By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd October 2001

“Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here”, Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the First World War ended, “that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”. In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to regional control and the transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked, “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.” But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin’s fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia’s political and economic control over the Central Asian Republics, which is precisely what the West has spent ten years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of “diversifying energy supply” and to penetrate the world’s most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In South Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, the US oil company Unocal has been seeking since 1995 to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. The company’s scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that “oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America’s, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan.” Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal’s interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid “the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [a US oil consortium which worked in Saudi Arabia], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.” US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal’s plans and the government’s covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained “the only other possible route” for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in East Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan’s strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration reported that “Afghanistan’s significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan.” Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that a reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of “Corridor 8″, an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

This is not the only long-term US interest in Afghanistan. American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance”, which means that the United States should control military, economic and political development all over the world. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that “China’s fundamental interests lie in … the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order”. In June, China and Russia pulled four Central Asian Republics into a “Shanghai Co-operation Organisation”. Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to “foster world multi-polarisation”, by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the United States succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing it with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if it then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944, “The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.” I believe that the United States government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naive to believe that this is all it is doing.

A politician being touted as Britain’s next Prime Minister has been persuaded to take action to criminalize 7 million citizens following intensive industry lobbying over file-sharing. Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is in favor of introducing tough laws including Internet restrictions and fines of up to £50,000 ($83,000).

The debate on how Britain should tackle illicit file-sharing is heating up. The government has already set an utterly unrealistic target of reducing online piracy by 70% within a year. If that isn’t achieved, under the Digital Britain proposals communications regulator Ofcom would be given extra powers to take degenerative action against the functionality of a user’s Internet connection.

Now, thanks to intense lobbying from the music and movie industries, the government is considering giving Ofcom these powers more quickly.

Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, the man being touted among his Labour party voters as the successor to Prime Minister Brown, is said this morning to have been “persuaded by the argument for tough laws to curb illegal file-sharing.”

But what could’ve prompted this renewed aggressive anti-piracy stance from Mandelson? According to a report today, the Business Secretary’s intervention comes after he and David Geffen – the billionaire producer who co-founded the DreamWorks studio with Steven Spielberg – had dinner with members of the Rothschild banking dynasty at the family’s holiday villa on the Greek island of Corfu.

The consultation document on Government’s latest plans – which could be included in the Queen’s Speech later this year – could mean the criminalizing up to 7 million British citizens including Internet restrictions and fines of up to £50,000.

UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson is naturally against these draconian fines. “You’re branding a huge percentage of this population criminals for doing something that doesn’t have any proven implications,” he said this week. “It’s a ridiculous state of affairs. People who copy a movie are lumped in with people who steal cars.”

After having negotiated a deal with the entertainment industries, ISPs in the UK have agreed to send out warning letters to customers who are suspect of downloading copyrighted movies and music. However, one ISP has decided to take it one step further, by actually disconnecting alleged copyright infringer.

Every day, tens of thousands of warning letters are sent out to ISPs on behalf of copyright holders. Some ISPs simply ignore them but the majority forwards the emails to their customers. However, the actions of the UK ISP Karoo in dealing with these requests are quite unique, and more far reaching than this.

Instead of notifying its customers that they have received a letter from a copyright holder, with the claim that their IP-address is associated with illegal downloading - Karoo customers are immediately disconnected without any prior warning. As we reported last year, Karoo doesn’t even allow users to have an open router.

Andrea Robinson is one of the Karoo customers who was accused of downloading illegally, Terminator Salvation in her case. She lost her Internet connection and the only option she has to get her Internet access reinstated is by signing a form sent to her by Karoo, which says she admits guilt.

“The form basically said ‘if I admit my guilt you’ll reconnect me’. So I didn’t sign it and walked out. I’m still not reconnected,” she told the BBC. With Karoo being the only ISP in her neighbourhood she is now left with no Internet, and clueless what to do about it. According to the BBC she is not the only one, as there are similar cases at Karoo dating two years back.

In the United States there is one ISP that employs a similar strategy - Cox. When Cox receives a takedown request from a copyright holder, it will disconnect the customer associated with the IP-address, if they don’t admit to being guilty. If a customer receives three take down requests their Internet is cut off entirely.

The real problem with Karoo and Cox’s methods lies in the fact that they act upon accusations made by anti-piracy organizations who employ evidence gathering methods that are shoddy, to say the least.

In the UK, the BBC consumer show Watchdog revealed how easy it is to point the finger (and pull the plug) on the wrong person. For Karoo this means that these wrongfully accused customers will lose their Internet access, unless they admit to an offence they were not involved in.

Since Karoo is the one and only Internet provider in the area, some will feel that they have no alternative, and they will sign the “guilty” form just to get back on-line. The anti-piracy groups must be proud of Karoo and their reckless tactics but the ISP should stop to consider the future. Monopolies don’t last forever and the Internet has a long memory.

Update: After today’s reports Karoo decided to change their policy. Instead of disconnecting alleged pirates directly, they will operate a a three strikes and you are out rule.

Just last week, multi-talented entertainer and general all round good guy Stephen Fry confirmed what everyone had secretly hoped he would, that he pirates TV shows with BitTorrent. Now, to immortalize those momentous occasions, a new game featuring Fry himself has been released entitled ‘Stephen Fry and The Quantum of Torrents.’

Last week Stephen Fry admitted to downloading TV shows for free using BitTorrent. Speaking at the iTunes Festival in London, Fry told the gathered audience that he previously downloaded episodes of 24 and the series finale of House, starring his former comedy partner Hugh Laurie.

Fry also took the opportunity to have a swipe at the music industry and criticize the Digital Britain report. But enough of the boring stuff already.

Stephen’s antics haven’t gone unnoticed by Glasgow based games design company, T-Enterprise. Inspired by Stephen’s confession, they created a new Flash game entitled Stephen Fry and the Quantum of Torrents in which the player takes control of Stephen in his trademark black London taxi, dodging the law and downloading copies of House.

“When I heard about Stephen Fry’s admission of guilt about downloading illegally at the iTunes Festival I could not believe it! Especially not given the fact he was supposed to be speaking out about piracy in the industry!” said T-Enterprise’s Managing Director Sadia Chishti.

“So he had downloaded the rest of the [House] series legally but it seems that there is always the temptation to take the easy route. At least he has admitted it and not gone down the hypocritical one. What a refreshing change…”

For years the RIAA has defended the use of DRM, much to the dislike of millions of honest customers who actually paid for their music. Now, in a shocking turnaround, the outfit seems to have come to the realization that DRM does more harm than good and has officially declared its death.

The digital music landscape is evolving continuously. Just two years ago RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol defended the use of DRM on digital music because customers would benefit from it.

“DRM serves all sorts of pro-consumer purposes,” he said at the time, without going into detail about the alleged benefits.

However, in the year that followed the numbers of consumers calling for DRM-free music increased and more labels and music services started to offer music without digital restrictions. Still, the RIAA was not convinced that there could be a future without it, and predicted a comeback for DRM last year.

Quite the opposite happened. Although DRM is still present in the majority of the legal music stores, most of the big players have decided to ditch it. Most importantly Apple announced in early 2009 that all music sold via the iTunes store would be free of DRM. This time even the RIAA doesn’t believe that it can be resurrected.

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA’s view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

When the most vocal forefighters of DRM say so, it must be for real. Although this is the first time that the RIAA have actually said on record that DRM is dead, other players in the music industry have seen the light before them. Most notable IFPI, who said earlier this year that stripping DRM would “significantly boost download sales.”

In this we have to agree with them. All DRM has ever done is annoy consumers who actually paid for their music. No single piece of DRM has ever stopped anyone from pirating music, it’s quite the opposite as the music industry now realizes.

I been checking out this torrent tracker and I do like what I see. The tracker is biult into apache2 as a module and all its configuration are done in one file:

/etc/apache2/mods-available/bt.conf

Looking a the debian history of this package there been pachtes but it look like the develement of the module is on hold. On the Developer web page he say on a To Do list that “Implicit infohash registration by placing a .torrent in a directory (Probably a mod_perl2 handler that sits on top of /announce)“. This would be real benefit. The standard Bittorrent uses this method.

I ended up killing the test tracker with the tool btt_infohash - which edit infohash data in a mod_bt tracker database. I could not get the hang of how you use this tool.

I hope the this tracker software will become one for the main one out there. I like what I see and it would be a great benifit for Bittorrent world.

In preparing for Monday’s public FCC hearing, I decided to do a bit of research into how much money an organization can save by using bittorrent. It turns out that the savings are pretty amazing!

As you will see Democracy Now! has a fixed cost of roughly $200 per month (the service is donated) for distributing their news program at full resolution. Compare that to a bill for serving direct HTTP downloads using Amazon’s S3 service, which would currently sit at roughly $1200 per month and would increase with viewership.

diagram

Arriving at these numbers began with an email to Democracy Now!’s resident hacker, Mike Castleman. Based on the information he sent me, I calculated the following:
Current Traffic of Full-Res Video @ Democracy Now!

* Viewers/Downloaders per Day: 400-1000
* Average Video Size: 440 MB
* Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: 7-8 Terabytes

As for the cost, they priced out a dedicated server for bittorrent delivery and found that it would be about $200 per month (someone donated the service in the mean time). I decided to compare this to Amazon’s S3 hosting and delivery service, which would be a pretty standard choice for an organization of this size.
Cost: HTTP

* Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: 7-8 Terabytes
* Price per Gigabyte of Transfer (@ < 10 Terabytes): 18 cents
* Monthly Cost for Amazon S3: $1100 – $1500 (increasing with viewership)

Cost: Bittorrent

* Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: irrelevant
* Monthly Cost for Bittorrent Server: $200 (doesn’t increase with viewership)

Interesting Note: Amazon S3 supports the bittorrent protocol. In the right situation, this can serve as a great solution for saving money on bandwidth.

Stephen Fry, a highly respected actor, comedian, writer, presenter and author yesterday admitted to downloading TV shows for free using BitTorrent. Speaking at the iTunes Festival in London last night, Fry told the audience that he’s grabbed episodes of 24 and the series finale of House, starring his former comedy partner Hugh Laurie.

In Britain - and increasingly around the world - Stephen Fry is a much loved man. His contribution to the entertainment industry over many years has been colossal, with many of his fans in awe of his amazing mind and outstanding wit.

A self-proclaimed Internet and digital addict, Fry claims to have owned the second ever Mac sold in the UK and has joked that he has owned every smart phone available today. Indeed, he recently wowed Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson by showing him a pretty unusual use for his iPhone. Fry even has more than 500,000 Twitter followers.

So, unlike many who speak about Internet issues, there is a good chance that Stephen Fry actually knows what he’s talking about. Yesterday, to an audience gathered for the iTunes Festival in London’s Camden Town, he was a little more honest than most would’ve expected on the issue of illicit downloading, even if just hours before he revealed that he was finding his appearance unnerving, admitting, “I haven’t the least idea what I’m going to say.”

But it came good in the end. In a speech about copyright and the future of music introduced by Stuff’s editor-in-chief Tom Dunmore, Fry poured scorn on the music industry for attacking the public in file-sharing cases. “Making an example of ordinary people is the stupidest thing the record industry can do,” he said.

Noting a problem that was earlier outlined here on TorrentFreak, Fry said the Digital Britain report did not represent the views of the public, but those of “industry insiders” instead.

While Fry is pragmatic about the piracy situation, he’s not a supporter of large-scale infringers, described by him as those who download on an “industrial scale”. When asked how he felt about his own media output being pirated, Fry said: “I’m against cynical bootlegging but I work in a very molly coddled, overpaid business.”

But unsurprisingly for a clued-up digital native in 2009, there are some kinds of piracy that Fry isn’t completely against. He told the audience at London’s Roundhouse that he is a BitTorrent user himself and has grabbed episodes of 24 using the protocol.

Interestingly, he went on to reveal that he had also downloaded the season finale of House, the hit US show which stars the comedian most known for partnering Fry, Hugh Laurie.

However - and drawing a somewhat interesting analogy - Fry said that in the end, illegal downloaders may well feel a little guilty over grabbing something without paying for it. “Most of us feel guilt when we masturbate,” he said, “even though we live in 2009.”

Appearing a little concerned that his slightly pro-piracy stance might be misinterpreted, Fry then appeared on his beloved Twitter. “Well, finished my bit. Hope I’m not misunderstood. Such a pity if I get misrepresented as a ‘help yourself and be a pirate’ advocate.”

Not at all Stephen. The fact is there could be as many as 6 million people in the UK doing exactly as you are doing, largely because there still isn’t an attractive, workable, widespread and convenient legal alternative. You set the example. You buy lots of media and download too, which proves that participating in one doesn’t exclude you from the other.

The infamous Dasht-e-Leili massacre is back in the news in the wake of new evidence published in a New York Times report last Friday that shows the Bush administration blocked at least three federal investigations into the alleged war crimes. The article by journalist James Risen notes that “American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation because the warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the CIA and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001.” Dostum served as a defense official in the Karzai government. Last year he was suspended for threatening a rival at gunpoint and lived in Turkey in exile. But ahead of the August 20th elections, Karzai has invited him back to the country and reinstated him as military chief of staff. Democracy Now! first covered the massacre six years ago when we aired the award-winning documentary from Jamie Doran Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death.

URL to original article: www.democracynow.org

The pro-internet file sharing Pirate Party yesterday scored a big win by securing a seat in the European parliament.

It pulled in 7.1 per cent of votes in Sweden, which handed the party one of the country’s 18 seats in the European parliament.

“Privacy issues and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that clearly when they voted today,” Pirate Party candidate Anna Troberg told Swedish TV on Sunday.

Thousands of Swedes declared their support for the party following the landmark Pirate Bay trial in April, which saw founders of the notorious BitTorrent tracker site convicted of being accessories to breaching copyright laws and handed one-year jail terms.

The party was formed in Sweden in 2006 following the introduction of a controversial law that forbade the downloading of copyrighted material from the internet.

The Pirate Party is not the only marginal party that has now claimed a seat in Strasbourg. In the UK, the Far Right BNP has claimed two seats, while the UK Independence Party came in second overall behind the Conservatives. Labour was pushed into third place.

The BNP, which styles itself as the representative of the “Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norse and closely related kindred peoples” it says constitute the indigenous peoples of the UK, took 6.5 per cent of the UK vote. The Pirate Party beat this, with its 7.1 per cent share. We think this tells us something significant, but we’re not sure what.