The debate on Net Neutrality has been ongoing for way too long. It was supposed to be settled long ago. Last summer someone asked me if I would be writing something about this, I didn't have the time and thought I'd miss the deadline (September). Funny and sad at the same time is the fact that it...

A quick word about the term "online privacy", or "Internet privacy".

I dislike when politicians and media talk about "online privacy". It's as if it's a specific notion that only applies to a virtual world detached from reality. Perhaps many discard its importance and translate it to "s...

By now you may already have heard about PRISM. In short it is a surveillance program run by the NSA that collects data about (almost) ev...

If you haven't heard of it, EME, or Encrypted Media Extensions, could be a part of the W3C specification that would allow a website to control a visitors web browser. The goal would be to restrict access to content, this ranges from restricting ...

Lately there have been more and more attempts to legislate, censor and control the Internet and with that many protests to counter these measures. There are also more and new groups and political parties that advocate Internet freedoms, freedom of speech and all that stuff. Even some website tha...

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 ye...

I've seen way too many comments about people using VPNs and/or Tor as a shield to any kind of possible breach of privacy and/or security in general. I'm going to attempt to explain very simply what they do, because these are good tools, but using them the wrong way can void their purpose.

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

I've already ranted a few times about EME and how it's bad and all that. In this post I want to point out one specific aspect, how EME can be used to exclude users to content based on their software and/or hardware choices.

Quick brief, EME is nothing...

As written on the W3C's Twitter feed: Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. joined W3C (no period at the end of the sentence either, standards are already breaking apart).

Microsoft, Google and Netflix have already been hacking away at the W3C's v...

After the clear explanations of how various governments are spying on everyone using mostly popular web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, Skype, etc etc, it's almost a surprise that nothing has changed. Half of the web still uses Google Analytics and an array of interactiv...

Censoring Inappropriate Content

David Cameron would like to setup filters at ISPs for all home users. These filters would sieve out content that is judged as "inappropriate" by the authorities. Only the subscriber would be authorised to deactivate the filters, and to do this, he/she m...

Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act which would enter U.S. law if passed, the House of Representatives will be voting on this in the next few days. There are many flaws with this, the EFF has a good FAQ about CISPA. In short it gi...

If you are American it is possible that by violating the Terms of Service of a website (which constantly change without warning) that you are a criminal. With that in mind, here are my Terms of Service: By visiting this website you are exceeding your authorized access. Therefor...

The discussion about implement DRM in HTML has been ongoing on the W3C mailing lists for a while now. Sometimes it seems more of a flame war than others. Companies like Netflix, Microsoft and even Google are trying to push for a standard that would allow the content distributors to...

You may have already heard about CISPA (or CISPA or

How malicious is your ISP ?

If they practice DNS hijacking then it's pretty damn messed up and should obviously be illegal. Yet for some reason there are ISPs that do this and have been getting away with this for years. Even stra...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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"...

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

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 phon...

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,

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 s...

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 O...

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 try...

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 audi...

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 so...

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 ap...

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite a lot. 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,...