Sen. Wyden places hold on second Internet censorship law

From Raw Story (h/t Dictynna):

A U.S. Senator from Oregon has once again taken a stand against his own party to defend what he sees as the inherent right to free speech on the Internet, placing a hold on a bill that could force search engines and Internet service providers to block websites deemed to be "infringing" on copyrights.

The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act -- or "PROTECT IP" for short was part of a second attempt to pass provisions of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which failed to clear Congress during its last session thanks to a parliamentary maneuver by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

And once again, Wyden has stepped forward to ensure those measures do not pass.

The article notes that "Internet freedom advocates claim the proposed laws could be used to shut down websites that link to other websites that authorities claim to be carrying out infringing activities."

For more on CIOCA, see here and here. These moves by copyright and IP holders are becoming increasingly and intrusively aggressive.

As evidence, I offer channelsurfing.net and atdhe.net. These domains created no content, as near as I could tell. But they linked to sites that offered sports television over the Internet, and those links were on a game-by-game basis. So, for example, if you didn't want to subscribe to cable, but wanted to watch ESPN games, you could go to one of these sites, peruse the list of links, choose your game and source, click and watch. Sometimes several sources offered the same game, and you had several links to choose from.

Again, neither of these sites generated the video. They merely offered links to other sites that did. Those other sites perhaps violated intellectual property rights; these sites certainly did not.

Now go ahead and click the links for those sites, and see what happened to them. Yep, that's the Homeland Security logo.

Three guesses when both of these seizures occurred. If you said "Right before the Super Bowl," America's ad and money feast with a football game inside, you wouldn't be wrong. Homeland Security, the counter-terrorism arm of our national security state, is helping to seize small-people's property (those sites were property) in order to protect the profits and property of billionaire sports owners and the advertisers who love them.

So you can see where Internet freedom is headed. I'll reiterate that these sites provide only links to other sites. As Wyden said in his prepared statement (click and scroll down to read it):

PIPA's prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

Without Wyden's hold, the bill would have passed. So good on Sen. Wyden for putting the brakes on this stuff.

A second point — I've been watching Wyden for a while. I'm developing a list of known-good progressives, and several people with decent public reputations are actually questionable. Ron Wyden ran an aggressive shirt-sleeves & baseball-cap campaign in 2010 in a barely contested race. He appeared to be inoculating himself against something, but I couldn't figure out what.

Wyden seems to be a progressive. Is he a reliable part of the progressive coalition? This will help move him into the Yes column. Thank you, Senator. More of our people should be using these holds.

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E. coli outbreak hits Europe

The news started in Germany but now France is also warning over possibly tainted cucumbers from Spain. Most of the cases have been in Germany but other EU countries have also been hit with problems. So far there are at least 2 deaths that they believe are directly associated with E. coli. Reuters:

An E. coli outbreak in Germany which has infected more than 270 people and killed at least five is one of the biggest of its kind worldwide and the largest ever in Germany, European health experts said Saturday.

German officials said Thursday they suspected cucumbers imported from Spain as a possible source of the outbreak of hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), a serious complication of a type of E. coli known as Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC).

In a risk assessment of the outbreak, the Stockholm-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors disease in the European Union, called it "one of the largest described outbreaks of STEC/HUS worldwide and the largest ever reported in Germany."

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Me on CNN talking about the boring GOP field for 2012

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US Park Police arrest dancers at Jefferson Memorial

Unbelievable. What in the world is happening in our country? Read the rest of this post...

Mubarak and former ministers fined $90 million for shutting internet

Even after they pay the fines, they will still have millions left and possibly even billions. That said, the bigger problem for Mubarak and company is whether they will avoid the death penalty. CNN:

A Cairo court has ordered the first ruling against Hosni Mubarak since he was ousted on February 11, fining him and his top officials more than $90 million for their role in cutting the mobile phone network and Internet service for five days.

Adel Saeed, spokesman for the general prosecutor, said Mubarak himself was fined $34 million, former Interior Minister Habib El-Adly $50 million, and former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif $6 million.

"They were charged with cutting the communication to hinder the efforts of the January 25 revolutionaries," he said. The blocks began January 28 as demonstrations against Mubarak's rule heightened in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

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The Specials - Do The Dog

We had another early rise this morning thanks to one of the cats "hunting" a bird. And when I say "hunting" I mean cat girl was staring at a starling that was well out of reach and she meowed menacingly for 15 minutes. At 6:30AM just outside the back window.

More perfect sunshine here which means a nice ride out to Versailles with one of my cycling partners. The garden still needs water though and we're wondering when the rain is going to arrive.

This evening I'm preparing a nice pipérade for dinner and will poach some eggs in the stew. Mmmmmmm. Read the rest of this post...

UK training Saudi forces that would be used to shut down protests

It's probably better to not even think about how much deeper the US is with the Saudis. The Guardian:

Britain is training Saudi Arabia's national guard – the elite security force deployed during the recent protests in Bahrain – in public order enforcement measures and the use of sniper rifles. The revelation has outraged human rights groups, which point out that the Foreign Office recognises that the kingdom's human rights record is "a major concern".

In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in "weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training". The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier.

The MoD response, obtained yesterday by the Observer, reveals that Britain sends up to 20 training teams to the kingdom a year. Saudi Arabia pays for "all BMM personnel, as well as support costs such as accommodation and transport".

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Is anorexia a biological disorder?

It's an interesting new debate.

The review of past research on the topic, published in the June issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry, finds that certain genetic and cellular processes get activated during starvation in organisms ranging from yeast to fruit flies to mice to humans. The idea, said study researcher Donard Dwyer, is that in people with a broken starvation response, a few initial rounds of dieting could trigger a metabolism gone haywire.

In this theory, it's not stubbornness or a mental disorder that keeps anorexics from eating, it's their own bodies. The theory could explain why it can be so difficult to convince anorexic patients that anything is wrong with them, Dwyer told LiveScience.

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