China to to Require Web Filtering Software on All PCs

Via: Wall Street Journal:

China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.

The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from “harmful” content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China’s security ministry and military.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Chinese government has a history of censoring a broad range of Web content. The new requirement could force PC manufacturers to choose between refusing a government order in a major market or opening themselves to charges of abetting censorship.

The software needn’t be preinstalled on each new PC — it may instead be shipped on a compact disc — giving users some choice. But if installed, foreign industry officials who have examined the software say, it could transmit personal information, cause PCs to malfunction, and make them more vulnerable to hacking. It also makes it difficult for users to tell what exactly is being blocked, officials say.

A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard Co., which has the largest PC market share of any U.S. vendor in China, said the company is “working with the government authorities and evaluating the best way to approach this. Obviously we will focus on delivering the best customer experience while ensuring that we meet necessary regulatory requirements.”

You Tube Free Speech Purge Accelerates, Infowarrior Channel Banned

But more Alex Jones videos appearing on video networking site than ever before as censorship backfires

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, May 12, 2009

You Tube accelerated its aggressive purge against free speech today after the video networking website suspended the Infowarrior Channel, which was the replacement for the previously censored Alex Jones Channel.

When attempting to visit the Infowarrior Channel this morning, one is met with the message, “This account is suspended.”

Just as before, no credible reason has been provided for the suspension of channel. The original Alex Jones Channel was suspended because You Tube claimed that showing a computer print out of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette news article on camera constituted “copyright violation,” despite the fact that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette denied ever making a copyright complaint.

The real reason for the censorship is of course You Tube’s move towards becoming nothing more than a corporate shell for big studio production companies. The company is hemmoraging money because its current format is not a sustainable business model. However, despite doing what any normal company would do in such a situation and accepting advertising, You Tube has decided to just hand over the direction of its whole content to corporate interests.

According to communication we have had with You Tube employees, You Tube has abandoned any pretense of copyright claims and is now embarking on a blanket campaign to ban all Alex Jones videos from their website.

However, You Tube’s decision to ban both the Infowarrior and the Alex Jones Channel has seemingly backfired, with more Alex Jones videos appearing on You Tube than ever before.

A general video search by date of the term “alex jones” on the You Tube website shows that You Tube users have met our challenge to fight back against Internet censorship, not by admitting defeat and abandoning You Tube, but by bombarding the website with more Alex Jones video uploads than ever before.

Not only are there multiple times more Alex Jones videos being added to You Tube on an hourly basis, but they are being uploaded from numerous different user accounts, making it difficult for You Tube to target individual accounts for suspension.

At time of writing, the first two pages of Alex Jones related videos, when one searches by “recently added,” have been uploaded by no less than 14 different user accounts.

Screenshot shows different Alex Jones videos being uploaded by numerous different user accounts.

The London Daily News has now picked up on the story, reporting on its website, “Radio and internet journalist Alex Jones has been censored by the internet giant Youtube with the removal of the “Alex Jones Channel” from the site, causing revulsion across the United States and Europe, in what is increasingly being seen as another example of a “Big Brother” intervention in the democratic process.”

“Increasingly YouTube has been scorned for its move away from its foundation of “free speech video” to being seen as part of the establishment it tried to redefine when it was first established,” states the report.

In a related development, Google Video has now suspended all new content from being uploaded and is re-directing users to You Tube, where full videos longer than 10 minutes cannot be uploaded without a special “director” account.

“If current videos will remain online, and for how long is anyone’s guess. The move to suspend all new content from being uploaded adds another attempt to the growing list of methods used to remove viral content from the Internet that is damaging to the Establishment and the New World Order,” writes Mark Dice of the Resistance Manifesto.

We would normally encourage people to subscribe to the new official Alex Jones channel on You Tube, The Infowarrior, but since that has now also been banned we can only reiterate our challenge for You Tube users to continue to upload Alex Jones videos in large quantities in order to break down the electronic Berlin Wall that You Tube and other large video sharing websites are apparently trying to erect at the behest of their corporate masters.

You Tube’s disdain for free speech is rivaled only by their unsurpassed stupidity. Don’t they realize that the more Alex Jones channels they ban, the more resentment they will create amongst You Tube users? This will only lead to more Alex Jones related videos being posted on You Tube. In engaging in this wanton censorship, You Tube is only making a rod for its own back.

While allowing all kinds of x-rated trash to appear on a website that is frequented by millions of children, You Tube is waging a war on free speech and the alternative media by consistently banning our video channels under phony pretexts invented as a way to hide the real reason behind the purge – You Tube’s transformation from a much-loved and popular user-driven video website to a hollow shell that puts the interests of its corporate sponsors above those of the people who helped make it one of the biggest websites in the world today.

