Flickr and Obama's strange relationship

Flickr has been doing a lot of political censorship lately, the most recent taking down a mocking picture of Obama depicting him as the Joker. This is in addition to other pro-Obama censorship, including deleting the photos of a user that left critical comments on the official White House photo page. Now, this wouldn't have anything to do with Flickr signing an agreement with the Obama White House to carry their propaganda, would it?

Update: More on copyright, Flickr and the White House

Afghanistan censors its election coverage -- sort of

The Afghan government said that it expected media outlets to avoid “broadcasting any incidence of violence” between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. on election day “to ensure the wide participation of the Afghan people.” The Afghan government wouldn't have done this, of course, if there had been no election violence. Way to bring unbridled democracy to a country -- marred elections AND quasi-censorship of the press.

Yahoo censors Obama critic

Apparently Yahoo feels compelled to retaliate against those who dare to criticize politicians on its services by deleting all of their data. Rather unfortunate. I'm certainly not creating a flickr account anytime soon.

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.

A New Vanguard in Internet Censorship: Austrailia

Australia's Labor party has plans to censor the entire Internet based on a new "cyber-safety" initiative. Additionally, if you want your Internet even more watered down than that, you can opt in to an additional blacklist that will block content "inappropriate for children." Who elects these bozos?

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