Project DoD cannot caution Canadians enough to be mindful of the free speech and censorship implications of tying a for-profit third party’s liability to user’s Internet content with no judicial oversight. If you are a Canadian citizen, now is the time to act. A year ago Project DoD looked to Canadian data havens as a remedy for DMCA abuse. A year from now we may only have servers in Canada to help its citizens resist copyright abuse under a set of laws that are shaping up to be worse than the US.

Here is the preliminary wording on C-32.

(2.3) It is an infringement of copyright for a person to provide, by means of the Internet or another digital network, a service that the person knows or should have known is designed primarily to enable acts of copyright infringement if an actual infringement of copyright occurs by means of the Internet or another digital network as a result of the use of that service.

(2.4) In determining whether a person has infringed copyright under subsection (2.3), the court may consider

(a) whether the person expressly or implic- itly marketed or promoted the service as one that could be used to enable acts of copyright infringement;

(b) whether the person had knowledge that the service was used to enable a significant number of acts of copyright infringement;

(c) whether the service has significant uses other than to enable acts of copyright infringement;

(d) the person’s ability, as part of providing the service, to limit acts of copyright infringement, and any action taken by the person to do so;

(e) any benefits the person received as a result of enabling the acts of copyright infringement; and

(f) the economic viability of the provision of the service if it were not used to enable acts of copyright infringement.

One final caution.  The US also has the notion of fair-use of copyright and this does not stop the flood of takedown notices for satire, commentary, criticism, derivative works, or other fair-use exceptions.  Add to that for-profit service providers that increasingly find it easier to remove content permanently than follow the requirements for safe-harbor, as well as a complete lack of court intervention even in some of the most abusive cases, and your society is ripe for censorship abuse a the hands of powerful people, corporations, and every troll with a laptop connected to their local coffee shop wifi.

Since we’re a nonprofit we are always looking for ways to save money.  One such way is to go with inexpensive commodity disks in our servers.  In fact, my observations have been that the community is trending away from expensive enterprise class hardware and towards commodity consumer hardware.  If this holds true for your organization, or if you’re simply a broke non-profit, hard drives may no longer be a place to pinch your pennies.

In the past we’ve used commodity hard drives with great success.  We have one set of commodity disks that have lasted us seven years so far with no problems.  We were even told by an enterprise organization that the 1TB Seagate Barracuda disks were a great choice for stability (and they may still prove to be).  Nevertheless, we have found one huge problem with write performance under rotational vibration (RV).  Our hopes are that this experience can help save you or your organization a great deal of trouble.

We first noticed the problem when trying to migrate some data to one of our new servers destine for Sweden.  The write performance was so bad that the box was visually slowing down when typing on the command prompt.  To fill in some background details, we are running ZFS with a zpool root mirror.  This mirror is composed of two 1TB Seagate Barracuda disks in a core2 quad-core box with 8GB of memory (again, we are a broke non-profit).  Running ‘zpool iostat -v 5‘ indicated that our disks were only getting about 5MB/s write performance.  Since we have five of these boxes we started running the same test on the other boxes.  Every box reported something a little different, yet they were all in the same build state under no load.  The best we observed was one of our boxes getting about 35MB/s, where others were floating around 7MB/s to 11MB/s.

We started to think that there may be a cable issue, or even that the fan was creating electromagnetic interference.  We took the fan out of our case and the write performance increased while we were watching.  After a few simple tests we determined that this drop in write performance was vibrations from the case’s cooling fan.  To demonstrate our specific example of the stark difference in write performance under different rotational vibration we made this video:

After doing more research on the issue we found this great research post on the Seagate page.  Between our video and the Seagate post, we think it would be prudent for any enterprise class organization to consider the impact of running commodity disks.  While we do not have the budget to replace our disks with enterprise class disks, we are lead to believe that they would actively compensate for environmental rotational vibrations that may impact write/read performance.

As for us, a solution to the problem was to turn the fan speed down to “quiet” in the BIOS.  If you find this information useful, you can always consider making a donation to Project DoD.

