Memex 1.1

Hmmm… This is one of those cases wehre the cock-up theory of history probably provides the best explanation. But here’s The Register’s take on the story so far:

Italian bloggers may be required to register with a national database, unless an ambiguously-worded new law is amended before it comes into force.

Widespread outrage among bloggers and IT-savvy journalists has reached the mainstream press, and the government now appears to be keen to revise a draft law which has led politician Francesco Caruso to remark: “This is Italy, not Burma.”

The law got its initial approval from Mr Prodi’s Cabinet of Ministers in mid-October, as part of a package attempting to tidy up Italy’s publishing-related regulations, and requires further approvals before coming into force.

According to many legal experts, the murky text of the law (pdf) can be construed to include non-professional, not-for-profit blogs and websites among “editorial products”, giving them the same duties and liabilities as magazines and newspapers.

This would require even the lowliest Italian blogger or MySpace account holder to go through the hassle of filing personal details with the national registry of “communication operators” currently reserved for professionals of the publishing sector.

And The Register’s conclusion?

The chances of this law becoming effective in its current form are exceedingly slim, so there is no immediate cause for concern. The blog brouhaha may turn out to be another storm in a teacup, but it has certainly shown Italian netizens once again that their government is remarkably out of touch with the realities of the internet age.

Associated Press have done a really neat piece of detective work to investigate rumours of dirty tricks by Comcast, a US ISP.

NEW YORK (AP) - To test claims by users that Comcast Corp. was blocking some forms of file-sharing traffic, The Associated Press went to the Bible.

An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.

We picked the Bible for the test because it’s not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.

In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.

Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.

The Bible test was conducted with three other Internet connections. One was provided by Time Warner Inc.’s Time Warner Cable, and the other came from Cablevision Systems Corp. The third was the business-class connection to the AP’s headquarters, provided by AT&T Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc.

No signs of interference with file-sharing were detected in those tests.

Further analysis of the transfer attempt from the Comcast-connected computer in the San Francisco area revealed that the failure was due to ‘’reset'’ packets that the two computers received, carrying the return address of the other computer.

Those packets tell the receiving computer to stop communicating with the sender. However, the traffic analyzer software running on each computer showed that neither computer actually sent the packets. That means they originated somewhere in between, with faked return addresses…

It seems that Comcast uses Sandvine traffic-shaping hardware to limit the effectiveness of BitTorrent seeding. The goal is to manage BitTorrent traffic without tipping off mainstream users that it’s being done. This source cites Robb Topolski’s explanation of how it’s achieved:

“The Sandvine application reads packets that are traversing the network boundary. If the application senses that outbound P2P traffic is higher than a threshold determined by Comcast, Sandvine begins to interrupt P2P protocol sequences that would initiate a new transfer from within the Comcast network to a peer outside of the Comcast network. The interruption is accomplished by sending a perfectly forged TCP packet (correct peer, port, and sequence numbering) with the RST (reset) flag set. This packet is obeyed by the network stack or operating system which drops the connection.”

I love the idea of using the Bible as the test file. Reminds me of Larry Lessig’s report of coming into his office in Stanford one morning to find the network police waiting for him, grimly announcing that it had been discovered that he had P2P software installed on his computer. Larry explained that he used P2P as a way of distributing his own publications — intellectual property that he owned. The idea that there might be legitimate uses for P2P had clearly never occurred to the management.

And that’s in Stanford!

Later: Ed Felten has also commented on Comcast’s traffic shaping practices.

Tech Review has an interesting interview with John Palfrey of the Berkman Center. Preface to the interview reads:

The Burmese government’s recent shutdown of the country’s Internet connections amid pro-democracy protests was a new low for what is already one of the most censorious nations in the world. Earlier this year, the OpenNet Initiative–a collaboration among researchers at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Toronto–found that the nation’s rulers blocked 85 percent of e-mail service providers and nearly all political-opposition and pro-democracy sites. (See “Internet Increasingly Censored.”) All this in a nation in which less than 1 percent of citizens have Internet access in the first place.

Last week–after images of the beatings of Buddhist monks and the killing of a Japanese photographer leaked out via the Internet–Burma’s military rulers took the ultimate step, apparently physically disconnecting primary telecommunications cables in two major cities, in a drastic effort to stop the flow of information from Burma to the rest of the world. It didn’t completely work: some bloggers apparently used satellite links or cellular phone services to get information outside the country.

One chilling exchange in the interview goes:

TR: How does this shutdown compare with other state-controlled actions you’ve documented?

JP: I’ve never seen anything like this cutoff to the Internet at such a broad scale so crudely and completely. They’ve taken the nuclear-bomb approach. We’ve witnessed what appear to be denial-of-service-type attacks during elections, for instance, but nothing so large-scale like this shutdown. Still, information has leaked out. So the military junta has found that given the many roots to the global telecommunications infrastructure, it’s very hard to cut off a place entirely.

