Australia just passed into law one of the world’s most censoring copyright law,
which allows the country’s media giants like Village Roadshow to use
one-sided administrative process to get court orders to censor any
website whose “primary effect” is infringement, then use those orders to
force search engines to delist any site so blocked, and then recycle
those orders to block for any site or service that “provides access” to a
blocked site or service.
In other words, Village Roadshow can now censor any site it doesn’t
like, without the site’s operators being present to argue their side,
and then block search engines from displaying that site’s contents,
making it virtually impossible for everyday Australians to learn that
the site has been blocked – and they get to block tools like VPNs that
might allow people to get outside this censoring national firewall that
they get to run.
The pricetag for this is a secret: thought Village Roadshow gave AUD1.2
million to pass the precursor to this bill, Village Roadshow refuses to
say how much it spent in this cycle, and Australia’s backwards
election-spending transparency rules mean we won’t find out for months,
after this has faded from the news cycle (prior to this bill, Village
Roadshow’s all-time lobbying spend topped AUD6.7 million).
Look, I’m as delighted as you are to see Alex Jones’ ability to spread
hatred curtailed – because in a world where all the important speech
takes place online, and where online speech is owned by four or five
companies, being kicked off of Big Tech’s services is likely to be an
extinction-level event.
And yeah, it’s cute to see him wander from platform to platform, looking for a home, while “Conservatives” wake up and discover
that 40 years of Ronald Reagan antitrust-lite policies have given a
handful of shareholder-driven tech companies control over public
discourse (I call it “reaganfreude”).
But as David Greene – civil liberties director at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation – writes in the Washington Post, the big picture
here is terrible.
The platforms’ version of policing bad speech is sloppy, capricious and
arbitrary. People get censored for discussing terrorist atrocities,
while actual videos of terrorist atrocities stay up. Millions of
accounts are disconnected for being bots, with no recourse for actual
activists who are caught like dolphins in that big ole tuna net. Real
protests are delisted for being “inauthentic,” while Nazis organize in
the open.
Greene has a very, very modest proposal for how the platforms should conduct censorship, based on the widely accepted “Santa Clara Principles” on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation:
1. The companies should publish up-to-date stats on which posts and accounts they’ve shut down;
2. The companies should notify you when your post or account is flagged or removed;
3. You should have a right to appeal takedowns, and the rules should be evenhandedly enforced.
These are, as I say, modest goals. They’re a lot more likely to produce
good takedowns and healthy online forums that disconnecting people by
the millions using algorithms, or picking them off one by one only when
the public outcry gets loud enough.
The problem is we’ve given these companies this power by allowing them to build monopolies. And companies are less likely to allow us rights than our pale excuse for democratic goverments are.
What we need is the good representative democracy that can be achieved with Proportional Representation.
“We are heartbroken to share the news that Bassel Khartabil was executed by the Syrian government some time after his disappearance in October 2015 in Damascus, Syria.
“Bassel Khartabil, also known as Bassel Safadi, was born in Damascus, Syria on May 22, 1981. He grew up to pursue an education and career in computer engineering. He was the co-founder of the collaborative research company Aiki Lab, and the CTO of the publisher Al-Aous. He served as the first project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, and contributed to numerous Internet projects, such as Mozilla Firefox and Wikipedia.
“On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was arrested in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. For more than three years he was detained by the Syrian government at Adra Prison in Damascus. On October 3, 2015, Bassel was removed from his prison cell, and was sentenced to death by a Military Tribunal. We know now for a fact that Bassel Khartabil was executed by the Syrian government some time in October 2015, and we are demanding to know the exact date he was tried and then executed. No information at all was provided to his family until July 2017. The details of his sentencing and execution, and the whereabouts of his remains, are unknown at this time.
“Bassel Khartabil is survived by his wife, Noura Ghazi Safadi, as well as his mother and father.
“At the request of Bassel’s family, Creative Commons is announcing today that it has established the Bassel Khartabil Memorial Fund to support projects in the spirit of Bassel’s work. Creative Commons is accepting donations, and has seeded the fund with $10,000. Bassel was our friend and colleague, and CC invites the public to celebrate Bassel’s legacy and support the continuation of his powerful work and open values in a global community.
Contributions to the fund will go towards projects, programs, and grants to support individuals advancing collaboration, community building, and leadership development in the open communities of the Arab world. The fund will also support the digital preservation, sharing, and remix of creative works and historical artifacts. All of these projects are deeply intertwined with CC’s core mission and values, and those of other communities to which Bassel contributed.
Here in the “free world,” extraordinary efforts to silence and shut down free software and free culture by large corporations are ongoing. If software freedom was the unquestioned norm I have to wonder: would Bassel even have been arrested?
Today the EFF released these letters Bassel wrote from jail before he disappeared.
EFF is honored to share the letters we received in 2015 from activist Bassel Khartabil, whose death in Syria was confirmed this week. pic.twitter.com/kaeY7Fj4YF
What an extraordinary young man. My heart goes out to his family.
“Around the world, activists and advocates seek the sharing of culture, and open knowledge.
Creative Commons, and the global commons of art, history, and knowledge, are stronger because of Bassel’s contributions, and our community is better because of his work and his friendship. His death is a terrible reminder of what many individuals and families risk in order to make a better society.”
Yesterday I reblogged 33 other bloggers posts here, even though they are probably not free culture. Although I try to keep Canadian politics in the Whoa! Canada blog, limiting political articles on this blog to issues around copyright and free culture, Bill C-51 has crossed the line. This law the Harper Government is planning to pass, (maybe today, probably this week) in the face of strong opposition from a clear majority of Canadians, will certainly have a devastating effect on Canadian Culture. The removal of free speech protections will cause a massive chilling effect ~ self censorship ~ on all Canadian culture.