Perhaps You Tube should be renamed “Corporate Tube,” because the “You” is certainly being taken out of the equation altogether.

Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists and Hackers for Years

The software’s primary utility appears to be in tracking down suspects that use proxy servers or anonymizing websites to cover their tracks. That’s illustrated in several cases in the documents, including the 2004 hunt for a saboteur who cut off telephone, cable TV and internet service for thousands of Boston residents. The man’s name is redacted from the documents, but the description of the case matches that of Danny Kelly, an unemployed Massachusetts engineer.

According to court records, Kelly deliberately cut a total of 18 communications cables belong to Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and others over a three month period. In anonymous extortion letters to Comcast and Verizon, Kelly threatened to increase the sabotage if the companies didn’t begin paying him $10,000-a-month in protection money. He instructed the companies to deposit the cash in a new bank account and post the account information to a webpage he could access anonymously.

When the FBI tried to track him down from his visits to the webpage, they found he was routing through a German-based anonymizer. The FBI obtained a warrant to use the CIPAV on February 10, 2005, and was apparently successful. Kelly went on to plead guilty to extortion, and was sentenced to five years probation.

The CIPAV also played a previously-unreported role in an investigation of a prolific computer hacker who made headlines after penetrating thousands of computers at Cisco, various U.S. national laboratories, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2005. The FBI agent leading the case sought approval to plant a CIPAV through an undercover operative posing as a Defense Department contractor “with a computer network connected to JPL’s computer network,” according to one document. The FBI linked the intrusions to known 16-year-old hacker in Sweden.

And in 2005, FBI agents on the Innocent Images task force hit a wall when trying to track a sexual predator who’d begun threatening the life of a teenage girl he’d met for sex. The man’s IP addresses were “from all over the world” — a sign of web proxy use. The bureau sought and won court approval to use the CIPAV on August 9 2005.

Other cases are less weighty. In another 2005 case, someone was unwisely using the name of the chief of the FBI’s Buffalo, New York office to harass people online. The FBI got a warrant to use the spyware to track down the fake agent.

Additional cases include:

• In March 2006, the FBI investigated a hacker who took over a Hotmail user’s account and acquired personal information. The hacker tried to extort the owner out of $10,000, demanding the victim crete and fund an E-Gold account and e-mail the password to the hacker. The FBI obtained a search warrant allowing them to send the intruder a CIPAV instead, to uncover his or her location.

• In October, 2005, an undercover agent working a case described as “WMD (bomb & anthrax)” communicated with the suspect via Hotmail, and sought approval from Washington to use a CIPAV to locate the subject’s computer.

• In December 2005, FBI agents sought to use the spyware to track down another extortionist who sent an e-mail to a casino threatening violence.

• In June 2005, an intruder deleted a database at an unnamed company and demanded payment to restore it. The FBI prepared a search warrant affidavit and was ready to ask a judge for authorization to deliver the CIPAV through the hacker’s Yahoo e-mail account. They were briefly thwarted when the intruder stopped communicating with the victim, but after a month of silence the hacker reestablished contact and, presumably, got the FBI’s spyware for his trouble.

The documents appear to settle one of the questions the FBI declined to answer in 2007: whether the bureau obtains search warrants before using the CIPAV, or if it sometimes uses so-called “pen register” warrants that don’t require a showing of probable cause that a crime has been committed. In all the criminal cases described in the documents, the FBI sought search warrants.

The records also indicate that the FBI obtained court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which covers foreign espionage and terrorism investigations, but the details are redacted.

The FBI released 152 heavily-redacted pages in response to Threat Level’s FOIA request, and withheld another 623. We’re scanning the documents now, and we’ll add them to this story later Friday.

Image courtesy ABCNews.com

New “cybersecurity” legislation major threat to free speech

Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) – The end of the free Internet, if enacted.

Yet another in an unrelenting series of  legislative attacks on liberty, this bill threatens to usurp ICANN and private domain registrars’ control of DNS (Domain Naming System) in the US.  DNS is the system that maps IP addresses (eg. 255.255.255.255) against names like mydomain.org.

SEC. 9. SECURE DOMAIN NAME ADDRESSING SYSTEM.

(a) IN GENERAL.—Within 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information shall develop a strategy to implement a secure domain name addressing system. The Assistant Secretary shall publish notice of the system requirements in the Federal Register together with an implementation schedule for Federal agencies and information systems or networks designated by the President, or the President’s designee, as critical infrastructure information systems or networks.

b) COMPLIANCE REQUIRED.—The President shall ensure that each Federal agency and each such system or network implements the secure domain name addressing system in accordance with the schedule published by the Assistant Secretary.

If the feds take control of DNS, they can set their own terms of service and force all hosts onto subdomains, deciding who can and can’t have a web site, blog, email or IM server, etc.  But one thing controlling the DNS will not do is protect networks against hackers.  Almost any type of network connection (except DNS itself) can be made by IP address, bypassing DNS entirely.

I wonder who the president’s “designee” will be.  Perhaps Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens?

If  these incompetent boobs can’t even secure their own networks now, what makes them think they can do a better job than private industry?  I haven’t been hacked since about ‘97 when I ditched Windows NT.  I don’t need their help to secure my DNS servers.  Hey feds- If you want secure systems, start by ditching Windows.  If you can’t even get that thru your heads, how do you expect to take over DNS for the entire friggin Internet?  Who are you going to award the no-bid contract to, Microsoft?

This is about one thing: eliminating the networks that independent citizens use to inform each other and exercise free political speech.  They can’t stand the fact that you have access to real journalism on the web instead of being spoon-fed CNNBCBS propagada on TV.

SEC. 18. CYBERSECURITY RESPONSIBILITIES AND AUTHORITY

The President—
. . .
(2) may declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network
. . .
(6) may order the disconnection of any Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information systems or networks in the interest of national security

So the president or his designee can simply shut down “critical infrastructure” every time they freak out and decide something is an emergency?  What exactly is critical infrastructure?

SEC. 23. DEFINITIONS.

(3)   FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND UNITED STATES CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS.—

The  term ‘‘Federal government and United States critical infrastructure in formation systems and networks’’ includes—

(B) State, local, and nongovernmental information systems and networks in the United States designated by the President as critical infrastructure information systems and networks.

Its whatever they say it is.  No measures, standards, or criteria.

This is not a misguided effort to protect our network infrastructure.  Its a deliberate attack on free speech, and the feds know exactly what they’re doing. According to Reuters, the previous head of the National Cyber Security Center Rod Beckstrom resigned in protest of the over-reaching role the NSA is playing in cyber security.

What is the first objective of a military when attacking any enemy?  Shut down their communications. We are the enemy and this is an attack on the ability of free individuals to communicate with each other.  Please write your congress critters immediately.  If you don’t care about politics, at least think of your 4chan and bittorrent downloads!

Unsubstantiated: eBay put Skype on iPhone ‘to boost price of NSA backdoor’

unClick Google

We can force Google to stop their privacy violations while ridding the internet of advertising… by clicking ads.

On March 11, Google revealed its latest plan to violate your privacy: they will now record the types of websites you visit in order to gather a behavioral profile of your interests purportedly so that they can send you targeted advertising. This policy is in addition to their current policy of keeping a record of every single web search you have ever made along with as much other personally identifying information as they can gather. Of course, these behavioral profiles and detailed search histories will also be made available to law enforcement personnel upon request. The disregard for user privacy is a long standing tradition at Google and one that should be challenged. Just as Facebook was recently forced to cave after protests, Google too can be made to backtrack from their creeping violations of our privacy. Every company has their weak point, for Facebook it is the fear that users will stop using the site, and for Google it is the necessity of increasing their advertising revenue. I propose that we collectively embark on a civil disobedience campaign of intentional, automated “click fraud” in order to undermine Google’s advertising program with the goal of forcing Google to adopt a pro-privacy corporate policy.

As every internet user knows, the web is inundated with advertising. Many of these ads are generated automatically by Google. Unlike advertisements in newspapers or on billboards which are priced per impression (the more people that see an ad the more expensive it is), Google’s ads are priced per click. Therefore, every time you click on a Google AdSense advertisement, some advertiser must pay Google. If the ad you clicked on was displayed on a website other than Google’s then Google must also pay that website. As you can see, if ads are being clicked on automatically then the whole house of cards upon which the AdSense system is built on crumbles. Advertisers will refuse to pay Google and Google will refuse to pay websites.

Because Google ads are targeted, certain advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for clicks. Some keywords such as insurance, refinance and “IRS problem” are rumored to be worth more than $10 per click. Click fraud can very quickly do major damage to Google and its advertisers but the fact is there is nothing Google can do to stop it, if we work together.

The system I propose is quite simple and is accomplished in three steps: 1) Install Firefox and restart Firefox 2) Install GreaseMonkey (a useful plug-in for Firefox) 3) Install the Blackspot Google GreaseMonkey script or if you are on a slow network install the Blackspot Google Randomly script which will only click on one ad randomly.

Now, whenever you use Google your computer will automatically click on all the AdSense advertisements sending a message to Google to stop their privacy violations.

Note: If you are a techie and want to get involved with this campaign, we need a version of this script that will both remove the ads from our sight and click them automatically. The best would be integration of this script into Adblock Plus. Unfortunately, this script does not work with Adblock Plus so if you want to use Adblock Plus (you should!) then you must disable it on google.com in order to automatically click their ads. If you are a programmer, post your upgraded version of this script below. (Update: One person has already posted an updated version, but I haven’t tested it yet.)

