Cuba Uses Linux To Stick It To The US

from the take-that-evil-capitalist-pigs dept

It looks like Fidel Castro's plan to build a Cuban software industry has paid off, somewhat: the country has announced that it's launched its own variant of Linux. The goal is to replace the Microsoft operating systems that runs most of Cuba's computers, because the government sees Windows as a security threat. Insert your own punchline there, but for Cuba, it's because it believes US authorities have access to Microsoft code, and can therefore spy on Cuba through it. That's debatable, but so is the claim from the dean of the School of Free Software at Cuba's University of Information Sciences, who says the "black holes and malicious codes" in proprietary software "doesn't happen with free software." While open-source projects often offer better security than proprietary platforms, open-source or "free" software isn't inherently more secure. But somehow it seems ideology is probably more important than facts here.

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Why Did The US Gov't Take Down A British Travel Agent's Websites?

from the jurisdictional-questions dept

Over the years, we've seen a ton of jurisdictional questions raised by the internet. After all, since the internet is available just about anywhere, and content on it may break laws in some countries, but not others, how do you handle the jurisdiction question. Some courts have determined that it doesn't matter -- and they'll claim jurisdiction for whatever they want. Others suggest that evidence needs to be shown that the content is directed at and was seen by many people within the jurisdiction. Others have held that it needs to be created by a local resident or hosted on a local server. However, with all that said, it's not clear what jurisdiction the US government seems to be claiming over a bunch of websites created by a British travel agent. The websites all advertise trips to or information about Cuba. The websites were designed for European travelers to plan trips to the island nation. Now, it's well known that US citizens are not allowed to travel to Cuba, but that's not true of people from other countries. So, this guy clearly was not breaking any laws.

No matter, though. Since he had registered the domains for his various websites through eNom, an American company, the US Treasury Department had them pull down his sites and to refuse to release them to another registrar. There's no doubt that if the sites were targeting Americans or was run by an American travel agency, you could understand these actions. But to take down a UK-based website that was aimed at European travelers, offering them perfectly legitimate trips to Cuba, seems to go beyond any reasonable jurisdictional claim.

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