The fallout from the Pirate Bay seizure is that the minister of justice (Thomas Bodstrom) has been accused of ordering the police to take action after pressure from the US government. Bodstrom, who is the initiator of the EU data retention directive, IP spoofing on Swedish main nodes, extended bugging laws etc., and also known as a proponent of a totalitarian big brother society, has been requested for constitutional hearings.
Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries. People have been very generous with equipment and hosting as soon as they heard it was the Pirate Bay folks asking for assistance.
The Swedish Police site, www.polisen.se, was taken out for a day with a sustained DoS attack. An investigation has been started.
The public is in favor of the Pirate Bay in numbers like 90-10 or so, and most are extremely critical of the action against the Pirate Bay, especially since the police used 50 police officers to seize two computer nerds and their legal representative. A whole slew of innocent operators were also having their machinery seized, in an unconstitutional manner.
The action may have a real political effect, come the September elections.
Can't you guy invent your own stuff rather than taking our Snow White, our democracy, our data retention initiative...?
Let me quote Thomas Jefferson (younger people can e-mail me and I'll tell you) to show you how perverted you Americans have become lately:
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance."
As it turns out, the illegal action against the pirate bay was on direct order from the swedish justice department (this is also illegal in Sweden), which in turn acted on a request from the US government, which in turn acted on behalf of MPAA.
This is all classified, but leaked to a very authoritative (as BBC) TV channel in Sweden.
Therefore, the swedish government is determined to ignore the law, as has happened so many times before.
Look for the pirate bay in the free world, i.e., in china or something.
No, Shi Tao was not imprisoned for advocating freedom. He could have done that, and nothing would have happened to him (fuck, I do it everyday, and I am still alive!).
Shi Tao received classified information from his employer, a newspaper. He was told it was classified, and he was also told not to take notes of what was said (he did anyway). He was completely aware of the consequences of disseminating the information.
He spread the information from his workplace, the newspaper, using the newspaper's computer. By Chinese law, he committed a crime. By Chinese law, he deserves to be in prison, and by Chinese law, the punishment was accurate.
Therefore, the petition will not free Shi Tao.
On a more personal note I would like to say that I have never heard of such a stupid dissident before. Not only did he openly take notes, ignoring his bosses, but he also used his employers equipment, using an emial address with the account name huoyan1989 (1989 flame), sending the info unencrypted to foreign addresses that were sure to be monitored by the shield.
Child porn used to be legal in Japan, before the entire Western powerhouse, led by the self-proclaimed "moral" leader of the world, the land of the free, stepped in and more or less forced the Western human rights onto the Japanese.
Before anyone wrongly believes I am in favor of child porn (which I am not), I would like to point out that what is considered child porn varies from nation to nation. Typical limits are 18 in the US and the Western world, and 14 in China. In my native Sweden, it used to be a matter of maturity in the actor/actress, which is why Traci Lord movies that were banned in the US were allowed in Sweden (good stuff, btw). Now Sweden has also jumped onto the US bandwagon, as in so many other issues, and I am the first to be sorry for that.
There is still a popular lolita culture in Japan, despite the ban on real child porn. The actresses are 18 or over, but they dress as if they were 14, in school uniforms and so on.
Anyway, what Americans don't understand and will never understand is that the UN decaration of human rights was created by Westerners to be imposed onto the rest of the world. In essence, other people should not only have the freedoms we have, but they should also not have any other freedoms.
Therefore, this campaign stinks of the usual cultural imperialism that has plagued us recently, the kind of American world view that is shoved down our throats.
The page links to some country reports, for instance http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/ on China. As I have done a similar report (in China), I can only say that it is exaggerated, and its purpose is to demonize China to the maximum extent. It doesn't put things in a cultural context, and doesn't honor the changes that have taken place for the better.
The conclusion, "While there can be legitimate debates about whether democratization and liberalization are taking place in China's economy and government, there is no doubt that neither is taking place in China's Internet environment today" is completely wrong.
