… not.
As you might notice in the posts below, I’m missing everything since late March… No fun for me, and no fun for those that had bookmarks.
I’ve managed to salvage the previous posts from my friends RSS reader, and I’ll post them all below so you can find them by searching the blog at least :/
Jun 12, 2009
Open Rights Group comments on the EU-elections
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
The Open Rights Group has published their reflections on the recent EU-elections.
From Openrightsgroup.org – “What do the EU results and Pirate Party mean for digital rights?”:
But the biggest shock from a digital rights perspective is the election of the Swedish Pirate Party, with one representative, or two if the Lisbon Treaty is adopted. Their membership and votes have been boosted by the Pirate Bay trial, although they are separate organisations. The Open Rights Group’s perspective is rather different, but we welcome their election, because it will force a public debate on issues which of concern to us.
Politicians would be making a mistake to simply mock or ignore this new if eccentrically-named political force. The Pirate Party have shown that politicians can lose their jobs if they fail to defend our rights. They have demonstrated that young people want the public benefit from the new digital world. The Pirate Party have demonstrated that privacy rights and fair copyright systems matter to people enough to vote for them.
Their election will open up a debate about how well the public interest is served by our current copyright and patent laws. Their position is for a five year copyright term, and a file sharing exception. These are somewhat extreme positions – but the very respectable ‘cultural flat rate’ proposal might in practice be something similar to a payment made in exchange for a file sharing exception. And many copyright academics feel the economically optimal term for copyright is nearer 15 years than the life plus 70 years that most authored works can claim.
Read the full article…
Also, I’ve given some answers to journalists from Don’t Panic (UK), Capital.bg (Bulgaria) and Publico.pt (Portugal) during the last couple of days, so I’m going to keep an eye out for new Pirate-articles there. They seemed nice enough but you never know with the media We’ve seen all misunderstandings there is here in Sweden during the last year…
Jun 10, 2009
Victorious! 7.1%, 1 mandate to The Pirate party!
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Photo (original): foxypar4 on Flickr. CC BY. Edited by me.
We had a great success in the Swedish EU-elections and got a whopping 7,1% (might be more after final count) of the votes which grants us one mandate in the parliament. If the Lisbon treaty gets ratified by all countries, and lets hope it does not, we will get another mandate.
A lot of international newspapers are writing about this. Actually so many that I’m not even going to try to start listing them. Instead, see this Google News query that should give you the information you need
I was on the ballot, and so far I’ve gotten around 1100-1200 personal votes (with 60% of votes counted). Feels like a strong result, as I’ve never lifted a finger in any personal campaign.
During the months before the election and on election day I was responsible for the election ballots in the district of Stockholm and everything went fine. We had our freshly coded (BSD-licensed) election tracking webapp that we used to coordinate our distribution efforts and in the end, we had 100% coverage in Stockholm!
What was most impressing during the elections was the way that people in the municipals around Stockholm rose up and took responsibility on their own, solved problems and created problem remediation groups dynamically. For me this was like Utopia Saved me alot of work, actually so much that I got uneasy about not having something to do during the afternoon.
We should be very content with this result, and enjoy the success!
So… what will the pirates do in the European parliament? The primary focus of all our political questions are personal integrity, and as such we’ll work against all laws that might impede that.
The first really important vote coming up is the Telecoms Package, which will be handled shortly after the parlamentarians take their seats. We are not against the package per se (it does contain a lot of good stuff) but we do not want it if it comes shipped with lobbyist prepared amendments which limit Internet accessibility and/or mandate some kind of filtering or removal of the “mere conduit” principle.
Second we’ll work to relax the copyright legislation to further the cultural environment in Europe. Third we’ll move on to investigate how we might change patent regulations in order to make it work for inventors not against them.
The next goal for the Pirate Party is now the state elections coming up in September 2010… It’s looking good and hopes are up;)
May 21, 2009
We’re all The Pirate Bay
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Montt Mardié on Youtube with “We’re All The Pirate Bay”.
Posted with this info:
“Hello,
An artist has got to make a living just like everybody else, there’s no doubt about it. And these are tough times, believe me I know. The thing is though, if I were to go back in time, 10 years or so, and tell the 15-year-old version of myself that over a night, 60 000 people had heard one of my songs, the first question I’d throw back at myself wouldn’t be “how much money did I make?”.
