The New Freedom

I’m going to the HOPE conference in NYC tomorrow through Sunday. If anybody is going and wants to meet up, drop me a comment or an email and we’ll sort something out!

I’m tentatively scheduled to give a demo of the Anomos protocol in the General Demo Area on the mezzanine at 1300 on Sunday, you should all come by and watch it. For those who aren’t able to attend the demo or the conference, the rough draft of the presentation is available here (pdf).

I’ll also be taking pictures hopefully and posting them here when I get back.

See you there!

As Google is handing over your sensitive personal information to Viacom, I was reminded by some strange behavior I noticed in Google’s caching system a while back, that I have decided to investigate further.

This code doesn’t do anything exciting, but give it some time to let Google cache it and let another monitoring program I’ve written do it’s job and maybe something interesting will turn up. Maybe not, this is just something I’m looking into.

And I need a link to it, so here it is by itself.

Sorry about the name, I know that’s pretty awful.

Anyway, my GSoC project and Anomos are both coming along nicely. I’m getting very excited for HOPE.

Digital rights are still eroding fast, faster than all the people trying to save them. ACTA, the EU wanting to turn off internet access for accused copyright infringers, this Viacom/Google bullshit, and a horrible trend towards corporate-owned ‘cloud-computing’. I’m more certain than ever that cryptographic autonomy is the only solution left if we want to be free.

R

John has just done a hell of a write-up of the Anomos protocol we came up with last summer, complete with pretty pictures of fancy graphs. This is just a teaser for before we drop the real-deal, of course, but at least we can let the protocol be publicly audited and publicized. FTA:

Anomos is a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system derived from BitTorrent which is capable of protecting its user’s identities by means of an advanced, planned mix network. Its purpose is twofold. In one way it is simply an intellectual exercise; we are computer scientists interested in encryption, the limits of anonymity, and the design of networks. In another sense it is a profound demonstration of individual liberty, a demand for freedom, privacy and anonymity on the Internet. Here I will give a brief outline of the technical details of Anomos. As the project is still in the early stages of development some aspects of it are still subject to change.

Read the whole thing here. I’ll be back in the USA tomorrow and coding both Google/Singularity Institute project and Anomos (HOPEfully get it done in time..) and reporting on both. Expect technical posts this summer.

R

R

There is an imminent threat to all internet users in westernized countries! If two pieces of proposed legislation go through, which they likely will unless we really, really fight against them, file-sharing copyright infringement will essentially change from being a civil offense to a criminal offense and will create a body to enforce those laws. As in, 40% of young people become criminals and will be punished for it every time they cross an international border. As in, downloading a Led Zeppelin album means that authorities can come into your home, seize your computer and throw you in cage. Not only that, but certain aspects of the proposal aim to criminalize the use of legitimate privacy tools, justified by the fact that supposedly they could be used to hide from the copyright authorities.

The recently leaked proposal for the ACTA trade agreement to be created at this year’s G8 summit in July outlines exactly this. The agreement will give border authorities the right to search through your laptops and MP3 players for possible infringement and to seize the devices, fine, and imprison you. This means that for young people who want to cross an international border are in danger of being imprisoned, unless they can prove to a 9$/hr TSA rent-a-cop that their files aren’t infringing on anybody else’s copyright.

Not only that, the proposal seeks to punish infringers even if the copyright holder doesn’t want to pursue them. It also seeks to criminalize the use of tools which protect individual privacy. The language is still vague, but presumably this means Tor or at least P2P over Tor, and almost certainly Anomos.

The world-governerning forces are openly admitting to seeking to criminalize those of us who seek to protect our own privacy. Everything is backwards. Whereas we should have a Privacy Bill of Rights as Bruce Shneiner recently suggested, people who refuse to willingly turn over all of their personal data are in fact about to become criminals. This could be the worst violation of privacy in the history of mankind. At least the Statsi in East Berlin had to do some legwork. If this comes to pass, we will literally be forced to send all of our personal details straight to an assortment of corporate/government authorities under the guise of IP protection and anybody who doesn’t will be an outlaw.