So much for John Perry Barlow’s utopian dreams — to which (full disclosure) I once also subscribed. Sigh.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

The Australian government spent almost $85 million on a filter to block children’s access to porn on the Net. Tom Wood, a 16-year-old from Melbourne, cracked it in 30 minutes, all the while heaping nationalist scorn on the imported product. “It’s a horrible waste of money,” he said. “They could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one.” The government responded by adding an Australian designed filter. Tom cracked that one in 40 minutes. Communications Minister Helen Coonan said, “The vendor is investigating the matter as a priority.” Young Tom says there are more important concerns about children’s Net safety to deal with anyway. “Filters aren’t addressing the bigger issues anyway,” he said. “Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix. They really need to develop a youth-involved forum to discuss some of these problems and ideas for fixing them.” And maybe give them some security tips as well.

This is what you get if you try to access YouTube from a Thai internet cafe.

Thanks to Pete for spotting it.

This morning’s Observer column…

The Flickr firestorm is just the latest refutation of the enduring myth that the internet is uncontrollable. While technologically adept users can usually find anything they’re looking for, the vast majority of the internet’s 1.1 billion users are at the mercy of local laws, ordinances and customs.

Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea are finding themselves at the sharp end of this, because Yahoo needs to conform to local laws if it is to continue to trade in those jurisdictions. The same forces explain why Google provides only a restricted search service to its Chinese users. Libertarianism is all very well when you’re a hacker. But business is business.

Michael tells me that Answers.com is now being blocked by the Chinese authorities. Answers.com is an advertising-supported, free website which was launched in January 2005 and has become one of the leading information portals on the Internet. It claims to hold four million answers drawn from over 120 titles from brand-name publishers, original content created by Answers.com’s own editorial team, community-contributed articles from Wikipedia, and user-generated questions & answers from its proprietary WikiAnswersTM system.

From Technology Review…

BEIJING (AP) — New rules by a Chinese government-backed Internet group maintain strict controls over the country’s bloggers, requiring them to register with their real names and identification cards.

The guidelines from the Internet Society of China, a group made up of China’s major Internet companies, contradict state media reports this week claiming that China was considering loosening registration requirements for bloggers to allow anonymous online journaling.

The society’s new draft code of conduct seen on its Web site Wednesday says Web log service providers must still get their users’ real names and contact information.

Critics say the requirement violates a blogger’s right to freedom of expression and puts them at risk of punishment or imprisonment if they post controversial opinions about politics, religion or other issues.

The society’s proposed code of conduct for blog service providers comes in addition to already existing government regulations that govern China’s Internet. The country’s official Internet watchdog banned anonymous Web site and blog registration in 2005.

Online bulletin boards and blogs are the only forum for most Chinese to express opinions before a large audience in a society where all media are state-controlled.

China has the world’s second-biggest population of Internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online. It also has some 20 million blogs, according to government figures…

From today’s New York Times…

Speaking at the annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, said Google’s long array of initiatives was organized around three ideas.

“Our next strategy evolution is to really think about three components,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Search, ads and apps,” he said, using a common shorthand for applications, or software programs.

The move is less a strategy shift than a new message — a way for Google to talk about its disparate initiatives in a way shareholders and the public can readily understand.

“It is worth saying that our underlying mission has not changed,” Mr. Schmidt noted.

The first two — search and ads — are well known to shareholders, and they account for virtually all of the company’s success. The third — apps — puts under one umbrella Google’s growing business of offering an eclectic mix of software.

Mr. Schmidt said the unifying theme behind the seemingly disparate programs was that they resided on the Web, rather than on users’ PCs, and were available wherever there is an Internet connection.

The programs include photo storage, social networking, online calendars, e-mail, instant messaging, word processing and spreadsheets. Most are free, and many compete with paid offerings from Microsoft. But Google has started charging businesses for some of them. “That is a business that looks like it is going to grow very nicely for us,” Mr. Schmidt said.

But a shareholder proposal to force Google to resist censorship in countries with authoritarian regimes like China was defeated “by an undisclosed tally”.

Surprise, surprise. Corporations don’t do ethics, any more than my cats respect fledglings’ rights.

From Saturday’s Herald Trib…

MOSCOW: At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the incoming managers had some startling news of their own: From now on, at least 50 per cent of the reports about Russia must be “positive”.

In addition, opposition leaders cannot be mentioned on the air and the United States is to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told.

The report goes on to say that:

Parliament is considering extending state control to Internet sites that report news, reflecting the growing importance of Web news as the country becomes more affluent and growing numbers of middle class Russians acquire computers.

Business as usual in the Kremlin, then.