Rainblog

Yesterday, I wrote a post in which I suggested that we shouldn’t shed too many tears for Megaupload, and that the subsequent DDoS served no one - except the RIAA, the MPAA, and government agencies anxious to find an excuse to extend their interference in the Internet. I believe that the DDoS actually hurts the fight against SOPA and PIPA and empowers the special interests pushing for censorship.

While we’re on the subject, go read Umberto Eco’s “Striking at the Heart of the State”, which you can find in his essay collection “Travels in Hyperreality”. The gist, briefly summarized, is that terrorism - under which heading we can include retaliatory DDoS attacks - actually serves the cause of the autocratic states or multinational corporations it claims to fight. The damage inflicted by terrorist attacks is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but attacks allow ‘the authorities’ to introduce ever more draconian schemes of control and surveillance in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’. The true enemy of autocracy is democracy, not violent direct action.

That said, the Megaupload takedown serves as an illustration of everything that’s wrong with bills such as SOPA and PIPA. As well as pirates, Megaupload also served legitimate users, who have now lost access to their files - one of the inevitable side-effects predicted by opponents of the bills. Meanwhile, there are claims that you can still access Megaupload if you know the right IP address to use. Again, one of the objections raised was that the measures proposed would be easy to bypass, and that pirates - who are highly-motivated and technically-savvy - would be the first to do so. Looks like the anti-SOPA folks were right about that too.

The takedown also illustrates that the industry doesn’t even need SOPA: they’d like it, sure, but they shuttered Megaupload without too much difficulty. The record companies’ fight with Megaupload also featured a record company making fraudulent claims of ownership in order to censor something they didn’t like (the anti-SOPA movement called that one too), US government agencies acting as agents of the music/movie industry, and foreign governments doing the bidding of the US. In short, pretty much everything that opponents of this type of bought-and-paid-for legislation warned you about has turned out to be correct, and you can find it all illustrated by the Megaupload case.

I still don’t think that DDoS was a good idea, though.

Dear Representative Velazquez

I am writing to you today to express my opposition to express my opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). 

I work for an Internet startup in New York that hosts original web video content. The company employs around 50 people; through our advertising programs we allow tens of thousands of independent creators to earn money from their work. The videos that we host include original drama, comedy, citizen journalism, documentaries and more.

We take copyright very seriously, and act swiftly in any reported or discovered case of infringement. We are both responsive and proactive in protecting the rights of copyright holders.

Existing laws, including the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, strike what I believe to be a good balance between protecting the rights of copyright owners and creating an environment in which innovative technology companies can emerge and grow. The ‘safe harbor’ provisions of the DMCA make it possible for Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and ourselves to do business, to innovate, and to create jobs, without the threat of liability or arbitrary disconnection. The DMCA is not perfect, but it sets out clearly the rights and responsibilities of each party. It protects both rights-holders and innovators.

SOPA is a different matter entirely. At a stroke, it offers almost arbitrary power to large corporations to censor or to shut down Internet sites. In recent years, there have been countless cases in which corporations have misapplied or even abused the mechanisms of the DMCA. Takedown requests have often been sent based on incorrect information or in violation of the principles of fair use. In some cases, individuals and companies have knowingly submitted illegal takedown requests that contained false declarations or that related to content that they did not own. In many cases, the provisions of the DMCA mitigated the damage done, but these cases make abundantly clear that any mechanisms put in place allegedly to ‘fight piracy’ can and will be abused.

Now imagine the harm that can be done by SOPA, which offers sweeping and unchecked new powers to those same entities that have already used the mechanisms of the DMCA carelessly, incorrectly and dishonestly. The victims of this misuse will be not only world leaders in technology like Google or Facebook, but - perhaps above all - smaller companies like ours that lack the resources to defend themselves against unfair or arbitrary use of the powers granted by SOPA. SOPA creates an environment that is actively hostile to any company involved in the business of media on the Internet. It is doubtful whether a ‘new Google’ or ‘the next YouTube’ could emerge under SOPA.

SOPA directly threatens my livelihood, but that is only one reason why I am opposed to it. As I have said, I believe that it is hostile to innovation. I also believe that it is unnecessary, ripe for misuse, and riddled with unintended and extremely dangerous consequences. You can read about some of those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s page at What’s on the Blacklist.

Above all, I believe that SOPA is contrary to what we believe in as Americans. SOPA creates a system of censorship. It hands control of that system to powerful corporate interests. It includes no effective provisions to prevent abuse of that system. For any one of those reasons, it should be instantly repugnant to anyone who believes in freedom of speech, one of the core principles of our democracy.

I urge you to oppose this dangerous and unnecessary legislation by every means available to you. Please vote against it and work to educate your colleagues about the harm that this legislation will do. Thank you.

Who decides what you see on the Internet? 

The short answer: not you.