Here in the US, the PRO-IP Act, which has now passed the House, seeks to do domestically essentially the same thing as ACTA, using federal Department of Justice agents (think: the DEA) to fight IP infringement.

There are definitely corrupt forces at work here. The existence of the ACTA document only surfaced illegally through Wikileaks, and only a month and a half before it will be formalized by the G8 nations at this year’s summit in Japan. There was obviously no public debate or discussion about whether or not this should be pressed for. Of course, as this does not benefit the American people, this is surely being pushed for exclusively by corporate trade associations behind the closed doors.

Please, if you have come here through a social bookmarking site or something like that, please don’t just read about this and not do anything. This affects you and it isn’t going to stop unless you take a stand against it. This is the most pressing digital rights issue yet. This is an extremely important threat to the future of open access to information. It is ageist legislation pushed by a corporate-backed, corrupt government which explicitly criminalizes young people because we know how to use the open network in a way they haven’t accounted for. We must fight this not just for ourselves, but for generations to come. Imagine the future implications of this. In fact, think back two years when the Linux/SCO case was going on. Under this legislation, anybody using the Linux operating system could have had their laptop confiscated at the border.

This is what we need to do to stop it, and how you can help:

1) Contact your Representatives in Opposition. Do this right now. Here is the link: EFF Contacting Congress . It will take two minutes of your time and IS an affective tactic. Ask to speak to the highest-up person you can. Let them know how extremely serious you are about this. You are smarter than your representative about this sort of thing, so let them know why this is so serious and why it matters to you. Talk about the future implications. Contact the people on the relevant committees. If you have time, write them a letter and post it to them. They will likely actually read it and send you a reply. If you do get a reply, send it to me. Let’s build a database of who stands on which side of the line.

This applies especially so if you are able to contact:

- Rep. Mary Bono (R-CA)
- Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)
- Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
- Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

As these are the representatives who are responsible for the PRO-IP, and presumably (Berman at least) helped to frame the leaked ACTA draft.

2) Support Net Neutrality Although we should be gunning for rights so that authorities may not search our machines or our data streams, in the mean time we must secure our data using cryptographic measures. However, without net neutrality, there is nothing to stop data carriers and governments from automatically dropping encrypted data streams. If you want to continue having secure data and transmissions, you must to everything in your power to support a neutral internet.

3)Contact the Media - The media cares about ratings. If enough people tell them what they want reporting on, they will respond accordingly. As much as we don’t like the mainstream media, they still reach the largest audience and they should be covering this story. So far, all of the coverage about this has been Canadian or blog-based. I can’t find any from the other G8 countries, but I don’t speak the language or know where to look.

4) Change-Congress.
This type of legislation only could have arisen because certain wanted it to. It does not benefit the people, in fact, it deliberately criminalizes them. It would not have come to pass if Washington was devoid of corporate interest. For this reason, we need to support the Change-Congress movement to remove corporate influence in Washington.

5) Ensure the 5th Amendment at the US Border
This one is going to be a bigger issue in the next few years. Right now, the law says that US border patrol agents can look through your laptop. In the UK, they can force you to give up a password. In the US, there is no ruling about this. Theoretically, it seems that the 5th Amendment should protect against this as a form of self incrimination. However, this is less clear at the border, where it suddenly becomes an issue of “national security,” and as we know, civil rights need not apply for such matters. We need to fight dearly for this right. Anybody know a good lawyer or anybody at the ACLU? This is right up their alley.

6) Work to Create a Digital/Privacy Bill of Rights
Yes, the tech-savvy amongst us will probably always be able to hide our data using cryptographic or obfuscating techniques. However, this is not the type of culture I want to live in. I don’t want to have to enter a fake password to prove to authorities that I don’t have infringing files; I don’t want the authorities to have any access to my data without a warrant. I don’t want ISPs or the NSA to monitor my browsing habits. I don’t want Google to permanently keep a history of my searching habits. And I don’t want companies to be able to sell my data. See the above link to Bruce Schneiner’s article in Wired.

