Let it be so with drones.

About a decade ago, I wrote about Smuggling USB Sticks. You can load an incredible amount of data onto flash memory and carry it just about anywhere.

Nowadays, drones mean that people don't need to physically carry drives themselves. And drones can carry a lot more than data.

Drones deliver abortion pills to women in Poland

Drones have been used to deliver abortion drugs to women in Poland in a protest against Poland's pregnancy termination laws. CNet

The same is also happening in South Korea, where propaganda is delivered to the North via drone.

The drones don't have to physically drop goods. Consider how a swarm like this could be used to broadcast a message:

There is a vast commercial opportunity for cross border trade using drones. That's all legitimate traffic. But with swarms of drones cluttering the skies, how easy will it be to spot a couple of rogue ones flying in formation?

Drones can be used for 3D mapping - quickly capturing a scene and then scurrying off:

Skydio

@SkydioHQ

This is not a #drone video.
This is not animated #virtualreality.
This is a #3D model captured autonomously by #Skydio 2.

This is sneak peak #4 of Skydio's upcoming software product: Skydio 3D Scan™. More details in this blog post from Marc Flamm: skydio.com/blog/3d-scan-s… pic.x.com/acyffgmjvw

---

Skydio

@SkydioHQ

Replying to @SkydioHQIf you liked this, you'll LOVE #Skydio 3D Scan™ Sneak Peak #3. Make sure to check out the blog linked in each video we post for all the juicy details. 🚀 skydio.com/blog/3d-scan-h… pic.x.com/qh5u9vvgx5

---

The law is clear about drone flights - and how responsible owners should behave. But with the cost of drones plummeting, and their ability to carry heavy payloads over longer distances increasing, we should expect a surge in "interesting" uses.

The woman was wearing a military uniform - a proper one, not a sexy Hallowe'en costume - and was asking a fairly sensible question of me. But something didn't sit right.

Usually, these accounts have stolen photos and random names. But the name of the account matched the name on the uniform! A bit more digging showed there was a Verified account for the real user - so I reported the fake account for impersonation.

A few months later(!), and Twitter told me they'd removed the fraudulent account.

This got me thinking. How many fake accounts do I follow? How many have been retweeted into my timeline? How many have I interacted with? Surely, by the law of averages, I must have been fooled at least once. Right?

What if Twitter (and Facebook, and MySpace, and TikTok, and Club Penguin) told users that an account they were following has been removed?

Would you like to know that the "celebrity" you were following was actually an unauthorised fan account? How about that the insightful political analyst was really a paid-for propaganda bot?

The idea has some downsides.

There will be False Positives. An entirely innocent account which is removed despite doing nothing wrong. What are the libel laws if Twitter tells you @RealPoliticalAlanayst was deleted for being a bot - when they're not?

Does it diminish your faith in the platform if, once per week, you find out that accounts like @SuperKittensAway were paid to retweet Anti-Vax nonsense into your timeline?

You normally don't notice that you're no longer following a specific account. Does it have a chilling effect on you if people you thought you trusted are suddenly removed?

Is it overwhelming if you regularly get a notification which says "You recently liked a Tweet from @IdrisElbaIsSoFit - we have determined that account was paid for by the People's Front of Judea to promote anti-Roman sentiment"?

What if a user just deletes their account of their own free will. Should you be told?

There are tools which will monitor who you follow - so you can see if a user has been removed. But not the reason why.

With all that said, I think it would be useful if social media told you if accounts you interact with are removed. Whether it is for racism, trolling, propaganda, or malicious intent. Yes, it may reduce your willingness to engage with similar accounts - but that's probably a good thing.

Think I'm wrong? There's a comment box just down there where you can vent your ire.

Four years ago, I made a modest proposal for a new HTTP Code to indicate censorship.

A few days ago, RFC 7725: An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles became an approved standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

This allows a website, proxy, or ISP to explain to the user that the resource the user requested is unavailable for legal reasons.

This could be:

• Content which isn't permitted in a specific country. For example, eBay could serve a 451 code to a user in Germany who tries to access Nazi memorabilia.
• An ISP in the UK can let the user know that the High Court has banned access to a site - as opposed to displaying a generic error message.
• A proxy server could warn the user that the content requested is illegal and, optionally, suggest alternative means of access.
• A DNS server could redirect via a 451 code to warn the user that what they're doing is illegal and that they should cease such activity.

This is a purely optional code and, of course, there may be legal measures which prevent an block being publicised. That said, I hope that it will gain use and help highlight just how much access to information is being restricted

The vast bulk of the work was conducted by Tim Bray - who is a formidably persuasive writer with a seeming mastery of all things technical. I know that the OpenRightsGroup helped lobby for this proposal via their 451 Unavailable campaign. My contribution was limited to a few emails and the initial suggestion. I'm also grateful to everyone who blogged and commented about the proposal as it made its way through the standards body.

Tucked away at the bottom of the final RFC is this:

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Terence Eden, who observed that the existing status code
403 was not really suitable for this situation, and suggested the
creation of a new status code.

Thanks also to Ray Bradbury.

RFC7725

So I shall bathe in reflected glory, and step up my efforts to get ISPs to adopt this new code.

I've talked before about my time working as an "Adult Material Classifier" for Vodafone UK. In short, my team and I used to watch pornographic videos and classify whether they were suitable for inclusion on Vodafone live.

There were the usual limitations (no more than two participants, all over 18 etc) we also had a list of banned words.

It contained the usual sexual and racial slang which was verboten - as well as strawberry and teabag.

I had obviously lead a very sheltered life. I had no idea that "to teabag" was a thing. Nor that one could "procure a strawberry" to defile. But, you can, and people do.

I can understand that David Cameron wants people not to be able to search for "obvious" search terms - but how do you block ambiguous terms? It's not hard to imagine to sort of depraved search query which would produce this image: As people see what is being filtered, it's fairly easy to switch to a slang which has no "official" meaning. In China, the Government regularly censor discussion about the massacre at Tienanmen Square. Forbidden from mentioning the date of June 4th, locals instead refer to May 35th.

So, how does any search engine filter out "innocent" terms which may lead to "illegal" images?

I'll leave you with a quote from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in the Global Times (emphasis added):

Web regulation in public's best interest

Many countries are trying to regulate their Internet services. Under pressure from public opinion, many well-known websites are becoming more self-disciplined. For example, Facebook has started to provide training for its website regulators to help identify and delete inappropriate remarks. In Turkey, where chaos and turmoil are running rampant, the Turkish government criticized social media as the top threat. Similar denouncements have also been heard from the British Parliament.

What exalted company our wise and infallible government are keeping.

While downloading the blueprints may not be illegal, any UK citizen who made and owned such a handgun could face arrest, according to the UK's Metropolitan Police.

BBC News

It may not the best weapon in the world - it has reliability and accuracy issues - and it may not be the cheapest - around £5,000 for a 3D printer to fabricate the thing. But it's certainly the most portable.

The total file size for the 3D models to build the weapon? 1,084,069 Bytes. Small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

Most of us send emails with larger attachments every day. Never mind that this gun evades metal detectors - spotting these scant few bytes in the gigabit flow of everyday life is nearly impossible.

There has been an attempt to pull the plans from the Internet. That can't work. Ever.

The way modern file distribution is done is decentralised. As long as you know the hash (the unique code calculated from the file's contents) you can download a file from a Peer-to-Peer network.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:
6C4089AC6C134F1B2DFF18499658B228D9EB2657

That's short enough to memorise, turn into a song, print on a t-shirt, tattoo onto your flesh, or simply send in an SMS.

You can even split the hash up and represent it as a flag of many colours.

My neighbour has an HP LaserJet with an open WiFi connection. I can print anything I want through it. There's a limit to the amount of malicious damage one could do with paper and ink. But what happens when HP release a consumer grade 3D printer with their typically poor security defaults?

Anyone with a phone could walk down the street, upload to those printers a short alphanumeric string, and all of a sudden every house has an (unwanted) AK-47.

We can't wipe this knowledge off the Internet. We can't force every 3D printer to recognise every potentially malicious shape - nor convince it only to print from an "approved" list. We can't stop people of lax moral character from acquiring and using guns.

