The new Blogger interface sucks

Just a brief note. I recently got a new Android mobile device that I use, among other things, for blogging. And Blogger just changed their user interface. Now, as far as I've been able to tell, it's added no useful new features or functionalities. What it has done is make blogging harder and more annoying, especially on a mobile touchscreen device. In short, this sucks. It makes blogging harder. For example, managing labels for posts is now rage-inducingly difficult, as is setting the publication date. The pop-up menus on the right side of the screen where this is done are just unbelievably annoying to navigate, as is the new "Edit posts" screen. At times, the menus simply don't work. If you're looking to set up a blog, right now I would advise against doing so on Blogger.

As this comes right on the heels of Facebook's new Timeline, I can't help but ask why the hell. In my opinion, a user interface should only be changed if the transition costs of adjusting to the new interface are significantly lower than the benefits of the new system. I don't think this is even close to being true in either case. On Facebook, I actually believe that their motivation is to deliberately obfuscate their privacy settings and try to deceive people into making previously private information public so they can sell it to advertisers. It makes me wonder why Blogger changed theirs.

UPDATE: I'm finding it almost impossible to label and schedule this post. That should tell you what kind of interface we're talking about here. If this post doesn't have paragraph breaks or labels, it is because I was unable to add them. Seriously.

SOPA and all that: the view from Finland

Yeah, I'm not blacked out because I'm lazy. But I'm delighted that so many websites, from Wikipedia on down, are protesting the idiotic legislation proposed in the US. US laws on copyright and the Internet make a huge difference for the rest of the world as well, especially since if the US passes a law like this, European legislators will inevitably use that as momentum to pass similar ones here, if they're not directly pressured into it by the States.

We in Finland should be especially wary, as we've had some nightmarish experiences with Internet censorship before. One of the first posts I made in this blog was a very poorly written rant on the Finnish "child pornography" censorship bill, which permitted the Finnish state police to set up a secret blacklist of foreign child pornography sites that ISPs would be voluntarily forced to block access to. Shortly after the list was launched, a Finnish website criticizing this was put on the list, in blatant violation of the law. After years in court and endless obfuscation by the Finnish police, the Finnish justice system decided that it had, in fact, been wrong to censor a Finnish page containing no child pornography under a law that allows censoring foreign-based child pornography websites. However, none of the police officers responsible could be reprimanded in any way, as they can't be expected to understand the laws they enforce. I'm not making that up.

So the previous time Finland tried a censorship blacklist, it took literally days to expand beyond its original purpose into censoring criticism of the police and government. In the same decade, in a country where smashing a disabled person's head into the wall while raping them doesn't get you a prison sentence, creating parody blogs does. Last year, the Finnish police requested a law banning "approving" discussions of child pornography, and of course, we now have Internet censorship again with the Pirate Bay ban. So in effect, Finland already has SOPA.

By the way, if you criticize any of this, the MPAA thinks you're a corporate pawn.

In the middle of all this, it would be good to remember that I'm writing this blog post on Blogger, and because of Sweden's FRA law, the Swedish military can read this as it's written, along with my personal e-mails and everything else I do online. Lately, some US jurisdictions have started shutting down cellphone services to hinder demonstrations, and similar moves are mooted in the UK.

The defining struggle of our time is between a "total state", bent on using information technology to monitor and regulate everything we do, and between a civil society that paradoxically uses that same technology to create new forms of communication that constantly elude those controls. Put simply, I believe that in the long run, our alternatives are an Orwellian surveillance state or a free information society. Will information technology be used to repress us or liberate us? That's what this is about, and it's the most important political struggle of our age.

Disagreement as violence

Last month, I wrote a post on this blog titled Dependency theory and conspiracy theory in response to one of Flavia Dzodan's posts at Tiger Beatdown. I left a comment there with a link to my post, and was a little disappointed when they chose not to publish that comment.

With that in mind, I was interested when Ms. Dzodan posted another text, this time on moderating comments: The troll is dead! Foxnewsification and the notion that all points of view are valuable. Again, I think that text makes several very good points:

I would venture that the internet troll took the first deathly blow in 2001 when hateful anti Islamic rhetoric became acceptable in most media. What was once brushed off as “trolling” became the standard. We saw the incendiary language get worse every day, certain slurs that were usually reserved for the back rooms of hateful sites repeated on news hours, commenting sections of news sites, blogs, etc. Any challenge to this bigotry used to be met with a chorus of “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!” utterances. As if every form of speech deserved a platform everywhere, as if it was the obligation of site moderators to allow any content without critical thinking. As if all content was equal.

