Firefox Add-On Bypasses SOPA DNS Blocking The pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) continues to inspire opponents to come up with creative solutions to circumvent it. A new anti-SOPA add-on for Firefox, titled “DeSopa,” is such a counter measure. When installed, users can click a single button to resolve a blocked domain via foreign DNS servers, bypassing all domestic DNS blockades and allowing the user to browse the site though the bare IP-address (if supported). “I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe,” DeSopa developer T Rizk told TorrentFreak. “It could be that a few members of congress are just not tech savvy and don’t understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down,” he adds.
Net Neutrality Posted by Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, and Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless (Cross-posted on the Verizon PolicyBlog.) Verizon and Google might seem unlikely bedfellows in the current debate around network neutrality, or an open Internet. And while it's true we do disagree quite strongly about certain aspects of government policy in this area -- such as whether mobile networks should even be part of the discussion -- there are many issues on which we agree. For starters we both think it's essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform -- where people can access any content (so long as it's legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice. There are two key factors driving innovation on the web today. Second, private investment is dramatically increasing broadband capacity and the intelligence of networks, creating the infrastructure to support ever more sophisticated applications. Finally, transparency is a must.
Lost Hacking Documentary Surfaces on Pirate Bay | Threat Level | After collecting cobwebs in a studio vault for the better part of a decade, an unreleased documentary on the 2003 hacking scene leaked onto the Pirate Bay Thursday. Lamo says the film had been bogged down by conflicts among the producers and crew. “It’s ironic that a film about overcoming barriers, about new technologies, about thinking differently, had to come to the public eye by being hacked out of the hands of people who, after making a film about the free flow of information, tried to lock away that information forever,” says Lamo. “The truth tends to itself.” Lamo adds that he had nothing to do with the leak. Lamo made his mark early in the decade with a string of brazen hacks against large companies, characterized by a flair and sense of humor that appear quaint in today’s era of for-profit hacking and multi-million credit card theft. Unemployed and prone to wander the country by Greyhound, Lamo gained the appellation “the Homeless Hacker.” See Also:
Protecting the President's Power | Cheney | washingtonpost.com James A. Baker III came to see Wyoming's sole member of Congress on Nov. 19, 1980, days after Ronald Reagan won election as president. He was about to assume the post of White House chief of staff, which then-Rep. 1. Cheney's muscular views on presidential power, then and now, offer one answer to the question raised often by former colleagues in recent years: What happened to the careful, mainstream conservative they once thought they understood? In fact, Cheney's views on executive supremacy -- like many of his core beliefs about foreign policy and defense -- have held remarkably steady over the years. In the Ford administration, Cheney backed largely losing arguments on executive authority, resisting the limits set by Congress after the Watergate scandal and the Church Committee's revelations of CIA abuse. Cheney left the White House at what he later called "the low point" of presidential authority. Every modern president, to some degree, has shared that view.
‘The Pirate Bay Dancing’ Add-On Killls DNS and IP Blockades Efforts to censor the Internet are increasing in the Western world. In the US lawmakers are currently discussing legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that could take out The Pirate Bay, or disable access to it. In several other countries such as Italy, Finland and Belgium, courts have already ordered Internet Providers to block their users' access to the site. Demonstrating the futility of these efforts, a small group of developers today releases a browser add-on called "The Pirate Bay Dancing." When Homeland Security’s ICE unit started seizing domain names last year, a group called “MAFIAAFire” decided to code a browser add-on to redirect the affected websites to their new domains. The release went viral and by now more than 200,000 people have installed the add-on. Today MAFIAAFire delivers a new release that aims to thwart the increasing censorship efforts in countries worldwide. Putting the add-on to work only requires two clicks and is completely free. The Pirate Bay Dancing
Electronic Privacy Information Center This Is the Internet After SOPA [PICS] Today, many popular websites are going "dark" in protest of Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The consensus among many experts, Internet users, web companies and even the White House, is that SOPA is too restrictive, too dangerous, too complicated and too big of a threat to our privacy. In a way, today's blackout shows what the Internet might look if some of the principles in SOPA start being enforced as law. Do you like seeing big "CLOSED" signs on your favorite websites? Neither do we. SEE ALSO: Why SOPA Is Dangerous We've gathered the screenshots of sites that are protesting SOPA with a blackout in the gallery above, and will be adding additional pics as more sites join in.
