You may have already heard about CISPA (or CISPA or CISPA at !wiki), if not the simple version is: It's another law/bill/treaty/crap designed to waste everyone's time.

The slightly longer version is that it is a bill designed to allow companies to share data with other companies or governments with less hassle, like the hassle of asking or even informing the person who's data is shared. The full title says it nicely: To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities, and for other purposes.

One interesting thing has popped up in the news, it's that Facebook supports CISPA. Here are some other letters from some brave companies who support CISPA. In Facebook's case I can totally understand their view, their whole business is based on user's data. How could they not support this ?

Now the expected thing to do, if you are interested in privacy and that sort of thing, is to spend hours reading boring legislative crap until your brain starts pouring out of your ears. However, I really don't care this time. This might sound selfish or just lame, but I don't feel very affected by this. I don't have personal data on third party services (or ones I can't trust).

The real reason I don't care is not because I feel covered, it's because many of those that aren't covered do not care. Seriously, so many people believe that the practicality of having an email provider that let's you "star and tag" emails and the convenience of keeping up with friends just by clicking on their name outweighs any reason for concern, since years.

So if you use such services, and again disagree with this sort of legislation then it's your problem to solve now.. You can delete your account(s), write to them or just hope it will go away magically.

Many ISPs or other Internet services in these current days will often voluntarily co-operate with the authorities without requiring warrants and such. Some will be even working directly with the MPAA/RIAA. However there are some people out there, like Nick Merrill who are are totally not like that.

Today he is raising money to start a non-profit ISP and mobile phone service that will be designed to resist surveillance, with things like encryption, minimal logging and mostly by challenging requests by the authorities that are abusive and/or illegal and/or unconstitutional.

So if you do live in the U.S.A. and more precisely NY for now, you could be very interested in checking out Calyx Institute and perhaps donating via Indiegogo or via their Paypal form.

Also, check out the people on the advisory board.

The UK would like to implement a new system (originally brought up by the Labour party) that would oblige Internet access providers to monitor all electronic communications. The ISPs would have to store logs of all communications, though they say the actual content of emails wouldn't be recorded without a warrant.

They will most likely forge email providers certificates in order to intercept encrypted traffic, because most browser by default trust just about any certificate emitted by a "company" most users wont even notice.

If you are a UK citizen you can sign this petition. You can also check out ORG who follow these issues very closely (the only thing they do wrong is that they use bitly links!).

This came out yesterday, yet it's not an April fools joke..

Read more:

• Phone and email records to be stored in new spy plan - telegraph.co.uk
• Backlash over email and web monitoring plan - bbc.co.uk
• Stop the government snooping on every email and Facebook message - action.openrightsgroup.org
• Scrap Plans to Monitor all Emails and Web Usage - epetitions.direct.gov.uk

In some coffee shops you can easily get access to the Internet, what they do is just give you the password and voila. Neat right ? Anyway, these other coffee shops, chains to be precise, hire a 3rd party company to do it for them. So the other day I went in to one of them to get a coffee and an IP. This is what I noticed.. images.

And then, just to make sure I could feel the chilling effect of being censored... They blocked reddit.com/r/ACTA !!

Actually they blocked ALL of Reddit.

So there you go, the future of the Internet could be this.

Vic Toews wants to spy on underage children, and all other Canadians. At least that is what I understood from what I read today.

A Twitter user created the account vikileaks30 to enable others to get to know Vic Toews a bit better. It's an interesting demonstration of how it can be disturbing to have your personal life available to people you don't know.

One of the things that if find interesting in this proposal is: Force internet providers and other makers of technology to provide a "back door" to make communications accessible to police. It reminds me of Symantec's dodgy unpatched and perhaps intentional backdoor they let lay around for a few years.

Anyway, it's been hard keeping up with the torrents of laws that are being thrown around these days, but most of them lately are focused on the dying entertainment industry. The other thing being again, that this law seems to want to actively gather information about the users themselves, read their emails and all that stuff. Every Canadian's emails that is, and every Canadian child of course, hence Vic Toews wants to spy on underage children.

Update: This very short clip tells a long story..

A new book to be released in a few hours (I think this is on USA time): No Safe Harbor. This book is released by the United States Pirate Party, it features many interesting people and ideas.... .. and yes, it's licensed under the Creative Commons license. You can buy it or download it. Etc. You can even read it.

It's no news that Fox News is mostly made up of real geniuses who always deliver properly researched, reliable and fair information. Today they published an article on how"savvy moron surfers circumvent Wikipedia blackout.

The article goes on about how people have found ways of getting access to knowledge by using alternative sources (other websites!!) but the most striking part was that they announced how to get actual content from the Wikipedia itself.. ORLY!

