Actual cause of Internet slowdowns

An extremely dangerous law has been passed in New Zealand and goes into effect on February 28, 2009. This law enables a person’s internet access to be permanently terminated if they are accused of copyright violation three times. No trial. No judge. No jury. No conviction. Just an accusation by a copyright holder.

We’ll get to the legal stupidity of this in just a moment. Let’s establish why this matters: because this is 2009, and the Internet is no more optional than power or water to a civilized society. Banned from the ‘net, you and your children will be at an increasing disadvantage in education, commerce, career advancement, and more.

There’s a long litany of lawmakers and judges who enact legislation, set precedent, and make policy decisions regarding the Internet that, at best, illustrates how uninformed they are and, at worst, encroaches upon fundamental freedoms that are supposed to be protected by the laws of the land in which they reside. This law, specifically Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act in New Zealand, may just take the cake for dangerous ignorance in the realm of legislation aimed at controlling the Internet. Well, ignorance in the case of the lawmakers at least, but the organization pushing for such laws can hardly claim ignorance. This is exactly what they want, and they’ve been pushing for something similar in the USA. What organization would that be? Wait for it…wait…

…Oh yes! Our old friends the Recording Industry Association of America/New Zealand/[insert country name here].

The RIAA and its international devil spawn have become notorious in the last few years for extorting thousands of dollars at a time out of mostly clueless individuals by threatening to sue them for copyright violations. Not suing — just threatening to sue. Basically, they would say “pay us $5,000 (or whatever) or we’ll take you to court, which we can afford to do and you can’t.” I’m not kidding, they did this to thousands of people and got away with it for awhile. Some of the accused, however, with the legal and financial backing of groups like the EFF, have called the RIAA’s bluff and in many cases won because the RIAA actually didn’t have any proof these people were knowingly infringing on copyrighted material. The RIAA had “logs” that simply were rarely concrete enough to a identify a specific individual. For example, people were sued because they had open wireless access points and neighbors shared music through it — OK, not a smart thing to leave your wireless AP open, but there’s nothing in our laws that makes it criminal, nor that makes you responsible since you weren’t “knowingly” sharing copyrighted material. Or more often, records and IP addresses got mixed up at the ISPs (some of whom just handed this stuff over to the RIAA, shame on them), and the wrong person was fingered. Most often, the accused simply didn’t know they were sharing music or movies, because their computer was just infected with some really nasty stuff (as unmaintained Windows machines can be) and was acting as a file-sharing hub for all the internet. Ignorant users? Yes. Criminal? Hardly. You want to slap them with something, slap them with a “how to properly use a computer” book, not a lawsuit where the payment goes to a huge media corporation.

But wait, we’re not done. I’m still not to the law passed in New Zealand. Just so you know how specious it is that the RIAA should be allowed to serve as judge, jury and executioner in this “three strikes you’re out,” “guilt upon accusation” law, consider their record with their traditional lawsuits. The RIAA has sued dead people, a woman who was getting a transplant (they won a default judgment against her when she didn’t respond to their request…hmm, wonder why?), and another woman who has never bought, used, or even turned on a computer in her life. In one instance, even after the court smacked down the RIAA because they were suing the wrong person in the household, the RIAA argued that the defendant could still be held liable because “the computer may well have been in a common area such that defendant heard music coming from the computer when [the] admitted infringer … was using it.” Yes, the RIAA was arguing that simply hearing music coming from a PC is copyright infringement. When they lost that court battle too and the court ordered the RIAA to pay the defendant’s attorney fees, the RIAA appealed the order to pay the fees so that other individuals might still be scared of going to court, and they could go back to their extortion scheme.

This, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg, just a tiny sampling of what the RIAA has done and how they have extorted people and abused the legal system over the past decade.

The law about to take effect in New Zealand, as I said, allows for any user to get banned from obtaining personal Internet access if they get accused of copyright violations three times. Accused, not convicted. By the copyright holder — often, the RIANZ. Somehow, either through bribery and kickbacks (probably — the RIAA et al spend hundreds of millions of dollars around the world on lobbyists and legal fees) or sheer, astounding ignorance (probably some of that too), the law was passed by the New Zealand government. In addition, it changes the definition of ISP to include anyone who runs a DHCP server — in layman’s terms, basically anyone who provides a shared internet connection. Have a home router? You’re now an ISP. From the Creative Freedom Foundation site:

ISPs now include businesses, schools, libraries, government departments and any organisation that provides internet services. Odds are, you’re an ISP.