As someone who runs two blogs whose comments sections are moderated, I wholeheartedly agree. I get my share of personal attacks, and judging from the behavior of one of my Pirate Party comrades in the social media recently, I made him very angry indeed when I refused to publish a series of long-winded comments he left on a piece in my Finnish-language blog. There was a simple reason for that decision: he offered no counter-arguments to what I wrote, except to claim either that I was lying or that I was expounding "feminist lies" and being irrational. That isn't a counterargument, that's a personal attack, and I'm under no obligation to publish those. My blogs aren't a discussion forum. The reason I moderate comments at all is because when I started writing about immigration and racism, my blogs started to overflow with nearly identical ideological commentary, mostly consisting of personal attacks and trolling, from Finland's organized racists and their "useful idiots". So I basically agree with Ms. Dzodan: not all points of view need to be aired on every forum.

However, because my comment had just been rejected on her blog, I approached Ms. Dzodan's piece a little more skeptically than I might otherwise have. In her lead-in, when she describes the kind of objectionable contents Tiger Beatdown receives, here's what she lists:

However, MatrixMansplainer is not alone. We got a whole bunch of them on the Black Pete post. People who would accuse me of racism against Dutch people; those who would inform me that I should fuck off to whichever hellhole I came from; those who would write 800+ word comments explaining the many ways I was wrong; privilege deniers; garden variety White supremacists; rape threatening dudes.

My boldface.

Wait a minute. Racism, white supremacism, threats of rape and... disagreeing at length?

She then goes on to compare comments like this (racist, violent and, um, long) directly to violence:

We created “safe spaces” with varying degrees of editorial control. However, I have to wonder why are not all news sites and major blogs made “safe”? If in any other environment, people felt systematically unsafe, we would demand immediate change and measures of protection. If a club, a venue, a public space allowed people to be subjected to violence without actually taking counter measures, such places would most likely be shut down due to public outcry. However, this is what our media does.

She then quotes a comments policy from another site, and I totally agree with the quote:

A variety of points of view is all to the good, but a mere opinion not backed up by facts, reasoning or analysis is unlikely to get through. Moreover, not all points of view are valuable.

And goes on:

“Not all points of view are valuable”. This needs to be repeated. Any point of view that actively seeks to alienate, oppress or bully someone does not deserve to be exposed.

I'd be totally okay with this, if only my comment hadn't been left unpublished and my counterargument been ignored. I've re-read it, and for the life of me, I can't figure out where I was seeking to alienate, oppress or bully anyone. If there's any uncertainty on this, I can say that I certainly wasn't trying to do any of those things.

All this puts a slightly new spin on something Ms. Dzodan said in the comments section to the post I was trying to comment on:

For this one piece, I’ll make one thing clear: I am not going to approve any comments that base their critique on the idea that I am speaking out of “ignorance” and that I have no clue of what I am talking about.

It is fine to disagree with me, but to pretend that you (generic you), as a commenter, hold the truth and I am misguided and ignorant is a form of violence.

So wait: if I think that on a given, specific topic, I'm right and Ms. Dzodan is wrong, then I'm committing a form of violence? And therefore, my viewpoint is one that doesn't deserve to be exposed? I'll be frank: I'm very ignorant on a large number of topics, and for almost all of those, there are people out there much, much better informed than I am. Therefore, when discussing one of those topics, it may in fact be true that I'm misguided and ignorant and the person I'm speaking to holds the truth. It's certainly happened to me! But it seems it, a priori, can't happen to Ms. Dzodan.

Do you really believe that disagreement is violence? Really?

The logical outcome of this, for Ms. Dzodan and her co-moderators, seems to be that no comments that disagree with her will be allowed. That isn't creating a safe space, that's creating a political echo chamber where only the like-minded are allowed to speak. Disturbingly, that's what the comments sections of Tiger Beatdown increasingly resemble: a dozen or two iterations of "Good post!", and no content. Certainly no disagreement, informed or otherwise.

That's a very depressing comments policy. Luckily, Ms. Dzodan offers those of us who have our comments deleted some advice:

One would expect that this MatrixMansplainer would have realized, after so many weeks, that his comments are not welcome since I have systematically trashed them.

I suppose I'll realize that, then.

The madness of the copyright industry

Earlier this week, Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN won a lawsuit against Usenet provider news-service.com, forcing them to shut down their Usenet service.

TorrentFreak: Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order

News-Service.com, one of the leading Usenet providers with many prominent resellers, has terminated its services with immediate effect. The shutdown is the direct and unavoidable outcome of a two-year battle with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which was eventually decided against the Usenet provider. News-Service announced that it will appeal the decision “out of principle” as it threatens the entire 30-year-old Usenet community.

However, it's the reasoning behind this decision that should alarm everyone:

The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.

Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.

BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.

So, if service providers like news-service.com can't ensure that all illegal content on their servers will be deleted, they have to shut down. This is simply insane. Try applying this logic to other service providers. Can, for instance, a motel "find a way to identify and prevent all illegal activity" on its premises? Can an airline guarantee none of the people or things it moves will be used in the commission of some crime, or indeed that no-one on board is a drug mule, or carrying a pirated CD? If not, should they be shut down? By this logic, yes.

