I just found The Crypto Project. This bit, from an interview with their representative Sir Valiance, needed to be quoted:

The Internet is the greatest creation of mankind and we cannot sit back and watch as the beautiful freedom it allows be stripped apart by the greedy, selfish, and power hungry individuals who which to control it. It is the duty of those who have the knowledge and ability, whether you are a developer, cryptographer, or security expert to protect that freedom, because if we don’t preserve it, there are those who will strip it away from us.

irrepressible.info is a new anti cencorship site from Amnesty. “Undermine censorship by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site. The more people take part, the more we can defeat unwarranted censorship and create an unstoppable network of protest.”

thru Slashdot

Boing Boing has a picture of exiled Tibetans protesting against Google censorship in China. With, among other signs, the Cult of the Dead Cow’s “Goolag” logo.

via FreeCulture.org

I just wrote about this in Swedish but I have to let my non-Swedish readers know as well. A new political party has just been started in Sweden. They are called Piratpartiet (meaning “The Pirate Party”) and they hope to get into the Swedish parliament after the elections in September 2006.

On the agenda is the abolishment of intellectual property as well as stronger privacy protection (e.g. non-implementation of data retention). They refrain from having an opinion on any other issues, so as to not alienate anyone or “shift the left-right balance”.

Update: About to be Slashdotted

Finnish filesharers to be pilloried in public | The Register

Finnish authorities recently developed new anti piracy laws which would allow record companies to place names of convicted file sharers in major newspapers, and then charge them for the ad.

I forgot to blog that when I first heard it. Hilarious! Scary, though.

Just as the Canadians were starting to do something about the USA PATRIOT Act, Slashdot reports that the US Senate has failed to reauthorize Patriot Act Provisions.

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans’ privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders … If a compromise is not reached, the 16 Patriot Act provisions expire on December 31.

In Canada, there is a proposal that would allow government departments to immediately cancel a contract with an American firm if it hands personal information about Canadians to U.S. anti-terrorism investigators. There is some concern that information protected by Canadian privacy laws could be disclosed under the USA PATRIOT Act.

Read more at Canada.com.

At the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society Richard Stallman was held by U.N. Security for wrapping his RFID-equipped badge in aluminum foil, according to Bruce Perens.

Stallman, who opposes RFID because of the technology’s potential for privacy invasions, objected to wearing the badge because it could track him as he moved around at the summit. – InformationWeek

A few days ago I noticed that CoCo had a list of where the 10 latest visitors came from (geographically). I though it looked cool and after som clicking I found my way to MapStats. I have now added MapStats to this site and you can see the latest visitors on a map by clicking the blue Mapstats button on the right.

I hope no one feels too exposed by this. If so, please let me know.

Slashdot | No DRM for Apple in Intel-based Macs

An anonymous registered Apple developer claims that the Apple x86 test boxes do not have DRM or TCPA components.