It seems like every time we turn around, somebody else is trying to enact another scheme to make the Internet a little less open, a little less useful, and more of a surveillance tool for people who can't quite make out what the writing on the wall seems to say.
The latest, and possibly most frightening salvo in the as-yet undeclared War On the Internet is something called the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act). In a real sense, it's COICA v2.0 in that it still allows the US …
For nearly twenty years in the United States a law called CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994) has been on the books. To summarize, CALEA set the federal requirement that telecommunications companies (phone companies, long distance companies, cellular carriers, and so forth) had to modify their infrastructures such that various forms of wiretapping of customers had to be possible upon presentation of a warrant. Contrary to popular belief, there are methods of surveillance other than recording a conversation. The simplest involves making a list of every phone number that a particular number calls, when the calls were …
The hot topic these days is the January 25th revolution in Egypt: the people rose up and demanded that their president (who is known for, among other things, having bloggers raided, torture, censorship, and general repression of the people of an entire country) step down and do whatever it is that retired dictators do (which is usually not what the people wish he or she would do). For the record, the United States was well aware that this was happening, and in fact aided the government of Egypt to the tune of 1.5 billion US dollars a year because …
Once upon a time, monitoring someone's communications was a relatively simple matter for law enforcement: they sent someone out to the pole or the side of the house with a hex driver and patched a transmitter into the pair of wires leading into the building that would kick on and send both ends of any conversations to a listening post some distance away. Since then, technology's changed just a bit (consider this my entry for the Understatement of the Year Award) but the powers that be are finding themselves hard pressed to keep up. In the year 1994 a law …
It could be said that DNS is one of the services which underpins the Internet by translating hostnames (like drwho.virtadpt.net) into the IP addresses which are actually used under the hood (such as 66.93.100.253). Unless you remember the IP addresses of the sites you usually visit or you have them hardcoded on your system, if your local DNS isn't available there isn't a whole lot that you can do online. Scattered around the Net are publically available DNSes that you can configure your machine to use in the event that something goes wrong with your …
An outfit called In-Q-Tel in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 1999, is known to be a semi-independent but private aspect of the US intelligence community which invests in tech companies that do things deemed strategically useful. Practically all of those things are on the cutting edge of commercial technology for the time. They say as much on their website, in case you're wondering if I've been listening to a little too much Coast to Coast AM lately. Their latest investment project is a most interesting one, a company called Visible Technologies which develop software to monitor social activities on the global …
As one might expect, it's been a busy couple of days (a week, really), which has kept me from being able to post anything. I got back from Philly around 1700 EST5EDT last Friday, and I've been offline pretty much the entire weekend because I've been too tired to do much of anything. After I got back, Lyssa made a wonderful hot dinner (all the more special because temperatures in the tri-state area have been averaging in the mid-twenties Fahrenheit), and then we decided to get together with some friendly faces to hang out for the evening. To that end …
It would appear that the US Senate is pushing to turn the Net into a nice, safe, sandboxed playground that are constantly monitored because they don't like what you can find on it. It should come as no surprise that they're invoking the protection of children to justify the installation of near-ubiquitous content monitoring and filtering so that They can decide what you should or should not be allowed to look at. They seem to like using children as an excuse, because no one in their right mind would not want to protect kids, right? Parents, they say, are utterly …
A couple of weeks ago, the RIAA managed to get a law passed that requires royalties to be paid to them for all music streamed across the Net, regardless of the reason or origin of the music. If you listen to the audio stream coming from a local commercial radio station's website, they're paying the RIAA royalties for the privilege (then again, chances are they're getting paid by the RIAA to only play certain songs - this has been known for years but no one's been in a position to do anything about it). If you read the fine print, though …
The United States military is planning to launch a communications satellite that is a dedicated Internet router by the year 2009. The way the Net works right now, some communications satellites are involved in handling net.traffic but there are two major differences from how they want to start doing it: First of all, net.traffic goes from the ground up to a comsat and then is retransmitted to another downlink on the ground; the IRIS project will route traffic from comsat to comsat, something that hasn't been done before. Secondly, traffic is transmitted on fixed communications channels; the IRIS …