In today’s despatch from the You Could Not Make This Up department, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have jointly proposed an Internet code of conduct. The proposed code demands that countries show respect for “human rights and fundamental freedoms”, and work to combat “criminal and terrorist activities that use information and communications technologies”. It also enjoins states not to use the Internet to “carry out hostile activities or acts of aggression”.

It would perhaps be impolite to point out that none of the four backers are really known for their enlightened position on human rights, and when it comes to “criminal … activities that use … communications technologies”, Russia might want to deal with some of its own thriving population of hackers, spammers, carders and DDoS specialists before telling the rest of the world how to behave. As for “hostile activities or acts of aggression”, there’s reason to think that neither China nor Russia are innocent of this particular charge. Of course both nations claim to be more sinned against than sinning, with the Russian government in particular denying any involvement in, say, attacks against LiveJournal or regional rivals. (These attacks are usually blamed on a few overenthusiastic patriots; naturally, the Russian state deplores such anti-social behavior).

Which raises the question: whose idea was this, and were they able to keep a straight face when they presented it?

As we slowly slip-slide down the slope that leads to increasing government control of the Internet, with politicians demanding an Internet kill switch and the ability to yank whole domains out of DNS on the say-so of the Attorney-General (or his friends in the MPAA and RIAA), the FBI has offered us another glimpse of what the brave new cyber-policed future holds for us, with a raid on service provider DigitalOne. The guardians of law and order on the electronic frontier apparently showed up with a warrant and proceeded to impound machinery, seizing, according to the New York Times, “three enclosures” worth of servers. Among the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire were DigitalOne themselves, the excellent pinboard.in bookmarking service, Instapaper and Curbed Network. Pinboard and Instapaper were able to stay online, but Curbed seems to be definitively down. None of those named are thought to be targets of the FBI raid.

The actual targets are unknown at this time, but the rumor mill says that the operation was probably aimed at Internet bad-boys-of-the-week, LulzSec. If so, it’s a predictable response to the recent burst of grand-standing by the top-hatted japesters. Just as Osama bin Laden and his homicidal pals are part of the reason we can’t fly from Dallas to Chicago without having the TSA put their blue-gloved hands in places that are usually off-limits to all but our very closest friends, scofflaw attention-seekers doing it for the lulz furnish ample pretexts for legislation and police actions designed to impose some law and order on the anarchic ‘net. If your children ask you why we can’t have nice things on the Internet any more, remember to thank the hackers (along with the spammers, the music downloaders and other solid citizens) for creating the moral outrage among the legislating classes needed to make Joe Lieberman’s American Networking Authority for the Legislative Restriction of Antisocial Persons and Environments (ANAL-RAPE) Act, 2014, a reality.

I don’t know what redress the average citizen has when the Man decides that it’s in the public interest to grab everything that draws power within an eighteen-foot radius of a suspected malefactor. Those who’ve been taken down by the FBI’s IRL denial-of-service attack may be faced with significant costs and/or loss of revenue, but I somehow doubt they’ll be getting a check and an apologetic note on Bureau stationery for their trouble. Probably the best they can hope for is to get their servers back in a few weeks.

The mood of the moment among the powers-that-be is that the Internet Must Be Controlled. While our leaders pay lip-service to the role of the Internet in mobilizing the people of North Africa and the Middle East to throw off the chains of tyranny, they view the properties of the Internet that made that possible - freedom from central control, anonymity, privacy of communication - as deeply undesirable. As state control of the Internet becomes more entrenched, we can expect to see more innocents ‘inconvenienced’ by over-zealous enforcement. Today’s raid is not so much an aberration as a model for what may become commonplace.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine your servers being loaded into the back of a police van … forever.

War is a series of tubes

A study commissioned by the OECD has concluded that the Internet kill switch favored by Senator Joe Lieberman could “cause more problems than it would prevent”. The study also found “a tendency to exaggerated language, an over-reliance on military concepts of war and defence and plenty of confused thinking”.

It’s nice that someone did the study, but I could have told you that for free.

A friend posted a link to this picture, showing a leaf whose main vein has been deliberately damaged. The picture illustrates how smaller veins, arranged in loops rather than branching structures, ‘route around’ the damage, ensuring that nutrients continue to reach the rest of the leaf. Without this looped network of veins, local damage could starve parts of the leaf and cause them to die. (If you’re interested, Wired has a video giving more detail about a recent study of looped vs. branched networks).

The picture reminded me of another article that I had read recently. Researchers studying traffic flow through the Internet are finding that traffic increasingly flows through the edges of the network, instead of across the backbone maintained by major communications companies. Peer-to-peer connections between smaller players are starting to play a significant part in the movement of data across the Internet. The Internet has always been a looped rather than branched network to some degree, but the extent and importance of the looping may be increasing.

And as any leaf could tell you, that’s probably a good thing.