Monday, 16. September 2002
Australia Taps More Phones Than Entire U.S.
An anonymous reader writes "Last year Australian authorities tapped more phones all United States authorities combined. Australian phones were tapped at 20 times the rate of phones in the US according to this article in the Sydney Morning herald. The fact was revealed during a debate in the Australian parliament. The government is attempting to pass new legislation to to make it even easier for the country's domestic spy agency ASIO to tap phones." Update: 09/16 14:07 GMT by T: Julian Assange writes "The Australian is also running the story and has better stats." [Slashdot]
Shrink-Warp Licences for Books.
Mit éShrinkwrap Agreement‚ versehene Bücher verbieten dem Leser die Weitergabe von Information an Dritte. Lizenz auf Wissen. [Telepolis News via Der Schockwellenreiter]
First Conference on Internet censorship
"IMGccc" I attended the conference today organized by "CCC" as couterpart to the conference tomorrow by the district government Düsseldorf. The event today was held at the conference level of a local Bank. Very business like location. Attendance was about 50 to 60 people.
I guess the event was financed by eco the german association of
Internet providers. Seems eco is piping some money into the CCC to make them do the unconventional part of lobbying. Interesting
alliance.
insert_coin: experimental web filtering
They used the proxy for several manipulations of the other students view of the web. Using a word exchange routine they exchanged names of politicians, parties and so on. "Art" was exchanged for "rubbish", "political party" for "robbers". Every twentieth web access was redirected to a advertisement page at "InterAd.gov". People had to answer a short consumer survey and watch advertisement before they where allowed to continue surfing. All pages of the Merz Akademie, including student's homepages, where shown with pop-up advertisement.
After using a searchengine surfers where shown an additional frame with a form to complain about inappropriate content. The only way to get rid of this frame was to send a complaint. Pages of webmail services where changed to include a box form the "Global Penpal Association"; this box suggested a penpal selected based on your "personal configurations and surfing habits".
The result of their experiment: nobody complained. Even when the students where told what was going on, many of them didn't change their proxy settings back to unfiltered Internet.
What bothered me a bit about the presentation was the absence of ethical considerations in it. They where doing experiments on non consenting humans which comes which a bunch of difficult ethical problems. Interesting stuff nevertheless.
Further stuff on todays conference: Andy Müller-Maguhn gave his usual presentation. Jens Ohlig and Pylon presented the development of the whole issue labeling it "chronology of horror".
Mr. Summa of the german Internet provider association eco explained their position and sounded reasonable while doing so. When the german Internet providers willingly blocked http://xs4all.nl in 1996 just because to show that this doesn't work out. I have some difficulties getting used to this thought because I dimly remember eco as being pro filtering in the nineties.
Irini Vassilaki did a legal analisys of the blocking order. Working systematically through all the small steps involved in checking if such an order is legal she concluded it's illegal. Well done. A core problem is if the webpages have to be assessed under the statues of our media law (MDStV) or telekommunication law (TDG). Another interesting problem is the question if the district government is acting to do risk containment (they could) or to enforce criminal laws (that's law enforcement's job - not theirs). Mrs. Vassilaki assumes the second possibility.
Prof. Hoeren, who is also judge in Düsseldorf did not show up as advertised. As far as I understood, he is expecting to be involved in this subject as a judge and wants to avoid being prejudiced.
There is an german article at heise about the event.
disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif
http://www.odem.org/static/insert_coin/proxypix/penpals_small.gif" align="right">At the conference today Alvar Freude presented his
project insert_coin. Freude and Dragan Espenschied, like Freude a student at the Merz Akademie, programmed a rewriting proxy server in Perl and then changed the settings of all webbrowsers on the university's public computers to use this proxy.
Conference round-up
Six Internet providers are going to court over this issue and intend to bring this issue forward, if needed up to the constitutional court. Good that they stand up.
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