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 […]
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 […]
The Government now requires your college to spy on you and give your money to media companies. Simple as that.
I’ve written a post about this on the Free Culture blog about the bill from a Free Culture perspective, but if you just want news about the bill, I’d recommend Ars Technica’s coverage.
I’ve written my opinions […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