IGP Blog :: Why Wikileaks polarizes America's Internet politics At IGP we pride ourselves on having a pretty good bead on internet governance issues, but we have to admit that the emergence of Wikileaks as a global governance issue took us by surprise. The internet has proven itself to be a source of political disruption in a way we did not anticipate. There have been strategic leaks of diplomatic information many times before. Often the practitioners are diplomats or other insiders in the political-military-diplomatic axis who use it as a form of policy influence. What makes this case different are the following things: To get to the root of the internet governance implications of the Wikileaks episode, however, one must examine the fulminations coming from the American Enterprise Institute, normally a rather staid distributor of dully predictable conservative policy wonkery. So a few tatty cables and discomfiting revelations spark demands for death, assassination, censorship and cyber-war. inShare0
Don't Break the Internet Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression. To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S.
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse Why SOPA Is Dangerous I'm sure you've heard by now that SOPA is bad and would ruin the Internet, but have you actually read the bill? If not, it's worth reading, for two reasons. First, if you are going to oppose a bill, you should know exactly what you're opposing, not just the vague principle behind it. Second, it'll provide you with a valuable insight: that these bills are written in an attempt to obscure the truth. First off, I'm going to qualify that I'm not a lawyer. However, I am a programmer, and that's made me pretty good at unraveling spaghetti code. Here is the full text of the bill, as of Jan. 15, 2012. The Scalpel Section 102(a)(2) permits the attorney general to take action against foreign sites (i.e., sites that do not fall under U.S. jurisdiction) if "the owner or operator of such Internet site is facilitating the commission of [copyright infringement]." This isn't quite as bad as the rest of the bill because the power lies with the attorney general, rather than the copyright holder. To Sum Up
Why WikiLeaks Matters More (And Less) than You Think - Umair Haque by Umair Haque | 12:06 PM December 8, 2010 Rather than seeing WikiLeaks through the lens of morality or national security, let’s look at it through an institutional lens. To those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while, that may be second nature. But to the newcomers, let me explain what I mean. Perhaps the most basic economic institution is GDP. And unfortunately, it’s also one of the most in need of radical institutional innovation. When GDP’s updated to reflect environmental costs, so must be corporate income statements — otherwise, the math simply won’t work. Now let’s go back to the much-maligned WikiLeaks. Consider just how moribund yesterday’s institutions are when it comes to information collecting and sharing. Now ask yourself: does that make even a tiny sliver of sense in a world where I can trade equities from nearly any beach in the world, hundreds of times a minute, using my iPhone? And the result of an undersupply of disclosure is toxic, perverse incentives.
Coders Are Already Finding Ways Around SOPA Censorship - Politics A developer who calls himself T Rizk doesn't have much faith in Congress making the right decision on anti-piracy legislation, so he's built a work around for the impending censorship measures being considered: DeSOPA. The Firefox add-on is stunningly simple as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would block specific domain names (e.g. www.thepiratebay.com) of allegedly infringing sites, T Rizk's lightweight tool allows you to revert to the bare internet protocol (IP) address (e.g. 194.71.107.15) which takes you to the same place. “I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe," T Rizk told the site TorrentFreak -- and you can pretty easily guess whose side they're on. If that doesn't work, TorrentFreak points to another developer-made anti-SOPA solution that's also in the works. Meanwhile, Rep.
Net Neutrality 101 When we log onto the Internet, we take lots of things for granted. We assume that we'll be able to access whatever Web site we want, whenever we want to go there. We assume that we can use any feature we like -- watching online video, listening to podcasts, searching, e-mailing and instant messaging -- anytime we choose. We assume that we can attach devices like wireless routers, game controllers or extra hard drives to make our online experience better. What makes all these assumptions possible is "Network Neutrality," the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet. Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online. The biggest cable and telephone companies would like to charge money for smooth access to Web sites, speed to run applications, and permission to plug in devices. The network owners say they want a "tiered" Internet. What's the Problem Here? The End of the Internet?