The idea that people would “inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility” was supposed to create wealth and wellbeing. Has it instead created a technologically advanced dystopia?

This week, Lockheed Martin—the largest U.S. military contractor—and several other defense contractors have reportedly experienced intrusions in their computer networks. Those intrusions may be connected to a hacking attack on RSA's SecurID security token division, disclosed back in March.

Hackers penetrating Sony's Playstation network or Google, affecting the data privacy of millions of users? Bad. Hackers penetrating the networks of the US military's largest weapons makers? Really, really, really bad.

Reuters was first tonight with the news of the intrusion at Lockheed, which the company is said to have first detected on Sunday.

They breached security systems designed to keep out intruders by creating duplicates to "SecurID" electronic keys from EMC Corp's RSA security division, said the person who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter. It was not immediately clear what kind of data, if any, was stolen by the hackers. But the networks of Lockheed and other military contractors contain sensitive data on future weapons systems as well as military technology currently used in battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Lockheed press statement, reprinted in part in the Wall Street Journal,

[T]o counter any threats, we regularly take actions to increase the security of our systems and to protect our employee, customer and program data. We have policies and procedures in place to mitigate the cyber threats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multilayered information systems security.

John Markoff and Christopher Drew in the New York Times link the Lockheed hack to the March RSA breach. While Lockheed's problems may be the first publicly known damage from that attack, other firms may also be affected.

"The issue is whether all of the security controls are compromised," said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and a specialist in computer security issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy group in Washington. "That's the assumption people are making."

Neither RSA, which is based in Bedford, Mass., nor Lockheed would discuss the problems on Friday.

Officials in the military industry, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, said Lockheed had detected an intruder trying to break into its networks last Sunday. It shut down much of its remote access and has been providing new tokens and passwords to many workers, company employees said.

Raytheon published a statement today saying it took "immediate companywide actions" when the RSA breach became known back in March. General Dynamics denied experiencing problems related to the RSA breach; Northrop Grumman and Boeing declined to comment to the Times.

Related reading:

•
SecurID Company Suffers a Breach of Data Security (NYT, March 17, 2011, John Markoff)

• Columbia University computer science professor Steve Bellovin's take on the RSA breach (March, 2011).

• And Ars Technica's counterpoint to RSA's characterization of the breach as "extremely sophisticated."

Proving the words of countless mothers across countless nations, new research shows that spending all day staring at computers and TVs actually is bad for kids, giving them heart problems later in life.

Scientists say that kids who spend many hours in front of screens have narrower arteries in the back of their eyes, and link this to future heart problems.

The study looked at almost 1,500 Australian children, and the results took into account age, sex, ethnicity, iris color, length of the eyeball, BMI, birth weight and blood pressure. The children averaged 1.9 hours of screen time every day, and 36 minutes of physical activity. Every hour of time in front of a monitor equated to a retinal artery 1.53 microns narrower, and associated with a blood pressure increase of 10 mmHg.

The measure of the micro-vessels in your retina is an indicator for cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure in adulthood.

It might not turn your eyes square, but sitting in front of a screen all day definitely isn't good for your health.

Illustration by Andrea Danti/Shutterstock

What's new for Amazon? Bandwidth, and tons of it. We've reached the point where uploading 5 or 15 or 20GB of data to a cloud service is a feasible task for most broadband-connected consumers, and that changes the nature of the argument entirely. If you're a Cloud Player customer, you get a defined 5GB or 20GB of storage, and the music that lives in that storage is your copy. Your copy that you're allowed to make. It's not "functionally equivalent" to a fair use copy anymore -- it is a fair use copy... This is going to completely fuck the labels, since they can't argue that Amazon is making unauthorized copies of songs. In order to stop Cloud Player, they're going to have to completely switch tactics and argue that it's actually the content that matters, and that Amazon doesn't have the rights to enable streaming content from their platform. But that's a ridiculous argument, since Amazon is just going to say that it's not actually doing much of anything -- it's just giving users some storage space and publishing an app that can play those files over the network. The labels will have to somehow argue that the content of the music files is protected, since they can't really touch what the users are doing to their own copies.

Although signing "localhost" is humorous, CAs create real risk when they sign other unqualified names. What if an attacker were able to receive a CA-signed certificate for names like "mail" or "webmail"? Such an attacker would be able to perfectly forge the identity of your organization's webmail server in a "man-in-the-middle" attack! Everything would look normal: your browser would use HTTPS, it would show a the lock icon that indicates HTTPS is working properly, it would show that a real CA validated the HTTPS certificate, and it would raise no security warnings. And yet, you would be giving your password and your email contents to the attacker.

