Today I found out that some laws recently passed in Sweden to allow then to capture and spy on all internet traffic in their country. This is a big deal because of the way the internet works. Your messages are sent between about 20 “Routers” on their way around the world to the place where they are going, and now, if any of those routers are in Sweden, your message will be able to be read by their government, unless you are using something like SSL for the communication. The Pirate Bay, a large, respected digital media sharing platform, is advising ISP’s to block traffic moving via Sweden to protect their user’s from these privacy issues. I contacted my ISP, iiNet, to suggest they implement this. Their response was very disapointing. Seemingly boiling down to ‘you do it, we can’t be bothered’.

Hello,

Thank you for your email.

I am very sorry but we cannot stop all traffic between our country and sweden. We also
cannot advise sweden not to implement these laws.

All trafiic, even in Australia, is monitored to some degree. In order to catch criminals
who use the internet illegal uses we must monitor at least where traffic is going and
how much is going out. No country is completely unmonitored.

The U.S.A is heavily monitored by a system called “Echelon”. If you wish to stop your
traffic going through the United States you will have massive problems with your
internet service.

If you do wish to stop your traffic going through sweden then you can use a command called
“tracert” from the command prompt of your system to check the path to the website you are
intending on going to. If the trace goes through Sweden, do not use the website.

If you have any further inquiries please don’t hesitate to contact us by either replying
to this email or calling our friendly support staff on 13 22 58.

Regards,
Shaun the Shiny Pony
Customer Support Representative

I changed the names for the privacy of the support person. :)

The comparisons aren’t any good. ‘Echelon’ was a system mostly used to spy on the soviets. While it can supposedly intercept emails, it is hardly a system designed from the start to spy on regular citizens. And I’m sure you can all tell the difference between looking at where the messages are going, and opening them up looking at all the text inside, and making a copy just in case you’d like to look again later.

A disapointing result, but maybe your ISP respects your privacy more than mine. Why not email them a support request asking about this issue too? Surely with enough pressure we can get Sweden to behave as a good citizen of earth.

Nellie McKay — Identity Theft is a track from her really great album! Modern political music is fun! ^_^

Markaby is nifty and all, but to my horror, just now I found out that it enforces the standards! That’s no way to live! A world of ideals and hopes and dreams. Okay so here is how to hack markaby to let you use an attribute that isn’t in the specs:

Markaby::XHTMLStrict.tagset[:option] << :"data-href"

And now you can use option(”blah”, :”data-href” => “nifty stuff!”) to transport nifty stuff to the funky cool javascripts in your page. Of course your page won’t validate anymore, but you’ll have a warm cuddly feeling because you are still using a standard, even if it’s a draft standard and not the one you specified with your doctype, and your app will work and have nice clean output! This hack would be especially useful for using Dojo with markaby. :)