Entries Tagged 'Big brother' ↓

Here’s some updates - What the RIAA has suggested as content to ACTA:

I especially like quotes like this:

in the absence of proof to the contrary, an internet service provider shall be considered as knowing that the content it stores is infringing or illegal, and thus subject to liability for copyright infringement

I think comments are not needed…

There’s been questions coming our way about the olympics - are we going to promote it on The Pirate Bay or not. The answer is ‘No!’

First of all, sports are not that interesting! Politics however is. Helping out promoting a country like China is not in anyones interest besides their oppressive government. I’m quite surprised that the discussions about China versus human rights have been so quiet during the olympics. In my opinion the olympics should never be held in a country like that.

I feel a bit sick in my body when I see that journalists are upset that they would have to use a restricted Internet during their stay in China - and that they’re OK with going there anyhow, when the restrictions are lifted for them, personally. It’s sickening! Everybody needs to demand freedom for the people, not only freedom for some lucky ones. It’s spineless.

Today I held a speech in Malmö against the FRA law. Here’s the speech, for those interested!

Som involverad i The Pirate Bay har jag från första parkett sett hur Sverige givit efter för
påtryckningar från utländska makter.

Med det i bagaget - och med vetskap om avtalet som skrevs i April 2007 mellan Sverige och USA om informationsutbyte angående terrorism - så kan vi inte blunda för att systemet kommer utnyttjas till andra saker än vad det är framlagt som idag.

Det är inte omöjligt att USA kommer få direkt tillgång till FRA:s övervakningsmaskineri. Och även andra EU-länder har visat intresse för ett sådant samarbete!

FRA-lagen i sig är redan idag en katastrof för den personliga integriteten, speciellt med tanke på att den - tekniskt sett - inte ens är speciellt effektiv.

Därför är det viktigt att vi inte ser kortsiktigt på FRA-lagen. Ändamålsglidning är något som
historiskt sett nästan alltid skett med register i Sverige.
Vi måste sätta ner foten, oavsett vilka goda intentioner politikerna påstår sig ha just nu!
Nästa regering kanske vill utöka befogenheterna.

Idag kan vi skydda oss relativt enkelt med krypteringstekniker och liknande.
Något som terrorister såklart insett för flera år sedan.
Men i t.ex. England är det för privatpersoner idag olagligt att inte ge ut sitt krypteringslösenord när polisen ber om det.
Med enbart misstanke om brott så kan man få upp till fem års fängelse om man inte ger ut den.
Även om man faktiskt glömt sitt lösenord! Är det kanske nästa lagförslag i Sverige?

FRA-lagen är onödig, ineffektiv, oönskad och inte minst dyr. Regeringen borde lyssna på folket, det går inte byta ut oss. Vi har däremot makten att byta ut regeringen.

(Sorry for the usual Swedish, it’s probably not interesting outside Sweden anyhow…)

I tried holding a 2 min speech and I think it was almost that length. Also, I’m so happy that all parties currently holding positions in Riksdagen decided to join. And I’m happy that Jason showed up even though it ruined his schedule a bit. Over 1000 people joined the demonstration. There’s some movie footage (raw format, released under Creative Commons) downloadable.

(Update: Even though I hate watching it - my speech is viewable on facebook)

I’m not a big fan of politics. I’m not a big fan of voting. Especially not for a party that only cares about one cause. That’s my biggest problem with the Swedish Pirate Party. I prefer to vote for a party that has a sound idea about all the questions that are important, not only one. A lot of people have asked me why I’m not that fond of PP and that’s essentially the answer they’ve got.

However, during the past few months, I’ve been frequently amazed at how great the people within PP has behaved. Especially their work with the FRA-law has been something that impressed me. That’s why I today decided to support them a bit more, not just morally as I’ve noticed I have done more and more. Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for their changes they want to do (I say they’re not even going far enough, but still better than most) - but now I know that they’re needed and I know that they’re doing a good job. I will keep on having a nice relationship with them, and I decided today to put in a monthly monetary transfer to them. I suggest all of you to do this! Go to http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate (International) or http://www.piratpartiet.se/guldpirat (Swedish). Do it right now, everything helps. Also, when The Pirate Bay are getting questions about cash donations we’re now sending them the link to PP’s donate page. I hope they will gain some from this. (But just to be clear - the profit made on the TPB merch store will of course still go to Piratbyrån, who also do a really important and I would say even more interesting work.)

(No, I will not join the Pirate Party though - I’m not allowed to vote in Sweden anyhow).

Another suggestion - I just read the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. You should also read it.

So, it’s the second day at Reboot. It’s as always very nice people here, but I was a bit scared by one of the speakers that made the whole audience hug eachother and now he’s playing “Somewhere over the rainbow” which is supposed to be heartful and needy. Holding my lecture with Magnus in two hours, I have a surprise for him. Just an internal joke.

Anyhow, so many people have a hard time following the news flow about FRA so I made a small surveillance site. It monitors the news flow and collects all relevant data about FRA - just as they want to do. It’s based on some AI, which is kinda what FRA wants. But for us who wants to follow the debate, you can go to http://piratbyran.org/franews/ to see it. There’s also an RSS feed in there for those who need it. Oh, and it’s free, breaks no privacy and it’s smart. And yes, there’s a problem with the RSS containing nothing but links for now. All big Nordic media and valuable blogs are monitored by the system, so you should miss very little of the interesting news.

(For those who missed it: http://piratbyran.org/pbnews/ is the same type of thing but for piracy / file sharing related news.)

