Archive for 'SOPA'
You Tube Launches Vicious Censorship
Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down
While the file-sharing ecosystem is currently filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology continue to work on their decentralized BitTorrent network. Their Tribler client doesn’t require torrent sites to find or download content, as it is based on pure peer-to-peer communication. “The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,” the lead researcher says.
Internet strikes back: Anonymous’ Operation Megaupload explained
Google Is Already Using SOPA-Like Censorship
From PrisonPlanet:
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Despite Google’s much-heralded support for the anti-SOPA movement, the web giant is already enforcing SOPA-like policies of its own, blacklisting legitimate websites from its news aggregator and following government orders to remove material from its search results and You Tube.
As major Internet giants joined forces yesterday to protest legislation that would hand the U.S. government power to arbitrarily seize websites with no legal process under the pretext of copyright infringement, Google slapped a black censorship image over its logo and urged people to sign an anti-SOPA petition that has accrued over 5 million signees.
However, Google’s main issue with SOPA is seemingly not related to their concerns about Chinese-style web censorship becoming commonplace, but rather which entity gets to wield those powers – large transnational corporations or governments.
While Google criticizes SOPA publicly, it is already privately using SOPA-like powers to unfairly marginalize legitimate web content.
Google News is a content aggregator that allows users to search thousands of news sources for relevant stories. Although the aggregator includes a plethora of obscure, occasionally offensive, and barely-read websites, in November 2010 Google took the decision to de-list PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com from its indexed news sources.
Infowars.com alone is an internationally recognized news website that gets more traffic than MSNBC.com and innumerable other big mainstream news websites. Our articles are routinely featured on the Drudge Report, which itself is renowned as the primary agenda-setting news website in the United States, driving more traffic to individual stories than the likes of Facebook and Twitter combined.
Infowars owner Alex Jones is a nationally syndicated radio host whose broadcast appears on an ever-expanding list of big mainstream radio stations. Jones has been afforded feature profiles by the likes of Rolling Stone Magazine, who acknowledged his role as a pioneer in the media world.
Infowars.com is clearly a legitimate and important news website that features original content which routinely makes an impact and occasionally goes viral. And yet Google de-listed the website from its news aggregator on a whim with no explanation provided. Since Google and its owner Eric Schmidt are prominent financial contributors to the Obama campaign, we can only assume we were blacklisted for political reasons.
Whether you concur with our political stance or are rapidly against it, what can’t be argued is that we are a legitimate news outfit – but Google has arbitrarily banned us from appearing on their ‘news’ search results.
This is a clear example of how Google is already enforcing SOPA-like rules of its own choosing, without the need for any law to be passed by any legislative body.
In addition, while concerns rage about the state obtaining the power to shut down websites and remove web content with no recourse, Google is already following orders from the federal government in the majority of cases in removing videos from its You Tube platform, including takedowns on the grounds that the videos contain “government criticism”.
Google-owned You Tube has complied with thousands of requests worldwide to remove political protest videos that are clearly not in violation of any copyright or national security interests and do not constitute defamation.
The number of takedown orders received by Google from authorities based in the United States rose dramatically over the past year, with demands to remove information increasing by 70 per cent. Google complied in removing the material in 63% of the cases.
One such example was You Tube’s compliance with a request from the British government to censor footage of the British Constitution Group’s Lawful Rebellion protest, during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.
Google has also targeted our own You Tube channel for termination on numerous occasions merely for posting legitimate news content, such as the Wikileaks Apache helicopter footage, which appears on hundreds of other You Tube channels.
Crucially, Google has for years censored its own search results subject to the mandates of different governments across the world. SOPA and PIPA are merely an effort to codify into US law what is already taking place in more authoritarian countries, with the willing participation of Google itself.
Many other web giants are also moving to censor the Internet, including VeriSign, who recently demanded the power to terminate websites deemed “abusive” with no legal oversight whatsoever.
Public wi-fi systems stationed in airports, train stations, libraries, schools, and workplaces also routinely censor political websites.
Who needs government to censor the Internet when large corporations are already doing it? Amidst all the anti-SOPA rage, we should not be so naive as to give the likes of Google a pass when considering the totality of threats posed to free speech on the world wide web.
We encourage people to at least be aware of alternatives to Google, search websites that will not enact SOPA-like censorship policies, such as StartPage.com. Watch a video below from November 2010 in which Alex Jones explains how Google is censoring the web – without the need for SOPA.
Going Dark
This site is going dark on January 18, 2012 to protest SOPA/PIPA/NDAA and every other group of people who use force in attempt to take away our lives, liberty and property.
Please visit http://www.AmericanCensorship.org for more information.
Abandoned by British justice: Student faces 10 years in U.S. jail for setting up ‘illegal’ website
From the DailyMall:
A British student faces up to a decade in a U.S. prison for actions which are not even a crime in the UK.