More decisions like this will simply mean that more and more Internet traffic is going to be conducted through darknets and other practically invisible connections that are impossible to police or monitor. In short, they're driving the Internet underground. At best, all this kind of bludgeoning legislation will accomplish is driving legitimate service providers out of business and replacing them with a black market. That isn't in anyone's interest. At the same time, our freedom to use the Internet to interact with other people and express ourselves is being severely curtailed, all in the name of the supposedly lost sales of a few giant multi-national corporations.

These cases very nicely define whose interests the justice system is looking out for.

Finland's idiotic Pirate Bay ban

Just this week, the Helsinki district court has ordered Finnish ISP Elisa to block access to the Pirate Bay. Torrentfreak has the story in English.

As Ville Oksanen points out in his blog, the court decision goes to some lengths to justify the ban, even though they're aware that it won't work. They expect the ISP to block access to a website, without specifying either the domain names or IP numbers to block, or specifying the means to use. Indeed, the presiding judge admits that the block will be ineffective, but astonishingly, insists on it anyway.

Perhaps the best outcome is that the Finnish copyright lobby managed to elicit this public statement from one of the country's biggest telecom companies (via TF):

In a response to the ruling Elisa immediately announced that it will appeal the District Court’s decision. The ISP claims that among other things, the ruling is very unclear as it doesn’t state the specific domain names or IP-addresses that should be censored.

Elisa further says that the decision is practically irrelevant in the broader fight against online copyright infringement.

“The industry should focus on measures that can truly reduce piracy in practice, such as making content available online at a reasonable price and without artificial delays,” Elisa’s Henri Korpi said.

In other words, as Valve recently put it, "piracy is a service issue". That's pretty much what, for instance, various Pirate parties have been saying all along, but it's good to hear it from a big ISP.

This is just the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of Finnish Internet censorship. Previously, a "child pornography" blacklist was set up, and then used to go after a Finnish activist who criticized the police. The police defended themselves by saying that "collateral damage happens". We went to a demonstration on his behalf.

It was later found that blocking access to activist Matti Nikki's website was, in fact, illegal, but this being Finland, the police officers in charge of violating the law to infringe on Nikki's rights to free speech were let off, and he had to pay his own court costs because, really, it wasn't the police's fault that they flagrantly and intentionally broke the law.

The whole child pornography blocking scheme, with its secret blacklists of websites and whatnot, has since been abandoned, but the next step in implementing Internet censorship is being taken by the copyright lobby. In all this, the one thing that's remained abundantly clear is that no-one in the political or judicial process represents the interests of us, the citizens of this miserable country. Legislation, court decisions and everything else is dictated by the interests of the police and the copyright industry. This isn't how a democracy is supposed to work.

Richard Dawkins is an asshole

Richard Dawkins is someone I think very highly of. Or at least I used to, until he took a stand on the Internet to compare a woman's, Skepchick's Rebecca Watson's, that is, fear of sexual assault to his annoyance at someone chewing bubblegum.

Read Phil Plait's summary of events here. Finnish readers can also check out Kaj Sotala's blog here. Ms. Watson's own reply is here. Frankly, the only way I can describe this is that Richard Dawkins is not only being an asshole, but is adamantly refusing to acknowledge it.

This whole thing is just depressing. As I understand it, what Ms. Watson was saying, was that a dude was creepy to her in an elevator, and she thought it was creepy. Her advice to men: don't be creepy.

Of course, what with the culture wars going on, you don't have to go far down in Mr. Plait's comments section for this to start:

At this point you are basically advocating total segregation of men and women.

Men are not allowed to make even the slightest advance towards women.

And it goes on from there. On that forum, and on so many others, people are jumping on bandwagons, and the most popular one is dedicated to framing her view as an attack on all men everywhere. According to these feminazis, men aren't allowed to have a sexuality at all and aren't allowed to talk to women, and so on and so forth.

I would be intellectually dishonest if I didn't mention that a particularly obnoxious anti-feminist from my very own political party got on the same case, ridiculously summarizing this whole episode as feminists being enraged at a woman being asked to have coffee, because they think all men are rapists.

You can watch the video that prompted all this nonsense here, and determine for yourself that she says none of the things she's been accused of. Seriously, she doesn't. She gives men everywhere a very good, reasonable piece of advice: don't be creepy.

Most of the response to this is just astonishing. Not only is what she actually said being totally distorted to make her look ridiculous, but the whole point of this concerted attack is that she feels wrong. How dare that woman feel threatened! Why, it's an insult to men everywhere.

Read Ms. Watson's rejoinder to the whole thing here; it's beautiful.

So here we are today. I am a feminist, because skeptics and atheists made me one. Every time I mention, however delicately, a possible issue of misogyny or objectification in our community, the response I get shows me that the problem is much worse than I thought, and so I grow angrier. I knew that eventually I would reach a sort of feminist singularity where I would explode and in my place would rise some kind of Captain Planet-type superhero but for feminists. I believe that day has nearly arrived.

