Although buy atarax in us people with controlled asthma have symptoms sometimes, they are still viagra online sales able to carry out their usual activities. Therefore, people taking buy atenolol cheapest alternatives india them should avoid driving or operating potentially dangerous equipment until canadian glucophage they know how the drug affects them. Although most people discount retin-a with tracheobronchitis recover on their own, complications such as pneumonia buy quinine on internet may sometimes occur. If a person's osteoporosis has not caused viagra drug too much bone loss, lifestyle changes can help prevent osteoporosis erythromycin prescription bone breaks. The most reliable predictor of potential risk for buying generic zyprexa sudden cardiac death is a previous episode of sudden cardiac order erythromycin arrest, which means the heart suddenly stops beating. However, in buy zoloft generic clinical trials, after receiving the second dose of Shingrix, headache best price for celebrex and shivering were reported more often. Medical News Today has purchase amoxicillin online made every effort to make certain that all information is where to order diclofenac factually correct, comprehensive, and up to date. Some people worry that.

That’s the “verdict of ¬†the herd.” Herdict accumulates input from people all around the world about what parts of the web they can and cannot reach. It’s a beautifully engineered site, but requires broad participation to be useful Put a the link on your toolbar so you can report anything funny. The aggregation of a million funny observations will be profile of global information freedom and information imprisonment.

This cute Youtube video explains it all in two minutes.

Congratulations to Jonathan Zittrain and the team he led at Berkman to bring this project to fruition.

The abominably misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” seems to be gathering steam for reinstatement. I have no political axe to grind here; I’m an information free-marketeer. Can you imagine any court going along with the proposition that by government regulation, editorial opinions in newspapers have to be politically balanced? Given the First Amendment, it is hard to think of anything more un-American.

The argument goes that the airwaves are different; they are public property and there are only so many to go around. As a national resource, they should be distributed “fairly,” so that a range of views can be heard.

There are so many things wrong with this argument from a purely philosophical point of view that it’s hard to know where to begin. Should truth and falsehood be equally represented, and if not, who is to decide whether someone’s claimed truth is actually false? Do Darwin and Usher get equal time to express their views on the age of the earth?

But the fundamental problem here is that spectrum scarcity, which is the premise for its nationalization and government control, is artificial. Chapter 8 explains the reasons, but my evidence could not be simpler. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of broadcast radio stations coexist around you right now. They are called cell phones. Modern radio technology is much more efficient than that of the 1930s when the present schemes for allocating broadcast licenses were legislated.

The case for the government to dictate content of radio broadcasts is very week philosophically, but without its technological foundation, it collapses completely.

Some outrageous, utterly non-stimulative censorship language is being written into the stimulus package at the behest of the telecomm and entertainment industries. I transcribe this alarm directly from Public Knowledge. Please help!

Say No to Copyright Filtering in Broadband Stimulus

Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

1. First, infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.
2. Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

Right now, we need you to contact a few key Senators: Majority Leader Harry Reid, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee Daniel Inouye, and Chairman of the Commerce Committee Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Finance Committee Max Baucus, and senior member of the Appropriations Committee Senator Barbara Mikulski, and tell them to leave out this controversial provision.

Fax a message to these Senators NOW

or,

Call these Senators NOW via Cause Caller

Reportedly, Barak Obama’s pick to head the FCC is Julius Genachowski, a classmate at both Columbia College ¬†and Harvard Law School, and a close advisor. Genachowski was a key figure in drafting Obama’s technology policies during the campaign.

This is good news for the open-Internet movement, both because of the positions Genachowski has advocated, and because he is close enough to the president-elect to weigh in on the larger issues beyond the FCC’s specific remit, including economic growth and intellectual property issues.

No, the Chronicle isn’t censoring anybody. But I have a piece about censorship in today’s issue of the Chronicle Review.

The UK “Culture Secretary” is planning a “crackdown on offensive and harmful online activity,” according to the Telegraph. This would include a rating system like that now in place for movies. The Secretary, Andy Burnham, says,

There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.

As examples of successful rating systems he cites the systems for broadcast television (limiting what can be shown before 9pm) and video games.

I’ve already gone on a bit about Australian Internet censorship plans, and their failings. Such ideas are plainly catching on as legitimate.

But the particular way this is put shows that it emerges out of a metaphor failure. The Internet is no more like a movie theater than it is like a library. No more like a video game than it is like an encyclopedia. No more like a TV screen than it is like the postal service. Try to control one aspect of the Internet and you’ll fail. Try to control the core of the Internet and you’ll break it.

