Politico: Cruz slams Obama for 'internet giveaway'

"Today our country faces a threat to the internet as we know it. In 22 short days, if Congress fails to act, the Obama administration intends to give away the internet to an international body akin to the United Nations," Cruz said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday. "I rise today to discuss the significant, irreparable damage this proposed internet giveaway could wreak not only on our nation but on free speech across the world."

Cruz is pledging to make the issue his primary focus this month. He's already launched a website warning about the dangers of the administration's strategy, complete with a countdown clock against a black background. And he's scheduled a hearing of the Senate Judiciary oversight subcommittee he chairs next week to “investigate the possible dangers” of the plan.

Meanwhile, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) said Wednesday that language to delay the transition could be included in the continuing resolution to fund the government past this month. And House Republicans are considering their options in the coming appropriations bill, a GOP aide confirmed this week.

"Twitter shuts down 30 sites..."

"... dedicated to saving politicians' deleted tweets"

"Imagine how nerve-racking — terrifying, even — tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?" Twitter reportedly told the OSF. "No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user’s voice."

The US arm of Politwoops was shut down in June this year, but this new decision affects countries all over the world including Canada, Egypt, India, Ireland, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, Norway, and the UK. The Diplotwoops site, dedicated to archiving deleted tweets from diplomats, was also shut down, with the OSF noting that all the accounts had been "extensively used and cited by journalists around the world." The organization's director, Arjan El Fassed, commented: "What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos, but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice."

The cozy relationship between governments and big communication businesses is stronger than ever.

"Someday a child will run to her parents and say "mommy, daddy, how did you meet?"... "

"... They will turn to each other, hold hands, gaze into each others eyes and sweetly say "we both swiped right."

Top Reddit comments...

Tinderella: The Tale of Two Swipes

Mine: Daddy's buddy was being a sexist douche in aram team chat, so mommy trolled him and they became friends. Then she met daddy, and he traveled half way across the country to help her make you! Riot matchmaking OP.

I met my boyfriend of a year online and whenever someone asks I just tell them we met where our first date was. Seems more relatable.

Mine will be "I saw her profile on OKCupid and sent her something stupid about potatoes"

I met a girl at an internet cafe, but we didn't click.

"Why won't they release the rules?!?!"

"It's been less than 24 hours since the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve strict new regulations on Internet providers, but that's the leading question coming from its critics."

The speculation is that it's worst than people realize.

Meanwhile in China...

Some of China's largest Internet companies deleted more than 60,000 online accounts because their names did not conform to regulations due to take effect on Sunday, the top Internet regulator said.

It was good while it lasted.

"From Internet to Obamanet"

"Critics of President Obama’s “net neutrality” plan call it ObamaCare for the Internet."

That’s unfair to ObamaCare.

Both ObamaCare and “Obamanet” submit huge industries to complex regulations. Their supporters say the new rules had to be passed before anyone could read them. But at least ObamaCare claimed it would solve long-standing problems. Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn’t broken.

The permissionless Internet, which allows anyone to introduce a website, app or device without government review, ends this week. On Thursday the three Democrats among the five commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission will vote to regulate the Internet under rules written for monopoly utilities.

GOP control of both the house and the Senate has not amounted to a hill of beans when it comes to slowing down Obama's aggressive power grab.

"Ulbricht denies all allegations. He is not the Dread Pirate Roberts"

"The prosecution insists off the bat that Ross Ulbricht = the Dread Pirate Roberts, and the Dread Pirate Roberts = Ross Ulbricht. The grand jury indictment is premised on that equation."

The Dread Pirate Roberts could not have picked a better pseudonym. The name is taken from a character in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (later made into a film in 1987)—a dastardly masked man in black who later turns out to be the female protagonist’s childhood sweetheart Westley in disguise. In the novel and the film, “The Dread Pirate Roberts” is itself a pseudonym without a stable identity. Westley inherits the name from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, who hands it over after retiring. The Dread Pirate Roberts is not so much a single individual as it is a persona, a reputation, a mask.

