Chris, McGreal, a reporter for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, took to the road last month to report on how Americans living along Route 66–made famous in John Steinbeck’s fictional Grapes of Wrath journey–are faring during the recession.

You might think McGreal quickly encountered “real Americans” protesting President Obama’s “socialist” healthcare agenda by hurling insults at town hall meetings. Cable news channels are full of these images, which together portray the United States as a giant angry grassroots rally against reform-minded policies.

Odd, then, that McGreal reports this:

The outbursts against President Obama’s healthcare plans filling television screens, with opponents calling him a Nazi and accusing him of planning death committees to do in old people, are to a large degree manufactured by the same people who use similar tactics to oppose abortion.

(continue reading…)

Pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount, on 24th August Stockholm’s district court ordered aggressive action to remove The Pirate Bay from the Internet.

The court ordered the site’s bandwidth supplier, Black Internet, to disconnect the site from the Internet or face penalties of 500,000 kronor ($70,600). The ISP complied immediately – it had no choice if they were to comply with the law.

The Pirate Bay was quickly back up with a new bandwidth supplier but now several Swedish political parties are being openly critical of the law used to threaten Black Internet with fines as punishment for failing to stop the actions of others. The politicians are now calling for a change in the law.

(continue reading…)

µMonitor is a handy iPhone application that allows users to control their uTorrent client on the go. After putting months of hard work into getting the software ready for a public release, the developer Claudio was told by Apple that everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.

“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.

This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.

Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.

Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.

Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.

via torrentfreak.com

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has turned up the heat on the wireless industry expanding its probe of mobile phone practices following widespread complaints about a lack of competition, openness and innovation.

The “Notice of Inquiry,” announced during a Thursday agency meeting, expands on open FCC proceedings, including a look into exclusive contracts that lock phones to provider networks, and the anti-competitive blocking of applications and services.

With the new inquests the agency is broadening its investigation into innovation and consumer choice in the wireless marketplace. Issues that will come under consideration in this proceeding will likely include exorbitant text-messaging and termination fees, device and application blocking, and others.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are the two largest carriers in the marketplace controlling more than 60 percent of mobile phone accounts in the U.S. (continue reading…)

NY Times

The New York Times gets Net Neutrality right again, and again, and again. In their fourth editorial in support of Net Neutrality the newspaper’s editors write:

“A good bill that would guarantee so-called net neutrality has been introduced in the House. Congress should pass it, and the Obama administration should use its considerable power to make net neutrality the law. “

Why? According to the Times, we can’t let Internet service providers prioritize certain content over others.

Allowing these companies to become the Internet’s gatekeepers would undermine the democratic nature of the Web, which has made it such a great engine for free speech and economic growth.

(continue reading…)

Radiohead.com

Radiohead are no strangers to BitTorrent after the well-documented pay-what-you-like “In Rainbows” album unofficially racked up many thousands of downloads using the protocol.

Late last week the band’s BitTorrent link was revitalized after a new Radiohead track leaked onto the Internet. After this advance release of “These Are My Twisted Words,” rumors began to grow that Radiohead themselves might be behind the ‘leak’.

Speculation grew on the back of comments made by Thom Yorke of the band to The Believer: “We’ve actually got a good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out”.

Today, on the band’s Dead Air Space blog, Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar and keyboard) seems to solve the mystery:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.

We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

At the bottom of the post are two links to downloads, one directly from Waste and the other the original torrent uploaded to Mininova a few days ago. In fact, it was uploaded twice.

An enthusiastic commenter on Mininova exclaims: “OMFG! This torrent is being redirected from the radiohead official store, so there’s no album, just this song finished, this is very edgy, i mean thom yorke is way ahead from any other artist, at least we know he’s not doing his music to get some profit, at least not anymore, this is history being made, again, GREAT!”

Sounds like the first of many happy listeners.

Mininova is happy with Radiohead’s move also. The site’s co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “It’s great to see that artists use Mininova to distribute and promote their content for free. We encourage everyone to do this, which is why we provide our Content Distribution service.”

Radiohead uploaded the torrent the old fashioned way though, seeding it themselves. Apparently they are well aware of the latest developments in the BitTorrent community, as they used the newly founded OpenBitTorrent tracker.

via torrentfreak.com

Two months ago BREIN decided to take the Pirate Bay founders to court, hoping to get the BitTorrent tracker shut down in The Netherlands. BREIN won the civil case two weeks ago, and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch visitors within 10 days or face thousands of euros each day in penalties.

For now the verdict has been put on hold by BREIN, allowing the three defendants to appeal. Nevertheless, because of the legal issues between the two parties, an encounter between the head of BREIN, Tim Kuik and Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm that took place at Hacking at Random (HAR) this Friday was a rather interesting one.

