Summary

1. Net-neutrality is a business-term for a technological concept
2. Regulate ISPs to adhere to the end-to-end principle.
3. Break up vertical monopolies.
4. Enforce 'mere conduit' provision of the E-commerce directive.
5. Empower non-commercial, libre and public ISPs, assign 33% of the Digital Dividend for this purpose.

End-to-End principle

Net-neutrality is business terminology for a fundamentally technical concept, the so called End-to-end principle.

The Internet is based on multiple layers of various protocols. The user interacts with the top layer, which passes the data down to the next layer. At the bottom of stack there is some physical medium, like a cable or a radio wave (essentially the ISP). On the receiving side a similar stack of protocols handles the data from bottom to top until it reaches the user on the other end. The layers have no knowledge of the data being passed from above and do not alter it in any way. Each layer is directly addressing the matching layer on the other end. Processing happens at the communicating parties ends, not in-transit, hence the name.

This End-to-end principle decentralizes the intelligence in the network. Telecom companies coming from a classical telephony background are used to having the intelligence of the network under their control, at the "center". On the Internet however, the intelligence is at the edges - at the clients - while the network is mostly dumb. ISPs are just one of the lower layers in this stack. Thus, any kind of content sent through an ISP should be processed regardless of the source, destination or data making it up. That is the end-to-end principle and this is also what is now being relabeled as network neutrality.

It is imperative to oblige infrastructure providers to adhere to the end-to-end principle and handle all data without prejudice.

Competition

The root cause of this discussion is a two-fold competition and fundamental rights issue.

First the offering of both infrastructure and content by the same business entity raises anti-trust concerns, this creates incentives to discriminate against 3rd party content. Extreme examples of discrimination even completely ban VoIP (Internet telephony) offerings or access to legal and alternative audio and video content. This behaviour is also a violation of the end-to-end principle, where the content sent should be handled by the lower layered network infrastructure without prejudice.

The network neutrality consultation must find long term solutions to the underlying root cause. The separation of content from infrastructure providers (e.g. like triple-play where Internet, TV and telephony is bundled) clearly calls for market separation.

Fundamental Rights

The second reason for the net-neutrality debate goes further than limiting access, it endangers fundamental rights. The copyright industry cannot cope with the changing business environment and tries to push ISPs to filtering and automatic blocking of access for wide portions of the population. In some member states this has been ruled unconstitutional on a national level. Essential parts of everyday life (from traffic information, banking to interaction with public services) depend on the access to a free Internet. The right to Internet access is already a fundamental right in Finland.

It is important to enforce the 'mere conduit' provision of the E-commerce directive, where network operators have no legal liability for traffic conveyed by them. This is a vital provision for the end-to-end principle, otherwise human rights need to be sacrificed, privacy invasive filtering and free-speech impeding blocking would become collateral damage while violating the end-to-end principle once more. Introduction of 3rd party liability for ISPs - which would induce ISPs to voluntarily adopt filtering and blocking measures - is a contradiction to the E-commerce directive and must be prohibited. The interests of a vocal, but otherwise small industry cannot overrule fundamental human rights.

Digital Dividend

In order to ensure a balanced neutral infrastructure, it must be possible to provide non-commercial libre public internet access. Community networks must be able to provide last-mile services. The Digital Dividend provides ample possibilities to assign at least a third of the analog television spectrum for non-commercial libre public ISPs, initiatives like the Openspectrum initiative must be empowered to create prospering public non-commercial ISPs that increase competition and investment in infrastructure.

Conclusion

While commercial and public interests collide, it is important to note that the short-term business interests are in no relation to the long-term societal benefits that this debate is trying to reverse.

feel free to comment via email.

thx: to pettter, lillmacho and Twelve from Telecomix.

Background

The original idea came from our team-member Erik Josefsson. Unfortunately he is not a lawyer, so he came up with the idea to make legislative texts (laws) more comprehensible for non-politicians, by looking for text-blocks that are copied from one document to another. These text-fragments act as memes that carry the most important legislation into new laws and other legal documents. By classifying these fragments and 'translating' them into short summaries, it is possible to ease the burden of reading such documents. Reverse-engineering the EU is something akin to having only the legal code of a Creative Commons license, but not the deed (a simple one line explanation - see an example for a deed) nor the icons, using Pippi we try to reduce the code into deeds and possibly also icons for easier understanding for citizens, activists, advisors and politicians themselves.

