Commissioner Malmström launches censorship arms race

[mrmod]

Commissioner Malmström has been explaining to the European Parliament and to the press that her Internet blocking proposals are "only" about child abuse websites and "only" the kind of blocking that is in place in countries such as Sweden. At the same time, however, her officials have been convincing the EU's national home affairs ministries to agree in principle to measures to develop legal powers to destroy web resources outside the EU anywhere in an area covering the majority of the northern hemisphere.

Buried in the Commission Communication on the Stockholm Programme adopted in June 2009 was a proposal to allow the EU to launch unilateral attacks on Internet resources in countries that rely on the RIPE NCC regional Internet registry in The Hague. Internet access or hosting providers considered to be involved in "criminal" activities (which would include alleged intellectual property infringements if the planned IPRED II Directive is adopted) anywhere in the RIPE area, which covers south-western, central and northern Asia as well as all of Europe, could be completely removed from the Internet under the measure.

After her own government rejected the proposal to include this policy in the Stockholm Programme, Malmström's services successfully pushed to have it included in the "Council conclusions concerning an Action Plan to implement the concerted strategy to combat cybercrime" adopted on 26 April. The text is very light on details at the moment, referring only to the adoption of "a common approach in the fight against cybercrime internationally, particularly in relation to the revocation of Domain Names and IP addresses".

The free speech dangers of countries giving themselves unilateral powers to destroy foreign web resources were very clearly illustrated in 2008. A British citizen living in Spain had been providing tourism services to Cuba for almost ten years. From one day to the next, all of his web resources disappeared. On further investigation it turned out that the United States had exploited the fact that he had registered his domain names through a US company to delete his entire web presence. While the EU's plans would allow this type of attack also, they go much further, as they would permit the destruction of entire ISPs, including all of their websites and all of their internet connections.

Source



Kinda of old news, but aren't you worried about this? There is a chance it could pass .

Gives your thoughts...

[srijantje]

yes very worrying.
interesting how the map is devided with most "undeveloped"countries without censorship,probably because they don't have the resources,but none the less.

[billy]

personally i think she and her cronies should be shot.

we already have laws concerning child abuse/porn in place already. strengthen them by all means but if they do it shouldn't need a bill that covers anything else.
we also laws concerning internet crime. it's obvious they're more possible about controlling every aspect of the internet than being interested in real crimes.

they have an agenda put forward by film and music industries.

it's a shame that for 1 month. that we can't get it so no one goes to the movies and no one buys a cd.

an impossibility i know but what a message it would send.

[billy]

No politician wants to stand up for unfettered freedom of speech.

It is always about how society now needs to protect itself against the perverts and the pirates who abuse the Internet for their own ends.

i can understand that to a certain extent.

what i can't understand is using something as serious as child crimes as a knife point come stepping stone to cut out the heart of file sharing.

[billy]

The Internet allows any PC in the world to open a TCP connection to any other PC in the world,
and then move a completely private and encrypted data stream through the connection.
For many people, this is an unacceptable and dangerous level of free speech.

and thats a sad state of affairs when the few with the help of unnamed backers try and control that free speech. a free speech they're not really bothered about on a moral level. it's often a financial paradigm that tries to control the nets free speech.

[srijantje]

http://freenetproject.org/

anybody knows anything about this?would like to have your opinion on it

[billy]

sounds like a great option for those who live in an internet oppressive regime such as china.

is there any way tp speed the up/downloads. i see because of the configuration filesharing is slower.

does anyone now by how much ?

[billy]

and i suppose for it to that it would need an abundance of servers?

[billy]

The number of servers (or participating machines) is part of the problem.
Effective file sharing is based on direct connections between the seeders and leechers.
Any system that employs intermediate relays, from using VPN hosts (single relay) to participating in networks such as Freenet or TOR (multiple relays) will cause a dramatic drop in file transfer performance.

that makes sense.
i don't think it will be long before we see a dramatic change in the way we share files though. i know we've had clouds for a while but i can't see that as a viable alternative. i'm not geeky enough to have an answer or solution but someone out there will be

[srijantje]

you see that changing any time soon?there must be lots of people working on that

[billy]

i would say so.

at present i'm okay re downloading but that can always change
the sooner those in the media realize they need to change their business model to embrace p2p the better for us all.