I, too, would like to say that this is exactly what makes me a feminist. From my point of view, the people attacking Ms. Watson live in an insane world. She felt creeped out in a situation where I, at least, consider that it was totally reasonable, and in response to her saying that, men from Richard Dawkins on down attack her. Clearly she's not allowed to feel creeped out!

What makes it quite simply sinister is that this fits in perfectly with the attitude that so much of our society takes to sexual harassment, objectification of women and even sex crime. The victimization of women in our society is real, but far too often any attempt to draw attention to it is dismissed and ridiculed. Feminist critiques of the gender system are totally misrepresented as ridiculous strawman caricatures, and things like false rape accusations are played up far beyond their actual numbers to suggest that all these women are just being silly.

I'm constantly surrounded by this. I already mentioned the ludicrous caricature that a fellow Pirate party member presented of this particular incident. Earlier, another fellow blogger dismayed me on the topic of rape. I have the greatest respect for him as a person, but it's just shocking when he puts together blog posts with such utterly ridiculous strawmen as "feminists claim rape accusations can never be false" and so on. Just last week, Finland's Aamulehti published a particularly idiotic article where the author claimed that in America, men can't even get into the same elevator as women without facing a rape charge, with no evidence beyond the woman's word required.

This stuff is completely moronic and untrue, and the people peddling it are being maliciously dishonest. What's even worse is that by doing so, they're actively trying to make claims of sexual harassment and rape appear suspect, overstated and false. Bizarrely, they often justify themselves by claiming that they're pursuing sexual equality: a lunatic definition of equality where men's sexual needs are paramount, and women simply aren't allowed to feel differently. The Pirate party member I've mentioned also authored a proposal for increasing sexual equality, which included using the school system to, frankly, teach girls to put out more. When it was pointed out that this kind of approach would almost certainly increase sexual harassment, in his response the proposer simply ignored this. To him, it seems, sexual equality means the satisfaction of men's needs, and the adjustment of women to conform to men's needs. And he, in all seriousness, calls himself an "equality activist".

By attacking feminism, and especially by attacking feminist critiques of sexual oppression, these people are quite simply enabling more sexual harassment and sex crime. The more we create an atmosphere where complaints of sexual harassment are viewed as frivolous, the more we make sexual harassment acceptable. It's absolutely unconscionable and immoral to participate in this kind of activity. Given my "criminal record", it should be obvious that I'm all for highlighting problems of gender and sexual equality for both sexes; what I don't approve of is this idea that it needs to be done through undermining feminism and women's rights. That whole notion is based on turning feminism into a ludicrous strawman.

The single most appalling reaction I've encountered to this whole business came from a wealthy white man, who was absolutely incensed that people like Ms. Watson are treating men as potential sexual offenders. He was hurt by this sexism! So somehow, Ms. Watson feeling creeped out is transformed into not only her being a sexist against the man who was creeping her out, but an attack on the rights of a man half the world away. Never mind that neither Ms. Watson nor Mr. Plait made any claims that "all men" are anything at all, or even the fact that this "all men are rapists" notion mostly comes from rabid anti-feminists who are hell-bent on regarding the SCUM manifesto as feminism's Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In my opinion, nothing illustrates how bad the situation is as well as a privileged white man coming away from this incident feeling hurt because women feel harassed and threatened, and somehow that infringes on his rights.

So really, when I see this kind of activity going on, it reaffirms my belief not only in feminism, but in the necessity of feminism. When someone like Richard Dawkins feels the need to speak up solely to belittle and ridicule a woman's experience of feeling harassed, it's obvious that we have a problem. When Ms. Watson regularly receives threats of murder and rape for speaking out, we have a problem. To far too many of us, women are still second-class citizens whose emotions and concerns can be dismissed, and even should be dismissed.

It's easy to think we live in a perfect world of gender equality, where feminism is no longer necessary. Then something like this comes along, and we're forcefully reminded that feminism is still very necessary. Sexual harassment isn't something to point and laugh at. It's especially reprehensible when privileged white men are the ones doing the pointing and laughing.

**

On the subject of response, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that this even made the front page of Conservapedia! You know, the Reliable Encyclopedia (tm) that's bowdleriz...erm, retranslating the Bible. What it said when I checked was this:

Boorish and uncouth atheist men are causing disharmony between the sexes in the atheist community.

Followed by a link to a ridiculous blog post on this very topic. Atheists: boorish, uncouth and fat. Yes, there is a Conservapedia page titled "Atheism and obesity", and even worse, somewhere there are people who think that that page is a reasonable argument.

And I'll finish with a humorous endnote: Skepchick also has a Swedish-language site, which I shouldn't have been reading in the middle of the night, because I genuinely misread the second item of this post as "Finskor har också känslor. Så även skaldjur."

Criminal insanity, online and off

First, a piece of madness I must have missed when it hit the news and just happened to run into.

