Digital Rights Ireland » Garda plans to introduce web blocking in Ireland : ‘Last year we revealed that the Department of Justice was working on secret plans to introduce internet filtering in Ireland. Now, despite a complete lack of any legislation, public consultation or democratic discussion, these plans have moved to the implementation stage.’ wtf, this is just appalling lack of oversight
(tags: gardai blocking filtering ireland politics legislation oversight isps ispai alto censorship eff)Daragh O’Brien on the Gardai’s plans to force ISPs to implement IP filtering : ‘Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.’ well said
(tags: internet filtering censorship blocking gardai isps ireland data-protection privacy)
Month: March 2011
RIM: The inmates have taken over the asylum : some notes from Blackberry’s slow circle round the toilet, as it’s hammered by iPhones and Androids. also: I can’t believe QNX is still alive
(tags: rim mobile blackberry qnx embedded phones)
Improving Linux performance by preserving Buffer Cache State : handy — a patch to rsync(1) which will not disturb the buffer cache, so that large file transfers and backups will not interfere with what’s been cached previously
(tags: performance linux caching buffer-cache rsync io cache patches backups)
ImperialViolet – Revocation doesn’t work : OCSP doesn’t work — the browser vendors have failed to implement it safely
(tags: security ssl https tls ocsp revocation crl via:fanf)L. MULLIGAN. GROCER.: Beer of the Week: Metalman Pale Ale : *excellent* Irish pale ale, brewed by ex-co-worker Grainne and her partner Tim, now on sale in my favourite pub. yay!
(tags: mulligans beer ipa pale-ale metalman coworkers)TomatoUSB : ‘an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements. Tomato USB supports many Broadcom-based routers from Asus, Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear and other manufacturers.’ Looks good — I’ve been a Tomato fan for many years — and jzawodny-approved
(tags: router tomato firmware linux routers wireless wifi)
Detecting Certificate Authority compromises and web browser collusion | The Tor Blog : ‘If I had to make a bet, I’d wager that an attacker was able to issue high value [SSL] certificates, probably by compromising [the USERTRUST SSL certificate authority] in some manner, this was discovered sometime before the revocation date, each certificate was revoked, the vendors notified, the patches were written, and binary builds kicked off – end users are probably still updating and thus many people are vulnerable to the failure that is the CRL and OCSP method for revocation.’ It seems addons.mozilla.org was one of the bogus certs acquired. Major ouch. Thanks to EFF/Tor et al for investigating this — SSL cert revocation is a shambles
(tags: security ssl tls certificates ca revocation crypto exploits eff tor comodo usertrust)
I’m uncomfortable voting for David Norris for President. Here’s why.
In November last year, he was a key voice in a Senate debate on the topic of “Protection of Intellectual Property Rights”, where he quoted heavily from the flawed judgement by Mr. Justice Peter Charleton in the Warner, Universal, Sony BMG and EMI vs UPC case. (There are allegations that he called the debate after speaking to Paul McGuinness (U2’s manager) and Niall Stokes (of Hot Press).)
In the debate, Norris quotes Mr Justice Charleton, saying:
‘In failing to provide legislative provision for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.’ Norris then says: ‘Irish law could be brought into alignment with the intention of the European directive through a simple statutory instrument.’ [1]
Now, let me clarify my position — I’m in favour of some means of resolving the level of piracy of music and movies which is widespread nowadays, and I believe there’s a mutually agreeable way to do this. But what Norris and Mr Justice Charleton propose is not it. Here are the problems as I see them.
It Lets The Internet Filtering Genie Out Of The Bottle
The big one.
The problem is that any infrastructure for ‘blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft’ is effectively infrastructure for ‘blocking, diverting and interrupting’ any communication on the net. We have to be very careful about how this is permitted, as it’ll very quickly suffer “feature creep” and become a general-purpose censorship system — the Great Firewall Of Ireland. As Damien Mulley put it:
‘first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book? And don’t think they’ll stop there too, any site that links to The Pirate Bay and the others on the hate list will probably be added to the list too…’
In Australia, the anti-child-porn filtering system was quickly used to block gambling websites, gay and straight porn sites, political parties, Wikipedia entries, Christian sites, Wikileaks, and a dentist; in Thailand, a similar system was used to block criticism of the royal family.
