Is that part of this:

idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/201....php

This seems to be a move by the DOJ to make any violation of terms of service/use a criminal offense—I like how this is debunked by witnesses before the congressional committee contemplating this nonsense.

volokh.com/2011/12/14/sopa-rope-a-dope/
SOPA-Rope-a-dope

Stewart Baker • December 14, 2011 8:26 pm

Critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) have had an impact. A manager’s amendment has been offered by Lamar Smith, R-TX, the Judiciary Committee chairman. I was critical of the first version. Here’s my take on the new version.

This version contains several provisions aimed at the security concerns raised about the first version. The new bill insists that it is imposing no technology mandate and that it should not be construed to impair the security of the domain name system or the network of an ISP that receives an order. And it whittles away at the original requirement that ISPs must “block and redirect” visitors to pirate sites. Now, the ISPs are only obliged to block those efforts, not to redirect the subscribers to an alternative site that warns against piracy. ISPs also get a safe harbor that allows them some assurance that they don’t have to redesign their networks to carry out the blocking.

Unfortunately, the new version would still do great damage to Internet security, mainly by putting obstacles in the way of DNSSEC, a protocol designed to limit certain kinds of Internet crime. Today, it’s not uncommon for crooks to take over Internet connections in hotels, coffee shops and airports — and then to direct users to fake websites. Users sent to a fake banking site are prompted to enter account and password data, which is used to loot the account. DNSSEC prevents such attacks by giving each website a signed credential that must be shown to the browser by the domain name system server before the connection can be completed.

That’s a great idea, but crooks will predictably try to override it. Their best bet is to claim that the website doesn’t have a signed credential – a claim that will be plausible at least during the transition to DNSSEC. What should a browser do if a website says it doesn’t have a signed credential yet? The site might be telling the truth, or it might be a fake site backed by a DNS server that’s been tampered with. To find out, the browser needs to ask a second DNS server, and if that server doesn’t give an answer, a third and a fourth server until it gets an answer. That’s the only way to keep criminals from blocking the real DNS credentials and offering their own.

Unfortunately, the things a browser does to bypass a criminal site will also defeat SOPA’s scheme for blocking pirate sites. SOPA envisions the AG telling ISPs to block the address of www.piracy.com. So the browsers get no information about www.piracy.com from the ISP’s DNS server. Faced with silence from that server, the browser will go into fraud-prevention mode, casting about to find another DNS server that can give it the address. Eventually, it will find a server in, say, Canada. Free from the Attorney’ General’s jurisdiction, the server will provide a signed address for piracy.com, and the browser will take its user to the authenticated site.

That’s what the browser should do if it’s dealing with a hijacked DNS server. But browser code can’t tell the Attorney General from a hijacker, so it will end up treating them both the same. And from the AG’s point of view, the browser’s efforts to find an authoritative DNS server will look like a deliberate effort to evade his blocking order.

The latest version of SOPA will feed that view. It allows the AG to sue “any entity that knowingly and willfully provides …a product … designed by such entity or by another in concert with such entity for the circumvention or bypassing of” the AG’s blocking orders.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this provision is aimed squarely at the browser companies. Browsers implementing DNSSEC will have to circumvent and bypass criminal blocking, and in the process, they will also circumvent and bypass SOPA orders. The new bill allows the AG to sue the browsers if he decides he cares more about enforcing his blocking orders than about the security risks faced by Internet users. Indeed, the opaque language about “another in concert with such entity” makes perfect sense in the context of browser extensions. It allows the AG to sue not just browsers but also add-ons with this feature.

OK, that’s the law. Now imagine you are Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or Mozilla. The DNSSEC guys come to you and ask you to implement DNSSEC. It won’t increase your revenue, they admit, but it will make the Internet much safer for your users. You want to be a good internet citizen, so you think maybe you should devote some precious code-writing resources to the cause. But first you ask your lawyers whether they foresee any problems.

“Well, yes,” they’d have to say. “If you add code to the browser that implements DNSSEC, you’ll have to add code that circumvents criminal hijackings of the DNS system. And that code can be declared illegal by the Attorney General pretty much whenever he likes. You can litigate about it, of course, but if you lose, the AG can shut down all shipments of your browser until it’s been revised to the satisfaction of his staff and their advisers in Hollywood.”

