US Congress Still Doesn’t Understand the Internet, Reddit Responds to Lamar Smith Over SOPA

Recently, US Representative Lamar Smith (accidentally?) issued a challenge to the social-media news aggregator site Reddit by calling them a vocal minority who didn’t understand the law as written and therefore their fears were unfounded. Smith then challenged the community to point out the areas they felt SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) threatened the integrity of the Internet.
"It’s a vocal minority,” he said. "Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded."
To put this in Internet meme terms, Reddit took this to heart: Challenge Accepted.



Anyone ready to dismiss the power behind Reddit and its role as an organ of mainstream Internet reaction might want to look at how GoDaddy did when Reddit became a leverage-point for pressure against the domain-name registrar to drop their support for SOPA.
It is broadly argued by opponents of bills such as SOPA and PROTECT-IP that while they’re philosophically designed to counteract copyright infringement and piracy but pragmatically they burn down the forest to kill the wolf. Under these bills set before Congress corporations who hold copyrights will be given unprecedented powers that would allow them to censor any target without due process (as cited my many opponents of the bills) already this is a problem for the DMCA in its “automatic takedown” provisions but will only be expanded to ridiculous extremes by SOPA and remove what works out of the DMCA (although it should be pointed out that the DMCA is still demonstrably broken in a way SOPA breaks worse.)
Needless to say, the deck has been stacked against opponents of this bill and even Google has found themselves at the table speaking out against it. While one might think it would be hard to marginalize a corporation like Google, the US Congress managed to do just that with ridicule and dismissal.
It seems unlikely the Lamar Smith will look at the artifacts of Reddit’s reaction to his challenge, but the research and replies developed from within their ranks will further fan the flames and better educate people as to what portions are in fact poorly designed.
On another note, language from corporations who do not support “the current version” of SOPA should really just drop it. The public at large understands that there’s a strong reason for copyright holders to desire powers that enable them to protect their copyrights; but when they ignore the unequal treatment of different holders and providers in these contexts (to their own obvious detriment) and are unable to explain away the philosophical bankruptcy of bills like SOPA it damages their credibility.
The politics of this bill are ever shifting, and everyone should be aware of who supports it in the gaming industry—for example here’s some MMO publishers who belong to the Entertainment Software Association (SOPA supporter) but who have been looked through recently to see who supports the party line of the association.

Way to go TRION Worlds who was recently discovered to not support SOPA (so spake they in a forum post) and said they’d take it up with the ESA. Hopefully more will follow suit.

Kingdoms of Grace

If you are into total Internet cheese, then you’ll be with me on this one. I found this awesome little animated, live-action, comic-book Internet miniseries: Kingdoms of Grace.

It’s totally cheese, do not get me wrong on this, in fact you’ll know it really quickly once you watch the first episode—but, it’s also become my dirty little secret. Apparently I really like cheese when it’s presented in Internet miniseries form.

My heart was stolen by the amazingly effective animation methodology but really what brought the smirk that makes me a viewer happened to be right at the live action sequence. I had to pick myself up off the floor after laughing; then I had to rewind a little so that I could re-watch what I missed.

I found this wonderful work via ALT: Rock Culture and Lifestyle Magazine.

You should really check it out, come back and let me know if you agree. Good cheese?

Link to Kingdoms of Grace.

Preserving the Narratives of Virtual Worlds

With the advent of the MMORPG came an entirely new magical method to interact with a world—and far more transient an effect as well. Unlike books, newspapers, and other physical world affect the MMORPG and all of its different progeny exist with an ethereal substance that is more difficult to capture.

An article posted by the BBC right now goes over some of the interesting facts of history and virtual worlds, Writing the History of Virtual Worlds.

To ensure that the big and small events in these fledgling worlds are not forgotten, erased or overlooked, the University of Texas, Austin has kicked off a project to study the best way to preserve their history.

"It's a huge challenge for archivists to deal with digital information," said project co-ordinator Professor Megan Winget from the School of Information at the university.

Prof Winget's interest in preserving massively multi-player games grew from her involvement in digital artworks that do not hang on a wall but invite interaction, and change as a result.

"One of the most interesting problems for digital preservation is interactivity and how difficult that is to preserve," she said.

"Video games offer all of the same problems as digital art," she said. "They are interactive, very complex and a lot of people get involved in making them happen."

Digital media, history, and keeping such documents intact are interesting problems for archivists. Archives in this day and age are not looked upon kindly by states and other organizations—they are relegated to the diminishing budgets of universities and private collections. Unlike physical repositories of papers, virtual/computerized repositories suffer terrible attrition when their money dries up—a physical repository of papers may be in a warehouse that gets shut up for a few years, disused, but generally intact when the proprietors come back (some elements of famous repositories have survived to this day because the workers took boxes home when they were closed.) This is not true with data centers, which, unlike warehouses, are at an absolute premium. Once they are shut down the data is obliterated, not simply set aside. Although valiant archivists could save data for future generations by taking it home also…this isn’t a common miracle for this field.

Virtual words are becoming an interesting insertion into the lives of the 21^st century. To the extent that entire recombination of the narrative occur in them, changing the very trademarks and internal structures of the stories that drive them. Much like any book or movie or TV series.

So the problem of recording and saving these events for posterity falls to the digital archivists; the strange heroes of virtual history who have taken up that mantle.

SQL Injection Worms of War

There is a worm on the loose. A SQL injection worm. A vicious little mealy mouthed slobbering parasite that opportunistically infects certain exploits in web software. And it hit one of my projects and this makes me a very unhappy. It is that today I spent a lot of time prowling the database with a flamethrower and machete doing in every malicious byte of its gruesome progeny.

For those who haven’t met this particularly pernicious bug, a word of caution: it will ruin thy day.

If thou happen to run an Apache server, I suggest heading on over to 0x000000.com and taking a look at the .htaccess suggestions there. I certainly took a few more to add to my defense script and it has done well to prevent the furtherance of this nuisance.

In particular this line will stop this beast in its tracks:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}    ^.*(;|<|>|'|"|\)|%0A|%0D|%22|%27|%3C|%3E|%00).*(/\*|union|select|insert|cast|set|declare|drop|update|md5|benchmark).* [NC,OR]

The malicious worm (which was insanely active on August 9^th, 2008) depends on a SQL DECLARE, SET, and CAST statement all of which occur after some URL encoding and other tricks, which this line does an excellent job of ferreting out.

Onwards to battle. Onwards to a cleaner web experience.

Link