Just to give you an example of the above, the deed of the previous paragraph could say: "we look for copy/pasted texts (the longer the more interesting - hence the name: Pippi Longstrings) and try to translate this into short, comprehensible summaries".

Tracing sources

Among other this can also be used to track the sources of such fragments. Previously there have been interesting pippies discovered by manual inspection:

• the FSFE found out, that parts of the European Interoperability Framework have been "authored" by the Business Software Alliance.
• parts of the EU Telecom Package have been written by Telecom Italia (Amendment 542)
• and parts of EU laws (like the IPRED directive) have been included in Trade Agreements with Canada, Korea, scores of Caribian countries and possibly also India (more on this later).

There is a benefit for policy advocates as the above examples show. For non-legislative purposes Pippi Longstrings can also be used for tracking and translating memes in contracts, terms of service agreements and EULAs, similarity to the EFF's great Tosback service.

National implementations

Another important use-case for Pippi Lonstrings in regard to EU laws is the analysis of adoption of these laws into member states law. All EU laws are automatically translated and published in all 23 languages of the member states. So when a member state adopts a law, we can check whether they adopted the verbatim translation or changed bits and pieces while adopting it into national law. In the later case it is definitely interesting to analyze the reasons for the deviation from the original EU translation.

Current status

Pippi Longstrings is currently running as a closed beta. If you're interested in analyzing a certain document against the current European corpus of regulations and directives please suggest mail them to longstrings on ctrlc.hu.

We have about 40 documents that are on our list waiting to be processed. These are related to Internet, privacy, copyright topics and trade agreements, but we are looking for more docs to analyze.

Currently the processing of a doc takes a couple of hours against the whole EU corpus of law, the list of docs to be processed is being prioritized by us, until we succeed in adding a feature for user initiated processing and/or get donation for lots of powerful hardware. As an alternative, you can get the code which is completely free according to the Affero GNU Public License and operate a Pippi service yourself.

Document formats

Pippi Longstrings is part of a set of tools to reduce entry-barriers to participation in the European legislative process. Even though the European legislative process is obliged to be transparent, some - some of the most important - issues are shrouded in secrecy and so we need to rely on low quality PDF leaks for analyzing and reacting to them. These leaks are usually scanned PDFs which do not lend themselves for automated analysis. There is a grave need for solutions that are able to transform these PDFs into high-quality machine-processable documents (semantically correct HTML or ODF preferably). Currently we rely on crowd-sourced transcriptions mostly done by the Telecomix crew and La Quadrature du Net, but the EU-India trade agreement leak has not been transcribed yet by anyone - while it is surely a very interesting document. If anyone can help us to get these transcriptions more effectively, please share your tools, resources or whatever. It would be nice to have transcriptions done by recaptcha for example, google are you reading this?

If we have such a transcription or the original document is not a PDF, then we are able to produce some nifty diffs between different versions of these texts (think ACTA) so that we can track the negotiations without being admitted to them. The generation of these diffs is not as easy as you might know from software development though. Producing such diffs has involved a lot of manual labor to align the paragraphs properly for the most comprehensible results. The preprocessing prior to a diff for a typical ACTA leak or release takes between 5-10 days for a single person.

Plans

Our nearest-term goals are the introduction of commenting on (translating/summarizing) pippies, possibly also integrating marked up texts into the fantastic co-ment.org service. Also we are going to start a dedicated blog for pippies (longstrings.soup.io), where we are going to give summaries on the results of pippifications. If you request us to process a doc, you should also be ready to write a blog-post on the results in return.

As such we also intend to integrate Pippi with Eriks other very nice tool Tratten, which does track issues from the beginning of the legislative pipeline.

If you want to support the ongoing work consider signing up and donating via . We're also participating on Mozilla's Drumbeat project project, go and vote for us.

Big plans, lot's of things to do, let's not waste time. Please submit interesting docs to longstrings on ctrlc.hu.

Thanks go to a lot of supporters: amelia for setting us up, jaywalk for hosting us, asciimoo for his coding, erik for the idea and general support, jz for useful criticism, and the telecomix guys.

thx: juraj

ACTA notes

Sok minden történik az ACTA egyezmény körül, nemrég előadást tartottam a metalabban a témával kapcsolatban, alább az angol nyelvű jegyzetem.

background - history

• EU is 21% of the worlds GDP (PPP) while the US is only 20%
• WTO/TRIPs, World Trade Organization, established January 1st 1995, replaced GATT, Trade Related aspect of Intellectual Property rights agreement
• [the following 3 bulletts curtesy of W] Big Pharma is in trouble, Ever expanding marketing and R&D costs, approval costs, duration of approval procedures
• Big Content is in trouble, Disintermediation, Overabundance of material
• Original UN institutions as WIPO, BRIC countries are fed up with maximalists, NGOs have gotten a seat at the table
• Spring 2008, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries start to secretly negotiate a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).
• some leaks appear, complete leak in march 2010, after negotiations in new zealand the eu publishes the first public draft.
• The parliament: Resolution 10th March, voted overwhelmingly 633/13/16 - record of votes (search for "(ACTA) - RESOLUTION") "Parliament considers that the proposed agreement should not make it possible for any "three-strike" procedures to be imposed, in order to protect fundamental rights."

main issues

• Acta benefits a few companies to the detriment of billions of humans.
• policy laundering avoiding any hint of democracy Schlyter (swedish green mep): industrial lobby 90% of the participants in stakeholder meetings, among others: pfizer, daimler, ms, timewarner, google, yahoo, bsa, mpaa, pharma, br american tobacco, br telecom.
• criminal sanctions (ipred) - the commissions negotiator devigne on going beyond the acquis vs the council
  • inclusion of non-commercial activities
  • border measures, search of personal items like phones, mp3 players, notebooks.
• freedom of speech, one MEP talked about suppressing access to radical political sites.
• privacy (monitoring, seizure, deep packet inspection) - Peter Hastinx, EDPS on acta: "Intellectual property must be protected, but it should not be placed above individuals' right to privacy and protection."
• 3rd party liability - Alexander Alvaro from Germany said that "third party liability for internet servers is like making the post office responsible for what is written on the letters it sends".
• censorship (censilia/censursula, blocking)
• access to medicines - Medicines sans frontieres: "We are in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds, pushing IP rules, which are very effective at stopping access to life-saving drugs but are very bad at stopping or preventing fake drugs."
• other markets, that are dominated by a few big: spare car parts after-market, perhaps even thingiverse
• The opposition to ACTA has support from edri, tacd, ffii, kei, reporters sans frontieres, EuroISPA (business association of eu ISPs)

what can be done

• Written declaration 12/2010 was initially signed by MEPs Roithová (EPP) / Castex and Lambrinidis (S&D) / Alvaro (ALDE). list of signatories.
• never allow similar un-democratic legislative process, since we have arrived in the lisbon treaty the EP has co-decision powers, these are democratically elected, while the commision not. We need to help the MEPs to discover and protect their new powers. Demand to start from scratch, not accepting a draft that has been 2 years in secret preparation.
• get india/brazil/china/russia to comment and act on acta (india commented last tuesday, in an EP public hearing)
• convince MEPs sign written declaration 12, generally educating them about acta, showing that people care.
• community work: transcribing, cleaning, analyzing, translating, documents, leaks.
  • telecomix (pads+irc+twitter+wikis+small tools)
  • lqdn (wiki+co-ment+pads+twitter)
  • euwiki.org, pippi longstrings (not public yet), itsyourparliament.eu, custom tools!
  • develop tools that circumvent any kind of control, become a ciphernaut today!
  • support: LQDN, telecomix, eff, ffii, edri, your MEPs, wikileaks!
• make more videos like: cleanternet

assorted links

• La Quadrature du Net - ACTA dossier
• telecomix/werebuild.eu
• acta on co-ment.com
• wikification of the actaleak in march
• diff between leak and publication after NZ negotiations
• chapter-by-chapter clean-up of the leak and publication
• automated chapter-by-chapter diff of leak and publication
• pippi longstrings analysis of the NZ publication
• Michael Geist on acta
• EFF on acta
• Ante Wessels from ffii on acta in vienna
• The European Greens/EFA on acta

Bonobo is a greasmonkey script which automatically retrieves the tagclouds for all legislative text available in HTML. All you need is the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin and bonobo. According to wikipedia this script might also work on other browsers than Firefox.

If you have both greasemonkey and bonobo installed, start browsing here for example.

Bonobo gets the tagcloud information from a back-end server, which retrieves, caches and converts the legislative texts to tagclouds. Like Bonobo this back-end server is also part of a set of tools trying to cut through the fog of legislation. If you're interested in the code (AGPLv3) visit the project on github.

Please bear in mind, that this back-end server is running in a quite unstable environment. It might happen, that you're not served your tagclouds. If anyone can donate some spare hosting for this service, that would be awesome. It would really feel at home on a Debian server. ;)

I have some other ideas queued already for further developments, check this project github page regularly.

1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds
3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product
5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source
6. Any media content legally purchased by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time

WE Are Currently Living In a historical moment which will define and shape digital rights and information freedom on the internet for generations to come. It's one of those rare moments where the issue is black and white and where the two opposing camps can be identified without over-simplifying the issue. On one side, there are those fighting for the information revolution's culture of sharing, co-operation and the public commons. On the other side is a powerful, industry cartel who would stomp out the commons to salvage proprietary information that they can buy and own.

Du bist Terrorist (You are a Terrorist) english subtitles from alexanderlehmann on Vimeo.

My guess is, that there is a discrepancy between different versions of  jquery and the slider widget. The timecloud widget will work with jquery 1.3+, but without correctly working sliders.

i'll need to dig deeper to work this out.

cheers,

s

Nothing to hide

I have been lucky to visit the 25th Chaos Communication Congress between the 27th and 30th December. It was sold out the very first day, good seats, power outlets and free switch-ports were rare and well-guarded. :)

The lectures all were very inspiring, if you had a wired net-connection, you could also watch the talks in other rooms. Below is a short list to most lectures i saw either way. If you care there is a bunch of torrent files indexed on the pirate bay. Please note that all quotes below are not verbatim, they are notes quickly taken during the lectures.

quotes

• Fnord news show "good indicator for e-gov adoption is the loss of data"
• rfid talk: "never force technology onto users"
• Bre Pettis: "smoke is how robots express love", "school is dead",
• cisco ios "international ... sign: (_ x _)"
• la quadrature du net - netzpolitik.de
  • "law is code, ammendmends are patches. if a patch arrives 1 day before voting and and more than 800 patches need to be vetted it is very bad project managment."
  • the term "illegal software" raises interesting issues what about free software? if i alter it will it change from legal to illegal?
• not soy fast
  • patents: monsanto bought a lot of seed producers for soy, corn, cotton, etc. "protecting" IPR.
  • "hunger is not the result of scarcity of food, it is instead the result of an uneven distribution at the world level..." amartya sen. nobel prize winner.

visit

• hackerspaces

privacy

• onioncat with anonymous services - never leaving the tor network - .onion addresses.

robots

• Formica swarm robots: very cool robots, lot's of potential
• about://Asimov/robot/laws...

politics

• neusprech - newspeak in german
• Der elektronische Personalausweis - towards a commercial surveillance architecture / in german.
• e-voting and crypto - no silver bullet?
• wikileaks using onioncat to anonymize usage

crypto

• new stream ciphers: great to see some fresh approaches
• md5 collisions

security

• storm: p2p botnet owned.
  • opendht
  • python dht - entangled
• dect owned - used in many places.
• NFC phones hacked
  • An rfid tag presents a free "tourist info" telefon number, but a premium charged call is made instead.
  • Sticker attack:: putting your own sticker over an other rfid tag.

  quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who will watch the watchers

• Tikiwiki subversion activities (also on screenshot),
• view your delicious tags in real-time

JQuery Timecloud v1.0

Lately I have been trying to visualize a couple of things around me. One of the results is this JQuery Timecloud plugin producing somewhat nice looking animated tagclouds.

In the screenshot below I processed the Subversion logs of the Tikiwiki project and plotted the number of changes (commits) by developers over time.

As you can see below, the timecloud widget provides a similar interface to the Google Finance timeseries. In the top you have an overall view of all time activities, here you can zoom the timeframe and pan the selection.

Underneath there is a zoomed in view of the currently viewed timespan.

The first button starts/stops the animation, where the time frame is automatically advanced to the next day, thus creating an impression of moving through time. With the second button you can step forward by one frame, dunno if this is really necessary, it might be removed later.

HINT: If you set the timeframe in the overview to cover the whole dataset, you will be able to see an all encompassing tagcloud, but won't be able to animate it.

If you're interested head over to to the project home and have fun!

Cheers,

s

[UPDATE] In the download package there is an example which let's you visualize your delicious tags in such a tagcloud, unfortunately it needs a PHP enabled webserver to run.

[UPDATE2] a live example can be found here and one  for your delicious tags

[UPDATE3] the project home moved to ohloh.net, all references updated. development and versiontracking  is still at github.

[UPDATE4] demos found a new home.