Government can Track your Location Without Telco Help

Law enforcement agencies have been installing "Triggerfish" cell phone tower simulators which force cell phones to reveal unique identifiers. In other words, they now have the ability to track your location if you are carrying a cell phone. This requires a court order, but we all know how that story goes -- nowadays those are viewed as completely optional by those in power (not that they are all that hard to obtain anyways).

This wouldn't be all that significant (compared to other things we know about government surveillance) except that this monitoring technology is unique in that the government does not require the cooperation of any telco company to use it.

Coverage:
Daily Kos
Schneier

New Apple Computers have DRM

Seems like Apple wasn't content to only enforce DRM in its software; Apple has now put DRM in its hardware as well. New Apple laptops ship with HDCP, which disallows playing of video on all but approved devices (that is, devices that make certain types of copying more difficult). See the Ars Technica report on the subject.

French 3-strikes Copyright Law

A new, terrible law is making its way through the French senate right now. It requires ISPs to disconnect a user after three alleged copyrighted content downloads. This is an insanely terrible law for many reasons, including:

• Virtually everything on the internet is copyrighted in some form, and any "visit" to a web page requires a download of HTML, so this effectively outlaws the entire web.
• The bill, of course, is intended to apply mainly to video and audio bits. Since everyone effectively becomes a criminal under this law, selective enforcement will be the name of the game. Media companies, who are behind the whole initiative in the first place, will move to enforce the law's provisions against those who they feel are most threatening to their profits. That is, users of peer-to-peer networks.
• There is no due process mentioned in the article, (not to mention that a constant due process procedure for every internet user is way too costly for the bureaucracy) so we can only presume that these 'strikes' will be tallied at the whim of the ISPs and media companies.
• Internet access is becoming more and more of a necessity as more functionality moves on to it (communication with friends and family, banking, shopping, employment, etc.)

A commenter on Slashdot points out that this law is supported by a corresponding business interest for basically every layer of the network stack:

This law was mainly pushed by Vivendi but there are powerful backers from all across the spectrum:

* Telecoms firms that want a mandate to filter all Internet traffic so that they can block all P2P, and then VoIP, and then video streaming and then anything which competes with their monopoly products.
* Large ISPs, because these are now all owned by the telecoms firms.
* Vendors like Cisco because they want to sell loads and loads of expensive filtering equipment.
* The music industry, because it still thinks it's going to sue its way back onto the right side of history. Stupid kloten, when will they learn?
* The movie industry, because they've drunk the music industry koolaid.
* The TV industry, because they want to sell more DVDs and because their distributors in the digital age are, of course, the ISPs.
* And finally, certain software firms, because the only way to implement this law, finally, is to use a fully locked down operating system that only runs authorized software, so no Linux.

The French tried so hard to get this same law pushed through the European Parliament, but that seems to be saner.

There are similar legislative pushes all around Europe, at the national level, and for the same reasons.

The Internet is, really, under attack from concerted and powerful forces that hate what those free packets represent.