Henley and the fringe

The Nu Labour candidate has come in a distant fifth in the Henley by-election and even the BNP polled higher.

There really is something wrong in a country where a lunatic fringe group can do better than the organisation we have charged with running the state. But honestly you sometimes wonder if it is the lunatic fringe who are currently holding the high offices of state, as the government makes a renewed commitment to clamp down on criminal 5-year-olds.

Never mind though. We are advised to cheer up because we are apparently winning the war on terrors... er sorry... war on terrorism.

ICANN, the Net and the media

ICANN's recent machinations are being widely reported in conventional media circles as an indication that the Internet is facing a radical overhaul.

One of the things that irks me about these reports is the throwaway wild speculation reported as facts such as this from the Independent:

"The pornography industry, which accounts for around 12 per cent of all internet content..."

I mean what precise empirical evidence is such a claim based on? Nobody knows what percentage of internet content is porn but a figure like 12 % is a very convenient handle for campaigners wanting to control or regulate the technology in some way. That quote btw goes on to say that the porn industry:

"... is also hoping to be allowed to use the .xxx domain name."

Long time readers will know that this blogger has suffered regular censorship by commerical software filters due to the xxx in the title and url, so I've never been a big fan of the notion of the porn industry having an exclusive Web red light district under the .xxx banner. It'll be just another reason to make wild and unsubstantiated assumptions about what might be likely to be found at b2fxxx.

Genetic tests to id risk of breast cancer

In spite of Myriad Genetic's patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes having a widely reported chilling effect on research in this area, some scientists have continued to work on the genetic predisposition to develop breast cancer.

Cambridge researchers say there are seven common gene sites that elucidate the risk of developing cancer. From the Independent today:

"The chances of getting breast cancer vary more than sixfold among women because of their genetic inheritance but the breast screening programme fails to target those at highest risk, scientists have found. Researchers at the University of Cambridge say it may soon be possible to offer women a genetic test based on the seven common gene sites that determine cancer risk and to focus prevention efforts accordingly.

Currently doctors only test women with a very strong family history of breast cancer for the high-risk genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2. These gene faults increase the chances of a woman developing cancer from around 9 per cent to 80 per cent. But they are rare and few women benefit from such testing.

There are other common genetic variations that modestly increase the risk – but when they occur together they have a substantial effect. Around 3,300 women in the UK carry the low risk genes for each of the seven gene sites identified, who have less than half the risk of breast cancer of the general population – a 4.2 per cent lifetime risk compared with a 9.4 per cent risk.

At the other end of the scale, around 400 women have high risk genes for each of the seven sites, giving them a 23 per cent risk of developing breast cancer – two and a half times that of the population as a whole."

From the original study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week:

"Background New developments in the search for susceptibility alleles in complex disorders provide support for the possibility of a polygenic approach to the prevention and treatment of common diseases.

Methods We examined the implications, both for individualized disease prevention and for public health policy, of findings concerning the risk of breast cancer that are based on common genetic variation.

Results Our analysis suggests that the risk profile generated by the known, common, moderate-risk alleles does not provide sufficient discrimination to warrant individualized prevention. However, useful risk stratification may be possible in the context of programs for disease prevention in the general population.

Conclusions The clinical use of single, common, low-penetrance genes is limited, but a few susceptibility alleles may distinguish women who are at high risk for breast cancer from those who are at low risk, particularly in the context of population screening...

Although the clinical use of single, common low-penetrance genes is limited, a small number of susceptibility alleles could distinguish women at high risk for breast cancer from women at low risk, particularly in the context of population-screening programs. Moreover, stratifying women according to genetic risk may improve the efficiency of screening programs.

There are many questions to be answered and barriers to be overcome, however, before such potential could be realized. The simple models we described make several assumptions, some of which may not be robust. For example, the assumption that the benefit of mammographic screening for an individual woman is merely a function of absolute risk is clearly an oversimplification. The sensitivity of mammography is reduced in women younger than 50 years of age, and the true benefit is more likely to be a complex interaction between age and absolute risk. Furthermore, the complexity of a population-oriented prevention program that is based on individual risk might outweigh its marginal improvement in efficiency. As more risk alleles are identified, however, our ability to predict risk will improve, and the gain in efficiency will increase.

If it were feasible to implement a program for women with a genetic risk of breast cancer, public (and professional) education would be necessary, and even then the concept might not be acceptable. However, new and expensive forms of screening or screening tests with marginal clinical benefits to the individual woman may be possible only in subgroups of the population at high risk. Screening for breast cancer by means of MRI may be more effective than mammography, but it would be prohibitively expensive unless it was targeted to patients at highest risk.

