China has been stepping up control of the Internet, citing threats to national stability
China is blaming technology used to bypass China's censorship systems for recent terrorist attacks, suggesting that the government is considering tighter controls on the country's Internet. Domestic terrorists from the nation's western region are circumventing China's online censors to view blocked videos on terrorism, a top Chinese official said on Thursday. The official, Zhang Chunxian, made the comment after a group of knife-wielding attackers killed 29 civilians earlier this month at a local train station in Kunming, China. The government has blamed the killings on separatists from Xinjiang, a Chinese autonomous region where ethnic violence has broken out before. Zhang, who is party secretary of Xinjiang, suggested that virtual private networks (VPNs) -- services that allow Chinese Internet users to visit blocked sites -- had a role in fueling the violence. "Right now, 90 percent of Xinjiang's terrorism is the result of jumping the wall, and following online videos to create terrorism," he said while speaking with journalists. A video of his comments was later broadcast. China has long tried to filter out anti-government content, and blocked U.S. sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But jumping China's Great Firewall isn't hard. Internet users willing to pay US$10 or less a month can often buy access to a virtual private network (VPN).Read More!
Bringing SOPA to the Trans-Pacific Partnership
The machinery to dominate global intellectual property by American fiat was further tightened by the announcement of Robert Holleyman’s as deputy US trade representative. President Obama’s announcement is just another reminder what sources of inspiration are governing the drive by Washington to control the downloading and dissemination of information via the Trans-Pacific Partnership. After all, Holleyman was a former lobbyist of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill introduced by US Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tx) to gift US law enforcement authorities with the means to combat copyright infringements. Indeed, Holleyman’s own blurb as an author for The Huffington Post considers him as “one of the 50 most influential people in the intellectual property world”, an individual who “was instrumental in putting into place the global policy framework that today protects software under copyright law.” Such is the nature of mislabelled internationalism – Washington’s policy by another name.Read More!
Germany offers frightening glimpse at copyright trumping privacy
In February, thousands of websites urged their users to help stop web monitoring. The Day We Fight Back, led by American lobby group Demand Progress, condemned NSA Internet surveillance and remembered Aaron Swartz, opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), who hanged himself last year when faced with fifty years in prison for downloading academic texts. Swartz, from whom courts sought $1m in fines, is synonymous today with US clashes over online justice, but the subject is a global one. Germany, where I moved just before SOPA hit the news, offers a frightening glimpse at what happens when copyright policing trumps privacy. I moved to Berlin in September 2011, as the German Pirate Party won its way into the city state’s assembly. Papers bewildered by this breakthrough named the party, all of whose candidates gained seats, the new rebels in national politics, noting their platform reached young, deprived and disaffected voters. I spent October in a part of town with plenty, renting a cupboardlike room while seeking somewhere longer term. The other tenants, a Barcelonian tour guide and science student from Berlin subletting empty space for cash, already knew each other. Nocturnal, inconsiderate and antisocial, the new kid scared of trying to make friends, I wasn’t a good flatmate, and left amid severe awkwardness.Read More!
Op-Ed: NSA chief seeks to end free press
Outgoing National Security Agency boss, Keith Alexander, advocated making it a crime to report on government leaks this week, and said that legislation to accomplish this was coming in weeks. While addressing a cyber-security panel, Alexander lashed out at the media and said that legislation making it a crime to report on government leaks would reach congress within weeks. Perhaps the most telling quote came from Alexander, when he discussed what could be accomplished once the free press was gagged. "I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks. I am an optimist. I think if we make the right steps on the media leaks legislation, then cyber legislation will be a lot easier."Read More!
Slate's Anti Copyright rant sounds like a letter from your psycho ex.
Slate has a new blog post out under their Future Tense section entitled "Hollywood's Copyright Lobbyists Are Like Exes Who Won't Give Up."
In it, the Hollywood Copyright Lobbyists (whoever they are) are taken to task for acting like exes who won't get the hint. What hint? The blog post says these unnamed lobbyists remain undeterred by the defeat of SOPA and are once again trying influence law makers. In other words, lobbyists are continuing to lobby. How dare they. It's not like google ever does the same thing, right? SOPA by the way, stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. Along with PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Piracy Act. According to the Slate post, these were introduced as a response to what was seen as the faulty Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998.Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Tumblr, YouTube, Reddit, WordPress, and Facebook aren’t responsible for the copyright infringement of each of their millions of users, so long as they take down specific posts, videos, or images when notified by copyright holders. But copyright holders thought that wasn’t good enough. They wanted to take down whole websites, not just particular posts, and without ever going to court. In 2011, they proposed a bill that would let them do just that. Read More!
No comments:
Post a Comment