Internet Freedom Preservation Lives On

Again, sorry for the massive delay of this post. I know it's long overdue, but this week was really kind of crazy. This next week should be a lot more calm so hopefully I'll be able to make another post before the end of next week.

I've been working on my Net Neutrality video for my Contemporary Issues in CS class and it's been fun. I'm trying to get various viewpoints on net neutrality and expose the truth, my personal biases aside. A few people aren't talking on camera, so that kind of sucks, but I'd rather have a video where everyone wants to speak their mind than one where I have to pull people's arms. I actually totally forgot that censorship fell under the spectrum of what neutrality is trying to fight, and I'm reeling now to cover my bases on that end. Fortunately, How Stuff Works has a really great explanation of censorship in its many forms with tangents into net neutrality if you feel like your knowledge is deficient or could use a brush-up.

There is good news though: Congress introduced a bill earlier this week called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act that I really love: it seeks to protect the neutrality of the Internet not by regulating it but rather by empowering the FCC to investigate if companies are "blocking, thwarting, or unreasonably interfering" with consumers' consumption of online content. This could be worded a little better yet because it needs to allow them to block spam and child pornography and all that stuff, but you get the picture. Would such a provision protect illegal content? Probably not, but I'd rather live with that than tiered service and censored content. The bill additionally directs the FCC to hold several broadband summits with other countries to discuss the issues of consumer choice and protection and such with regard to broadband service. It's a really interesting bill that I think could do well if people mobilized and told their representatives to support it and maybe if it was polished up just a little bit so that it doesn't become an overbearing piece of regulation.

The House of Representatives has been really busy because another interesting bill, that was introduced recently and I even brought it up here, passed easily. It's called the College Opportunity and Affordability Act and one of its very strange provisions requires universities to provide legal alternative to P2P file sharing and that it implement network filtering. Obviously, all the IT departments are pretty pissed and have been about this issue for a while now. There's a very real fear that maybe if they don't comply they'll lose federal funding even though dealing with illegal downloading isn't their priority; providing a quality education is. You think the MPAA and/or RIAA had a hand in this? I wonder. What really upsets me about this provision isn't that it discourages stealing, I'm ok with that, but rather the fact that pushes this crap onto our universities. So basically, we don't care that this country is lagging behind in math and science graduates or that other countries, like India and China, are outpacing us in churning out really smart students but rather that our universities help out greedy labels and clueless studios in their quest to stamp out piracy. Since when did our commercial society get to the point where we value this junk over securing the future of this country. I mean come on, once these kids graduate it's not like they're going to keep pirating your nonsense if they can easily afford to just buy it. It's like burning Aladdin at the stake for stealing a loaf of bread for himself and his loveable monkey.

Anonymous has come out with yet another video:



I don't know if I talked about this back when I explained my fascination with Project Chanology, but they had a flyer on their site about gatherings in various cities on February 10 at Churches of Scientology in protest of them. I'm sure it was inspired by V for Vendetta, but that's alright because it was still a good idea. What amazes me is that people still refer to them as religious bigots. I saw someone's opinion in the local paper blasting these protesters as bigots, which is crazy because they keep emphasizing that it's the Church, not the beliefs, that they're attacking. It's no wonder that we elected George W. when people are this naive. There is proof of the Church's human rights violations and there's proof that they're the bigots in that they try to silence those who speak out against them. Not only that, but they're thieves by not paying proper taxes. Christian churches get tax breaks and, lo and behold, actually give food and clothing to the poor and conduct various services for the community. Yes, they still make money, and yes they're crazy powerful, but they don't take from the community without giving back and get tax-exempt status. Oh, did I mention people who have left the Church speaking out against the Church coercing people to work for them? You can get the big picture by watching The Bridge. I'm a big supporter of this cause, and I'm glad that they sound more focused and determined now than they did before. Oh, and Tom Cruise is crazy.

