Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make “streaming” infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn’t available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend “public performance” rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.
Several websites, including YouTube, have been blocked from U.S. military computers in Japan to free bandwidth for recovery efforts.
Washington (CNN) — The U.S. military has blocked access to a range of popular commercial websites in order to free up bandwidth for use in Japan recovery efforts, according to an e-mail obtained by CNN and confirmed by a spokesman for U.S. Strategic Command.
The sites — including YouTube, ESPN, Amazon, eBay and MTV — were chosen not because of the content but because their popularity among users of military computers account for significant bandwidth, according to Strategic Command spokesman Rodney Ellison.
The block, instituted Monday, is intended “to make sure bandwidth was available in Japan for military operations” as the United States helps in the aftermath of last week’s deadly earthquake and tsunami, Ellison explained.
U.S. Pacific Command made the request to free up the bandwidth. The sites, 13 in all, are blocked across the Department of Defense’s .mil computer system.
“This is a response to a time of extreme demand for networks,” Ellison said.
Law enforcement agencies are digging deep into the social media accounts of applicants, requesting that candidates sign waivers allowing investigators access to their Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other personal spaces.
Some agencies are demanding that applicants provide private passwords, Internet pseudonyms, text messages and e-mail logs as part of an expanding vetting process for public safety jobs.
More than a third of police agencies review applicants’ social media activity during background checks, according to the first report on agencies’ social media use by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the largest group of police executives. The report out last month surveyed 728 agencies.
“As more and more people join these networks, their activities on these sites become an intrinsic part of any background check we do,” said Laurel, Md., Police Chief David Crawford.
Privacy advocates say some background investigations, including requests for text message and e-mail logs, may go too far.
“I’m very uneasy about this,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Where does it all stop?”
(Brisbane Times) — Politicians are letting foreign-owned companies covertly gather information about voters.
The websites of Barry O’Farrell, Kristina Keneally, Tony Abbott and the Greens plant spying devices on visitors’ computers, which can track them as they browse the internet.
Information gathered about a user’s online behaviour can be used to build detailed profiles to help target advertisements – a practice many believe is a threat to privacy.
Online tracking is done mainly by cookies (text files) and beacons (invisible images).
The devices allow a third-party company to see which elements of a page the user has clicked on, potentially identifying information held in the URL, such as an email address.
A tracking device, owned by Yahoo! and dated to expire in 2037, was planted on this website’s test computer when visiting the website of the federal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.
The site of the Premier, Kristina Keneally, placed devices owned by ShareThis, a company that collects information about online habits.
All four websites planted YouTube cookies, even though this website’s computer did not play any videos.
YouTube has begun removing al-Qaeda videos from its website after the British Government contacted the White House to complain about the material.
A number of clips by Anwar al-Awlaki, believed to have been the mastermind of the cargo bomb plot, were deleted from the video sharing site last night. However scores more, including incendiary calls to wage war on non-Muslims, remain.
A Google search for one of the most provocative videos – entitled 44 Ways to Support Jihad – on Google brings up more than a hundred results from YouTube. Two of the three top results have now been blocked although the bulk of the rest remain available.
Users clicking on the deleted content were confronted with a message saying “This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s terms of service.”
YouTube says its community guidelines “prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech or incitement to commit specific and serious acts of violence”.
A source at Google, which owns the video sharing site, confirmed that staff had begun to take down al-Awlaki’s videos after being alerted by the Telegraph’s report.
YouTube has already almost completely removed the video ‘Hide The Decline’ (right now there is only one uploaded video left) and ‘Hide the Decline II’ has been removed completely.
Climategate: Hide The Decline – the video
Just in case that this last video will also be removed:
Climategate: Hide The Decline – the video
Climate Experts Square Off Over Video
Dr. Michael Mann
Experts on opposing sides of the global-warming debate are now squaring off against each other over a satirical Internet video.
On one side is Dr. Michael Mann, professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, who has been ensnared in the Climategate scandal. He is threatening to sue Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW) after the group produced a satirical video called “Hide the Decline,” which features Mann’s face and makes fun of his scientific findings, and accuses him of covering up evidence of an apparent decline in temperatures over the past decade.
On the other side is Dr. Patrick Michaels, a contributing author and reviewer on the U.N.’s 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a well-known skeptic of global-warming alarmism. At a National Press Club press conference Tuesday, Michaels criticized Mann for having “very, very, very thin skin.”
The notion that a professor would file a lawsuit over a satirical video “is just quite shocking,” said Dr. Michaels.
Dr. Mann is perhaps most famous for his “hockey stick graph” which showed that mean global temperature changes, which had remained stable for the past millennium, spiked dramatically during the 20th Century. Mann was also involved in controversial e-mails between climate experts, which sat at the center of the Climategate scandal.
“Makin’ up data the old hard way, Fudgin’ the numbers day by day, Ignoring the snow and the cold and a downward line, Hide the decline (hide the decline),” reads the song in the video’s background, critical of Dr. Mann’s alleged manipulation of climate data.
The “Hide the Decline” video garnered more than 500,000 viewers and was featured on the CBS Evening News as well as on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show.
Not that we already have more than enough censorship!
Google says it will not “voluntarily” comply with the government’s request that it censor YouTube videos in accordance with broad “refused classification” (RC) content rules.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google’s censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.
Google warns this would lead to the removal of many politically controversial, but harmless, YouTube clips.
University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of Australia’s top communications experts, said that to comply with Conroy’s request Google “would have to install a filter along the lines of what they actually have in China”.
As it prepares to introduce legislation within weeks forcing ISPs to block a blacklist of RC websites, the government says it is in talks with Google over blocking the same type of material from YouTube.
