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Internet Defense League: A Bat Signal For the Internet
mikejuk writes "Following the successful defense of the Internet against SOPA, website owners are being invited to sign up to a project that will enable them to participate in future protest campaign, the Internet Defense League. The banner logo for the 'bat-signal' site is a cat, a reference to Ethan Zuckerman's cute cat theory of digital activism. The idea is that sites would respond to the call to "defend the Internet" by joining a group blackout or getting users to sign petitions. From the article: 'Website owners can sign up on the IDL website to add a bit of code to their sites (or receive code by email at the time of a campaign) that can be triggered in the case of a crisis like SOPA.
This would add an "activist call-to-action" to all participating sites - such as a banner asking users to sign petitions, or in extreme cases blackout the site, as proved effective in the SOPA/PIPA protest of January 2012.'"
In the UK this is going to be reminiscent, for a lot of people, of the English Defence League - a bunch of neo-nazi football hooligans who stage rallies against 'Islamists' in English town centres, as a shallow pretext to harass and attack people with dark skin.
The internet really needs better built in, automatic, technical measures to protect anonymity and protect against censorship.
End to end encryption as standard for everything. Censorship resistant technologies.
We can try to defend it against legal attacks, but those attacks only have to succeed ONCE, where the defence has to succeed EVERY time. I don't know exactly how and of course there will be many problems to solve, but I think technical measures are the only thing that can protect the internet in the long run. We must ensure that politicians and legal systems simply do not have the ability to damage it. of course that cannot be done in a perfect way, but that doesn't mean that moving in that direction is without use.
Website owners can sign up on the IDL website to add a bit of code to their sites (or receive code by email at the time of a campaign) that can be triggered in the case of a crisis like SOPA. This would add an "activist call-to-action" to all participating sites - such as a banner asking users to sign petitions, or in extreme cases blackout the site, as proved effective in the SOPA/PIPA protest of January 2012.
Are they nuts? I don't want any outside site having control over my clients' sites. If they are hacked this would give the hackers a quick way to affect any site that signs up with them.
Well intentioned (I hope), but count me out.
...it's hard to imagine the usefulness of a bat signal that goes off all day, every day. The scary truth is that we know of new plans to encroach upon out net neutrality every day, if not more frequently.
it isn't called "League of the Extraordinary Websites".
for "League of Self-Important Angry Young Men."
And thanks, I'll pass...
Website owners can sign up on the IDL website to add a bit of code to their sites (or receive code by email at the time of a campaign) that can be triggered in the case of a crisis like SOPA. This would add an "activist call-to-action" to all participating sites - such as a banner asking users to sign petitions, or in extreme cases blackout the site, as proved effective in the SOPA/PIPA protest of January 2012.
Are they nuts? I don't want any outside site having control over my clients' sites. If they are hacked this would give the hackers a quick way to affect any site that signs up with them. Well intentioned (I hope), but count me out.
I think the summary is wrong about how the system is supposed to work. From the actual IDF site: "First, sign up. If you have a website, we'll send you sample alert code to get working in advance. The next time there's an emergency, we'll tell you and send new code. Then it's your decision to pull the trigger."
Sounds like they give you a sample code in advance so you can make it fit with your site, then if something comes up, they send you a version specific to whatever the issue is. If you don't think it's important, you can just ignore it. If you do want to include a message, you can pop it on your site. And it shouldn't screw anything up because you've previously tested/customized the code for your site. That's slightly (completely?) different than the summary which implies they give you code allowing them to automatically add alerts to your site whenever they want.
I'm still not convinced it's worthwhile, but it's not the "no way in hell I'm doing that" method that the summary describes
And of course I meant IDL (Internet Defense League), and not IDF (Israel Defense Forces). But i had just read this post and had IDF stuck in my mind...
but ripe for abuse
they should call it the doomsday machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmCKJi3CKGE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is not a piece of code that you put on your site and they flip the switch for you whenever they feel like it (although that is an option too if you really don't care). They basically send you an email about the current threat and YOU flip the switch if you want to participate. The code is just so that everybody's banners look the same.
They've been doing this for ages. They have the JIDF and megaphone, which is like an app for announcing polls and bury brigades for social news sites. They use it to go and "improve" the overall opinion of israel's daily murders any time they pop up in the news.
I've been tempted to install the thing and see how repugnant it is, but, unsurprisingly, I've always found better stuff to do than wallow in shit.
This guys are trying to do the exact same thing, but more amateureshly, since they don't have US war funding to do it. I can't see how this could be free of corruption and misuse.
1: everyone integrates this code
2: an anonymous group hacks the control server
3: half the Internet goes dark thinking there is a "threat"
I don't think I'll be signing up for the automated version. I can come up with links to petitions and banners without anyone else's code. I've been doing it for 10+ years at this point.
That cute smiley cat logo has got to go. Not because it's cute, but because it's smiling. If you're going to use a cute cat for this, make it look sad or worried, but not happy. There is no sense of danger communicated by this logo. If this signal goes active and people see a smiling cat, then it looks like people are happy and are celebrating.
Sounds to me like the perfect way to troll millions of people at once
cables can be cut, power can be switched off, frequencies can be jammed
the health of the internet is merely a reflection of the health of society. so focus your efforts on the keeping society's attitude healthy. that's your best, and only defense, to keeping the internet truly free
there is no such thing as a technical fix to a sociological problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You know, not a single site I went to on "SOPA day" actually blacked out. Wikipedia put a lame ass banner frame that could be circumvented by pressing escape soon after the page loaded, and that was about the most aggressive I saw.
Governments, particularly that of the United States, do not give a shit if you black out your website or put a passive-aggressive post-it note at the top of each page. SOPA got killed because a bunch of multinational megacorps that spend millions on lobbying collectively had a quiet word with their "clients".
Just kidding, it was probably that thing on petitiononline.com, no, really it was.
And the internet will lose eventually.
The problem boils down to attention span. The SOPA/PIPA protest was something new. The threat was very in-your-face. It was easy to get the internet to pay attention for these reasons. Congress has learned from that mistake. The new bills are all going to end in the same situation, but they will be smaller and sneakier. The internet has already expended its attention span. It will be impossible to muster the same protest again, unfortunately.
Political power is all about amassing a support base of voters, activists, etc. that you can use when negotiating your position. Who is behind the IDL? And given a large enough membership list, what can we expect them to lobby for? Given a large enough membership list, they don't necessarily have to put up their cat banner to use their clout. So we might not see its misuse.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sigh. It won't work because some assholes will see any blackout as an opportunity to be taken advantage of. Some marketing D-bag will say "Look, all the X websites are down, now is time to promote ours".
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/27/1917213/patent-troll-now-armed-with-thousands-of-nortel-patents?utm_source=feedburnerGoogle+International&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)&utm_content=Google+International
Given the prevalence and frequency of attacks on our freedoms, (Internet or otherwise), I'm afraid these 'bat signals' will occur so often that even people who would otherwise be sympathetic, concerned, and involved will sooner or later simply start to ignore the warnings while the equivalent of 'compassion burnout' sets in.
The people in power understand this natural tendency, and will continue to up the ante until the overwhelming majority of netizens will respond to the latest warning with nothing more than a shrug. Then the Douche-IAA's, mega-corporations, and government agencies will go ahead and do what they always do anyway, which is to concentrate power and wealth into their own hands at our expense.
The Middle Class is an endangered species. When it comes to the four boxes of liberty, we've passed the soap box stage, the ballot box has proved to be pretty much ineffective, and the jury box is useless if the real criminals are never brought to trial. We're getting damned close to the time when we'll have to choose the ammo box, or face extinction.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Laws can be repealed.
But in practice, they aren't. Restrictions on the public tend to have a ratchet effect, becoming tighter over time. When was the standard term of copyright rolled back in the three-century history of copyright?
I see the value in HTTPS Everywhere for sites big enough to run on a dedicated server. But TLS as it is implemented today requires a separate IPv4 address per domain, and this won't change until Windows XP and Android 2.x are no longer in use. What's the best practice to secure a smaller site on a budget shared hosting plan, one that shares its IPv4 address with upwards of 1,000 other sites?
when fox news or msnbc says or does something knee jerk in response to national events and politics they have hoardes of people tuned in to THEIR agendas ready causing massive discontent
When it comes to the internet, all of them are quiet. We need to make civil action outside of the mainstream media a reality. This is a good start, if only for a narrow band of intrests.
You can call it an opened cat's mouth, but I'm pretty sure that's a beak
CISPA already passed the house. Nobody's paying attention to it even on slashdot, as far as I can see from this discussion.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120426/14505718671/insanity-cispa-just-got-way-worse-then-passed-rushed-vote.shtml