The Agile Panda: US Bill Creating the Great Firewall of America

A few places have been picking up on the implications of the US SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill, but I think that The Agile Panda has a very good analysis of the situation with comparisons to how this is being done in China.

Michael Geist, of course, has an excellent post:  SOPA:  All Your Internets Belong to US

“To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.”

Yes, SOPA would define ‘all’ Canadian IP addresses as being under US jurisdiction – and if you want to argue about it, just to get your foot into the door to register a complaint, you must acknowledge US has jurisdiction…no, I am not being circular, SOPA is.  And, as we have seen with other internet legislation, an accusation is sufficient to force your ISP to deny you service – as well as all online financial services would be cut off based on an accusation.

Lovely, is it not?

The Agitator points out that the US is trying to make it a federal crime to lie on the internet.

As I have said before – and doubtlessly will say again – we really really really need a diffused peer-to-peer internet alternative that will, by its very structure, be uncontrollable.

H/T:  Hacker News, Blog of Walker

So many wrongs – and they don’t add up tp any ‘rights’

I have little liking for the #occupy folks and have said so before.

But…

There is so much wrong in the police responses to the #occupy evictions that I don’t even know where to begin ranting.

Please, consider the following video:

 

First, a cop assaults a bunch of #occupiers (he uses unreasonable force against clearly non-violent people who offer no resistance, at least one of whom had to be taken to a hospital for treatment as a result of the assault), then the whole group of cops gets cowed and cowardly runs away when the mob advances on them!

The use of unreasonable force, especially against people who do not resist, is the second worst thing the cops here did.  The worst thing they did was to let themselves be run out by the mob.  A peaceful mob, but a mob none-the-less.

The lesson here?

If you are non-violent, police will assault you.  If you begin to – even just a tiny bit – look menacing, the cops will run away.

Just marvellous…

This sends a clear signal that the police are willing to neither obey nor uphold the rule of law.

Of course, we have seen this type of a response by police before:  peaceful citizens are bullied, beaten and arrested while violent law-breakers go unchallenged.  This is true from the Islamist rallies in the UK to Caledonia in Ontario and on and on.

All this type of police response will result in is that all protests will take on a violent streak, if only to protect themselves from police violence.  People will loose any vestige of trust they still have in the police,and, by extension, in the rule of law.

How can those calling the shots in the police responses not get it?

xda-developers: The Rootkit of All Evil – CIQ

Do you have a smart phone?

Then you might want to read this article at xda-developers about CIQ (CarrierIQ), which proclaims on their own website:

“…we give Wireless Carriers and Handset Manufacturers unprecedented insight into their customers’ mobile experience.”

 

‘Unprecedented’ is right!

It is understandable that any business would like to have a deep insight into their customers’ needs and desires in order to serve them better: satisfying customers is good for business.

However, customers also have a right to – and most have at least some expectation of – privacy.

The problem arises when customers are not even aware of the volume and detail of information about them that their mobile devices routinely report to their carriers: this lopsided information level makes any meaningful discussion about privacy vs data-mining virtually meaningless.

From the article:

“This [CIQ software] is given root like rights over the device, which means that it can do everything it pleases and you will have nothing to say about it.”

“…Because of all the metrics that could be obtained via the different triggers, that same network admin will not just know that you got a dropped call at 5 pm in California, but he/she will also know where in California you were located, what you were doing with your phone at that given time, how many times you accessed your apps until that time, and even what you have typed in your device (no, this last one is not an exaggeration, this thing can act as a key logger as well). Scared already? If not, here is a snippet of some…”

“…what kind of permissible purpose is out there that can allow a company to legally place a key logger on something and use it when you are not even getting service out of them?”

 

And, of course, we know no person or corporation would ever abuse any information they get access to!

Read the full article and weep.

H/T:  CodeSlinger

 

‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert’

Yes – I have just finished reading this book (Kindle version) and would like to say a few words about it.

