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Nominations Open For "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government"
The corporate overlords at SourceForge asked me to name a Slashdot category for their upcoming
Community Choice Awards and to let you guys select the winner. I have named my category "Most Likely to be Shut Down by a Government Agency." We're going to run this like we do an Ask Slashdot call for questions — post your nominations into the comments here. Use moderation to send up good ideas. In the upcoming days we'll post another story where you can vote on the actual winner. Nominations need to include the project name, a link to some sort of official website, and a paragraph of why you think they deserve to win. The project that wins will gain fame, notoriety, and maybe a cease and desist order that they could print out and frame if they had that kind of time.
It's basically only a matter of time before the fear-mongers and political demagogues in the U.S. and elsewhere outlaw any form of encryption that doesn't include a backdoor for the NSA and other "trusted" government agencies. There has already been evidence of commercial encrytption (such as Windows encryption) including such backdoors. And when the commercial companies all cave, how long do you think it will be before the government comes after the open source projects too?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The EFF's Patent Busing Project.
Or has it been shut down already?
The GNU software radio project
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
is a good candidate. It proposes to let you make electromagnetic waves in a manner not subject to prior restraint by the FCC, and without the back-doors intelligence agencies have on many current means of communications.
This is naughty.
I would think just about any anti-government project in Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, Russia, Cuba, Syria or Iran would be about 100 times more likely to be shut down than one in the U.S....
They're the next allofmp3 -- they're getting named by name in international treaty talks.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
wikileaks, followed by cryptome.org for doing a better job and mirroring the same content
Matt
I would like to nominate Slashdot as being most likely to be shut down. After all, free thought is anathema to government control.
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
wikileaks - since it already was (sort of) shut down by government.
Hey, they've actually committed some crimes now, right?
Tor, Freenet, and I2P are probably on the top of the list. There is no way that government wants difficult to trace communication to be availble to the general public.
I suspect that FreeNet is something that many, many governments would like to shut down. In the west, pretty much all they have to do is say "klddy pr0n" and it's gone. In China and other such countries, they don't really have to say anything at all.
If you look to the right, Microsoft is listed as a diamond sponsor of the event. Hopefully the government will shut them down soon.
Badass Resumes
Freenet, especially now that its reaching the point of widespread usability.
This website, supported by the states, offers its citizens affordable medications from Canada and Europe. I predict the federal government will shut it down, citing "safety issues" with foreign drugs.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
www.gao.gov
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
www.trapster.com
It's an interactive thingy where you post where cops are hiding in speed traps.
I'm surprised it's still up, honestly.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
We already have loads of censoring going on. for example, the 60 minute interview with Sibel edmunds was immediately gagged and then the studio was told to hand over EVERYTHING. In addition, ALL news org have been warned ahead to not talk about her.
In terms of software, PirateBay/Cryptome/GnuRadio. Anything dealing with encryption will NOT be shutdown, unless it involves a brand new and interesting algo.
Well, it worked for jfk...
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
... this is, for the powers that be.
http://thememoryhole.org/
http://wikileaks.org/
http://cryptome.org/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If you feel strongly about a project feel free to comment in support of said project.
We will do our best to try selecting the most popular/controversial projects for the eventual poll that will allow you to actually vote.
Tor would be a good candidate for being outlawed by an overbearing government. I don't know much about it, but i can bet legal online anonymity will go if things keep going the way they are... -Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Really asking what site you think is going to be taken down next by some government agency seems like fear mongering in it's self.
Most take down notices have come not from law enforcement but from companies not the government.
The vast majority of these are civil actions.
Isn't this heading into the tin foil hats and black helicopter area?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
All that music being played and nary a cent going to the RIAA is just begging for a court intervention. Now they also have the IRS looking into the Electric Sheep Company / CSI:NY promotion and whether or not the 'guides' income should be taxed and there are questions as to whether labour law should be getting involved with all the Slingo hosts and their employers. I give it two years tops.
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of my brain.
I haven't seen this listed yet and a lot of great ones have been mentioned but I'd just like to throw Tor out there.
http://www.torproject.org/
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Dunk'n Donuts! They are obviously just a front for Al-Qaeda with Rachel Ray as the master mind, I mean did you see that scarf!
BitTorrent only offers a software package the enables user to share data with an ease rivaling that of an open share on a network but without all of the hassles of completely insecure connections. That doesn't seem to stop the RIAA and the MPAA from trying to shut down even the idea that people should be able to use the Internet for what it was intended for, a free exchange of information. The software package was and is quite novel in the way it handles traffic and allows it to be shared across multiple connections and multiple computers. This is load distribution at a level higher than "enterprise class data systems". This is a huge productivity tool that can be used for sharing information over any kind of distributed network. It allows freedom and power.
What's going to stop it? The RIAA, MPAA and giant ISP's like Comcast and Verizon that throttle back torrent traffic. They will make cases for costs in bandwidth and network maintenance. The fact that many people use these types of peer-to-peer networks successfully and almost untraceably to share copyrighted information only adds to the arguments that the RIAA and MPAA will make to get it shut down. Since there entire websites like The Pirate Bay, Mininova, IsoHunt and even the BitTorrent website that link users to a large number of seeds for the torrent swarms of information copyrighted and non-copyrighted and such, it doesn't bode well for the tool either.
The RIAA and MPAA will use strong arm tactics and cite currently pending investigations in other parts of the world against such sites that employ the use of such software to cut the problem off at the head. It will likely lead to sweeping legislation that will outlaw many forms of file sharing. For references, look at what the RIAA and MPAA have managed to successfully do against those users with home media center looking to place digital copies of their license media on to online storage. Sure, selling the means to do the illegal act isn't illegal but that doesn't mean someone won't try to make it illegal.
see 47 C.F.R. 15.121(a) (a) Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, scanning receivers and frequency converters designed or marketed for use with scanning receivers, shall:
(1) Be incapable of operating (tuning), or readily being altered by the user to operate, within the frequency bands allocated to the Cellular Radiotelephone Service in part 22 of this chapter (cellular telephone bands). Scanning receivers capable of âoereadily being altered by the userâ include, but are not limited to, those for which the ability to receive transmissions in the cellular telephone bands can be added by clipping the leads of, or installing, a simple component such as a diode, resistor or jumper wire; replacing a plug-in semiconductor chip; or programming a semiconductor chip using special access codes or an external device, such as a personal computer. Scanning receivers, and frequency converters designed for use with scanning receivers, also shall be incapable of converting digital cellular communication transmissions to analog voice audio.
(2) Be designed so that the tuning, control and filtering circuitry is inaccessible. The design must be such that any attempts to modify the equipment to receive transmissions from the Cellular Radiotelephone Service likely will render the receiver inoperable.
Then why hide?
Seriously. If they want people to slow down, why hide behind billboards and bridges and other stuff and pop out and snag people?
If they honestly wanted everyone to slow down they'd just park on the side of the road in the very most visible spot. Watch your fellow drivers on the freeway sometime. They see a cop car, they hit the brakes. Even if he has someone pulled over and its obvious they could fly right by him.
They hide because it helps them write tickets. That's the goal of a speedtrap. Income. I'm sure the PR people love to smile at the camera and talk about how their just saving lives, but their actions simply do not agree. You can't tell me that having all this ticket revenue pouring in means nothing.
If they really want people to drive the speed limit, park out in the open.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
DIY Drones: amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and open-source Predators.
Perhaps not the first to go down, but I think the odds approach 100%. The peer-to-peer Internet, with its implicit equality for all servers, lacks the degree of barriers to entry that corporations need to "create" wealth. It is already dying through direct corporate action (protocol throttling, port blocking, etc), and there will be government intervention soon enough. Look for copyright, child porn, botnets, etc to be the excuses used to require licensing of servers.
Radio was unrestricted in its early days. Unrestricted mass communication is extremely detrimental to authoritarian governments. Net neutrality prevents ISPs and backbone providers from getting their vig. Nobody benefits from a peer-to-peer Internet except We The People, and most of us don't know that is the case, nor why. Show me something that does not have populist support, and does stand to allow profiteering and control if destroyed - and I'll show you a very tenuous place to stand.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Reading you post made me thing "Which government will be shut down by the US government?"
Huh? Unless I'm missing something Taco made no mention of left vs right, nor did he say anything reasonably interpretable as involving partisan politics whatsoever. In fact at the moment most pf the posts here seem to be about TrueCrypt, and the one-any-only post I can find from anyone that can even be remotely interpreted with a partisan implication is that the anti-crypto attempts "started trying in the 90s under Clinton's reign, with Al Gore as the point man... over 10 years later, I guess it's time for another round of facists to try it again". If anything, that would tie this sort of attack to the left, and the "another round of facists" is entirely ambiguous or entirely non-denominational as the rapidly approaching "next round of facists" is a tight presidential race between Dems and Pubs.
Maybe it's just an anomaly, but I've been seeing a bit of a repeating pattern lately. Borderline paranoid delusional people with a persecution complex about partisan political bias. They themselves are wildly biased, and it takes the form of baseless accusations of opposite bias, even against entirely non-political non-partisan statements complete strangers. They literally just imagine things and hang them on other people like Christmas tree ornaments, and by themselves imagining biased things about the other person it somehow "proves" that other person biased.
It was pretty interesting when someone went on a "bias" rant against me with all sorts of stuff that came out of their own imagination, especially when they managed to effectively toss in an accusation that I was sexist. A really neat trick considering that no one had even menentioned gender prior to that point. Chuckle.
One of the critical aspects to creating and protecting extreme bias is psychological filtering, uncritically embracing anything that serves that bias, and finding ways to automatically disregard anything that might challenge that position. For example if you decide someone is wildly biased and everything they say is completely unreliable, and they say 23+38=61, you don't have to waste any thought seeing if it's true or not. The source is "biased", therefore one can automatically send the untrustworthy information to the trash heap without wasting any mental effort evaluating it at all.
Baseless accusations of bias are themselves bias, are themselves a powerful psychological mechanism of creating and perpetuating that person's own bias.
I have some speculations on why I think this might currently be a particularly common issue, but such speculation would be particularly fertile ground for bias and accusations of bias. Heh.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If you use data from the same one-time-pad twice, it quickly turns from "a theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem" into "one of the weakest cryptosystems ever".
If you don't use data from the same one-time pad twice, then it's pointless to use one one-time pad to send another one-time pad, because every N bytes that you receive for the next key is just replacing N bytes of your last key that now can't be reused to send any other data.
No way, if you want to believe in evil government, there's nothing better for them than TrueCrypt. See, it has deniable encryption, where you can have a 'real' drive and a 'fake' drive, so you give 'them' the keys to the 'fake' drive, and go about your secret business, right?
:) Seriously, though, deniable encryption is only useful against enemies who are dumb and cannot employ force against you. Governments don't have much to fear from it, vs. any other kind of encryption. They're all Tempest watching us anyway. ;)
Queue Jack Bauer, beating you up:
Bauer: Gimme your passwords, elrous0. *Whack*
elrous0: OK, fine, it's 'gimmesomeluv1n'
Bauer's Assistant: OK, we're in. Hrm, it's just a bunch of computer stuff, some saved articles from business websites, some 80's metal mp3's and random e-mails. Oh, wait, he's using TrueCrypt.
Bauer: What's that?
Bauer's Assistant: It means he can give us a fake password that gives us fake information, but still keeps the real information hidden.
Bauer: What's your real password, elrous0?
elrous0: No, seriously, I gave it to you. That's it.
Bauer: Don't give me that crap. *Whack* Give me the real password!
elrous0: Dude, I just hang out on Slashdot and have a normal job. I'm not the guy you're looking for!
Bauer: A million lives are at risk, and this isn't going to stop until you give me the real password: *whack*
elrous0: Seriously, I'm telling you the truth.
Bauer: *Whack* *Whack* *Whack* *Whack*
elrous0: Ugh! My nose!
Bauer: *Whack* *Whack* *Whack* *Whack*
Bauer's Assistant: Um, Jack, do you think he could be telling the truth?
Bauer: No, this one's a pro. He didn't crack the whole time, and his accent is impeccable. He must be a deep cover operative. We'll try this again when he wakes up.
Oh, wait, I just played into the Conspiracy Theory myself.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)