Don’t get me wrong, I love money and I want to make a lot of it. Bathe in it just like Uncle Scrooge. But money isn’t the main reason why I write songs. First and foremost I want people to hear them. Times are so strange at the moment and a lot of people are angry and upset. Still, for each day that goes by I get more and more convinced that we shouldn’t try to fight the future, we should embrace it. Try to see opportunities instead of catastrophes. I’ve written a song. I call it “We’re All The Pirate Bay”. It’s free and nobody will ever have to pay for it, though if you insist you are welcome to make a donation.
Paypal account monttmardie@hybrism.com – all the money will go to new songs for people to sing along to.
Take care,
Monty”
The YouTube video info also includes the text and encourages people to create new videos for the song. One of the video responses that I liked was “Montt Mardié – We’re All The Pirate Bay (Val Venosta remix) (V2)”:
User generated content, it’s beautiful and it’s the future
May 20, 2009
Q.P. – 19 days to go
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
It’s been a while since I wrote, mainly because I have a lot of work and because when I’m supposed to be off I have yet some more work with distributing election materials all over Stockholm. I’ve also spent my weekends in Stockholm participating in some pre-election propaganda events.
I haven’t had a day off in four weeks now and I think it’s starting to get to me. I’m really looking forward to the wonderful release of June 7th and the elections. Both because we’re expected to take a couple of seats in the EU-parliament and because I’ll have a weekend for myself, my wife and our dogs.
I’m going to Finland with work tomorrow to have a presentation on the current developments in the malware business and I’m looking forward it. Always fun to speak in front of a smaller, more interactive, group as this one is (~15 people). Hopefully we’ll be able to record the whole seminar on video, and then I can post it here. We’ll see how things go
Next week will also be full of work, with one CERT gathering at a client and three days of pentesting at another.
19 days to victory and 19 days until I can sleep like a normal person
May 6, 2009
Pirate Party, now over 43211 members
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Today the Swedish Pirate Party passed 43211 members. That makes us the third largest political party in Sweden, if counting members. We’ll see how things turn out in the EU-elections, but it’s looking good so far.
Others writing in Swedish: Varför inte?, Yami och pandorna, Rick Falkvinge (to be continued, see Knuff)
May 2, 2009
I’m at Rättviks marknad
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
I’m at “Rättviks marknad“, which is a smalltown market event, to help out with a PP event we’re having here. Got here yesterday and will go home tonight. Sunny as hell
Some clouds though, and that is that Moderaterna (right wing/conservatives) that run this little municipal has tried to get us thrown out for being too visible. Unfortunately for them it’s not illegal nor against any rules to be seen, so we’re in the clear Disturbing though that people are trying to censor you AFK…
Cheers,
Apr 30, 2009
Q.P. – 5.1% to vote Pirate
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Synovate (a market research company) has done a poll on how people will vote in the EU-elections, and according to it the Pirate Party will get 5.1% of the votes.
That means there will be Pirates in the EU-parliament next year
More info in English here: TorrentFreak (Digg it!)
Other bloggers writing (in Swedish): Opassande, Jan Lindgren, “Varför inte?” and Rick Falkvinge.
Newspapers writing (in Swedish): Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet and Aftonbladet.
Apr 23, 2009
Q.P. – Judge in TPB-trial has conflicting interests
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
The Judge (Tomas Norström) in the “The Pirate Bay trials” is being exposed in a conflict of interest scandal here in Sweden today.
It seems that he is part of the same organizations as the plaintiffs and their lawyers:
Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt (SFU)
In english “The society for copyright“. The judge is a member of this society in his free time together with the plaintiffs lawyers (Peter Danowsky, Henrik pontén and Monique Wadsted). The societys website states that it is a “meeting place for qualified copyright discussions”.
Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)
In english “The Swedish society for industrial legal protection“. This society works with patents and pattern protection, but has also been lobbying for stronger copyright regulations. The judge is a member of the board in this one.
Stiftelsen .SE
In english “The .SE foundation“. This is an extra job that the judge holds. One of his colleagues is the lawyer Monique Wadsted, that represents one of the plaintiffs (the movie companies).
Other prominent lawyers and legal experts say in the media that he should have never taken on this case, as it’s such a sensitive one. From the outside it might be construed as corruption (no shit…).
This is ridiculous. Why would he take this kind of case with this obvious conflict of interest? A favor for a friend perhaps?
UPDATE: Seems like one of the organizations (SFIR) he’s part of wrote to the EU about stronger laws for punishing the service providers when it comes to online file-sharing. In the document it says it has been revised and handled by the board (and he’s on the board). Err… How can he not realise this is a conflict of interest? This smells, from far far away.
