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UN wants to ‘regulate’ the internet
February 22, 2012 — xanthippaAs if SOPA, ACTA Bill C-30 were not enough, there is a new threat to the information superhighway – from the United Nations, none the less. From The Wall Street Journal:
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 quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.
Really?
Does this not illustrate that it is:
- time to leave the UN – iff we cannot de-legitimize and dismantle the organization as a whole
- time to really push to establish an internet substitute which is diffused, so that there are no pipelines which could be controlled by any regulatory body (the current technology that could be used for this is still under development – and much too slow)
Yeah, I have called for both these things in the past, but perhaps the time is running out faster than we expected…
More thoughts about the issues of ‘privcy’ and ‘presumption of privacy’
February 21, 2012 — xanthippaOver the weekend, this video, purported to be from ‘Anonymous’, was released. It demands that the Canadian Minister, Vic Toews, remove bill C-30 (which would permit civil servants unlimited snooping powers on the citizens via the internet without judicial oversight) and that he step down immediately.
The following video also purports to be from ‘Anonymous’. As I have no connection to that group, I have no idea if it is authentic. However, I do think it is worth posting because it raises several issues worth further discussion:
This video raises the connection between the desire by various governments to regulate arms and to regulate the internet.
This is a deeper connection that one may think, at first glance. But, deep down, both are attempts to take away the citizen’s ability to protect themselves – including, if necessary, to resist their government. Both are ways in which governments make their citizens less secure, more isolated, and more afraid of their government.
Even if you are not as libertarian in your views as I am (I think that monopoly control over infrastructure – even, or perhaps especially, information infrastructure – is perilous to civil liberties), it is easy to see how governments are threatened by citizenry that is difficult to control and willing and able to oppose them.
Firearms are a means of physical self-defense and an equalizer between the strong and the weak. Even a small woman can protect herself from a rapist with the use of a gun: her physical safety is no longer dependant solely on the timely response of the state to come to her aid. This threatens the government monopoly on the enforcement of laws: as every monopoly’s natural reaction would be, the government’s reaction is to restrict this competition.
Let’s be clear about this: government ‘regulation’ of firearms is not about increasing public safety by having many well trained, well armed citizens available in public spaces who would be able to stop law-breakers and thus increase public safety. To the contrary: it is always specifically designed to restrict gun ownership, use, and the very presence of privately owned guns in public spaces. This intolerance on the part of government of guns in private hands – even though this increases public safety – is indicative of the government’s disrespect for its citizenry, with the goal to increase government coercive powers at the root of all ‘arms regulations’.
Information is a weapon and a powerful one.
So is anonymous speech.
The internet enables both.
As a matter of principle, anonymous speech is necessary for the preservation of the very freedom of speech. For example, The Federalist Papers could never have been published had their authors not had absolute anonymity at the time of publication! The bigger the government is, the more dangerous it is to speak up against it openly. Without anonymous speech, governments do indeed become more totalitarian and more tyrannical in nature: this cycle has been repeated so often, it is blatant.
Yet, the ever-growing governments in the formerly-free world now wish to have complete and unfettered access to the information which would identify each and every internet user: to be able to attach a name to every sentence uttered on the internet, from seeking sensitive advice at an online support group to dissenting political speech!
Of course, the governments are also increasing citizen surveillance on so many fronts… There will soon be no arena where we do have ‘presumption to privacy’, not even in our homes and certainly not anywhere else. So, the whole ‘getting a warrant’ might be a mute issue…
Technology is beautiful – but it is a tool, to be used for good or evil. It is necessary that we understand these tools because our society will need to evolve along with them. What am I talking about?
For example, drone-based aerial surveillance…
Or this totally awesome ‘bug thech’! (Do watch the video, it is art and technology combined!)
What is my point?
As new technologies arise, we will need to develop laws to govern their use. However, these laws (all laws, really) ought to be focused on protecting the civil libeties of individual citizens – not legitimizing the ways that governments and big business can circumvent them!
Dr. Andy Thomson: Why we believe in Gods
February 20, 2012 — xanthippaEven though this video is a few years old (2009), I have only come accross it recently. It is also a little long, but it is interesting because it aprroaches the topic from the point of view of modern medicine in general and psychiatry in paricular.
Garry McHale arrestted again, because the sight of him ‘provoked’ someone to violence
February 20, 2012 — xanthippaThis is the result when we stop remembering the proper roles for police, the military and the government.
The reason we have police is to uphold the laws of the land. That is, they are the instrument of force the State uses against its civilian population to maintain its monopoly on lawmaking within their territory. Basic, simple and clear, right?
The only legitimate role for a police force is to uphold the law – equally and without discrimination.
The only legitimate role for a police officer is to uphold the laws within the policing framework, and it is each individual officer’s personal responsibility to ensure they are not upholding the laws unequally or obeying illegal orders. This is essential because it is the front-line police officers who are the agents of the state within this: that is why they are the only ones who can safeguard this powerful force from corruption.
When exactly did the role of the police become re-defined from ‘enforcing the law of the land’ to ‘maintaining public peace’?
Because ‘maintaining public peace’ is not the same thing as ‘upholding the laws of the land’. If a crowd is upset by the presence of a witch, the easiest, most cost-effective course of action for someone ‘maintaining public peace’ is to simply burn the witch!
Most moral people would have a problem with this approach…
Yet, this is exactly what the OPP are doing in Caledonia: faced with an angry mob, they target the person the mob is angry at instead of maintaining order by upholding the laws of the land!
People who are willing to tolerate this approach to ‘maintaining peace’, who are ‘keeping their heads down’ in the conviction this will stop the mob from going after them should remember that in Eastern and Central Europe, the witch hunters sometimes killed every man, woman and child in a village they thought was infected with witchcraft.
The ‘peace of the tomb’ is not something our society ought to be striving for. Yet that is the logical result of the type of policing the OPP is practicing in Caledonia and many other places in Ontario!
Canadian Constitution Foundation on Brian Lilley: warrantless searches
February 18, 2012 — xanthippaGoogle Circumvents Safari Privacy Protections – This is Why We Need Do Not Track
February 17, 2012 — xanthippaWe knew this was happening – but now we have proof.
‘Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple’s default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking.
This tracking, discovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, was a technical side-effect—probably an unintended side-effect—of a system that Google built to pass social personalization information (like, “your friend Suzy +1’ed this ad about candy”) from the google.com domain to the doubleclick.net domain. Further technical explanation can be found below.’
It looks like this was a bit of a case where one division within Google was working on privacy issues – like the ‘no cookies’ option, while another was trying to inject the ‘social networking’ experience into Google (a bad idea, in my never-humble-opinion: if I want to know what my friends are up to, I’ll ask them – I certainly don’t need Google to pop up a bubble to tell me what they thought of something) and ‘worked around’ the privacy policy with some creative coding. This, of course, completely undermined all the privacy measures and blew up Google’s privacy policy.
Perhaps Google is getting too big to stay healthy…
Shoot ’em up – for charity!
February 17, 2012 — xanthippa‘Mojang has one weekend to make your game — live! The indie studio Mojang will be livestreaming all the glory and drama of making a brand new game in 60 hours. Based on a poll of more than 100,000 users, Mojang is tackling a real-time strategy shoot ’em up with a steampunk ancient Egypt theme!
Pay-what-you-want for the game any time during the jam. ‘
If you are not familiar with Humble Bundle, it is the best way to fight online piracy: make it easy to legally buy games online, pay what you think is fair.
Of course, everybody is familiar with Mojang – the creators of MineCraft…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 