And here is a chilling passage in the Telegraph story:

Mr Burnham admits that his plans may be interpreted by some as “heavy-handed” but says the new standards drive is “utterly crucial”. Mr Burnham also believes that the inauguration of Barack Obama, the President-Elect, presents an opportunity to implement the major changes necessary for the web.

“The change of administration is a big moment. We have got a real opportunity to make common cause,” he says. “The more we seek international solutions to this stuff – the UK and the US working together – the more that an international norm will set an industry norm.”

Aux armes, cityoens! Stop these assaults. Mr. Obama, tell our British friends to leave the U.S. out of their plans.

First, the Chinese Internet censors are back to work following a bit of a break to buff the country’s image during the Olympic games. As of a few days ago, the New York Times web site became inaccessible from inside China. The press couldn’t get a comment from the government, but in the past, it has said that other countries regulate the Internet too. (Thus equating child pornography with the New York Times. Oh well, that’s what totalitarianism is about.)

And second, Gatehouse media, which publishes some suburban newspapers, has sued the New York Times because boston.com (the site of the Boston Globe, which is owned by the Times) was linking to some local stories in the Gatehouse publications. Just listing the headlines, with live link to the Gatehouse publications’ original stories. The legal issues are several — see this good analysis from the Citizen Media Law Project. It’s hard to think that what the Globe is doing is not well within “fair use” from a copyright standpoint. But either way, strategically it’s a head-scratcher. The Globe is steering traffic to the sites of obscure suburban newspapers almost no one reads. As the eloquent David Weinberger asks, why would those papers want that stopped?

Australian authorities are gearing up to test their plans to filter all Internet communications for illegal materials — child pornography in particular, but perhaps other materials as well. The test is focused on blocking access to web sites, and there have been several good articles on BanThisURL.com, a site specifically devoted to opposing the Australian plans. It’s a good object lesson in how hard it is to censor a distributed system and still have it work. Every now and then some member of Congress gives an if-we-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon-we-can-make-the-Internet-safe speech, and the Australian experience is a good object lesson in the special problems the Internet presents.

A good interview with a computer security expert appeared recenctly (thanks, SlashDot). It’s got a heavy dose of tech-speak, but it will be mostly comprehensible to a general reader. Here are a few of the main points.

1. Man-in-the-middle attacks are a big worry. That is, if all Internet traffic is routed through one machine, or a small number of machines, which check for bad stuff, then getting control of one of those machines becomes a big prize. Control it and you can read all the mail going back and forth between Gmail and anyone in Australia, for example. What you do with it is your choice — you can just shut it down if you want to be nasty, or read it and not tell anyone if you want to do creepier things.
2. Denial-of-Service attacks are another. You can make your filtering machines more secure by having fewer of them — but then it makes it easier for someone to try to choke them with thousands of requests every second. The way to beat a DOS attack is to re-architect the system, distributing its workload over thousands of machines — but then you have to worry about security at thousands of sites, bribes being offered to thousands of machine operators, etc.
3. Exploiting software vulnerabilities. If the government buys machines and software from the lowest bidder, and doesn’t install patches with daily devotion, the machine is sure to be compromised by some Bulgarian teenager who is up to date on the latest and greatest attacks and has too much time on his hands.
4. The filters probably won’t work. There are two basic approaches, each with its share of problems.
   1. A blacklist is just a list of URLs of web pages known to have bad content on them. The simplest approach to filtering is just to assemble a blacklist and check to see if the requested page is on the list, and to send back a “page not available” message if it is; otherwise pass the request along. But that would only begin a cat-and-mouse game. As soon as the owner of the restricted page realizes it’s on the government blacklist, he’ll move it to a different URL. Or some enterprising soul will set up a proxy server in another country — so you’ll send the URL of the page you really want to get to the proxy server (encrypted, so the government authorities can’t see what you’re asking for), the server in the other country will get the page and send it back to you (probably encrypted also). The government may blacklist the proxy server, which then moves its URL, and so on ad infinitum, or at least until one side gets tired.
   2. A content filter analyzes what’s actually being transmitted, photos or videos typically, and doesn’t let it through if it’s bad stuff. Now that requires the computer to recognize obscenity, which is a task most courts have a lot of trouble with. You can have a catalog of known bad photos (or their easily extracted hashes, but that’s a detail), but you’d have to keep that catalog up to date — at all the locations where it’s stored. You can flag photos for human screening by the percentage of the screen that is taken up with flesh tones, but that would begin another sort of cat and mouse game. Content filters don’t work very well, and to effectively screen out bad stuff, they have to err on the side of over-inclusiveness and eliminate lots of legal images too (Michaelangelo’s David, perhaps, or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; not to mention medical illustrations and anatomy diagrams).
5. Whatever kind of analysis is done, has to be done very quickly. Particularly when delivering video content, there just isn’t a lot of time to do the processing to figure out what you’re delivering. The genius of the Internet, as we explain in the Appendix to Blown to Bits, is that in the core, it’s really, really stupid. It just passes bit packets along. Ask it to do more and it will break.
6. And of course everything you are doing has to be kept secret to foil your adversaries. Blacklists themselves become hot property — the blacklist used in Thailand became public a few days ago. It’s interesting to leaf through it — lots of garden-variety political cartoons with no sexual imagery at all.