So how do we do this? We need a politician who understands our plight. We need to align ourselves with consumer rights and identity fraud prevention groups. Roughly 1 in 4 people are victims of identity fraud, and this is a direct consequence of data being sold off and then sold off again until it reaches untrustworthy hands.

The internet needs to become a powerful lobby! Why can’t geeks come together with geeks to ensure the rights what we need?! We should be organizing, dammit, to ensure net neutrality, to decriminalize non-commercial filesharing, to repeal parts of the DMCA and to protect our digital privacy.

7) Anything you can think of.
We’re going to need to be smart to win this. They are too big and too powerful, so we can’t always play nicely. We’re going to need to be clever. The Chaos Computer Club in Germany acquired and distributed the fingerprints of the Home Secretary to protest the use of biometrics in security. Is anybody close enough to the people writing this legislation to find out what’s on their iPods or harddrives? Hell, what’s in their email? Don’t forget that even Bush was violating the DMCA on his by having Beatles songs when they weren’t for digital sale.

If you have any other good ideas, get in touch with me and we’ll figure something out!

Also, where is the EFF’s statement about this? I’m writing to them about this now. What about Google? Do people just not know about this yet? It’s getting bloody close to the deadline!

More as it comes..
Rich

Some more sources:
Wikipedia: ACTA, PRO-IP
IP-Justice: Anti-ACTA Campaign
The Vancouver Sun
Wikileaks

Update from the EFF
I sent an email to the EFF and they got back to me with this pretty quickly:

Rich,

Thank you for contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation.We’re certainly working on ACTA, and are very concerned. We have submitted comments to the US trade representative in March (below), spoken with government officials from Europe and the US on the topic in Washington in April as part of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, and are working with other groups to monitor and, where necessary, intervene in the process.

You can read the text of our comment here:
http://www.eff.org/issues/acta/acta-submission-032108.pdf

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me.

Regards,

Eva Galperin

Hooray EFF!

I’ve been listening to NPR and Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, came on and talked about “Government 2.0.” They were taking calls and I called in and mumbled something about financial and legal transparency. I meant to namedrop Free Culture and Change-Congress but I didn’t. He did mention Sunlight Foundation, though, which is just as good.

Really really cool to hear about these ideas on big broadcast media!

Anyway, the audio will be up here at 6PM tonight.

R

The other day, I clicked a link to some video footage of rather savage riot police beatings in Iceland which happened last week. The video was hosted on LiveLeak, a video sharing site similar to YouTube which bills itself as “Redefining the Media.” I had a few questions about the site, so I used the comment form on the site to send some in, and was pleasantly surprised to get a call back from Hayden Hewitt, co-Founder of the website, who was kind enough to answer my questions.

Rather than the usual worthless viral videos and clips of teenage girls dancing to bad pop music, LiveLeak has a community centered largely around politics and news, especially news about the war. The site was born out of the the ashes of Ogrish.com, which was home to a plethora of gory pictures and movies, similar to Rotten.com, both of which I remember disturbing the shit out of me as a kid. Just by looking through the Wayback Machine, you can see the site transition from being a straight shock and gore site (”Best Grotesque Movies and Pictures!”) to a site about the limits of human experience (”Can You Handle Life?”), ultimately to a running steam of grizzly details from events around the world (”Uncover Reality”). Ogrish finally became LiveLeak in November, 2006. The site grew rapidly in popularity after it first hosted the infamous video of the execution of Saddam Hussein. More recently, it was the first place to host Fitna, the highly controversial film about Islam in the Netherlands. The nature of the site draws a lot of tinfoil-hat types, but as Ogrish aimed to prove, sometimes these things do actually happen. The footage doesn’t lie.

The site has become a burgeoning haven for “citizen journalists,” a term which has become used for ordinary people who record news worthy events. This includes amateur journalists who investigate stories, but also largely includes people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a cameraphone on hand. With the horrendous quality of American journalism as of late, such as the obsession with trivial bullshit like lapel pins and the much more terrifying admission that the Pentagon has a media war unit and a long, continuing history of media manipulation, it is no wonder that there has been an upsurgance in independent media and citizen journalism. I was curious about where LiveLeak thinks it will lead, as well as their thoughts on relevant digital rights topics such as internet censorship, copyright, and net neutrality.

This is what Mr. Hewitt had to say. The questions which I asked are in bold. Also, keep in mind these are paraphrased from the notes I took during the interview.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Of course! I’m just glad to be talking to someone besides the mainstream media.

Has your organization ever received any DMCA or 2257 takedown notices?

No 2257 notices, as we don’t allow users to upload anything of that sort, but yes, of course we’ve dealt with DMCA notices. For things like Brittney Spears videos we’ll just take them down, it isn’t worth it. But for things that we think are important, we will fight them, yes.

So you have a legal team?

Well, we have a lawyer on our staff. We are a fairly small operation, distributed around the world. We’re still resisting moving into an office. It’s just much easier to be independent as a small, nimble organization.

Do you keep the servers in a foreign country to avoid copyright issues?

Actually, I’m located in the UK but our servers are in the US. We have a server farm of over thirty servers now, riding on the Rolls Royce of bandwidth. We’re really happy with our hosting.

A lot of the footage on the site appears to come from sources inside the military, despite the blanket ban on bloggers in the military, supposedly to increase troop safety. Have you received any type of legal threats about that?

Ah, yes. We’ll only take things down if there is a genuine threat to human life. We were actually contacted about one video, haha, of a soldier on the gunner turret of a jeep taking enemy fire, and they wanted it taken down because it could “give away troop locations.” We said Mate, if they’re shooting at you, they already know where you are!

Other than that, most of the contact with the military we have are requests for material for training videos.

Where does your organization stand on the issue of network neutrality legislation? This is such an important topic, but one which I still feel undecided about, which is why I don’t write about it on this site. On one hand, I don’t want my internet traffic to be filtered by companies trying to push their own products on me or restrict my access to their competitors, but I’m also extremely weary of the government becoming involved in regulating what the internet can and can’t be. It seems like too much of a slippery slope. It’s not far from the law saying “The internet should be Open” to saying “The internet should be Open..except for copyright infringing materials or people saying bad things about the government..” Where do you stand?

The only reason that net neutrality is an issue because of corporate greed. That’s all it is, pure greed. I remember being absolutely disgusted a few weeks ago when one of the heads of one of the largest ISPs in the UK called net neutrality “a load of bollocks.”

Ah, Virgin, right?

Yes, Virgin.

I’m constantly shocked by the staggering amount of apathy about the subject. It’s such an important issue but it seems like there is hardly any outrage about it. We can put up something every few weeks about it, but then we look preachy, and that deters people.

What we don’t want to see is the internet turn into television. Nothing but mindless crap like YouTube and MySpace, you know? We can’t let that happen.

Okay, but what about the problems of government regulation of the internet? I’m sure your site in particular would been one of the first to be censored.

At the end of the day, we’re eventually going to have know what the government is doing, which isn’t the case with the corporations. And, theoretically, we can change it. Democracy, revolution.. Right, exactly.

The most important thing is that we keep the platform open. Once we have the open platform secured, we can deal with content regulation and ways around that as it comes up. And the only thing preventing is from keeping this open platform is sheer corporate greed.

The most important that separates your site from the other video sharing sites is the Citizen Journalism section. What do you think is the future of citizen media? Will it overtake traditional media?

Well, you need to understand that we aren’t trying to compete with the mainstream media. We’re trying to do something completely different. You know, they’re bloated and full of money, but they can still do things that we can’t. We need to be smart in a different way.

What we’re envisioning is a global information network. Rather than modern mainstream media, where you just sit and take in what they present to you, we want everything to be readily accessible. Not just the big stuff, even local stuff. Everybody should be able to know who’s doing what and who’s talking to who.

