For a change, the Chinese government have decided to impose their holier-than-thou ideals on the public by preventing access to common social networking sites, including twitter.com
Not happy with just blocking Blogger, YouTube and a plethora of others, the Great Firewall of China has put a stop to Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com and others too. I’m guessing that China are looking to slowly remove Chinese social networking & reduce communication generally online, in a hope to stop this pesky freedom of speech stuff.
You may remember an article I wrote previously about China’s efforts to stifle freedom of speech, after YouTube and a few other video sites were “unplugged” from China’s network overnight – and it seems now that things are getting worse. Come on China! What are you afraid of? A revolution?!
It’s been a story that’s been going on for years. Whether or not the guys who run the Pirate Bay website are actually committing a crime or not. Well it seems that a court in Sweden have decided that they are.
The court in Sweden have handed out a 1 years prison sentence for Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde. The court also ordered the 4 to pay damages of £2.4 million. Peter Sunde is quoted as saying, "Nothing will happen to TPB [The Pirate Bay], this is just theatre for the media."
It’s interesting in that the people who run the website are technically doing nothing wrong, although you could argue they are facilitating and condoning the committing of a crime, they aren’t downloading the music or films themselves – just giving others the ability to search on available illegal downloads. Does it warrant a prison sentence? In my mind, it doesn’t. What sort of society do we live in when this sort of corporate bullying can be tolerated, and where even a court of law, it appears, follows their lead?
The BBC demonstrated that by acquiring some software from chatrooms on the internet, they were able to set up their own botnet and take control of 22,000 user’s PCs.
Apparently the BBC are voicing that as this was not done with "criminal intent" it’s not illegal – and that no personal information was obtained from the slave machines.
I’m a little shocked, I must admit. When has a TV corporation had the power to take it on themselves to hack thousands of computers and then in the same breath say it’s not illegal? Just the mere fact that the BBC took control, means they have broken the law. They have unlawfully obtained use of equipment that they didn’t pay for, don’t pay the electricity bill for & don’t pay the user’s ISP for use of the bandwidth. Stealing, as far as I have been aware has always been a criminal activity – and it doesn’t matter if you dress this with "criminal intent" or not. And if it’s not stealing, then it’s a breach of privacy in the most basic form – you have the right to use your own property without interference from anyone else.
A significant part of the British government has spoken out against the recent surge of recording and tracking the general public’s whereabouts and communications.
CCTV cameras, databases recording emails, SMS communication and Internet traffic have all been in the news lately, and covered in some depth on Tech Snake. And it appears that government officials have also taken note on the intrusions into civic liberty.
People turned out in their thousands to protest against Australia’s equivalent to the Great Firewall of China.
It seems as though Australian MPs had decided a nanny state is the way forward, instead of educating the (mis)users of the internet. All but one of the ISPs in Australia refused recently to conduct trials with the new system, so it should have been plain enough to expect a reaction.
The Digital Liberty Coalition organised the rallies in every capital city on the 13th of December to bring home the message that the average Australian isn’t going to take the censorship sitting down. 15,000 were expected plus speeches from Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontiers of Australia (EFA). Read the nocensorhip.info article for details.
That’s the conclusion I came to, after finding an article on silicon.com. In an interview with Detective superintendent Charlie McMurdie, the police force in the UK are looking to create some kind of magical device that can be used like a "computer breathalyser."
The device would look on somebody’s PC for any illegal activity, such as illegal file downloads, or information on fraud. Or at least that’s what the police believe – I feel a little differently about it though, as you would expect by now..
Portsmouth, UK, is the first local authority to install a system that can detect suspicious, and possibly criminal behaviour. Dubbed “Smart” CCTV, the system’s software looks for suspicious acts and alerts its human operators if it spots anything.
I guess the system, as long as it’s backed up by people, is a good idea – after all it’s doing nothing different than the operators did before – other than allowing them to work more efficiently. Of course you can argue one way or the other if CCTV generally is a good idea, from a privacy standpoint. You can’t dispute the facts of fallen crime rates where they are used though. Reported by the BBC, the system is on trial initially pending review by Portsmouth Council.
£1 Billion has already been ploughed into a monitoring system in the UK that could make every user of technology in the country a target for Big Brother.
The system, based in a building in Benhall, and reported by TechSnake in July, is being funded to intercept all email, SMS and internet traffic to the tune of £12 Billion, once running. Reported in a post on the This Is Gloucestershire website, the move has caused councillors and MPs to question the Government’s morality.
I, personally, can’t believe what is happening. In a modern society too. It is the civil right of every person to have private communications with each other without the government spying over their shoulders. This typical attitude by government agencies is of course wrapped up in the “threat of terrorism” cliché, that is starting to wear just a little too thin. Preventing terrorism is important, but not to the detriment of every other law-abiding citizen. The fishing net mentality is ridiculous – the process is already in place whereby a government agency can get a court order to track individual’s messages for potential terrorism involvement – the government doesn’t need to employ this level of privacy invasion. So what can we do about this – in the UK and globally?
With news that Google have just got that little bit closer to providing users of Google’s Maps and Earth a more detailed than ever view of where we live, I wonder if it’s all such a good thing..
The GeoEye satellite, 423 miles about the Earth, peers down as you’re outside doing the gardening. Little do you know that while you prune your petunias, the large lens of a hi-resolution camera is watching your every move, down to a 50cm resolution. What does that mean to the average person?
The Hacker from Blighty, Garry McKinnon, has recently lost his most recent battle to prevent his expedition to the US on counts of hacking.
Gary, who is being charged in excess of $700,000 in damages, is taking his case to the European court, which is expected to take at least a couple of years before it’s looked upon again. Originally charged with hacking into the NASA computer systems, the damages really amount to the cost of upgrading their systems (and user’s education you would imagine) to counter future attacks. Surely NASA should be shaking his hand, giving him a paycheck and patting his back for showing them how to improve their systems, after accounts were hacked using the most obvious methods possible: Administrator accounts without passwords, or default passwords, all available over the net via a terminal services connection. That’s like making a guy who punched you in the face to not only pay for the surgery to your teeth, but also pay for a couple of bodyguards, and karate lessons for you, to ensure you were more prepared in case somebody else tried their luck. I’m sure we would all want it, but is it really justified??
June 2, 2009 by Paul Godden
in 'Digital Rights, Internet Connectivity, Networking, Online Service, Security'
Not happy with just blocking Blogger, YouTube and a plethora of others, the Great Firewall of China has put a stop to Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com and others too. I’m guessing that China are looking to slowly remove Chinese social networking & reduce communication generally online, in a hope to stop this pesky freedom of speech stuff. 
The court in Sweden have handed out a 1 years prison sentence for Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde. The court also ordered the 4 to pay damages of £2.4 million. Peter Sunde is quoted as saying, "Nothing will happen to TPB [The Pirate Bay], this is just theatre for the media."
The BBC demonstrated that by acquiring some software from chatrooms on the internet, they were able to set up their own botnet and take control of 22,000 user’s PCs.
A significant part of the British government has spoken out against the recent surge of recording and tracking the general public’s whereabouts and communications.
People turned out in their thousands to protest against Australia’s equivalent to the Great Firewall of China.
That’s the conclusion I came to, after 
Portsmouth, UK, is the first local authority to install a system that can detect suspicious, and possibly criminal behaviour. Dubbed “Smart” CCTV, the system’s software looks for suspicious acts and alerts its human operators if it spots anything.
