War on the Internet: Meshnet activists Rebuilds the Net from Scratch

In anticipation that the US government will require the surrendering of customer’s data, two small email providers including Lavabit, a Texas-based service that was reportedly used by whistleblower Edward J. Snowden, decided to preempt them by shutting down and destroying their servers.

Such are examples of how government has used the web not only to expand their power but to mount repressive policies on their constituents. 

At the same time these are examples how government policies rob economic opportunities of small businesses (favoring the big ones).

However markets aren’t taking this slippery slope of privacy invasion sitting down. Some entities has taken into their own hands the rebuilding of the internet from scratch.

From the New Scientist 

Across the US, from Maryland to Seattle, work is underway to construct user-owned wireless networks that will permit secure communication without surveillance or any centralised organisation. They are known as meshnets and ultimately, if their designers get their way, they will span the country.

Dan Ryan is one of the leaders of the Seattle Meshnet project, where sparse coverage already exists thanks to radio links set up by fellow hackers. Those links mean that instead of communicating through commercial internet connections, meshnetters can talk to each other through a channel that they themselves control.

Each node in the mesh, consisting of a radio transceiver and a computer, relays messages from other parts of the network. If the data can't be passed by one route, the meshnet finds an alternative way through to its destination. Ryan says the plan is for the Seattle meshnet to extend its coverage by linking up two wireless nodes across Lake Union in downtown Seattle. And over the country at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, student Alexander Bauer is hoping to build a campus meshnet later this year. That will give his fellow students an alternative communications infrastructure to the internet.

While these projects are just getting off the ground, a mesh network in Catalonia, Spain, is going from strength to strength. Guifi was started in the early 2000s by Ramon Roca, an Oracle employee who wanted broadband at his rural home. The local network now has more than 21,000 wireless nodes, spanning much of Catalonia. As well as allowing users to communicate with each other, Guifi also hosts web servers, videoconferencing services and internet radio broadcasts, all of which would work if the internet went down for the rest of the country.

So successful is the community model that Guifi is now building physical fibre-optic links to places like hospitals and town halls where it can help carry the heaviest traffic.

The development of the “new” guerilla internet doesn’t totally bypass the current system.

Again from the same article:

Hyperboria, the virtual layer that underpins meshnet efforts in the US. Hyperboria is a virtual meshnet because it runs through the existing internet, but is purely peer-to-peer. This means people who use it exchange information with others directly over a completely encrypted connection, with nothing readable by any centralised servers.

When physical meshnet nodes like those in Maryland and Seattle are set up, existing Hyperboria connections can simply be routed through them. At the moment, Hyperboria offers a blogging platform, email services, and even forums similar to reddit.

Unlike sheep or automatons, the above shows how people respond to incentives. The war on the internet will signify a cat and mouse relationship in the deepening age of decentralization.

Central Banks Sees Bitcoins as Threat

Anything that emerges from the markets that poses as a threat to the power of central authorities will be harassed via regulations. This seems to be the coming fate of the fast growing decentralized P2P Currency or Bitcoins. Here is my previous post on bitcoins

From Bloomberg’s chart of the day,

An increase in the value of bitcoin, the world’s largest online currency, may fuel concerns that virtual money could undermine the role of central banks.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows that bitcoin has more than doubled in the past 12 months, strengthening to $16.37 from $5.88, according to data from Mt. Gox, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. The money, issued by a decentralized network of computers, has recovered after falling to $2.14 in November 2011 from a high of $29.58 five months earlier.

Greater demand for virtual currencies could have a negative impact on the reputation of central banks, according to a report published by the European Central Bank in October last year. Since the report was released, bitcoin has risen more than 55 percent against the dollar and use of the currency has surged.

Bitpay Inc., a bitcoin payment processing company that recently raised $510,000 in an investment round, this month announced that the number of companies using its services has increased almost 50 percent to more than 2,000 since November, when blog management firm WordPress.com said it would accept the digital currency.

“I think the ECB obviously is concerned, and it’s not reputational,” said Steve Hanke, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who helped to establish new currency regimes in countries such as Argentina and Bulgaria. “I think it’s a competitive threat. Maybe virtual currencies will be so convenient that they will pose a threat because of their ease of use.”

If more people will migrate to the use bitcoins, then central bank’s power to influence the economy will likely be diminished, so I expect not only a direct assault on bitcoin by regulations, other means of control will indirectly be coursed through social media via censorship.

War on Internet: Internet Freedom Prevails over UN Sponsored Regulations

The United Nations via the International Telecommunication Union has failed in her mission to put a centralized legal kibosh on the internet.

From Forbes.com

For the last two weeks some of the planet’s most oppressive regimes have faced off against some of the most powerful Internet advocates in an effort to rewrite a multilateral communications treaty that, if successful, could have changed the nature of the Internet and altered the way it is governed.

On Thursday night that effort failed, as a US-led block of dissenting countries refused to sign the proposed updates, handing the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union a humbling defeat.

The United States, which framed its dissent as defending “the open Internet,” was joined by more than 80 other countries, including Australia,Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Sweden and the United Kingdom. (Some of the non-signers seemed to be seeking to avoid making too overt of a political statement, saying, regrettably that they could not sign because they had to “consult with capital.”)