Source: SR P3 News (State Radio) (in Swedish unfortunately). Follow #spectrial in Twitter for more info.
Apr 21, 2009
Q.P. – Yankee group gets it…
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
On the 17th of April, Carl Howe @ Yankee Group said:
Today’s judgment in Sweden isn’t the end of the story. Like it or not, the Anywhere media genie is out of the bottle. Instead of using the courts to push the genie back into the bottle, media companies should figure out what they will do to profit from Anywhere media. All we found out today is that it’s probably not going to be the Pirate Bay that does it.
… now how long will it take before the media companies do the same?
Read the full article here!
Apr 20, 2009
A cultural revolution in Sweden
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Photo by Mats Larsson – www.matsart.se, resized.
So, The Pirate Bay got convicted, as I guessed earlier, and the punishment was so extreme that it has become evident that this was politically motivated judgement. The court has let itself become affected by the pressure from media-industry its lobbyists. However, there has been no formal errors as some point out, it’s just the law that’s twisted.
An unexpected (well, for some at least) side-effect of TPB getting convicted is that it’s now more or less illegal to publish links (you know, like when I link like THIS) on your webpage or blogg. For real. That is “hyperlinks”, the stuff that the web is built upon.
The evidence in the case was 30 torrents supposedly pointing to digital versions of songs, books and videos. It was also agreed that the people behind the service did not directly know that these files contained, but their ignorance to check every link to a torrent (in these 30 cases) was what made them part of the crime.
The reason that you can’t publish links is that you can never guarantee what is on the site you’re linking to, but if you do it 30 times to sites containing copyrighted material, you might be looking at 1 year in a cell and a 30 million SEK lawsuit.
Some might say this is just me being an internet-loving-fear-uncertainty-doubt-mongerer, but I’m not. Today one of the largest morning newspapers published this article (Google translator link). It is a case-study in how to be ignorant and how fail utterly at understanding both the internet and how to handle business in this new era. He more or less say that Google and Yahoo are parasites (like TPB) that aggregate news for their non-paying customers, and that the media businesses worldwide should come together and unite against the “external threat”.
Worth noting though is that danish newspapers has thought like this for a while, and do not allow Google to link or aggregate any of the info on their webpages. Has their revenues increased? No.
However, it seems like the Swedish population has the same doubts about this trial as I have, seeing as we have almost 10000 new members in The Swedish Pirate Party in just two days. 10000 people. And they keep rolling in, and our registration/e-mailservers almost can’t handle the pressure
The Pirate Party is now (we’ll see how it looks tomorrow) the fourth largest political party in Sweden if counting members and Ung Pirat, “Young Pirate”, is now the largest political youth organization in Sweden…
Yesterday, a total of around 1000 people also attended our demonstration against the verdict in central Stockholm where I spoke and also later got interviewed by some newspapers (Google translate).
This is the strongest signal so far to our currently elected politicians that the laws are not adapted to reality and needs to be re-done. We need a new copyright legislation that do not criminalize people for sharing files between themselves, and if that is not done asap, they will loose their mandates.
The people are with us, not them.
I think that a copyright legislation in a modern society should look something like CC BY-NC-SA. That would mean that no unauthorized distribution or modification of the artists work could be used commercially, and the artists would still get their pay from the radio companies, book businesses etc.
The public would however be free to do non-commercial distribution of the works and modify/remix them. If a remix was to be used commercially, then a deal will have to be done between the original IP holder and the remixer, same a today in other words.
We, as in the Pirate party, would also like to shorten the commercial protection time for copyrighted works to 5 years. This is what our party principles say:
The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.
All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.
The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today’s copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today’s world. If you haven’t made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.
We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers’ legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.
We would also like to strengthen the real author/artists rights to their work and make the IP-rights non-transferrable. This would effectively put them in control of their work, and not the companies that “help” them and today take over 90% of the revenues generated.
There are a million other things that has been written in Swedish that I’d like to write now, but I realize this post i getting extremely long by now, and I would like to end it with an e-mail that had been snapped up by an editor at a Swedish newspaper from a mailinglist. This is google’s translation with some minor edits and reformatting (it translated filesharing to “hunt pirates” etc.):
I myself am a conservative middle-aged man who has never “shared files” (And I dislike piracy.) Yet, I now intend to join the Pirate Party, vote on them in the European elections and give them a monetary contribution to their election campaign.
The reason for this is that all the other parties are obviously is willing to introduce crazy, disproportionately repressive laws and controls in order to enable a rather insignificant industry (the entertainment industry) to be able to cling on to a fully redundant and outdated business model for some additional years.
It would be one thing if it was about war and terrorism, or on acute lack of food or clean water. Then you could of course understand the situation would be so terribly severe that some restrictions on the personal integrity would be necessary.
But now it’s not about something that is not even the slightest essential for anyone’s survival or health, but about helping one quite insignificant industry to keep their outdated way of making too much money, so that today’s troubadours, actors and other jesters and their financiers do not have to adapt their business model to development.
A total, a quite unlikely, a fully pathological lack the sense of proportionality. Kind of like razing an entire society to the ground only so that the emperor could take morning walks undisturbed in that very spot for a couple of weeks.
Finally a question: Is there anyone on the list (except MPs and others in the apparent loyalty conflict) that do _not_ intend to vote for the Pirate Party in the European elections?
And if so, why in hell not?
Nuf’ said.
UPDATE: Torrentfreak on the demonstrations, citing me whooo
Apr 7, 2009
Relaxing with bulldogs
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Once in a while you’ve got to disconnect from everything. No technology, no debate, no politics, no… Just nothing.
What I do to clear my brain is to be with my wife and my dogs, and we visited a French bulldog meetup in Hagaparken (a park in the north of Stockholm) this weekend. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue.
A very good day overall
Here are some pics (CC BY-NC-SA) of the gathering:
It’s a challenge to photograph dogs, but it’s fun
Apr 2, 2009
IPRED, it’s not about file-sharing
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Yesterday I was interviewed by TV4, but the interview didn’t get aired. They just took the interviews with the persons that fit their stereotype of PP members (young and radical 
). I think it was unfortunate as I raised an issue that’s been broadly overlooked in the “old media”-debate.
The problem with IPRED isn’t really people not being able to share files. Sure it’s a serious side effect, but to see the whole impact you have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
First off, the rights granted to the media companies is not proportionate to the “crime” (when talking online piracy). When creating and passing laws, there should be a consequence analysis carried out, and in this case they obviously dropped the ball on that one both in the EU parl. and in the Swedish parliament.
Giving lobbying organizations access to means such as mass surveillance of peers, the right to invade the personal space of swedish citizens, the right to freeze all bank accounts of the alleged perpetrator and perform raids on their homes is not something you want to do. That is clearly a breach of human rights on many levels. There where already tools to go after the real criminals, and all that IPRED does is to OK the persecution of regular tax-paying citizens.
And when taking an even bigger step back, we are now seeing the psychological/sociological effects of this law.
All around Sweden people are starting to open up their WLANs, use harddrive encryption and encrypted tunneling services. People have stopped participating in the debate and even saying that you’re filesharing is now associated with the risk of getting your home raided. People are afraid, and we now have over 2 million people actively trying to circumvent a legislation.
Now the question is why people are doing this… Clearly, it’s not because people respect the law and think it’s a step in the right direction. Anonymity and the ability to transmit files & information is what drives the Internet and my (and upcoming) generation see this as a human right. Free speech and information is and will always be something that is expected in a democracy.
I think this is where the politicians in power screwed up. They see the Internet as a tool that can be restricted without any hassles, because it’s just a tool.
Unfortunately, 2 million swedes disagree.
Seeing people closing on themselves and starting to hide with encryption etc. hurts me deeply. This is not the way people are supposed to behave in a democratic society. This is how people act in China, Saudi and other repressive countries. In my opinion, this is by far the worst effect of our IPRED implementation.
Also, as I’ve written about before, when 2 million people do not respect one law being passed there is a very real chance that they’ll loose respect of other laws as well. This might cause a lot of even more serious problems in the long run.
If zooming in on the situation today, we can see the expected drop in overall Swedish Internet traffic. The media companies are trying to throw some FUD (Swedish link) and have launched one “person behind this IP-adress”-request so far.
That one case is a bunch of audio-book companies that has found an FTP-server containing around 2000 mp3’s. I mean, who downloads audio-books? The blogosphere is fantastic though, and in the discussion now going Olof (via Emma) gave a reference to a site dedicated to offering free audio-books that has entered the public domain (LibriVox). Talk about alienating their customers and digging their own grave
We’ll see how this turns out, but it’s important to keep in mind that this is not about file-sharing per se. It’s about the intrusions in peoples privacy that are needed to stop it and the right to a fair trial and freedom of speech.