First, in the name of transparency, I disclose that I am named in the acknowledgments as one of the over 40 citizen auditors whom the book’s author, Donna Laframboise, had recruited to audit the references in various IPCC AR4 chapters in order to verify whether the sources were peer-reviewed scientific journals or other materials. (More on this later.)

Let me start with the conclusion:  well worth a read!

It is worth reading regardless of your opinions about global warming and the role humanity does or does not play in it because, contrary to some book reviews, the book does not actually address the science itself.  Let me say it again:  this book is NOT an examination of the science, nor does it draw any scientific conclusions.  Not one!

Rather, this book takes the claims the IPCC (and its members) make about the organization and how it functions and tests them for consistency and validity.  As the sub-title of the book says, it is ‘An Expose of the IPCC’.  It is a journalistic expose of the process (and its corruption) behind the IPCC repots:  exactly the sort of thing that investigative journalist are trained to do.

This is a serious matter:  regardless of where your opinions may fall on the science itself, the process through which the IPCC reports – the reports with perhaps the furthest and deepest financial and political implications of our generation – are generated must be transparent and worthy of our trust.  It is perhaps even more the interest of the ACC believers that this process is ‘beyond reproach’ – that their Kool-Aid is not tainted, if you will.

What Donna Laframboise has revealed in ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert:  An Expose of the IPCC’ is an eye-opener to people who have trusted the IPCC simply because they were told to trust world’s leading scientists.

No, the book is not perfect.  There is a number of things that I would have either eliminated or re-phrased or even things I think are important that were not included in the book.  For example, she does go on about the Y2K bug in an attempt to parallel the hysteria and I get her aim – yet I think this and similar bits detract, not add to the book.  At times, her wording is more colloquial than what appeals to my taste, but that is a minor pick – and what she says, regardless of the style she says it in, is valid.

As for omissions – perhaps the most important one is that while I was checking the references for several of the chapters in AR4 for the Citizen Audit, I noted that a number of the references were not to peer-reviewed journals, but to actual official government policy papers.

To me, this is a big deal.

Yes, she correctly pans the IPCC for using a WWF and Greenpeace pamphlets and ads and press releases as source material – these are clearl not peer-reviewed science, despite the often repeated mantra that the IPCC uses exclusively sources from peer-reviewed scientific publications.  Citing these as peer-reviewed science is very problematic and Donna does a great job exposing this.

But that a number of actual government policy papers (from several different national governments as well as from the EU) are the source material on which the IPCC draws its conclusions is, in my never-humble-opinion, just as big (if not even bigger) deal.  Precisely because, as she documents in her book, it is governments who nominate people for IPCC participation, inclusion of policy papers by those very same governments demonstrates very clearly the conflicts of interest of many of the people behind the IPCC.

OK – that was my pet peeve.  I have to admit, in light of what the book does reveal and how meticulously it documents all of its assertions, it is just a minor niggle.

Perhaps the most praise-worthy aspect of ‘The Delinquent Teenager’ is how meticulously it is researched and documented.  I have not seen a hard copy, but the Kindle version (and, I understand, the pdf version) are filled with links to relevant material and almost a quarter of the book is ‘footnotes’.  Really.  Everything written in this book has been researched and documented beyond anything I have seen – ever.  For a fact junkie such as I am, this really makes the case – and proves it.

Different people liked different aspects:  here are a few other  reviews of the book (this one has copious quotes).

What did I learn from the book that I did not know before?

Two things jump to mind right away:

1.  There were no conflict of interest guidelines or rules for the IPCC as late as 2010 – they were deemed unnecessary.  This is problematic on its own.  However, following a scathing review by IAC, such conflict of interest rules have been done up.  Alas, they will not apply to any of the people currently working on the next IPCC report, because, as Rajendra Pachauri who heads the IPCC says, that would not be fair…

It would not ‘be fair’ to expect the IPCC ‘experts’ to adhere to conflict of interest rules?!?!?

2.  Donna Laframboise strings together a sequence of events that we should be aware of and supports it with quotes from Rajendra Pachauri and others:  the role of the IPCC never was to present an impartial report.