Bad news for HD-DVD: Wal-mart has decided that they're not going to be stocking up on HD-DVDs after June. Is this the nail in HD-DVD's coffin? I personally think so. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but this is a pretty big blow. Wal-mart is the world's largest corporation (by revenues) and is a huge player in selling music and movies. Couple that with Best Buy pushing Blu-ray and Netflix phasing out its selection of HD-DVD movies and you have an extremely steep battle for Toshiba. Is there any hope? I honestly don't think so. It would take something pretty miraculous for everyone to all of a sudden decide to give HD-DVD another shot. Does your mom ever admit she's wrong? Probably not, so it's not like Wal-mart is going to say "Whoops, let's start carrying HD-DVDs again" and all those studios that moved away from it also changing their minds. A format war is just bad for business, I think everyone just wants it to end sooner than later.

I know I haven't talked about the iPhone much in a while (I try to not pollute the Web with more buzz about how cool it is, even though it is rather nifty), but this is big. Gear Live has very reliable sources telling them that Flash support for the iPhone is in the very near future (I assume just a software update from iTunes), which makes sense so that it would coincide with the SDK release. It seems like what was holding it back was business negotiations, not power consumption issues, but it'd really help the iPhone if it had it, regardless.

Now for some odds and ends. Google developed Google Apps Team Edition so that company employees can collaborate with Google Apps without having to go through their IT department. I don't know/understand all the details, but it seems to me like this is kind of a security breach if people use this without their IT department knowing. These guys may be part of a bureaucracy, but it shouldn't suggest that they're useless. Six Revisions has an excellent article on using the Web Developer add-on in Firefox to bolster your web development efforts. I actually didn't realize all its advantages, I only wish that I didn't have issues using it on this computer. It'll probably work on the new computer I get in May. The last thing is this bulky list of open source alternatives to popular proprietary software. Some of the alternatives aren't so exciting, but applications like Gimp, Pidgin, and Miro (I just downloaded this one because it looks so freaking cool).

A Fresh SP Emerges

I should really be working on my lexical analyzer for Compilers, but I keep putting off this post because of my work and now there's just too much going on for me to not talk about it. So what is an SP? The Church of Scientology uses that abbreviation for a "Suppressive Person" and is mainly used for antisocial personalities, apparently, whose personalities focus on violence against groups intended for betterment. As you may already know, such a supposed group has emerged call Anonymous, Anon, or Legion. Most of the media prefers Anonymous. They've released 3 videos on YouTube so far, though the second one has been taken down. If you don't know anything about Scientology, I highly recommend this episode of Southpark. It's a surprisingly accurate depiction of what we know about Scientology, minus Kyle being the leader. Anyhow, it's almost pyramid scheme where you have to pay to learn more about the teachings and, because of this, they've gotten testy about people releasing information about the church or their videos not at all afraid to sue and manhandle people into silence.



Well, this hacker group decided that the last straw was when they took down this video from YouTube of Tom Cruise spewing out his nonsense about Scientology. They're pissed about the censorship, they're pissed about all the litigation, and they don't like how they deprive the people they "brainwash" (I put that in quotes because it's not fact, but I believe they do) of certain freedoms and of a lot of money. In fact, there's a lot of people who claim foul play in the death of one of their believers because of signs of undernourishment and physical abuse. In essence, they view the church as an oppressive regime and feel that it must be stopped. I'm fully in support of this, though I've unfortunately had no part in anything they've done. I think it's really ballsy. They're doing what the mass media can't because they can act without identity and get away with what they feel is right.

Does this lead to vigilante justice? Would this degrade our justice system? It's arguable as to how good it is right now. Some people say that the acts they've undertaken are wrong in general. They have committed cybercrimes in staging DoS and DDoS attacks to take down their site and lots of spamming. They have a wiki detailing their goals and such, but I've been trying to give you the synopsis here. These guys are definitely not amateurs though. They're really good at being anonymous and they're even better at Denial of Service; I was really impressed to read how they subverted the church's move to a DoS-safe host (they just filter before forwarding to the real IP of the site) by just finding the real IP and slamming it with requests. Their wiki is a ridiculously detailed explanation on how to do everything: the faxing, the spamming, the prank calls - it's meticulous. These are not a bunch of little kids, they're experienced. I just find it wildly fascinating that this has all come to fruition. Some have commented that they should attack Christianity as well, but I, of course, disagree. Obviously, all organized religions desire money and power, but Christian churches encourage alms giving to the poor and including everyone. I don't need any money to go to church and learn; I do to be scientologist. I was never brainwashed into being a Christian either, it's a choice I made over many years of reflection and learning. And, most importantly, they believe on me seeing a doctor if I'm in physical pain; they don't hang their followers out to dry.