Apr 2, 2009
EU Telecoms Package, amendments axed…
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
And that means (among other things) that this text is removed from it:
“Internet users are entitled to an Internet connection to send and receive content of their own choice, use services and applications of their own choice, and connect hardware and use software of their own choice that does not harm the network. Internet users are entitled to a connection free from discrimination based on type of application, service or content, or based on sender or receiver address.”
Now why would you want to do that?
More from Monica Horten over at IPTegrity.com! For info in Swedish, visit HAX.
Mar 27, 2009
Remixes of insane UK anti-terrorist campaign
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
BoingBoing announced a remix challenge on the new UK anti-terrorist posters yesterday, and the results are now in. Amazingly hilarious stuff
See all here!
Mar 25, 2009
EU: The Telecoms package, ACTA and the 2009-elections
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Shared by you
Photo: Cédric Puisney on Flickr. CC BY-NC. A parody on these.
The Swedish blogger Henrik Alexandersson speculates today about the underlying plans when it comes to the Telecoms package.
When adding up the combined effects of the Telecom package’s and national jurisdictions, the effects might be disastrous (my translation directly from his blog below):
“The operators will do filtering of the traffic from the internets backbones to their own networks. Here there’s been a discussion about them only distributing “legal content”. This might include everything from gambling sites (Italy) to pages questioning Turkey’s genocide of Armenians (France) or The Pirate Bay (a lot of different countries). This list could continue forever, and once you’ve started censoring, it’s a slippery slope to even wider filtering.
Then it seems that they’re paving the road for filtering all the way down to the user-level. (For example, the writings about a subscribers right to decide which services and applications they want to use has been removed from the package).
You could imagine several scenarios.
1. Subscribers are allowed free access to the Internet if they stay within a closed network that only reaches pre-approved internet sites that the operator has deals with (according to rumors, at least one swedish operator is interested in the idea).
2. Subscribers get the above – plus the possibility to buy access to different standard pages.
3. users can buyaccess to the rest of (already filtered) Internet. Here’s also the possibility to add “safe surf” filters, personal filters against porn etc.
In other words, it’s about degrading the Internet into cable-television.
This would mean the end to the Internet as we know it today. Many people would probably be satisfied with access to the most usual newspapers, television channels, Google, Facebook and the usual banks plus some other things, in exchange for a free internet connection. Top this with cheap music and movie services that will only be offered to those choosing the closed networks.
That would mean the end to the open, dynamic, free and creative Internet – where everyone could reach everything and share information with anyone.”
He paints a very dark picture, and is only speculating, but seeing how lobbying organizations has acted in the past (and currently is) it might be good to at least realize the potential of these kinds of regulations.
The freedom of speech, and information, is a fundamental right which should never be bargained with. Doing so can only be considered anti-democratic as it will never have the support of the people.
Read more on this over at Svart Måndag (scroll down for english), IPTegrity and in the La Quadrature wiki.
At the same time, I read that the The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has promised to review its transparency when it comes to ACTA:
“The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has pledged to review the transparency of its trade negotiations after criticism over its recent decision to withhold information on an intellectual-property trade agreement.
[...]
The pledge to review transparency comes after three groups, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking details about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a trade pact being negotiated among the U.S. and several other countries.”
Oh goodie… Maybe we could do the same over here? Or why not keep to the concept of democracy, where all political processes are supposed to be transparent…
Anyways, here in Sweden we have a choice to make in the upcoming elections.
Vote for the Pirate party!
Mar 25, 2009
This is what I get…
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
… when asking people at the office to put their dishes (Swedish word for dishes is “disk”) in the dishwasher:
This is when you realize you’re working with nerds…
Mar 24, 2009
Why is it that…
from ICMPECHO by Daniel Nyström
Shared by you
Why is it that…
- everyone knows to empty out sensitive information the night before a LAN-party, expecting to be raided?
- everyone is using full disk encryption. At it’s strongest config.
- everyone is switching to slower and more inconvenient ways to share files, just because it preserves your privacy?
- most people know how to use anonymity services?
- most people know how to hide from snooping corporations & governments, expecting to have their privacy breached?
And if they do not know any of the above, they know where to find out.
Why is it that…
- people are ready to spend up to 20€ a month on VPN tunnels, but not on music CDs or DVDs?
- people are ready to pay 10€ a month for Spotify, but not on music CDs?
- mothers ask me for advice on how to protect their children from IPRED?
A lot of “Why?“s in my head today :/ Looking at what people do and know today, one might wonder what kind of society we’re building for our children.