Here is the sequence:

  1. UN creates INFCCC
  2. UNFCCC creates a treaty to curb carbon emissions.
  3. UN creates IPCC to support the UNFCCC and get buy-in from various governments and people around the world.

Let me emphasize this:  the IPCC was created specifically to lend ‘scientific’ backing to the claim there is a problem only AFTER the UN had created the solution!

There is more in the book that I learned, but these two things are of such importance, it is difficult to believe any investigative

This is an important book – if you have not done so, please, read it!

MEMRI TV: American Muslims Demonstrate in Solidarity with Occupy Wall St.

Remember the videos from April, the Egyptian crowds shouting “the people want to topple Wall Street”?

Consider it when you warch this video from New York:

 

Measles outbreak among vaccinated kids: how it that possible?

Vaccination is an important weapon in our arsenal of weapons against infectious diseases, as I have written about before.

However, there is a very real problem with how our health officials are presenting vaccination.  It appears calculated to make people distrust the very tool they are touting!!!

After all, most people are not stupid:  we can tell when we are being told things that demonstrably are not true.  This includes oversimplifications to the poin of error:  we see the real-life results while the ‘experts’ are describing ideal ‘lab conditions’ outcomes…and the two are never the same.  (I’ll come back to this point later.)

I am convinced that the vast majority of anti-vaccination sentiment ‘out there’ is among people who have once  believed the health officials statements which touted the benefits of vaccinations, overstated its effectiveness and understated (or left out cmpletely) its risks.  There is no critic so hardened as one who was once a true believer and was proven wrong by real-life experience!

What do I mean?

If somebody sold you, say, suit of body armour and told you this armour can stop any bullet so that you will be safe wearing it anywhere in a combat zone – but omitted to tell you that the neck and joint areas of the suit are not actually armoured, you went out and got shot through the elbow, you might be annoyed.  Had you known, you would have behaved differently – guarded your unarmoured bits better…  But, having been told that the armour is impervious, you will not be as trusting when they try to sell you the next suit of armour…

There are two main things that health officials are not properly informing people about when it comes to vaccination:

  1. risk
  2. efficacy

Now that this is out of the way – it troubles me greatly to see how the latest ‘measles outbreak’ is being handled by the health officials and/or and mainstream media.

Background:

All school kids (with only very few conscientious objectors and health exceptions) are vaccinated against measles.  Yet, despite this, every few years, there are measles outbreaks.  What sets this one apart is how the story is being spun.

The first statistics that came out were that there were just under a hundred kids infected in the initial outbreak, but well over half of these kids were ‘properly vaccinated‘.  This seems to have baffled the health officials beyond belief – suggesting that these health officials are woefully unaware of the efficacy of vaccines…

Not only do vaccines have a surprisingly low rate of efficacy (some are below 20%), the ‘protection’ they confer on someone is not identical to the ‘protection’ that having the illness would.  This is a function of our immune system:  the sicker a germ makes it, the more dilligent it is about storing the antibodies against it – both in strenght and in length of time it ‘stores’ the antibodies for (hence the need for ‘booster shots’).  Since vaccinations only produce a very mild, immitation version of the disease, the body does not consider these antibodies ‘priority antibodies’ and will often drop them if it has too many other antibodies to worry about.

Therefore, we have consistently seen that may childhood illnesses like measles and chicken pox appear in teenagers or young adults, when they are much more dangerous illnesses than had they been suffered through in childhood.  This is what one would expect to see in a ‘properly’ vaccinated population!

It is similar to the not-often-mentioned fact that until very recently (when arrivals of people from the third world changed the situation), the only cases of polio were found in children vaccinated with the live vaccine and the grandparents who were looking after them.  No vaccination confers protection for more than 20-30 years – something our health officials also should be stressing.

But, back to our story:  since the initial news story, the outbreak has grown to over seven hundred.  Since the percentage on unvaccinated kids is small, it seems reasonable to presume that, as before. more than half of these students were also ‘properly’ vaccinated.

So, how do the health officials propose to deal with the outbreak?

MORE VACCINATION!!!

That is insane!

