The New Freedom

Normally, I’ll report on interesting things as I stumble upon them. This one, however, found me!

Schmap!! is an online/mobile international tour guide. They provide maps, locations of sights and information about the sights for lots of different cities all over the world.

I got an email from them as they wanted to use a picture from my Flickr account as an illustration in their guide to Berlin. The picture is licensed under a Creative Commons license, like all of my pictures, so they are free to use it in almost any way they like. It was nice of them to let me know they were using it, but they didn’t have to.

Now, if you visit the Berlin tour guide, you can see my picture! Clicking on it links back to the original Flickr page.

This is the kind of use of the Commons the Lessig was talking about in Free Culture. They have taken my photograph and added additional value to it by making it useful in a tour guide, and I think that’s great!

In other exciting news, The Pirate Bay Trial has started. This is the most important copyright trial of the century so far, and the Pirate Bay are really going all out trying to make this into a spectacle. There isn’t too much I can do to help them from here in the US, but I’ll be following the progress with a keen eye.

Rich!

I have a lot of projects on my plate right now. So, my natural response is to start more projects. Thus, I present you with Port Scandroid, a port scanner for Android!

I didn’t have any proper internet for a while so I had to use my fancy new Android phone to do all my tubing. Android is a very developer and open-source friendly platform, and I didn’t have anything else to do without real internet, so I figured I’d try my hand at writing an app.

For those that don’t know what a port scanner is, it probably isn’t of any use to you. Do you remember in the Matrix 2 when Trinity had to do some hacking to get into a building? She uses a port scanner to get started.

Port Scandroid is based on JMap by Tom Salmon.

I learned some interesting stuff about programming for mobile devices and about 3G networks doing this project.

Lessons learned (in no particular order):

If I had to do this again, I wouldn’t have ported JMap. It just isn’t very high quality code. I should have analyzed the way the code solves the problem and rewritten it. That way, I could ensure that the code was high quality, and I could also have avoided all of the hackery involved with moving from pure Java to the android application space.

I thought I had some major bug (I suppose it still might) where all results were returning false positives. I found that this wasn’t happening when I was connected over wifi. I asked around on the forums and the developers mailing list and apparently my mobile service provider is running some kind of proxy which accepts all connections and then does something to them before passing them along. There were some other threads about similar things happening where the actual traffic was modified by the proxy.

This program isn’t that great. It’s pretty slow, there are some hacks with the orientation. But it works! And I guess that’s what counts in this case. I normally wouldn’t have released this to the public, but I read this blog post ontaming perfectionism the other day and decided I’d release it anyway.

I think about half of the time of this project went into making the icon. Apparently, I love doing pixel art. I’m still not totally happy with the icon but at this point I can’t afford to spend any more time on it. I wanted to use all Free software for this project, but unfortunately I’m still not satisfied (or, more likely, competent) with GIMP, so parts of it were made with GIMP and other parts were done using photoshop. (Right now, one of the comments on the market says “Icon looks too XTREME for what this app acctually [sic] does.” I think I’m proud of that.)

If you don’t get the reference, you need to watch more David Cronenberg movies.

The application is available for download here (.APK) and is available on the market.

The source code is available here (.tar.gz) and is released under the GNU General Public License.

There! It’s over with! Now I can get on with my life! I’m not going to be working on this anymore, but I’d love to look at any interesting bugs or fixes or patches or anything else you do with the program. Let me know!

Rich

2009 has just started and various international authorities are already launching new programs to deny digital freedom. And this is only the beginning.

India
The new The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006 [PDF], passed on Dec 23, 2008, introduces a variety of astounding legal restrictions to Indian internet users. The text of the amendment is unreadable legalese which is causing a lot of confusion as to how this bill will be enforced, but the Naavi organization in India has produced a side-by-side comparisons of the original bill and the changes introduced by the amendment to make it easy to see what changes have been made.

Police are now allowed to intercept and monitor all communications, and that isn’t even the most frightening part of the act:

67A: Punishment for publishing or transmitting of material containing sexually explicit act, etc. in electronic form

Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted in the electronic form any material which contains sexually explicit act or conduct shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and with fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees and in the event of second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years and also with fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees.

This is an egregious human rights violation. Sexuality is an important part of human life and it should not be criminalized! Pornography is the guiding principle on which the internet is based and we cannot stand by while our Indian brothers have their porn taken away from them.

The solution: internet porn riot. I demand that we begin flooding the PM’s inboxes with the most wang-engorging porn from our collections in protest. After a hearty fap, they will see the error of their ways.

ZeroPaid links to reports and responses from various Indian bloggers:

“Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not.”

Incredible. I have no idea what enforcement is like in India, but it can never, ever be good to grant police that much abusive power.

