The case against Backpage was built on lies, innuendo, and a willful misunderstanding of how the internet works. But that didn’t stop the government from destroying the company and its founders’ lives. Over the last few years, we’ve written about how the entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The company actually worked […]

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Amazon is cracking down on pirate streaming apps that offer unauthorized access to Prime Video content. The company recently filed DMCA takedown notices with GitHub to remove APKs associated with popular apps such as PikaShow, Castle, and FlixFox. Interestingly, the takedown requests were made on behalf of Amazon Seller Services, an Indian subsidiary not typically linked to Amazon's streaming platform.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Deadpool & Wolverine' tops the chart, followed by 'Joker: Folie à Deux'. 'The Substance' completes the top three.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Google is facing criticism in Spain and Italy for alleged anti-piracy failures. The latest claim accuses Google of ignoring notices that aim to remove pirate IPTV providers from search results. So here's the thing: why would a company take down 10 billion URLs from search but suddenly start acting differently? The public labeling of Google as "grossly negligent" deserves context too; two weeks ago, Google's diligence prevented one of its accusers from deindexing its own website.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, leaks to the press were heavily protected in both ends – both for the leaker and for the reporter receiving the leak. In the digital world of our children, this has been unceremoniously thrown out the window while discussing something unrelated entirely. Why aren’t our digital children afforded the same checks and balances?

Another area where privacy rights have not been carried over from the analog to the digital concerns journalism, an umbrella of different activities we consider to be an important set of checks-and-balances on power in society. When somebody handed over physical documents to a reporter, that was an analog action that was protected by federal and state laws, and sometimes even by constitutions. When somebody is handing over digital access to the same information to the same type of reporter, reflecting the way we work today and the way our children will work in the future, that is instead prosecutable at both ends.

Let us illustrate this with an example from the real world.

In the 2006 election in Sweden, there was an outcry of disastrous information hygiene on behalf of the ruling party at the time (yes, the same ruling party that later administered the worst governmental leak ever). A username and password circulated that gave full access to the innermost file servers of the Social Democratic party administration from anywhere. The username belonged to a Stig-Olof Friberg, who was using his nickname “sigge” as username, and the same “sigge” as password, and who accessed the innermost files over the Social Democratic office’s unencrypted, open, wireless network.

Calling this “bad opsec” doesn’t begin to describe it. Make a careful note to remember that these were, and still are, the institutions and people we rely on to make policy for good safeguarding of sensitive citizen data.

However, in the shadow of this, there was also the more important detail that some political reporters were well aware of the login credentials, such as one of Sweden’s most (in)famous political reporters Niklas Svensson, who had been using the credentials as a journalistic tool to gain insight into the ruling party’s workings.

This is where it gets interesting, because in the analog world, that reporter would have received leaks in the form of copied documents, physically handed over to him, and leaking to the press in this analog manner was (and still is) an extremely protected activity under law and indeed some constitutions — in Sweden, as this concerns, you can even go to prison for casually speculating over coffee at work who might have been behind a leak to the press. It is taken extremely seriously.

However, in this case, the reporter wasn’t leaked the documents, but was leaked a key for access to the digital documents — the ridiculously insecure credentials “sigge/sigge” — and was convicted in criminal court for electronic trespassing as a result, despite doing journalistic work with a clear analog protected equivalent.

It’s interesting to look at history to see how much critically important events would never have been uncovered, if this prosecution of digital journalism had been applied to analog journalism.

For one example, let’s take the COINTELPRO leak, when activists copied files from an FBI office to uncover a covert and highly illegal operation by law enforcement to discredit political organizations based solely on their political opinion. (This is not what law enforcement should be doing, speaking in general terms.) This leak happened when activists put up a note on the FBI office door on March 8, 1971 saying “Please do not lock this door tonight”, came back in the middle of the night when nobody was there, found the door unlocked as requested, and took (stole) about 1,000 classified files that revealed the illegal practices.

These were then mailed to various press outlets. The theft resulted in the exposure of some of the FBI’s most self-incriminating documents, including several documents detailing the FBI’s use of postal workers, switchboard operators, etc., in order to spy on black college students and various non-violent black activist groups, according to Wikipedia. And here’s the kicker in the context: while the people stealing the documents could and would have been indicted for doing so, it was unthinkable to charge the reporters receiving them with anything.

This is no longer the case.

Our digital children have lost the right to leak information to reporters in the way the world works today, an activity that was taken for granted — indeed, seen as crucially important to the balance of power — in the world of our digital parents. Our digital children who work as reporters can no longer safely receive leaks showing abuse of power. It is entirely reasonable that our digital children should have at least the same set of civil liberties in their digital world, as our parents had in their analog world.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: At worst, our analog parents could be prevented from meeting each other. Our digital children are prevented from talking about particular subjects, once the conversation is already happening. This is a horrifying development.

When our digital children are posting a link to The Pirate Bay somewhere on Facebook, a small window sometimes pops up saying “you have posted a link with potentially harmful content. Please refrain from posting such links.”

Yes, even in private conversations. Especially in private conversations.

This may seem like a small thing, but it is downright egregious. Our digital children are not prevented from having a conversation, per se, but are monitored for bad topics that the regime doesn’t like being discussed, and are prevented from discussing those topics. This is far worse than preventing certain people from just meeting.

The analog equivalent would be if our parents were holding an analog phone conversation, and a menacing third voice popped into the conversation with a slow voice speaking just softly enough to be perceived as threatening: “You have mentioned a prohibited subject. Please refrain from discussing prohibited subjects in the future.”