So what we have to do, one of the ways we can outsmart the mainstream media, is to use the social power of the internet. We’re going to create a social network of journalists. If you’re doing a story and need some information from the other side of the world, you’ve got a contact there. Everybody has sources all over the world.

Next year, we’re going to move beyond video sharing by giving people the tools that they need to do this. We’re going to have video creation tools and a social network, you know, way beyond Facebook type stuff, to give the citizen journalists what they need.

Running a video site, you know how videos spread around the internet regardless of copyright until somebody makes a takedown request. Are you going to use this to your advantage and let people use, perhaps, Creative Commons licences?

Well, I’d like to see the videos be Creative Commons, but I don’t know if we can do that right away. A big thing we’re worried about is being preyed on by the mainstream media, you know, they’ll just play our stuff without giving any credit or money to the video’s creator. This happens already. So what we’re talking about setting up is a way that our users can directly sell their content to wire services like Reuters and the like. We’ll let users choose a ring of sites which can embed their videos.

What caused the transition from Ogrish to LiveLeak?

Ogrish was an interesting experiment. You’ve got to understand that these are really smart guys who made it before I joined the staff, not emo kids with pale faces. Eventually, though, it just got to the point where we had to say there is no more good we can do with this. I enjoyed Ogrish from a conceptual standpoint rather than for the actual content.

We do like being subversive, so we wanted to be subversive on a huge scale. A lot of our content was coming from journalists already, so we opened it up and created LiveLeak.

Although some of the videos on LiveLeak can be pretty brutal, it isn’t anything like there was on Ogrish. Does this happen deliberately?

Ah, yes. At the end of the day, there has to be somebody with decision making ability, somebody with discretion. It’s even like that on Wikipedia, you know, there’s ultimately somebody who has the final say. The trick is not to step in too often.

Ogrish wasn’t just gory pictures, everything on the site had some context. And it’s the same on LiveLeak. What we’re after is reality with a good dose of politics.

So there are things that you won’t put up. Where is the line drawn?

When the violence doesn’t add anything to the story. There was one video of a 12 year old boy, a member of the taliban, was beheading a man. It was so disturbing, I wish I could unsee it. We didn’t show that. We ran a censored version which stops right before the violence starts. There wasn’t any reason to show it, it didn’t add anything that wasn’t there already.

How do you feel about community?

Love ‘em. Absolutely. You know I’m out there on the site everyday, interacting with the community. That’s the thing about our site, you’ll always be able to get in touch with a moderator or an admin or me. It’s not like on other sites where the process is automated. I’m out there on the front lines.

A lot of your videos come from Iraq and Afghanistan. Where in the 60s, that kind of footage was taken by journalists and circulated widely on television, now it seems to be made all by the soldiers themselves on hand-held equipment and posted straight to your site. That goes against the ban the military has on blogging and vlogging. How are they doing that, proxies?

Not just proxies. They have their ways. I’m not going to say too much more so that they can keep doing it.

One last question.. Does LiveLeak have an ultimate goal? Where do you see yourselves in five years?

Nahhh! Mission statements are for guys in shiny suits. We prefer to stay small and dynamic. Right now we’re working on this citizen media network project, but somebody could come up with a brilliant idea in 6 months and we could go off in entirely new direction. But I think we will always focus on staying as true to reality as possible.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me!
_________________________________________________________

Thanks again to Hayden Hewitt and LiveLeak.com for doing this. I’m off to England this week, so I’m going to write a post about digital rights and US border security before I go. After that, I have a few more articles in mind, and I’ll give periodic updates about my progress as part of my Google Summer of Code project, which is being mentored by David Hart.

And it looks like the Anomos project for pseudonymous and encrypted BitTorrent has a new site and some new life..fingers crossed we get a release out by the last HOPE conference in July..

Rich!

Something I’ve mentioned a few times on here now is Lawrence Lessig’s new political reform campaign, aptly named Change Congress.

