Friday 16 September 2016

C‑484/14 Tobias McFadden v Sony

CURIA - Documents: "Having regard to the requirements deriving from the protection of fundamental rights and to the rules laid down in Directives 2001/29 and 2004/48, Article 12(1) of Directive 2000/31, read in conjunction with Article 12(3) of that directive, must be interpreted as, in principle, not precluding the grant of an injunction such as that at issue in the main proceedings, which requires, on pain of payment of a fine, a provider of access to a communication network allowing the public to connect to the internet to prevent third parties from making a particular copyright-protected work or parts thereof available to the general public from an online (peer-to-peer) exchange platform via an internet connection, where that provider may choose which technical measures to take in order to comply with the injunction even if such a choice is limited to a single measure consisting in password-protecting the internet connection, provided that those users are required to reveal their identity in order to obtain the required password and may not therefore act anonymously, a matter which it is for the referring court to ascertain." 'via Blog this'

Tuesday 13 September 2016

Spying, the seaside, sub-sea cables – and Rudyard Kipling @C4News

Spying, the seaside, sub-sea cables – and Rudyard Kipling | Tom Clarke on Science: "What’s very clear as soon as you get there is that GCHQ Bude is nothing new. The dishes of the satellite listening station on the cliff top have loomed over the town for years. That GCHQ snoops on phone and internet traffic in the interests of national security is also accepted by pretty much everyone.

 But what has come as a surprise are the revelations about how GCHQ, with its US partner the NSA, may have the ability to capture and store all of the data traffic coming across undersea cables crossing the Atlantic through a programme called Tempora.


While the satellite dishes have long pointed at the shiny communications platforms orbiting the earth, it now appears that with the growth of the internet and mobile phones, GCHQ Bude has actually been paying far more attention to the cable that connects Europe with north America, that runs practically right beneath it.

 TAT-14 is the main fibre-optic communications link between the US and the rest of the world and it makes landfall at Bude. Snowden’s leaks suggest GCHQ, with the help of the NSA, can gobble up all the data travelling along it, then filter it for information they are interested in." 'via Blog this'

How Russia and the UN are actually planning to take over the Internet | TheHill

How Russia and the UN are actually planning to take over the Internet | TheHill: "Only the academic publishing industry has enthusiastically adopted DOA in the form of its digital object identifier standard. Since 2000, journal articles are assigned permanent identifiers that point to digital versions of the articles. Metadata associated with journal article objects usually point to a traditional URL where the article can be accessed.

In a more advanced DOA environment, the system might use the permanent identifier associated with your laptop to determine whether you had the right to access the article.

 As it turns out, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia all really like the idea of baking information management directly into next-generation protocols. These governments all believe that information flows a bit too freely on today’s Internet. Wouldn’t it be great, they reason, if tomorrow’s Internet allowed us to track all devices online as well as withhold access to any content we did not want to disseminate?

Authoritarian regimes missed the boat on influencing existing Internet standards, but so-called “next-generation networks” provide a new opportunity.

The U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is an agency that, among other activities, hosts standards meetings between governments and telecom companies. Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia have used this forum to advance their vision for next-generation networks, including DOA.

The main point of attack is the ITU telecom sector’s Study Group 20, which focuses on the so-called “Internet of Things.”

The authoritarian regimes have banded together to ensure that DOA is adopted as the overarching standard for IoT devices, ostensibly in the name of protecting against “device counterfeiting.” In reality, DOA will allow IoT devices to be pervasively and persistently tracked. Next-generation networks could deny access to any device without a valid identifier. And by requiring registration at the point of purchase, tracking will extend to people, not just the devices.


In the long run, these next-generation networks open the door to rethinking the Internet on territorial lines. Suppose the Russian government, as is likely, runs the authoritative DOA server for everyone in Russia. In addition to tracking activity online, they could control the flow of information into the country and censor information at the border." 'via Blog this'

Wednesday 7 September 2016

James Madison on regulation by the state


Tuesday 6 September 2016

Review of Curran, Fenton and Freedman’s Misunderstanding the Internet

Review of Curran, Fenton and Freedman’s Misunderstanding the Internet | Simon Dawes: "Ultimately, Curran’s objective is to demonstrate that both market censorship (corporate concentration, commercial surveillance and strengthened intellectual property law) and state censorship (restrictive licensing, state surveillance and the ability to pull the plug) are now undermining the freedom many celebratory accounts promised of the internet (59), while the commonsensical distinction between state and market may not be as clear-cut or as epistemologically useful as it may at first seem." 'via Blog this'

Thursday 1 September 2016

Privacy Scandal Haunts Pokemon Go’s CEO: The Intercept

Privacy Scandal Haunts Pokemon Go’s CEO: "Today, given the spread of Pokemon Go and sensitivity of the data it accesses, it’s less important that Hanke now blames the mobile team for the Wi-Spy scandal than that his division, unwittingly or not, became the vehicle — or vehicles, to be precise — through which one engineer was able to collect massive amounts of hugely sensitive data, while managers and engineers from Hanke’s division repeatedly ignored explicit warnings, written and verbal, about what was going on from that engineer, according to the most thorough published investigation of the matter by a U.S. government entity." 'via Blog this'