Aussie web censorship ‘a smokescreen’
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| One of Australia’s top communications experts says the Australian government’s internet censorship trials were designed to succeed from the outset, presented no new information and are now being used by the government to further its political agenda.
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Separately, a report into the scope of content that will be caught up in the net filters concluded that the government’s policy might lead to a wide range of innocuous material disappearing from Australians’ computer screens.
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Commentators in Australia and overseas have interpreted Senator Conroy’s policy as pushing the country towards being like repressive regimes such as China and Iran.
Read more at www.stuff.co.nz |
Digital rights groups are becoming increasingly concerned about the ACTA treaty negotiations because of the lack of detail being provided. Potentially it could change the legal status quo of ISPs/subscribers. ACTA talks hone in on ISP liability and downloads |
ISPs around the world may be forced to snoop on their subscribers and cut them off if they are found to have shared copyright-protected music on the internet, under the ACTA international agreement being promoted by the US. |
Under existing laws in the US, the EU and elsewhere, ISPs are granted immunity from prosecution for illegal activities carried out by subscribers across their networks. This new global trade agreement appears to contradict the legal status quo, said Michael Geist, a law professor at Ottawa University, Canada. |
“It is unprecedented for an IP treaty that impacts literally millions of people to be negotiated in such secrecy,” he said, adding that the US negotiating stance “runs counter to the Obama Administration’s commitment to transparency.” Read more at computerworld.co.nz |
This is a fundamental technical change to the naming conventions for the Internet.
It has implications for everything from branding (name recognition with non-Latin character sets) to security (spoofing of existing trusted domains with international character sets). Internet to get new character with naming changes
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| The internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in non-Latin script, an official said. |
That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic - in which Russian is written. |
Of the 1.6 billion internet users worldwide, Beckstrom - a former chief of US cybersecurity - said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin. |
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the internet continues to spread,” he said. Read more at www.nzherald.co.nz |
The development of Internet censorship in New Zealand is largely occurring away from the public eye. Leaked paper sheds light on filtering failures |
ACMA filter trial blocked YouTube, DNS poisoning discussed |
| A technology whitepaper by ISP Watchdog, which specialises in supplying filtered internet access, is pointing to several problems with official Net censorship trials in Australia and New Zealand. |
| The whitepaper was published on whistleblower site Wikileaks |
| YouTube URLs continue to be problematic to block for hybrid Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) filtering systems such as the NetClean Whitebox that the New Zealand Department of Internet Affairs uses, and through which most of the country’s ISPs will filter their internet traffic. |
| Poisoning of the domain name system (DNS) is used by most of the filtering systems described by the white paper, but not NetClean Whitebox as used by the DIA. |
| High traffic sites such as YouTube “can seriously affect the performance” of systems such as NetClean Whitebox, the document says.Read more at computerworld.co.nz |
Governments need to ensure short URLs last as long as needed, (permanent URLs), so having their own service gives certainty.
I suggested a similar service as part of the NZ e-government programme, but suggested the ability to include meaningful shortcuts, such as go.govt.nz/passport. Does the world really need another URL shortener ? Apparently, the U.S. government thinks so. It just launched http://go.usa.gov as a link shortening service for government employees. It shortens links from any .gov, .mil, or .si.edu site. |
| Americans Don’t Like Being Tracked on Web
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According to the study’s abstract, |
| “Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. ARead more at spectrum.ieee.org |
There are only 30 large companies in addition to Google and including sites like Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube which now account for a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic Google Accounts for 6% of All Internet Traffic |
| Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic. |
This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990’s. |
The biggest trend to come out of Arbor Networks’ report is clearly that of the Internet’s consolidation. Today’s Internet is “flatter” and “more densely connected” than ever before, reveals Arbor Networks’ Chief Research Officer Danny McPherson. Not only is Google the largest traffic source, there are only 30 large companies in addition to Google and including sites like Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube which now account for a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
Crown Law to review internet publishing laws
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The Crown Law Office is conducting a review of internet publication, after recent cases raised questions over contempt of court and suppression order breaches. |
Debate was sparked during Clayton Weatherston’s murder trial this year when social networking websites posted comments from people assuming his guilt. |
University of Canterbury law faculty associate professor Ursula Cheer told Law News magazine the Weatherston, Berryman and Rickards cases were an example of a growing internet trend. |
More people were blogging and placing information on the internet, either without considering the legal implications, or in contravention of legal rulings because they felt strongly about an issue, she said. Read more at www.nzherald.co.nz |
If everyone in the world cannot own a car, can we afford everyone in the world to own a computer? This article makes the interesting observation that for many people in the world, their primary access to the Internet will be through a mobile phone. And that much of the infrastructure will be decentralised - including the power needed to run it. The Mobile Frontier - The Future of the Sustainable Network |
Everyone’s doing it - we tweet, text and surf on the go. We are constantly reaching out to the people, information and services we need to conduct our lives and businesses. We are connected 24-7, from wherever we are - anything less is unthinkable, even unacceptable. And what has all this access done? |
In countries that are energy poor, meaning they don’t have a reliable energy grid or enough supply to serve their people, a mobile network is often the only hope for connecting to the 21st century. Cell towers can be powered by wind or solar - in fact InStat estimates that by 2014 there will be 230,000 cell towers powered by solar or wind, and hopefully in the future the phones themselves will be solar powered (we have done it for calculators, why not phones). And with that connection, there is a lifeline to people, information and markets that can truly level the playing field. Read more at broadcast.oreilly.com |
New study provides opinions on the future of journalism - about 25 percent of all newspaper journalists will have lost their jobs between 2001 and 2009. Study pushes for net neutrality, new journalism models |
An all-star report calls for universal broadband availability and online community hubs |
| The wide-ranging study , released on Friday, calls for new ideas to share news and information, even as the traditional newspaper industry appears near death. |
“It is … a moment of journalistic and political opportunity,” the study said. “Information organisations, including many traditional journalistic enterprises, are embracing new media in unique and powerful ways, developing new structures for information dissemination and access. Political leaders and many government agencies are staking out ambitious agendas for openness. The potential for using technology to create a more transparent and connected democracy has never seemed brighter.” |
| The internet is “about creative destruction of that centralized model,” |
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Aussie Internet censorship