Like Creative Commons, the site has a form which lets citizens and candidates/congressmen display how they support the campaign. There are four pledges: Individual Donations Only, Abolish Earmarks, Increase Transparency and Public Finance Campaigns.

Pledges 2 and 3 are much easier to support than pledges 1 and 4, but the symbols are the same.

=

So a candidate with a weaker platform gets to display the same symbols as a stronger candidate.

In contrast, the Creative Commons logos differentiate themselves with symbols and abbreviations to make them human readable at a glance, like so:

I wrote Change Congress an email about this and they said they’d like to use symbols but couldn’t figure out a way to do it but they’d look at anything I could come up with. I made some mock-ups using abbreviations. I tried making some symbols, but it’s really really hard to make a 15px-squared ear with a line through it look like anything but a big blob. The others are doable (an individual person, a magnifying lens and a dollar with a bunch of arrows point it to it), but the earmark symbol is too tricky for the moment.

This is what they look like with abbreviations, though:

I think this makes it more human readable. Even if it doesn’t, it should make people who don’t know about Change Congress more likely to click the button because they want to know what the letters mean, as the stars just look like generic patriotic crap that would appear on a candidate’s website.

What do you think? Also, bonus challenge!: Can you make a tiny pixelated ear look decent? If not, what else would make a good symbol for ‘abolish earmarks?’

PS: Here’s the logo with a Sans Serif font, which fits better with the header typeface, but seems to run together a bit:

Rich

My school recently had an election for the student government body. The site looked pretty shoddy so I checked the source and played around with TamperData to see what was up. I noticed that the generated voting page had hidden Student UID and Name values hidden, and I wanted to check if those were the values checked when the h vote was cast or if it was actually checked from the cookie, so I wrote a script to try to generate votes from other IDs, casting a vote for Johnny Thunders. This was after casting a real vote for my good friend Jeanne, who campaigned ruthlessly by dressing up in a big red dog costume.

There are ~99999999 possible UIDs and only 15,000 undergrads, so only 1 in nearly 7000 would actually be able to cast a vote, and that’s assuming that none of those UIDs had voted already. I let it run for a few hours and tried a few thousand values before eventually giving up. A single vote wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election, but it would show a massive flaw in the voting system that could easily be used to manipulate the vote by anybody with a list of valid student IDs.

Playing with SQL injection seemed like a much more efficient way of casting false votes, and I was actually able to cast a ‘null’ vote at one point, which I thought was interesting and maaaybbee could have been probed further to either drop a table or cast negative/positive votes, but at that point I gave up and did my homework instead and didn’t remember about the project until after the election had ended. Anyway, the initial quirk I was curious about seemed to fall on the safe side, so that’s good.

The more interesting part for me was just playing with the ClientCookie python module, which accesses the already existing cookies of popular browsers and adds urllib/urlib2 functionality in python. This let me do scripting behind the Kerberos password screen without any complicated login trickery.

Anyway, the end result is this handy little script which can do bruteforcing on sites which require a session cookie. Nothing fancy but might come in handy, you never know. Might be useful for downloading files which are sequentially named or something like that.

Click to see Diebold.py!

In the end, Jeanne lost and some other d-bags won. Doesn’t matter either way, it’s a useless body which just hinders student interaction with the administration anyway. Disband!

I feel like I haven’t been updating very much lately. A lot of my energy goes to doing stuff for BU Free Culture and to being a busy college student with a personal life as well. I quit drinking for the semester on a whim, but that hasn’t freed up as much time as I would have liked, as I’m very good at finding other ways to piss away my time. I feel a lot better on Sunday mornings, though.

I still feel deeply about digital rights, but I’ve been uninspired to write about them without anything new to say. I don’t like just linking to current developments on RIAA lawsuits or some such and giving my quick little summary, either. I’m not trying to be BoingBoing. And I haven’t been working on Anomos, the pseudonymous BitTorrent, which is the only project I really care about actually finishing (er..alpha’ing..). I’m living in a house full of my friends right now, which is a lot of fun/insanity/videogaming/danger, but very tiring and invasive as well. I’d really like to just move out of the city and be alone for a month or two and just read and study and work on all of the little projects I want to do. No time for that right now, unfortunately. Maybe in the beginning of June I’ll get back from England and move to DC for a few weeks and do just that. Hmm..

