As mentioned here, there was a petition to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery. Well, the White House has spoken: Thank you for signing this petition. We appreciate your participation in the We the People platform on Whitehouse.gov. However, consistent with the We the People Terms of Participation and our responses to similar petitions in the past, the White House declines to comment on this petition because it requests a specific law enforcement action. Or to put in another way, you can only petition the government if you've agreed to the Terms of Participation and don't violate them - and requesting that the ...
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Democracy in Action!
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012The BBB: Part of the Problem
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012I've now moved from a web hosting provider that offered "unlimited" resources (I'd name and shame because they suck so bad, but I won't even give them that publicity to the search engines) to one that has specific monthly limits. As a result, I've been going through two-and-a-half years of apache logs and implementing various filters to cut down on spammers, scrapers, bots, and snoops. There are two major groups of pests: there are the "illicit" ones, the comment spammers, script kiddies, and so on. And there are the "legitimate" ones - corporate/government entities, and the ones who do the ...
The Biggest Gang
Monday, January 30th, 2012In a sign of how little it matters to the US Dept Of Justice to follow the letter of the law, the MegaUpload lawyers “received a letter...from the US Attorney that declared there could be an imminent destruction of Megaupload consumer data files on this coming Thursday." This as a result of MegaUpload's assets being froze. Apparently destroying evidence is acceptable practice, as long as it's the government doing it. This behavior from the DOJ isn't surprising, given the head honcho there lies like Judas about breaking laws to make new ones (and getting his own employees killed in the process). ...
Investigate Chris Dodd!
Thursday, January 26th, 2012There's a petition to investigate that Friend of Angelo, Chris Dodd, at whitehouse.gov, that exceeded 30,000 signatures as I was writing this. The petition is a reaction to Chris Dodd having said this on Fox News: Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake." You can't be more ...
I Feel Safe, Don’t You?
Thursday, January 26th, 2012From Wired: A government memo saying a railway was hacked in a targeted attack was incorrect, according to a spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads. “There was no targeted computer-based attack on a railroad,” according to spokesman Holly Arthur. “The memo on which the story was based has numerous inaccuracies.” Asked if there was an “untargeted” incident that disrupted train service nonetheless, Arthur declined to comment, leaving the public in the dark about what exactly was right and wrong in the memo. I don't think it's just the public who is in the dark - and I'm not talking about the railways!
Enslavement by Culture
Thursday, January 26th, 2012This quote opens an op-ed titled "I Don't Want To Own Music, I Want To Listen To Music." (which is well worth a read): "Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved” —Andre Malraux I'm not sure how true this is - think of the many ways different religions have been used to influence and control cultures (including music, art, and the written word) throughout history. Regardless, the future that the music industry envisions, as well as the one pictured by software patent trolls, ...
Justice For Who?
Thursday, January 26th, 2012From "Joint complaint of those affected by the closure of Megaupload service" The FBI has caused incalculable damage, far in excess of the losses claimed by the content lobbies, in a fruitless attempt to prevent access to the media content hosted on Megaupload, some of which they claim to have been infringing copyright under US law. ... The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended. For this reason Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International and other Pirate Parties [including the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom], have begun investigating ...
Some More Perspective On Online Piracy
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012I've read through the Megaupload Indictment, and I'm not terribly impressed by the case presented by the U.S. government. Not when there are items like these to be found throughout it: In approximately April 2006, members of the Mega Conspiracy copied videos directly from Youtube.com to make them available on Megavideo.com. So? Were these copied videos copyrighted and the licensing ignored, were the licenses followed, or were they in the public domain? On or about August 31, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to an associate entitled “lol”. Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file download page for ...
Some Perspective On Online Piracy
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict... But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's ...
The Pirate Bay SOPA Statement
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012From The Pirate Bay's press release about SOPA: Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there ...