There are calls to create a Netizen’s Rights Comission in India, which is a great idea and I wish them all the best of luck.

UK
In the UK, the Times reports that police in the UK have been given the OK to infect citizens with trojan horses to do “remote searches” and record keystrokes, all without a warrant.

The article is quite good and I don’t think I have anything to contribute that the article doesn’t say already other than some advice to British computer users: switch to a secure operating system and get a firewall. Encrypt everything. Your government is a threat to you and you must take your liberty into your own hands. Get better at hacking; you’re going to need it.

New Zealand
TorrentFreak (who despite their name have actually become quite a good source of legitimate digital rights news) report that a new law would mean that file-sharers are “Guilty Upon Accusation” and will be banished from the internet. There is no appeal process. The bill has not passed yet but will in less than 50 days unless something dramatic changes in parliament.

The most interesting part of the story is the rising public opposition. The Creative Freedom Foundation has been created by a group of artists and progressive public policy advocates “on behalf of artists whose creative freedom is affected by major Governmental decisions made in their name, and in the name of protecting creativity.”

The are running a petition so people can say why they are so opposed to this. Again, the best of look to them.

In the US, things have quited down a bit as the RIAA have stopped using MediaSentry to sue students and are instead focusing their resources on corrupting our government directly. We can expect to see some kind of variation on this 3-strikes type law here in the United States some time in the next year or so.

These digital restrictions are happening all over the world now and we need to have some type of international organization to oppose this corruption and fight for our rights. The EFF is great, but they’re only in the US. Meanwhile, the biggest threats like WIPO and the EU have an astounding amount of power and international influence, and we have no counterpart to that. What we need is some kind of digital Amnesty International.

This is going to be a very tough year, folks. And we’re going to need your help! Write an angry email to somebody. Let’s get this ball rolling now.

Rich

25C3 was amazing! Thanks to everybody who presented and attended! Especially big thanks to the German Privacy Foundation and the i2p team.

Rich

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Berlin, Germany for the 25th Chaos Computer Congress! I’ve never been to Germany and can only speak a very few choice phrases (”Ein bier, bitter!”), so I’m very excited for badly communicated German adventures!

Me and John will have an Anomos table set up at some point during, and we will hopefully be giving a lightning talk as well, so come see us! Also, stop by and talk to us or send me an email if you’re going to be there and we can go out for drinks and schnitzel! I’m looking forward to meeting some of the I2P team and some other leet Germans and would love to hang out with you as well.

On a more somber note:
This will be the last time that I will ever be able to re-enter the US without giving the feds (DHS: Der Heutigen Statsi) a lot of my biometric data. On January 18th, all non-US citizens will be photographed and fingerprinted during re-entry to the United States under the VISIT (Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) program. Even though I’m Americanized as apple pie and police brutality, I’m actually a UK citizen, so this means I am to be fingerprinted, photographed and background checked whenever I leave and reenter the country. “Papers please.”

If you citizens think this is okay, will you still think it make sense when they start scanning you when you try to leave or enter your own country? This is the first step. If we keep putting up with this now, it only makes it easier for them to expand deeper into our lives later.

The theme of the conference is ‘Nothing to Hide’ and it couldn’t be more appropriate.
R

A few weeks ago, I went to the Free Culture 2008 Conference in sunny Berkeley, California. The conference lasted two days. The first was for keynote presentations, and the second was for the ‘unconference,’ a self-organized gathering about key issues for the organization. The result is that Students for Free Culture has finally solidified its goals and has a roadmap for changing our college campuses into Open Universities.

The first day was quite good, lots of interesting talks from big players like Lessig, and I got to chat with some really interesting people (Ron Paul’s campaign manager?! That might need its own post…). The day was followed by a night of after-partying with awful music and even worse dancing.

The second day was much more interesting.

To give you some background about my background, I’ve been involved with Students for Free Culture for a few years now. I got the Boston University chapter off the ground and I’ve been involved with FC-related activities throughout Boston/Cambridge and on the internet. However, I’ve always been rather disappointed in the organization. It doesn’t do anything! It doesn’t stand for anything! The critical portait of an organization composed of the geek-chic sitting around with their iPhones, Twittering away their privacy and whining about the RIAA sadly isn’t too far from the truth.

My pal Tim Hwang had posted a similar criticism on his site:

What I’m trying to say isn’t anything like that Free Culture hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile. It’s just stalled on the national level as the times have changed. […] In promoting widespread action, staying at the forefront as technological issues spill outwards into different innovation communities, and taking aggressive and coordinated public action — the national organization as a whole has been quiet.