Will It Help? I Don’t Think So
Norris:
‘As long as Irish law is deficient, Mr. Justice Charleton has found that all creative Irish industries are losing money.’
This is quite a hilariously overblown and sweeping statement. ALL creative Irish industries? What qualifies as a ‘creative’ industry? I suspect some in this country have been involved in industrial acts of creation that made money. ;)
While they’re not Irish, the well-known indie label Beggar’s Banquet has gone on the record as stating the opposite where the current music situation is concerned —
“There’s fewer gatekeepers now. We don’t have to knock on a TV station’s door or a radio station’s door and it’s made us far more competitive. […] There’s a wide highway in front of us we can go speeding down, and it wasn’t there even two years ago. It means the majors are looking at a world where only 35 Gold Albums a year are certified compared to ten times that recently. But going above Gold in the US is not a problem for us.”
So it appears a ‘creative’ industry (albeit in the UK) is finding things not quite so bad.
Norris again:
‘the facts were established in the judgment of Mr. Justice Charleton in which he stated: “Between 2005 and 2009 the recording companies experienced a reduction of 40% in the Irish market for the legal sale of recorded music.” That is a devastating blow. […] He went on to state: “Some 675,000 people are likely to be engaged in some form of illegal downloading from time to time.”’
Without quite lining up one statement with the other, this reinforces the impression that the only reason the recording companies have seen these drops in revenues is due to internet-borne piracy. However, quoting the brilliant Mumblin’ Deaf Ro on the topic of lies, damn lies, and music biz statistics:
‘The drop in the value of Irish retail music sales was 11.7% between 2008 and 2009, which is significantly less than the 18% overall drop in retail sales for the economy that year. Digital album sales have increased by 30% since 2007 both in terms of volume and market value.’
So in other words, between 2008 and 2009, Irish retail music sales outperformed the retail sales economy as a whole!
In addition, Ro provides the following BPI figures for UK market volumes over the 2005-2009 period:
Year Albums Singles 2005 159.0m 47.9m 2006 154.7m 66.9m 2007 138.1m 86.6m 2008 133.6m 115.1m 2009 128.9m 152.7m
It’s clear that singles sales went through the roof, more than tripling. Album sales did drop however, but nowhere near by 40% — and this coincided with the general drop in the prevailing global economy around that time. He also notes that digital sales in the UK went through the roof globally on a number of metrics in 2009.
While this does not provide figures for the Irish market, I’m at a loss as to how it could be radically different — Irish and UK consumers have pretty similar musical tastes and consumption habits, I would guess.
Here’s a theory: perhaps the issue could be that “Irish” music sales are associated with bricks-and-mortar music shops selling the physical product, whereas digital music sales are associated with online services based outside Ireland, and an Irish buyer buying an album at 7digital.co.uk, or on iTunes, isn’t counted as an “Irish retail sale”? Could the problem be that we don’t have any significant Irish shops selling music online, I wonder?
Bricks-and-mortar music shops, such as ex-Senator Donie Cassidy’s “Celtic Note” (who coincidentally was quite vociferous in that Seanad debate), are indeed hurting in this new model of music consumption — and that’s a problem. But given that good, working digital music sales systems are in operation, it doesn’t necessarily appear to be due to massive volumes of internet-borne piracy, going by these figures.
Essentially, internet piracy is a convenient bogeyman, especially for the technophobic old guard, but may have little bearing on the current woes of the Irish record industry and bricks-and-mortar music shops.
(Update: a couple of days after this was posted, a pair of economists at the LSE have said basically the same thing.)
Audible Magic Won’t Work For Long Anyway
Audible Magic, which Norris suggests is IRMA’s favoured filtering system, received the following verdict from the EFF back in 2004:
‘Should Audible Magic’s technology be widely adopted, it is likely that P2P file-sharing applications would be revised to implement encryption. Accordingly, network administrators will want to ask Audible Magic tough questions before investing in the company’s technology, lest the investment be rendered worthless by the next P2P “upgrade.”‘
Naturally, encryption is widespread nowadays, so this may already be the case.
