Censorship

When traveling, I’ve been a bit squeamish about the wifi/broadband connections now usually provided by the hotels I stay at.  The lack of security, not knowing who might be listening in…it just makes me feel a bit squeamish.

Perhaps my paranoia might be a teeny-tiny bit justified, based on recent developments in China, ahead of the Olympics.   Seen at The Hill:

Brownback stated that his office had been contacted by lawyers for international hotel chains who informed him that the Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB) ordered foreign-owned hotels to install Internet monitoring equipment. Brownback provided documents showing that hotels were asked to cooperate with the Chinese government.

“The Chinese government has demanded that these hotels allow the PSB to install software programs and hardware devices on the hotel networks,” Brownback said. “These measures are designed to assist the PSB to spy on the Internet activities of guests and record websites visited, searches entered and even keystrokes. The text alludes to harsh punishment for failure to comply with the order, including loss of license to operate a hotel in China.”

Note to self – when traveling to China, plan to work offline.

Last week brought word that New York’s Attorney General finally discovered the tarnished, spam-ridden remnants of USENET, which many of us killed many an hour on, back before the web and the start of perpetual September.

And, well, a good fifteen-twenty years after the fact, an AG noticed just how seedy USENET’s darker corners could be, and pressured several large service providers to block access to.

Over the weekend, CNet carried a story on how Verizon is complying with the AG’s belated realization:

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee. [...]

What this means in practice is that, thanks to the New York state attorney general, Verizon customers will lose out on innocent discussions. Verizon is retaining only eight newsgroup hierarchies, even though over 1,000 hierarchies exist. [...]

The only Usenet newsgroups that Verizon will continue to offer customers are the comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.* hierarchies. Customers will continue to be able to connect to other non-Verizon Usenet servers; no blocking is taking place.

Now, even back in the golden age of Usenet, there were service providers — certain universities, really — that blocked access to the alt.* zoo, because of the nature of some of the content there…and because blocking an unrestricted hierarchy by policy played far better with the ‘net that targeting specific newsgroups.

Back in those days, censorship was a dirty word.

My how times have changed.

For whatever it’s worth, the Freie Universität Berlin provides access to essentially all non-binary newsgroups for €10/year.  Or, Google Groups is free, if you don’t mind being limited to a web interface and the lack of a kill file.

Recent events in Wisconsin — specifically, the flooding and draining of Lake Delton — provide a harsh reminder that the NFIP is about more than just providing flood insurance.  For NFIP coverage to be available in a community, that community is required to abide by federal policies intended to reduce the potential devastation from flooding.

Lake Delton, Wisconsin wasn’t signed up with the NFIP.

Seen at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Residents and landowners affected by the Lake Delton breach spent Wednesday seeking an explanation for why the community opted out of a free national floodplain insurance program that 90% of the state’s flood-prone communities have joined.[...]

The Village of Lake Delton began the paperwork just two weeks ago to rejoin the floodplain insurance program after a dispute with FEMA’s floodplain elevation maps from 2001 caused it to back out. But because of that decision, residents such as Tim Fromm, Tom Pekar and Don Kubenik were not able to obtain flood insurance - which is backed by the federal government - for the homes they built on the shore of Lake Delton within the last few years.[...]

Oopsie.  The lawsuits arising from this should be…entertaining

Well, this sounds ominous (from the Guardian):

From next week, Virgin Media will send letters to thousands of households where music is either being downloaded or illegally shared. Many of the recipients are likely to be the unsuspecting parents of teenagers who hoard free downloads offered by file-sharing services. Research shows the majority of them are unaware their children are breaking the law.[...]

Virgin has stopped short of threatening any of its 3.5 million subscribers with disconnection, saying it first wants to “educate” customers during a 10-week trial campaign. Their letters will, however, be accompanied by a stern written warning from the BPI, which will threaten both disconnection and a court appearance for those who continue to download illegally.

I of course don’t condone theft of intellectual property (especially now that the entertainment industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century), but surely someone will soon notice that the means of detecting illegal file-sharing is hardly foolproof.

I suppose it could be worse.  They could be imposing 5GB download caps, like those of us with Sprint cell modems are preparing to live with.

I’ve been somewhat remiss in paying attention to my email. A reader passed along word of a rather disturbing occurrence last weekend in Washington DC. Quoting a press release from “Free the Jefferson 1″:

A DC resident celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s contributions to our nation’s founding was arrested at the Jefferson Memorial on Saturday night, April 12th. Now known as “The Jefferson 1,” 28 year-old Brooke Oberwetter and approximately 20 other fans of the founders’ ideas were present at the monument in celebration of Jefferson’s birthday.

The revelers gathered just before midnight to silently dance with iPods and headphones in front of the statue of Jefferson, who once noted that “Dancing is a healthy and elegant exercise, a specific against social awkwardness.” The celebration was intentionally scheduled late at night—the memorial is open 24 hours a day—in order to not disturb other visitors.

Shortly after the dancing began, U.S. Park Police officers began forcibly pushing people toward the steps. According to witnesses, an officer approached Oberwetter, who was near a wall in the chamber, talking to friends, and standing in place “bopping” to the beat of Rob Base’s 1988 classic “It Takes Two.” The officer, later identified as Officer Hilliard, badge number 246, unit D-1, asked her to leave and physically pushed her toward the outer chamber of the memorial.

Oberwetter repeatedly asked the officer what rule or law she was breaking and why she was being asked to leave. The officer responded that she was being “noisy” and “disrespectful” before shoving her against a column and placing her in handcuffs, all under the watchful stare of the 19-foot statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence. Oberwetter did not resist and went quietly with the officers.

