The European Commission’s “copyright modernisation” plan is an unmitigated disaster, but there’s one particularly insane section of it that I want to call your attention to: the “link tax,” which entitles publishers to payment when people link to them on the internet.

Fundamentally, this is the insane idea that companies own the information about where they and their assets are located, a shitty idea that we’ve been making fun of since 2001, which the elected European Parliament has repeatedly rejected, which experiments in Germany and Spain have shown to be a disaster.

But the unelected, thoroughly captured bureaucrats of the European Commission refuse to let go of this ridiculous plan.

Internet people are mobilising on Twitter under the #savethelink hashtag, where you can contribute your thoughts on this regressive, absurd notion.

http://boingboing.net/2016/09/15/european-commission-wants-to-b.html

After the DNC hack, security experts began playing close attention to the security of servers associated with the Trump campaign, on the assumption that if the Democrats had been targeted, the Republicans would be, too.

They discovered a series of weird DNS lookups by an even weirder email server run by the Trump organization. This mail-server seemed to be engaged in regular email volleys with another server at Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s biggest banks, run by a Russian/Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to Putin. Both servers seemed to be configured to reject connections from anyone except each other. The metadata showed that the servers were only active during the overlapping Moscow/NYC business hours, and the timestamps and other metadata were highly indicative of human conversation (and not, for example, spam or forgotten automated processes).

When the NYT questioned Alfa Bank about this server, it promptly vanished. Then, just as promptly, another server popped up, with all the same properties.

The experts who’ve analyzed the data are a who’s-who of internet security and infrastructure guarantees (though the primary analysis came from an anonymous person calling themselves Tea Leaves), including Paul Vixie, one of the core authors of DNS.

The Trump campaign denies that the server is doing anything weird, but their explanation is contradictory and technically incoherent. Alfa Bank has retained a reputable security company to audit their end of the connection, and claim that their experts see nothing nefarious going on – but those same experts say they’ve reached no conclusions as yet.

There are no smoking guns here – all we see is the metadata indicating something that appears to be a highly secretive dialog between a politically connected Russian bank and the Trump organization. Without the content of these conversations, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.

http://boingboing.net/2016/11/01/leading-dns-experts-say-they.html

Yeah, I’d watch Muppets Lord of the Rings

my grandma sent me a picture of my dog with his new xmas present and i need a fucking inhaler LOOK AT HIM

oh to feel a fraction of the unbridled joy he is experiencing