Hollywood Wants to Break the Internet.

Hollywood wants to break the Internet


PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

As promised, here’s the first installment of our closer review of the massive piece of job-killing Internet regulation that is the Stop Online Piracy Act. We’ll start with how it could impact Twitter, Tumblr, and the next innovative social network, cloud computing, or web hosting service that some smart kid is designing in her garage right now.

Let’s make one thing clear from the get-go: despite all the talk about this bill being directed only toward “rogue” foreign sites, there is no question that it targets US companies as well. The bill sets up a system to punish sites allegedly “dedicated to the theft of US property.” How do you get that label? Doesn’t take much: Some portion of your site (even a single page) must

be directed toward the US, and either
allegedly “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement or
allegedly be taking or have taken steps to “avoid confirming a high probability” of infringement.

If an IP rightsholder (vaguely defined – could be Justin Bieber worried about his publicity rights) thinks you meet the criteria and that it is in some way harmed, it can send a notice claiming as much to the payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal etc.) and ad services you rely on.

Once they get it, they have 5 days to choke off your financial support. Of course, the payment processors and ad networks won’t be able to fine-tune their response so that only the allegedly infringing portion of your site is affected, which means your whole site will be under assault. And, it makes no difference that no judge has found you guilty of anything or that the DMCA safe harbors would shelter your conduct if the matter ever went to court. Indeed, services that have been specifically found legal, like Rapidshare, could be economically strangled via SOPA. You can file a counter-notice, but you’ve only got 5 days to do it (good luck getting solid legal advice in time) and the payment processors and ad networks have no obligation to respect it in any event. That’s because there are vigilante provisions that grant them immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement.

At a minimum, this means that any service that hosts user generated content is going to be under enormous pressure to actively monitor and filter that content. That’s a huge burden, and worse for services that are just getting started – the YouTubes of tomorrow that are generating jobs today. And no matter what they do, we’re going to see a flurry of notices anyway – as we’ve learned from the DMCA takedown process, content owners are more than happy to send bogus complaints. What happened to Wikileaks via voluntary censorship will now be systematized and streamlined – as long as someone, somewhere, thinks they’ve got an IP right that’s being harmed.

In essence, Hollywood is tired of those pesky laws that help protect innovation, economic growth, and creativity rather than outmoded business models. So they are trying to rewrite the rules, regulate the Internet, and damn the consequences for the rest of us.

Watch this space for more analysis, but don’t wait to act. This bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed. The bill’s sponsors (and their corporate backers) want to push this thing through quickly, before ordinary citizens get wind of the harm it is going to cause. If you don’t want to let big media control the future of innovation and online expression, act now, and urge everyone you know to do the same.

Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

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Internet Probe Can Track You Down

Everyone knows that every computer connected to the Internet has an internet protocol (IP) address, however, it's not so simple to track the exact physical location of a specific IP address. Or, is it.

Well, now that we know that Apple’s iPhone, iPad and Google’s Android smartphones constantly track users physical location, storing the data in unencrypted files that can be read easily by anyone who finds or steals your iPhone, it turns out that although these devices make it much easier to track you, they're not even necessary to find your physical location, 

New Scientist reports that it's possible to use "businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy.”

Closing in

The new method zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer. The first stage measures the time it takes to send a data packet to the target and converts it into a distance – a common geolocation technique that narrows the target's possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres.

Wang and colleagues then send data packets to the known Google Maps landmark servers in this large area to find which routers they pass through. When a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further. "We shrink the size of the area where the target potentially is," explains Wang.

Finally, they repeat the landmark search at this more fine-grained level: comparing delay times once more, they establish which landmark server is closest to the target. The result can never be entirely accurate, but it's much better than trying to determine a location by converting the initial delay into a distance or the next best IP-based method. On average their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres – good enough to identify the target computer's location to within a few streets.

Moreover, creepy researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views.

Just try not to get yourself on the Main Core list, which supposedly lists more than 8 million Americans.

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

-- senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations,

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Google Will Hand Over Anonymous Blogger's IP Address

This is a little scary.

"In an unprecedented move, Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) has agreed to supply the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used "Google Blogger" for a blog in which he slandered Shaarei Tikva council members running for reelection. The election is being held today. So far as is known, this is the first time that Google forewent legal action in such a case."

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The IP Rich List

Under IPv4 there are 4,294,967,296 possible IP addresses - each of which may be assigned to a device or computer on the internet. Four billion addresses equates to slightly less that two thirds of an IP address per person on the planet. As you may imagine, the IP addresses are not distributed evenly around the world - they are assigned to individual countries by Regional Internet Registries such as ARIN and RIPE. We take a look at how that information breaks down per person in each country.

First of all, I obtained an IP address to country lookup list, which revealed the blocks assigned to each country - from this I was able to calculate the total number of IP addresses allocated to each country. I then divided that total figure by the country's population, giving an indication of the number of IPs available to that country per capita (person).

Top 10 Countries

		Country	Population	No. of IPs	IPs/capita
1.		Vatican City	783	8,191	10.5 IPs per person
2.		United States	299,161,390	1,352,246,048	4.5 IPs per person
3.		Canada	32,547,200	70,313,601	2.2 IPs per person
4.		Iceland	297,139	589,790	2.0 IPs per person
5.		Monaco	35,656	63,480	1.8 IPs per person
6.		Gibraltar	27,921	47,097	1.7 IPs per person
7.		Liechtenstein	33,987	51,217	1.51 IPs per person
8.		Sweden	9,072,269	13,573,300	1.501 IPs per person
9.		Finland	5,255,580	7,705,691	1.496 IPs per person
10.		Australia	20,555,300	29,998,170	1.459 IPs per person

And so, onto the bottom 10 countries. Note that these are expressed in a slightly different way - rather that IPs per person, these are expressed by people per IP - the reciprocal.

Bottom 10 Countries

		Country	Population	No. of IPs	IPs/capita
195.		Afghanistan	29,863,000	20,476	1,458 people per IP
196.		Madagascar	18,606,000	12,286	1,514 people per IP
197.		Guinea-Bissau	1,586,000	1,203	1,550 people per IP
198.		Central African Republic	4,038,000	2,047	1,972 people per IP
199.		Burundi	7,548,000	2,302	3,278 people per IP
200.		Myanmar	50,519,000	12,286	4,112 people per IP
201.		Malawi	12,884,000	3,070	4,197 people per IP
202.		Ethiopia	75,067,000	16,383	4,582 people per IP
203.		Niger	13,957,000	255	58,139 people per IP
204.		Democratic Republic of Congo	59,319,660	1023	58,140 people per IP

As seen in the shaded map above, it's the African countries and disputed territories that have the highest ration of people to assigned IPs. The least IP-dense country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been stricken by war during the main period of growth of the internet, and has likely suffered. There is a clear reflection of GNP in these figures too - those countries with lower GDPs have similarly lower concentrations of IPs.

This IP shortage is the reason why the move to IPv6 is underway, which supports a markedly superior 3.4x10³⁸ possible addresses - more than enough for everyone on the planet, and no doubt we'll need the extra address space with the lesser economically developed countries catching up in terms of internet usage.

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