To test the prevalence of the validated, unqualified names problem, I queried the Observatory database for unqualified names similar to "exchange". (Microsoft Exchange is an extremely popular email server, and servers that run it commonly have "exchange" or "exch" in their names. Likely examples include "exchange.example.net" and "exch-01.example.com".) My results show that unqualified "exchange"-like names are the most popular type of name, overall, that CAs are happy to sign.

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

It may yet be too soon to celebrate the takedown of the world's largest spam botnet. For one thing, PCs that were infected with Rustock prior to this action remain infected, only they are now somewhat lost, like sheep without a shepherd. In previous takedowns, such as those executed against the Srizbi botnet, the botmasters have been able to regain control over their herds of infected PCs using a complex algorithm built into the malware that generates a random but unique Web site domain name that the bots would be instructed to check for new instructions and software updates from its authors. Using such a system, the botmaster needs only to register one of these Web site names in order to resume sending updates to and controlling the herd of infected computers.

Stewart said that whoever is responsible for this takedown clearly has done their homework, and that the backup domains hard-coded into Rustock appear to also have been taken offline. But, he said, Rustock also appears to have a mechanism for randomly generating and seeking out new Web site names that could be registered by the botmaster to regain control over the pool of still-infected PCs. Stewart said Rustock-infected machines routinely reach out to a variety of popular Web sites, such as Wikipedia, Mozilla, Slashdot, MSN and others, and that it is possible that Rustock may be configured to use the news headlines or other topical information from these sites as the random seed for generating new command and control domains.

(Image: Spam wall, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 63056612@N00's photostream)

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

The eBook User's Bill of Rights (Thanks, LibraryGoblin, via Submitterator!)

I attended the Clarion science fiction writing workshop at Michigan State University in 1992, and we were privileged to tour the university's Cyclotron. Of course, the first thing we asked was, "How do you kill someone with one of these?" (we'd been working on plotting). The scientist's answer was very disappointing -- he insisted that it was all very safe, with too many checks and balances to be a useful murder weapon. As I recall, he suggested that you could pry loose a brick from the wall and hit someone in the head with it.

As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski's head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski's left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.

Although the skin on the part of his face and back of his head where the beam hit eventually peeled off over the next few days, Bugorski did not die as they thought he would. The beam also burned through his skull and brain tissue along with the afore mentioned skin. However, ultimately he came through it all surprisingly well.

Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before. The few negative health drawbacks he did experience were not life threatening either. He lost the hearing in his left ear and experienced a constant unpleasant noise in that ear from then on. The left half of his face slowly became paralyzed over the course of the next two years. He also gets significantly more fatigued with mental work, though he did go on to get his PhD after this incident. The remaining side effects were occasional absence seizures and later tonic-clonic seizures, though these didn't show up right away.

Forty years ago this December, President Nixon declared a war on cancer, pledging a “total national commitment” to conquering the disease. Fifty years ago this spring, President Kennedy declared a space race, promising to land a man safely on the moon before the end of the decade. And 54 years ago, Artificial Intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon declared that “there are now in the world machines that think” and predicted that a computer would be world chess champion within 10 years. How have these bold efforts fared?

#

What might "terminator" seeds, access to medicines, free software, and free culture have to do with one another? Do the global attempts to push back against more intrusive intellectual property laws have a common perspective and theory? This book addresses that question, introducing readers to the emerging politics and ideas of "a2k," and the revolutionary expansion of "intellectual property" that preceded it. The book also is a critical engagement with the ideas and possibilities of A2K, with contributions by some of the leading thinkers in the field (Benkler, Liang, Aigrain, Love, and many others).

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

Recently British physicists announced to the world that they managed to put a Luneburg Lens on a silicon chip. Here's why this odd bit of news could change the world.

Well, at least the world of data processing.

A Luneberg lens is a perfectly spherical lens. All parallel waves of light that hit the lens on one side are curved by the lens and brought to a single point at the other side. This means that whether light waves hit the lens at the uppermost tip, the lowermost point, or dead center, they will all be brought to a tight focus at the other end of the lens, as long as they are moving parallel to each other. To someone looking at the far side of the lens, the light will be emitted from a single point.

For those struggling to see the practical purpose of such a thing, Luneberg lenses are sometimes used as radar reflectors. Half of the lens is made reflective. Light shines in from a source and focused on a single spot at the reflective side of the lens. The reflective side pitches the light back through the lens and out to the light's origin.

