Posted 06/29/09 at 01:00:15 AM by Quinn Norton

For years, Congressman Rick Boucher of Virginia wandered the desolate wilderness reserved for lawmakers who speak sensibly about copyright and the Internet. Well, given that criteria, the desolate wilderness was reserved for Rick Boucher. He’s been in Congress since 1983 and self-identifies as a techno-geek. Boucher is a different kind of politician—ours—loyal to a technology community few other representatives know exists. He has worked to legalize crypto export, expand rural broadband, support net neutrality, and has pushed back on copyright maximalism.

Boucher went so far as to say, “The recent extension of the copyright term by the Congress was wholly unjustified,” in a Slashdot interview in 2001. That’s right—Slashdot interview. Even Cory Doctorow described him as “the closest thing to a copyfighter in Congress.” (Boucher did vote for telecom immunity, confirming that no one is perfect.)

Continue reading after the jump!

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Posted 07/10/08 at 09:06:14 AM by Chris Moody

The folks behind the popular torrent site,The Pirate Bay have added another project to their list. They want to encrypt the Internet. Not just little pieces, but the whole thing. They have named it Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets, or IPETEE for short. The encryption would happen on the network level so most anything could be encrypted transmitted and decrypted, providing the systems have adopted the technology on both sides. It would be completely transparent to the user, unlike say IPSEC on IPv4. IPv6 may make this moot if its implementation is more polished (and we will have to leave IPv4 sometime)

Apparently the European Union’s move going to a DMCA like copyright enforcement effort is what spurred this interest from the Sweden based group.

I love anything that keeps our privacy, private. I do have to wonder if it’s going to really be practical or worth it to encrypt everything. It adds overhead to bandwidth, and increases loads on CPUs. Granted these are minimal, but on busy servers this will pile up and run up costs, which would impede adoption.

Of course it still has to be launched, and track records count. The Pirate Bay’s other unlaunched projects include: The Video Bay, music site PlayBle, and a new secure version of the P2P protocol. IPETEE is a much more ambitious and involved project than any of those. We will have to wait and see if there will be enough interest to get it going. In the mean time we can be entertained by their legal section.

What do you think of total encryption of all internet traffic? Is it worth it? Let us know in the comments section!

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