-R

I wasn’t planning on applying for the Google Summer of Code this year, but the stars aligned and I got shafted on the internship I thought I was going to have, I found a GSoC project I actually liked, and Google pushed the deadline back, so I have nothing to lose and plenty to gain by giving it a shot.

I’ve written a proposal to create a ‘RelEx Web Crawler’, which will scour a given section of the web and process it into a format which is machine readable so it can be used by artificial intelligence agents. For more information, see the linked wiki entry on OpenCog.

The project will be mentored by the Singularity Institute, which is basically the coolest thing going on in applied computer/cog science right now. I feel like my app is a total long shot, but it’s wayyy too tempting to pass up on.

Would love any feedback about this, friends..

Rich!

This week, CampusMovieFest, a pretty great organization that gives film equipment to kids to make short films in one week, came to BU. This year, their primary sponsor is AT&T, a company which is responsible for voluntarily and illegally assisting the NSA in one of the largest and most intrusive privacy violations in human history. They are currently being sued by the EFF for these violations.

Anyway, maybe it was because I had just gone to a screening and out for beers with Alan Toner, one the the film makers of Steal This Film, but I used the equipment they gave us to make a documentary about AT&T. Basically out of spite.

They have a special $10,000 prize for the best use of their phones in a film. I don’t think I will win it.

The music is by MonoCulture, an IDM artist who releases his work under open licenses. I found him through Gratisvibes, a sweet Creative Commons techno/idm/etc blog.

The song is quite a bit more chilled out than I wanted it to be, but that’s alright. I wanted to use 65daysofstatic’s song Goodbye, 2007 (intro track of that show, 3rd track on their new EP) but I couldn’t for copyright reasons. Grumble. Still, I think that MonoCulture track is quite fitting as well..

I learned the camera and ProTools and wrote/shot/edited the thing in just over a day. I’m fairly please with how it turned out, considering.

This film is Creative Commons-BY, Rich Jones, 2008. Email me if you’d like a higher-res version for editing or redistribution!

Njoi!
Rich!

Stanford University, once home to Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, has just changed it’s campus network policy to actively report all DMCA infringements to the copyright overlords.

According to my friend George, a Stanford freshman: dude. shit is fffffucked up at stanford

This article from the Stanford Daily covers today’s story.

This drastic change now requires the university to flag and report each individual download spotted on the network. An ITSS spokesperson explained, “This isn’t the usual risk associated with illegal downloading. If you download 100 songs, 100 complaints will likely be forwarded to the RIAA. This is consistent with students’ user agreements, and we strongly urge everybody to take this news very seriously.”

Administrators have hailed the changes as an important first step toward Stanford becoming in copyright enforcement among universities. Provost John Etchemendy said, “Stanford is a world leader in intellectual property law, and we are proud to be the first institution to proactively defend copyrights and protect creative freedom. Many students, understandably, will oppose such a policy, but it’s not about what’s fair; it’s about what’s right.”

Already, 78 unnamed students have been reported in just the first day under the new rules, with that number expected to dramatically increase in the coming days.

Without any warning, Stanford has turned 78 of it’s students to potential financial bankruptcy in the first day of this new program alone.

Their new website for the project states, quite terrifyingly,

The Stanford Copyright Integrity Initiative has been introduced by Stanford University to demonstrate the university’s leadership in efforts to strengthen the integrity of copyrights and intellectual property. The Stanford University Information Technology Services user agreement reserves the right of the university to monitor illegal copyright and media violations in all traffic on its network. In a bold response to the growing deterioration of copyrights at national universities, Stanford has decided to report all DMCA-violating traffic directly to the proper authorities (RIAA, MPAA, ESA) as part of Stanford’s ongoing leadership in Silicon Valley and in the domain of intellectual property law online.”

