New York State Senators want "refined First Amendment," laws to prevent trolling, flaming and excluding people from online groups

New York State Senators Jeff Klein, Diane Savino, David Carlucci and David Valesky apparently missed civics class, because they think the First Amendment grants the "privilege" of free speech, not the right, and that this "refined" view of free speech should be implemented in order to stop people from saying stupid things on the Internet.

Their report suggests that a "refined" First Amendment could be used to stop "happy slapping" (a short-lived violent craze from 2005), trolling, "flaming," and "INTENTIONALLY AND CRUELLY EXCLUDING SOMEONE FROM AN ONLINE GROUP" (the caps are theirs).

Seriously? If we don't let you into the club, it's now a form of cyberbullying? It makes you wonder what happened to these particular Senators when they were kids.

The paper also attacks "anonymity," again ignoring how anonymity can often be extremely helpful to kids who wish to discuss things and ask questions without revealing who they are.

As for where they're going with this? Well, you guessed it: they're planning to introduce new laws to deal with cyberbullying (even though NY already has such a law). The plan is to extend two existing areas of law: "stalking in the third degree" will now include cyberbullying, and "manslaughter in the second degree" will be expanded to "include the emerging problem of bullycide."

(via /.)

(Image: The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from brentdpayne's photostream) This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 5:55 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

China State TV “unpublishes” video that led to fears of cyberattack on US

China's state television network has removed from its public website a video that security researchers and military analysts say shows proof China's military has engaged in online attacks against US networks.

A mirror of the now "unpublished" CCTV video is embedded above: Link to part 1, Link to part 2.

As noted in previous Boing Boing posts, the clip was from a CCTV 7 show titled “Military Science and Technology," specifically a cyberwarfare-themed episode that aired on July 17: "The Internet Storm is Coming." A mirror archive of the series is here.

Ed Wong in the New York Times:

Western analysts this week began publicly scrutinizing a sequence that a narrator on the show says shows “many Internet attack methods.” There is then a demonstration of one method: on the screen, what appears to be a human-operated cursor chooses a target Web site address, then hits a button that says “attack.”

Using a software application on screen, the cursor chooses a target Web site under a pull-down menu for "Falun Gong Web sites in North America."  Falun Gong is a spiritual group that underwent persecution in the late 1990’s in China and is now outlawed in the country.

In the CCTV show, the cursor selects an IP address of 138.26.72.17 as a target. It is a defunct IP address at the University of Alabama. But a screenshot of the page linked to that address that was archived on the Internet in 2000, shows an informational page associated with the Falun Gong. It is unclear who set up the page.

Military analysts Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins at China SignPost say it's not clear whether the b-roll in question was a demo or an actual attack--the software is at least a decade old.

Either way, they wrote:

[It] is significant that an official Chinese state television channel showed even a symbolic representation of a cyberattack, particularly one on entities clearly located in a foreign sovereign nation.

More around the web:

• F-secure has an animated GIF of the relevant video segments, with translation and analysis.

• Items at PC World, The Diplomat, and an earlier Epoch Times article.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

New reports of China State TV broadcasting video of cyberattacks on US

WSJ: "Chinese state television has broadcast footage of what two experts on the Chinese military say appears to be a military institute demonstrating software designed to attack websites in the U.S."

Looks like old footage they're using as b-roll. I would love to see a copy of this propaganda documentary, if anyone has clips?

Earlier this week, I blogged of a similar report in the Falun Gong newspaper Epoch Times. I was inclined to treat the Epoch Times report with some skepticism, given the source, but this second report is interesting.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.