China is notorious the Net over for its anti-Internet political stance. Bloggers have to register, talking about democracy is a dangerous thing to do at best, and the Great Firewall of China makes a valiant attempt to filter net.traffic to keep the masses uninformed and unable to speak out. They've even managed to have Internet addiction considered a real social problem treatable with hospitalisation and electroconvulsive therapy What gets me is this: The kids that are hospitalised for this 'treatment' (and I use the term in the loosest possible sense) aren't sleeping well, aren't motivated, don't like to listen …
It seems that the bird flu, which has a disproportionate number of people scrambling for grey market antibiotics and sterile facemasks (a rant that you can be sure I've been prepping for a while) is making financial and networking industry high ups wonder what would happen to the Net in the event of a real outbreak. Their reasoning seems simple enough: In the event of an outbreak of the avian flu that posed a serious threat to people in the US, many thousands would want to work from home to minimise their chances of being infected. However, it is also …
Another bill's been put into circulation that I think everyone should know about. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas has put forth legislation that would require every ISP to keep records of what their users do on the Net to assist. For every customer an ISP has, every IP address they are given, every DNS request they make, every outgoing connection, and every incoming connection attempt would be recorded and archived on the off chance that a subpoena came in. Failure to do so would mean fines and jail time for not complying with this proposed law. On top of that …
Well, it seems that Carnivore DCS-1000 isn't enough to feed the gaping information maw of the FBI. Rather than sniff the traffic associated only with a single IP address they've decided to record ALL of the traffic for a given netblock and analyze it offline. For my readers who don't understand how this might apply to them (you know that I'm headed for the Fourth Amendment already), here's a quick rundown of the principle. IP addresses are organised into contiguous blocks that make them easy to manage. If your DSL provider assigns you the IP address 192.16.10.42 …
