It’s time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression, and to move on to the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good it can do in the world, and minimize the evil.
…the Consumer Groups note Bell Canada’s somewhat thin argument on s. 36 to the effect that throttling is examination of the “application header of the content but not the content itself.” This is akin to arguing that one is listening into a telephone conversation and identifying the language being spoken but not listening to the words. However, this is a false analogy, as Bell does influence the content of the message by blocking the usability of the P2P protocol by slowing it down, thus rendering its purpose (to quickly download large files) moot. To continue the language analogy, Bell is effectively listening in for, say, Mandarin Chinese and making sure the call breaks up and drops out to the point that half of the speakers simply abandon the call.
Krzysztof Kotowicz has recently published the first part of a Chrome hacking series. In what went up mid-March, he provides the proof of concept code to ID the addons that users have installed. (The live demo – avoid if you’re particularly privacy conscious – is here.) There are various advantages to knowing what, specifically, browser users are running:
Means of uniquely identifying browsers have come and gone before, and this will continue into the future. That said, as more and more of people’s computer experiences occur through their browsers an ever-increasing effort will be placed on compromising the primary experience vector. It will be interesting to see if Google – and the other major browser vendors – decide to see this means of identifying customer-selected elements of the browser as a possible attack vector and consequently move to limit addon-directed surveillance.
We live in a dangerous time when ISPs – largely to head off potential federal regulations – establish private arrangements with copyright holders to disrupt Internet subscribers from accessing certain content. Sandoval notes that,
Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from pirating music, movies and software over the Web. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.
But during a panel discussion here at a gathering of U.S. publishers, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program by July 12.
…
[Subscribers] will also be informed of the risks they incur if they don’t stop pirating material. The ISP then can ratchet up the pressure. The ISPs can choose from a list of penalties or what the RIAA calls “mitigation measures” that include throttling down the customer’s connection speed to suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating. The ISPs can waive the mitigation measure if they choose.
This isn’t a small matter: rights holders regularly make errors when they assert that a person is engaging in infringing behaviour. Rights holders assume that taking ISP subscribers hostage – by throttling or otherwise impacting their online behaviours – will (a) cause subscribers to cease potentially infringing behaviour; (b) lead subscribers to acquire content in non-infringing ways. I suspect that, instead, we’ll witness a ratcheting up of anonymization and encryption schemas to limit file sharing surveillance practices.
Many will say that ISP collaboration is just the next stage of an ongoing cat-and-mouse game but, in so saying this, may fail so see the larger implications of this game. In the UK, worries that the content industry might get powerful new legal capabilities via the Digital Economy Act led the security and intelligence services to protest a copyright-related bill. It wasn’t that the services were supportive of infringement but instead that, by encouraging regular citizens to evade and hide their online actions online for consumer gain, the services’ capabilities to monitor for threats to national security would be degraded.
That’s not a small matter. You may be pleased – or not – that the security and intelligence services’ operations might be hindered. Regardless, your stance doesn’t mitigate the fact that copyright legislation threatens to have far reaching impacts. Using ISPs as traffic cops that establish antagonistic relationships with their subscribers is poor business for the ISPs and potentially makes national security issues more challenging to combat. We need to have a far more holistic accounting of what new copyright capacities and actions mean for society generally and, in the process, get away from narrowed discussions that obfuscate or externalize the full potentialities that accompany the (prospective) criminalization broad swathes of the population.
Wired has run a decent piece surrounding unilateral American seizures of domain names by acting on critical infrastructure governed by US law. A key bit from the article to get you interested:
Bodog.com was registered with a Canadian registrar, a VeriSign subcontractor, but the United States shuttered the site without any intervention from Canadian authorities or companies.
Instead, the feds went straight to VeriSign. It’s a powerful company deeply enmeshed in the backbone operations of the internet, including managing the .com infrastructure and operating root name servers. VeriSign has a cozy relationship with the federal government, and has long had a contract from the U.S. government to help manage the internet’s “root file” that is key to having a unified internet name system.
These domain seizures are a big deal. Despite what some have written, even a .ca address (such as the address country code top level domain linked to this website) could be subjected to a take down that leverages the root file. In effect, US copyright law combined with American control of critical Internet infrastructure is being used to radically extend America’s capability to mediate the speech rights of foreign citizens.
The capacity for the US to unilaterally impact the constitution of the Web is not a small matter: such actions threaten the sovereign right to establish policy and law that governs the lives of citizens living in countries like Canada, Russia, Australia, and Europe generally. Something must be done, and soon, before the Web – and the Internet with it – truly begins to fracture.
From DSLReports we find that:
The leap year appears to be the latest thing to confuse Cogeco’s metering software, with users reporting that a bug resulted in them being informed they’d already used their monthly allotment before March even really got started. Notes one of several users:
“I got my 100% warning on March 1st. I use my router as well to watch my usage. My router for Feb shows 170GB, Cogecos 254. I am going to get hit with a $75 charge and I am pissed. Measurement Canada needs to get involved here, this is getting absurd.”
Measurement Canada seems absolutely unwilling to get involved in issues related to mobile or landline data speeds and volume accuracy. We really need to get at least an OfCom level of involvement: the punting between Industry Canada, Measurement Canada, and the CRTC continues to have very real implications for citizens and consumers, and these problems have to be addressed.
Last year The Star ran an article detailing the merits of online voting. You get the usual benefits: increased turnout, happier constituents, and enhanced convenience. What the article entirely misses, of course, are the security and associated legitimacy issues linked with voting online. An academic blogger, writing before the article, notes that:
‘securing’ the Internet is a Herculean task. It absolutely cannot be regarded as a ‘secure’ development environment, especially when dealing with matters that are highly sensitive to political, technical, and social fault conditions. Such conditions may be worse that a fail condition, on the basis that faults generate fear and concern without a clear indication that something has gone wrong. In the case of an election, a perceived exploitable fault condition threatens to undermine political legitimacy and politically-generated solidarity on grounds that electoral results might be questionable. Thinking back our bridge example, a ‘fail’ might be a bridge collapsing. A ‘fault’ might include cracks spanning the support columns that cause motorists to avoid using the bridge out of fear, even though the cracks do not endanger the bridge’s stability. If ‘faults’ cannot be corrected, then there may be general fear about the validity of an election even if the election is not manipulated. If a ‘fail’ condition occurs but is not detected, then there may be a perception of electoral legitimacy without the election actually being legitimate.
Elections are not something to be trivially tampered with. Heightened conveniences should not trump electoral security and legitimacy. While paper voting is annoying it is a far more ‘secure’ method than online voting mechanisms. It really isn’t too much to ask/expect of people to mail in a vote, go to a polling station, or (quite reasonably) abstain from the process for their own reasons. We should not undermine a foundation of democracy just to make things a little bit more convenient.
Every time we come up with a technical solution that protects privacy, the websites come up with something they want to do that is broken by this privacy protection, and so they find a workaround for it and they basically break the privacy protection.
This notion that apps should pay for bandwidth is insane. Telcos should pay developers a commission for helping them sell bandwidth.
Tim Bray, Developer Advocate at Google
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