By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
Having just posted about the Higgs boson, other matters suddenly seem inconsequential. Still, such a convincing defeat of ACTA in the EU gives me cautious hope we'll be rid of it worldwide. Well, until we replace it with another acronym; after SOPA and PIPA we've still got plenty of letter combinations left!
Image from RT.
In 2011 I discussed how I was giving Google the benefit of the doubt regarding their harvesting of open WiFi data, and that it was consumer network hardware manufacturers that should be working to protect consumers. I was... at least partly wrong!
From my Google's non-existent whitelists... exist post I wrote on the 11th of March 2011:
Take the street view controversy. While I think Google engineers were short sighted by not closely studying the source code of the software they put on their trucks and drove around the world, I don't believe they did it maliciously.
Unfortunately, we now know that isn't true. From Stilgherrian:
So, you know when Google’s Street View cars, the ones taking photos down every street, were also accidentally scooping up people’s unencrypted Wi-Fi traffic? Turns out the engineer who wrote the software did it deliberately, and his boss knew he did.
The European Union isn't impressed, and may reopen their case against Google. To quote John Gruber:
Uh-oh.
Back when this controversy started and people were blaming Google for stealing people's data, I read an equal number of posts from other bloggers blaming people for having open wireless networks in the first place. I acknowledged this:
These signals were being broadcast in the open, and while the scale of Google's downloading may warrant further scrutiny, it skips the real issue that people are still broadcasting unencrypted data out of their homes for anyone to gain access to.
Still, I didn't go as far as to blame consumers.
Rather than blaming consumers (which is always an easy thing to do) however, I place the blame on network hardware manufacturers for selling devices that didn't make this clearer.
Unfortunately, we now know in hardware manufacturers attempted to make security easier for consumers by implementing WPA2 standards, and in the process introduced a security vulnerability so severe it bypasses the otherwise strong encryption used by them. All of course except Apple, and I remember people chewing me out for having a Airport Extreme base station... heh ;D.
Regardless, there are a lot of issues at play here, not least the ethics of some Google engineers. Any company can/does have rogue players, but the key is transparency. Only disclosing this now rubs me the wrong way, a little.
From The CBC, of all places:
The leaders of France and Germany said boosting economic growth across Europe is a priority in their efforts to stem the debt crisis that is showing signs of spreading across the 17 countries that use the euro.
Water also discovered to be wet, and The Bird is The Word!
Okay, I posted this story to get you to click through to the original article. Angela Merkel's expression is priceless!
I woke up this morning to the news that Italy has a new President of the Council of Ministers (generally referred to as the Prime Minister in the Western press). I'd been wondering on The Twitters who they might get, and whether they'd have the same bad luck as the Greeks.
A split second search in the Book of Knowledge turned up this.
Monti is an international adviser to Goldman Sachs
They're not even trying any more.
France's new data retention law requires online service providers to retain databases of their users' addresses, real names and passwords, and to supply these to police on demand. Leaving aside the risk of retaining all this personal information (identity thieves, stalkers, etc -- that which isn't stored can't be stolen and leaked), there's the risk of requiring providers to store plaintext passwords, as Bruce Schneier points out. ~ BoingBoing
Patently absurd, insecure, and will end up only driving French web services overseas. Therefore, unenforcable.
Is Spain's rejection of proposed draconian copyright laws delaying the inevitable, or is it time to celebrate the changing tide? That was a Bittorrent pun, if you weren't smart enough to pick up on that one. Like a boss.
In late December 2010, Spain's government rejected some fairly draconian copyright law changes that were supported by... no, wait for it... US media corporations. The proposed changes would have brought Spain's laws in line with the US which is obviously very cosy with said media corporations.
Spain already has some of the most reasonable, common sense copyright laws in the world, as TechDirt describes it:
It says that personal, non-commercial copying is not against the law and also says that third parties should not be liable for copyright infringement done by their users.
Makes sense, right? I talked about these issues in a post in late 2009 about Aussie ISPs being liable for what infringement happens on their networks.
So the questions on my mind are twofold, which means you'd end up with a very small piece of paper if you started with A4, because you would have folded it twice. You'd get A5 from that, right? Anyway, that's one of the questions, the other one is this:
Alas, I think so. These guys and gals don't give up without a fight. There's simply far too much money at stake. Watch out for Spanish politicians receiving lavish gifts from anonymous doners, or alternatively some more negative forms of persuasion. Not to mention international pressure through free trade agreement stalling and stigmatisation until they adopt "ethical" copyright legislation that will "save" their industries. You're on the list Spain!
That's what this is all about, without draconian copyright laws, these giant companies stand to lose billions! Piracy is theft!
See, everyone who even entertains the possibility of performing copyright infringement would have gone out and bought legitimate copies if they couldn't download it. Every single act of copyright infringement is an automatic lost sale! I saw a guy at uni who had several hundred movies on an external hard drive, he would have gone to a store and bought ALL of them on DVD if Bittorrent wasn't there tempting him!
The big problem with Spain isn't just that its such a super evil hotbed for all the copyright infringement in the history of the universe, but that their reasonable copyright laws could spread like some sort of idea virus if more people were informed about them. That'd be just awful! Think of the children!
We need to nip this problem in the bud, even if these politicians have to keep debating it until they pass something we want. Right? Hey, sounds like Ireland and the Lisbon Treaty. That worked!
Even with good news like this, its hard not to look long term and see this as anything other than a speed bump for the objectives of mostly American media companies, and certainly the vast majority of politicians are either too clueless, misinformed or corrupt to either care or realise the long term implications of their policies.
Anyway, I applaud the Spanish government for this victory against copyright insanity and excess, but for how long this victory lasts remains to be seen.
Here's a question, if the EU Parliament adopts crazy copyright laws, Spain and other member states would be bound to them, right? Perhaps that's where more journalists should be focusing their attention, if we had more Michael Geists and less Perez Hyatts or whatever his name is. Oh yeah, and if the general public cared enough to be interested in reading about it. Oh well.