Our parents would have been horrified if this happened — and rightly so!

But in the digital world of our children, the same phenomenon is instead cheered on by the same people who would abhor it if it happened in their world, to themselves.

In this case, of course, it is any and all links to The Pirate Bay that are considered forbidden topics, under the assumption — assumption! — that they lead to manufacturing of copies that would be found in breach of the copyright monopoly in a court of law.

When I first saw the Facebook window above telling me to not discuss forbidden subjects, I was trying to distribute political material I had created myself, and used The Pirate Bay to distribute. It happens to be a very efficient way to distribute large files, which is exactly why it is being used by a lot of people for that purpose (gee, who would have thought?), including people like myself who wanted to distribute large collections of political material.

There are private communications channels, but far too few use them, and the politicians at large (yes, this includes our analog parents) are still cheering on this development, because “terrorism” and other bogeymen.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: In a series of posts on this blog, we have shown how practically everything our parents took for granted with regards to privacy has been completely eliminated for our children, just because they use digital tools instead of analog, and the people interpreting the laws are saying that privacy only applies to the old, analog environment of our parents.

Once you agree with the observation that privacy seems to simply not apply for our children, merely for living in a digitally-powered environment instead of our parents’ analog-powered one, surprise turns to shock turns to anger, and it’s easy to want to assign blame to someone for essentially erasing five generations’ fight for civil liberties while people were looking the other way.

So whose fault is it, then?

It’s more than one actor at work here, but part of the blame must be assigned to the illusion that that nothing has changed, just because our digital children can use old-fashioned and obsolete technology to obtain the rights they should always have by law and constitution, regardless of which method they use to talk to friends and exercise their privacy rights.

We’ve all heard these excuses.

“You still have privacy of correspondence, just use the old analog letter”. As if the Internet generation would. You might as well tell our analog parents that they would need to send a wired telegram to enjoy some basic rights.

“You can still use a library freely.” Well, only an analog one, not a digital one like The Pirate Bay, which differs from an analog library only in efficiency, and not in anything else.

“You can still discuss anything you like.” Yes, but only in the analog streets and squares, not in the digital streets and squares.

“You can still date someone without the government knowing your dating preferences.” Only if I prefer to date like our parents did, in the unsafe analog world, as opposed to the safe digital environment where predators vanish at the click of a “block” button, an option our analog parents didn’t have in shady bars.

The laws aren’t different for the analog and the digital. The law doesn’t make a difference between analog and digital. But no law is above the people who interpret it in the courts, and the way people interpret those laws means the privacy rights always apply to the analog world, but never to the digital world.

It’s not rocket science to demand the same laws to apply offline and online. This includes copyright law, as well as the fact that privacy of correspondence takes precedence over copyright law (in other words, you’re not allowed to open and examine private correspondence for infringements in the analog world, not without prior and individual warrants — our law books are full of these checks and balances; they should apply in the digital too, but don’t today).

Going back to blame, that’s one actor right there: the copyright industry. They have successfully argued that their monopoly laws should apply online just as it does offline, and in doing so, has completely ignored all the checks and balances that apply to the copyright monopoly laws in the analog world. And since copying movies and music has now moved into the same communications channels as we use for private correspondence, the copyright monopoly as such has become fundamentally incompatible with private correspondence at the conceptual level.

The copyright industry has been aware of this conflict and has been continuously pushing for eroded and eliminated privacy to prop up their crumbling and obsolete monopolies, such as pushing for the hated (and now court-axed) Data Retention Directive in Europe. They would use this federal law (or European equivalent thereof) to literally get more powers than the Police themselves in pursuing individual people who were simply sharing music and movies, sharing in the way everybody does.

There are two other major factors at work. The second factor is marketing. The reason we’re tracked at the sub-footstep level in airports and other busy commercial centers is simply to sell us more crap we don’t need. This comes at the expense of privacy that our analog parents took for granted. Don’t even get started on Facebook and Google.

Last but not least are the surveillance hawks — the politicians who want to look “Tough on Crime”, or “Tough on Terrorism”, or whatever the word of choice is this week. These were the ones who pushed the Data Retention Directive into law. The copyright industry were the ones who basically wrote it for them.

These three factors have working together, and they’ve been very busy.

It’s going to be a long uphill battle to win back the liberties that were slowly won by our ancestors over about six generations, and which have been all but abolished in a decade.

Our children are right to demand Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights — the civil liberties our parents not just enjoyed, but took for granted.

I fear the failure to pass on the civil liberties from our parents to our children is going to be seen as the greatest failure of this particular current generation, regardless of all the good we also accomplish. Surveillance societies can be erected in just ten years, but can take centuries to roll back.

Privacy remains your own responsibility today. We all need to take it back merely by exercising our privacy rights, with whatever tools are at our disposal.

Image from the movie “Nineteen-Eighty Four”; used under fair use for political commentary.

On the 31.03.2018, the KSHZLE Crew is hosting the famous "Eastersession" in Karlsruhe again, where you have the chance to meet all the homies and have a great time! BTW you have also the chance to win some prizes and vouchers. meeting point is at the Karlsruhe Central Station at 12am (local time), where it starts directly with a street session through Karlsruhe and ends with a chilled night session at the illuminated ODP Skatepark.

All the best, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

What:
Easter-Street Session 2k18 - hosted by KSHZLE Crew

When:
31th March 12am - 22pm (local time)

Where:
Karlsruhe Central Station
76137 Karlsruhe


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