Tag: Politics

Germany will Sensor the Internet

But of course it’s “for the children.” Germany passed an Internet censorship bill under the guise of stopping child pornography…

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4406608,00.html

This is always the first set in full government censorship. Find something almost everybody decries, make a law banning it, and further use that law to censor all free information exchange where that now illegal item can be obtained.

The bill as it stands right now doesn’t prevent a person from viewing a site deemed to contain child pornography it just makes them click through a displayed stop sign (and I’m sure record their IP address for government agents can come arrest them).

The problem I have with a bill involving any kind of censorship is this. If you give a government an inch they’ll take a mile. This is true of every government. Right now they will only censor child pornography but next it will be anything deeming sexually abnormal and eventually it will involve anything that speaks badly about the German government.

North Korea Makes Threat it Can’t Keep

More shenanigans from North Korea…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8104709.stm

A hilarious quote from North Koreas state run news agency…

If the US and its followers infringe upon our republic’s sovereignty even a bit, our military and people will launch a one hundred- or one thousand-fold retaliation with merciless military strike

OK North Korea can’t even hit us with one fold how do they expect to strike us with one hundred or one thousand (they’re not even sure which) fold attack? Personally I’m not too scared.

North Korea is like a young dog. It’s going to bite and rip things apart but in the end all you have to do is give it a good smack with a news paper and it’ll settle down.

Six Percenters

In episode 50 of The Handgun Podcast the hose, Eric Shelton, threw down a great idea. He’s calling it the Handgun Podcast Six-Percenters. The basic idea is to get involved in gun rights by contacting your officials. Details are here…

http://gunrightsradio.com/forums2/index.php/topic,1853.0.html

Why six percent? In Eric’s own words…

Six Percent is almost embarrassingly low. It’s actually kind of sad to think that that’s all I feel I can reasonably expect to get involved.

I think he’s right six percent of people is able all you can expect to get. The stupid thing is that contacting your representatives isn’t hard. They make it easy to do as well. You can call them, e-mail them, or send them a letter using the old fashion postal system.

You don’t even have to bring up an issue when you contact them. Just let them know who you are and that you’re a strong supporter of the second amendment. Every voice matters in this case, the more calls, e-mails, and letters they get from pro gun rights people the more likely they will be to vote for the second amendment. This is the only way to win political victories.

So here is my officially stating that you need to contact your congress critters and let them know where you stand.

New Hampshire Might Hike Non-Resident Carry Permits

Rather depressing news here…

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Read.aspx?ID=4955

New Hampshire has a budget proposal that will increase the price of their non-resident carry permits from $20.00 to $100.00. Speaking as a man with one of these permits I find this sad since one of the things I like about the permit was the price and the fact their permit approval system wasn’t nearly as backed up as everybody else’s. I hope this item gets the axe from the budget but I’m doubting it will.

Jealous Countries want United States to Relinquish Internet “Control”

Another thing that irritates me is the fact that the rest of the world apparently things the United States should relinquish control of the root DNS servers. I’ll drop this link to a slashdot.org story for reference…

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/28/1734243

For those of you who are unfamiliar with how the Internet works I’ll give a brief explanation of the DNS (Domain Name System). Each website is located on a computer which has a number associated with it called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. For instance the IP address of this web site is 74.200.243.253 (actually that’s wordpress.com’s IP address which hosts me). Typing that address in would take you to wordpress.com

Of course numbers aren’t really useful to human being when it comes to associating things. Because of this we designed a system to translate names to IP addresses. When you type in www.google.com what is actually happening behind the scenes is your browser is asking a DNS server to return the IP address of www.google.com. Once the browser gets the IP address it accesses Google though the IP address.

So the DNS is pretty much a phone book for the Internet. And the master servers (called root servers) are the rulers of the roost. They are controlled by ICANN via contract from the United States Department of Commerce.

What many other countries are saying is since the Internet is a multi-national entity that the United States should give control of the DNS to some third party (usually the United Nation’s name is dropped). This is a case of pure jealously and idiocy.

The Internet is an evolution of ARPANET. ARPANET was created by the United States Department of Defense as a project to create a communication network that would survive a nuclear strike for the Soviets. Anyways through much work and finagling this evolved into the Internet that we know today.

This bring my first argument against surrendering control of the DNS over to some other entity. America invested the initial capital and research into the creation of the Internet. We then opened it up for everybody to use. Now being it was a government project apparently different rules apply to it. Because when a corporate creation becomes a world wide de facto item (like Microsoft Windows) no other government calls for it’s release to a third party. Releasing the DNS root servers to international oversight would be like Microsoft releasing the source code for Windows to international oversight. Yet nobody calls for that because it’s understood Microsoft put the initial capital and research (i.e. they bought DOS from a third party and rebranded it after some small adjustments) into Windows so they own it.