Tim Kuik participated in a panel discussion on copyright laws and the future of media distribution at HAR, and halfway through he was standing face to face with Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Svartholm, who had been following the discussion in the audience, took the opportunity to confront Kuik with some of the allegations he made.

Svartholm started by asking if BREIN actually has any evidence that The Pirate Bay is making ‘a lot’ of money from distributing copyrighted works, as they claim. “Can you please tell me where that profit is, because i’d like some of it,” he asked, which resulted in applause and cheers from the audience.

“You tell me, you’re here, somebody paid for your trip,” Kuik quickly replied in an attempt to turn things around, implying that Svartholm must have used Pirate Bay revenue to make his way over to The Netherlands.

Svartholm, who currently works as a software programmer in Asia where he earns his living, then replied, “I paid for this trip by developing computer software for my customers,” which was again followed by applause from the audience.

Kuik found his argument crushed so reverted back to the earlier question about profits. “Everybody knows, including yourself, that you’re selling advertising space on your website, and people pay you for that,” he said.

Kuik went on to say that a Swedish investigative journalist found that The Pirate Bay made hundreds of thousands of kroner every year. To some this may sound like an impressive figure, but 300,000 kroner ($40,000) may not even be enough to cover the hardware and bandwidth costs, so it doesn’t prove that there’s any profit.

From Kuik’s responses it seems that BREIN has no evidence at all that The Pirate Bay is as profitable as they claim it is, so Svartholm went on to ask Kuik about the defamation lawsuit that the former Pirate Bay founders started against him and his organization.

The head of BREIN is being sued by TPB in Sweden for defamation, after Kuik claimed that the Pirate Bay founders were responsible for an alleged DDoS attack on BREIN’s website. In Sweden, Kuik is now facing up to two years in prison, and Svartholm wanted to know if he plans to show up.

In his reply, Kuik denied that he ever attributed the DDoS attacks to the people behind the Pirate Bay, but he said that it was a coincidence that their website was hit right after the case against TPB was announced to the press. Svartholm of course questioned Kuik’s denial, but he never saw his original question answered.

In the end, Kuik never answered any of the questions posed by Svartholm, but the face to face standoff between two people at the extreme ends of the copyright debate was an interesting one nonetheless. After the panel discussion, Tim Kuik and Gottfrid Svartholm set their differences aside for a brief moment, as they posed for the cameras.

The video of the HAR panel discussion is available in OGG and on Vimeo (Gottfrid at 30:20).

Tim Kuik (BREIN) and Gottfrid Svartholm (The Pirate Bay) credit: Reinoud Van Leeuwen

via torrentfreak.com

Pirate Party UK

In June the Swedish Pirate Party shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament, with no less than 7.1 percent of the vote. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in Sweden, which went beyond all expectations.

This achievement motivated supporters of the Party’s ideals in other countries to become active as well. Last month the Swiss Pirate Party was founded and the Canadians are mobilizing too. In the UK the local Pirate Party hasn’t been sitting still either, quite the opposite.

Today the Pirate Party UK announced that they are officially registered at the Electoral Commission. The paperwork is done and all the bureaucracy has been dealt with, so now the party’s biggest challenge is to increase its membership.

“Now the party can really start. It’s time for us to tell the world that we exist, to recruit members, raise funds and gear up to fight the General Election,” Pirate Party Chairman, Andrew Robinson told TorrentFreak. “The officers and web team have built the framework that the party needs to get going, now it’s time for the public to make things happen,” he added.

Increasingly the UK copyright lobby is pushing politicians, ISPs and law enforcement to take action against those accused of copyright infringement. If anywhere, a Party devoted to protecting online privacy and weeding out copyright abuse is much needed in Britain. However, they can’t do much without the help of actively involved members.

“Join the party, tell the media about the party, tell your friends about the party, take part in policy and news debates on the forum, join our Facebook group, donate or set up a regular payment to provide financial support, set up a branch in your constituency, school or workplace,” Robinson suggests, emphasizing that the success of Britain’s newest party depends on its members.

All over the world the Pirate Party movement is growing, with new parties being founded every month. For those who want to get involved locally, a full list of all the parties can be found at Pirate Party International.

Pirate Party UK Campaign Poster

via TorrentFreak.com

ItsHidden.com

If you’re of the mindset that what you do with your BitTorrent client is your business and not that of people snooping, sniffing, and prying at your packets along the way, ItsHidden offers a free VPN server to anonymize your activity.

ItsHidden uses 128-bit encryption on the secure tunnel created between you and the ItsHidden servers. Based out of the Netherlands, ItsHidden takes advantage of the legal climate there and doesn’t log any activity passed through its servers.

