again, if you make a decision that 5% savings make it worth your while to deal with someone you consider evil, don’t point any fingers when the company in question does the same.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics