It seems the UN is interested in wresting control of the internet from the evil Americans.

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5179122.html

Thoughts?

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup

I really don't have any confidence in the UN. Allowing an organization like the UN to administer the most important communications tool the world has ever seen is a huge mistake.

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The best daily political cartoons can be found here:

http://www.csmonitor.com/commentary/index.html

the internet was designed to survive a nuclear strike. if anything can kill it, it is UN bureaucracy.

On second thought, you might have a point.

__________________


The best daily political cartoons can be found here:

http://www.csmonitor.com/commentary/index.html

United Nations Body Set up to Make Recommendations on Governing Internet
NEW YORK, November 16, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The United Nations has established a working group on Internet "governance", to prepare for a decision on the issue to be made at the World Summit on the Information Society (second phase), to be held in Tunis in November 2005...

from http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/nov/04111602.html


Dear Santa,
for Christmas this year i want nothing except that you dissolve the UN and dont allow it to come back into existence ever again.
Thank You So Much!

As if the democratic us didnt sign the un treaties they find convenient.
Democratic countries with the power of never turn down an opportunity of vetoing when their best interests are threatened.
Keep the un, without them, democracy would lose of its efficiency.

from lifesite.net:
"The UN has no respect for the sovereignty of nations regarding its dearly held ideological positions on life and family and thus will have little concern for businesses, organizations and individuals which contravene UN orthodoxy."

Wow. That is just too fucking rich.

Not that I don't disagree that specific control mechanisms forced onto the member countries are bad, but are we really certain what exactly is being discussed here? To take one example, if anyone remember the echelon- case France filed some years ago? Very little evidence exists to prove the Echelon network's existence, of course, but it raises a few interesting questions. For instance it would be - this every programmer most likely knows - very easy to intercept information from for instance a specific country, or a specific region or adress and then make sure that it would be possible to piece the information together again, specially if there are specific nodes everything must go through in order to reach it's destination. Usually, we don't really consider this a security risk, because every ip- package does not travel through the same sets of servers every time, and so it would be much easier to intercept such info actually anywhere else than on the routers. But given that there would be a possibility to place a few strategic intercepters, I would say it would be perfectly possible to pick out info like this. In the case of the French trial, it was alleged that the network had been used for industrial espionage, and of course without actually breaking into anywhere. It's stuff like this - structural and security concerns, standards and so on, that is the main course on the banquet at the UN meeting. Just so you know.

I thought Echelon was mostly radio intercepts

Well. I won't claim to have evidence of what exactly the network is used for now. The radio and communication satelite interception is what we know from some documents after the Freedom of Information act, even if it's glaringly obvious that the project was not shut down or limited to a specific set of areas. It's hopeless discussing the evidence for what it does, though. It will always be partial theories like this, for instance. Of course, the US still denies that anything like /this particular espionage system, nossir/ exists, even after other intelligence agencies have admitted it, and that would mean hundreds of conspiracy theories muddling the real issue. Because what is interesting is to look at the possibilities of such networks, and how they might be used. And after that, how they might be circumvented. I mean, the interesting parts are how much we trust information to be safe, what uses encryption has and so on. Perfectly sane and important issues that have been just that since the start of global communications. You can read about the echelon network on echelonwatch.org if you'd like a paranoia trip or something like that. But as I said, it offers no proof, even if many likes to think so, that there exists a global network which can scoop any and all information from anywhere. That kind of theories have a special name. That is no excuse for saying that there exists no possibilities for these networks whatsoever, though. Think of how fast the blaster- worm managed to spread and how long it survived, and you get the picture. The author of that virus wrote something like "oi, Bill Gates made it possible for me to do this to your system - upgrade now" in the code. Believe me, causing a protection fault which would shut down the system is not the only thing a buffer overflow can be used to do to a system (specially if it's windows).