Information must be free!
Sometimes, information is withheld from the public for political
or economic reasons. If some persons already have (access to) these
informations (sometimes in the form of computer software), then they
are intimidated, threathened with "cease
and desist" letters and their Internet Service Providers are often
also intimidated.
Yet, I believe that
is extremely dangerous in a society when posession of information or
computer software is made illegal. Of course, distributing copyrighted works
should be illegal, and one should respect a person's privacy. But except for
privacy and copyrights, information should be free to posess!
So here is a list of pieces of information (and programs) that are hunted
down by some parties:
- The paper that Sklyarov,
Elcomsoft employee, got arrested for at DefCon 9. The arrest was made based on
the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA):
the PDF document and/or the presentation supposedly are an "illegal encryption
circumvention device" and therefor posession and distribution is
against the law. Well duh! We will take a moment silence now for you to
curse that law.
- The paper describing how to
defeat the SDMI watermarking technologies that Prof. Felten
decided not to publish after legal threats of the RIAA.
- The "VBS Worm Generator"
that shows that Microsoft still has to
repair the security holes in VBW, Outlook Exchange, and other
software components. I downloaded it from the author's
website; he may have hidden it a bit but it's still there...
- The software instructions to decode a CSS-coded Digital
Versatile Disc: DeCSS.
- Mike Zieper's times square video
that the FBI has been trying to wipe from the face of the
earth.
- A report on hacking CyberPatrol to see
if their banlist is appropriate and not based on political motives.
The report includes sources and executables so that you can examine
the banlist of your copy of CyberPatrol for inappropriate blockings.
As of March 20, CyberPatrol has added all mirrors of cp4break
to their blocking list. If you're using CyberPatrol, disable it
because you'll be experiencing a censored WWW! For more empirical
data that filters are a Bad Thing, have a look at the "Foil the Filters" contest
A United States federal judge has decided
that mirror sites should remove their copies. Due to the limitation
of the jurisdiction of that decision, the mirror on this site (located in
The Netherlands) will stay.
[
ZD-Net | Wired ]
- Did you know that AOL's "youth filter" is very
politically biassed? [ cnet ]
- IGDecode to decode Symantec IGear's list of
blocked URLs. [ Peacefire ]
- The executables of Gnutella, the open source Napster
implementation. Download gnutel048.exe,
which is the recommended version, gnutel049.exe
or gnutel0491.exe. You can find
installation instructions here.
AOL pulled the plug on this would-be open source project (source
have not been available yet).
- Trying to find the 8Hz free mp3 encoder that got slapped with a
$15000 per year royalty fee? It's still alive on some places [
net-search | wwcn ]
- The QNX crypt has been hacked, it's used a.o. in ATM machines.
Let's hope they will develop a stronger encryption next time. [ source ]
Software Patents
The European Patents Office is considering to allow software patents in
Europe. That means that companies can patent common software techniques such
as `using null instructions to slow down a program'. We all did this back in
the eighties on our Sinclair ZX81! Sign the pitition now
to make yourself heard. You have until november 2000.
Prevent American patenting practices in Europe!
"The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it"
Are you a lawyer that wants me to remove some of this information? mail me and I'll explain to you why I won't do it.
Please don't bother my co-locators, my DNS providers or my uplink. If you
have problems with the contents of this page, mail me. The other
parties have nothing to do with the contents of this site.
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Not everything we write makes sense....