News

ACTA; war over. We win. Again

Posted Thu, 2012-02-16 15:32 by arjen

According to Dutch Economics Minister Maxime Verhagen, 'ordinary' people have nothing to fear from ACTA. This treaty is merely designed to shut down child pornography sites. Go to the link and have another listen (in Dutch), because he really does say this!

That's good because, although I quite like a good download, I tend to limit myself to books and movies and books that fall a little more within the acceptable media spectrum. However, this statement gives us a fascinating glimpse into the mind of our Minister-of-All. Apparently in the case of distribution of photographic evidence of actual child abuse he is first and foremost concerned with possible copyright infringement. Is this a professional contortion or is he simply exceptionally goal orientated? This is what journalists should be pouncing on. For the lulz.

But beauty emerges even from the surrealist farce that is modern western copyright policy. No, I'm not talking about more music, movies or books, for there is no evidence that more culture is created by fanatically prosecuting 14-year olds for downloading. However, the recent weeks have clearly shown the usefulness of a common enemy. Thanks to ACTA, more Europeans than ever are involved in a critical discussion of modern copyright law and the balance with civil liberties. That is a wonderful development. Furthermore, it now seems that ACTA is dying following the remarks of European Commissioner Viviane Reding (she senses the political climate). One European country after another is delaying signing the treaty. In the three years since the “crisis” citizens have developed a fairly sharp bullshit filter to detect the kind of neo-liberal nonsense that ACTA is full of, and they will take no more. Like Software Patents it always takes awhile for the protests to get going but once they go representatives tend to choose the side of the people who can get them in a seat by voting in a few years.

SOPA; not our problem

Posted Thu, 2012-01-19 15:00 by arjen

Yesterday was the big SOPA protest day. Wikipedia (in English), Boing Boing, Reddit and many other sites were blacked out. Other sites, and even google.com had one-line banners beneath the bar exhorting me to contact the US Congress. The link said: "millions of Americans Oppose PIPA and SOPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the US". Even a classic song urges me "to call my congressman". But google.nl, did not show this - clearly indicating that it perceived the matter to be an internal American political problem.

In recent weeks there have been many calls for action outside the US against SOPA. These calls have been synchronized with outrage and protests as Bush Obama signed the NDAA anti-terrorism law. Under this law, anyone in the US "suspected" of involvement in "terrorism" (both nebulously defined) can be indefinitely imprisoned or even killed without trial or any other form of judicial review (think Stalin '30). The anger itself is justified, but more than ten years too late. Indeed the only new provision in the NDAA is that the US can now treat its own citizens in ways that have been enforced against the world's other 6.5 billion people since 2001.

ACTA and SOPA are great!

Posted Thu, 2011-12-22 15:24 by arjen

Socially aware people are, often justifiably, very good at moral indignation, but they just as often display a touching naivety. I recently watched with some surprise the American Occupy activists who were shocked (shocked I tell you!) as policemen (or university rent-a-cops) launched unprovoked attacks using batons and pepper spray.

It is indeed despicable that these officials use so much violence. But if people are still shocked by this in 2011, one has to wonder where they've been hiding for the last 10 years – have they not watched the news? Did they think that they could let stolen elections, illegal wars of aggression, shooting children with anti-tank weapons and the torture of innocent civilians happen without the ultimate consequence of their govenment using the same force against them?

But even the naive indignation of some Occupy activists about their government and its boot boys, is nothing compared to the childish surprise of the IT press about ACTA and SOPA. The copyright industry has for decades lobbied for the length of copyright to stretch to the end-of-time-plus-a-day extra.

Sony has no problems with infecting computers of their customers with what amounts to a virus. A torrent of writs has poured forth from the offices of copyright enforcement. Babies and the elderly without a PC, deceased persons, and even a HP laser printer have been falsely accused of copyright infringement (labeled as “theft” by the lawyers of the industry). Surely we all know the kinds of organisations we are facing now?

DIY privacy, because the law no longer works

Posted Thu, 2011-11-24 08:31 by arjen

Over the last few years it seems as though everything that is centralised fails. Governments fail to solve societal problems (or even just complete a successful IT project), central banks fail to monitor the behaviour of ordinary banks, IT companies fail to offer us solutions that are safe and respect our privacy somewhat ...

Decentralisation works better: bittorrent, non-Western popular revolts, open source software, hacktivism and to a certain extent the Occupy movement. I'm glad Bits of Freedom and international counterparts such as the EFF exist because they put issues on the agenda that most of the over-50 politicians would not otherwise consider. In Berlin, the Pirate Party has over 9% of the seats in local government and is spreading rapidly across Germany.

But is all this really upholding our "rights"? Because despite all petitions, motions, actions and other initiatives our (digital) civil liberties are still evaporating. In the Netherlands it is virtually impossible to finish high school without buying Microsoft or Apple products, despite a long string of promises and agreements about this from our government. There are so many PCs that are controlled by cyber criminals that Microsoft had to set up a specific spring-cleaning for the Netherlands without user consent. This also makes it immediately apparent who really controls all these systems. Meanwhile, the government uses its own catastrophic Diginotar failure as a pretext for yet more government regulation of the online world.

iTunes for ebooks

Posted Thu, 2011-10-27 15:16 by arjen

In 1996 I got my first MP3s. Storage was expensive, so I burned files onto CD-ROMs. There were 10 to 12 audio CDs on a CD-ROM. Conversion of an audio CD to a series of MP3s lasted hours using an encoder from the command line. They could only be played on a PC (or a very expensive laptop) so I had no good answer to the frequent question from family and friends: “why do you bother?”. Except that I was confident that bigger hard drives and smaller, cheaper laptops would evolve. I first had an audio PDA in 2000 – with a 256Mb memory card that could hold a few albums. I've forgotten what all that has cost, but probably quite a lot.

A year later, Apple came out with iTunes to make it easy to manage digital music collections. The first iPods with graphical software came along soon after, and MP3s were accessible to a wider audience. The result is that virtually all music can be downloaded from somewhere. It is up to the individual whether to pay for it, because downloading is not illegal in many countries and even where it is, there has been little noticeable effect on people's behavior.