And irresponsible beyond belief!

Either the strain that is ravaging the teens has mutated from the original – which viruses do on a regular basis, in which case giving them the ‘standard’ vaccine would have no effect (there has not been sufficient time to adjust the vaccine), or there is a genetic pocket of people whose immune systems don’t respond to vaccination typically….in which case vaccinating them some more is both idiotic and dangerous.

Plus this creates the false impression that the problem is being contained, when all this activity will have no significant impact whatsoever.  People need to take personal precautions – yet the authorities are assuring them that they don’t need to since they have everything under control…

I know I am sounding like a broken record, but…

Vaccinations are an important tool for combatting infectious disease.  But, like all tools, it must be used properly and its limitations must be clearly stated and generally understood – and this is not happening right now.  Our health officials, through their attempt to manipulate us to all make the ‘right’ choice and misrepresenting the effectiveness of this tool are actually undermining people’s trust in it and feeding the anti-vaccination hysteria!

Anonymous has been picking some fights…

Lately, I have been intrigued by Anonymous, and have blogged my thoughts about them here and here.

They seem to be very busy lately.  Here are just two of the little fights they have picked lately:  Fox TV (because Anonymous does not approve of their coverage of the #occupy movement) and a Mexican drug cartel (for kidnapping one of their own).

Both of these are rather troublesome, though each for a different reason.

Threatening an attack on Fox (pretentiously scheduled for ‘remember, remember, the 5th of November’), just because they don’t like the way they are describing the #occupy folks, is very ‘easy’ to condemn.  The very idea that someone should be shut up (through being shut down) simply because someone else does not like their opinion (whatever that opinion is) is odious and despicable and all kinds of other really bad, more colourful expletives.

It runs contrary to the principle of defending freedom of speech – and is dangerously close to being diametrically opposite to the founding principles (if I may stretch the term in this manner) of Anonymous itself…at least, judging from their past actions and condemnations of corrupt organizations like Scientology.

This is the type corruption which one associates with ‘absolute power’:  at first, one considers themselves to stand for justice and all that is ‘right’ but as one begins to feel all-powerful, one begins to defend one’s position/reputation even though it means compromising the very principles that brought one there…

Well, it looks like at least some parts of Anonymous are drinking their own Kool-Aid.

Of course, this shows that the very thing which made Anonymous strong may be its undoing:  it is a hydra, with many heads.  Is this what happens when one of the heads gets so big, it turns against the more principle-minded parts of the collective?

Because as much as Anonymous or anyone else may wish, we – humans – do NOT have a hive-mind!

We may be capable of acting collectively, when necessary:  but to be effective in an extended collective action, we do need a hierarchical structure, if only to keep from interfering with things that other bits of the collective are doing.  This is both the strength and the weakness of our species and no amount of technology will deny our nature.

The very autonomous-ness of its members may be the undoing of the whole Anonymous collective if the loose canons among them drag the name of the collective into unfortunate actions like this and thus devalue its brand and sully its reputation.

The second fight Anonymous has picked is much more intriguing.

In a nutshell, this is my reading of it:

  • a guy works in a pamphlet campaign to raise awareness about Anonymous
  • said guy gets kidnapped by the Zetas, a drug cartel in Mexico (I am given to understand this is one of the ‘traditional’ ways these drug cartels raise cash – through kidnap-for-ransom and not because of any action of the kidnapee)
  • Anonymous threatens to expose names of Zeta collaborators unless their guy is released
  • nearly three dozen Zeta collaborators are killed and dumped on a Mexican highway, apparently killed by a rival cartel

Well, this teaches us some things:  Anonymous is willing to stand up for their own (good, very good) and they are not afraid to get people killed (bad, very bad).

While I do appreciate the ‘wild justice’ angle Anonymous has taken in the past, there is a big difference between messing up someone’s online life or even forcing them to sell their business  – and getting almost 3 dozen people killed.

There is no coming back from ‘killed’!!!

And being killed by a rival gang – not usually a ‘clean kill’, either.