On Friday, the remaining members of the ITU, which is made up of 193 countries, signed the treaty, known as International Telecommunications Regulations, but the gesture in many ways was hollow.

Like other U.N. agencies, the ITU strives for consensus, and it’s within that consensus that the ITU derives its authority. The ITU can’t force a country to abide by its treaties, but if representatives of all member countries agree to a global telecommunications framework, and subsequently pass laws enforcing the framework, the ITU itself grows stronger.

Dissenting countries led by the US have not really been for defending “open internet”, as the US for instance have pursued various forms of social media censorship (some examples see here here here and more). The difference, I think, is that these supposed “open internet” faction don’t want to be tied up with or submit to a global regulator via such treaty.

They seem to prefer approaching the internet via domestic policies.

The same article seem to give such a hint,

Interpreted as a power grab by the United Nations, the secrecy rang alarm bells. Distrust of the ITU began to approach panic after the contents of more controversial proposals became known. Some of the proposals endorsed by authoritarian countries would have increased censorship, potentially restricted the free flow of information and undermined the voluntary framework that forms the basis of today’s Internet.

In addition, upholding the treaty may also extrapolate to the dilution of power by the opposing bloc to the UN consensus led by authoritarian governments which would be unacceptable to opposition many whom are developed economies.

The good news is that forces of decentralization embodied by the internet continues to sow division on governments. Such factionalism will likely be more pronounced when the next debt crisis surfaces.

War on the Internet: China’s Censorship on New York Times’s Expose on Chinese Leader’s Wealth Fails

The New York Times published an expose on the Chinese leadership which had been met by swift response and censorship by Chinese authorities.

Nonetheless, the article continues to generate readership within China via the informal or shadow internet economy.

From the New York Times (bold mine)

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday criticized a decision by The New York Times to publish a lengthy investigation into assets accumulated by the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, saying that the article “smears China and has ulterior motives.”

Speaking at a regularly scheduled daily briefing in Beijing, the spokesman, Hong Lei, also said that the Chinese government’s decision to immediately block access to the English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times on Friday morning was taken “in accordance with laws and rules.”

China’s censors also moved with unusual swiftness on Friday to delete any social media postings alluding even tangentially to the article, which cited publicly available corporate documents in reporting that Mr. Wen’s family has controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.

Sina Weibo, a very popular microblogging service similar to Twitter and traded on the Nasdaq in New York, on Friday morning immediately deleted the unofficial account that had been used to promote the culture and arts coverage on the Chinese-language site of The Times and that had nearly 60,000 followers. The site’s official account had been blocked since the site began operations in late June.

Even the term “$2.7 billion” was blocked on Friday on Weibo. But users were still discussing the article by using deliberate mistakes like “2.7b.”

Despite the censorship, there were signs that the article was attracting attention. According to the company’s statistics, the number of page views and unique users of the Chinese-language site fell by only a third on Friday compared with the previous Friday, even though 85 percent of users are typically located in mainland China.

The investigative article was the site’s most popular, drawing nearly a third of page views, while the home page drew another third.

The continued strength of traffic to the site was a sign that many users were using virtual private networks, or V.P.N.’s, to effectively bypass servers in China and circumvent the country’s censors.

The controversial article can be seen here

Earlier, Bloomberg had been banned for a similar expose focused on another political leader

This serves as more proof that China’s largely statist regime or her practice of state capitalism, where nearly half of the enterprises remain state owned, have been tainted with favoritism, nepotism, corruption, cronyism and all sorts of economic windfall derived from the privileges of wielding political power.

And this is why policies in China have remained predisposed to Keynesianism despite its record of mounting failures and of the explosive growth of private enterprises. The latter of which has grown into a political force enough to challenge the status quo 

This also debunks the myth of selfless or virtuous leaders. Politicization of economic opportunities universally leads to immoral actions or conflicts of interests.

And importantly, the failure to censor the article in the entirety also exhibits the shadow internet economy thrives in China, which serves as further proof that internet remains a free market despite frenetic efforts of governments to control or regulate flow of information in order to protect the status quo.

Forces of decentralization (Information age or the Third Wave) have been gnawing at the foundations of the 20th century designed political establishment.

The Information Age and the Philippine Cybercrime Law

Amidst fiery protest by many Philippine cyberspace users, the newly enacted Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 RA 10175 took effect today (BBC). 

So far, according to Freedom House in 2012 the Philippines ranks 6th in the world in internet freedom.

I am pretty sure that the law will diminish the current state of internet freedom, regardless of the excuses given by politicians, and regardless of the relative standings of internet freedom in the world overtime. Although I expect some of the current activities to shift to the informal cyberspace.

Just read all the clauses containing the term “misleading” as punishable by law to understand the law’s arbitrariness. This simply means legalistic vagueness could be used to harass political opposition or anyone on the whims of the politicos.

As of this writing the government website hosting RA 10175 is down. This could be because of heavy traffic or could be down due to protest activities undertaken by hacktivists (Examiner)

As a side note, I am also quite delighted to see the passionate responses even by statists against internet censorship. It’s a bizarre world though, when curtailment of freedom involves them, the statists balk, resist and join the commotion, but when curtailment is applied only to others they cheer.

Nevertheless, here are the top 10 Countries who censor the internet most.