NY Daily News: Florida mom Alexandra Tobias pleads guilty to murdering baby for crying during her FarmVille game

A Florida woman admitted shaking her 3-month-old baby to death after the little boy's crying distracted her from playing a wildly popular Facebook game.

Alexandra Tobias, 22, told cops she was playing FarmVille and her baby, Dylan Lee Edmondson, wouldn't stop crying.

According to the Florida Times-Union, she confessed to shaking the baby, smoking a cigarette to calm down and then shaking the baby again. The baby may have hit his head during the January incident.

Tobias pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

She later got a 50-year sentence. And here I thought FarmVille was bad for you before I knew about this.

**

Here's another example of criminal insanity:

FOX Chicago: Teen Charged with Murder in Police-Involved Shooting, Armed Robbery Case

Ross was charged Thursday evening with murder and armed robbery with a firearm, police News Affairs Officer Robert Perez said.
The incident unfolded about 8 p.m. Wednesday when two police sergeants were stopped by a person saying two people had just committed a robbery near East 70th Street and South Cregier Avenue.

The sergeants saw two people matching the description and ordered them to stop, police said. One of the suspects, with a weapon in his hand, turned in the sergeant’s direction. The sergeant shot the suspect, identified by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office as 15-year-old Tatioun Williams.

Williams, of 1311 E. 69th St., was pronounced dead at 8:40 p.m. at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to the medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Thursday found he died from a gunshot wound to the back and ruled the death a homicide.

A weapon and proceeds from the robbery were recovered at the scene, police said.

No one else was injured, police said.

So two guys commit an armed robbery, and as they're escaping, the police shoot one of them. Therefore, the surviving criminal is charged with murder.

This is how the felony murder rule works: if one perpetrates a felony, and as a result someone is killed, the perpetrator is charged with the murder. Here, the result even means that if the police shoot your accomplice, you are charged with his murder.

Another example of this idea in action here:

NY Times: Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers

CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.

The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home.

Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter.

He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies.

In all seriousness, this is insane. As the New York Times article says, this law doesn't actually seem to have any deterrent effect, by comparison with jurisdictions that don't have it. Furthermore, it blurs the definition of murder; as the paper referenced by the New York Times points out, murder is defined by an intent to kill, except in this case, where you can be guilty of murder by lending your car to someone.

What makes it even more dangerous, in my opinion, is the simple precedent that a person who is in no way directly responsible for a crime, and who may even be totally unaware that it has occurred, can be charged with it. Imagine extending that idea to other crimes.

But most of all, it's completely unrealistic to postulate, even as a system of ethics, that everyone must take responsibility for all consequences of their actions. Responsibility for consequences needs to be within reason; if someone lends a homicidal friend a shotgun, I have no problem with them being held culpable, but lending someone a car doesn't seem to be strictly comparable.

Even crazier is the notion that when the police shoot your accomplice in the back, you're guilty of murder. Yes, I accept the idea that had you not been involved in the armed robbery in the first place, your friend wouldn't have been shot. But is this in any way a realistic standard of ethics? If people are going to be held criminally liable for the actions of others, where on earth do we draw the line? And doesn't this, in fact, give police a virtual blank check when pursuing a felony suspect, because any deaths that occur during the crime and subsequent pursuit will be blamed on the suspect, whether he had anything to do with them or not?

This touches on what I've been thinking about in general with regard to law lately. It seems to me that on the whole, our legislation is essentially random. I've been toying around with the idea of constructing a legal code not as a confusing jumble of separate laws but as a system of principles. Surely one of those principles should be that a person can only be held responsible for his own actions or inactions, not for the actions or inactions of others. In this case, both armed robbers should be responsible for themselves, and the cop who shot one of them responsible for the shooting. If the shooting is deemed justified, then it is, but under no stretch of the imagination should the police officer's decision to use lethal force be the other robber's responsibility.

I'll chalk this up as yet another odd aspect of an increasingly insane US justice system. Here's another example:

Wired: There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information.

The United States seems to be reaching the point where legistlation is classified to protect national security.

I'd comment, but I don't know how.

**

Here's some surveillance state news, too.

Nature: Terrorist 'pre-crime' detector field tested in United States

Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly 'sense' whether you are planning to commit a crime.

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person's gaze, to judge a subject's state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.

The tactic has drawn comparisons with the science-fiction concept of 'pre-crime', popularized by the film Minority Report, in which security services can detect someone's intention to commit a crime. Unlike the system in the film, FAST does not rely on a trio of human mutants who can see the future. But the programme has attracted copious criticism from researchers who question the science behind it (see Airport security: Intent to deceive?).

Do, in fact, see the linked article, which starts off with this:

In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.

Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.

George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.

It remains unclear what the officers found anomalous about George's behaviour, and why he was detained. The TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has declined to comment on his case because it is the subject of a federal lawsuit that was filed on George's behalf in February by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Again, I'm not sure how to comment on this. It's terrifying.