In the Silk Road case as well, there are rumors that the Dread Pirate Roberts was actually multiple people. It remains to be seen what the Ulbricht defense’s exact theory of the case is, or whether they will completely flesh out an alternative theory.

Adding to the strange ephemerality of this case is how the bulk of the evidence seems to be electronic in nature: digital footprints, IP addresses, e-mail accounts, chat logs, Internet postings, messages, Bitcoin transactions. Much of this evidence comes from the laptop that Ulbricht had open at the time of his arrest, so it is not as though the government’s case is impossibly flimsy. But the nature of the evidence still undermines their efforts to make the allegations sound as serious as possible. The evidence they present inevitably makes it all sound like a video game, or a recap of an Internet forum dispute in which the community manager bickers with other moderators and ends up permabanning them from the site.

The Awl: "The Potato Salad Kickstarter Is the Science Fiction Villain We Deserve" (updated*)

"As of writing, a Kickstarter campaign for "just making potato salad" has raised $37,115. ($58,667 as of this posting) Every few seconds that number climbs higher, and each uptick is greeted with cheers. It's a self-perpetuating humor machine, and it is horribly efficient. There is no joke, at least not anymore; whatever joke there was has become an adaptive, joke-like arrangement of circumstances. It is a perfect device, compatible with all known theories of humor and therefore with none of them." (read more)

 

 

* Email: Problem Solved. 

 

h/t Allen S

Lem has No internet wifi this morning

Esquire Interview: Jerry Seinfeld Doesn't Buy the 'Burden of Celebrity'

Scott Raab: Who do you have on the new season of Comedians in Cars?

Jerry Seinfeld: Jon Stewart, Robert Klein, Aziz Ansari, Sarah Jessica Parker, George Wallace. And I've done three of the five. Have two more to go. And it's gone very well. The whole thing is leading me around now. It was really just an experiment. But I love the potential that a technology like the Internet gives a guy like me. I thought, What if I just put something out and didn't say anything about it? People would probably start moving it around for me. It's very self-promoting. Unlike traditional network or movies, where you got to hustle your butt off to get people to notice something, I said, This thing, it'll do it itself. The one thing we are deprived of now is "Have you seen this?" or "Do you know?"

Scott Raab: Everyone knows everything.

Jerry Seinfeld: And they want to know. "Did you hear who died?" Of course I know who died. Everybody knows who died. This is what a good idea does. Here's how a good idea works. Same thing happened with the series. You make it. Then it's like you're in a rodeo and you can't get your hand out from under the rope, and now this thing is still going and it's dragging you around in the dirt.

WiredUK: Espionage in a post-privacy society

"We will soon have to live in a world with no such thing as privacy and no such thing as secrecy, says Richard Aldrich, speaking at PINC 15 in Amsterdam. "We will be living in a transparent society, it will be a bit like living in a nudist colony."

We're used to the idea that secret intelligence agencies spy on us, but over the last ten years the big intelligence gatherers have become airlines, banks, internet providers and Tesco -- all of which have more information about us than GCHQ and the NSA put together.

"These organisations are becoming cleverer and cleverer. Cleverer than the CIA; cleverer than the KGB."...

Citizens too though are increasingly becoming intelligence gatherers. By studying the reaction of the blogosphere to the Boston Marathon bombings -- which led to a mob forming outside the house of someone wrongly identified as the bomber from crowdsourced photos posted on Reddit-- we can understand how dangerous this can be. "Espionage is even scarier when it's controlled by you guys," Aldrich tells the audience. (read more)

The 'Right To Be Forgotten' claim

The Telegraph - An ex-politician seeking re-election, a man convicted of possessing child abuse images, and a GP who received negative reviews from patients have all asked Google to delete their internet histories, after the European Union’s top court ruled that data about individuals held by Google must be removed on request. 

The European Court of Justice said earlier this week that an individual has the "right to be forgotten" when such personal data "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purpose for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed". (read more)

 

"U.S. to relinquish remaining control over the Internet"

"U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move that pleased international critics but alarmed some business leaders and others who rely on the smooth functioning of the Web."

The change would end the long-running contract between the Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based nonprofit group. That contract is set to expire next year but could be extended if the transition plan is not complete.

“We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan,” Lawrence E. Strickling, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, said in a statement.

The announcement set off a passionate response, with some groups quickly embracing the change and others blasting it. Read More

This is fucked up. We invented something wonderful. Hopefully, handing it over to backward people will not come back to haunt us.

Washington Post

“Being well assured that every individual of this excellent society is solicitous for its prosperity, we are confident that a few observations given in candor and good feeling will be received in that spirit,”

“All indecorum of the members is strictly forbidden at all the Society’s meetings,” one rule read, banning “smoking, the wearing of hats or caps, violent language, &c. &c.”
Those founding documents of the Philharmonic — the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States — are now available online, the orchestra announced on Wednesday..."

"The documents from that first season, which have been posted on the Philharmonic’s website as the latest installment in its digital collection, paint a vivid picture of the orchestra’s earliest days, when it was founded as the Philharmonic Society of New-York, with an orchestra of 53 members, and charged with “the advancement of Instrumental Music.”

 

"Among the future highlights, the Philharmonic said, would be first editions of Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini” and Wagner’s “Rienzi” overture, and a score of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 with evidence of a spat between two of the orchestra’s most illustrious music directors."

"The score bears the markings of Gustav Mahler, who made some changes to it when he led the orchestra. Those changes apparently offended Arturo Toscanini, who led the ensemble from 1928 to 1936: He wrote on the score “unworthy of such a musician” and signed his name."

NYT - New York Philharmonic’s Archives Going Online

Surf the Internets History, or Go Back in Time

"The history of the internet began long before the first web browser was made in 1990. But as such a new development, an entire account of how today's web was created still isn't much to go through, and on Web Directions' "Web History, a timeline," the full story is catalogued and laid out in major milestones for you to follow along — even if you don't already know what CSS or the ACID test are. The milestones can get technical, but they're always explained and never so dense as to be unintelligible. For the most part though, you'll be scrolling past milestones you may well remember, and picking up trivia, like the first the term "surfing" was ever used in conjunction with the web, which happened in 1991."

Example here. (I cant embed the catalog, I would if I could. Remember to click > when you get to the page)

1941 ideas

The Garden of Forking Paths
First published in 1941, Jorge Luis Borges short story 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is considered to prefigure ideas of hypertext.

As Johnny used to say - "I did not know that".

The Verge

Real names, real problems: Pseudonymity under siege

"I don't want people finding out about me in a way I didn't intend and then using it against me," she says. "Being a fetishist also makes you a more interesting target to cyber-stalkers. Most of the people in the kink community are nice, but it only takes one jerk to ruin your life."

But Elsa's ability to keep her two identities separate is eroding. Major social networks now require users to supply real names or risk having their accounts deleted. To reign in trolls, popular sites have vowed to verify the identities of registered users. As online services incorporate facial recognition and other biometric technologies to identify users, the notion of participating online using a name not found on your government-issued ID may become a quaint relic of the early Internet.

Pseudonymity, part of Net culture since its early beginnings, is under siege.

Last month the Huffington Post decided to remove the cloak, announcing plans to "independently verify" the identity of each registered user. In a blog post explaining the decision, managing editor Jimmy Soni wrote:

"It's simple and painless to decry online toxicity; it's harder and more important to do something about it. We at The Huffington Post have chosen to take an affirmative step by verifying the identities of new commenter accounts. We won't eliminate every last note of negativity and nastiness on the site, but we believe this change will offer the guarantee of a gut check."

Ten Rules of Internet

Anil Dash's Ten Rules of Internet are getting a fair amount of attention recently.

I find Rule #6 and the second  bonus rule particularly interesting in light of recent events. Applicable? Maybe. 

What happens if a person breaks a rule?  The internet will count to ten?