Think of the way a red reflector on the back of a bike shines in a car's headlights. The same principle applies to radar, which is useful if you're a little boat in a big ocean and you don't want to get mown down by any of the big boats out there.

Since silicon chips don't engage is maritime activities, what good is it to put a Luneberg lens on one of them? Optics are already used in computing to reduce noise and process data. Precise focus will help expand that technology.

Or they'll just be used to signal ships of tiny, tiny boats.

Via Physics World and WN.com. Original scientific paper [PDF] at arxiv.

Image credit: Ulf Leonhardt

How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.

Longreads and Brain Pickings have teamed up to highlight the most fascinating in-depth stories published on the web this year. Earlier, we featured the best of Business and Art, Design, Film & Music. Our final spotlight shines on Science, Medicine & Technology.

FOR THE LOVE OF CULTURE

Google, Copyright and Our Future (Lawrence Lessig, The New Republic, Jan. 26, 2010)

Time to read: 26 minutes (6,454 words)

In the wake of the Google Books project—and the subsequent settlement with publishers — Lessig calls for a new approach that untangles copyright law and helps keep information accessible to all.

What are the rules that will govern culture for the next hundred years? Are we building an ecology of access that demands a lawyer at every turn of the page?”

For more on this complex and controversial subject, see our continuous coverage of remix culture.

SEARCH FOR A STRESS VACCINE

Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine (Jonah Lehrer, Wired, July 28, 2010)

Time to read: 23 minutes (5,700 words)

Lehrer profiles Robert Sapolsky, a scientist researching ways to create a vaccine-like treatment to protect people against stress. (In early research he’s injected a modified herpes virus into rodents’ brains.)

Sometimes it’s not enough just to tell people, ‘Jeez, you should really learn to relax.’ If stress is half as bad for you as we currently think it is, then it’s time to stop treating the side effects. It’s time to go after stress itself.”

NEW DRUGS AND CLINICAL TRIALS

New Drugs Stir Debate on Rules of Clinical Trials (Amy Harmon, New York Times, Sept. 19, 2010)

Time to read: 17 minutes (4,173 words)

A heartbreaking story from Harmon’s “Target Cancer” series about two cousins with skin cancer enrolled in the same clinical trial — but only one of them received the powerful new drug.

At times beseeching and belligerent, Mr. McLaughlin argued his cousin’s case to get the new drug with anyone he could find at U.C.L.A. ‘Hey, put him on it, he needs it,’ he pleaded. And then: ‘Who the hell is making these decisions?’”

THE STATUS QUO OF ELECTRIC CARS

The Status Quo of Electric Cars: Better Batteries, Same Range (Gail E. Tverberg, The Oil Drum, May 19, 2010)

Time to read: 16 minutes (3,940 words)

The Chevy Volt is Motor Trend‘s Car of the Year, but Tverberg argues that, in many ways, we’re no better off with electric cars than we were a century ago.

Weight, comfort, speed and performance have eaten up any real progress. We don’t need better batteries, we need better cars.”

AUTISM’S FIRST CHILD

Autism’s First Child (John Donvan and Caren Zucker, The Atlantic, October 2010)

Time to read: 33 minutes (8,165 words)

While there is quite a bit of attention on autism as it relates to children, what happens when they grow up? Donvan and Zucker track down Donald Gray Triplett, 77, the first person ever diagnosed with autism.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Donald’s life is that he grew up to be an avid traveler. He has been to Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia—some 36 foreign countries and 28 U.S. states in all.”

THE GOLDEN BOY AND THE INVISIBLE ARMY

The Golden Boy and the Invisible Army (Thomas Lake, Atlanta Magazine, June 2010)

Time to read: 19 minutes (4,777 words)

Writer Thomas Lake puts the H1N1 virus in human terms with this story of John Behnken, a 27-year-old Atlanta man who seemed an unlikely target for swine flu.

Dr. Stauffenberg had done close to 1,600 autopsies, and this was the first time she had seen an otherwise healthy person die from the unaided influenza virus.”

SHOULD WE CLONE NEANDERTHALS?

Should We Clone Neanderthals? (Zach Zorich, Archaeology, March/April 2010)

Time to read: 17 minutes (4,274 words)

An examination of the scientific, legal and ethical questions raised by the possibility that scientists may one day be able to clone neanderthals. At least one paleoanthropologist predicts: It’s going to happen.

If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks, you have violated every ethical rule we have, and if your experiment fails…well. It’s a lose-lose.”

THE PEANUT SOLUTION

The Peanut Solution (Andrew Rice, New York Times, Sept. 2, 2010)

Time to read: 21 minutes (5,258 words)

A peanut-buttery paste called Plumpy’nut is praised for its potential to help end malnutrition across the globe. Patents, intellectual property and competing interests make distribution more complicated.

I wouldn’t want to see a new world order where poor people are dependent on packaged supplementary foods that are manufactured in Europe or the United States.”

SHOOTING FOR THE SUN

Shooting for the Sun (Logan Ward, The Atlantic, November 2010)

Time to read: 13 minutes (3,149 words)

The story of Lonnie Johnson, an inventor with some 100 patents who is best-known for creating the Super Soaker squirt gun. His latest obsession: Bringing affordable solar power to the world.

Johnson is a member of what seems to be a vanishing breed: the self-invented inventor.”

THE PLASTIC PANIC

The Plastic Panic (Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, May 31, 2010)

Time to read: 19 minutes (4,788 words)

Is the BPA found in plastic bottles actually harmful to us? And if so, why isn’t it banned in the United States? A look at the regulatory issues that keep potentially toxic chemicals in the marketplace.

The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976, does not require manufacturers to show that chemicals used in their products are safe before they go on the market.”

See more Longreads 2010 “best-of” lists here.

Mark Armstrong is a digital strategist, writer and founder of Longreads, a community and Twitter service highlighting the best long-form stories on the web. His thoughts about the future of publishing and content can be found here.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms. (The blog, Twitter and the newsletter.) If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets us know we're doing something right and helps us pay the bills.

Juels says that these cracks were possible because the proprietary algorithms that the firms use to encode the cryptographic keys shared between the immobiliser and receiver, and receiver and engine do not match the security offered by openly published versions such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) adopted by the US government to encrypt classified information. Furthermore, in both cases the encryption key was way too short, says Nohl. Most cars still use either a 40 or 48-bit key, but the 128-bit AES - which would take too long to crack for car thieves to bother trying - is now considered by security professionals to be a minimum standard. It is used by only a handful of car-makers...

What's more, one manufacturer was even found to use the vehicle ID number as the supposedly secret key for this internal network. The VIN, a unique serial number used to identify individual vehicles, is usually printed on the car. "It doesn't get any weaker than that," Nohl says.

(Image: Invalidka - Soviet car for disabled people, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dittaeva's photostream)

Longreads and Brain Pickings have teamed up to highlight the most compelling in-depth stories published on the web this year. Earlier, we featured the best of Art, Design, Film & Music. Next up: Business. Here are 10 must-reads from 2010, from “wrongness” as a business strategy to procrastination to how culture can make (and break) a company.

Don’t miss our related selection of the year’s best books in Business, Life & Mind.

ON BEING WRONG

Error Message: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong (Kathryn Schulz, Slate, Aug. 3, 2010)

Time to read: 16 minutes (4,050 words)

Norvig explains what happens when a company (in this case Google) takes an engineering-centric approach to its products and business. First, it means that errors are actually a good thing.

“If you’re an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you’re always right, then you aren’t getting enough information out of those experiments.”

COCKTAIL PARTY IN THE STREET

A Cocktail Party in the Street: An Interview with TGI Friday’s Founder Alan Stillman (Nicola Twilley & Krista Ninivaggi, Edible Geography, Nov. 15, 2010)

Time to read: 17 minutes (4,193 words)

Before it arrived in strip malls around the country, TGI Friday’s was the first “singles bar” in New York City. Alan Stillman reflects on his transition from “looking to meet girls” to running a business.

“The restaurant business does come down to real estate … A restaurant owner is renting or sub-letting you a piece of real estate for the evening.”

WHAT AMAZON FEARS MOST: DIAPERS

What Amazon Fears Most: Diapers (Bryant Urstadt, Businessweek, Oct. 7, 2010)

Time to read: 14 minutes (3,468 words)

That which one fears… one buys. Just before Amazon plunked down $540 million for Diapers.com, Businessweek profiled co-founders Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara, whose company studied Amazon’s every move.

“We’re obsessed with Amazon … Recently I read every 10-K since 1996. It’s interesting to read all those 10-Ks in a row. They were doing so many things so soon.”

LATER

Later: What Does Procrastination Tell Us About Ourselves? (James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010)

Time to read: 14 minutes (3,574 words)

Take comfort in this exploration of the “basic human impulse” of putting work off.

“The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder.”

THE NEW GAWKER MEDIA

The New Gawker Media (Felix Salmon, Reuters, Dec. 1, 2010)

Time to read: 25 minutes (6155 words)

There were almost as many Gawker long reads this year as there were Insane Clown Posse stories. None revealed more about the business of Nick Denton’s blogging empire than Felix Salmon’s breakdown of the company’s operations.

“The problem with Gawker Media’s current model—and this is true of many other sites, too, including the Huffington Post—is that it’s based on pageviews and those tyrannical CPMs. It’s essentially a junk-mail direct marketing model.”

A Q&A WITH A VACUUM CLEANER SALESMAN

A Q&A with a Vacuum Cleaner Salesman (Mike Riggs, The Awl, Nov. 24, 2010)

Time to read: 25 minutes (6,342 words)

Tense, depressing, and sometimes very funny, interview with “Darrell,” a door-to-door salesman in Florida whose specialty is selling elderly people on products they don’t need.

“I was like, ‘Ma’am, it’s called a referral. We’re gonna call them, and we’re gonna tell them you referred us. I’m just being honest with you.’ She was like, ‘No, no.’ And I was like, ‘Ok, just write down their name,’ because we are going to f—ing do this.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO YAHOO

What Happened to Yahoo (Paul Graham, August 2010)

Time to read: 8 minutes (1,935 words)

Was it all that banner-ad money being thrown at them? Or their ambivalence about technology? Paul Graham offers theories as to why Yahoo has struggled.

“The company felt prematurely old. Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers. At Yahoo it felt as if they’d deliberately accelerated this process.”

TALES OF A BANKRUPT CULTURE

At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture (David Carr, The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2010)

Time to read: 16 minutes (4,081 words)

An archived Times piece from the swinging, inappropriate 1970s? No, a stunning present-day account of eyebrow-raising behavior by executives at the troubled Tribune Company. (CEO Randy Michaels resigned soon after.)

“After CEO Randy Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, ‘watch this,’ and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.”

WHY I SOLD ZAPPOS

Why I Sold Zappos (Tony Hsieh, Inc., June 1, 2010)

Time to read: 9 minutes (2,271 words)

The Zappos CEO reveals the events leading up to his company’s purchase by Amazon, and the internal tensions over preserving its famously familial corporate culture.

“The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.”

A BULLY FINDS A PULPIT ON THE WEB

A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web (David Segal, The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2010)

Time to read: 24 minutes (5,881 words)

The story that introduced us to the term “utterly noxious retail.” Online retailer DecorMyEyes cheated, threatened and stalked its customers — and then claimed to earn better Google rankings because of it.

“He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.”

See more Longreads 2010 “best-of” lists here.

Mark Armstrong is a digital strategist, writer and founder of Longreads, a community and Twitter service highlighting the best long-form stories on the web. His thoughts about the future of publishing and content can be found here.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms. (The blog, Twitter and the newsletter.) If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets us know we're doing something right and helps us pay the bills.

First, these seizures may be just a short preview of the kind of overreaching enforcement we'll see if the Congress passes the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). That bill, which was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov 18, gives the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, in particular the ability to make entire websites disappear from the Internet if infringement, or even links to infringement, are deemed to be "central" to the purpose of the site. Rather than just targeting files that actually infringe copyright law, COICA's "nuclear-option" design has the government blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system -- a reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech. As we've noted, one of the most pernicious effects of COICA is likely to be just what we've seen here: the takedown of legitimate speech.

Second, the seizures also show why this kind of enforcement doesn't work; seized sites were available at other domain names within hours. If the United States government increases interference in critical DNS infrastructure to police alleged copyright infringement, it is very likely that a large percentage of the Internet will shift to alternative DNS mechanisms that are located outside the US. This will cause numerous problems -- including new network security issues, as a large percentage of the population moves to encrypted offshore DNS to escape the censoring effects of the procedures outlined in COICA. Presumably the DOJ and the DHS should be committed to improving network security -- not undermining it.

Third, it's hard to believe that this kind of action is the best use of the Department of Homeland Security's resources. What investigations didn't occur while the DHS spent it time and energy pursuing the agenda of large media companies? Moreover, it's highly unlikely that this publicity stunt will really help creators get compensated. The best way to help artists of every stripe get compensated for their work is to make sure that there is a thriving marketplace of innovative digital businesses to pay them -- business like OnSmash, which is committed to promoting new and unheralded artists.