There are already so many organizations like Creative Commons and the EFF that are working for the things that Students for Free Culture want, and they have more time and resources than us. We are an organization which exists for the sole purpose of saying “We agree!” The biggest failure in my view was when the SFC failed to do anything prevent that passing of the Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention Act, a corrupt, bullshit piece of legislation that essentially gives big media companies some control over college networks.

So we have decided to change our tactics. We are still in agreement with other digitally progressive organizations, but now we have our own agenda.

The largest theme of the unconference was open access in education. We are interested in copyright reform, of course, but we can’t do anything as students. However, we can work for changes in academia, the area where we do have some influence.

For instance, our main project at Boston University is trying to start an OpenCourseWare platform. I thought we were the only students trying to start one from the ground up, but Kevin Donnovan is trying the same thing at Georgetown, so we got to share notes. I also met Zac McCune, who is majoring in Hipster Studies at Brown. He’s doing an experiment in wikifying himself, which includes all of his course notes. We talked about starting a new OpenCourseWare project, OpenCourseNotes. I made a mock-up site but I’m still looking for a parter or two to help out with content management; I simply don’t have enough time for the projects on my plate as it is, yet alone with this, but I’d still like to do it if other people are willing to help out. (If you’ve got time and interested and a some skills, drop a comment or send me an email!)

Ultimately, all the congregates reconvened at the end of the day to have the big discussion about our flaws as an organization and what we should do about it. The result was what has come to be known as the Wheeler Declaration, the 5 points that Students for Free Culture stand for, things that we can fight for on our own campuses. These are the five points of the Wheeler Declaration, things that define an Open University:

The research the university produces is open access.

This means not publishing in journals which require expensive subscriptions, but in journals which allow access to all who want to read them. This is very important for curious minds, for science and for business. More information on this is available at The Public Library of Science.

The course materials are open educational resources.

This means that professors and students have a place to share their educational works under open licenses. The best example of this is MIT’s OpenCourseWare, but there are plenty of others.

The university embraces free software and open standards.

This means not forcing students to use proprietary software if there are Free alternatives and allowing compatibility with open standards for documents. More information on this can be found over at the Free Software Foundation.

If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.

This means that the university does not place restrictions on the manufacture of generic drugs for the thirld world or prevent open source software developers from coding by using patent enforcement. Universities Allied for Essential Medicines has more on this as well.

The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.

This one might seem the most simple (just be a neutral ISP, don’t spy on us or filter our traffic), but it might be the hardest because of the law I mentioned earlier. The law doesn’t require binding action and may not come into play. It’s a wait-and-see issue with the new administration coming into the White House and I think that SFC should make it a point of contention early on. As Lessig said, we should be picking some fights and trying to snatch some of the low hanging fruit.

So, now we all have things that we can be working for on our own college campuses. We need to make a lot of noise and do a lot of nagging at the bureaucracy. We might have to set up our own servers and supply our own bandwidth to get the ball rolling, but we can’t sit on our asses anymore! We have specific goals and we can all help each other in working to achieve them.

I’m excited and you should be too!
Hope to see you all again next year,
Rich

PS: More photos on my Flickr and those tagged with #fc2008

Just over a year ago, the streaming-video site TV-Links.co.uk was shut down and the owner and some of the staff were arrested.

Now, the site has relaunched as TV-Links.ws and staff member Martin gave me some information about what has happened since the raid.

What has happened since your arrest? What crimes have you and the other staff been charged with? Have you come to any plea agreements or anything like that?

I have had no further visits or contact with the Police since my questioning. I can only assume that we broke no laws since we have not been charged with anything.

Things never went that far, I was questioned, released and that is all, I didn’t need to make any plea agreement. Sin was also released without charge.

Will there be a trial?

Again no, having been released without charge I can only assume that there will be no trial.

Are you afraid of facing another arrest?

Yes, however I believe that the authorities would be better off spending their money and time on more important things where people are actually suffering as a result of real life problems, and spend less time been goons for the rich and powerful.

Why are you still involved with tv-links after your arrest?

Because it’s a hobby for me, I enjoy taking part in a community of people that share my interests in media.

Is tv-links.ws a business venture?

It can’t be called a business in my opinion, businesses make profits and their staff get a pay cheque every week. I’ve never made a cent out of what I do, and don’t want to either. Tv-Links is not a comercial entity, any money thats made from ads goes directly back into the site, to pay hosting bills etc, and any extra is invested in improving the site for its users.

What precautions are you taking to prevent another repeat incident?

We are now located in Sweden, the site is completely legal according to Swedish law as we do not host content. Linking to other sites is not illegal (which is in effect what we do). We will of course now and always fully abide by the law of our country which is Sweden.
We wont go into details on the precautions we have taken other than that we have worked closely together with our lawyers to ensure the legality of what we do and that there are measures in place protecting us in case anyone tries to challenge that.