For the diehard Wiki-fan who simply cannot do without Wikipedia, there is even a way to circumvent the blackout, using a system that relies on Google's cache of online sites.

This is how: Enter a search item in Google's search box, click on the double gray arrow that will appear when you hover your mouse on the right side of the search results. When a snapshot shows up on the right, click on "cache" ... and voila! ... you will be directed to the last snapshot of your search item in Wikipedia.

Of course, you could also click on the "Learn more" link provided by the blacked out Wikipedia page and find a simpler solution like:

During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.

Of course, for Fox News it is much easier to relay the stupidest crap on earth then to go read 4 sentences.

Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) speaks about the anti SOPA/PIPA blackout, noticeably about Wikipedia.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

Indeed, nobody should be allowed to take down their own website, only MPAA and friends should have that kind of power.

Parts of the Internet will be on strike tomorrow as you may have noticed on this site. Join us while it is still legal.

A few good links:

• List of sites on strike
• BoingBoing on strike
• EFF on SOPA

There are many many many more out there, click them while they are still legal.

A friend pointed out this article on how Richard Stallman was right all along and of course, I agree and actually was not part of those who think/thought that RMS is too paranoid/crazy. I don't have a mobile phone and don't have a googlebookspace account, etc etc.. Like you too right ?

Anyway, lately pieces are being put together, SOPA (crap), ProtectIP (also crap), HADOPI (merde), Spain blocking websites, Belarus bans anything foreign, etc etc. . . Oh, and Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act which in short allows the U.S. (of North America) to detain anyone they suspect/want indefinitely..

It's all crap, and then you realise that half of the "cool Internet" has been using Godaddy as their registrar !!

The other day I read about how Go Daddy supports SOPA (and loves Microsoft and kills elephants !). Since there has been a massive move of domains out of GoDaddy, including Wikipedia (still at GoDaddy as I write, c'mon Jimmy, it's been 5 days now!).

Since GoDaddy has changed their mind about SOPA but then it appears they haven't exactly changed their minds.

If you actually use GoDaddy you can pledge to boycott GoDaddy.. . and/or you could just up and leave them, I mean who registers a domain with a company whose name is "Go Daddy" ?

Important note, if you leave, be careful where you go as there are many GoDaddy re-sellers out there.. Just go to Gandi.net or EasyDNS, they both openly oppose SOPA and aren't just doing it for marketing's sake.

Over the past 10 years or so the entertainment industry has been whining about losing money because of the Internet. Of course it is (most probably) false. The crazy thing isn't the bitching, it's the desire to have full control of human communication, over the Internet at least.

I am so tired of them that it is unbelievable, the only reason these people have any power is because people actually buy their products and hence provide them with a neat fortune.

From here on I am going to go out of my way to not purchase anything that provides them with income. I am already not a big client of theirs, however it can happen that I legally watch a movie or buy a movie merchandise, that's done.

I do not support the "Entertainment Industry" (anymore at least), I would like to see them disappear for good. I am not afraid of not being entertained.

Today I heard about OEmbed, my first reaction was to implement it, of course ! The idea is to define a way of providing a page preview. Say you post a link on a microblog or something, the said microblog or something can visit the link, figure out what the resource is to obtain the preview, or OEmbed version (embeddable), and then chose to display that preview. Neat.

For it to work you need what they call an OEmbed provider, A provider is another service that will return the summary (JSON, XML or HTML). Apparently the client could specify the format they want the reply in.. To get the provider it seems there is a list of "well known providers" !! This means you take your link and ask the provider (another url) to transform your initial link into an OEmbed formatted something.... . FAIL !!11!!1.

Another thing is discovery, now this is a good thing, obviously, to put in the header a link to get the OEmbed version of the page, like RSS maybe ? The stupid part is that it requires that the link contains a url GET parameter, that supposes that instead of just providing a link to a OEmbed happy version of the page you MUST provide a "OEmbed provider link" that will take the URL of the page you are visiting, parse it and.. . BROKEN.

Why can't it just be an alternate link ?

Of course there are 3rd party providers now, and that is exactly what we don't need... It's so simple to generate a JSON or XML file that why would anyone ever think of a 3rd party web site whose role it would be to scrape your site to then provide a.. .OMG BROKEN.

As the idea is good but the implementation sucks why not simplify it, lets say we either use HEAD, like Jared Hanson and Vitorio Miliano pointed out in May 2008, or just use an alternate link a la RSS feed. If it's simple and easy for everyone to implement it will work.

Over and over again corporations have been trying to control the Internet and make it their product and governments have been trying to make it their terrain. Meanwhile many, the masses, think it's fine, nothing wrong with any of this People like shiny new products and the government is just trying to protect it's people (just like in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, China, etc etc).. . ..

