A service which claims to “remove” bad links from the innernets.
The Consumerist completely owns them.
Don’t have anything in your mouth when you click the link.
Category: Internet
Moneylaundering Bank Julius Baer Drops Suit Against Wikileaks
My guess is that they decided that it was better to ask to have the suit dismissed than it was having millions of internet users going through their records with a fine toothed comb.
My guess is that they will be moving an offshore registrar.
Note to Self: Don’t Do Business in the United States
The New York Times reports on the case of a British Travel Agent living in Spain, who had his domain names seized by his US domain registrar at the request of the Treasury Department.
They felt that he, “helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba”, so they seized the sites, including one about Earnest Hemingway, and two in Italian and French.
A whois shows that the Pirate Bay uses Key-Systems GmbH?
Perhaps they are in a country of laws, and not men.
Wikileaks Takedown Order Reversed
The federal has reversed himself on the takedown order for Wikileaks.
It’s being lauded by civil libertarians, but the initial take down order was less of a ruling on the internet than it was a consent decree between a domain registrar, Dynadot, and the owner of a money laundering operation in the Caymans, Julius Baer.
GOP to Congressinal Investigators: Piss Off
Well, after white house staff admitted using RNC emails to avoid the record keeping laws, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested backups of the emails.
Henry Waxman, the committee chairman, has now revealed that the GOP has told Congress to go pound sand, saying that they, “has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.”
These folks are absolutely lawless.
NY AG Cuomo Subpoenas Comcast on Bit Torrent Throttling
Well, this shold be very interesting.
My guess is that Andrew Cuomo is going to be much more aggressive than the FCC.
He’s following Spitzer’s lead, and the consumer protection laws in NY are more aggressive than the FCC’s power at this time.
Wikileaks.org Back On Line
The Judge has modified his injunction, replacing a permanent injunction against keeping the site up with a temporary injunction against hosting the specific documents in question.
Additionally, Wikileaks has been given an opportunity to file a response, the first ruling was between Julius Baer and the Domain Name service Dynadot LLC, with no input from Wikileaks.
It appears that the Wikileaks folks were not given any notice of the proceedings.
This Will Happen to Anonymous
Seriously, the people behind the internet attacks on Scientology will be hounded to death as Shawn Lonsdale has just been.
Scientology is an organization that harassed the Internal Revenue Service into submission.
See here for background.
BitTorrent Companies Develop Technology to Thwart Comcast Throttling
And so goes the technological war between BitTorrent and Comcast. A coalition of BitTorrent software providers are developing an encryption technology to allow the connections to be obscured.
What Comcast does not realize is that BitTorrent is the canary in the coal mine. Any issues that they create are an artifact of a network that is heading towards inadequacy, and they need to fix it.
Wikileaks.org Taken Offline By Judge
This is pretty close to unprecedented, see here and here.
The judge, Jeffery White, had the registrar take down the page, and prevent any transfer of the domain.
FWIW, I’ve not reviewed his background, but Judge White does not seem to be a lockstep Bushite, he has allowed environmental groups and cities sue federal agencies over global warming.
This was in response to a lawsuit brought by a Swiss banking group over documents leaked that imply that they were aiding tax evasion and money laundering.
FWIW, a Belgian mirror is accessible at this time, and the number of mirror sites is probably growing exponentially.
Rep Markey Tries Incrementalism In New Net Neutrality Bill
Once again, the draw by crayon libertarians at CNET get it wrong, and Harold Feld at TOTSF gets it right.
This is a change, and while it seems minor at least to the folks at CNET, it’s not.
Specifically, it ammends the FCC act of 1934 and adds a specific goal for the regulators at the FCC:
by adopting and enforcing baseline protections to guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoratism for, or degredation of, operators based upon its source, ownership or destination on the Internet.
In addition, this explicitly gives the FCC authority over “information services”, and eliminates the argument that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 stripped this authority.
Go read the whole post.
A Victory for Civil Rights in the UK
5 Muslim students had their convictions for perusing Jihadi websites overturned.
The appeals court declared that, “Difficult questions of interpretation have been raised in this case by the attempt by the prosecution to use [anti-terrorism law] for a purpose for which it was not intended, …. We do not consider that it was made plain to the jury [in the original trial] … that they possessed the extremist material for use in the future to incite the commission of terrorist acts. We doubt whether the evidence supported such a case.”
It’s not in the US, but I’ll take it.
Comcast’sAnswer to Complaints of Sabotaging Applications: A Change to Their Terms of Service
More confirmation that the Cable companies will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.
In response to complaints to spoofing packets to break filesharing applications (and other applications too, like Lotus Notes), Comcast has rewritten its terms of service.
The short version is:
Our network sucks, and we can block your peer-to-peer connections — and everything else — for any or no reason. And since the FCC’s competition policy lets us operate with no competitors — where else are you going to go?
Additionally, Comcast’s terms of service have “conduct terms” that would make John Ashcroft proud.
Note to self: Check out Verizon Fios terms of service.
When Giants Stumble
Well, it appears that EBay may have screwed the pooch with its recent changes in fees and feedback policy, and its competitors are doing its level best to exploit the current dissatisfaction.
