A New Firefox (and Chrome) Add On That I Highly Recommend…

It's called MAFIAA Fire (note: it is listed as Experimental on Mozilla.org.)

MAFIAA stands for the Music and Film Industry Association of America, and it redirects from sites that have been seized under conditions of dubious legality by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

I probably never would never have heard of it, except for the fact that the Department of Homeland Security demanded that Mozilla.org pull the plug in:

The Department of Homeland Security has requested that Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, remove an add-on that allows web surfers to access websites whose domain names were seized by the government for copyright infringement, Mozilla’s lawyer said Thursday.

But Mozilla did not remove the MafiaaFire add-on, and instead has demanded the government explain why it should. Two weeks have passed, and the government has not responded to Mozilla’s questions, including whether the government considers the add-on unlawful and whether Mozilla is “legally obligated” to remove it. The DHS has also not provided the organization with a court order requiring its removal, the lawyer said.

“One of the fundamental issues here is under what conditions do intermediaries accede to government requests that have a censorship effect and which may threaten the open internet,” Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s lawyer, wrote Thursday on his blog.

The net result of this is that the total number of downloads has gone from 6433 when Wired wrote the article to 38,560 as I am writing this.

As JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS observes, this is a classic example of the Streisand effect.

I'm adding this to my Firefox Extension links (below blogroll on right hand column).

I don't really have a need to install it, I've yet to run into one of the redirected sites, but it's worth whatever small amount of attention that I can give them.

I've listed their developers' reasons for this software after the break:

Why?

Well, in one word: fairness – and balance of power.

A little while back the scumbag anti-piracy organizations like the RIAA and MPAA (Also known as the Music and Film Industry Association of America – (jokeingly known as the) MAFIAA)  ran to the American government whining like they usually do and got ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) involved with taking down websites – local AND foreign websites, completely overriding the laws and rights of non US / foreign citizens who owned these sites.

These anti-piracy (MAFIAA) companies submitted a wish list of sites that they did not like and ICE (like good lapdogs) started to seize those domains.
(At this point I would like to mention (in fairness) that we are in no way affiliated with the below sites)
Some of the seized domains were perfectly legal, like TorrentFinder.com which only had links to other sites and RojaDirecta.com which was declared to be a legal site in Spain – twice!





"Not all bad men wear masks" Looking at court documents it becomes obvious that ICE does not do any diligent footwork but takes the music and film industries word as the gospel truth, or are downright sloppy at best.
The best example of how sloppy and mad with power ICE is can be is found in how they took down 84,000 sites for 3 days  in a “mistake”.  These innocent sites were run by small businesses, mom and pop garage startups etc and for 3 days had a big official splash page displayed to all visitors that it had been taken down due to child porn.

It’s hard to bounce back from something like that and it’s a safe bet to assume a lot of businesses / people went belly up because of being wrongly accused of peddling child porn (something the music industry loves, by the way).
To make matters worse there is currently a law being drafted (called COICO) that will make such types of domain name seizures easier.

Enough is enough.

There is a time to bitch and moan and there is a time to take action - the time to be taking action has been long overdue.

Governments around the world are either censoring for the entertainment companie's never ending woes or using that as an excuse to slowly get more control over the internet for their own agendas - and trampling over our rights in the process.

Before it was "think of the children", then came "the terrorists win" and now its "piracy". While there were few genuine exceptions it's mostly bogeymen, unicorns and leprechauns or the music industries 75 trillion US dollars in losses due to one companies p2p software.

Our right to privacy should outweigh any outdated business model, unfortunately average Joe cannot afford a $10,000 plate dinner to speak to his representatives so his voice is drowned out by the vultures who can pay and get a politician's ear for "business".

F-22 Fleet Grounded

There is a problem with the onboard oxygen generation system, which might have contributed to a crash in November.

Considering that the aircraft is designed to spends a lot of its time at or above 20,000 meters, and the pilots do not wear a pressure suit, this is a non-trivial issue.

People With Way Too Much Free Time…

Perusing what Uncle Ted called "a series of tubes," I came across Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction:

Lee
What’s the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply?

Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.

McNeil
This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion. The Romans would do this in the eastern empire every once in a while. A city would become a hotbed of rebellion, threatening to pull other cities into the action. The Romans would wipe out that one city, no matter how wealthy (Palmyra comes to mind) to put any other potential rebels on notice. Kind of like a mastectomy. You lose one productive part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.

…………

Lee and Mcneil, along with Perich, Fenzel and Stokes (read the whole thing provide an interesting dialogue on economics and governance that is (I think) unintentionally a rather trenchant analysis of the current American imperial hubris.

Just read it.

Vermont Passes Conference Committee Version of Single Payer

So it now goes to the governor, who has promised to sign the bill.

My take on this is very straightforward: It won't get the waivers needed to be implemented, because employers in the region would leave skid marks to open up offices in Vermont if it did, which would have a cascading "race to the top" which would render much of the US health insurance irrelevant, and Barack Obama aggressively lobbied to prevent such an option for the states for his healthcare bill.

I'm not sure whether it is philosophy (Obama honestly believes that the solution has to be private because of his philosophy), or if it is expediency (Obama needs to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign, and the FIRE sector is the source of much of that money), but the effect is the same:  He will not allow this plan to proceed to fruition.

Still Not Enough

The monthly jobs report is out, and 244,000 non-farm payroll jobs were added last month, which is better than recent history, but still means that we would be over 8½ years away from the already anemic job market that existed in 2008. (8 million jobs lost, natural growth of the labor force is about q75K, so we have about 70k in job "claw back" this month.

Conversely, the unemployment rate actually rose to 9.0%, but this was not because of more entering the workforce, but fewer jobs reported in that study:

Some readers have asked whether the unemployment rate can rise even as employment is growing because more people start looking for work — and thus count as officially unemployed. Theoretically, the answer is yes. This does happen sometimes. But it didn’t happen in April. The unemployment rate rose last month because the household survey showed a decline of 190,000 jobs, not because of a surge in job seekers. That’s why there is no way to reconcile last month’s results of the household survey and employer survey. They make sense only in the context of previous months.

So, your mileage may vary on all of this.

Today's results are either better than expected but still crappy, or somewhat worse than that.

Jon Stewart Convinced Me………

Release the f%$#ing photos

All the arguments about the bin Laden death photo are a part of the bigger picture, which is that essentially nothing resembling accurate and impartial photojournalism is ever allowed in our "war on terror", and this is intentional.

A more accurate picture of the forever war we are involved in would inevitably result in a substantial erosion in the support for it, which would mean that Blackwater Xe would not be able to support John Ashcroft in the manner to which he is accustomed.

Great Googly Moogly!

Click for full size

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H/t Wall Street Pit for the graph Pr0n

It's jobless Thursday, and the numbers are brutal.

It's back in the 450-485K sweet spot that it hung about for most of last year.

They expected it to fall by about 30K to around 400K, but it rose by 43,000 to 473,000, and the less volatile 4-week moving average rose by 22,250 to 431,250.

Continuing claims rose by 74,000 to 3.73 million, though emergency and extended claims fell by 42,900 to 4.12 million, though in the case of the latter, I do not know how much of this is just the "99ers" exhausting their benefits.

Obama should be running around like his hair is on fire over this report, but he should have been doing that over much of the past year with real unemployment (U-6) staying well over 15%, but because the Banksters are back to paying themselves big bonuses, no one in DC seems to give a damn.

Much more of this, and Sarah Palin will be sworn in as president the day that I make aliyah to Israel.