Since the UK riots, the UK prime minister, David Cameron, would like to have a red button that can shut down "social media" in case. In case his subjects through a fit or something. A red button that can shut down Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry Messenger and probably everything I guess because.. I mean.. wait, maybe he doesn't know about the other websites and services that exist, lets not tell him.

Not so long after that, like a few days ago, during an attempted protest in San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cut off access to the mobile phone network. So, no protest, no problems. No problems at all.

Of course Anonymous played around with the BART's website and exposed how securely they store their user's data. However, penetrating websites and exposing data, flaws, etc is just not going to be enough, BART probably does not care, they will reset their passwords, apologise to their clients and move on. As for the incident, they gave a nice explanation for their actions.

Maybe I'm just getting too paranoid, I mean, communications are private and nobody reads your emails, chat sessions and SMSes right ? Of course not, but still, police arrest a man for organising a water fight via Blackberry Messenger! A water fight !? And how did they know ... .

Maybe because Blackberry has agreed to help the police and has probably opened their doors wide open so the government can investigate on the riots. And on anything else they seem to stumble on. Like water fights ?! I still can't believe this.

Many have been comparing the looting and riots to the Arab Spring, obviously that is stupid as the UK's citizens have so much freedom compared to any Arab Spring affected country. That being said, as they are fighting and gaining freedom, others are getting very close to losing it.

Maybe we will all soon be dreaming of escaping to North Korea.

A victory for the creative industry, finally. A British court has ruled that BT (British Telecom) must block access to Newzbin2 (if you can't access it check via Herdict).

Some say this is good news for the audiovisual entertainment industry as they will finally be able to pay their bills and such. Indeed it is well known that the industry behind the MPA (Motion Picture Association) have been in complete financial decline since the popularisation of the Internet.. check the numbers. They have been selling approximately the same amount of tickets every year for the past 15 years yet the revenue has doubled, that means they are doing bad right ?

Others say this is an attack on our Freedom of w4r3z.. .. People need w4r3z, that's why the Internet was invented.

And others, more seriously, point out the issues between having ISPs enforce content filtering, websites being blocked more and more easily, innocent bystanders... and websites getting blocked for "copyright" reasons when it will in reality be for other reasons, like political for example.

Worse comes to worse, they block all of this stuff from the Internets and people will have no choice but to do other things with their lives. I think that because I doubt people will spend more on music and movies than they already do. Because people already spend a lot of money as it is..

Read more at Guardian/filesharing.

I don't even know how to go about writing about this.. So the Internet used to be a place where physical location did not matter.. Then websites started to deny access depending on your IP's declared physical location... .

Innovation being a part of the Internet, it seems that we may soon have a system to mimic real world borders, at least in Europe that is. It would work just like regular borders, most people can come in, some will need a visa others just a load of cash or something.

Of course internal movement will be free, except from time to time, like in case of revolutions in countries bordering Europe, France and Italy will try to close the borders down to national levels.

Anyway, the good news is that this might just slide as it is probably just a some kind of tantrum from Hungary's tenure of European presidency.

I just read a sad piece of technical journalism from Charles Arthur for the Guardian. I'll resume his rant; he blames p2p (file-sharing) usage for the new "no more unlimited mobile networking" policy that apparently O2 is moving into. He cites an O2 blog post which actually makes no mention of this.

According to the very imprecise graphic 97% of the users consume less than 500MB a month, the average would be 200 and 0.1% use more than 690MB. In short, very very few people tend to exaggerate IP (data) usage. If that caused any real nuisance to the network that would mean that either the operator's network is insufficient and/or they do not have the knowledge to implement simple QoS regulations (example: slow down the speed when network usage goes up so that all traffic can be on the move). So what is the real deal here ? Why are operators no longer happy to offer unlimited data for a fixed price ?

My conspiration theory is as follows: Now that you can access the Internet via your mobile device you can trade limited "text messages" (SMS) for unlimited text via realtime chat (irc/msn/aim/icq/etc) or email, you can trade phone calls for VOIP (skype, etc). And all this being on The Network (Internet) means that there is no difference between local and long distance communications. This is precisely, in my opinion, the real part where the operators may feel cheated. Users can escape the overcharges of calls and text messages not included in their plans, and why not even get a minimal call/text deal and just go for the unlimited mobile internet.

In reality the very few who actually do use p2p networks (illegal or legal btw) are not a real nuisance for the network, they are instead, AS USUAL, an excuse to change policies, pricing and laws. In this case, it's actually a "technology journalist" ranting about this, as if 0.1% of the data/phone users stole directly from his pocket.

Oh, and one more thing, I'm pretty sure those statistics include users who bought the mobile Internet dongle thing, you know the 3G usb device intended to connect computers to the Internet, in that case it's more than normal to go over 690MB in one month..

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.