I was recently asked about why Project DoD named its name servers darkside.dod.net and deathstar.dod.net, rather than something more appropriate like FREEDOMOFSPEECH.DOD.NET and FREEDOMOFSPEECH2.DOD.NET.  Here is the long answer.  The names are a simple pop culture reference to Star Wars themes.  Also covered in our podcast — not yet published — is how we started in 1998.  When we started, Project DoD was about providing a full-featured hosting service to the underprivileged.  The evolution to a censorship resistant hosting provider came around 2004 and 2005.  As hosting became more of a commodity we started to loose users to the big corporations because they could provide a better level of support and hardware/software resources at reasonable prices.  At the same time we were starting to take an influx of users (that we sometimes refer to as corporate hosting refugees) that were being censored because large corporations cared about one thing: profit.  We cared more about our mission than profit, and users gradually started to host with us because they needed this type of consideration when being censored.  So, we did not choose FREEDOMOFSPEECH as a hostname at the time, because that was not what we were providing.

A side note on the freedom of speech issue is that dod.net not a true free speech provider.  Our mission is to promote a more just and equitable future through the use of technology.  True free speech — in theory — values that one principal above all others.  I for one believe that for members of a global community to live and flourish we need access to all ideas (the very good and the very bad).  In practice, providing an outlet for the very bad tends to violate our mission to provide a more just and equitable future.  For instance, we do not host hate sites or sites advocating pedophilia.  These are two real world cases where the collective members sat up for nights on end discussing the merits of true free speech in society.  The academic line — that I personally believe in — is that something deemed “really bad free speech” is always relative based on the disposition of the observer.  For instance, you and I may find a racial slur offensive because of cultural or religious predispositions, where certain segments of society may use that same word without its negative racial intention.  In the former case we are likely to censor the use of that word, where in the latter case the person using it would not censor it.  Through this example, one can see that those members of society that enjoy the privilege to control content are the ones that set what is an acceptable frame of reference on free speech.  As a result, free speech becomes relative to the sensibilities and tastes of those in a position of power.

Going back to the academic argument, we can see that true free speech is something that must be held as a higher principal.  That is, its a fundamental precondition to liberty that no individual or group of individuals should have the power to obstruct free speech.  But we can clearly also see that Project DoD does not at this point in time support certain types of speech that violate the principals of our mission statement.  So while we may have a very open policy on what we will host, the organization has not made the commitment to be a truly free speech provider.  I’m one of the dissenting members that believes the answer to bad speech is more speech, but until the organization can reach a consensus on commitment to true free speech hosting, we’re more inclined to say we are a censorship resistant hosting provider.

Back to the issue at hand.  You can see we did not choose a free speech theme because we were not focused on free speech at the time, nor do we think of ourselves as a truly free speech provider yet.  As for why we originally chose those names.  Well I would love to tell you that we sat around thinking about those names for nights on end trying to choose something clever.  That we chose those specific themes from Star Wars as some sort of social commentary on the dangers of imperialism.  Truth be told, we were all living in a house together when we originally started Project DoD.  In that house we had a room lined with all sorts of computers.  At any given time there were five people sitting around hacking on something while one of the three original Star Wars movies infinitely looped on a television hooked up to a VCR in the corner of the room.  I’m sure when the time came to choose the names we simply spat out whatever themes had been subconsciously playing through our heads.

Would we like to change the names?  The answer to that is most certainly yes, but last I checked this was not a trivial task.  Domain registrars typically attach the DNS records for a domain to the name’s of the servers you provide.  So, while we have change the addresses of those servers over the years, we have never changed the hostnames.  To do so could possibly take a huge amount of cooperation with each user, for a simple name change.  As of right now we are naming servers after donors as a way to say thank you for all your support.  We are planning on naming our future name servers after donors and slowly retiring the legacy darkside.dod.net and deathstar.dod.net names.  Nevertheless, they have been with us for twelve years and will most certainly mark the end of an era.

At the suggestion of users we have cleaned up the domain list on the side of the Project DoD homepage.  Every ten minutes we will check our internal domain list and verify that the domains on the list are active in DNS, reside on our server, and are serving something other than the default index list.  So, if your domain has been removed from the list please make sure your domain is still active with a registrar, the domain points to our servers in DNS (foo.com -> www.dod.net), and you’ve uploaded some form of content other than using the default index.  Once you meet all the requirements your domain should be on the list within 10 minutes.

The list went from 156 domains to 100 domains as a result of this cleaning.  Please let us know if you find any problems.

This is video footage of the Tsunami created by the Chile earthquake last week.  A good fiend of mine, Damon Houk captured this footage outside his home in Hawaii.  You can view his upload here.