Effective use of genetic profiling depends on the best available set of markers. Most reported genetic associations have been false positive results and would be worthless for risk prediction.³¹ The evidence providing support for some loci that were recently identified in genomewide studies, such as those used in the above calculations, is strong, but it will still be important to base profiling on accurate estimates of the risks associated with these loci, either singly or in combination.

Our understanding of the genetic susceptibility to breast cancer and other complex diseases is likely to change rapidly over the next decade. Policymakers should start to consider how this knowledge could be used to make a polygenic approach to disease prevention a reality."

It's a challenging but rewarding read and at a little over 3000 words is relatively brief. In addition, you're always likely to get a more accurate picture of what the scientists have discovered through reading the actual paper rather than the mass media's interpretation of the research. (Note that I'm not a geneticist but an 'allele', as I understand it, is one variety of a series of possible alternative forms of a particular gene. So with the gene controlling eye colour, for example, one allele could be the code for blue eyes, another the code for brown eyes.)

Nu labour cheer whilst pm hums

I don't think Simon Carr is too keen on our esteemed Prime Minister.

"Day by day it's harder to pay attention to the PM. He sounds like the air-conditioning. But if you think about something else you can stop hearing the drone after a time...

Gordon's every answer is a triple as he has to do three things. 1) show that whatever it is, it's not his fault, 2) that the Government is doing things, and 3) the Tories are wrong...

There's another factor: if we can't understand him, he thinks, we'll blame ourselves and credit him with superior intelligence. Is that how it works for you? Me neither. He knows he's boring but he equates that with sober government. We equate it with twisted, paranoid drivel offered up as a dialogue of the deaf."

"Dialogue of the deaf" - you've got to like that one.

Start-up sues Google over e-mail switching tool

From the Washington Post: Start-up sues Google over e-mail switching tool

Boyle: A Czar for the Digital Peasants

James Boyle is in cracking form in the FT again.

"One sure sign of a lack of political vision is a rise in the number of pieces of acronymic legislation. After September 11, the US Congress passed the euphoniously named “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act” the initials of which spell out “USA – Patriot.” The Patriot Act is a pretty bad piece of legislation, but at least its drafters worked hard on the acronyms so that opponents could be labelled “anti-patriot” – a perfect level of analysis for Fox News. Admittedly, in this administration, having public officials torturing acronyms rather than detainees might be counted as a plus, but I still find the whole practice distasteful. I'd suggest that politicians vow to vote against any piece of legislation with its own normatively loaded acronym, no matter how otherwise appealing. It might make them focus a little more on the content.

In any event, Congress has been at it again. The House just passed, and the Senate is considering, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 – or “Pro-IP” Act. (If it passes, a version is sure to be urged on Europe as a matter of “harmonisation.”) Are you pro-intellectual property? Then surely you must be for this piece of legislation! The name says it all.

Actually, there is more than a linguistic reason to dislike this nasty little industry wish-list. Bill Patry, a senior lawyer at Google and a respected copyright scholar said it may be the "most outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US"...

...the central feature remains – the creation of a White House level “intellectual property czar”... The czars were good at a lot of things, including autocracy, the toleration of pogroms and a fondness for having their cossacks sabre the peasants. None of these springs to mind as the ideal quality for a contemporary leader...

The point of having a czar, particularly a White House level czar, is to...“codify.. political interference in the independent exercise of .. prosecutorial judgment”... This Act would make political interference with prosecutorial judgment something that is not aberrant, it is ubiquitous and legally required. We could call it the “Politicize Responsibilities Of Independent Prosecutors” Act, I suppose. That at least would be truth in labelling. Whatever acronym we put on the title page it isn’t “Pro-IP,” merely “anti-balance.” This is one czar the digital peasantry should reject. "

Lessig: Change Congress

Larry Lessig delivered another impressive speech a couple of weeks ago on his plan to change Congress. This time at the National Conference for Media Reform.



Lessig followers will be familiar with the message - Congress is bought and paid for by vested interests and needs to be helped towards independence and acting for the public good. It's still well worth the 30 minutes or so to watch it.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

From Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Good question.

Shirky at the RSA

Clay Shirky gave a terrific talk at the RSA last month.

Always good value Shirky talks about the ideas in his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, illustrating his points with stories about collective protest with the aid of Web technologies that couldn't have happened without those technologies - students v HSBC, students v dictator in Belarus, business v mafia.

