Tea Party Speaks Out Against Net Neutrality, Has No Idea What They’re Talking About

Net Neutrality is one of the most important features of the Internet. With the Internet quickly becoming the backbone of civilization, open and free access for everyone is pertinent for continued survival of the Information Age.

Which is apparently why the Tea Party is against it. The Tea Party group FreedomWorks came out against Net Neutrality on Wednesday, verbally attacking it in a new video after — surprise, surprise — President Obama announced strong support for regulations that require Internet providers like Comcast treat all web traffic equally.

Just to be clear here, the Baggers are now defending Comcast and AT&T.

This also means that, in due course, your Fox-addled Tea Party relatives will be claiming that Net Neutrality is the product of Soviet Germany under Stalin and Hitler.

Iris Somberg, the communications coordinator for FreedomWorks, said in the video that Net Neutrality doesn’t support a “free and open Internet.” According to Somberg, Net Neutrality regulations would prohibit providers from blocking or slowing down access to any websites or online services. Because the ability of corporations to block or slow down service to websites constitutes a “free and open Internet” to these people. I could make remarks comparing this to Nineteen-Eighty-Four, but at this point, I’m almost certain they’ve read it and made the collective decision to one up Orwell.

According to Somberg, this is bad because the “web content isn’t equal“:

The same speed, the same prices, the same access, but all web content isn’t equal. Netflix is not the same as a high school blog, and YouTube certainly isn’t the same as Facebook. They serve very different purposes and they have very different needs.

By dictating that all these sites be treated the same, Net Neutrality makes small companies that don’t take up much bandwidth at all pay more so that big companies can pay less. That’s not the kind of equality the Internet needs.

Nobody took the time to explain how the Internet works to her, did they?

Here’s a better analogy: A dump truck, a bus, and a sports car are not the same thing. But they’re all served by better roads; the better the roads, the better they can all function. Making sure the roads are repaired equally, not just for the bus or the dump truck because the bus or the dump truck can afford to pay more — that’s Net Neutrality. If any Tea Baggers in the audience need me to get out the road rug and the toy cars and trucks to make the analogy more concrete, I can.

She added that “Net neutrality is not a level playing field. It’s an anti-competitive policy that protects the Internet’s biggest companies at the expense of everyone else.”

Now that is some impressive mental gymnastics. Who benefits if Net Neutrality goes away? Certainly no the high school blog, I’ll tell you that right now. Free speech is money, and if you can’t pony up the money to pay for the service, too bad — no freedom for you.

Republicans have also strongly denounced Net Neutrality, just in case you thought FreedumbWorks was somehow alone. And given the fallout from earlier this month, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the year that we buried Net Neutrality. Great job, America. Your choice continues to impress me.

You can watch the video below:

Internet Victory: Major Web Filter No Longer Allows Users To Block Gay Content

If you've ever found yourself sipping a latte in a an overstuffed cafe chair trying to read websites like, say, Queerty, only to be met with a message along the lines of “this content is blocked,” you know how annoying internet filters can be.

Public schools and libraries are actually required to use them, and many businesses that offer free wi-fi choose to switch them on. And all too often, LGBT content gets lumped in with porn and is deemed inappropriate.

But now imagine that instead of someone in a cafe trying to stay current on their queer gossip, it’s a suicidal gay teen trying to access The Trevor Project’s website from his high school’s computer lab. Big problem.

Well one leading internet filter company, Symantec, has taken a huge step to address the issue. They’ve removed “LGBT content” as a toggle altogether, meaning that while administrators of the software can still block offensive websites, there will be no way to block sites based purely on sexual orientation.

This opens the door to sites like GLAAD and The Trevor Project. GLAAD’s CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said:

“Symantec gets it. It’s time that our software reflects our values, and that means filtering out discrimination.”

Not only is this the right thing to do for people who need access to gay advocacy websites, it acknowledges that it is flat out wrong to block gay sites that aren’t obscene.

And it means your dream of reading Queerty at the public library will finally come true. Hallelujah.

How true is this!!!!?

Post by Andrew Harrison.

John Oliver on Net Neutrality

How to choose a secure Internet password

I ran across this in my travels and can’t not show it to you. Bruce Schneier, one of our cyber-security gurus, tackles the question of Internet passwords, hacking them, and choosing safe ones.

Password hacking is a science.

Here’s what that looks like:

The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they’re broken. The general attack model is what’s known as an offline password-guessing attack. In this scenario, the attacker gets a file of encrypted passwords from somewhere people want to authenticate to. His goal is to turn that encrypted file into unencrypted passwords he can use to authenticate himself. He does this by guessing passwords, and then seeing if they’re correct. He can try guesses as fast as his computer will process them — and he can parallelize the attack — and gets immediate confirmation if he guesses correctly. Yes, there are ways to foil this attack, and that’s why we can still have four-digit PINs on ATM cards, but it’s the correct model for breaking passwords.
There are commercial programs that do password cracking, sold primarily to police departments. There are also hacker tools that do the same thing. And they’re really good.

Part of the problem with choosing a password is that most passwords follow predictable patterns, which makes almost all passwords hackable or guessable:

A typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. The root isn’t necessarily a dictionary word, but it’s usually something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90% of the time) or a prefix (10% of the time). One cracking program I saw started with a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like “letmein,” “temp,” “123456,” and so on. Then it tested them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: “1,” “4u,” “69,” “abc,” “!,” and so on. It recovered about a quarter of all passwords with just these 100,000 combinations.

He has more to say on just this idea, but pause a moment. Are your passwords a root plus an appendage, either a prefix or suffix? If so, you’ll probably be interested in what he has to say about how that kind of password is hacked.

His best recommendation for a strong password?

Pretty much anything that can be remembered can be cracked.
There’s still one scheme that works. Back in 2008, I described the “Schneier scheme”:

So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something that this process will miss. My advice is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like “This little piggy went to market” might become “tlpWENT2m”. That nine-character password won’t be in anyone’s dictionary. Of course, don’t use this one, because I’ve written about it. Choose your own sentence — something personal.

Here are some examples:

▪ WIw7,mstmsritt… = When I was seven, my sister threw my stuffed rabbit in the toilet.
▪ Wow…doestcst = Wow, does that couch smell terrible.
▪ Ltime@go-inag~faaa! = Long time ago in a galaxy not far away at all.
▪ uTVM,TPw55:utvm,tpwstillsecure = Until this very moment, these passwords were still secure.

And be sure to check the four rules following this sentence: “There’s more to passwords than simply choosing a good one.” Good info to have, right? It will only take a moment to read it though, and I think you’ll be glad you did.