Some brave souls will continue to publish their art, just as the stubborn ones did in the early days of the Third Reich. I realize many of you will think this hyperbole, but the parallels between then and now are striking. I can tell you that I am not a brave soul, that’s why I am doing everything I can to stop this now. I don’t want to see Canadian civil rights undermined to the point of meaninglessness, not just for myself, but for my family, and all the generations that will come after.
But if my little voice, in concert with all the other Canadian voices goes unheeded, although it will surely break my heart, I will continue to do as I always have; I will continue to follow the law.
But it isn’t law yet, so today I will share and reshare as much as I can manage. Because I care. Because it matters.
I was an early adopter on Pinterest. I liked the service myself, not because I was looking for more social media, but because it allows me to aggregate links and sort them visually. I’m one of those people who navigate by landmarks, so having a visual cue reminds me which link goes to which article.
The problem is that the owners of Pinterest have been working to “improve” the site, often making it harder to use. Primarily adding more bells and whistles — that use more of my computers resources (internal memory). This makes it virtually impossible to use on my little underpowered netbook. (I can only have about 3 browser tabs open before it locks up.) So I usually do research on my big and powerful desktop computer, and the aggregate the links in Pinterest. I have an extensive link library I began to compile there during last years NaNoWriMo when I began my historical novel.
The problem is, Pinterest has recently crippled the service to anyone not signed in. This means I can’t just look at the site to find the link to the material I need, I have to sign in — and use more memory than I can afford — to access this. This is a huge problem for my own use of my own “pins.” But as someone who wants to share links to my own content, this means only people willing to sign in to Pinterest will be able to access my content. That’s a problem. I won’t be sharing Pinterest links anymore.
People concerned about personal privacy call that a registration wall. That’s a big part of why I stopped using Smashwords. I couldn’t use it for the purpose many authors use it — to give out free copies of ebooks — but if people have to pay Smashwords in personal information, the eBooks are not free at all. (Now I email review copies of ePubs, or people can anonymously download from TUEBL.)
And of course, there is Imgfave, another service that allows me to do much the same thing– without needing to be signed in to access my own (or anyone else’s) content. So that will do.
Who’s The Boss?
When we use someone else’s website, they get to make the rules, and we have to follow them. They can change how the site works, or what users are allowed to do, whenever they like. If we don’t like it, all we can really do is leave. (See: MySpace)
Pinterest is not alone in retaining control over how it chooses to allow us to use its website. The same is true of every other website that “generously” allows users to aggregate content or create content for its own greater glory (and profit). All we have to do is pay them in personal information and trust the faceless people making decisions not to change it to make it unusable for us.
Off the top of my head (but by no means an exhaustive list) web platforms that control your data can includes: Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest, Imgfave, Instagram, dropbox, ScribD, NaNoWriMo, LibraryThing, GoodReads, MySpace, LinkedIn, DeviantArt, Imgur, Flickr, YouTube, Livestream, Wattpad, blogspot, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Livejournal etc.
DIY
If you want to control your own data, you need to host it yourself. And that certainly will sound like a scary proposition. But is it any scarier that ripping up that carpet and replacing it with the tiles you want instead? We have no qualms about Do-It-Yourself projects in the physical world, it is not so much different in a digital world. Probably the biggest difference is that there are sure to be many more how-to videos on You-Tube for doing digital DIY. You can very often talk to actual people who made the software you need online via Twitter or through email. (Ever tried to ask Facebook a question?)
blogging
I know WordPress software is licensed to share, so you can download it to your own computer and host your own blog yourself, on your own computer. It is so easy lots of small businesses do this. WordPress even allows you to port your blog hosted on its free site to your own computer any time you like.
(Which is a great way to make backups… not because I don’t trust WordPress to do so, but because like any corporate service provider, it may be compelled to remove some or all of your content on receipt of a DMCA notice (a legal process that merely requires an accusation of copyright infringement… no proof needed). If your original work is taken down in this way, you will need to prove yourself innocent and then upload your content again. Backups are always a good idea because digital data is fragile. I am not certain but I think you can host your own Tumblr as well.
social media
If you are more interested in social media than blogging, there are a growing number of self hosting alternatives out there. If you like Facebook you might want to look at Friendica or Diaspora, if you like Twitter, you can host your own GNUsocial or StatusNet instance in the Fediverse. If you just want to be free of Twitter censorship, you can sign up for an account hosted by individual people, and there are a couple of big co-ops like Quitter and Gnusocial.de.
private browsing
I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually trust Google’s “private” browser to be private. And of course if you want more freedom from being tracked, you might want to use Duckduckgo or StartPage or Ixquick to do your web searches…
The only way to be private online is by using encryption (and even then you need to follow best practices). LONG passwords are more secure than a clever one that is difficult to type or remember.)
If you want to be secure, for email use PGP (stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”) the best (free) software; and for everything else, use TOR (TOR project). Great resources can be found at KW Crypto
And of course, you have the same problems if you use software that you don’t actually own… so Free Software is the way to go.
[Note: normally I would link everything but I simply don’t have time just now. Maybe later.]
If you want to control your own data, you need to host it yourself. And that certainly will sound like a scary proposition. But is it any scarier that ripping up that carpet and replacing it with the tiles you want instead? We have no qualms about Do-It-Yourself projects in the physical world, it is not so much different in a digital world. Probably the biggest difference is that there are sure to be many more how-to videos on You-Tube for doing digital DIY. You can very often talk to actual people who made the software you need online via Twitter or through email. (Ever tried to ask Facebook a question?)