Meanwhile, the Systems Administrators Guild of Australia has written a letter to the government stating, in essence, that it won’t work and they can’t make it work.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal Story claiming that Google was pulling a double-cross on its pro-Network-Neutrality posture has spawned a series of imitators. Today the Boston Herald voices its editorial opinion that Google has been caught in red-handed hypocrisy, and therefore the whole Net Neutrality idea ought to be abandoned. Let the unregulated free market work its wonders and all will be well.

In fact Google explained itself quite well on the morning the WSJ story appeared. Net Neutrality is the principle that the Internet should treat all packets should be treated equally, not favoring those with a particular source or destination. What Google was proposing is called edge caching, locating its servers at points in the network where they can reduce Internet traffic to deliver the same content. It’s not a new idea — lots of companies make a nice living doing it.

Here is some of the Herald’s analogizing:

The FCC should repeal its neutrality policies. The historical accident that telephone companies were organized to connect calls in the order received should not prevent high-value Internet services from being paid for and provided separately from other services. Telephone companies early on leased private lines for exclusive use of customers willing to pay extra. Telegraph companies also leased private lines and charged for telegrams on the public wires at various rates.

But telecomm law has to do with much more than that. The telcos can’t disconnect the service of all Republicans on the eve of an election in order to make it harder for them to get the vote out. And as we say in Blown to Bits, Western Union actually was subject to neutrality legislation, after it colluded with one of the “wire services” to filter the news for political purposes. Those are better analogies for what neutrality means.

In other Google news, Warner Brothers has started to pull its videos off YouTube after failing to reach agreement on contract terms. No more Madonna or Red Hot Chili Peppers on YouTube? We’ll see who gets hurt more. It sounds like a foolish move on the part of an increasingly desperate music industry, unable to staunch the bleeding of bits and of dollars.

The ever-provocative Chris Soghoian raises that interesting question. Here’s the background.

If you buy an Adwords ad from Google — those are the text ads that appear to the right of the organic search results on the main search page — you’re not allowed to mention any trademark you don’t control. So Coca-Cola can’t buy an ad that says “Coke is better than Pepsi.” It can’t even buy an ad that says “Coke begins with C and Pespi begins with P,” even though that is plainly true as a matter of fact, not allegation or opinion.

Now the problem is that if you’re an activist or have a political cause that involves some corporate entity, it’s hard to advertise yourself if you can’t mention your adversary. So a group favoring the return of ROTC to Harvard couldn’t buy an ad that read, “Bring ROTC back to Harvard,” since “Harvard” is a trademark of the university. In practice, Google waits for the trademark holder to complain, and then takes the ad down, no further questions asked. (Actually, all ads — Harvard would just have to send one email and all ads mentioning Harvard would be taken down.)

There is nothing unlawful about Google’s policy — in fact in the unpredictable world of trademark litigation, it may be exactly what Google’s lawyers want, so that the company stays out of the middle of disputes in which it has no real stake.

But in a world where more and more information reaches the public through Google’s window, it’s a serious question whether this policy will impoverish the public discourse. In Chris’s case, he was unable to keep up an ad stating the true fact that AT&T had contributed to a particular political candidate, because AT&T — not the candidate — complained to Google. Should we care that Chris has lost this inexpensive, effective means to get his message out? Will this contribute to the tyranny of the majority, as we call it in Chapter 4 of Blown to Bits?