I’ve said it before I will say it again, fuck California. It is no wonder that California, home of Hollywood Howard Berman, would introduce this bullshit ageist policy. Napalm the whole state.

(Also, it’s a prank. Type your name into the box on http://riaa.stanford.edu/ and you’ll notice you’ve been betrayed to the RIAA! Apparently the Stanford Daily is running a joke issue. And this is the only article from that issue they have online, the others are more obvious and in print. And my friend/I didn’t get the joke until I’d written half of this already. Good larf though!)

I got interviewed for a piece about file sharing on America.gov, the State Department’s hard-hitting investigative media outlet. It’s a really shitty piece that I don’t really want to talk about. I wanted to talk about the cultural/governmental implications of the RIAA’s actions, but it doesn’t cover any of that, only things which you all already know. Also, I am bitter because they asked me for a picture to use and I sent them one of me holding a big gun, which they did not use. Instead, they use one of my friend Paul looking rather dopey. Ah well.

R

Bummer.

After lots of thinking and advice, I have decided it does not make sense for the Change Congress movement for me to a run for Congress in CA12. We would have just over 30 days to introduce a district to me and to an idea. That would not be enough time to convince them to turn away from an extremely popular politician with 30 years of public service. And while anyone within the district would understand that, outside the district, the lesson would be that a “Change Congress” message has no salience or support. That would, in my view, harm the movement more than it would help.

— Larry Lessig, February 25, 2008.

Before he announced he wasn’t running, I sent him an email of encouragement and a few criticisms of the Change Congress movement. This morning I got an email from him thanking me for the support, which was really nice. I got excited seeing Lawrence Lessig in my inbox! Here are both emails (his reply and my opinions about the Change Congress movement):

Subject: Re: You represent the solution: Openness!

Rich, thanks for this kind but balanced support. I’m sorry I couldn’t follow through in the way you wanted here, but I agree with you about the strategy. And I agree with you about the duty part.

On Feb 22, 2008, at 10:30 PM, rwjones@bu.edu wrote:

Mr. Lessig!

This is my note of encouragement. I love everything that you?ve done in creating Creative Commons and your ideas about copyright. I don?t agree entirely (you are not pirate-friendly), but your works have done wonders in bringing the issue higher into the social consciousness.

The reason I want you to run is because you are Open. Even in your thoughts about whether or not you are going to run, you are open. This is basically unheard of in politics, which is disgusting, especially considering how easy it is with readily available technologies. When you run, and when you win (which you will), I assume that you will continue to be just as open about your thoughts. That means that for the first time ever, the people will have a true expose of the real processes that drive a campaign and a congressional position. That will be a truly novel and amazing thing even as a purely academic document, let alone as a vehicle for real political change. You have a chance to be the people?s bullshit detector. When a person is this open, there can be no doubt: You are actually on our side! Not a single other politician can say that.

If anything, I am afraid your positions are not progressive enough. Change Congress shouldn?t just be about earmarks and PAC money, it should necessarily be about openness. I want to know exactly how you are spending your money and I want to know who you are talking to. I want to know your opinions about their motives. At the end of your term, I even want to read all of the emails you sent and received. It?s so simple technically, a .mbox dumped onto a server, and if you are worthy of your position you should have nothing to fear.

The only way to stamp out corruption is to bring it under total, constant public scrutiny.

Please, Mr. Lessig, you have the clout to make this potentially world-changing idea into a full blown sociopolitical revolution. Consider it your moral duty!

Rich Jones
Boston University Free Culture
http://www.thenewfreedom.net

—–
Lessig
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
650.736.0999 (vx)
650.723.8440 (fx)

After I wrote that, I found out that (at least according to this brief article) Swedish politician’s emails are public domain. Oh, Sweden!

Speaking of Sweden, I discovered this Google Tech Talk of Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, talking about “Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties.” It’s an hour long, but it’s very good, as are the questions asked by the Googlers at the end.

Rich!