Russia has better Whois privacy laws than the U.S. or ICANN. Russia. RUSSIA!

Russia calls for an end of Whois in Dot RU � DomainTools Blog

John Young
Cryptome Org
251 West 89th Street
New Yor, NY 10024

RE: www.cryptome.org

Dear Mr. Young,

This letter is to notify you that we are terminating your service for violation of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective Friday May 4, 2007. We are providing you with two week notice to locate another service provider.

Sincerely,

VERIO INC.
an NTT Communications Company

!! Absolutely no explanation given. The site is EXTREMELY slow right now, I suspect a number of people are attempting to mirror it prior to it's disappearence. Cryptome is one of the most important anti-censorship resources on the Internet. Its existance on the net is certainly a canary in the first amendment rights coal mine. Expect a widespread reaction when it finally goes away this Friday.

Press coverage at IDG, and on Slasdot.

Update: OK, if I was a Verio customer I'd now be hopping mad. I don't agree with JYA's interpretation that this is a government conspiracy. This sounds like yet another authoritarian fool who got a job in the abuse department of an ISP and thinks they're the center of the universe.

We do not provide the customer with any details regarding the termination of our AUP - we can refer them to the AUP and more than likely they already know why -

Best Regards,
Danna Thompson
Legal Department
NTT/VERIO Inc.

Danna Thompson has obviously never run a website. No, we don't always know everything that happens on our sites and we certainly can't predict what sort of arbitrary offense might be taken to a particular piece of content. Furthermore, as JYA has proved time after time, complaintants aren't always in the right. Message: Don't do business with Verio/NTT.

Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT

Whatever his motivation, Savoy logged on to the 120 machine using the "temp/temp" username and password he had found on Mail2. He spent 15 minutes there, looking at a phonebook file, and a list of account names, and found information that led him to believe Heckenkamp had an account on the machine. He also saw what he called "computer hacking tools" and files that Qualcomm had described. Savoy made screen-print copies of these files as evidence.

Jennifer Granick has more information about the University hacking case.

Appeals Court Misfired in Hack-Counterhack Dispute

P2P enforcement forced anonymity and evasion technologies to evolve far faster than they ever would have if the FBI had been the only 'threat' to privacy online.

I agree with this conclusion. You don't really want mostly innocent people resorting to these technologies. Pressures such as RIAA enforcement have helped create these networks, and ISP Data Retention as well as laptop border searches will push it further along. If you are creating a policy situation where most people fear monitoring and prosecution you've done something wrong.

slight paranoia: How The RIAA and MPAA Unknowingly Assist Child Pornographers

That didn't take long. On Feb. 8, I posted to YouTube a clip taken from the Super Bowl: not the football, but the copyright warning the NFL stuck into the middle of it, wherein they tell you it's forbidden even to share "accounts of the game" without the NFL's consent.

Their copyright bot didn't seem to see the fair use in my educational excerpt, so YouTube just sent me their boilerplate takedown. Time to break out that DMCA counter-notification.

Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags: My First DMCA Takedown

Christopher Soghoian posted the following simple idea in response to one of a myriad of proposals floating in Government this year to turn the Internet into an architecture of control.

Declan reports that Senators McCain and Schumer have proposed the SAFE act, which would create a national database of child porn images - or I'm guessing, simply require that the FBI make their own database public. ISPs would be given access to this database, and would be required to screen traffic and alert the authorities of any user who transmits/hosts an image that matches a fingerprint in this database.

Once the infrastructure is in place for them to compare hashes of child porn, it won't be too difficult for them to start comparing hashes of music, copies of dissident literature, photographs of dead soldiers in Iraq, anti-Scientology documentation, or anything else that someone with their hand in a Senator's pocket doesn't like.

To combat against this evil intrusion into our private Internet behavior, I now introduce 'broken glass'. It is a perl script that when given an image file, will change 1 pixel's red component by /- 1. It's not enough for the human eye to see, but it will make the MD5/SHA1 hash fingerprint of the image be completely different.

Then he pulled the code, fearing that he'll be accused of aiding and abetting child pornographers.

Source code pulled until I chat with a couple legal minds.

Its worth noting that the law doesn't require ISPs to screen traffic. It merely authorizes the sharing of child porn images for this purpose. Presumably there are ISPs lined up who want to do this but presently its illegal. Soghoian's perl script is a simple example of a myriad different things that can be done to data to make it invisible to this sort of screen. But Soghoian, having already had the FBI break into his house in the middle of the night for pointing out naked emperors, thought better of publishing the code.

Consider this in light of the recent Mooninite fiasco. What is deterred by the fact that the people who were hired to hang the signs are facing years in prison? Certainly not terrorism of any sort, or any kind of behavior that might reasonably be considered malicious, but a great deal is deterred. Are those things valuable? Of course. Are they worth the cost of not throwing the book at anything you mistake for an attack after it becomes clear that its not an attack? Of course. Do I expect authority to get that? No, I don't.

Neither Terrorism nor Child Porn need create these fissures in our society. It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Thought Crime

A bill has been proposed in the Georgia State Senate which would require social networking websites, possibly including MemeStreams, to verify that minors who create accounts have parental permission. In practice this would mean that any Georgia website, no matter how benign, which allows users to create profiles, would be required to implement as yet undefined age validation procedures for all new users.

We believe that this proposal is a bad idea for a number of different reasons. We composed the following open letter to the sponsors of the legislation in an attempt to articulate our concerns.

BTW, If you are a Georgia resident and you are concerned about this issue, a polite and respectful letter to members of the Senate Science and Technology Committee wouldn't hurt.

MemeStreams response to Georgia Senate Bill 59 - 2007

To promote freedom of expression on the Internet, to protect United States businesses from coercion to participate in repression by authoritarian foreign governments, and for other purposes.

While the original version of this proposal was well intentioned I raised some serious objections to it. This version is much better. The export provisions have been cleaned up considerably and the right answers are far more likely to be reached through the process envisioned here than the one that was proposed by the prior bill.

The provisions about hosting computers have been improved as well, but it remains to be seen if the changes are sufficient to make this workable. This bill simply prohibits U.S. companies from storing personal information about their customers in "internet restricting" countries. It really depends on how people have their technologies architected, but this is at least plausible. I think minimally there should be a grace period for reaching this goal, but if anything kills the bill it will be this provision.

Unfortunately the bill that I did like last year, which funded development of circumvention technology, does not appear to have been reproposed. However, that work could be funded under the Office of Internet Freedom proposed here.

The Global Online Freedom Act is back, and this time it looks much better!

A Georgia senator worried about the safety of young teenagers who log on to Internet social networking sites such as MySpace.com and FaceBook.com has proposed a bill that would force such companies to tighten up their access to minors.

The measure would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission. Senate Bill 59 also would force MySpace.com and FaceBook.com to allow parents or guardians to have access to their children’s Web pages at all times.

Oh great. Looks like this is going to be an interesting few months. Here is the bill.

Senator wants restrictions on social networking sites | Capitol Updates

Ixquick's position:
- You have a right to privacy.
- Your search data should never fall into the wrong hands.
- The only real solution is deleting your data.
- We delete our users' privacy data within 48 hrs.
- We are the first and only search engine to do so.
- Our initiative is receiving an overwhelmingly positive response!

This search engine claims that they delete their logs.

Ixquick Protects Your Privacy!