I really believe they are a secret affiliate to Microsoft. They still refuse to index application/xml+xhtml pages, and what browser is it that can't display such pages?
Also, their UI is as inferior as Microsoft's.
To me, they ARE Micrsoft, and therefore evil.
Shame on all of you who bought their slogan... and congrats on Google for such smooth sales operations, fooling even the tech savvy whiz kids.
Another poster answered this already. Let me ask you this, is Darth Vader was running in a democratic election, and the US elected him to office, how would you expect the world community to react?
If you replace Lord Vader with Dubya, you pretty much have the current situation. We wouldn't stop talking to him. On the contrary, it would be more important than ever not to isolate him. America wants to isolate Hamas. It will be a disaster, because Hamas will just be another martyr in the Middle East.
Europe spits on us because they can't compete against us in a fair marketplace. Why else would they sue every successful US corporation instead of, you know, just competing against them fair and square? Where's my French-made web browser? How about my German operating system? Europe dropped the ball, and now they're jealous that the US has been steering the ship while they were off playing space invaders.
It is not Europe who have import tariffs on steel, it is the US. So much for free trade.
Let me also remind you that the web and the first web browser were indeed European inventions (CERN/Mosaic). Operating systems? Linux is Finnish.
We don't spit on the US for its successes, producing great Apple Macs and so forth, just as we don't spit on the Japanese for producing great cameras and other electronic devices, or on ourselves for making superior cars and mobile phones. We spit on you because you allow this Lord Vader to shake up the world, thereby compromizing our security as well. We spit on you because you are hypocritical. We spit on you because you are a self-proclaimed world police, supporting dictators like Pinochet and Saddam Hussein, and resistance groups like the Mujahedine, just to reap the inevitable "harvest" (9/11) later. Your "harvest" spills over on us, and we don't like it.
So, please take your CIA agents off my continent, close the secret prisons in Romania and Poland, leave Cuba, dismantle your bases in Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Svalbard and god knows where else you have a military presence. Then, perhaps, the world will finally become a more peaceful place without terror.
This is clearly an instance of "democracy with American characteristics", involving lawyers to get somewhere.
Anyway, M$ can't afford to stall the launch any further, which means the users will have to pay for Symantec's share.
Hell, M$ might even start thinking more about security just to piss off Symantec. Or maybe put them out of business entirely, because they live like a parasite on M$.
Stupid. Deduct the number of people executed, and you still have roughly the same figures.
Your argument that the US is better because it executes fewer people than in China is stupid. If the US put an end to the medieval practice of killing people, perhaps you could exercise a greater pressure on China on the capital punishment. We try to do that in Europe, but the US is a fly in the ointment, as always when it comes to human rights (the Gitmo gulags, intervention in too many countries, spy planes over Europe, and so on).
It came back up in february, but is blocked again. But this time it is hard blocked, which means you need a proxy to get into it. Before it was a matter of a simple forward.
Google and Wikipedia are the two most valuable tools on the net, and what China is doing here is a kind of information war, crippling those two tools in China to favor their own solutions.
That said, I believe Baidu will be able to create a Chinese encyclopedia that is more useful than Wikipedia, which currently has major problems with stupid character mixings and fierce ideological battles between different Chinese spheres of influence (mainland, TW, HK, MC, even foreign Chinese). More useful in all respects, except for topics such as Falun gong, independence movements, individual dissidents, and the square incident.
Baidu will never be better than Google, however. It is just too lame.
No, no, no... you can't be Chinese, because the Chinese can't read Slashdot. In particular YRO. At least not without a firewall. And if they do anyway, they must either be "informants" or government propagandists.
In China, everything what we discuss on Slashdot is censored. You can't say democracy, because then Hu Jintao will send his thugs and fuck you in the ass. Yep, that is how China works. I saw it on Fox News.
No, economic success is not possible under communism. That is why China turned to capitalism. But that was in 1978. In what cave have you been for the last 27 years?
Circumventing censorship in China, if needed (it rarely is), is easy, and most people know how to do it (it is spread by peer education in homes and internet cafes). No one is gonna lock you up for doing it either, so I don't know what TFA is talking about.
Now, tearing down the firewall would be the easiest thing in the world. It just requires a collaborate effort between governments in the West, or at least some powerful companies in the West, namely to host servers for distributed protocols a la Tor and similar, distributed and encrypted IM and so on.
But you won't ever see such a collaboration. I leave it as an exercise to figure out why.
For Iran... I recommend we nuke'em. It is the simplest and least painful way.
Yes, math is difficult. China has a population of 1.3 billion people.
Nevertheless, the total number of incarcerated people in the US ("the land of the free") is still higher, in absolute terms, than in China. That is also a measure of freedom.
There are Chinese proxies for the same purpose, and they are more reliable than foreign proxies. Some Chinese proxies are actually police proxies, though. Might as well just install Privoxy.
That said, you rarely need a proxy in China. It might come as a shock to most people here, but the Chinese in general do not look for information on Falun Gong or the Tian'anmen incident. If they did, they would easily find what they are looking for using baidu.com, or P2P (which is completely unblocked) solutions. And even if they don't, there will be people telling them about it all the time anyway, by phone campaigns and distribution of leaflets.
As usual, the hysteria over censorship in China is waaaaaaaaaaay exaggerated, and the problem actually lies in the other side of the world, within the democratically elected Western governments, which legitimize China's practices by installing similar devices back home.
Hey, I am posting this from China... fuck Hu Jintao. Now please execute me.
Slashdot Mirror
The fallout from the Pirate Bay seizure is that the minister of justice (Thomas Bodstrom) has been accused of ordering the police to take action after pressure from the US government. Bodstrom, who is the initiator of the EU data retention directive, IP spoofing on Swedish main nodes, extended bugging laws etc., and also known as a proponent of a totalitarian big brother society, has been requested for constitutional hearings.
Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries. People have been very generous with equipment and hosting as soon as they heard it was the Pirate Bay folks asking for assistance.
The Swedish Police site, www.polisen.se, was taken out for a day with a sustained DoS attack. An investigation has been started.
The public is in favor of the Pirate Bay in numbers like 90-10 or so, and most are extremely critical of the action against the Pirate Bay, especially since the police used 50 police officers to seize two computer nerds and their legal representative. A whole slew of innocent operators were also having their machinery seized, in an unconstitutional manner.
The action may have a real political effect, come the September elections.
Can't you guy invent your own stuff rather than taking our Snow White, our democracy, our data retention initiative...?
Let me quote Thomas Jefferson (younger people can e-mail me and I'll tell you) to show you how perverted you Americans have become lately:
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance."
As it turns out, the illegal action against the pirate bay was on direct order from the swedish justice department (this is also illegal in Sweden), which in turn acted on a request from the US government, which in turn acted on behalf of MPAA.
This is all classified, but leaked to a very authoritative (as BBC) TV channel in Sweden.
Therefore, the swedish government is determined to ignore the law, as has happened so many times before.
Look for the pirate bay in the free world, i.e., in china or something.
No, Shi Tao was not imprisoned for advocating freedom. He could have done that, and nothing would have happened to him (fuck, I do it everyday, and I am still alive!).
Shi Tao received classified information from his employer, a newspaper. He was told it was classified, and he was also told not to take notes of what was said (he did anyway). He was completely aware of the consequences of disseminating the information.
He spread the information from his workplace, the newspaper, using the newspaper's computer. By Chinese law, he committed a crime. By Chinese law, he deserves to be in prison, and by Chinese law, the punishment was accurate.
Therefore, the petition will not free Shi Tao.
On a more personal note I would like to say that I have never heard of such a stupid dissident before. Not only did he openly take notes, ignoring his bosses, but he also used his employers equipment, using an emial address with the account name huoyan1989 (1989 flame), sending the info unencrypted to foreign addresses that were sure to be monitored by the shield.
That stupidity alone should give him ten years.
Child porn used to be legal in Japan, before the entire Western powerhouse, led by the self-proclaimed "moral" leader of the world, the land of the free, stepped in and more or less forced the Western human rights onto the Japanese.
Before anyone wrongly believes I am in favor of child porn (which I am not), I would like to point out that what is considered child porn varies from nation to nation. Typical limits are 18 in the US and the Western world, and 14 in China. In my native Sweden, it used to be a matter of maturity in the actor/actress, which is why Traci Lord movies that were banned in the US were allowed in Sweden (good stuff, btw). Now Sweden has also jumped onto the US bandwagon, as in so many other issues, and I am the first to be sorry for that.
There is still a popular lolita culture in Japan, despite the ban on real child porn. The actresses are 18 or over, but they dress as if they were 14, in school uniforms and so on.
Anyway, what Americans don't understand and will never understand is that the UN decaration of human rights was created by Westerners to be imposed onto the rest of the world. In essence, other people should not only have the freedoms we have, but they should also not have any other freedoms.
Therefore, this campaign stinks of the usual cultural imperialism that has plagued us recently, the kind of American world view that is shoved down our throats.
The page links to some country reports, for instance http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/ on China. As I have done a similar report (in China), I can only say that it is exaggerated, and its purpose is to demonize China to the maximum extent. It doesn't put things in a cultural context, and doesn't honor the changes that have taken place for the better.
The conclusion, "While there can be legitimate debates about whether democratization and liberalization are taking place in China's economy and government, there is no doubt that neither is taking place in China's Internet environment today" is completely wrong.
I really believe they are a secret affiliate to Microsoft. They still refuse to index application/xml+xhtml pages, and what browser is it that can't display such pages?
Also, their UI is as inferior as Microsoft's.
To me, they ARE Micrsoft, and therefore evil.
Shame on all of you who bought their slogan... and congrats on Google for such smooth sales operations, fooling even the tech savvy whiz kids.
If you replace Lord Vader with Dubya, you pretty much have the current situation. We wouldn't stop talking to him. On the contrary, it would be more important than ever not to isolate him. America wants to isolate Hamas. It will be a disaster, because Hamas will just be another martyr in the Middle East.
It is not Europe who have import tariffs on steel, it is the US. So much for free trade.
Let me also remind you that the web and the first web browser were indeed European inventions (CERN/Mosaic). Operating systems? Linux is Finnish.
We don't spit on the US for its successes, producing great Apple Macs and so forth, just as we don't spit on the Japanese for producing great cameras and other electronic devices, or on ourselves for making superior cars and mobile phones. We spit on you because you allow this Lord Vader to shake up the world, thereby compromizing our security as well. We spit on you because you are hypocritical. We spit on you because you are a self-proclaimed world police, supporting dictators like Pinochet and Saddam Hussein, and resistance groups like the Mujahedine, just to reap the inevitable "harvest" (9/11) later. Your "harvest" spills over on us, and we don't like it.
So, please take your CIA agents off my continent, close the secret prisons in Romania and Poland, leave Cuba, dismantle your bases in Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Svalbard and god knows where else you have a military presence. Then, perhaps, the world will finally become a more peaceful place without terror.
Chinese guy? Pure Viking blood here, dude...
They say they want free trade, but they won't buy IBM PCs after China bought the brand (no other difference).
They say they want democracy in the Middle East, but when there is democracy in the Middle East, they don't respect the outcome (Hamas).
They say other nations should respect human rights, but they themselves don't (Gitmo, torture flights, numerous examples).
Anyone still wonder why the rest of the world spits on America?
Yes. China is authoritarian, not totalitarian.
Such pressure on a company to install spyware would leak out to the world, and Lenovo would be finished for good.
This is clearly an instance of "democracy with American characteristics", involving lawyers to get somewhere.
Anyway, M$ can't afford to stall the launch any further, which means the users will have to pay for Symantec's share.