The interesting thing for me was that he also described the moment he stopped being a cyberutoptian. This was when a student who worked for a teen magazine explained they had decided to shut down their online discussion forums because they were being dominated by pro-anorexia girls, evangelising starving themselves. Yet when the forums closed down the girls just moved to another web site. It struck Shirky fairly forcefully that the destructive use of the technologies was not just a side effect but a feature. Just as they can be used to peacefully protest against brutal dictators by eating ice cream in Minsk, they can are are being used by organised groups for much more socially and politically destructive purposes.

Is Google the next Microsoft

Rufus Polllock has been working on an empirical study of search engines and has recently released his first complete version of his paper.

"Abstract

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately ‘web-search’) has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Starting from nothing in the 1990s, today search is a multi-billion dollar business. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become household names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different `participants’ (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as ‘information gatekeepers’, determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these."

Empirical research in this area is still very thin on the ground so this is recommended.

Open ID security

Kim Cameron does a terrific job of explaining why "Open ID leads to information cards"

(Be patient - it takes about 30 seconds to load on a fast connection)

Lisbon treaty dead or alive?

There's been a lot of traditional media column inches, broadcast media speculation and politicians' hot air expended on whether the Lisbon treaty is finished now that my homeland has rejected it in a referendum. I'm inclined to think the treaty has reached corpsedom since article 6 of said treaty states:

"1. This Treaty shall be ratified by the High Contracting Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited with the Government of the Italian Republic.

2. This Treaty shall enter into force on 1 January 2009, provided that all the instruments of ratification have been deposited, or, failing that, on the first day of the month following the deposit of the instrument of ratification by the last signatory State to take this step."

IANAL but that's as clear as you can get really - it enters into force when "all" states ratify it, preferably by January next year and if not then in the first month after the "last" member state ratifies it. Ireland have rejected it; "all" and "last" =>The treaty is legally dead. QED.

Fewer rules better behaviour

From David Bollier:

"Imagine what would happen if you took down road signs and traffic signals. More accidents would surely result, or at least significant confusion and slower traffic. Or would it? The surprising thing is that a number of cities around the world have actually done this, and experienced dramatic declines in traffic accidents...

The Dutch town of Drachten adopted this “unsafe is safe” approach in 2007 and found that casualties at one junction dropped from thirty-six over the previous four years to only two in the two years following the removal of traffic lights. Traffic jams no longer occur in the town’s main junction, which handles 22,000 cars a day. The town is “Verkeersbordvrij,” meaning “free of traffic signs.” (I am grateful to Jonathan Zittrain’s reference to Drachten’s experiment in his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and to Wikipedia for its account of “shared space.” )...

The idea is to return public spaces to people in order to encourage them to take greater personal responsibility. Monderman explained, “We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior….The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”"

He's right. Too many decision makers subscribe to the notion that human variability can be eliminated if only you create enough rules. The result is that intelligent people spend inordinate amounts of time circumventing the rules to get things done. When such circumvention is noticed the "solution" is more and tighter rules, including the outlawing of the circumvention. Eventually circumvention becomes too onerous or risky and even the intelligent and dedicated find it hard to take personal responsibility for the emergent chaos wreaked by the rules. As Bollier notes:

"Who could have thought that the wisdom of Lao-tsu, in the Tao Te Ching, could be applied to traffic safety engineering?

Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.

….If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.

Jonathan Zittrain mentions the shared-space design philosophy as a way to explain the success of Wikipedia. I would extend the principle to many other commons – water management, lobster harvesting, free software projects, scientific database commons, and much else. We naturally have greater respect for rules that we have had some role in formulating – and a willingness to punish those who misbehave — than we have for rules that have been imposed upon us by some higher authority."

Those who seek to control should be made to repeat Lao-tsu's mantra every day:

If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.

The forgotten Web of Paul Otlet

From the NYT: The Web Time Forgot

"MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”"

Thanks Ian for the link.

IP law Centres write to Commission on copyright term extension

My friend and colleague, Mark Rogers, is amongst the signatories of a Letter to the President of the European Commission warning of the damage Charlie McCreevy's proposed extension of copyright term in sound recordings will do to the Commission.

The letter is accompanied by a full impact assessment of the empirical affects of the extension produced by the leading centres for IP policy research in the EU at Cambridge, Oxford, London, Queen Mary College, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, LSE and a whole host of others, coordinated by Martin Kretschmer and Philip Hardwick at Bournemouth University.

They suggest:

"It is a spectacular kowtow to one single special interest group: the multinational recording industry...

The proposed Copyright Extension Directive will damage European creative endeavour and innovation beyond repair."

They go on to say that competition will be impeded, consumers harmed and the EU's balance of trade damaged.

