YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

via YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood.

House Kills SOPA

In a surprise move today, Representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, effectively killing the bill. This move was most likely due to several things. One of those things is that SOPA and PIPA met huge online protest against the bills. Another reason would be that the White House threatened to veto the bill if it had passed. However, it isn’t quite time yet to celebrate, as PIPA(the Senate’s version of SOPA) is still up for consideration.

via House Kills SOPA – Denver Computers | Examiner.com.

Remember the “borderless” Internet? It’s officially dead

Balancing chaos and order has always been a challenge; you want to curtail botnets and spam and phishing and other Internet ills without destroying the productive chaos that allowed a million websites and online businesses to launch without permission from any gatekeeper. Early Internet theorists, caught up in this chaos and still somewhat insulated from criminal gang activity behind so much spam and fraud and hacking online today, worried about breaking the Internet’s best qualities. Today, with 15 years of online bad behavior to look back on, governments have increasingly ignored Dalzell—but they sometimes risk imposing so much “order” on the ‘Net that creativity, commerce, and free speech is affected.

via Remember the “borderless” Internet? It’s officially dead.

How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet

I finally got around to reading the text of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) today. While the ostensible intentions are to combat online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods, the bad news is that the legislation contains elements which basically puts every single domain registered under generic TLDs under the authority of the United States Attorney General.

via How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet » blog.easydns.org – Happenings and observations.

How SOPA’s ‘circumvention’ ban could put a target on Tor

How SOPA’s ‘circumvention’ ban could put a target on Tor | Privacy Inc. – CNET News.

“It looks like SOPA would outlaw Tor,” says Markham Erickson, an attorney with Holch & Erickson LLP who runs NetCoalition. The trade association opposes SOPA and counts Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and Yahoo among its members.

It will be interesting what plans they have to enforce this.