Imagine living in a world where the critics of a medical practice are silenced when speaking out about its scientific merit and potential risks. As it turns out, there is no need to imagine this world, because you’re living in it. The scientific process is what gives western medicine the ability to progress, adapt, and improve. This process, and indeed the entire marketplace of ideas, requires that all parties involved have equal access to entering a debate about the facts. Project DoD has been hosting refugees from the corporate hosting world for quite some time, and over the past 12 years one technique to disturb this balance reigns supreme.

Misrepresenting infringing work using DMCA 512 takedown provisions — that favor rapidity over accuracy — has become the most powerful tool an abuser can use to censor content on the web.  DMCA related censorship is a condition of hosting in the US these days, a fact that the international community should consider before adopting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).  This post is a cautionary tale about the state of free speech on the Internet, the failures of provision 512 of the DMCA, and the risks to the entire Internet community if the ACTA takes hold.  We hope to demonstrate through example the burden placed on ISPs to comply with the takedown provisions of the DMCA and their disastrous consequences on free speech, and in this particular case, the scientific process and public safety.

The Problem Quick and Simple

A little over a year ago Project DoD, one of its users, and one of its upstream providers started receiving DMCA takedown notices from a group of individuals bent on silencing Advocates for Children in Therapy, an organization trying to stop the practice of attachment therapy. As it turned out, ACT had allegedly been chased around the Internet by Ronald S. Federici et al. based on a claim that ACT was violating his copyright and the copyright of his colleagues. ACT was bounced from both small and major hosting shops because of these DMCA 512 infringement notifications, and the organization was never once given the option to file a counter notice.

Other ISPs decisions to kick ACT presumably stem from the fact that the DMCA seeks to tie the ISP’s liability to the content upon notification of infringement. That is, a takedown notification is not simply a cease and desist against the user, but an implicit threat on behalf of the notifier that the ISP may be sued for its user’s content.  If a user files a counter notice, the ISP must continue to keep the content down for about 10 days, but may suffer further liability on behalf of its user if the content is not restored within 15 days. If the ISP jumps through all these hoops they may still suffer baseless threats from either party. Remember, there is no judicial oversight of this entire process. In order for either party to have their day in court, the DMCA has forced the ISP into the position of arbitrating this legal dance, which is at best time-consuming, and at worst a total blunder that leaves the ISP liable for damages to one party or both.  We’ve posted about this problem and its implications on free speech before, and that says nothing compared to what one might find on sites like the EFF, chilling effects, or simply by following #DMCA or #ACTA on Twitter.

As if to add insult to injury, the tool to prevent abuse by either party is provision 512(f), which allows the ISP to collect damages and attorney fees if either the notice or counter notice was misrepresented. This provision amounts to more lawyers, more time, more money, and as we’re finding out it’s often a huge battle simply to choose jurisdiction (which is likely to be a nightmare with the ACTA).  So as not to wave our hands at the magnitude of this problem in the abstract, we will share our specific experiences in more detail.

The Details

The violation in question was a page with a list of properly cited quotes, that were/are quite clearly fair-use. What’s more, our friends at the EFF, with their work on Lenz vs. Universal, had recently gotten a judge to state that fair use must be considered before takedown notices are sent. These findings go a long way to giving provision 512(f) teeth for any ISP willing to stand up against abusive takedown notices, but do not guarantee that an ISP is willing to go through the process of defending its users.  In fact, the deck is stacked so far against the ISP and its users that there have only been a handful of 512(f) claims filed in the last 10 years despite rampant abuse.

Project DoD’s involvement with this case started when Ronald S. Federici sent an incomplete takedown notice for a list of properly cited quotes. We honored the initial takedown notice, but realized it was incomplete when ACT expressed their intention to file a counter notice.  We apologized to all parties and requested clarification on the elements of notification from Federici, while restoring ACT’s content.  We now strongly suggest that all ISPs possess a full understanding of what elements of notification are required by a takedown notice, and request clarification for incomplete notices.  While Federici insisted that we shut down their entire website, the elements of notification define the exact content that is claimed to be infringing.  What’s more it provides key conditions that may be contested by either the user or the ISP in a counter notice or 512(f) claim.

At this point Mr. Federici put together the proper elements of notification, which we forwarded on to ACT.   The content was removed from advocatesforchildrenintherapy.org, and ACT filed a counter notice maintaining that their use of the content was fair.  In order for Project DoD to comply with the safe-harbor conditions of the DMCA we were then statutorily required to keep the content down for 10 days.  This, in our opinion, is one of the worse possible requirements of the DMCA.  Without any judicial oversight someone can send a takedown notice to an ISP, and in order for the ISP to not be liable — even if the user contests the notification — they must keep the content down for 10 days.  In the computer security world we call this a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

After DoSing ACT’s content for 10 days, Project DoD started to receive takedown notices from other people listed on ACT’s site that followed the same template as the Federici notices.  It appeared clear to us that there was collusion behind the scenes, and all said and done we received six other takedown notices from individuals listed on the childrenintherapy.org homepage.  Like the Federici takedown notice we requested clarification on the elements of notification where necessary, and took ACT’s content down for each 512 notice received.  For a full month there was some part of the ACT site that had the words “redacted” written all over it because of this abuse.

While the content was down, Project DoD and its upstream provider, Silicon Valley Web Host, received harassing communications threatening further legal action if the content was restored as required by the statute.  The process of dealing with every complaint was time consuming to say the least, and these individuals were sending additional complaints via email on a daily basis that we needed to forward to our counsel for review.  What’s more they severely strained our relationship with our upstream provider, and nearly had every site we host go dark as a result.

We cannot demonstrate with more clarity what it means to be a member of a hosting collective that puts its mission and members above profit.  In the end we survived the assault and moved on to pursue technological solutions that would help prevent attacks on free speech in the future.  Unfortunately, about six months later we received another takedown notice from Federici for the same exact content, but this time the communication came through his attorney.

Again both Project DoD and our upstream provider were assaulted, and again the content was exactly the same, save the consolidation of the domain name, from advocatesforchildrenintherapy.org to childrenintherapy.org.  ACT, controls both domains, but they had put in a redirect for the advocates domain to the shorter childrenintherapy domain.

Enough was enough!  Project DoD’s members consulted with the EFF to discussed what options we had at our disposal, and the conclusion was obvious: provision 512(f).  The EFF backed our upstream provider, while Project DoD’s attorneys Tiffany Rad and Craig Dorais found two litigating attorneys, Robert Mittel and Rufus Brown, to assist with the case.

From this point forward the matter is public record, but I have uploaded the arguments for peer review and comment under the “Court Documents” section of this post.  As anyone can see by the title of this article, our case was dismissed in Maine based on Maine’s lack of personal jurisdiction over Mr. Federici.  As somewhat of a surprise to us, Eric Goldman, Associate Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and Director of the High Tech Law Institute posted this analysis of our case.

While our case is by no means over, we believe it’s instructive for those dealing with provision 512 abuse in the US, and a severe warning to the international community about the looming threat of the ACTA.

Conclusions

I’m feeding a wood fire stove on a small island off the coast of Maine, there is snow on the ground and it’s about an hour before midnight on New Years Eve.  Tomorrow ushers in the 10th year anniversary of the DMCA, which proponents of free speech are still fighting passionately to correct.  I have passed up a night of celebration to write this post.  Disturbingly, if the injustice of the DMCA goes on unnoticed, the international community now faces the looming threat of the ACTA.

I’m sure that, like us, you’re wondering how it is that a handful of large media corporations have the power to control the laws that dictate your right to free speech, and your access to information.  All we can say is take heart.  You’re not alone in this battle.  Spread the word about the DMCA, the ACTA, and their potential abuses.  Talk about this new era of censorship, about the dangers of silencing free speech, about the dangers of silencing debate over science and medicine, and about the danger to our liberty when the rich and powerful design laws where the effectiveness of the gag they hold in one hand is only surpassed by the blindfold they wield in the other.  Fight to be in control of your own speech, insist that you be in control of your actions, and that you are the one accountable for those actions.  Fight against a law that forces internet service providers, primarily concerned with profit, to share liability for your content.  If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that this state of affairs fails to serve the interest of the ISP, the user, or free speech.

I’m reminded of the 1960’s Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and the words of Mario Savio:

There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Fight censorship, fight silence, and don’t give in!

Happy New Year from Project Defense of Dissent

Further Reading

In previous posts we have talked about DMCA Abuse and the Changing Service Landscape, while the EFF has also discussed the problem in their No Downtime for Free Speech Campaign article.  If you have a related article please feel free to post it in the comments.

Help Project DoD

Project DoD is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit and your donations are tax deductible in the United States.  If you can, please make a donation to Project DoD today.  If you’re interested in assisting us to build a more censorship resistant global infrastructure, you can spark up a conversation on irc.dod.net in #dod.  We may be available to answer questions for members of the press, or to speak on this topic.  Please call if you have questions or would like us to speak: 207-450-2332.

