Ethiopia Criminalizes VoIP Services
An anonymous reader writes "The Ethiopian government has passed legislation criminalizing the use of VoIP services like Skype and Google Talk. Anyone using these services within the country now faces up to 15 years in prison. 'Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of "national security concerns" and to protect the state's telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizen's Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets. ... Reporters Without Borders also reports that Ethio Telecom installed a system to block access to the Tor network, which allows users to surf the Web anonymously. The organization notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic.'"
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Wisconsin Gov. Promises To Use Internet Sales Tax To Lower Income Tax
It sounds like a nice idea, if you don’t own a calculator. The governor of Wisconsin wants to give his residents a tax break, using the revenue from a proposed Internet Sales tax to lower the state’s income tax. “I want to make clear, should federal Marketplace legislation become law, my intention would be for any resulting additional revenue be used to provide individual income tax relief for Wisconsin’s taxpayers,” Wrote Governor Scott Walker to members of Congress. The Marketplace Fairness Act will permit state governments to collect sales taxes from any business that both grosses more than $1M in revenue and has a substantial operating base in their region. Earlier this month, a draft of the bill passed the U.S. Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, but faces tougher opposition in the House, where Republican leadership is concerned that the law will be a logistical nightmare for small businesses. Although, I wouldn’t get too excited. With 5 million residents in Wisconsin ...
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Even After Hacks And Bombings, Privacy Advocates Have Big Week In Congress
In light of the AP’s high-profile Twitter hacking and a vicious domestic bombing, Americans have not let fear derail privacy legislation. Just this week, the Senate advanced an anti-email snooping law and the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is reportedly on its way to the grave. It appears that the burden of proof has shifted to proponents of government surveillance, and they’ve been conspicuously silent about how spying will keep Americans safe. Two Bills CISPA, which gives immunity to Internet companies for sharing sensitive data with law enforcement, will reportedly not be taken up for a vote in the Senate. “We’re not taking [CISPA] up,” a representative from the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation told US News, “Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we’re going to strengthen cybersecurity. They’ll be drafting separate bills.” After ...
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ElectNext Raises $1.3M To Provide Contextual Political Data To News Sites
If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Digital News Ventures, Gabriel Investments, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Investor’s Circle. When I spoke with ElectNext’s founder and CEO, Keya Dannenbaum, she explained ElectNext as something similar to our own CrunchBase, providing widgets full of data for publications to embed: “We have a comprehensive underlying database (on politicians on our case as opposed to companies in the CrunchBase analogy) from which we create data-driven content that lives inside, and gives relevant context to, political news.” Dannenbaum knows politics, as she’s ...
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How A Fired Republican Staffer Became A Powerful Martyr For Internet Activists
Someone in DC thought they had snuffed out an official Republican report on radical intellectual property reform by convincing the authoring agency to erase the document from the Internet and fire the staffer charged with writing it. The shadowy politicking backfired. The young fall-boy, Derek Khanna, instantly became a front-page living martyr against the entertainment and telecommunication lobbies, who have long been villainized for pushing aggressive anti-piracy laws at the expense of innovation. Just 3 months later, Khanna led a massive 100,000-person petition to give consumers more rights over their cell phone carriers, convincing the White House and Congress to publicly prioritize consumer choice and uphold the principles first laid out in the now non-existent committee document. A day later, legislation was introduced to codify the White House’s support into law, with an official hat-tip to Khanna. “They sought to ‘silence’ him by firing him, but it just brought him more attention ...
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