"If the European Commission wishes to support European artists, there are many possible measures that would not result in monopolising the back catalogue of recorded music for another 45 years. At the level of member states, policies include (i) the regulation of copyright contracts, and (ii) social security and insurance schemes; at the European level, policies include (i) equitable remuneration rights only available to living performers, and (ii) the regulation of collecting societies and licence tariffs, such as the nature and distribution of income from any copyright levy scheme.

The record industry was offered a generous commercial bargain when investing in recorded music under the current exclusive term of 50 years. This already far exceeds the protection available to other R&D intensive industries. It cannot be the job of the European Commission to protect the revenues of incumbent companies at the cost of consumers, creativity and innovation."

This is pretty hard hitting stuff from academics who usually use much more neutral language.

AP wants payment to license 5-word quotations

Cory is in full flow over the AP's decision to charge bloggers for 5 word quotations from stories.

"In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" -- the right to copy without permission -- means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").

It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP "reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."

Over on Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden nails it:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save."

I hope Cory and Mr Hayden don't mind me quoting such a large part of their posts. ;-) Jeremy at IPKat is, as you might expect, slightly more measured:

"As an active part of both the blogging community and the IP community, the IPKat is understandably concerned. Neither the Berne Convention or TRIPs, nor indeed any other international instrument of copyright law provide for a blanket "bloggers' right" to make use of protected materials for ephemeral purposes or for subsequent archiving -- and it is optimistic to hope for any such blanket use to be explicitly sanctioned. But blogging has to make a responsible use of all materials. The IPKat welcomes debate on this topic and wonders what his readers think. Merpel asks, there aren't any collecting societies out there, offering easy licences to use materials for blogging purposes, are there?"

Update: David Bollier's take on this is well worth a read at On the Commons, which I notice has had a facelift since my last visit.

French 3 strikes laws comes closer

From The Times:

"Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy.

“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.

Under a cross-industry agreement, internet service providers (ISPs) must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders.

In a classical French approach the scheme will be enforced by a new £15 million a year state agency, to be called Hadopi (high authority for copyright protection and dissemination of works on the internet)."

Spy's simple sabotage manual

This is quite funny. A section of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual for US spies, declassified on 16 June 1976, reads:

"(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon."

I do also like these bits:

"(9) Communications
(a)
Telephone
(1)
At office, hotel and exchange switchboards
delay putting enemy calls through, give them wrong numbers, cut them off "accidentally," or forget to disconnect them so that the line cannot be used again."

"(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production...

(b)
Managers and Supervisors
(1)
Demand written orders.
(2)
"Misunderstand" orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can...

(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

(12)
Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files...

(13)
Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
(14)
Apply all regulations to the last letter.
(c)
Office Workers (^L) Make mistakes in quantities of material
when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.
(2)
Prolong correspondence with government
bureaus.
(3)
Misfile essential documents.

(d)
Employees
(1)
Work slowly...

(2)
Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can...

(4)
Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once...

(7)
Snarl up administration in every possible
way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
(8)
If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management.
See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on...

(12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating
Confusion
(a)
Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations
when questioned.
(b)
Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.
(c) Act stupid...
(i)
Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks."

Thanks for the link Tony.

How the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill

From Michael Geist: How the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill

"Last week's introduction of new copyright legislation ignited a firestorm with thousands of Canadians expressing genuine shock at provisions that opposition MPs argued would create a "police state." As opposition to the copyright bill mounts, the most common question is "why"?

Why, given the obvious public concern with the bill stretching back to last year, did Industry Minister Jim Prentice plow ahead with rules that confirm many of the public's worst fears?

Why did a minority government introduce a bill that appears likely to generate strong opposition from both the Liberals and NDP with limited political gain?

Why did senior ministers refuse to even meet with many creator and consumer groups who have unsurprisingly voiced disappointment with the bill?

While Prentice has responded by citing the need to update Canada's copyright law in order to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Internet treaties, the reality may be that those treaties have little to do with Bill C-61.

Instead, the bill dubbed by critics as the Canadian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (after the U.S. version of the law) is the result of an intense public and private campaign waged by the U.S. government to pressure Canada into following its much-criticized digital copyright model.

TechCrunch ban AP stories due to IP over-reaching

From TechCrunch: Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned

"They do not want people quoting their stories, despite the fact that such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law. They claim that the activity is an infringement.

A.P. vice president Jim Kennedy says they will issue guidelines telling bloggers what is acceptable and what isn’t, over and above what the law says is acceptable. They will “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”

Those that disregard the guidelines risk being sued by the A.P., despite the fact that such use may fall under the concept of fair use.

The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rule around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of legal property rights that don’t exist today. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet."