!='s KEI FOIAs USTR ACTA NDAs points us to a really great blog post by Jamie Love on what appears to be a really good blog called Knowledge Ecology International (“Attending and mending the knowledge ecosystem”).
Recommended for anyone interested in the intersection between intellectual property law and, well, freedom and development.
Daily Kos: Harry Reid abdicates his leadership role.
Seems the X-rays emerging from the Majority (q.v.) Leader's Office are not encouraging.
Snarky letter in today's NYTimes, Letter – How to Find a Book
To the Editor:
Re “A Library to Last Forever” (Op-Ed, Oct. 9):
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, writes, “Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”
Fly??? I’m pretty sure I can e-mail a reference librarian and ask her to check holdings before I do anything so drastic as fly. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Internet?
Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Danbury, Conn., Oct. 9, 2009
Not to mention this major civilization advance known as “inter-library loan” — a service provided not only by university libraries but even by better public libraries.
In a faculty seminar earlier this week, a (female) colleague said, apropos Chief Justice Marshall, that he “is the only Supreme Court Justice I would have liked to date.”
This is, to me, a wholly new way to think of Supreme Court Justices.
Any other candidates?
Guardian gagged from reporting parliament:
The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
Fortunately, sanity (and the internet) prevailed. Gag on Guardian reporting MP's Trafigura question lifted,
The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.
Within the past hour Trafigura's legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.
Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.
It's called the Streisand effect now,
The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted.
Having one major country with the First Amendment and lots of servers means that most other countries cannot at present easily censor like they used. (See my 1997 article The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage). But there are exceptions: countries with almost no Internet access, and countries that have managed to control both the basic routing information and limit the number of connections to the outside world. That would be China, so far.
For a brief while, all .se domains were inaccessible to most Internet users due a small one-character typo.
The official explanation is at Incorrect DNS information | .SE. What seems to have happened is that someone left off the trailing “.” in the routine republication of the official announcement of the .se root zone.
The mistake was identified within an hour or so, and the official .se data republished, but without some of the authentication information it would usually carry. The result was, if I understand what happened, was that .se remained inaccessible for a while for two groups of people: those whose ISPs had uploaded the erroneous .se data and hadn't gotten around to updating to the corrected .se info, and those whose ISPs are meticulous about validating DNSSEC signatures and noted that the (corrected) replacement failed that test.
In short, the laziest and the most painstaking were the most effected.
Update More at Sweden’s Internet broken by DNS mistake, including this:
The problems were made worse by the fact that DNS lookups are cached externally. Since DNS lookups are cached a certain time and the .se zone has a 24 hour time-to-live (the time information is cached by external DNS servers), the problem could last for up to 24 hours for some users.
..
Problems that affect an entire top-level zone have very wide-ranging effects as can be seen by the .se incident. There are just over 900,000 .se domain names, and every single one of these were affected.
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