Hillary Clinton is back, lecturing the world on internet freedom, but thirteen months after her original speech on the topic, the dimension of the debate has changed. Back then she targeted the Chinese, whom she could confidently and credibly criticise in the wake of attacks on Google.

Last year, the secretary of state made her position clear, warning that "countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century" – a pointed criticism of China's 'great firewall' approach to a technology that many previously thought inherently democratising.

Yet after the WikiLeaks affair it is harder for the United States to so readily moralise. It is only two months ago that WikiLeaks saw its US domain name briefly taken away. Julian Assange's site was also stripped of its ability to raise money via PayPal, MasterCard and Visa.

And her speech comes on the day that civil rights organisations are in court in Virginia trying to stop the government snooping on the details of private Twitter accounts. The internet has hummed with criticism about US double standards.

Clinton mostly bulldozed past this point on Tuesday – choosing simply to assert the same set of principles again. "We are convinced that an open internet fosters long-term peace, progress and prosperity. The reverse is also true. An internet that is closed and fractured, where different governments can block activity or change the rules on a whim – where speech is censored or punished, and privacy does not exist – that ... is an internet that can cut off opportunities for peace and progress and discourage innovation and entrepreneurship," she told her audience at George Washington University.

So what about WikiLeaks? State department officials briefing about her remarks made two points behind closed doors. One point is legitimate – that the US will "always oppose the leaking of confidential information". But that fails to explain why WikiLeaks was so heavily penalised, even though the official line remains, rather implausibly, that it suffered no sanction at the behest of the US government. Instead the likes of MasterCard and Visa were simply acting, in the words of her officials, in accordance with their terms of service "without having been called to do by the Obama administration".

In a way this is all a pity and a distraction. Her argument about the importance of internet freedom is fundamental: although the Egyptian revolution carried on despite the brief shutdown of the mobile phone network, the overthrow of Murbarak was certainly enabled by it (and a regime unable to fight back online).

But her argument is tarnished by WikiLeaks, for it is too easy to say that the US failed to maintain the principles of internet freedom at a moment when its own structure of secrecy was threatened.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/hillary-clinton-internet-freedom

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20110123154937132

For years The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the music industry, but things could be about to take a turn for the worse. Over the past days rumors of a new project titled “The Music Bay” have been circling, and now a Pirate Bay insider has just confirmed to TorrentFreak that the major record labels have good reason to be afraid, very afraid.

For those who haven't been following the story, Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer, alleged members of the computer security group Goatse have been charged with Conspiracy to Access a Computer Without Authorization and Fraud in Connection with Personal Information for their alleged role in exposing a major flaw in the way AT&T was storing the personal information of iPad users. The email addresses of many in rich and powerful circles was open to exposure including members of the White House Staff.
While the Department of Justice claims these two "hacked into" AT&T databases, the reality is that they simply queried them a number of times. On a public-facing web page, you could ask the database who was associated with which hardware ID and it would tell you.
Read more: @
https://hackbloc.org/content/court-documents-case-against-goatse-hackers-reveal-use-confidential-informants

Last year saw a huge rise in malware, cyberwar and attacks on social networks, according to a report from security firm PandaLabs.

The firm's 2010 Annual Security Report, snippets of which were released at the end of last year, revealed that in just one year cybercriminals created and distributed a third of all existing viruses, meaning 34% of all malware that has ever existed was created last year

http://tinyurl.com/5vl9pqb

Company defensively registers hundreds of domain names for its senior executives and board members.

As Bank of American awaits a possible release of information from WikiLeaks, it wants to ensure that you don’t think its executives suck. Or blow for that matter.

The company has been aggressively registering domain names including its Board of Directors’ and senior executives’ names followed by “sucks” and “blows”.

For example, the company registered a number of domains for CEO Brian Moynihan: BrianMoynihanBlows.com, BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianTMoynihanBlows.com, and BrianTMoynihanSucks.com. Just to be sure, it also picked up the .net version of these names and some .orgs as well.

I count hundreds of such domain name registrations on December 17 alone. They were registered through an intermediary that frequently registers domain names on behalf of large companies.

Some of the other names are for CFO Charles Noski, Chairman of the Board Charles Holliday, and board member Charles Rossotti (who is also Senior Advisor, The Carlyle Group).

I’m not sure if this strategy will work. You can always go register BrianMoynihanBlows.info.

Source: http://domainnamewire.com/2010/12/20/bank-of-america-wants-you-to-know-its-executives-dont-suck/

http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=5900

The free software movement has unwittingly presented the peoples of the world with an important tool to avail of, on the frontlines of democracy. Many of those previously and currently engaged in the free software movement are unlikely to be fully aware of the consequences and benefits of their work and may still be living in the fantasy belief world of neo-liberalism, free markets, trickle down economics, endless growth, domination and mindless consumerism. This is simply because many of the participants just do it ( -i.e. write code) and are not in any formal way a member of anything in particular, or politically motivated. Undoubtedly global capitalism has also fed off the free software movement and gained its own benefits, but on balance it would seem it has been positive to ordinary people too.
It is clear that most people like and want to be part of something constructive and it is inspiring projects and ideas about the future that are always more appealing than the often necessary dwelling on the negatives. And this is something we need to tap into.

The next stage of development of the free software movement most likely will be just as important as the last, but it is incumbent on us all to get involved to some degree to protect the gains we have made and push it even further and help usher in the rapid cultural change needed to get society to make the necessary change to go down the path of sustainability and survive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchism#Free_Software_movement

The Free Software movement is an example of an emergent movement with anarchist characteristics.[40] The nature of the GPL and many other free software licenses is such that there is a collective sharing of resources (in this case, source code) between developers and users, thus some anarchists see this as putting into practice their perspective on private property and economic organization.[41] There is, however, little evidence that those involved in the Free Software have considered the political implications. The movement can be treated as being a large number of anarcho-syndicalist communities.[42]

The Free Software movement was started by people who believe that software should be free, and indeed this is the position of the Free Software Foundation.[43] However, large amounts of free software is written nowadays by traditional software development bodies who consider it as a better development method for many cases.[44]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchism#Free_Software_movement