Faced with that advice, would you implement DNSSEC?

Neither would I.

In fact, I wouldn’t even allow the DNSSEC guys to write an extension that implemented their protocol. And so, by poising a sword of Damocles over the browser companies, SOPA will kill DNSSEC.

Let’s hope that the opposition to SOPA hasn’t punched itself out against the first version of the bill, because this version is badly in need of a knockout punch.

Categories: Uncategorized

radar.oreilly.com/2011/11/s...ectip.html

blogs.reuters.com/jackshafe...he-disease

boingboing.net/2011/12/27...ives-i.html
TorrentFreak continues to crawl through YouHaveDownloaded, a database of IPs that have been logged by a BitTorrent-spying tool run by some folks in Russia. They've already revealed the downloading habits of the RIAA and DHS as well as the behavior detected at Nicholas Sarkozy's official residence, and now they're publishing stats on the US House of Representatives.

The House, of course, has been mired in Internet controversy since Rep Lamar Smith introduced his Stop Online Piracy Act, which establishes a regime of national censorship in the name of fighting copyright infringement. So it is with some amusement that TorrentFreak points out that more than 800 of the IP addresses assigned to the House of Reps were involved in copyright infringement over BitTorrent, according to the YHD database. There's a big trove of self-help books in there, with titles like "Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High," and who knows, maybe that's what Mr Smith was reading when he decided to sell out America to Hollywood?

Something that immediately caught our eye are the self-help books that are downloaded in the House. “Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High,” for example, may indeed be of interest to the political elite in the United States. And “How to Answer Hard Interview Questions And Everything Else You Need to Know to Get the Job You Want” may be helpful for those who aspire to higher positions.

Books tend to be popular in the House because we found quite a few more, including “Do Not Open – An Encyclopedia of the World’s Best-Kept Secrets” and “How Things Work Encyclopedia”. But of course the people at the heart of democracy are also downloading familiar content such as Windows 7, popular TV-shows and movies.

And there was another category we ran into more than we would have wanted too. It appears that aside from self-help books, House employees are also into adult themed self-help videos. We’ll list one of the least explicit here below, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As for me, I'm just shocked (and a little bit heartened, to be honest) to learn that there's someone in the House who knows how to use the Internet.

www.vice.com/read/lamar-...right-whoops
The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator
By Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

"The DMCA is one of the big reasons companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter weren’t crushed in their early days by harassing lawsuits."

That was then, when the internet was in its infancy. Arguments that the law should never be changed now ring hollow. The internet, faceboo and Twitter are not going to go away just because web sites have to implement greater measures to stop their sites from being used as tools for piracy.

Now tribe.net might not survive any change, but that is because the operation is barely viable already, according to the last time I heard anything about it from New Systems Associates (NSA), its current administrators.

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15...-bills.html
January 14, 2012
White House Says It Opposes Parts of Two Antipiracy Bills
By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Saturday that it strongly opposed central elements of two Congressional efforts to enforce copyrights on the Internet, all but killing the current versions of legislation that has divided both political parties and pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley.

The comments by the administration’s chief technology officials, posted on a White House blog Saturday, came as growing opposition to the legislation had already led sponsors of the bills to reconsider a measure that would force Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material.

www.digitaltrends.com/computi...ntinues/
With a vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) delayed indefinitely due to political pressure, Reddit.com has confirmed with Digital Trends that it still plans to blackout the popular site on Wednesday, in protest of the equally-controversial Protect IP Act (PIPA).

UPDATE: Wikipedia will also blackout its pages on Wednesday. See more details here, and below.

A vote on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been delayed indefinitely, but the fight against Internet censorship continues: Reddit.com will go forward with its site-wide blackout on Wednesday, January 18, to protest the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA), Digital Trends has confirmed. PIPA, a similar bill to SOPA, is scheduled to go up for a vote before the Senate on January 24.

news.cnet.com/8301-31322_...ybody-loses/
In the aftermath of Wednesday's SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, the Internet community amassed quite a bit of goodwill, flexed its muscles in a friendly, humorous, civil-disobedience kind of way, and, remarkably, even managed to change quite a few minds.

Just 24 short hours later, Anonymous legions nuked that goodwill and took cyber security into thermonuclear territory. The real question now is: were they played?