(NaturalNews) The US government has issued a new report that recommends blocking access to popular websites during a pandemic outbreak in order to preserve internet bandwidth for investors, day traders and securities clearing house operations. The concern is that a pandemic would cause too many people to stay at home and download YouTube videos and porn, hogging all the internet bandwidth and blocking throughput for investment activities, thereby causing a stock market meltdown.
This isn’t an April Fool’s joke. It’s all based on a public report issued by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), available from their website at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d108.pdf
In this article, I’m going to explain how a pandemic outbreak could theoretically bring down Wall Street. But to get to that, you’ll first need to find out what the GAO said in its curious report (see below). Parts of this article are presented as satire, but the underlying facts quoted here are all true and verifiable (links are provided to all sources).
This report in question is entitled, “GAO Report to Congressional Requesters, INFLUENZA PANDEMIC” and includes this subtitle: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet Congestion and Encourage Readiness.
As the report explains:
In a severe pandemic, governments may close schools, shut down public transportation systems, and ban public gatherings such as concerts or sporting events. In such scenarios, many more people than usual may be at home during the day, and Internet use in residential neighborhoods could increase significantly as a result of people seeking news, entertainment, or social contact from home computers. Concerns have been raised that this additional traffic could lead to congestion on the Internet that would significantly affect businesses in local neighborhoods, such as small doctors’ offices or business employees attempting to telework by connecting to their employers’ enterprise networks.
Popular C-Span Junkie user channel suspended, 6400 videos gone
You Tube has expanded its zealous copyright crusade by suspending the popular C-Span Junkie user channel, and in doing so has pulled hundreds of viral Ron Paul videos, which are now completely dead.
The C-Span Junkie user channel, a non-partisan archive of short clips taken from C-Span broadcasts of events in the Congress and the Senate, has been the home of the vast majority of You Tube videos you have seen of Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others being confronted in Congress, as well as Ron Paul’s speeches on the House floor. A total of more than 6400 videos in all have been pulled, hundreds of which featured the Texan Congressman.
Whether or not C-Span itself requested that You Tube pull the channel is not known, but it is clearly in the public interest and constitutes fair use to show a clip less than 10 minutes in length of what the people who are supposedly our Representatives are saying in Congress on our behalf.
As we have highlighted before, You Tube arbitrarily suspends accounts based on flimsy copyright claims that aren’t even properly investigated.
We had our own You Tube account suspended following a copyright complaint from a separate party who didn’t even own the copyright on the original material. In addition, the copyright claim was clearly erroneous as it was based on the fact that Alex Jones held up a printed version of an online newspaper story for a few seconds on camera. The channel was eventually reinstated after You Tube received a flood of complaints.
“I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to in a moment see 6400 videos gone,” writes the channel owner on the C Span Junkie website, “Figure 6400 hours (easily) poof GONE! I did this for the common good and now it all gone.”
The channel has now been replaced with a new account but it’s unlikely to survive long if the owner dares to post anything of substance.
Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.
Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.
Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that “threatens to expose deeply private information.”
The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.
Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema.
Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.
Joe Lieberman, senator and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman, wants to censor what you watch on Google and YouTube. Lieberman has sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, accusing the corporation of allowing “offensive material” on its site, namely “videos produced by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups.” Joe wants these taken down immediately and demands Google “prevent them from reappearing.” No word if Schmidt has responded, but a letter sent by a bigwig commissar such as Lieberman is nothing to take lightly. Schmidt and his corporate lawyers have likely confabbed.
“Today, Islamist terrorist organizations rely extensively on the Internet to attract supporters and advance their cause. The framework for much of this Internet campaign is described in a bipartisan staff report released last week by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which I am privileged to chair, titled Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” writes Lieberman. “The report explains, in part, how al-Qaeda created and manages a multi-tiered online media operation that produces content intended to enlist followers in countries all over the world, including the United States. Central to this media campaign is the branding of content with an icon or logo to guarantee authenticity that the content was produced by al-Qaeda or allied organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam (a.k.a Ansar al-Sunnah) or al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb.”
Or how about an “allied organization” such as the CIA, military intelligence or one of its cutouts? “An expert computer analyst has presented evidence that so-called ‘Al-Qaeda’ tapes are routinely digitally doctored and has also unwittingly exposed an astounding detail that clearly indicates a Pentagon affiliated organization in the U.S. is directly responsible for releasing the videos,”Paul Joseph Watsonwrote last August. Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant, examined the image quantization table of a 2006 Ayman al-Zawahiri tape and made a fascinating discovery – al-Qaeda’s As-Sahab logo (supposedly the media arm of al-Qaeda) was placed on the tape at the same time as the IntelCenter logo. As it turns out, IntelCenter, notorious for releasing al-Qaeda videos, is run by Ben Venzke, former director of intelligence at a company called iDefense, a Verisign company. Jim Melnick, a senior military psy-op intelligence officer who worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld, is billed as iDefense’s director of threat intelligence. In short, there is a distinct possibility the al-Qaeda videos mentioned by Lieberman are fake.
There’s no question John McCain is getting a free ride from the mainstream press. But with the power of YouTube and the blogosphere, we can provide an accurate portrayal of the so-called Maverick. We can put the brakes on his free ride!
Since we first released The Real McCain a year ago, our REAL McCain series has garnered close to 2 million views, with over 13,000 comments and tens of thousands more in petition signatures! Clearly, John McCain’s record is something the public wants to discuss, and yet the corporate media is doing NOTHING to present the truth. We feel obliged to continue countering the mainstream media’s love of McCain. And so we thought it was high time for a sequel: The Real McCain 2.
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