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The coming war on general computation
Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation
The copyright war was just the beginning

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

Transcript: https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md

How SOPA Creates The Architecture For Much More Widespread Censorship
"This is a major concern with SOPA/PIPA, and one that supporters of the bill keep trying to brush off, because they have no good answer to these concerns other than "trust us, the US government doesn't want to censor." I'd like to believe that's true. In fact, it very likely is true for many people in the government. But the scenarios Sanchez predicts are not out of line with what we already see regularly today. It happens so frequently, in fact, that it's difficult to imagine how Congress won't expand the law to make use of this censorship apparatus."

Belarus: Browsing Foreign Websites a Misdemeanor

As stated in an explanatory note published together with the Law, this act was issued to implement the Decree of the Belarusian President of February 1, 2010, on Improvements to the Usage of the National Segment of the Internet. The newly published Law imposes restrictions on visiting and/or using foreign websites by Belarusian citizens and residents. Under this new Law, the violation of these rules is recognized as a misdemeanor and is punished by fines of varied amounts, up to the equivalent of US$125. (Id.)

MPAA Tries Its Hand At Comedy With A Top 10 List In Favor Of Censoring The Internet
The MPAA has been sending around a sort of "top 10 list" to folks in Congress about why they should vote to censor the internet via PROTECT IP (PIPA). It's actually two different top five lists. The first is five reasons to vote for the law. The second is five reasons that "Google" is wrong about the law (as if Google is the only one complaining about the law -- which is pure hogwash). Of course, the ten reasons don't make much sense, and we figured that it might be helpful to shine a little of that reality light on the claims: