So I thought I would take a moment and speak about something besides technology today. Late last week violence broke out in the separatist region of Georgia known as South Ossetia. Now for those not familiar with this area the politics and history of it are almost as complicated as those of Israel and Palestine and I don't think I could possibly scratch the surface. What I would like to talk about is the possible future impactions of this. The Russian aggression in this region reeks of pre-1990s Soviet policy. The popularity of Putin and his party have never been greater as he regions Russia to its former greatness. The question that remains how long will the west stand by on the side lines and allow this second coming of the iron curtain to go unopposed. Now while I do not like either candidate in this fall's upcoming election, I do feel that if Obama get elected Russia aggression will continue and it will be unchecked. This is one region of the world that will be interesting to watch as the years go on.
Read More......Monday, August 11, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Another Lost Liberty
The Department of Homeland Security recently released this gem about their policy regarding the search and seizure of laptops and other electronic devices, "Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed." The policy also includes their ability to share any information obtained with other agencies as well as the right to send your computer to non-government agencies for translation and things of that nature. Now while the seizure of laptops without a warrant at the boarder might not seem like that big a deal, its not far from the government claiming the right to tap any and all international communication because importation of information from a laptop is no different then sharing information over a VPN. On top of this several European government are in the works of passing legislation that will allow airport security to search laptops for pirated software and songs.
I know many of you will say that this is for the greater good and the government is only doing this to protect us. But who is regulating the government? When you are no long allowed to freely share information with others without the fear of big brother looking over your shoulder things start to look a little bleak. Along with all the recent news about net neutrality it looks like the age of unregulated internet is coming to an end.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
So an intro Eh?
My name is Torshin and I am video game addict. I've been playing video games ever since I was a little kid and haven't stopped since. Was first a huge console fan and was first hooked on play-station and N64 and then around nine or ten I discovered the beauty of online gaming and it all went down from there. I love the internet and I love the fact that it allows you to be who ever you want to be, but as of late I have become more and more cynical of it as we hear more stories of kids killing themselves over Facebook or eloping to Jordan because of a boy they met on Myspace. So as the newest member of BIBTTP I will be writing about all that is wrong with technology and the internet in general these days with a bit of my views on politics thrown in once and a while.
To start us off I'm going to mention BBN Technologies Inc. current pet project for which they recently received 12 million in government funding and a large amount of dedicated bandwidth to, well basically replace the internet. The name for this project is Global Environment for Network Innovations(GENI) and it is supposed to take a clean slate approach to the internet to fix serious security issues. Now looking at this very optimistically this project could drastically fix serious problems facing the internet such as transfer of copyrighted materials and things of that nature. But I look at this as government regulation of internet content, aka China. These are the kinds of things that interest me and these will be the kinds of things I will be writing about.