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Project Gutenberg: Court Order to Block Access in Germany

Die Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF) sperrt jetzt den Zugang zu allen Büchern des Project Gutenberg für IPs die Deutschland zugeordnet sind, aufgrund eines Gerichtsurteils das in Deutschland ergangen ist, weil Werke von Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann und Alfred Döblin in USA zwar bereits gemeinfrei sind, aber noch dem deutschen Urheberrechtsschutz (Tod + 70 Jahre) unterliegen.

Es lohnt sich, die Q&A im PGLAF statement zu lesen. Money quote:

PGLAF's legal advisors disagree that any foreign Court or entity has jurisdiction over its actions regarding copyright. The Court in Germany has promoted a theory that it has jurisdition, mainly because the www.gutenberg.org site has some content in the German language. The view of PGLAF is that it is up to the rights owner in Germany to identify people there who are infringing on its copyrights, and pursue remediation there.

Q: So the court thinks that the presence of content in German means that courts in Germany have jurisdiction, regardless of the fact that PGLAF is entirely in the US?
A: Yes, that was the original basis of the claim for jurisdiction, which the Court accepted in their judgement. Since then, there some more recent decisions in the European Court of Justice, and other German courts, that support this theory based on a Web site being accessible from a country.

Wenn ich irgendwelche Abos beim S. Fischer Verlag, GmbH oder anderen der Verlagsgruppe Georg Holtzbrinck GmbH (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC) hätte, würde ich die jetzt kündigen, und zwar mit Angabe genau diesen Grundes. Wer derartigen kulturellen Kahlschlag auslöst verdient es nicht anders. Auf jeden Fall werde ich in Zukunft vermeiden Bücher von angehörigen Verlagen zu kaufen. Obwohl das schwierig werden könnte, denn es sind eine ganze Reihe von Verlagen unter Holtzbrinck: Macmillan Publishers mit den deutschen Publikumsverlagen S. Fischer Verlag, Rowohlt Verlag, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Droemer Knaur, Argon Verlag, [Quelle Wikipedia]. Leider sind die Dieter von Holtzbrinck Medien (DvH Medien), denen der Zeitverlag gehört, der Georg Holtzbrinck GmbH eng verbunden.

Gerüchtehalber gibt es wohl einige Unstimmigkeiten bei der Geo-Zuordnung von IPs bei verschiedenen deutschen Internet-Providern und ob IPv4 oder IPv6.

You.Fucking.Idiots.

People who voted D.T. in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming.

Lenovo Superfish Komodia — Greed, Stupidity and Idiocy

Meanwhile you should have heard about the Lenovo hardware that had Superfish installed, an adware injecting software that uses an SSL hijacker SDK made by Komodia. If not then duck it.

I'd classify that as a Maximum Credible Accident (MCA) which was only possible due to greed, stupidity and idiocy.

  • Greed – Lenovo was greedy enough to deploy Superfish on its hardware, probably just for a few bugs revenue more per machine.
  • Stupidity – Superfish was stupid enough to use the Komodia SSL hijacker, just to be able to inject ads into https connections. Hopefully without knowing what they were doing, else it would had been double stupid stupidity. However, and of course they are greedy as well, because all ad sellers are.
  • Idiocy – Komodia was idiots enough to implement an SSL hijacker SDK and embed a root CA certificate in the software using it and super idiocy chose "komodia" as all private keys' password, making the certificate available to anyone and grandpa.

Extracting the certificate was fairly easy, see here for Superfish and here for other software developed with the SDK. The hit list is lead by parental control softwares.

Now, as if that wasn't enough, according to Forbes the loser behind founder of Komodia was once a programmer in Israel’s IDF’s Intelligence Core. Really? I'm not impressed.

Or wait, here's room for conspiracy theories! Let Superfish be a venture capital startup, financed by Israelis, which maybe is not that far fetched. What if the whole concept just serves the idea to spread an SSL hijacker to be able to intercept HTTPS connections and inject man-in-the-middle attacks? Sounds like a good plan? Yeah, well done, goal achieved, it couldn't be better ;-)

Lenovo shut down the servers that enable Superfish to function and provides a removal tool and instructions for the software and certificates. The list of affected models is quite extensive:

Superfish may have appeared on these models:
G Series: G410, G510, G710, G40-70, G50-70, G40-30, G50-30, G40-45, G50-45
U Series: U330P, U430P, U330Touch, U430Touch, U530Touch 
Y Series: Y430P, Y40-70, Y50-70
Z Series: Z40-75, Z50-75, Z40-70, Z50-70
S Series: S310, S410, S40-70, S415, S415Touch, S20-30, S20-30Touch
Flex Series: Flex2 14D, Flex2 15D, Flex2 14, Flex2 15, Flex2 14(BTM), Flex2 15(BTM), Flex 10
MIIX Series: MIIX2-8, MIIX2-10, MIIX2-11
YOGA Series: YOGA2Pro-13, YOGA2-13, YOGA2-11BTM, YOGA2-11HSW
E Series: E10-30
Hopefully this incident will teach Lenovo a lesson to not fiddle around with the customer too much..

An App they would like you to use

Another wet dream of the secret service and advertising department:
mobile application software that identifies a user's behavior and location in order to suggest events and locations of interest and keeps track of events and locations a user has attended or visited; mobile application software that allows a user to notify other users when arriving at an event or location, share photos with other users, and exchange messages with other users
I won't name it nor link to it.

Hallo NSA?! Ich nutze Tor und Tails und Cryptozeugs!

Ich bin Extremist!

Eigen TOR

XKeyscore-Quellcode: Tor-Nutzer werden von der NSA als Extremisten markiert und überwacht

Dabei sollte ich das besser gar nicht benutzen, denn alleine dadurch mache ich mich schon zum Freiwild. Eigen-Tor: Gefahren der Tor-Nutzung im Alltag

William Binney heute in der Anhörung im NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss: Die Vollüberwachung der Gesellschaft ist die größte Bedrohung der Demokratie seit dem amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg.

Ups, da hab ich doch glatt auf netzpolitik.org verlinkt, jetzt bin ich Doppel-Extremist.

Eigentlich ja Dreifach-Extremist, denn Mails verschlüssel ich schon seit Jahren (falls denn jemand mitmacht) mit GnuPG.

Damit ein für alle Mal klar ist was ich von euch NSA-Arschgeigen & Co halte: Und Du, NSA, brauchst da nichts weiter zu speichern und analysieren.

Yours sincerely,
The Tororist