Extrajudicial killings, too – so the information on which these people (yes, people!!!) were killed has never undergone any kind of a judicial oversight or indeed any kind of a test to prove its accuracy!!!  That, in my never-humble-opinion, is beyond bad.

If Anonymous is willing to go there – probably justifying it to themselves that they did not do the killings directly, but used the rival cartel as proxy – it is not inconceivable that they would be willing to instigate violence on a greater scale.

That is troubling, to say the least.

H/T:  Just Right

Ruling in the Warman V Fournier Copyright lawsuit

CORRECTION: THE FOURNIERS WILL NOT BE BACK IN COURT LATER THIS WEEK.  (I was confused by a header from an earlier email – my apologies for the my error.)

(Sad, isn’t is, that I have to specify which of the Warman lawsuits against the Fourniers this is about….)

This is the ruling in the motion to suppress a number of ‘things’ from the Fourniers’ defense statement in the lawsuit Mr. Warman is pursuing against them because he thinks that they have violated his copyright by:

  • inline-linking to his image (while he had full control of the image and could have blocked in-line linking)
  • not taking down a re-posting 0f an article fast enough after he acquired copyright over that article in an out-of-court settlement
  • posting on their site some public documents which quoted the above article

OK, OK – I’ll not stretch the suspense out any longer.

The Fourniers won!!!

It’s not the whole case – just this motion. But, it means that the trial lawyer will have the ability to weigh all the evidence and decide for her/his own self as to what is relevant and what is not.

So, this is a victory for justice!

Small victory, but victory none-the-less.  Especially since Connie Fournier – a non-lawyer – went up against the smooth and charismatic Mr. Katz (without whose extraordinary lawyer skills most of Mr. Warman’s lawsuits would have been summarily dismissed as frivolous – in  my never-humble-opinion) and won!!!

In that sense, it is big personal victory for the Fourniers.

Congratulations, Mark and Connie.

P.S. – The Fourniers will be in Federal Court in Ottawa again on Thursday, 3rd of November, 2011.

When the ‘cure’ is worse than the ‘disease’…

When one of the most rotten, corrupt, contemptible institutions in the history of humanity – the Vatican – calls for world tax to fund an all-encompassing world government which would over-rule the legitimate governments of nation states….

And when that institution speaks as if this was just a ‘speeding up’ of the inevitable course we are now…

And when this call is said to line up with the #occupy goals…

.we should sit up and pay attention.

H/T: FFF

The Fourniers will set another Canadian legal precedent

It is the nature of laws – at least, in free societies – to be passed in response to new developments in society.  That is why, in the common law tradition, legal precedents affect not only how old laws are applied but also how new laws evolve.

This creates a feedback mechanism:  the laws affect how the rules of society evolve, the rules of society affect how the laws evolve.

Currently, the courts are trying to interpret the existing laws to accommodate the changes due to our ‘communications revolution’.  Since more and more of our public and private communication as well as our public and private information is online, the impact these ruling will have over the coming decades is truly profound.

This makes Connie and Mark Fournier’s ongoing legal battles very important to all of us:  if you are reading this on a computer, then the rulings in their legal battles will affect the rules under which you live your life.  And not just in Canada – the world is fast becoming one electronic family and slowly but surely, internet-affecting legal precedents set in one Western country reverberate in the whole world.

That is why I have started to document the Fourniers’ legal journey – even though I have no legal training and my understanding of what is being said in court is imperfect.  But, if I document it to the best of my ability, perhaps others who are more knowledgable will be able to comment  on what I have witnessed and explain it better to all of us!

Last week, the Fourniers were in Federal court in Ottawa – charged with copyright infringement by Richard Warman.

To my mind, some of the things the Fourniers are charged with are difficult to understand – but one of them is very clear and will very likely set the legal precedent for Canada on a very hot topic: ‘inline linking’.  The legal precedent on copyright issues regarding the insertion of an inline web link has been ruled by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, clarifying that inserting them does not violate US copyright laws.  For search engines, anyway…

There has not been a comparable ruling in Canada – yet.

