Monday, June 30, 2008
FBI amassing eye scan database
And the new personal information that the government is vacuuming up this week is... eye scans! It appears that the FBI is adding information about people's eyes to the already existing biometric databases of the populace. Great.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
NY Attorney General Pressures US ISPs to filter content
And this is how it all begins... under the guise of "protecting the children" and other such claims, the New York Attorney General has pressured several major US ISPs into filtering traffic. At least one ISP, Time Warner, has blacklisted all of USENET.
There can be no justification for this kind of behavior. What will happen we have seen a million times when a clueless administrator tries to close down an open network:
1) The people that this law is supposed to stop will use other channels (proxies, other USENET servers, encryption, etc.)
2) Everyone else will suffer the brunt of censorship and surveillance, until they decide to make like a child pornographer and circumvent the restrictions themselves.
3) The ad-hoc, secretive blacklist expands without notice or warning or opportunity for review by anyone, an increasing number of non-kiddie-porn sites get caught up in the filter, including sites that may be politically inconvenient for the Government (Wikileaks, Pirate Bay, etc.).
4) Government realizes it can get away with this kind of behavior, starts pressing for more elimination of "bad" things from the Internet.
5) Free speech plummets.
News coverage:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9964895-38.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/nyregion/10internet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/1819200&from=rss
There was an interesting comment on Slashdot, revealing that one can tell when Google has received a takedown notice for child porn relating to a search. Check out this search for an example (look at the bottom of the page): http://www.google.com/search?q=4chan
There can be no justification for this kind of behavior. What will happen we have seen a million times when a clueless administrator tries to close down an open network:
1) The people that this law is supposed to stop will use other channels (proxies, other USENET servers, encryption, etc.)
2) Everyone else will suffer the brunt of censorship and surveillance, until they decide to make like a child pornographer and circumvent the restrictions themselves.
3) The ad-hoc, secretive blacklist expands without notice or warning or opportunity for review by anyone, an increasing number of non-kiddie-porn sites get caught up in the filter, including sites that may be politically inconvenient for the Government (Wikileaks, Pirate Bay, etc.).
4) Government realizes it can get away with this kind of behavior, starts pressing for more elimination of "bad" things from the Internet.
5) Free speech plummets.
News coverage:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9964895-38.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/nyregion/10internet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/1819200&from=rss
There was an interesting comment on Slashdot, revealing that one can tell when Google has received a takedown notice for child porn relating to a search. Check out this search for an example (look at the bottom of the page): http://www.google.com/search?q=4chan
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
More airport madness
It appears now that you can be prevented from boarding an aircraft simply for wearing a designer T-Shirt -- this shirt (hilarious comments in the Boing Boing thread, btw) got someone banned from a flight because it depicts a transformer brandishing what looks like a cartoonish gun.
In other news, the EU is testing a flight system installed in every passenger seat that monitors your facial expressions for hints of terrorist inclinations. False positives, anyone?
In other news, the EU is testing a flight system installed in every passenger seat that monitors your facial expressions for hints of terrorist inclinations. False positives, anyone?
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