Sheesh. Why don't we just all move to China, Zimbabwe or Iran?
It seems the US is sinking to the bottom of the pile when it comes to government intrusiveness and snooping on Net users.
Now US citizens have to deal with: - massive, systematic NSA snooping, - un-checked, covert FBI investigations, - DoJ judicial suppressions of EFF advocacy; and - a Congress that makes the Belarussian parliament look liberal democratic.
On top of this, beleaguered American net users also have to deal with the DMCA, and the draconian powers given to the RIAA and MPRA that allow these organisations untrammelled power to pursue and persecute thousands of net users every year!
Like I said, I doubt that any place in the world now has such a level of State intervention in the Internet and the online lives of its citizens, and condones the victimisation and suppression of online users by private companies to such a degree.
So give China, Zimbabwe, Iran etc a break! They ain't that bad after all.
Let's wait 5 years to see if Google is indeed so wonderful, ground-breaking, innovative blah blah blah.
The rapid growth trajectory they are on at the moment has been traced by many tech and other companies in the past, and along the way things get more complicated and organisations and their environment can change dramatically, often for the worse. G. are not unique in this or any respect, and don't live outside of history.
I'd also like to dispute statements that Google is "an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base "? There is nothing innovative about the items in that list at all - Google didn't invent (nor even significantly improve) web-based email, nor web-based database front-ends, nor good search algorithms nor desktop search nor photo-sharing on the web nor web-based satellite mapping nor the delivery of contextual web-based advertising etc etc etc. And to call the 'Google Desktop' an innovation when it is just a round up of basic software tools (many of which aren't even Google's) is especially dumb.
There is, in fact, very little that Google has done in terms of products or its business model that is 'innovative' by any stretch of the imagination. Let's face it, they haven't really invented much at all.
They are indeed very good at buying up other small innovative companies, they do web search well, they run a good ad banner network in AdSense, and offer good software like GDS, Picasa, SketchUp and other titles for free. I thank them for that, and their business has indeed successfully delivered those things to me and millions of other people, but I'm not going to lose my sense of judgement about the company because of these nice but hardly innovative achievements.
This looks and smells like political censorship, not 'phishing' or a case of 'copyright infringement'. Disguising it that way ain't gonna work.
The incident makes it look as if in Australia it only takes a phone call from an anonymous Canberra bureaucrat to have a politically critical web-site shut down.
Ugh. Great promotion of Australia, guys.
The way Melbourne IT and Yahoo seem to have acted in this is really poor. All it took was one phone call, it seems, from some anonymous Canberra bureaucrat, making vague claims against a web site, and then Melb IT etc rushed to take the site down.
Did they attempt to verify the caller? Did they ask for the take-down notice in writing? Did they verify the request with their lawyers? Did they contact the publisher to indicate that an objection had been raised about the site content, give the web-site owner a copy of the objection, and outline on what basis they proposed to take down the site? Is the procedure for dealing with this sort of objection clear in their customer TOS?
etc.
As a tax-payer whose $$ have funded the supposedly Commonwealth copyrighted material that Mr Neville was supposed to be infringing on, I would also at a minimum like to have the original request for the take-down notice made publicly available, so that voters can see who issued it, and under what legal authority. We need transparency here.
I wonder now how many *other* instances of political censorhip happen in Australia, thanks to anonymous bureaucrats closing down web sites and other political commentary platforms, but which never make the news. Who knows.
Maybe Condy should raise the issue of democracy and press freedom in Australia with Mr Howard while she is in the country. Seems apt.
Can't someone at Google load up the client software on the thousands of CPU's of the distributed Googleplex? Or Akamai? Shouldn't take long to crack the with all that firepower brought to bear on it.
Or just say its a message from Osama Bin Laden and the NSA will get it done for you in a millisecond.
But of course the NSA probably broke these messages 60 years ago.
In which case just put in a Freedom of Information request for de-crypted result!
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh. Why don't we just all move to China, Zimbabwe or Iran?
It seems the US is sinking to the bottom of the pile when it comes to government intrusiveness and snooping on Net users.