**

It seems fitting that just as my copy of The Gulag Archipelago arrived in the mail, I saw this news item:

Guardian: China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

In the Soviet Union, it was gold-mining on the Kolyma: in China, it's World of Warcraft. Surreal. However, they haven't abandoned their efforts at reforming the inmates:

He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

You can't make this stuff up. It only happens in real life.

Policing the Internet in Europe

First of all, the Matti Nikki saga continues in Finland. I wrote about it years ago, and here's a press release from Electronic Frontier Finland back in 2008 explaining the whole thing. In brief, Internet activist Matti Nikki runs a website that criticizes the Finnish and EU authorities' inefficient anti-child pornography actions. For this, his Finnish site, which doesn't contain pornography, was censored by the Finnish police under a law that allows censorship of foreign child porn websites.

Just last week, the Helsinki administrative court decided that the police were wrong to censor Nikki's site and ordered it removed from the block list. Bizarrely, they maintained that while the intent of the law was clearly to censor foreign websites that contain child pornography, the police couldn't have understood the law, and are therefore not to blame. In my Finnish-language post on the topic, I linked to Radley Balko's summation:

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The same standard operates here, as we now have a decision from our administrative court that effectively releases the police from any culpability for misinterpreting a law. The court entirely failed to address the fact that the censorship constitutes an attack on Nikki's constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. In my opinion, the sole reason Nikki's website was extralegally censored was his criticism of the Finnish authorities. The cops have just been let off the hook for that.

**

Meanwhile, in Germany, the police are taking a hand in the general elections:

Falkvinge.net: German Pirate Party’s Servers Confiscated In Police Raid — Two Days Before Election

Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage.

I have nothing to add. You'd think that in Germany, of all countries, they'd be a little leery of sending in the storm troopers to suppress a political party, but I guess not.

Can't explain that

As we all know, fundies say the darndest things. My personal favourite from the site is this gem by awesomestnerd:

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."



Yes, awesomestnerd, they certainly would.

Recently, conservative political commentator Bill O'Reilly offered his own contribution to science concerning the heavenly bodies, specifically the Moon.



From the LA Times blog The Big Picture:
"But when it comes to seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, no one tops Bill O'Reilly, who has been the butt of a thousand jokes after confronting an atheist on his show with irrefutable evidence of the existence of God--using as his evidence the fact that the tides come in and the tides go out. I mean, O'Reilly said with great certainty, who else could possibly be controlling that?"

When confronted with the more conventional explanation of the tides, O'Reilly went one level higher and speculated on the origin of the Moon.




All this has caused much hilarity on teh internets, and you too can participate in the meme with the handy MemeGenerator.

Here's our contribution:

Funny pictures

I'm not the only person who associates the Nazi Pope with a certain bear. Via the Huffington Post, of all things:

It's a little too small to make out properly. Suffice to say that a police department in California recently warned parents about this dangerous "mascot".

**

While I was doing my post on Sheriff Joe of Maricopa, I remembered a particular image I'd seen floating around the Internet a while ago. To my great regret, it's fake, at least in the sense that if the vehicle exists, it's in private hands, not official use.

The picture is still awesome, as it contains more repressed homosexuality than I've ever seen in my life. If it's actually overt homosexuality, then it's just awesome.

**

On that topic, some nations have great newspapers. Here's Uganda's Red Pepper, with the most unreal and hysterically funny headline I've ever seen.

I wish we had headlines like that.

Little green footballs

Here's an almost-year-old but fascinating New York Times article I ran into, on the Little Green Footballs blog. I'm paraphrasing heavily, but basically he started out as one of these "anti-jihadist" lunatics, but at some point realized, as he put it in 2009 to the Washington Independent, that:

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

So, why do I post a link to this now? Some of you might guess.

Last week, Finland's premier racist web forum was shut down for the night (HS). Conflict and controversy erupted, because Finnish racists are mobilizing themselves into a political party for the next parliamentary elections, with the solidly unimaginative title of "Change 2011". The founder of "Change 2011" decided to quit the web forum and the whole party (HS), in part because he found out that - shockingly - the party founded on rampant islamophobia and racism is full of crazy racists.

I wonder what he thought these people were on about when they posted their racist rants online and went on to form a web forum seemingly dedicated to bringing together Finnish racists? I mean, what did he think their political line was going to be? What puzzles me about both of the above examples is really just that. What kind of people did they think they were going to be associating with?

I have to admit it is somewhat fun watching this "movement" implode.

Character Assasination

Some of the gamers out there may remember an ambitious "roguelike" game called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, developed by Tarn Adams from 2000 to 2005.



In 2002 he started working on a sequel, Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, and has worked exclusively on it since 2006. In the past eight years Dwarf Fortress has acquired impressive depth and list of features while still officially remaining in alpha stage. The game has also attracted a number of dedicated followers, exited at the prospect that it will "Drag the world out of the Dark age of Gaming kicking and screaming!"