Do we accept a world where it is trivial to access powerful weaponry? Do we engineer a change in attitudes so that gun ownership is undesirable? Or do we use ham-fisted legislation to try to censor knowledge in a futile attempt to be seen to be "doing something"?

I think I know which one our rulers will choose - but is there a better solution?

This year, Claire Perry MP produced an "independent" report into online child protection. By "independent" I mean "produced by vested interests including religious groups".

It makes for pretty tedious reading, however you may get a laugh from the antics of our MPs on page 86 when they start discussing Internet filters...

Helen Goodman: I’m sorry, maybe I’m particularly stupid, but I haven’t understood how I get this software or this kit or whatever it is, this filter thingy that you click or whatever without buying a new computer and I don’t want to spend a thousand pounds just to have a filter. I just haven’t understood what I do, and you’ve been talking to us and I’ve been in this room for half an hour.

Matt Lambert: You can download any number of parental control software for free...

Helen Goodman: But I don’t know how to download parental controls. I can send an email, I can click onto Windows but the minute you talk about downloading software, my brain goes bzzzz.

Matt Lambert: Ok, I’m sorry I’m using a technical term, but if you go to search and you ask for parental controls, you will find, whichever search engine you’re using, you’ll find any number of free options including ours.

Jonny Shipp: If you talk to your Service Provider, they’ll help you, I think, mostly.

Helen Goodman: How do you talk to them?

Jonny Shipp: The service provider that provides your internet connection at home.

Helen Goodman: You mean you phone them up?

Jonny Shipp: Yes, or however you’d normally talk to them.

Helen Goodman: I don’t normally talk to them very often.

Fiona Mactaggart: The point that Helen is rather effectively illustrating is the point that, this is the point I was trying to make about being stupid, about the fact that for this best to work, particularly when children are more technically aware than their parents, they know how to get around better than mum and dad, that actually there has to be something which is really simple and which kind of delivers itself to your door...

The "particularly stupid" Helen Goodman speaks for the Labour party on matters of Culture, Media, and Sport. Which, in our twisted democracy, also means "The Internet".

I'm not saying that someone with such responsibility needs to be able to compile their own software, or rebuild a PC. But it would be nice if they understood how to install software.

On an entirely unrelated note, please join the Open Rights Group today. They're doing great work trying to stop Parliament from destroying the Internet.

More people are being prosecuted for free speech on social media, copyright trolls are lurking and website blocking injunctions need tackling: ORG is ready to bring the fight for digital rights to the courts.

Every supporter donating at least £5 per month by direct debit receives a free copy of Rapture of the Nerds co-authored by Cory Doctorow, a member of our Advisory Council and Charles Stross, one of ORG's founding members.

ORG needs to fund a new position: a legal expert who can co-ordinate a crack-team of volunteer lawyers, perform thorough legal research, and create new case law to actively prevent potential threats to civil liberties.

Please help ORG achieve it goal:

150 new supporters will allow ORG to start our legal project.

300 new supporters will allow ORG to pay a Legal Officer full time.

Please set up a Direct Debit today.

ORG supporters usually give between £5 and £10 each month, but please be as generous as you can afford to be.

Further discussion on HackerNews.

"This Is Not A Film" by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is under house arrest in his country for alleged “propaganda against the regime,” will be screened under the Free Jafar Panahi Program of the 13th Cinemanila. The film was smuggled from Iran in a Flash-Drive hidden inside a cake to Cannes for screening a few months back.

Manila Bulletin

This is a microSD card. Currently on sale in the UK for under £14. It can hold 32GB of information. That's a little abstract, so let me break it down in to more understandable units.

32GB is, roughly,

• 30,000 minutes of music.
• That's 21 days worth of listening. Or, if you prefer, 700 CDs.
• 40 standard definition movies.
• 20 high definition movies.
• 35,000 novels.
• Those books would take up over a kilometre of shelving.

What I'm trying to get at, is this. It's quicker to send a 32GB card through the post than it is to download its entire contents. The cards are small enough to hide anywhere.

This is what happens is countries like Cuba.