Where do you see the project in 3 to 5 years?

It’s hard to say really, it’s a hostile market and difficult to predict any changes in law, licensing and demand. If the market is there, we’ll be there.

I’d also like to take this time to say that although other tv-links clone sites exist, they are nothing to do with us. Many of them use heavy handed advertising methods to monetize their sites for profit, which we do not condone at all.

It’s good to here that the boys there have been staying out of trouble and that there was no punishment.

In the year since the arrest, streaming video has gone legitimate with sites like Hulu.com and major networks like CBS and ABC launching their own, ad-supported streaming video services.

The next year will be interesting. Hobbyist sites like TV-Links typically have the advantage in sheer quantity and availability of shows (and they don’t have ads), but the legitimate sites have the advantage in video quality and reliability. Hulu is deliberately keeping the amount of available content low, presumably to push new TV shows and DVD sales of old shows, so there may always be a place for sites like TV-Links, especially as more foreign MegaVideo clones pop-up to provide the bandwidth.

There has also been recent research into streaming torrents, so a third alternative may arise which could combine the archival depth of TV-Links and the Pirate Bay with the convenience and quality of Hulu. The internet needs to sort out a way for me to watch every possible Star Trek episode in high-quality whenever I want. This is the challenge, internet, you have exactly one year!

Rich out.

HELL YEAH. I know this site isn’t about video games but I don’t care, I’m so excited about this amazing hack I’m writing about it here anyway.

The Mother3 Fan Translation is now available.

Mother3 is the sequel to the Super Nintendo game EarthBound, which is my favorite game of all time. Mother3 came out for the GBA, but only in Japan, so some dedicated fans have been working really tirelessly on hacking the ROM to make it playable for us English speaking folks. This is a really tough hack, way more complicated than just changing out a script as you might think. I’ve been following the development progress on the dev blog quite religiously for some time now and it really shows the magnitude of the work that went in to creating this.

Thanks and congratulations, Tomato and Jeffman!

I don’t think I’m going to sleep until I play through this game now. See you in a few days.
Rich

I’m going to Free Culture 2008 in Berkeley, California on Friday! I’m excited to meet all of the free culture people and see all of the speakers. Hopefully I’ll be giving a talk/workshop thing on the second day, not quite sure how they’re going to set it up, though, so we’ll see how that goes..

Anyway, if you’re going to be there you should come and see me! I’d love to talk to you about OpenCourseWare or applied cryptography or anything else.

I’ll be sure to put up some pictures of all the FC kiddies getting hyphy up in the Yay Area, of course.

See you there!
Rich

There has been a lot of talk about cryptoanarchy, but zero talk about the other side of the equation, anonymity in government. I dub this Anonarchy, and have made a logo accordingly (actually, I made the logo first and the system of government to fit it.)

If you’re not a computer-science person, this wikipedia article might explain some things. In short, A* is the algorithm which is used to find the best paths between anonymous relayers in mixnets like Tor.

There are pros and cons to this type of government. One one hand, it is a completely pure type of politics. Supposing this is a representative democratic anonarchy, all potential leaders are anonymous and therefore judged solely on their stance on issues and their speeches, not by their age, sex, skin color, history, etc. It is also corruption-proof as the bribee is unknown, and the result of the bribe cannot be verified anyway.

On the other hand, 4Chan.

That is all.
Rich.

You’ve probably seen a kiosk at some point in your life. They’re the standalone computers you see in malls and lobbies all over the place. They’re typically just a browser and some software to stop you from doing anything else on the computer. This makes me sad. All that computing power just being used for reading email? These computers are yearning to unleashing their full potential. Plus, as we shall see, these computers are inherently untrustable, so you may need to get out of kiosk mode to make sure you aren’t being keylogged, or so you can install Firefox and Tor and browse anonymously, or you may just need terminal access.

A recent presentation at DefCon announced the release of iKat a suite of tools for experimenting with kiosk browsers. Before this, 0×000000 had some really good scripts for breaking broswers with javascript and the like. Unfortunately, most of these tools are geared towards Windows kiosks, and the ones near me run OSX. So.

I get an hour lunch break. I am bored. But, I have enough time to figure out how to crash our local macs running wKiosk, and to blog about how I did it. With time to get a banana and yoghurt.


First, reboot the computer by holding/spamming Command + Control + Eject (Top right button). (If that doesn't do it, run this Flash overflow exploit to crash wKiosk and then spam reboot.)

During startup, hold down shift to boot into safe mode, which should let you pick a user.

As you log in, hold down Command + D to force the dock.

Then, open up finder and terminal and have your fun. wKiosk might still pop up, but if you've got the finder running you should just be able to force it into the background.