Internet Censorship Harms Our Global Image
‘do we really want to send out the message that, digitally, we’re the new France? Come to think of it, do we want to tell Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter that, digitally, we’re the new Britain?’
Right now, more than ever, we need to put out an image that we’re ready to do business on our end of the internet. Mandatory censorship systems don’t exactly support this.
In Summary
So in summary, I would hope to see a more balanced approach to the issue from Norris. Most of the problematic statements in his speech were directly sourced from Mr. Justice Charleton’s flawed judgement, but some critical thinking would be vital, I would have thought. The fact that this was lacking, particularly given the allegations of heavy music-biz lobbying beforehand, leaves me feeling less inclined to vote for him than I would have been before, particularly since I haven’t heard any clarification on these issues.
([1]: Funnily enough, an SI similar to this was nearly sneaked through a couple of weeks ago, according to reports.)
HBGary planned to “BLOW THE BALLS OFF OF NMAP” : ‘I would like to call it “B.E.S.T. Scanner” so people kind of get stuck calling it “the best scanner”. We can figure out what BEST means later.’ omgwtf. Is this guy 12 years old?
(tags: funny security humor anonymous scanner nmap hbgary open-source fail idiots)Ireland’s new coalition on media, IT & IP law | Lex Ferenda : ‘some first thoughts on how the just-published coalition agreement (Fine Gael and Labour) in Ireland proposes to deal with issues of interest to cyberlaw and media law.’
(tags: lex-ferenda law ireland ip content internet fair-use copyright tv)
Nuclear energy: Inside the black box : What’s going on inside the Fukushima nuclear reactor, and how it is hoped meltdown can be averted
(tags: nuclear-power meltdown disasters japan fukushima power electricity nuclear)
Backdoor legislation is no way to tackle thorny issue of copyright – The Irish Times – Fri, Mar 11, 2011 : good article by Karlin Lillington on the attempted sneaking-through of an SI to ‘deal with’ filesharing. agreed on all counts
(tags: filesharing piracy ireland law karlin-lillington legislation fianna-fail)
The Remarkable Notability Of Old Man Murray | Rock, Paper, Shotgun : wow, the *entire games industry* (basically) comes out to praise Old Man Murray — the influential satire site. I’d forgotten about their Time-To-Crate game rating system (which I still apply)
(tags: gaming humor old-man-murray games crates)
Old Man Murray Deleted From Wikipedia | Rock, Paper, Shotgun : more idiotic deletionism from Wikipedia. when will someone fork WP with a saner community?
(tags: wikipedia deletionpedia deletion gaming history old-man-murray web community asshats)The Telegraph – Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | A lesson for colony cousin : So much win in one article. (a) the Bengali equivalent of “craic” is, roughly, “phatiphati”; (b) “In Irish pubs, amid the tiddly-doo music, this is a craic”; (c) wtf Gadaffi references; (d) shared post-colonialist glee
(tags: craic funny colonialism bengali phatiphati tiddly-doo libya india cricket)O2’s page on their new “block 18+ content on mobile internet” policy : O2 UK have just instituted a mandatory block for all “18+” content, which is only removed once the customer pays a UKP1 fee via credit card (which is immediately refunded). Twitter is *full* of angry UK O2 users right now
(tags: o2 uk content credit-cards filtering censorship adult)
TechWire: Don’t do it, Enda and Eamon : Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through ‘3 Strikes’ by the outgoing one: ‘Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn’t worked in France. It hasn’t worked in Britain. And it certainly won’t work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.’
(tags: 3-strikes ireland adrian-weckler politics filesharing piracy filtering internet freedom)Notch on piracy: “if a pirated game is a lost sale, should bad reviews be illegal?” | PC Gamer : wish more “piracy = theft” people would think about this viewpoint. mind you, fwiw, I buy my games, and have paid for Minecraft ;)
(tags: piracy gaming games minecraft notch)
UK Government Agency wants your spam, but filters the submission address : doh (via Graham Cluley)
(tags: via:gcluley spam uk filtering anti-spam doh funny)