Hell, M$ might even start thinking more about security just to piss off Symantec. Or maybe put them out of business entirely, because they live like a parasite on M$.
Mail clients like Apple Mail have a resize function built-in for this purpose.
That is the correct user implementation.
Stupid. Deduct the number of people executed, and you still have roughly the same figures.
Your argument that the US is better because it executes fewer people than in China is stupid. If the US put an end to the medieval practice of killing people, perhaps you could exercise a greater pressure on China on the capital punishment. We try to do that in Europe, but the US is a fly in the ointment, as always when it comes to human rights (the Gitmo gulags, intervention in too many countries, spy planes over Europe, and so on).
Then the USA will be an even bigger winner, because smoking pot is a political crime.
That China jails dissidents is bad, but they are not that many. Most prisoners in China are in jail for real crimes.
That is the Apple way, folks. Robes, sandals, beach sand. Cars, guitars, sex, and teenager violence...
You are free to sweat in your Business Bhurka and eventually choke on your tie when it gets stuck in your Dell lapstop, but remember you had a choice.
Thanks. I was using 145.97.39.145 earlier.
It came back up in february, but is blocked again. But this time it is hard blocked, which means you need a proxy to get into it. Before it was a matter of a simple forward.
Google and Wikipedia are the two most valuable tools on the net, and what China is doing here is a kind of information war, crippling those two tools in China to favor their own solutions.
That said, I believe Baidu will be able to create a Chinese encyclopedia that is more useful than Wikipedia, which currently has major problems with stupid character mixings and fierce ideological battles between different Chinese spheres of influence (mainland, TW, HK, MC, even foreign Chinese). More useful in all respects, except for topics such as Falun gong, independence movements, individual dissidents, and the square incident.
Baidu will never be better than Google, however. It is just too lame.
Irony is new to you?
No, no, no... you can't be Chinese, because the Chinese can't read Slashdot. In particular YRO. At least not without a firewall. And if they do anyway, they must either be "informants" or government propagandists.
In China, everything what we discuss on Slashdot is censored. You can't say democracy, because then Hu Jintao will send his thugs and fuck you in the ass. Yep, that is how China works. I saw it on Fox News.
You can discuss democracy in China. Try this one: http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=11 8157&fpage=1&highlight=
No, economic success is not possible under communism. That is why China turned to capitalism. But that was in 1978. In what cave have you been for the last 27 years?
No Unicode, no GUI. Lame.
Circumventing censorship in China, if needed (it rarely is), is easy, and most people know how to do it (it is spread by peer education in homes and internet cafes). No one is gonna lock you up for doing it either, so I don't know what TFA is talking about.
Now, tearing down the firewall would be the easiest thing in the world. It just requires a collaborate effort between governments in the West, or at least some powerful companies in the West, namely to host servers for distributed protocols a la Tor and similar, distributed and encrypted IM and so on.
But you won't ever see such a collaboration. I leave it as an exercise to figure out why.
For Iran... I recommend we nuke'em. It is the simplest and least painful way.
Yes, math is difficult. China has a population of 1.3 billion people.
Nevertheless, the total number of incarcerated people in the US ("the land of the free") is still higher, in absolute terms, than in China. That is also a measure of freedom.
There are Chinese proxies for the same purpose, and they are more reliable than foreign proxies. Some Chinese proxies are actually police proxies, though. Might as well just install Privoxy.
That said, you rarely need a proxy in China. It might come as a shock to most people here, but the Chinese in general do not look for information on Falun Gong or the Tian'anmen incident. If they did, they would easily find what they are looking for using baidu.com, or P2P (which is completely unblocked) solutions. And even if they don't, there will be people telling them about it all the time anyway, by phone campaigns and distribution of leaflets.
As usual, the hysteria over censorship in China is waaaaaaaaaaay exaggerated, and the problem actually lies in the other side of the world, within the democratically elected Western governments, which legitimize China's practices by installing similar devices back home.
Hey, I am posting this from China... fuck Hu Jintao. Now please execute me.