Why is this important? Because under the new law, ISPs have to keep records of all internet activity through their network for a period of two years, just in case the police need to come sifting through in order to confirm future accusations. This could come at significant cost of both time, money, and manpower for everyone now identified as an ISP.

So let’s review: the Recoding Industry Association, which has been pushing for this type of law almost everywhere, including the United States, finally managed to get their baby passed in New Zealand. It will allow them to kick anyone off the Internet simply by accusing them three times of copyright infringement with no trial, no due process, no proof, nothing. This is a vile, horrible, dangerous law and of course has ignited the attention of a great deal of the ‘net in the hopes of getting the word out before it goes into effect.

But how did it get passed in the first place? Here we come to the really important part, at least for the rest of us. In our government, like in many, there’s a representative who is in charge of education plans and policy, of energy policy, of transportation policy — all people who spend their energies on one area of public infrastructure and who are responsible for making sound decisions for their field of influence. For the most part, this works. And that’s why scary laws like the one in NZ and other disturbing digital surveillance and anti-privacy laws here in the US have gotten passed — because there’s no one person in our government responsible for the Internet. Fortunately, President Obama has pledged to appoint an “Internet Czar” (terrible name) or “US CTO” (Chief Technology Officer) to do just that — and it’s quite evident that we need it. One tactic of the RIAA is to attach “but there could be child porn!” to any legislation to get it passed. For example, discreetly through lobby groups, the RIAA has tried at various times to make all P2P software illegal, to require ISPs to log all P2P traffic, and has encouraged legislation empowering the FBI and other federal agencies to have ridiculous power over the Internet because “P2P networks are rife with child pornography.” Few politicians with a hope of reelection are likely to vote “no” on a law billed as preventing child pornography, no matter how stupid or unjust it is, so combating these ridiculous proposals is quite the uphill battle for people who actually — how do I put this — “get” the Internet and…what was the other one…oh yeah, the Bill of Rights.

These battles and the RIAA’s idiocy have been going on for some time now, but I never want to miss the opportunity to make regular people — non tech-industry folks — aware of what’s going on. There are several salient points to be made here:

1. The Internet is not optional in our society, just like power is not optional, water is not optional, basic education is not optional.
2. Any lawmaker who allows an independent, for-profit organization to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a matter of law should be immediately removed from office, slapped in some way for egregious ignorance, and perhaps put on trial (if possible) for the civilian equivalent of dereliction of duty of a public officer and disregard for the Constitution of the United States.
3. The RIAA needs to have the tables turned on them. THEY should have a “three strikes” law levied against them, perhaps — three frivolous lawsuits and you’re done, you can’t file any more? Would be nice.
4. Be aware of this kind of thing and contact your representatives if you hear they’re on a committee that’s considering such a law. It’s less likely something scary will be passed with the Obama administration, which seems to have met the Internet, unlike the Bush administration, but it’s still possible. There’s at least as many idiots as smart people.

Let me make something clear before I conclude: I’m not saying copyright violation/piracy is OK. Not at all. Especially as a content creator myself (in the form of software and user interfaces), I understand that copyrighted content needs to be protected and the creator should received their due. What is not OK is the RIAA extorting people and then being handed the power to remove them from the Internet without the involvement of any legal or governing body whatsoever.

Everyone hope for the best for our friends in beautiful New Zealand. And send dark, evil thoughts the RIAA’s way.

A few more stories about the RIAA

• Academics warn of EU ‘three strikes’ back door plan
• RIAA ordered to shell out $100k for P2P witch hunt
• Judge approves public broadcast of RIAA lawsuit * I love this one

Disturbingly, Davis (who was the judge on the original trial) had bought into this argument, and had issued an instruction to the jury (Jury Instruction 15) that they could find her guilty under those conditions. However, he called both parties back to his courtroom last month of his own accord, and said he may have committed a “manifest error of the law.” He then ruled that the instruction given to the jury was erroneous and “that error substantially prejudiced Thomas’ rights.” Hence, a mistrial.