Richard Warman has brought a lawsuit against the Fourniers for violating his copyright in 3 separate ways.

One – and, perhaps most important regarding the abovementioned legal precedent – is for having permitted the insertion of an ‘inline-link’ on the Free Dominion forum they operate which linked to a picture of Richard Warman, on his own website.

In other words, the picture was always posted only on Richard Warman’s own personal website and he had full control over it.  An inline-link was posted on Free Dominion which would show the reader Richard Warman’s picture from Richard Warman’s site.  The picture was, at all times, on Mr. Warman’s server and under his complete control – he could have, at any time, blocked inline-linking to the picture…yet he chose to permit inline-links to the picture to function.

Inserting the inline-link on Free Dominion, according to Mr. Warman’s claim, constitutes displaying his image without permission and thus infringes on his copyright.

Therefore, the ruling on this will have important implications for internet use in Canada, perhaps further.  Should the ruling go against the Fourniers, then any time anyone inserts a hot-link when they comment on something on a blog or site you control, you could be liable for copyright infringement.

The other two counts of copyright infringment Mr. Warman is suing the Fourniers for are regarding words, not images, and words which were posted on the Free Dominion site and not words that were simply linked to.

Jonathan Kay had written an article for National Post in which documented how, at various court hearings, it was revealed that Mr. Warman appears to have made some highly inflammatory racist, misogynistic and anti-immigrant comments (specifically targeting Senator Anne Cools) on a white supremacist website/forum.  (I myself have heard the same assertions during the ‘Vigna v Levant’ defamation hearing, where Mr. Levant had clarified that to the best of his knowledge, it was not Mr. Vigna but rather Mr. Warman who was the card-carrying member of a neo-nazi organization and the author of this most vile hate speech directed against our first black female Senator.)

This newspaper article was re-printed (with credit – but it was not stated during the hearing if fully or partially) on the Free Dominion forum.

Mr. Warman sued the National Post for publishing that article and the National Post and he reached an out-of-court settlement with them.  As part of this settlement, Mr. Warman got the copyright of the article.

Once he owned the rights to the article, Mr. Warman’s lawyers contacted the Fourniers and demanded that they remove the article from their website.  This they complied with immediately, as was confirmed by Mr. Warman’s lawyers.

Despite this, at some subsequent time, the Fourniers were contacted by Mr. Warman’s lawyers and were requested to pay some sum of money to Mr. Warman to avoid a lawsuit for having posted the article in the first place.  The Fourniers believed that they had complied with the request to remove the offensive material in a timely manner and therefore did not think they were obligated to pay any money as well.  Subsequently, Richard Warman filed a copyright violation lawsuit against them on these grounds.

The last, third count of copyright violation has me puzzled more than the previous two.

The Fourniers had posted on Free Dominion sections of court documents – public documents, to the best of my knowledge – which had contained the phrases on the basis of which Mr. Warman was taking legal action against someone (the phrases he had found offensive) which had also been published in the article from point two.  Even though the Fourniers had clearly published these phrases as part of a public document, as they were also part of the article which Mr. Warman’s lawyers asked them to take down, Mr. Warman had charged them with copyright infringement for having posted them.

This, in a nutshell, is the background to this particular lawsuit Mr. Warman is pursuing against the Fourniers.

The Fourniers had filed their defense statement with the court – representing themselves.  Mr. Warman’s lawyers had informed the Fourniers that some of the things which they listed in their documents were inadmissible in court and asked the Fourniers to remove them.  The Fourniers refused to do so, because they believe this information to be relevant to their defense and would like the judge in the case to be the one to decide what is admissible and what is not.

Mr. Warman’s lawyers then filed a motion to have parts of the Fourniers defence statements struck from the record (not all the bits they had originally wanted removed, but still a significant amount)- something the Fourniers believe will affect their defense not only in this copyright violation lawsuit but also in three additional lawsuits (for defamation, I believe) that Mr. Warman is pursuing against them.

Last week, there was a hearing in federal court for this motion – a most interesting event in its own right (which I had gone to see for myself and will write up very, very soon, I promise!).