Do something about the TPP, fellow youtubers ..... Mail your senators now.....

Well Folks. The TPP (trans pacific partnership) is still being worked on. This draconian "treaty" to force copyright infringement laws, very draconian ones, ones that make SOPA look nice, has to be stopped. It's up to you to stop this. Because under this Treaty, YouTube and all of the Internet gets shut down. Including Gaming sites. This treaty would do the following:



"I've decided to write about what I've been writing about on that

blog for the last few days, the secret treaty called the "Trans-Pacific Partnership", which will
 basically force US to adopt copyright laws so broad and corrupt that it will make SOPA look
nice.  Under the law, the ISP's are required to A) filter all communications looking for possible
or alleged infringement, and then they are forced to hand it over to the government. The
government would then look through it looking for possible infringement. The problem with
this is that the government can then say that this site needs to be taken down to google and
other similar sites, force ISPS to filter it out, and worse. No actual proof is required that the
transmission or site is actually infringing on something, just one infringing link, or the
assurance that the site contains lots of infringing links. Also temporary copy infringement, is 
not exempt to this. Every time someone watches a video on YouTube, 1000's of temporary 
copies are created by the streaming process. The ISP would be forced to use deep packet 
inspection to find these and if one of these temporary copies is a YouTube packet that is part 
of a youtube video stream that has one "alleged" infringement on it, the person watching the 
video could get arrested, and sued, because the ISP is forced to tell the "alleged" copyright 
holder. The most recent RIAA case defendant had to pay $22,500 dollars per songs for 
illegally  downloading only 30 songs, each only 99 cents each... Imagine that multiplied by 
1000 for listening  to a video on YouTube where video game footage is overlayed with 
copyrighted music, because of the  1000's of temporary copies produced on the persons
HDD, all caught by the ISP. That's $22,500,000  dollars for watching a video!


Under this, there is an almost certain chance YouTube will be shut down. Youtube is filled with
infringing videos uploading copyrighted music. At least a few million.  But the other video types
uploaded to youtube, such as video game lets plays, walkthroughs, etc, could all be sources of
"alleged" infringement, due to the fact that many videos showing off games are put under fair
use, which TPP seems to be made to eliminate.  But even worse,  since the government simply
has to say a site is filled with infringing links, a lot of sites will be targeted under this. Expect all
the big file sharing hosts like 4shared, mediafire, etc to be shut down first. They have tons of
copyrighted material on them, and many people keep assuming they profit off pirated files
because they allow people to buy premium accounts for more upload space, even though the
pirated files are all tiny files, all tiny portions of an archive, split into 200 parts with 200 accounts
registered to upload a file. There is no way sites like this are profiting off of files uploaded to
their free account due to the fact that ads on these sites are part of every download, no
matter how legal."

It's important to talk to your senators NOW. Let them hear your voice. Tell them you can't
stand what this treaty is doing and that that your against it, and they should not vote for it.
It will shut down 90% of the known internet. This is really important, you can do something
about this... It is due for ratification soon, by the end of the year.... Get to work, youtubers!

Note, to get around the filtering they plan, you can use the EFF's plugin, HTTPS everywhere,
to force your browser (FireFox Only) to use the Encrypted HTTPS format. This should (in theory)
prevent the ISP's from illegally reading your traffic (deep packet filtering) under the TPP to find
alleged copyright material some 2 bit fake copyright holder claims you are distributing when your
not. These things can be bypassed. In case this gets passed make sure to do this!

Why Mandatory Web Filtering is stupid....

There are people out there who praise web filtering, and say how It's the greatest thing to protect children online. There are others who say "these non-child friendly sites, why do we even allow them?" and mandate mandatory filtering for all, such as Australia and it's mandatory filtering program called the "great Aussie firewall" which was stopped a few years ago due to complaints that it would block video game sites...
You read it right... Gaming sites..  Censorship is never right, even if kids are the reason for it. Already many states have mandatory regulation in public libraries to block sites found "harmful  to minors", as vague as that seems. The statues are vague and have no specific content that must be blocked, so they basically allow the libraries to chose what sites are harmful to minors to block them.  This extends into schools, including colleges as well in many cases. I tried 2 filters, and both gave me complete control over what sites to block...
Talk about scary ways they could be abused to block out something the person running the school/library doesn't like.  So what's the whole thing about gaming sites being harmful to minors, anyway?

One of the internet filters I tried is a free one called OpenDNS. I also looked at another site called "free internet", which also blocks gaming sites by default...  OpenDNS is not just web filtering, it is a free DNS service to reroute traffic from dangerous (virus) sites that happens to offer a free internet filtering program. I tried it out.... And was shocked how much dubious, not so harmful to minors type stuff was included with full filtering. The following categories of stuff were filtered:

Gaming sites
Sexuality oriented sites
Porn sites
File sharing sites
Web mail
Forums (!)
Gambling
and some others I can't remember now..

Most of these could be considered stuff you don't want kids to see, but gaming sites, forums, webmail, why are they even on the list? So I got curious. I decided to sign up with OpenDNS's free filtering service to test 50 or so sites to see what ones are blocked, assuming I was browsing the internet where OpenDNS was forced down my throat due to mandatory filtering laws (hypothetical ones).  The results were, well stupid...  Number 1, a ton of gaming sites got blocked, including doomworld, planetquake,planethalflife, rockstar.com, planetduke, blood.com, and the site for my favorite video game, Deus Ex.   But even worse the following gaming sites which report on gaming news were also blocked, Rock Paper shotgun, Gamepolitics.com, g4tv.com, kotaku.com. Then you get the downright retarded entries which were blocked for no good reason whatsoever: Fpscreator.com, TesNexus.com, 3dgamers archive, filefront,com, bioware.com (!),  planetdescent.com (!) , and the site of a free descent 2 source port, d2x-xl.   But almost ALL sites for video games that are quite controversial were allowed by this filter, including duke4.net, fear3.co.uk, callofduty.com, seriouszone.com, and others, yet Planetdescent and d2x-xl's sites get blocked? Descent is pretty much the coolest and least violent series of FPS games, you fly around destroying robots, yet the big site for duke nukem 3d, which approaches x-rated terms in violence, is allowed?  Then sites like  rock paper shotgun, and kotaku get blocked for being gaming news sites, what good reason is there for that? Then comes the ones that "really" piss me off, Bioware.com, TesNexus.com, and Gamepolitics.com. Gamepolitics is a game related politics site, not a violent games site, bioware makes RPG games that are mildly violent with one or 2 with same sex relationships that got ripped on Fox News (Mass Effect), besides that their games are less about gore and more about strategy, yet their entire site gets blocked for 1 controversial game? (that shouldn't be, none  the less!). Then you get tesnexus.com, a modding site for a tame yet really good RPG games in the elder scrolls series. Why block that?  None of those games are really that violent at all. Fallout3Nexus, for Fallout 3 wasn't blocked and it's the most violent rpg ever made? Add in 2 file hosting sites for games, Filefront.com, and gamers.org, both blocked. Why? Are they afraid that some kid will download some mods for a game he probably doesn't own... Why filter out files. You need the game and a PC to even play them. Librarians would probably catch the kid trying to burn a cd with  the game demo or attempting to play it in the library. For mods, you need the damn game the mod is for to play it, and a demo won't do. Patches, same thing. Why block file sites whatsoever. There is no reason why, unless the people thought game file hosting would lead to school shootings, or something utterly stupid like  that. It makes no sense whatsoever to block this way, PERIOD.

Other types of sites blocked are web mail sites like gmail and yahoo mail, which have absolutely no reason to block. I had yahoo mail since I was 20 for gods sake. Why filter that out? You then get all the file hosting sites online like 4shared, mediafire, rapidshare, dropbox, etc. All of these have a reputation for hosting pirate files, and they do. But they also host plenty of completely legal files, including mods for video games. There have been plenty of links to video game files on sites like this, posted on forums. Sometimes the only way to be able to host a file is to use a service like this, and simply blanketing them as "pirate" sites is stupid, but unfortunately, it makes no sense to block the host, when you could block the actual warez sites with the links to the 200 files you need to download the pirated stuff, because without that you will never find all 200 files with a simple internet search due to the fact that each link to one of these sites has a completely different account character list and file name, and the character list is a random string of characters, 30 long, that makes it almost impossible to find one file after you found the previous file through a web search.

Then you get the complete ban on social networking, which is well... Stupid.  Almost every single big social networking site, such as myspace, youtube, facebook, etc, are all blocked and made it look like someone was trying to redirect me to a fraudulent site,  to boot. This will  scare people who try to go to these sites to make it look like their infected with redirection malware which normally does this kind of  thing, with an Error box in chrome  that fooled even me, thinking that some malware had infected my PC when I tried to visit youtube, until I read it closer. I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind the panic on social networking. Sure, a kid could become obssessed with them, and they give out personal info, but as long as you know what you are doing, you're fine.  But the  youtube thing pisses me off. Youtube's primary focus is video streaming, NOT social networking, unlike myspace and facebook. By demanding these things get blocked, the mandatory filtering groups will be cutting off all lets plays, all walkthroughs, and tons of other stuff that simply are not even close to harmful to minors.  Now, none of this was meant as an attack on OpenDNS, I just think if they mandate filtering in the US, and use something similar to OpenDNS, in terms of site types to block, they will end up blocking TONS of sites that aren't even remotely harmful to minors, and let a lot in too. Filtering is not the answer, really.