Now it seems some Goon has decided to create a clone of Dwarf Fortress, called "Goblin Camp", in a move which has been perceived as a personal attack on Mr. Adams.

Goblin Camp is, not surprisingly, quite similar to Dwarf Fortress, as this screenshot demonstrates:



This picture shows a very early camp with a general stockpile for goods, a small farm for growing Bloodberries, a small workshop with an orc working in it, and a protective fence. There's not much else to the game yet, and it is this general dearth of features and lack of polish in a game in beta stage (remember, DF is still in alpha after eight years!) that has led some commentators to already write the game off.

Though Goblin Camp is ultimately developed by some Goon, he has opened the source code, and accepts additions and improvements from volunteer contributors. So far he has had programmers suggesting rewriting the whole thing, preferably in some other programming language, while some other suggestions for features are, well... see for yourself.



Here we see a more advanced camp with more stockpiles, more extensive fence, a bakery and a brewery. Bakery turns berries into pies, and brewery turns berries into wine.

Notice the brown '~' and '#' symbols near the left edge of the picture. They represent different depths of pools of filth; a great example of features internet forums can collectively come up with!

After your camp has reached this state, there's very little to do yet but watch your goblins harvesting berries and your orcs defeating the occasional attack by hostile animals.

Speaking of hostile animals: because, so far, animals can open doors, you have to come up with creative ways to protect your camp from attacks, like this maze entrance:



There's really not much else to say about the game or the Goon behind it. If you feel like wasting a few minutes of your time, here's the official website of Goblin Camp.

Finnish blogger in prison

Two years ago, I wrote about a Finnish blogger, Seppo Lehto, getting a two-year prison sentence. His crime was creating several blatantly fake blogs that purported to be written by Finnish civil servants. We may be in a third world country, but seriously, when you google a politician and find a ridiculously racist, infantile and insulting blog that focuses on the writer's genitalia and confesses to him being a KGB agent, really, you probably figure it's a joke.

In short, anyone with the Internet literacy of a brick understood that the fake blogs were juvenile parodies. I thought no-one took them seriously until it turned out that the Finnish police did. Lawsuits were raised, and as Hesari put it at the time, the crime was deemed "exceptionally serious" and Seppo Lehto was sentenced to two years and four months in prison for "aggravated libel". He also has to pay tens of thousands of euros of reparations.

After the sentence was passed, Seppo went on the lam. According to Aamulehti, the police finally caught him this midsummer as part of a random DUI screening. That tells you everything you need to know about the Finnish police's alacrity in policing search warrants, by the way. He's currently doing time at the Turku prison.

I just thought I should put this out there. Here we are, peacefully reading and writing our blogs, while in the country I'm writing this in, a man is going through a multi-year prison sentence for blogging.

Here's the problem: I can't accept that. At all. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone reads this blog regularly, but if you do, you may recall a couple of posts I did on rape in Finland. In this one, I related the story of a Helsinki police officer who got a two-year suspended sentence for raping a minor. He used his badge to get into her home and raped her. So he didn't go to jail at all. A lot of similarly "fun" examples here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit to a certain personal bias. I did prison time too, for not serving in the army. If I'd spent six months playing war and raped an underage girl instead, I wouldn't have.

I live in a country that puts people in jail for blogging, but not for rape. There's no way I can express how wrong that is. And the fun thing is that no-one cares. Every time there's a high-profile rape case where the guilty party gets off with practically nothing, there's a storm of public outcry, but within a few days everyone's forgotten all about it and gone back to watching The Hills or True Blood.

That's the way civilization ends: not with a bang but with indifference.

Game preview: England - USA

We're not going to write one; we'll let Conservapedia do it for us. This news item was on the "In the News" feed on their front page.

Ravaged by atheism, England cannot even field a decent soccer team anymore. They could struggle against the obscure American team in their big match on Saturday. [53] That is so pathetic!

The link is to a Seattle Times article that says the US "may have the edge in goal" in the upcoming game.

So remember: if England struggles against the US, it's because of atheism.

Atheism.

In Russia, the Internet searches you

Daily Mail: Every Google search to be logged and saved for two years under new Euro MP plan

Every Google web search could be stored for up to two years under a controversial new EU plan that has the backing of more than 300 Euro-MEPs.

'Written Declaration 29' is intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles by logging what they look for using search engines.

But civil liberty groups have hit out at the proposal which they say is a 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy.

And they claim that there is no evidence that it would even be effective in trapping paedophiles who would never use search engines like Google to look for child pornography.

The idea that "pedophiles" use Google to look for child porn is ridiculous, but what's even worse is that there are MEPs who are willing to sacrifice the privacy of everyone who uses a search engine in order to catch a pedophile who's too dumb to actually find kiddie porn is terrifying.

Is privacy a value at all for these people? Is pedophilia really such a terrible enemy that our decision-makers are willing to sacrifice all of our fundamental human rights to stop it?

