Is NASA Still Relevant?

Well, that's that. The shuttle program is no more. More importantly, NASA is now without any functional launch vehicle capable of achieving orbit. NASA will rely on the Russians to get U.S. astronauts to the ISS. There is a certain irony in this. NASA will also use the capabilities of private companies once these system are mature enough. NASA's own launch system is still being studied. I have doubts that even this scaled back system will never be built, given how easily the U.S. government cuts NASA's budget. The U.S. seems determined to make itself irrelevant in future space exploration.

Kill The Messenger

Killing the messenger is rarely a useful tactic but that seemed to be the goal against WikiLeaks this past week. First Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off the S3 service. Then EveryDNS killed the WikiLeaks DNS service. Lastly, PayPal terminated the WikiLeaks donation account. These are all U.S. companies responding to pressure from elements in the U.S govenment. Of course, no one at the companies has the guts to admit that they censoring WikiLeaks. Instead they offer plausible, hand wavy explanations, coincidence be damned. All this backlash over some diplomats' gossip, most of which should never have been kept secret in the first place.

Of course, trying to kill the messenger on the Internet is like trying to trap a fly with a fishing net. Since the attacks against it have become too severe, WikiLeaks is finally mirroring the site on multiple servers, something many believe they ought to have done from the beginning.

[Updated 2010-12-06. Should be EveryDNS, not EasyDNS.]

Long Hard War

The U.S. continues the long slide down the slippery slope as the Department of Homeland Security "seized" several domains (full list) for alleged copyright violations. Apart from the obvious question of what does copyright have to with U.S. security, what does the DHS think they've actually "seized"?

A domain is just an address in a database, nothing more. It costs a few dollars the register another one. Guess what? Most of the owners of the seized domains probably already have new domains. Once again the people at the top demonstrate that they have little understanding of how the Internet works.

And that my friends is why we will win in the end. However, make no mistake: it's going to be a long hard war. What's next? Wikileaks?

ACTA: The Extremes

Last week the European Parliament passed a resolution which shoots down the entire process in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations. On the other side of the Atlantic, President Obama throws his unreserved support behind ACTA. This is about as extreme an opposing view can possibly get. Each nation in the negotiations has a veto over what information can be released, so as long as the U.S. takes this position any transparency on ACTA is impossible.