My next issue is this, the Internet is not censored. It’s an open means of communication which anybody can use, even an opinionated ass such as myself. This is accomplished for one main reason, the United State’s right of free speech. I can imagine the second some other entity such as the United Nations got control over the DNS censorship wouldn’t be far behind. For instance the United Nations is very anti-gun so I’m sure pro-gun sites would get axed. Being they have a lot of clout with the United Nations I’m sure the European Union could get a resolution passed to ban any negative talk about the Lisbon Treaty as well. Pretty much the bastion of free speech that we know of as the Internet would become akin to what China does with the Internet.

Problem three with the United States relinquishing control of the DNS is the fact that there is nothing stopping any other entity from starting their own root servers. The DNS is incredibly dynamic and anybody can setup a DNS server. Hell your network and work probably has one. If Britain wanted to control a DNS server they could most certainly set one up and use it. Nothing is stopping them. So instead of bitching they could try setting up their own system and force their citizens to use it.

Finally the system currently works. I’m a big fan of the idea that if something isn’t broken don’t fix it. The Internet works incredibly well at the moment so why the Hell should we do something drastic like rework the DNS? All that will do is break something and we’ll be fucked bad.

European Union Sues Sweden

Proving once again the European Union was a bad idea…

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/eu-sues-sweden-demands-law-requiring-isps-to-retain-data.ars

The European Union passed a law requiring ISPs to retain customer data “long enough to help police but not so long as to cause privacy concerns” (now THAT is some grade all bullshit). Sweden has not enacted this policy (probably because they have a little common sense left) so the European Union is suing.

I don’t know what they are going to get out of suing a member of their own union but like most things The Union does this is a pretty stupid idea.

And now for a side rant. If you just wanted the news article you can stop reading here. This side rant involves comments made on slashdot.org which I’ll link to in a bit. The actual rant is more to do with fanatic atheists though. First the link (do note because of the craptacularness of the comment system this may not take you to the actual thread I want, but hey I’m trying)…

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1247565&cid=28121785

What about this irritates me? Simple we have atheists who want to blame everything on religion. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against atheists or atheism in general. Just like I have nothing against Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other form of religion or lack thereof. But I do have a problem with the zealots in all of these groups who try to blame every other religion (yes I’m calling atheism a religion in this case) for the world’s problems.

Being I visit technology sites I get exposed to far more zealot atheists then any other type of zealot. They love nothing more then highjacking a conversation and using it as a soapbox to preach their faith (yes faith, because these people have a faith there is no deity/deities). At least on slashdot I’ve never noticed this behavior with any other religious group so these guys get pointed out.

Now the reason these guys piss me off. They are blaming religion as the one and only factor for terrorism in the world. These people are claiming if it weren’t for religion all would be well. Guess what guys you’re being hypocrites here. You are pretty much saying your group is so morally superior that if all other groups ceased to exist the world would be perfect. That’s hypocritical because that’s what all extremist religious people say. If you don’t want to be associated with religion and religious people STOP ACTING LIKE THEM (them being specifically the extremist zealots).

Anyways I just needed to get that out of my system.

National Park Carry Law Signed

Obama actually did it, he signed some pro-gun legislation. Of course it was tacked onto his precious credit card bill of rights…

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Federal/Read.aspx?id=4901

We won’t be able to carry in parks until February 22, 2010 but we won this battle. Once again I don’t like the idea of having attached it to, what I consider, a bad bill but then again the Antis have been using this method for years. I wonder how they like the taste of their medicine. I bet it tastes like defeat.

Of course I’ll throw out the standard disclaimer that winning this battle shouldn’t make us feel confident. We still need to fight just like we did with this bill. If we keep fighting this hard more victories should be imminent.

FTC Considering Regulate Blogs

Well this figures, I was reading Snowflakes in Hell and came across a rather scary news article…

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090519/1030204931.shtml

The Federal Trade Commission is considering sticking their fingers in bloggers’ business. They want to require bloggers who review products to disclose whether the product being reviewed was given to them, is a sponsor’s product, or if the reviewer is getting paid to do the review.

Up next requiring bloggers to be “fair and balanced.”

Source: http://www.snowflakesinhell.com/2009/05/21/government-looking-to-regulate-blogs/

Right to Repair Automobile Law Put Forth

It’s about time a law was put forth that removes all the barriers between automobile computers and their owners…

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro

Strangely enough it’s being proposed by Bob Barr and Ralph Nader. I never thought I’d see a day when these two people agreed on something.

The bill would make proprietary computer systems with lockout mechanism illegal for use in automobiles. As it stands right now automotive manufacturers like to make their vehicles as hard to work on as possible. They do this because they make a huge chunk of change when you bring your car in for work. This would allow a person to diagnose their own problem and possible fix it themselves or have an independent mechanic do it (which is normally a LOT cheaper).