Davis’ decision isn’t going to stop these types of cases, but it at least is going to force the RIAA to actually prove someone guilty rather than just threatening them or sweet-talking the courts into being on their side. Thomas is still going to have to go through another trial, but the RIAA will be required to demonstrate that she actually distributed the songs, rather than just making them available. Which is how it should be, because up to this point it’s almost as if Thomas (and others) had been convicted simply for loading a gun but not shooting anyone with it. The RIAA’s tactics severely violate the “innocent until proven guilty” statute that is the basis of our criminal justice system (or is supposed to be…horror stories from air travelers especially make you wonder what country this is), and they seem to think that’s perfectly fine. Actual quote from RIAA lawyer:

“Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners’ rights online – and would solely benefit those who seek to freeload off plaintiff’s investment.”

So, the RIAA shouldn’t have to actually prove someone’s guilty because…that would be too hard? Yeah, better that the courts just take the word of a special interest group. That always works out great. Apparently they believe they’re exempt from the law when gathering their “evidence” for these trials too.

Naturally, this has many people concerned about the security of their data. Privacy advocates in particular are very wary of the sheer volume of information that Google collects and stores on each user. That being said, the general consensus (and please note I said “general” — there are of course dissenting opinions) is that in today’s world your life is online (in some form) whether you want it to be or not, and Google is a pretty friendly company that tends to do its damndest to protect its users. In other words, it’s widely believed that in general Google adheres to their “do no evil” policy, and consequently enjoys a rare level of likability for a company of its size.

But however careful and diligent Google is about protecting all that data from theft, abuse, exposure, and misuse, they can’t avoid overreaching judges and politicians who engage in practices of questionable constitutional merit in the interest of “protecting” someone from something — though they never seem to be protecting you and me, but more typically large corporations and/or “national security” (which has, in my opinion, become one of the most disgusting phrases of the decade for how often it is used to toss the Constitution and Bill of Rights out the window).

Today, a federal judge ordered Google to turn over trillions of Youtube access logs to media giant Viacom (which owns Comedy Central, CBS, Nickelodeon, and dozens of other properties). The logs show which videos are viewed most on Youtube by which users, which Viacom is particularly interested in as part of their $1 billion lawsuit against Google alleging that the search giant built a business by willfully infringing on copyrighted works. Although it appears that Google is asking to be allowed anonymize the logs before handing them over, I think the real danger here has become clear. The problem isn’t that Google might do something misguided with all this data; the danger is simply that they have the data, which gives other companies the opportunity to acquire it through (shadily) legal action. Even if you trust Google, you can’t trust the government very much these days.

The lawsuit is crap, of course, and the reality is that the execs of these huge media corporations are too outpaced by today’s technology trends to adapt to the market, and they think they can still control every last frame of video they produce. What they simply don’t get is that once they put it out there for consumption, the game’s over. They need to stop trying to control people’s lives and refocus on the quality of content and how they deliver it. Their current strategy, rather than improve their own offerings, is just to continually sue everyone they see, but that doesn’t solve the problem. If these companies put half of the energy into building new business models that they do into litigating, they would solve their own problem overnight. But I could go on about that for hours…that’s another post entirely. It’s amazing how people who get paid millions of dollars a year can be so short-sighted.

CNN: Youtube ordered to reveal its viewers

If you were looking for concrete evidence that sky-high gas prices are affecting consumer buying habits en masse, look no further.

The Ford F-150, which has been the best selling vehicle in America for 17 straight years, has, in May 2008, fallen to 5th place behind the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Toyota Corolla, and the new best selling vehicle the Honda Civic.

All four of those well-built vehicles offer a lot for the money and get about 30 mpg or better on the highway, while most full-size trucks are about half that. With $4 gas, a lot more people appear to be asking themselves the question, “Do I really need that truck?” As I’ve personally pointed out for years, most people who drive them don’t actually need them.

