There is a lot of controversy surrounding the recent ACTA proposals now that the 2006 document is circulating and gaining momentum. If you’ve been following tech news at all then you’ll know ACTA is an attempt to make a global DMCA-plus of sorts that would protect intellectual property rights worldwide — changing many countries existing [...]
Australia finished setting up its great firewall and began filtering their Internet (like much-accused China) this year censoring protests, pornography, and anything else the government-appointed censorship board found to be amoral. The secret, unpublished list has continued to grow as more and more websites are filtered and more reasons to filter are invented. Censorship in [...]
Many people made predictions of what 2010 was to hold. Somehow I managed not to stumble across Rik Myslewski’s article in The Register. Whoops. He paints a poignant picture of corporate techno-conspiracy surrounding the growing embrace of cloud computing and the loss of device control as companies such as Apple and Google tell us what [...]
A recent paper from the Columbia Business Law Review by Joshua L. Simmons shows how the government can, and has, been using fourth-parties to acquire your private information. The fourth amendment is supposed to protect us from unlawful search and seizure, however the Supreme Court ruled that acquiring data from third-parties is okay as long [...]
An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday showed that the highly-criticized Iranian government is starting to retaliate by threatening American- and European-Iranian citizens that have criticized the government on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media outlets. His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named [...]
Just last Monday the Spanish parliament viewed the latest draft of the Sustainable Economy Act. This law is designed to change current copyright laws to allow the Spanish Ministry of Culture to take down websites (both domestic and international) by blocking their viewing from Spanish ISPs all without court order. All of this is done [...]
ArsTechnica has an excellent write-up asking the question of whether or not government supervision is the worst thing that can happen to a communications network. The article parallels the telegraph with today’s Internet and begins with a quote from Charles A. Sumner that sounds much like our own protests on where the Internet is headed: [...]