To access the ItsHidden VPN, you need to sign up for a free account and make a small configuration tweak to your respective operating system to enable the VPN. They include step by step instructions for Windows XP, users of other systems will either have to use them as a template or look up the specific steps for their OS. ItsHidden requires no software installation.

During our test run with a large Linux distribution, connection speeds with the ItsHidden VPN enabled were only negligibly decreased from our standard torrent speeds without the VPN in place. Check out the link below for more information and if you know of another service for anonymizing your internet activity—torrent-related or otherwise—let’s hear about it in the comments.

via Lifehacker.com

Carrie Lowe

At last month’s American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, I served on a Sunday morning panel presentation on the topic of Network Neutrality. On that day, there was no Network Neutrality legislation in Congress (like there is today, thanks to Reps. Markey and Eshoo). There was no flashy evening news piece on the topic, no rock stars on the Hill advocating for a free and open Internet. Yet 500 librarians showed up on a spectacular Chicago summer morning to hear Cliff Lynch, Greg Jackson and me talk about Network Neutrality.

If you are not familiar with librarians, this story might surprise you. But if you have ever found yourself on the business end of a discussion of intellectual freedom issues with someone from our community, you can predict what I am going to say next: The audience asked incredibly thoughtful questions and challenged some basic assumptions.

You see, Network Neutrality is, at its core, an issue central to librarians’ professional hearts. Like other issues that we’ve dealt with – such as censorship or book banning – Network Neutrality is fundamentally about having access to ideas.

Libraries’ Position on Network Neutrality

The ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy laid out its position on Network Neutrality in an issue brief published in 2006. In that paper, we argued that libraries’ interest in Network Neutrality is twofold.

First, Network Neutrality is an intellectual freedom issue. The ALA defines intellectual freedom as the right of all people to seek and receive information from all points of view, without restriction. Unfortunately, there is no law that protects intellectual freedom on the Internet today. Internet service providers (such as the cable and telephone companies) have the ability to block or degrade information or services travelling over their networks. If these companies discriminate against certain kinds of information based on the content of the message being delivered, this would represent a severe violation of intellectual freedom.

Second, Network Neutrality is a competition issue. Libraries in the digital age are providers of online information of all kinds. Among hundreds of examples, public libraries are developing online local history resources, and academic libraries allow the online public to explore some of their rarest treasures. Libraries, as trusted providers of free public access to information, should not compete for priority with for-profit history or literature Web sites that might be able to afford to strike deals with service providers. This makes the Network Neutrality debate not only a matter of philosophy and values for librarians, but also of livelihood.

In addition, librarians value innovation. Many of the technologies most central to the Internet are founded in principles of librarianship. Metadata? We call it cataloging. Online search? May I point you to the online public access catalog (OPAC)? Linked content? Cross references in the card catalog. Indexes, full-text search – the list goes on and on. We understand that in the context of the Internet, innovation begins at the edges; a killer app is more likely to be developed by two guys in a garage than by a highly paid executive in an industrial park. It is vital to preserve and encourage this innovation that has built the Internet. Network Neutrality is central to achieving this goal.

So What Do Libraries Want?

While our profession is built on some lofty principles – and librarians are among the fiercest free speech and intellectual freedom advocates you’ll meet – we are also a community of pragmatists. We believe that there is a way to strike a balance on Network Neutrality.

There oughtta be a law. The FCC changed the rules in 2005, removing the legal protections that guaranteed consumers the right to send and receive communications and content of their choosing over the Internet. Legal protections to prevent discrimination by ISPs and to protect intellectual freedom and innovation on the Internet should be restored. There are two ways to do this:

1. The “fifth principle”of nondiscrimination is right on the money. The language of the nondiscrimination condition the FCC applied to the AT&T/BellSouth merger (and echoed in the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program rules) is rational and appropriate. We urge the FCC to make this principle official.

2. Congress should act to preserve the neutral and open nature of the Internet. The Internet Freedom Preservation Act is the right bill at the right time. We urge Congress to pass this legislation.

Tiered pricing structures are both fair and unrelated to the central debate. We strongly agree that any Web site or organization (including libraries – nearly all public libraries provide no-cost access to the Internet) with a high-bandwidth connection should pay more for that service than a home user or a smaller organization. This is a traditional tiered pricing structure, and it is a fair and proven model. However, once a user has purchased bandwidth, there should be no artificial restraints on the legal content that he or she receives.

The Network Neutrality debate shows no signs of slowing down, and as I witnessed in Chicago, librarians show no sign of losing interest in this topic. We look forward to working with policymakers to protect the free and open nature of the Internet. Our libraries – and our nation – deserve nothing less.

via savetheinternet.com