Only about 2% of Cubans can get online, but it doesn't matter. You don’t need the internet. The news may be a little stale by the time you read it, but it gets around. Whole stacks of HTML files from news websites are dumped onto USB drives.

James Scudamore in Intelligent Life

I don't know what will happen to the Internet. SOPA, DEA, and HADOPI all conspire to break the way we share knowledge - under the benign guise of copyright protection.

And yet all it takes is a dozen USB sticks, a few memory cards, and very little effort to break their embargo.

Ever since Gutenberg started the information revolution, vested interests have tried to burn books. We're just going to have to create more and more books until their efforts are overwhelmed.

Further discussion on HackerNews.

If you're in the UK, please consider joining the Open Rights Group today. They're doing great work trying to stop Parliament from destroying the Internet.

More people are being prosecuted for free speech on social media, copyright trolls are lurking and website blocking injunctions need tackling: ORG is ready to bring the fight for digital rights to the courts.

Every supporter donating at least £5 per month by direct debit receives a free copy of Rapture of the Nerds co-authored by Cory Doctorow, a member of our Advisory Council and Charles Stross, one of ORG's founding members.

ORG needs to fund a new position: a legal expert who can co-ordinate a crack-team of volunteer lawyers, perform thorough legal research, and create new case law to actively prevent potential threats to civil liberties.

Please help ORG achieve it goal:

150 new supporters will allow ORG to start our legal project.

300 new supporters will allow ORG to pay a Legal Officer full time.

Please set up a Direct Debit today.

ORG supporters usually give between £5 and £10 each month, but please be as generous as you can afford to be.

NB - the affiliate style links are for ORG's member-get-member program. If you'd prefer to join without giving me as the referrer, please use http://www.openrightsgroup.org/join/.

I don't have the money to lobby bribe donate to the Conservative party. I'm too scared of the police attempting to kill protesters to go and stand up for my beliefs. What can I do that will make me feel smug and self-righteous yet won't involve me having to go outside in the snow?

It is, I understand, illegal to blockade Parliament. But there's nothing to stop us enforcing a virtual blockade, is there?

I tweeted as much on Twitter, and got the following reply.

How

So, here's how to blockade Parliament. This guide assumes you have moderate technical ability and know what an .htaccess file is. If you are unsure, please ask a geek to help you. They will, invariably, accept payment in beer, pizza or sexual favours.

The Houses of Parliament have the following IP address range.

194.60.0.0/18

That translates to every IP address from 194.60.0.0 to 194.60.63.255 . (See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Range_blocks for details.)

In your .htaccess file, add the following

order allow,deny
deny from 194.60.
allow from all

That will simply block access from the Houses of Parliament. It will also catch a few other IP addresses in the same range - but that's acceptable collateral damage.

If you want to be a bit more creative, you can redirect the users to any URL you want.

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^194.60.
RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.example.com/index.htm

All we need now is for every website - from the humblest blog to the mightiest newspaper - to block Parliament from their websites and redirect them somewhere more enlightening.

Where Should I Redirect Them To?

My good friend Tom Scott has penned this rather eloquent piece for the Guardian explaining why filtering cannot work. I would refrain from pointing at shock-sites. You'll only give MPs something else to consider banning.

Hang On! There Are Massive Flaws In This Plan!

Yes, yes there are.

Politicians may need access to information which has been inadvertently blocked. For example, a gay MP might want help coming to terms with his or her sexuality - only to find the content unavailable.

Of course, politicians could use a proxy to get round these restrictions. They could use their phone's web browser. They could access from a friend's house. They could get a mate to download content onto a USB drive and hand it over in the playground.

In short, this plan is as ill-conceived as the ridiculous notion that you can ban children from access naughty images and videos.

Open Rights Group

If you care about Internet Freedom, please join the Open Rights Group.

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

The CSR's comments can be safely ignored.

Of course, this raises the question of whether big companies should treat their CSRs like mini-PR agents and give them a commensurate salary boost. I believe that front line staff have more of an impact on "brand perception" and "customer loyalty" than even the glitziest of advertising campaigns.