Now US citizens have to deal with:
- massive, systematic NSA snooping,
- un-checked, covert FBI investigations,
- DoJ judicial suppressions of EFF advocacy; and
- a Congress that makes the Belarussian parliament look liberal democratic.
On top of this, beleaguered American net users also have to deal with the DMCA, and the draconian powers given to the RIAA and MPRA that allow these organisations untrammelled power to pursue and persecute thousands of net users every year!
Like I said, I doubt that any place in the world now has such a level of State intervention in the Internet and the online lives of its citizens, and condones the victimisation and suppression of online users by private companies to such a degree.
So give China, Zimbabwe, Iran etc a break! They ain't that bad after all.
Huh? Lets keep a perspective here.
Let's wait 5 years to see if Google is indeed so wonderful, ground-breaking, innovative blah blah blah.
The rapid growth trajectory they are on at the moment has been traced by many tech and other companies in the past, and along the way things get more complicated and organisations and their environment can change dramatically, often for the worse. G. are not unique in this or any respect, and don't live outside of history.
I'd also like to dispute statements that Google is "an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base "? There is nothing innovative about the items in that list at all - Google didn't invent (nor even significantly improve) web-based email, nor web-based database front-ends, nor good search algorithms nor desktop search nor photo-sharing on the web nor web-based satellite mapping nor the delivery of contextual web-based advertising etc etc etc. And to call the 'Google Desktop' an innovation when it is just a round up of basic software tools (many of which aren't even Google's) is especially dumb.
There is, in fact, very little that Google has done in terms of products or its business model that is 'innovative' by any stretch of the imagination. Let's face it, they haven't really invented much at all.
They are indeed very good at buying up other small innovative companies, they do web search well, they run a good ad banner network in AdSense, and offer good software like GDS, Picasa, SketchUp and other titles for free. I thank them for that, and their business has indeed successfully delivered those things to me and millions of other people, but I'm not going to lose my sense of judgement about the company because of these nice but hardly innovative achievements.
This looks and smells like political censorship, not 'phishing' or a case of 'copyright infringement'. Disguising it that way ain't gonna work.
The incident makes it look as if in Australia it only takes a phone call from an anonymous Canberra bureaucrat to have a politically critical web-site shut down.
Ugh. Great promotion of Australia, guys.
The way Melbourne IT and Yahoo seem to have acted in this is really poor. All it took was one phone call, it seems, from some anonymous Canberra bureaucrat, making vague claims against a web site, and then Melb IT etc rushed to take the site down.
Did they attempt to verify the caller?
Did they ask for the take-down notice in writing?
Did they verify the request with their lawyers?
Did they contact the publisher to indicate that an objection had been raised about the site content, give the web-site owner a copy of the objection, and outline on what basis they proposed to take down the site?
Is the procedure for dealing with this sort of objection clear in their customer TOS?
etc.
As a tax-payer whose $$ have funded the supposedly Commonwealth copyrighted material that Mr Neville was supposed to be infringing on, I would also at a minimum like to have the original request for the take-down notice made publicly available, so that voters can see who issued it, and under what legal authority. We need transparency here.
I wonder now how many *other* instances of political censorhip happen in Australia, thanks to anonymous bureaucrats closing down web sites and other political commentary platforms, but which never make the news. Who knows.
Maybe Condy should raise the issue of democracy and press freedom in Australia with Mr Howard while she is in the country. Seems apt.
Can't someone at Google load up the client software on the thousands of CPU's of the distributed Googleplex? Or Akamai? Shouldn't take long to crack the with all that firepower brought to bear on it.
Or just say its a message from Osama Bin Laden and the NSA will get it done for you in a millisecond.
But of course the NSA probably broke these messages 60 years ago.
In which case just put in a Freedom of Information request for de-crypted result!
This is one good reason for some of the big online players with huge market caps to take equity positions in telcos like AT&T. Like MS has.
If Google or eBay is a big stock-holder, idiot telco CEO's won't be so inclined to pursue dumb plans like these.