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.

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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.

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Oh, and Batman’s in it too.

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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.

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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.”

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Update: A much better angle which shows that the guy was restrained and already in handcuffs when he was tasered.

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There are red flags to be found in each telecom provider’s privacy policy. A close reading of Time Warner’s policy reveals:

* Along with knowing juicy details of your calling and viewing habits — those 900 numbers, say, or that subscription to the Playboy Channel — the company keeps track of “Internet addresses you contact and the duration of your visits to such addresses.”

* Time Warner not only compiles “information about how often and how long” you’re online, but also “purchases that you have made” via the company’s Road Runner portal, which provides access to thousands of goods.

* On top of that, the company may monitor “information you publish” via the Road Runner portal, which should send a chill through anyone who accesses his or her e-mail through Time Warner’s servers.

The disregard for privacy at companies like Time Warner go beyond merely their current customers, apparently.

At least you don’t have to worry about these companies knowing things about you after you take your business elsewhere, right?

Wrong.

Near the very bottom of Time Warner’s privacy policy, the company discloses that it maintains personally identifiable info about people “as long as you are a subscriber and up to 15 additional years.” This, it says, is for tax and accounting purposes.

The aptly titled Your Loss of privacy is a package deal is particularly timely, given today’s publication by a German operator of a Tor node (a network designed to give its users privacy while accessing the Internet) which details his arrest by the police a few months ago. Both the arrest and other privacy concerns are discussed in a CNet article.

What does this mean? That if you don’t protect your privacy now, not only nobody else will do it for you but there are several parties actively interested in taking it from you. On the online front, a good starting point is the Tor network, of which you can read more about here. If you require more reliable access, you can also consider commercial services such as Xerobank.

It takes barely any work, and if you have any interested in safeguarding your information, you should start now.

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The present database in England and Wales holds details of 4m people who are guilty or cleared of a crime.

Lord Justice Sedley said this was indefensible and biased against ethnic minorities, and it would be fairer to include everyone, guilty or innocent.

[...]

He said the only option was to expand the database to cover the whole population and all those who visited the UK, even for a weekend.

It’s hard to tell if Sedley is attempting to reduce the argument of a DNA database to its absurd extreme or if actually believes that this is an acceptable solution, but nothing in the article indicates he might be anything but serious.

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Like most Marines and former Marines, she is largely apolitical. The fact is, most Marines are trigger pullers and most trigger pullers could care less who the President is. They simply want to be the tip of the sword when it comes to defending the country. She voted once in her life and otherwise was always in some forward post on the water during election season.

Something is wrong with the Navy and the Marines in her view. Always ready to go in harms way, Marines rarely ever question unless it’s a matter of tactics or honor. But something seems awry. Junior and senior officers are starting to grumble, roll their eyes in the hallways. The strain of deployments is beginning to hit every jot and tittle of the Marines and it’s beginning to seep into the daily conversation of Marines and Naval officers in command decision.

“I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer”, she said. “But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran.”

She goes on:

I asked her about the attack, how limited and so forth.

“I don’t think it’s limited at all. We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens.”

This is very close to a news story that got published independently on The Times:

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes� against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,� he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.� It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus�.

Things are going to hell in a hand basket. Fast.

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Crimes commonly considered to be felonies include, but are not limited to: aggravated assault and/or battery, arson, burglary, some instances of drug possession (dependent on the jurisdiction, often possession over a certain weight, based on the type of drug, is held to indicate intent to sell or distribute), embezzlement, grand theft, treason, espionage, racketeering, robbery, murder, rape, kidnapping, cannabis cultivation and fraud. A third offense for driving under the influence is also a felony in most states.

So treason, arson, murder and rape. Boy these people take their parking lots seriously.

But wait, let’s hear the explanation for the overreacting authorities:

You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,� she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.�

Here’s the original new item along with Bruce Schneier’s comments.

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Now a guy in the U.S. who has been convicted of uploading a copy of the Star Wars movie has been forced by the court to switch to Windows if he wants to use a computer, because they want to track him using software that is not available on Linux.

Lord knows we need them dangerous criminals tracked.

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