Special thanks to Alf at Hublog for designing the prototype of this script four years ago which I upgraded to work today.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. He can be reached at www.micahmwhite.com or micah[at]adbusters.org

MPAA-funded RAND Study Links Piracy to Gangs and Terrorists

Via Torrent Freak
Written by Ben Jones on March 04, 2009

On reading the report’s summary, there is a strong wave of deja-vu. It hardly seems like 4 years have passed similar claims put out by a UK industry group were debunked. Worse still, the same old tricks are being used again to cloud the issue. The only difference is that instead of just concentrating on the situation in UK and Ireland, they’ve now gone global.

The MPAA funded report report titled ‘Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism’ claims that terrorist groups use film piracy to finance their activities, while organized gangs see it as a significant revenue stream. Selling pirated goods is a ‘low-risk, high-profit enterprise’ which attracts criminals of all sorts according to the report. And, as if that is not bad enough, in some areas the influence of these pirating gangs extends into law enforcement and political leaders, who are bought, intimidated, or induced to create “protected spaces” where crime flourishes.

Something that jumped out during the first glance at the report is the blurring of terms. On page 3 of the report, one of the reasons things can, and are, overstated is explained as a footnote.

“The terms “piracy” and “counterfeiting” are used interchangeably in this report, although they can mean different things.”

Unfortunately for the study, they do mean VERY different things. ‘Piracy’ in this context tends to refer mostly to digitally representable items, while counterfeit goods can run the gamut from aircraft parts, to cigarettes. In France, you can’t sell certain brands of handbag on eBay easily, because they might be counterfeit. Fake aircraft parts (which don’t meet specs) are a major problem for the airline industry (also counterfeiting) and fake cigarettes are a commonly seized item at international borders. If you want another example, just look no further than your spam folder – count the number of Viagra, and other medications you are offered – all counterfeit.

It only goes downhill from there. Early in the report, it moves on to talk about definitions of organized crime, including some that are so loose it’s hard to see anything except a lone person’s opportunistic crime as being ‘organized’. In fact, by the definitions given, the RIAA may be an organised crime gang, or the UMP party in France, making 3-strike Sarkozy, the head of a crime syndicate.

Digression aside, the case studies that underpin these findings also fail to pass scrutiny. The very first one mentions a seizure of 9400 discs in a shipment. Using a standard weight of a DVD (60g, with box), it comes to about half a ton, and assuming each disc can be sold for $10 (a high price) that’s only $94,000. A kilo of cocaine has a higher street value (about $160,000 right now, according to Cleveland Police), and is much easier to transport. In addition, drugs don’t tend to suffer from the ‘do it yourself’ aspect that gives sites like the Pirate Bay and Mininova such heavy traffic. No value is ever given for the ‘profit’ made either, only..

The combined proceeds from CD/DVD piracy and drug sales were estimated, for the purpose of assigning asset forfeiture, at $3 million.

Throughout many of the case studies listed, there is little hard evidence to actually link crimes. One cites packages arriving at a location containing copied DVDs, and when the police arrived, several men with false papers attempted to run. This leads the author to the assumption of using immigrants to work a copying operation, despite the only evidence mentioned being a single person trafficked.

If movies are the easy, safe and profitable way, as the report suggests, then someone’s not telling these gangs. A little chart is even produced, which lists gangs worldwide and the work they’re involved in.  There are no prizes for guessing that they all apparently participate in DVD copying, but more surprisingly, its the only activity they all share.

The true purpose of the report is of course to force authorities worldwide to do something about piracy, or criminal gangs and terrorist groups will take over. We have no doubt that the MPAA will cite this study in nearly every press release they issue from now on, and bring it onto the political agenda. Here are a few recommendations the report gives.

* Piracy should be made a priority offense within anti-gang strategies.
* Laws should be enacted to grant investigators greater authority to sustain investigations, conduct surveillance, and obtain search warrants.
* Key piracy cases should be fought in the organized-crime or money-laundering divisions of prosecutors’ offices.
* Governments should share intelligence with industry-led anti-piracy efforts.

It is likely that the MPAA will use these findings to get tougher anti-piracy laws. This wouldn’t really be a problem if it would only affect commercial piracy. However, as a side-effect people might have to prove that the music on their iPod is legit when they go through customs, and at home their ISP might be looking into their download behavior.

Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of sources given in footnotes, happen to be the very groups that have funded the story, the MPA(A) and FACT, which should seriously dent the credibility of the report. However, it is to be expected that this report will be given the same credibility as other MPAA-financed studies, despite their dubiousness. As a result, expect more laws to tackle this ‘threat’, which will only ever be used against everyday citizens, and that’s just how the likes of the MPAA like it.