Internet Babel

http://wordpress.org/news/2012/01/help-stop-sopa-pipa/

You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of Sherlock*, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).

Some thoughts:

• In the U.S. our legal system maintains that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and that people are innocent until proven guilty. This tenet seems to be on the chopping block when it comes to the web if these bills pass, as companies could shut down sites based on accusation alone.
• Laws are not like lines of PHP; they are not easily reverted if someone wakes up and realizes there is a better way to do things. We should not be so quick to codify something this far-reaching.
• The people writing these laws are not the people writing the independent web, and they are not out to protect it. We have to stand up for it ourselves.

 

A different perspective on some facts and figures relating to BP’s recent fire/oil-spill and similar events that weren’t BP related:

11:  The number of people killed in accident on oil-rig leased by BP.

15,000+: The number of people killed in accident at Bhopal plant owned by American company Union Carbide.

4: The number of presidential vists (so far) to sites affected by accident at BP.

0: the number of presidential visits to site of Union Carbide accident.

$1.6bn: Spent so far on BP clean-up operations.

Bhopal: No clean-up.

$20bn: Compensation fund established within 2 months by BP.

$470m: Compensation paid since Bhopal accident 20 years ago.

$45m: Compensation paid out by oil firm Trafigura to 30,000 victims of dumped toxic waste in Ivory Coast after a 4 year legal battle.

$7bn: Compensation paid out to families of 9/11 victims.

$2.6bn: Dividend from BP, cancelled through political and public pressure.

$1bn: Dividend paid out by Transocean, owners and operators of the ‘BP’ rig, approved one  month after the accident.

 Hmmm….

The information in this post was sourced, extracted and reproduced in good faith from Private Eye issue: 1265

Google and an investment arm of the CIA are jointly backing a company working on real-time web monitoring and prediction.

Recorded Future uses real-time analysis of tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to identify relationships between people, organisations and events — both present and still-to-come.

The company says its temporal analytics engine looks at  ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same (or related) entities and events. The idea is to derive, for each event, who was involved and where/when it happened or might happen.  Recorded Future plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

This seems to be the first time that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA, but this is bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government.

Full story: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

A UK Police Federation article that seems to advocate the forced chemical sedation of suspects is a move into dangerous territory.

It appears that the Federation wish to formulate a strategy which they hope will lead to recognition and acceptance of so-called “excited delirious syndrome” and to formalise chemical methods of dealing with suspects who exhibit symptoms they say are associated with it including: running for no apparent reason; running wildly; being naked (trying to get cool); stripping off clothes (trying to get cool); apparent superhuman strength; seemingly unlimited endurance; violent resistance; violent resistance after being restrained; muscle rigidity; and the subject claiming “he can’t breathe”.

Read the full article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/apr/22/police-excited-delirium-forced-sedation

Those with ‘concealed-weapons’ permits may now carry guns in church—at least in Louisiana. thanks to a Bill signed by Governor Bobby Jindal on Tuesday night. As reported by Politico, the law allows “permit holders who take an additional eight hours of tactical training each year” to carry firearms into houses of worship.

See more here…

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/guns-be-allowed-louisiana-houses-worship