Earlier this week the Swedish stasi-government decided - against the peoples wishes - to wiretap all internet and telephone traffic in order to protect Sweden against threats. As you all know, being a neutral country makes Sweden a target for all the terrorists of the world, apparantly.

The wiretap law has been intensely discussed in the blogosphere and it’s very nice to see that people care about the subject. Interesting is also that Belgium decided to take Sweden to the Strasbourg court which I hope more countries will follow.

Many people have asked me what we’re planning to do - and the answer is “A lot!”. We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law. This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption - both for your harddrives and your net traffic. As some people know, we’re running a system for VPN-tunnels already and we’re going to lower the price for that as well and open it up for international users as well.

More stuff is planned - together with other people that work against the law we’ve talked about asking the international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden. Yes, that’s right! We want Sweden to be banned from the Internet. The ISPs need to block Sweden in order to protect their own customers integrity since everything they do on Swedish ISPs networks will be logged and searched.

One of the most interesting questions about all of this is that FRA bought the 5th fastest super computer in the world in order to handle the wiretap. But they bought it two years ago! It smells a bit rotten in my world to have that much confidence to buy a system like that without even a law passed that makes it legal to use it. Nobody discusses this issue, but I think we should dig a bit about it.

Since some of my hardware crashed, my network is still down and my blog was down for a while. I decided to move it to a temporary home (one of my development systems) so there might be some issues with missing images and so forth. No worries, it will be fixed later on.

Note on the FRA law that passed in Sweden - It’s not over yet.

The Pirate Bay moderation team just got an e-mail that to me was truely disturbing (I’ve translated it from Swedish):

Hi,

Can I unregister? I need your help…

Because of a new policy in our management company, where we work within the music industry, they’ve enforced that noone working here are allowed to have an account on The Pirate Bay. My computer have been used by many people and the company got to know that some of us have memberships, which means our jobs are on the line… Please help us remove our accounts!

This is just utterly bizarre. I’m not even gonna comment any further, the e-mail says everything about how the copyright lobby behaves - not only to the consumers but also to their own employees.

Yesterday we reported that the responsible police officer for The Pirate Bay investigation is now employed by Warner Bros.

Today, IDG news talked to the prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall about what this means for the investigation. Apparantly this is normal and has happened before. He sees no problem with this man being employed just moments after his work with The Pirate Bay case has been filed. The past two years of this mans life has been focused on finding out our intimate details, secrets, no matter if they’re illegal or not. All the information is supposed to be handled gently by the police in order to keep us, the suspects, safe. Only information that will be used in the court are supposed to reach the other party since the rest is considered irrelevant to the case. Things like sexual habits, alcohol consumption, friends, family and so on are already checked into by the police.

Roswall thinks that the copyright industry like to employ swedish police personell for their skill. Many of us computer skilled are laughing a bit about the way the Swedish IT-police forces work. They are simply not good at their job. Or well, it turns out they are good at their job for their employers-to-be.

So my suggestion to solve this is - Hire me! I want to work for the Swedish IT-police. I have been using computers for 20 years, I’ve done a lot of high-tech stuff and I have a background both in hacking and the demo scene. And I have a lot of inside information. I’ll be a perfect skilled employee and I’ll probably have more knowledge about computers and (computer-) networking than the current employees.

Also, trust me file sharers - I’ll of course be objective but there’s no worries for you, since I’ll just close down all the cases against you. And it’s not a problem, because I’ll still be objective, according to the prosecutor! And if there’s a case against The Pirate Bay, of course I’ll be objective. I might work with it, but not a problem.

Röta.

Corren och bl.a. IDG skriver idag om det uppmärksammade fildelningsmålet i Linköping.

Dessa har fått för sig att detta har nån som helst relevans för framtida fildelningsmål. Jag skulle vilja påstå att tekniken redan har gått åsidosatt den relevansen.

Mannen i målet har nyttjat systemet Direct Connect (som jag blir grymt irriterad när någon kallar DC++, vilket är en klient till Direct Connect). Idag får man nästan skylla sig själv om man sitter kvar i gamla system som Direct Connect. De flesta använder (och bör använda) BitTorrent.

Tekniken BitTorrent delar upp alla enskilda verk i små små fragment. Dessa fragment laddas från så många personer som den möjligt kan hitta. Dom fragment man redan mottagit skickas vidare till andra som tack för det man redan fått. På det viset så tar man bort problemet med att folk måste dela ut vissa mängder data för att få tillgång till ett nätverk, som ju är fallet med DC.

Därmed faller ocksÃ¥ (i praktiken) möjligheten för nÃ¥gon att bli pÃ¥kommen med “ett stort antal upphovsrättsskyddade verk”. BT tar bort behovet (och till viss del möjligheten) för att man ska visa upp allt man har och pÃ¥ det viset blotta sig som ett mÃ¥l för upphovsrättsindustrins filjägare. ÄndÃ¥ sÃ¥ kommer APB och Ifpi självklart gÃ¥ ut med desinformation som pÃ¥stÃ¥r att det finns nytta med att lagstifta kring detta, sÃ¥ man “i tillfälle man hittar en storpirat kan genomföra husrannsakan och vidta civilsrättsliga Ã¥tgärder” - vilket ju är fallet med det nya lagförslaget. Helt enkelt har tekniken gjort det omöjligt att den lagen nÃ¥gonsin kommer att kunna appliceras. Istället kommer vi fÃ¥ se lagen användas till andra ändamÃ¥l. Kanske i politiska syften. För nÃ¥gon koppling till verkligheten om dagens fildelning har den dÃ¥ inte.

Och återigen ser vi hur politikerna inte förstår frågan och därmed också missar målet.