Source: Autoblog

In less than a week, no less than four undersea cables to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) have been severed, severely disrupting Internet access and crippling businesses and some government operations for a number of middle eastern and Asian countries. Just *snip* — cut, after years of perfect operation. Four in a week. And things are reportedly “beginning to get suspicious.”

Beginning to get suspicious? I think we’re way past suspicious. Is it just me, or does this seem like one of the unsung ways in which the third world war might start? I see deep sea divers with acetylene torches…

OK, I’m sure I’m overdramatizing. At least I hope I am. But this is clearly serious. Imagine if Internet access in the US went down — credit cards wouldn’t work, banks would be more or less frozen, the stock market couldn’t function, and the government would function even less than it does already, to say nothing of everything you personally depend on the Internet for every day. And imagine that the cause of it wasn’t just a power outage or something, but because four critical cables had been individually cut.

Internet traffic is being rerouted through other cables for the time being, but they’re strained to capacity and apparently not everything is completely operational. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, that’s for sure.

Phaser II detector

The first was for the automotive Phaser II radar/laser/whatever speed trap detector. The commercial began in that typical loud, excited announcer voice, and immediately said this:

“The Phaser II! The only detector you’ll ever need! Banned in eight states!”

They were clearly excited about how it was so good it was — literally — illegal in some places. Oh, and they repeatedly offered:

“If you do get a ticket, we’ll pay for it!”

OK, so…I’m just going to go ahead and speed, as long as I don’t have too many points on my license. Great, thanks.

Staples

The second commercial was less amusing and more offensive. It began with that old recording of Neil Armstrong’s famous words from the moon:

“That’s one small step for man…one giant leap–”

Which gets cut off by something along the lines of:

“We interrupt this broadcast for some important news you can really get excited about…”, etc, said in a very condescending way. You want to know what this “important” and “exciting” news is? That Staples now carries Dell print toner and ink cartridges. How…exciting. It then ends with “And now, back to that other thing…”

Talk about insulting. I understand the whole “interrupt this broadcast” ad premise — it’s been done many times before. But Staples picked the moon landing, a monumental scientific and technological achievement for which thousands of people worked incredibly hard and sacrificed much…in some cases — and here’s what really rubs me the wrong way about Staples using this — they sacrificed their lives. As if there isn’t too little appreciation for the space program already, Staples just trivialized one of the greatest human success stories of all time and made it the punchline of a stupid commercial.

It’s incredibly poor taste. I’ll never buy from Staples again; from a cursory search on Google I found, to my relief, that I’m far from the only one with this reaction to the ad.

So hold onto those old bulbs — they’ll be antiques soon!

“You know what the word ‘meteorologist’ means in English? It means liar.”

For lack of a better place, I usually get my forecasts from Weather.com. Over the years though I’ve developed an innate sense of what I can partially trust and what I can’t trust at all. For example, I can usually trust anything they say will happen within the next 12 hours. Usually. The 10-day forecast, though, is a complete joke, because over the course of 10 days each day’s prediction will change almost 10 times.

Then you have gems like today. I’m sitting in my office in downtown Indianapolis, and wondering if it’s going to rain soon. I go to Weather.com, which reports that today’s high is 81 F (it’s currently 83 F…interesting), and there’s a “slight” chance of rain at only 30%. The radar, meanwhile, is this:

…which I’m fairly certain a monkey could interpret to mean there’s a greater chance than 30% for rain.

Can someone recommend a place to get my weather from that doesn’t suck? The only thing I like about Weather.com is their interactive radar map. Other than that, I’ll be happy to leave the totally inaccurate predictions behind…not to mention the rest of their web site which is so chock-full of animated flash advertisements that I can feel my computer grinding to a halt whenever it loads the page.

(P.S. This post is a true test to see if Kim ever reads this site anymore )

Some of you may know I frequent the popular social news web site Digg.com. On Digg, users submit stores they find from around the web and other users “digg” (vote) those stories.

Yesterday, a string of letters and numbers that completely unlock the new encryption system being used on HD-DVDs (that’s High Definition DVDs) started circulating on the Internet. The MPAA, of course, which is perhaps the only organization that gets more excited about robbing people of their fair-use rights than the RIAA, does not want that key out and about, or people might actually be able to (gasp) backup their movies. So they started issuing cease-and-desist orders to any web site that had the key posted, and most complied.

