1. Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.
2. Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.
3. The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.
4. The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.
5. Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.
6. We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.
7. The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.
8. We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.
9. We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.
10. In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

The cold boot attack paper

Some reactions:

• the new at Slashdot
• the brief at Securitifocus
• comment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• new, comment and PGPcorp announcement at Kriptópolis [ES]

Carlo Wood knew it, but he didn’t surrender when he deleted accidentally his home directory. He studied how ext3fs works, then he wrote a tool, ext3grep, that helped him to recover sucessfully all the lost data. I had no time to analyze and test it but it seems it performs a jorunal-based attack.

Via LWN.net

Via Matt Blaze’s Exhaustive Search

But it only affects to the kernel if it supports this function. As I compile my own kernels, I tested the exploit and it didn’t work.

So, I’m happy to discover spenting hours and hours configuring and recompiling the kelmer is not only funny. It is useful too

xkcd comic strip: “Responsible behavior”

(under CC Attribution-Non commercial 2.5)

Since some years ago, in Spain we’re living with a sword over our heads because two laws about digital world rights: the LSSI aproved by right wing Partido Popular (PP), and “LSSI’s 2.0″ , LISI, aproved by left wing Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) last December, 20th. LSSI was the first step to control Internet operations in Spain. LISI reinforces this control and gives the chance to shutdown webs and another Internet services by administrative organizations even without court sentence.

Ok, what happened with Blogger? Some blogs hosted in Blogger encouraged to boycott Catalonian products because great part of Catalonians try to separate from Spain (in the same way I encourage to boycott Canadian products because they allow seal slaughters in this blog). So a court ordered a lien shutting down those blogs. As the blogs are hosted out of Spain, the next step was to block those webs. And, as CESGA could not block only that blogs, they decided to block all Blogger.

The wall was closed around a week. Those days were the wildest censorship case in the the history of the current democracy in Spain. And sadly, it is only the beginning.

Few webs and press published about the incident:

• Hazteoir.org(Spanish):“El centro de Supercomputación de la Junta de Galicia cierra el acceso a los blogs de Blogger”
• Libertad Digital (Spanish):“El centro de Supercomputación de la Xunta cierra el acceso a los blogs de Blogger”
• Vieiros (Galician): “Os universitarios galegos quedan sen acceso a Blogger”

Updated, August 30th : I’m not the lone paranoic. Via OS News.

From the report of Ars Technica:

“You won’t really see much mention of DRM in most vPro coverage, because Intel has (quite appropriately) spent a lot of time and effort over the past few years talking up the TXT + VT-x and VT-d combination as a robust enterprise security and remote management solution. And indeed it is. But as a potential technological enabler of more effective DRM, it’s also the ideal companion to Blu-ray and HD DVD, and a godsend to Big Content. Look for it across the rest of Intel’s desktop and portable line by the end of 2008 and prepare to kiss fair use goodbye.”

Via Kriptópolis[es].

What’s the dark side of the history? Well, if I accept that service, a technician automatically come to my home. Then he installs in every machine a program so if I call needing their service, they can make basic test from remote.

Sadly I think there will be a lot of wretchs that will accept the service…