This, along with the ongoing project to erect a Europe-wide version of Finland's failed Net censorship scheme make me very worried that as regards the freedom of the Internet, the EU is taking the high road to China.

Don't be evil

Whoops.

The Ukraine bans all pornography

The Register: Ukraine slaps ban on all porn

Porn is now illegal in the Ukraine, unless used for medicinal purposes. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko last week signed off on new legislation joining the Ukraine to an ever-lengthening list of countries that have decided to move the censorship goalposts over the last few years, from publication of porn on to simple possession of it.

(...)

On June 11, the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) made possession of pornography – not extreme porn, but ANY porn – a criminal offence. It will be punishable by a fine of 850 hryvnia - which our currency converter helpfully reveals is approximately 69 British pounds - or up to three years in prison.

Finnish readers may want to read Sofi Oksanen's column on the topic.

Meanwhile, New Zealand is looking to implement an Internet censorship scheme that sounds suspiciously familiar:

The Register: New Zealand set to join internet blocking club

Once blocking goes live, the DIA claim that the block list will focus exclusively on the first of these categories: it is reported that the DIA’s Censorship Compliance Unit has developed a list of over 7000 sites containing child pornography. If true, this is an interestingly large figure, being about five times the size of the block list maintained by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation, and significantly larger than the lists put in place over the last year or so by other European nations.

(...)

To date, the DIA has refused to publish their list, claiming, via the Official Information Act, that to do so would be "likely to prejudice the maintenance of the law, including the prevention, investigation, and detection of offences, and the right to a fair trial".

Initially, the block list will be voluntary: ISP’s may choose whether or not to take it.

Sound familiar?

Also in the Antipodes, Australia is to begin blocking access to websites that host or sell computer games that are not suitable for children. The block, of course, will affect all Australian internet users, not just children. Other topics to be blocked by the Great Australian Firewall include websites about euthanasia.

I hope you enjoyed the Internet while it was still free.

Hello world

Hi.

Since I'll be taking over the management of this blag during Michael's absence, I thought I'd do a little introductary post.

So: hi.

That should cover it. Now, some substance.

Lately there's been quite a bit of discussion about Pirate Party in Finnish media. I'd like to present an example of one of the things Pirate Party supports and copyright holder organizations absolutely oppose: free noncommercial use of protected content.

!WARNING! The creation and publishing of the following video was a crime. It was made by a thief illegally using content protected by copyright. By viewing this video you are supporting criminal activity.

If you do choose to view it, why don't you think about that while you watch?

In Finland, censorship is not censorship

The saga of Matti Nikki's anti-child pornography website, http://lapsiporno.info, continues. I wrote about it for the first time last year; to sum up, Nikki runs a website dedicated to criticizing the way the Finnish government and most European countries are handling the problem of child pornography. Nikki's view is that no real action is being taken to stop it, and all anti-child pornography measures being taken here are ineffective.

When Finland enacted a law that permits the police to block access to foreign websites containing child pornography, they blocked access to Nikki's site. It isn't a foreign site and doesn't contain child pornography, but censored it remains.

**

At the end of May, the Finnish courts and justice ombudsman both decided that Nikki has no grounds for complaint and that his case will not be tried in the second tier of Finnish courts. The view of the official bodies involved is that the decision of the Finnish police to censor a website is an administrative decision by the police, and is not subject to judicial review.

The Finnish constitution is generally held to forbid censorship. However, the justice ombudsman has, in his wisdom, ruled that in this case, censorship is not censorship. Therefore the law is not unconstitutional, basically because they say it isn't.

**

Electronic Frontier Finland is taking the case to the Finnish supreme court (their press release, in Finnish, here); I applaud their efforts, but they are in vain. The Finnish courts routinely ignore the Constitution, which quite simply has no force in Finnish law or practice.

As it stands at the moment, the Finnish police can block access to any Internet page on the World Wide Web. We now basically have a court decision that says the police can, under the law that provides for blocking foreign websites that contain child pornography, block a foreign or domestic website that either does or does not contain child pornography. That is to say, any website on the World Wide Web. And anyone whose website is blocked will not even be informed, and cannot file a complaint.

This is not a free country.

Big Brother is listening

BBC: Social network sites 'monitored'

Social networking sites like Facebook could be monitored by the UK government under proposals to make them keep details of users' contacts.

The Home Office said it was needed to tackle crime gangs and terrorists who might use the sites, but said it would not keep the content of conversations.

It is part of a plan to store details of all phone calls, e-mails and websites visited on a central database.

Civil liberties campaigners have called the proposals a "snoopers' charter".

Tens of millions of people use sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to chat with friends, but ministers say they have no interest in the content of discussions - just who people have been talking to.

I should write a bingo card.

"monitored by government"
"terrorists"
"not keep content"
"central database"

It's time to say goodbye to the old Internet, and say hello to Big Brother.