Today marks the day when it becomes illegal to even discuss media copy prevention methods in Finland and to transfer such usage-prevented music to portable MP3 players among other draconian articles of the EUCD. Finns reading this should consider joining organised discussion of such methods and reporting themselves to the police.

Late last year, the EU also adopted a big brother data retention directive on the excuse of fighting so-called terrorism. The recording industry is, of course, already after the logs.

There is an ongoing project to persuade Finnish ISPs to block access to a secret list of IPs on the pathetic excuse of child pornography, thus effectively setting up the Great Firewall of Finland. What's next? Tor? I2P? piratebay.org? infoshop.org? Whatever the policemen responsible for maintaining this secret list don't like? Not to mention that IP-based blocking can block a lot more sites than just the one intented. On the positive side, I don't think the list will stay secret for long. Freedom-loving citizens can form a distributed effort to scan for blocked IPs, and publish the list. That will show them.

Happy new year 1984! Orwell was an optimist.