Posts Tagged internet

Shopify Shuts Cody Wilson’s Account

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Shopify shut down Wilson’s Defense Distributed storefront at 7:07 am EDT according to an email from the company’s legal team to Wilson. The email said the account, which had been operating in good standing for over two years, was going to be shuttered in the next week and the storefront it was operating would be immediately inaccessible to the public.

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Facebook Censoring Links To Gun File Site

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, told the Free Beacon that links to CodeIsFreeSpeech.com have been blocked by Facebook, and Amazon has taken the site down from its servers. The website, which has republished the gun-design files at the center of the Wilson case, is a joint project of the Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation, Calguns Foundation, and California Association of Federal Firearms Licenses. Combs said publishing the files was within their First Amendment rights and the actions taken by employees at the tech giants is an attempt to censor them that he believes may have wide-ranging consequences

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What’s The Point Of A Printed Gun?

From Aier.org:

This gun is a manifestation of the new digital reality: the physical world has become information-based. The only way to control it is to muzzle people, violate free speech rights, and fundamentally transform a principle we have come to believe about the relationship between the individual and state.

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Social Media Purge Has Begun

From Zero Hedge:

One day after what appeared to be a coordinated attack by media giants Facebook, Apple, Spotify and Google on Alex Jones, whose various social media accounts were banned or suspended in a matter of hours, the crackdown against alternative media figures continued as several Libertarian figures, including the Ron Paul Institute director, found their Twitter accounts suspended.

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Slate Defends 3D Gun Plans

From Slate:

We protect speech so strongly under the First Amendment in part because we want to ensure unfettered discussion of policy matters. We want a well-informed citizenry that can engage in the hard task of self-governance. With the new rush of legislation concerning 3D-printed guns, the public and Congress should have access to the controversial files at issue, so they can understand what they are and are not.

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Defense Distributed Legal Fund

Defense Distributed is allowing people to support them with monthly donations to raise money for the many legal challenges against them.

You can join the cause here: https://membership.defdist.org/

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Explanation Of Futile Injunction Against Defense Distributed

From National Review:

We are in the grips of a bizarre political panic that is disconnected from the facts and the law but is deeply connected not just to the larger culture war over gun rights in the United States but also to the deep suspicion of virtually any action taken by the Trump administration. There was a time when we could have greater confidence in federal courts to take a breath, soberly consider the issues, and introduce a measure of reason and rationality to legal debate. In some courts — especially when Trump administration actions are at issue — those days are long past.

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LiberTV

New video site from James Yeager:

LiberTV

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Government Unable To Purchase Illegal Firearms Online

From IJR:

Our covert testing involving GAO agents attempting to purchase firearms illegally on the Surface Web were unsuccessful. Specifically, private sellers on Surface Web gun forums and in classified ads were unwilling to sell a firearm to our agents that self-identified as being prohibited from possessing a firearm.

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Sign Petition To Stop Warrantless Spying

From EFF:

The law behind the NSA’s sweeping Internet surveillance programs—Section 702, as enacted by the FISA Amendments Act—is set to expire at the end of 2017. Built-in expiration dates like this force lawmakers to review, debate, and update wide-reaching surveillance laws that impact their constituents’ privacy.

The looming Section 702 sunset gives Congress a chance to rein in the warrantless surveillance of millions of innocent people’s online communications. But some have another, much more dangerous idea.

Sen. Tom Cotton and a group of other Senate Republicans recently introduced a bill (S. 1297) that would not only reauthorize Section 702 without making much-needed changes, but it would also make the law permanent, effectively forfeiting lawmakers’ responsibility to periodically reexamine Section 702 and the impact it has on their constituents.

It would be unacceptable for Congress to ignore our privacy concerns and hand off their obligation to review surveillance law.

Sign our petition and tell Congress to oppose S. 1297.

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Defense Distributed Part of New Documentary

From The Verge:

In the film, Wilson is openly positive about the election of Donald Trump, which may help explain the film’s chilly reception among the liberal-leaning Sundance audience. Then again, there are plenty of reasons for people on the left — Lough included — to find Wilson unsettling. Lough interviews him at length in The New Radical, about other pioneers of the crypto movement, other libertarian radical activists, and how printable weapons level the playing field for anyone who wants a potentially undetectable plastic gun without any government oversight.

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Signal App Subpoenaed For User Data

From Open Whisper Systems:

In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation.

This is the first subpoena that we’ve received. It originally included a broad gag order that would have prevented us from publishing this notice, but the ACLU represented us in quickly and successfully securing our ability to publish the transcripts below. We’re committed to treating any future requests the same way: working with effective and talented organizations like the ACLU, andpublishing transcripts of our responses to government requests here.

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Blueprints Of Guns Not Allowed, Court Says

From Ars Technica:

In a 2-1 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not persuaded that Defense Distributed’s right to free speech under the First Amendment outweighs national security concerns.

Ordinarily, of course, the protection of constitutional rights would be the highest public interest at issue in a case. That is not necessarily true here, however, because the State Department has asserted a very strong public interest in national defense and national security. Indeed, the State Department’s stated interest in preventing foreign nationals—including all manner of enemies of this country—from obtaining technical data on how to produce weapons and weapon parts is not merely tangentially related to national defense and national security; it lies squarely within that interest.

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Choosing A Strong Password Is Easier Than You Think

From EFF:

Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren’t very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)

Measuring the security of a randomly-generated passphrase is easy. The most common approach to randomly-generated passphrases (immortalized by XKCD) is to simply choose several words from a list of words, at random. The more words you choose, or the longer the list, the harder it is to crack. Looking at it mathematically, for k words chosen from a list of length n, there are kn possible passphrases of this type. It will take an adversary about kn/2 guesses on average to crack this passphrase. This leaves a big question, though: where do we get a list of words suitable for passphrases, and how do we choose the length of that list?

In general choosing four five-letter words is better than one long word with number substitutions and some weird characters thrown in. It’s easier to remember and vastly harder for a computer to guess.

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Sharing Passwords May Now Be A Crime

From Motherboard:

At issue is language in the CFAA that makes it illegal to access a computer system “without authorization.” McKeown said that “without authorization” is “an unambiguous, non-technical term that, given its plain and ordinary meaning, means accessing a protected computer without permission.” The question that legal scholars, groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and dissenting judge Stephen Reinhardt ask is an important one: Authorization from who?

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