Anyway, that's enough of that topic, I really need to move on. Last week in my Contemporary Issues in CS class we had a guest speaker: Gary Chapman from the 21st Century Project. It was a very interesting talk about how it was started and how it promotes things like using IT to aid in disasters and OLPC and all that stuff. One thing he mentioned that I totally forgot about was that Thursday would be the auction for the 700 Mhz spectrum. That means that we're less than a year from digital transition, where any televisions relying on an antenna for programming (a lot of households, especially lower income households) will have to upgrade or get a converter box to watch TV. Despite it being a leisure, TV has become a pretty big part of our society so this is a pretty big deal because it's really going to happen after years of dilly-dallying from the government. What's more important though is the aftermath. What does winning the spectrum mean? That's still being speculated. The point is to raise over $20 billion (and also keep a small range for emergency services), but now it becomes a game of strategy. AT&T and Verizon want it for longer-range cell phone signals, but Google has their hat in as well. Why? They're trying to force open standards, which would be awesome and is probably in their best interest what with Android and all. Would they physically use it? Would anyone for that matter (they may just not want anyone else to have it)? No one is for certain (except for the big whigs), but Google could trade the spectrum to Sprint (not in the auction) for a piece of the WiMAX pie they have. After all, this spectrum is best for voice, not data. It's kind of an interesting issue and definitely a huge deal. There's going to be a lot about it in the coming months though, so stay tuned for more.

Engadget put up a bulleted clarification of Remote Disc, the add-on for the MacBook Air that promised that having an optical drive was unnecessary. As it turns out though, you can't use it to play commercial DVDs, burn CDs, play music CDs, or rip DVDs among other things. I don't know about you, but that's all I'd really be using an optical drive for anyway. Of course, I don't have a DVD-ROM because this computer is old (but still awesome), but I would rip my DVDs on a laptop to save the power when watching them. Anyway, I think this Remote Disc thing then is totally useless. I don't understand the logic behind it anymore, and the MacBook Air looks even more unattractive from a technical standpoint. Despite the appeal of digital content, it doesn't beat hard copies of stuff for a lot of users. My disappointment has been reflected further in the steep drop in Apple's stock price. It has dipped 30% in just two weeks. That's pretty intense. Steve Jobs alone lost $220 million (unrealized losses, I presume). Will they bounce back? Of course, it's Apple. I'm just shocked at how long this drop is going on for. I guess the market being down is hitting everyone hard and I want to blame that more than just Macworld.

It's getting late, so just a couple of quick, last things. Joel Spolsky put up a great article on reducing your concerns for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in exchange for just asking the five whys when problems occur to get to the root cause so they don't happen again. It makes a lot more sense than putting your blind faith in ridiculous statistics and backup schemes. IE8 is intending to be the most standards-compliant version of IE to date. The problem that has always plagued IE, however, is backwards compatibility with their old stupidity of horrible standards compliance. It's not that great even today, but it's better than it used to be. This has been a headache for me since I've had to be a site administrator, and a lot of people get so frustrated that they claim their site only works in Firefox, which is not the correct response (though I sorely wish it were). Anyway, their solution back in IE6 was doctype modes: a quirks mode if your site is to be rendered with the old engine and standards for IE6 and IE7 (yeah, it's weird, they're both on the same doctype though they're very different in compliance). Well, now they're doing a meta tag thing. If you have that tag it'll render as an IE8 page, otherwise it'll use an older rendering engine. It's one more pain to deal with, but I prefer it to having to hack things up more and shove IE8 into the standards doctype. It's better than the doctype thing, I think.