From 24/7 Wall Street based on Freedom House's ranking of internet freedom

1. Iran

2. Cuba

3. China

4. Syria

5. Uzbekistan

6. Ethiopia

7. Myanmar

8. Vietnam

9. Bahrain

10. Saudi Arabia

The next list is from the Committee to Protect Journalists 

The growing crusade by governments against the internet or internet censorship should be expected and constitutes resistance to change as forces of decentralization (internet) and centralization (governments) have been on a head-on collision course.

This essentially represents part of the volatile and turbulent transition process towards the deepening of the information age.

The lists of the 10 countries who apply internet censorship most reveals that despite governments’ acts to suppress free expression, the freedom of internet expression still thrives, albeit underground.

To give some examples

-China’s shadow or informal social media users continue to swell despite the government’s prohibition.

-Cuba’s repressive government has repeatedly failed to stop domestic political activist blogger who became an international sensation Yoani Maria Sánchez Cordero.

-There is the ongoing harassment against Wikileaks through  founder Julian Assange and the war against eponymous group Anonymous (who ironically appears to have taken up the cudgels of domestic cyber activists) for exposing on government malfeasances.

-Also the Iranian government’s attempt to convert her cyberspace into a national intranet has dramatically backfired where Iran’s government has been forced to retreat.

From Gizmodo,

After seriously flipping out, cutting of Iranian access to Google and basically herding all its citizens into a tiny little government-approved intra-net pen, the Iranian government has softened its Internet ban just a little bit and restored access to Gmail.

Though the outcry against censoring the Internet at large was loud, the backlash against cutting users off from Google services such as Gmail was particularly strong. Many Iranians (reportedly around half) resorted to using VPNs to get outside of the the intra-net bubble, creating millions of dollars in profit for local VPN firms. Even government officials railed against the lack of Gmail, and complained that local clients just weren't up to snuff.

Given that the penetration rate of internet users in the Philippines is nearly at 30% of the population (internetworldstats.com), from which the bulk comes from the elite and the middle class, it would not be surprising if a sustained uproar would end up with a political ‘compromise’ ala Iran.

Bottom line: Global governments including the Philippines will continue to do everything to try to control and regulate the flow of information in order to preserve the status quo. However and unfortunately for them, the free market in the internet, people’s newfound fondness with connectivity and the knowledge revolution will give them quite a challenge.

Yet there is no stopping the march towards the information age.

War on Internet: Despite Ban, Social Media Users in China Booms; Philippine Hackers Protests

As I have been pointing out, the information age, which essentially represents the snowballing forces of decentralization, particularly globalization and rapid technological advances, will dramatically change every aspect of our lives.

And governments operating from the political economic constructs of the 20th century, particularly the centralized top-down industrial age era political institutions has been fighting tooth and nail against such revolutionary changes that undermines the privileges of the incumbent the political class and their cronies.

Today’s centralization’s debt and welfare crisis have been in fact symptoms of the decadent top-down political institutions. Inflationism has thus been one of the measures of financial repressions that has been applied to achieve such an end.

Yet desperate attempts to preserve the status quo in favor of the current beneficiaries through more social controls has only transformed the internet into a major battlefront

Today’s war on the internet through serial attempts at censorship has apparently seen a backlash from civil society, whom has been waging a broad front online guerilla warfare.

Proof?

In China, banned social media websites continue to blossom.

From Bloomberg,

Facebook Inc. (FB) and Twitter Inc. have millions of users in China despite bans on the social networking services in the world’s largest Internet market, according to the results of a survey released today.

Facebook grew to 63.5 million users in China in the second quarter of this year, up from 7.9 million two years earlier, London-based researcher GlobalWebIndex said in a blog post today. Twitter users tripled to 35.5 million from 2009.

Sites blocked in China can be accessed via so-called proxy services, which connect users to servers outside the country so they can visit sites that are filtered. The workarounds have helped Facebook and Twitter compete with local sites including microblogging service Sina Weibo, said Tom Smith, founder of GlobalWebIndex.

“It only takes a little bit of desk research to discover that what is called the Great Firewall is actually much more porous than the Chinese government would like to admit,” Smith said in the blog post.

Despite their rapid growth, the two social networks are smaller than Qzone, a website operated by Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700), with 286.3 million users. Local rival Sina Weibo had 264.1 million users. Google+, the social network created by Google Inc. (GOOG) last year, had 106.9 million users. China has 513 million Internet users, according to the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center.

GlobalWebIndex asked 2,000 Chinese Internet users earlier this year which social sites they have created an account for, and which ones they used in the past month.

The quest for free market connectivity and the Hayekian knowledge revolution has been no different in the Philippines where attempts to censor social media has led to a concerted hacker attack on Philippine government offices

From another Bloomberg article, 

Hackers attacked websites of the Philippine central bank and at least two other government agencies last night to protest a law against cyber crime set to take effect next week.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 “effectively ends the freedom of expression in the Philippines,” according to a statement posted on the central bank website by a group that called itself Anonymous Philippines. Websites of Metropolitan Waterworks & Sewerage System, the Pilipinas Anti-Piracy Team and the American Chamber of Commerce were also defaced, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported today.

President Benigno Aquino signed the law on Sept. 12, which identifies, prevents and punishes Internet-based crimes such as hacking, identity theft and spamming. Provisions on online libel and the authority of the Department of Justice to block websites without a court order have been opposed in several petitions filed with the Supreme Court.

The law will “infringe on the Constitutional-guaranteed freedom of speech and expression,” Senator Teofisto Guingona, a member of Aquino’s party, said in a statement today. Guingona asked the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional several provisions of the law to take effect Oct. 3.

As I previously wrote, 

The internet essentially provides the platform for the unceasing struggle to attain civil and economic liberties, through the effective neutralization of political manipulations of the people’s minds.

The chief proponent and inspiration of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, the great philosopher anarchist Étienne de La Boétie once wrote,

“Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself,  cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom

Thus enslavement and freedom is a matter of people’s choice. And the state of knowledge or ignorance by every individual in a society determines that choice.

The more the diffusion of knowledge in a society, the balance of power shifts towards individual sovereignty at the expense of political entities.

And that’s why welfare warfare based governments have been averse to the internet, and that’s why political authorities will continue to wage an all out war of control of the internet.

It seems that my predictions are on a volatile path to realization.

War on Internet: Google Reports Increasing Government Requests for Censorship

Governments of western economies has been breathing down the neck of Google to censor ‘political’ content on Google’s cyberspace.

From TGDaily.com

Google's released data on the governments aiming to censor internet content, and says it's seen a worrying rise in the number of such requests from Western democracies.

In the second half of last year, for example, Spanish regulators asked for the removal of 270 search results that linked to blogs and newspaper articles referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors.

One example that's more entertaining than chilling came from the Canadian authorities. They called for the removal of a YouTube video showing a man urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. Google let the video stand.

"When we started releasing this data in 2010, we also added annotations with some of the more interesting stories behind the numbers. We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not," says senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou…

Google also received a number of requests from US law enforcement agencies. One concerned a blog post alleged to defame a law enforcement official in a personal capacity; another a series of 1,400 YouTube videos that were claimed to constitute harassment.

Google has so far ‘refused to comply’ with these requests and thus deserves a pat on the back.

Google earlier announced that they will warn users of state sponsored privacy intrusions.

My guess is that governments will continue to pressure Google, but perhaps more through indirect channels (taxes, licenses, anti-trust etc..) to get their wishes done.

Will Google eventually cave in?

War on Internet: Google will warn Users of State Sponsored Attacks

Hail Google. Google will warn their users of state sponsored privacy intrusions.

From Foreign Policies the Cable

UPDATE: A senior Senate aide confirmed that this evening he received a warning on his Gmail account that Google suspected he had been the target of a state-sponsored cyber attack.

Web giant Google is about to announce a new warning informing Gmail users when a specific type of attacker is trying to hijack their accounts -- governments and their proxies.

Later today, the company will announce a new warning system that will alert Gmail users when Google believes their accounts are being targeted by state-sponsored attacks. The new system isn't a response to a specific event or directed at any one country, but is part and parcel of Google's recent set of policy changes meant to allow users to protect themselves from malicious activity brought on by state actors. It also has the effect of making it more difficult for authoritarian regimes to target political and social activists by hacking their private communications.

"We are constantly on the lookout for malicious activity on our systems, in particular attempts by third parties to log into users' accounts unauthorized. When we have specific intelligence-either directly from users or from our own monitoring efforts-we show clear warning signs and put in place extra roadblocks to thwart these bad actors," reads a note to users by Eric Grosse, Google's vice president for security engineering, to be posted later today on Google's Online Security blog, obtained in advance by The Cable. "Today, we're taking that a step further for a subset of our users, who we believe may be the target of state-sponsored attacks."

When Google's internal systems monitoring suspicious internet activity, such as suspicious log-in attempts, conclude that such activities include the involvement of states or state-backed initiatives, the user will now receive the specialized, more prominent warning pictured above. The warning doesn't necessarily mean that a user's account has been hijacked, but is meant to alert users that Google believes a state sponsored attack has been attempted so they can increase their security vigilance.

Google wants to be clear they are not singling out any one government for criticism and that the effort is about giving users transparency about what is going on with their accounts, not about highlighting the malicious actions of foreign states.

Read the rest here

War on Internet: Anonymous will do a Wikileaks this December

The war on the internet continues.

Despite a string of legal harassment suit waged against activists like Wikileaks, internet activism will persist to haunt governments and their cronies.

Another activist group called the Anonymous announced that they will do a Wiki-leaks expose this December.

From Personal Liberty.com (hat tip Sovereign Man)

The global “hacktivist” syndicate Anonymous wants people all over the world to expose evidence of corruption and injustice by leaking documents to which they have access.

In a recently posted video, the group urges anyone who has access to evidence of corporate or government wrongdoing to purchase a USB drive and document the evidence for publication on the Internet.

“Imagine you purchase a USB drive. Imagine you take it to your work place. Imagine you collect evidence of illegality and corruption. Imagine together we expose all lies. Imagine we leak it all,” scrolls across the screen in a recent video posted by the group.

The initiative, dubbed Project Mayhem 2012, will take place over the 10-day period from Dec. 12 to Dec. 21, during which the video claims “the World will see an unprecedented amount of Corporate, Financial, Military and State leaks that will have been secretly gathered by millions of CONSCIENTIOUS citizens, vigilantes, whistle blowers and insiders worldwide.”

The group claims to be in the process of developing a Wikileaks-style platform called TYLER where the information can be anonymously posted.

Video here.

War on the Internet: 377 Words to use for Uncle Sam to Watch You

Free speech undermines the power of centralized government. So governments will make any excuses to work on repressing free speech.

One way is to make everyone a suspect for politically mandated illegitimate activities as ‘drugs’ or ‘terror’. This by monitoring so called ‘suspicious’ activities, a.k.a. spying. And naturally, where people congregate to share or exchange information, now becomes the hotbed for government intelligence.

A list of 377 sensitive words that you use may trigger Uncle Sam’s monitoring of you.

From Simon Black of Sovereign Man

After vigorous resistance, the Department of Homeland Security was finally forced into releasing it’s 2011 Analyst’s Desktop Binder. It’s a manual of sorts, teaching all the storm troopers who monitor our Internet activity all day which key words to look for.

Facebook, a.k.a. the US government’s domestic intelligence center, is the primary target for this monitoring… though it’s become clear so many times before that various departments, including the NSA and FBI, are monitoring online activity ranging from search terms to emails.

Domestic spying is typically denied in public and swept under the rug. After all, it’s legality has always been questionable… if not entirely Unconstitutional.

Yet month after month it seems, there is new legislation introduced to deprive Internet users of their privacy and make the open collection of data a natural part of the online landscape.

Homeland Security’s key word ‘hotlist’ is really no surprise… they’re just the ones to get caught.

So now we know, at least, what these goons are looking for. Sort of.

According to the manual, DHS breaks down its monitoring into a whopping 14 categories ranging from Health to Fire to Terrorism. It’s a testament to how bloated the department’s scope has become.

Afterwards there is a list of 377 of key terms to monitor, most of which are completely innocuous. Exercise. Cloud. Leak. Sick. Organization. Pork. Bridge. Smart. Tucson. Target. China. Social media.

Curiously, in its ‘Critical Information Requirements’, the manual decrees that analysts should also catalog items which may “reflect adversely on DHS and response activities.”

Absolutely unreal. Big Brother is not just watching. He’s digging, searching, reading, monitoring, archiving, and judging too.

The list of the 377 sensitive words here

How to Communicate on an Internet Blackout

Should there be an internet blackout (for whatever reasons), here are some ways to reconnect.

From Liberty News Online:

Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.

This is what happened in Egypt Jan. 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government cut off approximately 88 percent of the country's internet access. What do you do without internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.

PREVENTIVE MEASURES:

MAKE YOUR NETWORK TANGIBLE

Print out your contact list, so your phone numbers aren’t stuck in the cloud. Some mail services like Gmail allow you to export your online contact list in formats that are more conducive to paper, such as CSV or Vcard, and offer step-by-step guides on how to do this.

BROADCAST ON THE RADIO:

CB Radio: Short for "Citizens Band" radio, these two-way radios allow communication over short distances on 40 channels. You can pick one up for about $20 to $50 at Radio Shack, and no license is required to operate it.

Ham radio: To converse over these radios, also known as "amateur radios," you have to obtain an operator's license from the FCC. Luckily, other Wired How-To contributors have already explained exactly what you need to do to get one and use it like a pro. However, if the President declares a State of Emergency, use of the radio could be extremely restricted or prohibited.

GMRS: The General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) is a licensed land-mobile FM UHF radio service in the United States available for short-distance two-way communication. It is intended for use by an adult individual who possesses a valid GMRS license, as well as his or her immediate family members... They are more expensive than the walkie talkies typically found in discount electronics stores, but are higher quality.

Family Radio Service: The Family Radio Service (FRS) is an improved walkie talkie radio system authorized in the United States since 1996. This personal radio service uses channelized frequencies in the ultra high frequency (UHF) band. It does not suffer the interference effects found on citizens' band (CB) at 27 MHz, or the 49 MHz band also used by cordless phones, toys, and baby monitors.

Microbroadcasting: Microbroadcasting is the process of broadcasting a message to a relatively small audience. This is not to be confused with low-power broadcasting. In radio terms, it is the use of low-power transmitters to broadcast a radio signal over the space of a neighborhood or small town. Similarly to pirate radio, microbroadcasters generally operate without a license from the local regulation body, but sacrifice range in favor of using legal power limits.

Packet Radio Back to the '90s: There do exist shortwave packet-radio modems. These are also excruciatingly slow, but may get your e-mail out. Like ham radio above it requires a ham radio license because they operate on ham radio frequencies.

TELEPHONE:

Set up a phone tree: According to the American Association of University Women, a phone tree is "a prearranged, pyramid-shaped system for activating a group of people by telephone" that can "spread a brief message quickly and efficiently to a large number of people." Dig out that contact list you printed out to spread the message down your pyramid of contacts.

Enable Twitter via SMS: Though the thought of unleashing the Twitter fire hose in your text message inbox may seem horrifying, it would be better than not being able to connect to the outside world at all. The Twitter website has full instructions on how to redirect tweets to your phone.

Call to Tweet: A small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company Google acquired recently, made this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to the Twitter account, speak2tweet.

Alex Jones and infowars.com have a telephone number for people to listen to his radio show by phone, in case the internet goes down, or if you don't have internet. The phone in listen line is 512-646-5000.

FAX:

If you need to quickly send and receive documents with lengthy or complex instructions, phone conversations may result in misunderstandings, and delivering the doc by foot would take forever. Brush the dust off that bulky old machine, establish a connection by phone first with the recipient to make sure his machine is hooked up, then fax away.

You may not need a fax machine to send or receive faxes if your computer has a dial-up fax application.

NON-VIRTUAL BULLETIN BOARD

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the virtual world that we forget about resources available in the real world. Physical bulletin boards have been used for centuries to disseminate information and don't require electricity to function. If you are fortunate enough to be getting information from some other source why not share it with your friends and neighbors with your own bulletin board? Cork, magnetic and marker bulletin boards are as close as your nearest dime store and can be mounted just about anywhere. And if push comes to shove you can easily make your own with scrap wood lying around the house.

Getting back online While it might be relatively easy for a government to cut connections by leveraging the major ISPs, there are some places they wouldn't get to so readily, like privately-owned networks and independent ISPs.

The Liberty Online lists more:

FIND THE PRIVATELY RUN ISPs

RETURN TO DIAL-UP

AD-HOC NETWORKING

BUILD LARGE BRIDGED WIRELESS NETWORK

NINTENDO DS

INTRANET

BECOME UNTRACEABLE

GET SATELLITE ACCESS

Check them out here

Signs of China’s Snowballing Political Crisis: Six Arrested over Coup Rumors

China’s political sphere seems to be feeling the heat from the unraveling of the Keynesian policies

From the Telegraph, (hat tip Bob Wenzel)

The arrests are a sign of the ruling communist party's (CCP) extreme nervousness in the wake of an extraordinary few weeks in which an unusually public power struggle amongst the party elite has seen the one-time politburo contender Bo Xilai deposed.

Rumours that a coup was imminent began spreading after Mr Bo was removed from his position as CCP chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing two weeks ago. Posts on microblogs claimed that armoured personnel carriers and tanks had been seen on the streets of Beijing.

China's state news agency Xinhua reported late on Friday that six people are under arrest for "fabricating or disseminating online rumours".

Sixteen websites have been closed for posting reports of "military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing". An unknown number of people were "admonished and educated" for their part in spreading the rumours, according to police in Beijing.

"The rumours have "caused a very bad effect on the public," said a spokesman for the State internet Information Office, while the websites were shut down for not acting to stop their spread. Two of China's most popular microblogging sites, weibo.com and qq.com, were also "criticised and punished accordingly" for their failure to prevent the rumours circulating said the spokesman.

As I previously wrote,

China’s copycat of western Keynesian policies have led to massive internal bubbles, blatant misreporting of issued loans and financial innovative arbitrages by the political class, particularly the local governments, whom has circumvented party regulations by setting up 6,000 finance companies to raise funds for public works.

The negative effects of such top down policies have not only bred corruption, it has sown political conflicts which run the risks of escalation and transition to violent political uprisings.

The bottom line is that China’s behind the scene political struggles have been seeping out into the public and will be manifested through price signals in the marketplace, despite repeated attempts by political authorities to expurgate such developments.

China’s Credit Default Swap reportedly rose to new four month highs.

China’s Shanghai index fell 3.69% over the week and seems on path to neutralize this year's gains. Year-to-date, and based on Friday's close, China's gains have been reduced to 2.88%.

Longer term, the Shanghai index seem as approaching a critical threshold.

The almost 5 year symmetrical triangle formation seems on path towards a culmination.

Of course, the SSEC can breakdown or have an upside breakout or extended consolidation. Interpreting the charts mainly depends on the bias of the observer.

However, given the current conditions, the balance of risks seems tilted towards the downside. And this may likely be driven by the economic developments filtering into the political sphere.

It is unclear whether China’s authorities will be able to put a rein on this, and kick the proverbial can down the road, or if political tensions will deteriorate further.

Yet despite attempts to apply strong arm tactics through censorship, price signals will be the most dependable source of information. And any attempts to manipulate the markets may have short term effects.

While the Chinese yuan remains strong, any further deterioration in the political spectrum is likely to reverse the gains and may trigger hot money stampede out of China. And this may ripple through the commodity sphere and to global stock markets.

Again, China could just be the blackswan that could upend today’s central bank powered rallies.

China’s increasing censorship of social media or an attack on free speech also represents an assault to the forces of decentralization which has been operating on the internet platform. The jury is still out as to which of the two forces will eventually prevail. Over the interim expect heightened volatility on the marketplace.

Stay tuned.

Why Socialists Hate the Internet

Writes Mary O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip Mark Perry]

'There's a reason the people in Cuba don't have access to the Internet. It is because the government [couldn't] survive it."

That was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio last week at a Washington conference titled "Cuba Needs a (Technological) Revolution: How the Internet Can Thaw an Island Frozen in Time." The event was sponsored by Google Ideas, a for-profit venture of the giant Internet search enterprise, and the nonprofit Heritage Foundation. I was asked to kick off things with a Rubio interview. So I began by asking him what he makes of the Cuban military's reference last year to technology that allows young people to exchange thoughts digitally as "the permanent battlefield."

Mr. Rubio responded that it isn't communication with the outside world that the regime fears the most, but Cuban-to-Cuban chatter. "I think Raúl Castro clearly understands that his regime cannot survive a Cuban reality where individual Cubans can communicate [with] each other in an unfettered manner." He called "unfiltered access to the Internet and social media" Cuba's "best hope" of avoiding "a stagnated dictatorship" for "the next 50 years that would survive even the death of Raul and Fidel."

The internet or the information age isn’t just about connectivity though. Rather the age of the internet is about the knowledge revolution or democratization of knowledge through “geographically noncontiguous communication” as author Jeffrey Tucker recently described.

The information age brings about unfettered opportunities to learn or to expand one’s horizon of wisdom. Say for instance anyone who wants to access literatures from libraries around the world may try openlibrary.org.

How about basic materials for self learning or home schooling? You may also try the revolutionary Khan Academy.

The political power of despots and their socialists supporters principally derives from ignorance. This is why the public has been vulnerable to fear and to mind manipulation—via indoctrination and propaganda.

People hardly realize that conventional education, for instance, has been surreptitiously designed for the worship of the state. The internet brought me to this reality and made me an apostate to the religion of the state.

The internet essentially provides the platform for the unceasing struggle to attain civil and economic liberties, through the effective neutralization of political manipulations of the people’s minds.

The chief proponent and inspiration of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, the great philosopher anarchist Étienne de La Boétie once wrote,

Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself,
cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom

Thus enslavement and freedom is a matter of people’s choice. And the state of knowledge or ignorance by every individual in a society determines that choice.

The more the diffusion of knowledge in a society, the balance of power shifts towards individual sovereignty at the expense of political entities.

And that’s why welfare warfare based governments have been averse to the internet, and that’s why political authorities will continue to wage an all out war of control of the internet.

Web Wars: Pirate Bay to Use Hovering Server Drones

The web is a frontier for the cat-and-mouse analogy signifying the constant struggle between politics and markets.

I pointed out how social media activists have resorted to various means of technology innovations to elude censorship.

Yet more of these battles have been developing at an awesome pace.

From KurzweilAI,

The Pirate Bay (TPB), which allows users to share media files via BitTorrent, plans to avoid shutdown by Hollywood by putting some of its servers in GPS controlled drones hovering over international waters, the TPB team told TorrentFreak.

“With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air,” TPB revealed in a blog post.

“This way our machines will have to be shot down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away.”

Looking ahead, The Pirate Bay team thinks the site may no longer be hosted on this planet. “When the time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy’s most resilient system. And all of the parts we’ll use to build that system on will be downloadable.”

So the social media battlefield will be transformed into “star wars”. Drone technology will be used as commercial instruments, particularly as medium of transport and perhaps as shield, to defend against political censorship. And via drone platform based social media warfare, governments will be tasting their own medicine.

How the Web Nurtures Underground Economies

Through Anonymous Web Proxy Servers.

From author Bill Rounds (howtovanish.com), [hat tip Charleston Voice]

Communist Cuba is a great example of how this is being done. It has a thriving market for goods and services, even though strict regulations prohibit entrepreneurship, because the citizens find ways to exercise their enterprising minds. A site similar to Craigslist, called revolico.com, allows Cubans to exchange everything from baseball equipment to their place in line and they love their hawaladar. For the good of the people, the site is blocked by the government. But the site thrives nonetheless. How do the Cubans get around the repressive and immoral policies of their overbearing government? They use anonymous web surfing practices.

Anonymous web surfing is generally done by using proxy servers. Proxy servers allow the proxy computer, outside of Cuba and not subject to Cuban government regulations, to do the web surfing for the Cubans. The ISP registers that they have visited the proxy server, not the sites visited by the proxy server on their behalf. And, because there are many thousands of servers available at any moment, some of which have never been used before as a proxy, it is far more difficult to restrict access to proxy servers than to individual websites. This way, the web surfing activity of individual Cubans is made anonymous to those who are watching them.

Cubans using anonymous proxy servers for anonymous browsing which don’t disclose their IP address to the websites that they visit, nor the fact that the proxy server is even surfing for someone else, make it that much harder for a repressive government, like Cuba, to discover which citizens are visiting a site and then prevent them from visiting the site.

Cuba is not the only example. China, Iran, and many other countries have seen their citizens utilize proxy servers to spread information and ideas. I am sure that governments are not done trying to prevent their citizens from accessing information, sharing information, or associating with others through the internet, but I am also sure that there will always be those who circumvent limitations placed on them through the use of anonymous web surfing techniques. Some people might want to seek residency in another country that is more free and allows for more privacy.

Rapid innovation and accelerating diffusion of technology usage has been eroding the political framework of the 20th century. Also these have been fostering economic activities that goes beyond the clutches of political authorities.

And this means that the greater the penetration levels of technology, the bigger the informal economy, as well as, greater pressures applied to existing vertical structured political institutions. Put differently, closed door political economies are incrementally being pried open by the globalization through technology.

The relationship between markets and regulations can be analogized to a “cat and mouse” game which Wikipedia.org defines as “a contrived action involving constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes” where the interrelationship exists via a feedback mechanism: the markets always discovers means to skirt political shackles, and the political response to innovation would be to introduce new regulations.

Nonetheless the markets are always way ahead of and smarter than politicians, which is one fundamental reason to be optimistic despite the many challenges posed by the incumbent political agents and their lackeys.

Twitter Yields to Selective Censorship

This is a sad development for social media: The popular Twitter has yielded to selective censorship

From New York Daily News,

Twitter service may be getting spotty in some countries.

The micro-blogging firm announced on the company blog Thursday that it plans to change its censorship policies to comply with different countries' regulations.

"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," the post read. "Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar, but for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi comment."

Users' tweets will be blocked in a country where they are against the law, but shown in nations where they are legal. For example, a pro-Nazi tweet may be scrubbed in Germany, but would appear on the user's account if read in the U.S.

When Twitter removes a comment, it says it will clearly mark when a Tweet has been censored and send it to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which is creating a database of tweets deleted not only because of censorship but also as a result of cease-and-desist notices and copyright infringement.

Despite the setback, which I think is part of any struggle for change through attrition, I remain hopeful that internet freedom will prevail.

Video: Salma Khan on How SOPA and PIPA May Kill the Internet

Salman Khan of the famed free education based Khan Academy explains the draconian, insidious and totalitarian implications of the SOPA and PIPA.
(hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

Quote of the Day: The Internet is Not for the Government to Regulate

From Cato’s Jim Harper

The Internet is not the government’s to regulate. It is an agreement on a set of protocols—a language that computers use to talk to one another. That language is the envelope in which our communications—our First-Amendment-protected speech—travels in hundreds of different forms.

The Internet community is growing in power. (Let’s not be triumphal—government authorities will use every wile to maintain control.) Hopefully the people who get engaged to fight SOPA and PIPA will recognize the many ways that the government regulates and limits information flows through technical means. The federal government exercises tight control over electromagnetic spectrum, for example, and it claims authority to impose public-utility-style regulation of Internet service provision in the name of “net neutrality.”

Video: What's Wrong with Internet Censorship

Cato's Julian Sanchez explains what is wrong with internet censorship

From Cato:

Internet censorship is not the answer to problems of piracy online. Cato Institute research fellow Julian Sanchez explains that internet censorship won't effectively address the problem of piracy and will threaten innovation and the liberties of Americans by engaging in unconstitutional prior restraint.

By the way, after a furious backlash, bi partisan legislators are reportedly backing off from supporting the bill.

War on the Internet: Freedom Wins Round One

Writes Mac Slavo

Amid significant pressure from tens of thousands of internet users and major web behemoths like Google, Facebook, and Reddit, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is, in its current form, Dead on Arrival:

“Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

“The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

“The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” It added that any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.”

…

“Though the administration did issue a formal veto threat, the White House’s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form.

“A few hours later, Congress shelved SOPA, putting off action on the bill indefinitely.

“Sourced From Washington Monthly via The Daily Sheeple

Sponsored primarily by purported free speech advocates that include democrats and republicans alike, the SOPA would have fundamentally transformed the internet as we know it today. As Daisy Luther writes at Inalienably Yours, the bill was nothing short of a direct attack against the first Amendment and the right to free speech:

“On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech….and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of “wrong-doing”. It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding allowing “them” to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.

“How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet Service Providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait – I thought it was innocent until proven guilty….oh….that was “before” the NDAA.

Source: The Internet: The Last Bastion of Free Speech

While this bill of goods was being sold to the American public as a way to reduce online piracy originating on foreign shores, in essence the legislation would have made it possible for any organization (with the financial assets and access to attorneys to do so) to target web sites (foreign or domestic) using excerpts, quotes, and videos without express permission of the authors or producers of such content. Furthermore, any web site linking to suspected copyrighted content would be guilty by association for fascilitating the infringement.

Read the rest here

In the growing realization that political power is being frayed by the ongoing information age revolution or the democratization of knowledge, the 20^th century welfare and warfare state will use anything, like Intellectual Property and copyright arguments, as pretext to rein control over the internet. Earlier they argued that the cyberspace can pose a threat to national security.

Today, Wikipedia and other websites has shut down to express their opposition to proposals over censorship masquerading as ‘foreign Internet Piracy’.

The above is just one of the other being actions undertaken such as Spying of Email and the harassment of Wikileaks

As I previously wrote

These actions represent “resistance to change”, whereby politicians will try to enforce information control or censorship in the way the industrial age used to operate.

The horizontal flow of information threatens the institutional centralized frameworks built upon the industrial age economy.

As I earlier wrote,

“Political and economic ideology latched on a vertical top-bottom flow of power will be on a collision course with horizontal real time flow of democratized knowledge.

“This would likely result to less applicability of ideologies based on centralization, which could substantially erode its support base and shift political capital to decentralized structure of political governance that would conform with the horizontal structure of information flows.

“People will know more therefore control from the top will be less an appealing idea.

But again these attempts to regulate the web are likely to fail.

Nevertheless the war on the internet accounts as part of the adjustment process away from the command and control structure of the industrial ages with the knowledge revolution taking place beyond the reach of politicians. Besides, technological advances will work around regulations.

Signifying the foundation of knowledge, the internet will serve as THE battleground between socialism and free markets, and this will be just one of the many series of skirmishes that are destined to occur. And as previously noted, many internet activists have already been preparing for the worst scenario.

Indexed’s Jessica Hagy has a nice graphical depiction of the ongoing war, which she calls: Dark Ages II: in discussion now!

Indeed, the left and vested interest groups wants us to remain in the Dark ages and as their serfs.