Court Documents

Complaint as filed Part 1

Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss

Motion to Dismiss

Plaintiff’s Opposition Memo

Recommneded Decision

Looks like our DEFCON 17 talk on “Enhancing the World of Warcraft API” was posted.  If you want to watch it again, or for the fist time you can see it on the DEFCON 17 archive page!  Note that the video is not streamed, which means you must wait to download the entire thing.  Also listed on the DEFCON site are the slides and audio files for the talk.

Again, we have walked away from this project.  But if you would like to learn more about how our code works, or simply download the latest version that the community is working on you can go to the BTP page.  You can also read about our talk in the MIT Technology Review, and read about the official Blizzard’s response.  Unfortunately, it was not what we had hoped for, but was more in-line with what we expected.

If any of you were thinking of buying one of these Apple Time Capsules: don’t! They are way underpowered, and while I can’t tell you if this is an I/O or CPU problem, I can tell you about the design failures I’ve found.

First off, any time a user starts a backup the latency over the wireless network goes up to anywhere between one and ten seconds, and this is not because of the traffic created over the wireless network.  That is, if on plugs directly into the time capsule over ethernet, it still chokes out the device.  Large transfers over the network don’t slow the wireless network down, but if Time Machine starts to write to the disk, in fact if any process starts to write to the disk, the network collapses. You can still browse web pages, and you can still download, but if you expect to do anything that requires interactive access: forget it. This means that any remote SSH sessions, interactive chats, or online games are almost unusable.

To reproduce this you are likely going to have trouble testing it out of the box, which is why I assume this passed Apple’s testers without notice. In short, you need to have been using the time capsule for a month or so, which should be enough time to build up a fairly large sparesebundle. My assumption is that the time it takes to work with this large sparsebundle, reading all the band files, destroys either the I/O or the CPU of the device. If you already have a large image to back up, and you do it once, the next time you do a backup you should be able to reproduce this.

What’s more, I’ve been backing up my Macbook Pro on the Time Capsule and about a month ago all of my backups started to fail. Now I’m a busy person, and having my backups fail was not high on my list of things to fix. In fact, I dropped about $500.00 US on this thing so that I wouldn’t have to worry about my backups. After being unable to use the backup for a month and finding no other solution online, I decided I had no other option than to remove the sparsebundle file and start my backup over. So I opened finder and tried to delete the sparsebundle, but after a few hours the delete failed.

Now I believe the steps above would have exhausted almost all options for a normal user, but I had a few more tricks up my sleeve. Using Terminal I wandered onto my Time Capsule and found out that the sparsebundle files are a lot like MAC applications in that they are a directory structure with a bunch of meta information and data inside. Each band file that made up the sparsebundle was about eight megabytes in size, which — for large volumes — is far too small a chunk size. As a result, over a few short months, time machine had made enough small files to hit the maximum file limit of 65,535, which is why I was unable to delete the backup image from finder.

… some time passes …

I was planning on telling people how to fix this band size problem by resizing the band files, but a few days ago my time capsule’s power supply died. As a result, I no longer care about this post. So, In summary, don’t try to fix the band size problem since the time capsule will just fail; backing up over ethernet may reduce the time it takes to backup, but during that time you will experience unbelievable lag; and if you have one of these things get ready to register it at http://www.timecapsuledead.org/.  If you do not have one of these things, then congratulations you’ve saved $500.00.

Cheers

That’s right, Project DoD Inc. has achieved its financial goals for 2009.  We would like to thank everyone who generously donated, even in this tough economy.  Rest assured that your donations are being put to good use.   Not only have we completed our 12th year of service to the community, but we may have enough money to look at a cluster of modest servers to start building a more stable and censorship resistant infrastructure.

These last few years the Internet community has seen a marked increase in DMCA abuse.  As a result dod.net has seen a similar increase in refugees from the corporate hosting world.  We are standing up for people’s right to free speech, and speaking out against the DMCA and the new International ACTA, being drafted behind closed doors.  In addition to providing a new home for victims of fraudulent DMCA takedown notices, we are also standing up for our users in court.  We will release more information on our DMCA court case as we can.

Again, a big thank you to everyone involved with Project DoD.  Let’s make 2010 our best year yet.  Oh, and remember, “talk hard!”

We just updated the dod.net wildcard certs for  subdomains (e.g. foobar.dod.net), IRC, account manager, and the rest of our web content.  It costs us $600.00 a year, so please enjoy your collective SSL.