Nominations Open For "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government"

The corporate overlords at SourceForge asked me to name a Slashdot category for their upcoming Community Choice Awards and to let you guys select the winner. I have named my category "Most Likely to be Shut Down by a Government Agency." We're going to run this like we do an Ask Slashdot call for questions — post your nominations into the comments here. Use moderation to send up good ideas. In the upcoming days we'll post another story where you can vote on the actual winner. Nominations need to include the project name, a link to some sort of official website, and a paragraph of why you think they deserve to win. The project that wins will gain fame, notoriety, and maybe a cease and desist order that they could print out and frame if they had that kind of time.

Patent Busting

[MistaE]

The EFF's Patent Busing Project [eff.org].

Or has it been shut down already?

Software radio...

[Zelig]

The GNU software radio project

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/

is a good candidate. It proposes to let you make electromagnetic waves in a manner not subject to prior restraint by the FCC, and without the back-doors intelligence agencies have on many current means of communications.

This is naughty.

wikileaks, followed by cryptome.org

[QX-Mat]

wikileaks, followed by cryptome.org for doing a better job and mirroring the same content

Matt

MediaDefender

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, they've actually committed some crimes now, right?

Re:wikileaks, followed by cryptome.org

[moderatorrater]

I second wikileaks. It's got everything -- anonymity, copyright infringement, and (the ability, at least) classified documents. I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has.

Which Government?

[FiestaFan]

Any Government?

Freenet

[Sanity]

Freenet [freenetproject.org], especially now that its reaching the point of widespread usability [locut.us].

Enzyte (and others)

[Anonymous Coward]

The once daily tablet for natural male enhancement!

I've read most of these fake non perscription miracle drugs make their money by giving a "free" 30 day trial for like $30 bucks or something and rake it in off the people who forget to cancel. Obviously this pill doesn't enhance penis size. I think there is another one for weight loss where they go on and on about how 76% of each pound lost was actual fat, but if you read the fine print the usual weight loss is 3 pounds (doubt it even does that).

Trapster

[Weaselmancer]

www.trapster.com [trapster.com]

It's an interactive thingy where you post where cops are hiding in speed traps.

I'm surprised it's still up, honestly.

Our right to know.

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have loads of censoring going on. for example, the 60 minute interview with Sibel edmunds was immediately gagged and then the studio was told to hand over EVERYTHING. In addition, ALL news org have been warned ahead to not talk about her.

In terms of software, PirateBay/Cryptome/GnuRadio. Anything dealing with encryption will NOT be shutdown, unless it involves a brand new and interesting algo.

Liberty Dollar

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.libertydollar.org/ [libertydollar.org] This group has been bringing value back to money for 9 years. While in the past the government has confirmed the group's legallity and legitimacy, more recently the Treasury Dept. has begun claiming that they criminals. With the U.S. Dollar (Federal Reserve Note) falling harder and faster, prices soaring through the roof, the Liberty Dollar has held its value the entire time. This makes it a perfect scapegoat for the entire U.S. monetary system.

Re:Truecrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

A few more years under the Conservative Party leadership of Stephen Harper and Canada should be goose-stepping along quite nicely behind the United States.

Re:Slashdot

[exley]

Slashdot... free thought...

You must be new here.

Re:Truecrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

"OpenBSD doesn't have to abide by crpyto export rules because they are in Canada, for instance."

Yes, you can import strong encryption but you can't export un-approved encryption (ie what the US can't crack). So does that mean you have to worry about leaving the U.S. with too strong of encryption on your laptop then?

Tor?

[Facegarden]

Tor would be a good candidate for being outlawed by an overbearing government. I don't know much about it, but i can bet legal online anonymity will go if things keep going the way they are... -Taylor

Re:Truecrypt

[grandpa-geek]

Unbreakable encryption was invented by the US Army Signal Service in 1917. It is called the "one time pad". The encryption key is random and is as long as the message. The encryption is unbreakable as long as each key is used only once.

The drawback of a one-time pad system is the logistics of transporting the keys and having only two copies, that are destroyed after they are used.

Roosevelt and Churchill had transatlantic voice conversations during World War II that were encrypted using one-time pad technology. The conversations would remain unbreakable even if recordings of the radio transmissions were available today.

Re:Truecrypt

[SpaceLifeForm]

I don't need any 'approval' from anyone.

It was an experimental encryption algorithm and I screwed up
my hard drive, and now I can't decrypt it.

Does that help?

But isn't this fear mongering?

[LWATCDR]

Really asking what site you think is going to be taken down next by some government agency seems like fear mongering in it's self.
Most take down notices have come not from law enforcement but from companies not the government.

The vast majority of these are civil actions.

Isn't this heading into the tin foil hats and black helicopter area?

www.tudou.com/

[Valehru]

Tudou.com is on my list to be shutdown by the Chinese government. More so to do with the popularity amongst the average Chinese Chin, lack of regulations with content submitted than to do with lack of enforced copyright standards.

Second Life

[Mark Cicero]

All that music being played and nary a cent going to the RIAA is just begging for a court intervention. Now they also have the IRS looking into the Electric Sheep Company / CSI:NY promotion and whether or not the 'guides' income should be taxed and there are questions as to whether labour law should be getting involved with all the Slingo hosts and their employers. I give it two years tops.

Re:ThePirateBay

[Ynsats]

This was the first organization that popped into mind.

Sure they have lax rules surrounding them in the countries that they are based but it's only a matter of time before it goes beyond "making an example" and they are made "a precedent".

After them, the next on the chopping block would be Mininova.

I see BitTorrent going the way of the dodo...

[Ynsats]

BitTorrent only offers a software package the enables user to share data with an ease rivaling that of an open share on a network but without all of the hassles of completely insecure connections. That doesn't seem to stop the RIAA and the MPAA from trying to shut down even the idea that people should be able to use the Internet for what it was intended for, a free exchange of information. The software package was and is quite novel in the way it handles traffic and allows it to be shared across multiple connections and multiple computers. This is load distribution at a level higher than "enterprise class data systems". This is a huge productivity tool that can be used for sharing information over any kind of distributed network. It allows freedom and power.

What's going to stop it? The RIAA, MPAA and giant ISP's like Comcast and Verizon that throttle back torrent traffic. They will make cases for costs in bandwidth and network maintenance. The fact that many people use these types of peer-to-peer networks successfully and almost untraceably to share copyrighted information only adds to the arguments that the RIAA and MPAA will make to get it shut down. Since there entire websites like The Pirate Bay, Mininova, IsoHunt and even the BitTorrent website that link users to a large number of seeds for the torrent swarms of information copyrighted and non-copyrighted and such, it doesn't bode well for the tool either.

The RIAA and MPAA will use strong arm tactics and cite currently pending investigations in other parts of the world against such sites that employ the use of such software to cut the problem off at the head. It will likely lead to sweeping legislation that will outlaw many forms of file sharing. For references, look at what the RIAA and MPAA have managed to successfully do against those users with home media center looking to place digital copies of their license media on to online storage. Sure, selling the means to do the illegal act isn't illegal but that doesn't mean someone won't try to make it illegal.

Re:But isn't this fear mongering?

[Hatta]

A civil action is enforced by a government. What makes you think that doesn't count?

DIY Drones

[zlite]

DIY Drones [diydrones.com]: amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and open-source Predators.

Re:Truecrypt

[raddan]

Hrm-- do you have a reference for the discrete math book? I have two (just completed a discrete math course), and IIRC neither talk much about encryption beyond simple XOR ciphers.

Just say no to homemade A-bombs

[wsanders]

http://reactor1967.fortunecity.com/nuke.html [fortunecity.com]

Seem pretty obvious to me. Of course if you are making substantial progress on this, you're going to get something a little more difficult to ridicule than a cease and desist letter from some lawyers.

Indymedia

[ChunKing]

Indymedia in the UK has already been shut down twice in the past few years e.g. http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/06/28/0113237.shtml?tid=153&tid=158&tid=149&tid=17 [slashdot.org]

Re:Truecrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

We will see. The US will likely vote in a liberal - that ought to speed up the goose-stepping process if history is any guide. We will see if Canada can keep up.

A troll for a troll - lets see if this post also gets a +1 interesting.

Re:Truecrypt

[Sloppy]

You put your phone next to your wife's phone at night, and they exchange pads over a wire or low-powered IR link or something.

How they generate these pads, on the other hand...

We're talking about a device that has a radio antenna, a microphone, and probably CCD. It moves around all day, seeing inputs from all those different sensors, from your unique perspective. It's practically an entropy engine.

Re:Truecrypt

[rts008]

"Possession of lock picking equipment is intent."
Very good point. the whole 'possession with intent' argument used by our Gov't. and law enforcement/court system is just pure FUD. Currently THEY get to define 'intent' just based on possession, and that is the problem.
Common sense would dictate that 'intent' should be a seperate issue from possession, but by 'bundling' intent with possession,all bets are off.
It seems to be 'the WAR on mentality has automagically equated possession with 'intent', despite the facts actually present.

The 'facts' don't matter as long as you fit (even loosely) the 'profile'.

ARRGHHH! This 'New World Order' mentality really chaps my ass.

How is Boston Harbor setup for a 21'st century Tea Party these days? I think we need to explore this question here in the USA. Just thinking...

P.S. I know I am ranting in an offtopic direction, but when I enlisted in the US Army, I took an oath to defend our Constitution from enemies both foreign and DOMESTIC. WTF?!?!?!
I am really confused by what my proper course of action should be anymore. My instincts reload '1776-The Revolution' into RAM, but I doubt it would work now days with the apathy and 'consumerism' that is rampant here. I AM A CITIZEN (Egads- I hate this Newspeak Spelling, but nevermind), not a CONSUMER! I am a consumer when I go to a restaurant or pub- maybe when I go to a grocery store- otherwise I am a citizen, not a 'consumer'.

Is it too off-topic to say: I miss the social attitudes of my youth? (for reference, I was born in 1958- grad'ed HS in 1976- yes, I am older than dirt for most of you, and proud of it- I have seen a lot of really cool shit happening, but also a lot of not-cool shit too)

Re:Truecrypt

[despe666]

Because if they can't prove it's encrypted data, they can't get a warrant for the key, and can't bust you for refusing to give them the key. Plausible deniability.

Re:Truecrypt

[Antique Geekmeister]

Microsoft doesn't necessarily want the NSA to have the backdoors, but they sure want the backdoors for their _own_ use, so that they can unlock a customer's content as a "service", or sell it to business as part of a security toolkit. Please look into Palladium, renamed "Trusted Computing", to see exactly what their long-term encryption and authentication plans are.

Widespread use of Palladium, without careful thought, could lead to exactly the forbidding of non-backdoor-burdened encryption. And discovering a backdoor-free way to use it is one of the fastest ways to get such a technology dropped: take a look at what happened with the 'Clipper Chip' for an example of that.

DIYDrones.com

[Anonymous Coward]

DIYDrones.com ... $100 homebrew autopilots ... need I say more?

Re:Don't need government - doing it themselves.

[digitig]

Here's a hint about the American system: the president doesn't call elections in the first place, so he can't stop one from happening in the second. He has no legal authority to do so, so no one would listen to him if he tried. There's a reason no one's ever tried that before. Even Lincoln had to run for re-election during the Civil War (and almost lost!); there's simply no way to stop the process.

I suggest you check the Patriot Act carefully -- certainly some commentators believe that The Continuity of Government plan in conjunction with The Patriot Act gives Bush precisely that legal power. I am not a lawyer (and even if I were, I bet there would be a lot of disagreement amongst lawyers on this one), and I don't know whether that power, if it existed, was preserved in Patriot 2, so I'm not sure.

Re:Truecrypt

[evanbd]

High bandwidth hardware RNGs aren't that hard. I could design a circuit that ran at a multi-kilobit output rate (plenty for text messaging), occupied under a square cm of board area, and a parts cost under $3 in qty 1k -- with provable minimums for the amount of quantum mechanically generated entropy. And the price would drop dramatically in large quantity. Or you could take VIA's approach of noisy ring oscillators that's very fast, almost certainly good enough, but not quite guaranteed -- and can be integrated on a modest sized piece of digital logic at very very low cost. So why don't more people use high quality random number generators? No one cares.

The hard part isn't generating the pads; it's managing them securely (or generating them on hardware not intended for the task). But, if you happen to want a good hardware RNG designed, it's quite doable (though not trivial; it requires attention to detail, as always).

Vote Powerpoint!

[edxwelch]

vote for powerpoint! If it gets enough votes the goverment will shut it down. That's the way it works, right?
Finally we will be free from those brainless "funny" chain emails that waste all your mail space.

Re:Truecrypt

[glittalogik]

Have you seen Kevin Mitnick's business card [flickr.com]?

Re:Tor, Freenet, and I2P

[BlueStrat]

Tor, Freenet, and I2P are probably on the top of the list. There is no way that government wants difficult to trace communication to be availble to the general public.

And yet, Tor development was partially funded by the DoD.

Even more ironic, the entire internet was a DoD DARPA project.

Personally, it wouldn't surprise me if the internet itself was "The Most Likely To Be Shut Down (by the) Government". At least, the internet as we now know it as a general-purpose two-way distributed-node type network that is as hard to control and censor as the current iteration is.

Cheers!

Strat

SCO

[dmbrun]

SCO http://www.sco.com/ [sco.com]

They are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the moment. The next stage is Chapter 7 hopefully when Kimball's ruling comes through. Then the Government through the agency of the Delaware court will terminate them.

mySociety's parliament video site

[ReginaldSlapknackers]

Just announced yesterday: mySociety's House of Commons video [mysociety.org] site. Crowd-source some video timestamps [theyworkforyou.com] today!

Why might the government seek to close the site down? After all, aren't mySociety "the biggest single catalyst for political change in this country"? (Lord Gould of Brookwood, House of Lords debate, 15/6/06 [theyworkforyou.com])

Well, they may be, but they may have fractured, or at least bent, a copyright law or two.

You see, Parliamentary video exists under a draconian copyright license under which it "must not be hosted on a searchable website and must not be downloadable", apparently for fear of naughty citizens making humorous or satirical use of it; or indeed any use at all.

To which the mySociety guys and gals seem to have said a collective, "Well that's silly," and gone ahead and done it anyway. Good on you, people.

Seriously, do your bit for democratic transparency and go and timestamp a few videos [theyworkforyou.com] now. It's curiously addictive.

Re:Truecrypt

[HeronBlademaster]

The difference is that not purchasing from a company affects the company's bottom line, but not voting does not affect whether someone gets voted in, and in fact it can tip the scales one way or another.

In other words, if you don't buy, the company could go out of business (by not meeting their costs), but if not they can't really affect you. If you don't vote, someone still gets voted in, and it might be someone whose policies are quite opposed to how you might run things yourself, which might affect you directly through new laws.

So, you're wrong; "not voting" is not even close to the same as "boycotting a company".

The solution to "I hate the two-party system" is to vote for a third party. If that's not enough for you (and it probably won't be successful at first) you'll have to campaign for a third-party candidate and rally support. If I recall correctly, you can even write in whatever name you want for your vote.