Category Archives: Politics

Polish democracy grows up

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The best news we’ve had in months came from the Polish electorate, which comprehensively rejected the crew who have been ruining the country for the last few years. As the Guardian leader-writer puts it…

Polish democracy grew up on Sunday, when the country’s voters rejected the strident, xenophobic nationalism of Jaroslav Kaczynski. The election mattered not just because it was the first time a generation born after 1989 could vote. Nor because the liberal conservative winner Donald Tusk won the strongest mandate of any prime minister in the post-communist era. It was important because it saw a new generation of voters express its impatience with a leadership that saw the rise of Poland exclusively through the prism of 20th-century invasion and occupation. Though Mr Kaczynski’s twin brother Lech still holds the presidency, Poland has turned a corner.

The reaction in European capitals to the departure of the intellectually dominant Kaczynski twin is not the best way to gauge the result of a snap election. But it does show how many countries the twins alienated in their brief but incident-packed reign. There was Germany, which found that the country they had sponsored for entry into the EU was now using membership as a way of settling old scores. There was Russia, whose relationship with the EU was embittered by Poland, retaliating to a Russian ban on Polish meat. There was the EU itself, whose reform treaty was nearly scuppered in the summer by Polish demands for more votes. The election was as much about Poland’s image abroad as it was about the need for more tolerance and liberty at home. If Mr Kaczynski’s model for Poland was a combative, xenophobic country surrounded by perceived enemies, and committed only to a relationship with a dwindling band of US neoconservatives, that model was rejected by the thousands of Poles living in Britain and Ireland who had a calmer, less hysterical view Poland’s place in Europe…

Italian bloggers to be officially registered?

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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.

Neat work, AP

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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.

Where’s Blair?

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Nice column by Stryker McGuire…

Blair’s politics live on most vividly in Brown himself. It’s uncanny the way the new prime minister has both killed Blair and shamelessly assumed his mantle. He’s amassed impressive popular support as the anti-Blair with a serious, nonflashy style that sets him apart from Blair, whose presentational pizzazz came to be deplored as spin by an electorate that turned angry after the invasion of Iraq. And yet, like Blair before him, he’s continued to develop hard-line policies on such issues as immigration and crime. He’s proposed locking up for five years anybody in illegal possession of a gun, for example. Such measures help to tighten Labour’s hold on the political center ground that was so key to the party’s Blair-led landslide in 1997. “It’s very clear that [Brown is] determined to continue being a New Labour politician,” says Blair’s erstwhile ideologist-in-chief, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics. “You’ve got to grasp the center ground, and his strategy is to squeeze the Tories out toward the edges.”

Burma’s Internet Crackdown

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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.

Not ‘If” but ‘When’…

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From Simon Heffer…

The other day I went to one of the most disturbing events of my life. Together with a number of others, I listened for the best part of two hours to two American security experts: their area of expertise was Iran and the threat it poses.

The burden of their observations can be summed up as follows: that an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a question of if but when.

And, it was emphasised, this certainty is not dependent on the man the world regards as the warmonger Bush still being in office: his successor, be he or she Republican or Democrat, will see that there is no option but to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions too.

The terrifying thought is this: what he heard at that seminar may well be right — that the US will eventually go for it.

We have such short memories. It’s not that long ago since: we (Britain and the US) egged on– and armed — Iraq in its war on Iran; turned a blind eye to Iraqi use of poison and nerve gas against Iranian troops (there are still people in Iran dying from the after-effects of Iraqi gassing); and did everything in our power to prevent UN intervention to stop the conflict. Why? Because it was deemed necessary to stop Iran at all costs.

Nothing’s changed, really. But the Iranians have learned the lesson. In a world that is irredeemably hostile to them, nukes are the only safeguard. Which is why they’re going for them. We’d do the same in their position.

The Brooning of Labour

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If, like me, you were repelled by the unctuous vapouring of Gordon Brown’s Conference Speech, then you’ll enjoy Ross McKibbin’s acerbic commentary in the current LRB. Sample:

How problematic Brown’s policies were and are has been demonstrated by the Northern Rock affair. In the short term, of course, its difficulties were not the doing of the government. Northern Rock was the victim of a crisis in the international banking system caused by unwise mortgage lending in the United States. In the longer term, however, Brown, New Labour and much of the country’s political and financial elite have acquiesced, with more or less enthusiasm, in a financial regime which began in this country with the abolition of credit restrictions by the Thatcher government. Although there were arguments in favour of abolition it was always very risky – just as the present colossal levels of personal indebtedness (essential to Labour’s electoral success) are very risky. That it came to a run on a bank – something that has not happened in Britain for 150 years, not even in the international financial crisis of 1931 when the stability of the British banking system was the wonder of the world – shows how instinctively (and understandably) nervous people are of this regime. Furthermore, Brown’s system of regulation worked badly. It was he who divided regulatory responsibility between the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England – which was asking for trouble – and it was he who extended the autonomy of the Bank, with predictable results.

The truth is that — as McKibbin points out — much of what is most detestable about New Labour — its authoritarianism, contempt for civil liberties, adulation of ‘wealth creation’, micromanagerial obsessiveness over ‘targets’, PFI, etc. — are actually more Brown’s creations than Blair’s. The only difference is that Brown is now varnishing them with a new layer of patriotic tosh about “Britishness”, “British values”, etc. If the Tories weren’t so pathetic there might be some hope of unhorsing the pompous ass.

Will he or won’t he?

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From Stryker McGuire’s blog…

He won’t. Which is to say British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not call a snap election for the autumn after less than four months in office despite the current swirl of rumors and speculation. Hedge: nothing in politics is certain — but I really don’t think a precipitious election makes sense. More importantly, Brown’s inner circle, and Brown himself, don’t think it makes sense…

Tories plan supertax on SUVs

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Now here’s an unexpected political development …

Motorists who buy environmentally unfriendly “gas guzzling” cars would be hit by a new batch of green “supertaxes” that would add thousands of pounds to the final bill under plans announced by David Cameron’s advisers.

In a triple assault on high-emission vehicles, they have proposed a new “showroom tax” that would add 10 per cent to the cost of the biggest polluters, a new variable rate of VAT with the lowest charge for the greenest cars, and a new top band of vehicle excise duty that would add up to £200 to the annual cost of licensing “super polluters”.

The proposed taxes would act as an incentive for motorists to drive smaller, more environmentally friendly cars

As a result, a car costing £30,000 that was ranked in the most environmentally damaging category would have £3,000 added in tax to the ordinary cost as well as paying full VAT of 17.5 per cent and additional road tax…

Hmm…. Will this idea make it into the next Tory election manifesto?

Sale of indulgences, Release 2.0

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Engagingly snotty piece about Dave ‘Vote Green to get Blue’ Cameron.

Apparently Cameron offsets his carbon emissions by donating to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land.

The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide ‘treadle pumps’ to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like ‘step machines in a gym’, according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.

What might once have been referred to as ‘back-breaking labour’ is now spun as ‘human energy’. According to Climate Care, the use of labour-intensive treadle pumps, rather than labour-saving diesel-powered pumps, saves 0.65 tonnes of carbon a year per farming family. And well-off Westerners – including Cameron, and Prince Charles, Land Rover and the Cooperative Bank, who are also clients of Climate Care – can purchase this saved carbon in order to continue living the high life without becoming consumed by eco-guilt. They effectively salve their moral consciences by paying poor people to live the harsh simple life on their behalf.