The real backlash, however, came when Digg started removing story submissions that contained the key. If you’re not a member of Digg, you need to understand that one of the holy principles of the community is that it is governed by the community. Good stories make it to the front page; bad stories get buried. When Digg bent over for the MPAA and immediately started removing stories, the community responded…with unprecedented force.

The revolt had been picking up earlier in the day, but when I visited Digg.com at about 10:00pm EST, every single front page story — all 15 of them — referenced the key in some way. It was encoded as a screensaver, as web site color hex values, as the title tag on a site, within a JPG image, in a domain name, and in just about every other creative way imaginable. People have even created CafePress shirts, mugs, hats, etc…and unless the MPAA is going to come into your home and steal your coffee mug or rip the shirt off your back, they can’t stop this.

What makes this truly significant is that Digg.com CEO Jay Adelson posted on the Digg blog today that they must censor the stories because of the MPAA, or risk legal action. Now, users of social sites like Digg hate DRM (Digital Rights Management) to begin with, because they cause headaches and limit fair use rights, and when the overseers of Digg — a democratic community — started censoring stories, the results were staggering. What Digg faces now is a serious conundrum. The company, which just a couple years ago was a tiny startup, now features well over a million users, tens of millions of hits a day, and is valued at dozens, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars. And they must make a choice: do they allow the stories about the key, and risk the ire of the MPAA? Or do they continue to fight a losing battle against stories about the key, and alienate even more readers than they already have? With people encoding the key in everything imaginable, and even posting the key in comments about stories that are totally unrelated, the only way they can completely censor it is to shut the whole site down. What a position to be in.

What do you think? From my standpoint, as someone who follows the digital world closely, this is a stunning manifestation of the frustration that consumers have with DRM encryption — and the astonishing tactics by the RIAA and MPAA that attempt to gag people and restrict their rights. This type of revolt always starts with the people in-the-know, but eventually this will make its way to the general public. Music companies have already started to get the message — EFI has started selling most of its catalog DRM-free, and people are buying it. One day, the MPAA might get a clue and stop spending billions on encryption schemes that ultimately do more to frustrate honest consumers than determined pirates.

UPDATE 2: Digg.com is behaving very erratically under the onslaught of users determined to punish them and the MPAA for censorship. Stories’ digg counts are fluctuating wildly (in the span of 1 minute, the submission for this article went from 42 to 70 to 54), comments are appearing and disappearing, and a story even showed up on the front page with only 1 digg.

You have to wonder at the mental states of these overpaid gasbags who are in charge of enormous companies, and in turn responsible for tens of thousands of employees’ and shareholders’ (and even the economy’s) livelihoods. Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, has responded vehemently to the Bush administration’s proposal that automakers must raise CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) and CO2 standards 4% per year over the next several years (I know, Bush doing something good for the environment — shocking, although it took 10 states suing the federal government to make it happen). Lutz has now created a standoff of sorts, saying GM will halt development on a number of RWD vehicles, the very cars that many people are looking forward to and that are supposed to get GM out of its profit rut. He said to the Chicago Tribune, “We’ve pushed the pause button. It’s no longer full speed ahead.”

Lutz claims that improving the fuel economy will raise consumer prices by $5,000 because of the investment required by the automaker. And here’s his logic-bomb on why raising CAFE is not a good idea: “If we legislate CO2 from cars, why not legislate we take one less breath per minute since human release capricious amounts of CO2?”

What? Did the man really just compare exhaust from cars to a person’s right to breathe? And now he’s holding hostage some of the very vehicles that are supposed to save the American auto industry? What an idiot.

That car behind Lutz in the above image is the new Pontiac G8 — one of the awesome new vehicles that might be delayed (Motor Trend described the G8 as an “American M5″). That was the one vehicle that may have actually made me consider purchasing something from GM, but I think Bob Lutz’s attitude just killed any chance of me shopping with the General. Since Ford’s cars are boring and breakable, and Chrysler has lost their way and is now being sold, looks like I’m once again looking at just the stuff from overseas, where they actually know how to make cars and make a profit at the same time.