Competitor sites are seeing their business increase by more than 50%, though when one looks at the numbers (less than 10,000 auctions), they are at this point a drop in the bucket compared to EBay.
One wonders if this will blow over, or if EBay will modify its changes in the coming days.
Something Weird is Going On With the Cut Internet Cables
We have had three major fiber optic cables cut, and they , carrying the bulk of internet traffic for the Middle East and India, and it’s been confirmed that ships did not cut internet cables with their anchors.
Three widely spaced cables have been severed, and the chance that this would occur as random chance is vanishingly small.
I don’t know what it is.
It’s unlikely to be terrorist, because media like the internet help them both in their internal communication and their propaganda.
It could be some sort of attempt by some of the more despotic regimes in the area to get control of the internet, but the economic consequences of this does not make sense.
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I think that it’s the NSA using creative destruction in order to get taps on the lines, kind of how they used submarines to put taps on lines running from the Kamchatka peninsula to the Soviet mainland during the Cold War.
I Disagree With Paul Krugman
Dr. Krugman comments on the redefinition of high speed internet penetration. It’s now considered complete in a zipcode if one person gets over 200 kb/s.
So Bush is declaring “Mission Accomplished” on broadband, which is, once again, a lie.
However, I disagree with Krugman on the problem.
It’s not, “the failure of US policy to create effective competition”, it is a lack of regulation.
The incumbent providers are not spending money on upgrading the infrastructure because it is not to their business advantage to upgrade the infrastructure.
It is more profitable, and requires less capital, to put up barriers to other entrants into the field.
Europe and Japan with their state owned telecommunications monopolies, and their highly regulated wireless infrastructure are kicking our butt, because the market does not work in this area.
Spamford Wallace’s Is Back, Like a Cockroach
While I do not ensorse such things as Assassination markets, Wallace’s latest identity theft/spam escapade leads me to believe that I would have a hard time voting to convict on any Jury upon which I sat.
I’d say that this guy is like a cockroach, but I think that he is far hardier.
I don’t think that Polonium 210 would take him out.
Scientology Vs. The Internet: All Your Bases Are Belong To Us
Well, it appears that a group of anonymous internet vigilantes, calling themselves “Anonymous” (not a whole bunch of imagination there), have decided, since the attempted suppression of Tom Cruise’s “crazy as a bed bug” Scientology tape, have decided to go after the organization, see here, here, and here.
It appears that the people involved call this “Chanology“.
While I understand how these folks feel, someone, and I don’t mean a member of Scientology, is going to end up dead.
I used to follow Alt.Religion.Scientolgy on Usenet, and I will simply note that this organization browbeat the Internal Revenue Service into submission.
Here is the “official” “Anonymous” video.
OK, it wasn’t their official video, that is here, at least until Youtube is forced to kill it:
FCC Investigates Comcast Packet Blocking
For what it’s worth, if Comcast finds it necessary to throttle some applications, they should be open about it to customers and prospective customers.
What happened here was that they were forging TCP reset packets to throttle the traffic, and then lying about it.
The problem is threefold, first, it interferes with non-Bit Torrent applications, I’ve read about it interfering with Lotus Notes, second, it makes troubleshooting problems with other applications very difficult, and third, the customer is being defrauded.
FWIW, traffic management, if necessary, should be based on bandwidth, which is what the ISPs sell, not application. It, or so I’ve been told, a trivial operation.
To quote Wetmachine: Harold Feld’s Tales of the Sausage Factory:
1) The FCC issued a public notice asking for comment on our Petition for Declaratory Ruling that Comcast’s “network management practice” of messing with BitTorrent uploads violated the FCC’s “Broadband Policy Statement,” which includes a principle that network operators may not block or degrade content or applications. In a separate public notice (but as part of the same proceeding), the FCC also seeks comment on the Vuze Petition for Rulemaking on how broadband access providers handle and shape IP traffic generally. (Copy of Vuze Petition here, copy of our Petition here).
2) Separately, the FCC issued a separate public notice seeking comment on a Petition filed by Public Knowledge and the usual suspects asking the FCC to declare that wireless carriers cannot deny short codes or block text messaging. This goes after Verizon’s high profile “oopsie” of denying a request by NARAL for a short code. Although, as we pointed out in the Petition, the more likely and pernicious problem is with plain old anticompetitive blocking, such as denying a short code to VOIP provider Rebtel.com and denying applications to major banks offering competing services.
3) Comcast confirmed that the FCC has lanched a formal inquiry into whether it violated the FCC’s broadband policy statement. Comcast reiterated that it will fully cooperate with the FCC, and expects any investigation to show that Comcast did not block content and has engaged in legitimate network management practices.
I think that the problem here is largely cultural. To paraphrase Lilly Tomlin from Laugh-In, who originally said this about the phone company, “We’re the cable company, we don’t have to care.”
That said, for the complex minutiae of how this is proceeding, and what it all means, go to the link. The process is confusing.
In particular, look at his, “How Do I File Comments?” section. If you want your voice heard.
Big Brother
Lovely, Mike McConnel, the man who says that waterboarding is torture for him, but not for other folks, because he has a deviated septum, is low looking for the power to, “read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse”.
Sir, I am more concerned about your abuse of this nation than I am of any sick man with Marfan syndrome hiding in the tribal regions of Pakistan.