Although initially charged with disorderly conduct, the charge was later reduced to “interfering with an agency function” under Title 36, Sec. 2.32 of the code of federal regulations. Oberwetter was released from custody over 5 hours later, and a court date has been set for April 29, 2008.

There’s also apparently a collection of associated videos on YouTube (which, to give full disclosure, I can’t watch as of this writing because I’m rather bandwidth constrained at the moment).

I should also disclose that I haven’t seen the Park Service’s view on the matter.

I would express outrage at the “arrest first and ask questions later” mentality apparently shown by the constable in this situation…but in a sad testament to how seriously our civil rights have eroded, I have to admit I’m not terribly surprised.

There is, after all, a reason why groups tend to seek permits…or at least have an advance discussion with law enforcement…before engaging in a group demonstration in a very public environment. Otherwise you run the risk of encountering a law enforcement official who doesn’t understand surprise situations, and therefore has a nearly-reflexive response of “arrest and disperse”.

I was looking forward to watching Frontline this week after seeing this comment posted at Balloon Juice:

This weeks edition of Frontline will cover health care around the world. They have a few trailers up, and it looks to be quite good.

Sure enough, the program guide for the national PBS feed provides the following description for this week’s Frontline:

Sick Around the World The healthcare systems of other advanced democracies could provide the United States with ideas as to how to reform its healthcare system.

…unless one’s local PBS outlet is Connecticut Public TV. This week, CPTV will carry a different episode of Frontline:

Growing Up Online The impact of the Internet on adolescence focuses on children who are harassed or bullied and those who gain attention on YouTube.

I’m sure that this discrepancy is purely coincidental given the underwriting provided CPTV by certain Hartford-based insurers, right?

I’ll break out the rabbit-ears to pick up a Massachusetts signal, or see if I can download the episode later this week, I guess.

In case anyone’s missed it, I hate robocalls. They’re a plague on the election process, and I’ve vowed to not vote for any candidate who robo-calls me.

I’m not alone in detesting robocalls. It seems that Senators Feinstein and Specter have a bill in the Senate which would seriously curtail such shenanigans if it became law. ABC’s Blotter has a post on the subject, which includes the following reaction from a robocaller:

“[I]t’s bad for democracy,” one Democratic consultant told Politics magazine recently. His company is a member of the American Association of Political Consultants, which is pushing to stop the Feinstein-Specter bill, and defend “our clients’ First Amendment right to communicate with voters.”

So, would it be wrong for me to point out that the folks opposing robocalling aren’t necessarily opposed to stopping all forms of calls? I certainly don’t want to infringe upon candidates’ abilities to reach out to potential voters.

However, is it so much to ask that if they choose to do so by phone, they could at least extend the courtesy of putting a human on their end of the line to talk to me?

So, does anyone else think that our almost 50 year-long temper-tantrum over the nationalization of property owned by Americans in Cuba might sometimes go a bit too far?

From the New York Times:

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.[...]

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Note that the European travel agent, whose servers are physically in the Bahamas, apparently doesn’t sell trips to Americans. He just had the misfortune to have used an American domain registrar and to have annoyed the Treasury Department.

Setting aside that it’s long past time for the U.S. to normalize relations with Cuba, doesn’t such an act on the part of the feds seem a bit…overreaching?

Hmmm… I know this threat isn’t particularly new, but you would have thought that the internet cabal would have already taken steps to prevent something like this from happening. (Quoting Threat Level: )

The Pakistani government ordered ISPs to censor YouTube to prevent Pakistanis from seeing a trailer to an anti-Islamic film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders. YouTube has since removed the clip for violating its terms of service, but a screenshot of the film, available via Google, shows a crude drawing of a pig defecating with the word Allah underneath it.

Pakistan Telecom complied by changing the BGP entry for YouTube—essentially updating its local internet address book for where YouTube’s section of the internet is. The idea was to direct its internet users to a page that said YouTube was blocked.

Unfortunately, the ISP announced the new route to upstream providers. The upstream providers didn’t verify the new route but accepted it and then passed it along, cascading the bad address around the net, until most everyone using the net on Sunday would have been directed to the Pakistani’s network block. The blunder not only took down YouTube, but also choked the Pakistani ISP, which was quickly deluged with millions of requests for talking cat videos.

So, a repressive government doesn’t like what some European posts to YouTube, and has all of YouTube taken down for everybody.

The ways that such a feat could be replicated and abused are rather disturbing, wouldn’t you say?

Note to self: be nice if I should ever decide to blog about life in Saudi Arabia. Why I would blog about such a topic, I don’t know, but given this blurb from the New York Times, it seems rather important that I be nice should the situation arise.

An outspoken Saudi blogger is being held for “purposes of interrogation,” the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday.

Gen. Mansour al-Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman reached by telephone, said the blogger, Fouah al-Farhan, was “being questioned about specific violations of nonsecurity laws.” Mr. Farhan’s blog, which discusses social issues, had become one of the most widely read in Saudi Arabia.

Farhan’s blog is at www.alfarhan.org. It’s in Arabic, except for one letter in English which indicates he knew that officials were interested in him:

The issue that caused all of this is because I wrote about the political prisoners here in Saudi Arabia and they think I’m running a online campaign promoting their issue. All what I did is wrote some pieces and put side banners and asked other bloggers to do the same.
he asked me to comply with him and sign an apology. I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that. An apology for what? Apologizing because I said the government is liar when they accused those guys to be supporting terrorism?