Campaigners say Richard O’Dwyer, 23, is being abandoned by his country in the same way as computer hacker Gary McKinnon.
Mr O’Dwyer is accused of listing places where films and TV programmes could be illegally downloaded, on a website he ran from his university bedroom in Sheffield.
Scroll down for video
‘Guinea pig’: Richard O’Dwyer arrives with his mother Julia at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London today
Legal experts say this is not an offence under British law, and he did not download any of the entertainment himself.
Yet the ‘quiet and vulnerable’ son of a GP could spend ten years in a high-security American jail after he lost his fight against extradition yesterday.
The case has chilling similarities with the attempt by the U.S. to extradite Asperger’s sufferer Mr McKinnon, who hacked into Pentagon computers from his north London bedroom.
MafiaaFire fighting internet censorship
From Falkvinge.net:
MaaFiaFire Just Killed All Current and Future Copyright Industry Censorship
A story on TorrentFreak yesterday announced a new browser plug-in from MafiaaFire. Reading the comments and seeing the lack of impact, I think a lot of people don’t realize that MafiaaFire just killed the copyright industry’s entire ISP censorship strategy dead in the water.
The story on TorrentFreak goes into deep detail with the technical details on the inner workings of the plugin. Perhaps therefore, I guess, a lot of folks might have missed the big picture after this piece of code has come into being.
Here is that big picture with the plugin installed:
- US goons seize torrent site domains? No effect.
- Courts order ISPs to lie in their DNS records, giving you another page instead (“site blocked”)? No effect.
- Courts order ISPs to nullroute certain IP blocks, trying to trick you into thinking that the site is offline? No effect.
See, now?
In the hypothetical extreme case that some United States goon agency would seize the domain thepiratebay.org entirely, most ISPs also lying about its previous DNS records and giving you a “page censored” sign, and even having blocked it at the IP level (a technique never used), you would still just type “thepiratebay.org” in the address bar as usual (given that you also have the first MafiaaFire plugin).
The story on TorrentFreak goes into detail on how this is accomplished using a list of thousands and thousands of proxies, circumventing censorship. Essentially, what the released plugin does is to turn your computer into a node in a mesh network that finds the shortest unblocked route to the target you request.
This kills the copyright industry’s strategy that the ISPs are “critical gatekeepers” right dead in the water. Of course, the reason the strategy could be so easily killed is that it is fundamentally wrong to begin with; the Internet doesn’t work like that. No matter how much the copyright industry dreams and screams for one, there just isn’t a central point of control.
The first list of circumrouted sites include The Pirate Bay and Newzbin2, but more are to come (and, most importantly, are easy to add).
Now, I predict that the copyright industry will be pretending in courts and to their bosses that installing this plugin represent a “significant extra effort”, and therefore hinders copying. Besides that I consider the prevention of spread of culture to be bordering on a crime against humanity, this predicted allegation is delusional. How many steps are already required to prepare a fresh, out-of-the-box machine for file sharing? The free and pirate technologies for encoding audio and video are superior to the commercial alternatives, but they also require separate installation.
You need to install all the proper codecs (AC3, MPEG4, DivX3–DivX5, all OGG variants and a bunch more), you need to map the AC3 channels to your speaker config, you need to install at least one BitTorrent client and configure it, you need to configure your firewall to accept BitTorrent connections, and a couple of other things. Adding the installation of a plugin, turning the number of steps to 21 from 20, is absolutely inconsequential. These are preparations that are already made to a computer to enable its file sharing, that all 250 million European file sharers already do. What is included out of the box is entirely irrelevant, as nothing enabling file sharing is.
It could be noted, by the way, that the demise of Internet Explorer also was despite the fact that it came tightly tied to the operating system and people needed to jump through hoops and rings of flame to replace it. People learned to do that, and did that. Just like with file sharing and anti-censorship tools.
Of course, pirates are engineers and take active measures to reduce the number of steps required to enable file sharing on a given computer. On the Ubuntu operating system, which I use, it’s a matter of one single command for setting up everything in the checklist above:
apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
So to summarize, MafiaaFire just killed all the copyright industry’s censorship-for-profit, both current and future, without any measurable extra effort required for the 250 million Europeans that share culture and knowledge. The plugin’s name is the somewhat cryptic “The Pirate Bay Dancing”, that derives from the movie Dirty Dancing, and more specifically, the assertive quote Nobody puts The Pirate Bay in a corner! I subscribe to that idea.
Oh, and to answer a common question: The plugin is currently Mozilla-only but will be released for Chrome in about two weeks. MafiaaFire released for Firefox first in homage to Mozilla Foundation’s formal response to US censorship goons (“take a hike”).
So: Thank you, MafiaaFire. Thank you immensely. You’ve done humanity a great service.
Viva Freedom of Speech, and death to all censorship, no matter whose bottom line it serves.
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