Secondly, the "online community" seems to have a shoot first, ask questions later philosophy.
I'm pro-open-source and I think that crowd-sourcing research is a highly efficient and effective way to investigate stories. But one needs to substantiate first. Imagine if there really was a completely innocuous explanation (say someone hit the wrong button on the wrong box or Amazon were hit by hackers) all of a sudden the tide is out and we can see exactly who is swimming naked.

Thirdly, the immediacy of cyberspace does not map well to meatspace.
A scant few hours after the storm erupted, a blogger was asking

Is there any reason why The [Liberal Democrat] Party is still supporting and promoting them via the affiliate scheme? All the ethical people are disabling theirs.

Well... Possibly because they are part of the evil conspiracy, possibly because they wanted to see if it was true, and possibly because the person who makes those decisions was enjoying a weekend away from work. Her superiors were also probably eking what pleasure they could from the British springtime.

We don't all spend every waking moment plugged into the hyperzeitgeist that is twitter. Right now, ring your mum or ask your boss's boss what they think of #AmazonFail. I bet it won't even have crossed their radar.

The same is also true of Amazon. They've put out a press release on Tuesday - the first working day after the break.

The lesson here for big companies is that your customers are never on holiday. They expect your stores & call centres to be open at the customers' convenience, not the company's.

When I was Production Manager on Vodafone live! we would always ensure that someone responsible was on call to fix the site or answer questions on why a policy decision had been made. If we didn't know the answers, we were allowed to phone someone who did - even if it meant waking them up in the middle of the night.

Of course, this means paying overtime, TOIL or a decent wage. Something Amazon doesn't see the value in.

Finally
I honestly don't think any side in this mini-culture skirmish emerges with much glory.

Amazon need to keeps their CSRs better informed and need to make sure that someone with authority is allowed to engage with their customer base even during the holidays.

Bloggers, twitterers, facebookers should keep fighting the good fight. They also need to keep in mind Hanlon's Razor and, remember, it's ok to take a deep breath & wait more than 24 hours for an answer before breaking out the placards.

Postscript
Of course, if it turns out that Amazon have as a matter of policy deranking these books, I utterly condemn them. However, I'm sure the lost sales from bestselling authors will do more to change their minds than a boycott.

But don't blame Andy! It's not his fault. Allow me to explain...

Here's some pornography for you...

Phwoar! Look at the tits on that!

Here's some child porn.

Sickening. How could Leonardo Da Vinci bear to paint such monstrosities?

My local school is putting on a play full of under-age, pre-marital sex. With foul language, wanton violence, drug abuse and teenage suicide.

My public library has books on how to make bombs!

Won't someone think of the children and "rate" this sick filth!?

When we look at libraries, art galleries and the theatre, there is very little appetite for censorship. Why?

It's because such things are old and familiar to us. We understand them intimately. We grew up with them. They're part of our everyday experiences.

The Internet - for people of Mr Burnham's generation - is not part of the fabric of his world. It's new, scary and dangerous.

I first got online in 1994. Compuserve was my gateway to the world at a blistering 14.4Kbps. I've known the net for the majority of my life - for longer than I've known most friends. The net is entwined in the very fibre of my being.

But I am nothing compared to the kids born in the late 1990s. I can remember the magic of my first homepage - whereas their parents blogged their pre-natal sonograms.
I was astounded the first time I illicitly downloaded a movie. For today's kids, it's as natural as flicking through the TV channels is for Mr Burnham.

Andy Burnham has really only ever worked in the political realm. He has never, I suspect, been exposed to the wonders of the Internet. Now that he has a staff of researchers and secretaries - I doubt he ever will. Unless the good voters of Leigh oust him in favour of someone who lives in the real world. Or at least someone who appears to know what they are talking about.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying - it's not Andy's fault that he doesn't understand what he's talking about. He was born too early to fully grasp what's going on in the world. I suspect that if he was around when mobile phones first came available, he'd ask us to rate ourselves lest children accidentally rang us.

For those interested in the history of censorship and rating in this country, I suggest the book "The Lord Chamberlain Regrets..."

The book examines the curious fact that every play performed in the UK had to be looked over and rated or rejected by the government before it was allowed to be performed.

This lasted from 1737 to 1968. That's 231 years. Imagine how competitive the UK's digital economy will be after 231 years in the wilderness.