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That's why any citizen who wants to hire an attorney should automatically have standing to challenge the Constitutionality of any law.

You can already do this, more or less. If you have the money, you can fund a group of brilliant lawyers who will go through the list of every single person charged with this crime, find the perfect sympathetic defendant and then litigate the Hell out of it. Since this is a First Amendment/Technology issue, I'd start here or here.

There's a reason why the Constitution requires an "actual case and controversy" for the courts to find jurisdiction. This law may go into effect and subsequently never get enforced. The founding fathers knew that the judiciary would be so busy solving actual problems, that they didn't want to bother them with philosophical debates that may or may not every actually be resolved.

Who the hell would mod this insightful? Let's fix this broken "proof of identity" system we like to call Social Security Numbers with Social Security Number v2.0 in the form of RealID. Now your "transactions" are indisputable because "technology can't be broken" as far as a judge is concerned. Even if it is then it's your own fault (like with PIN transactions) because you were negligent enough not to protect it, just like in today's system you were negligent enough not to keep all those people you had to give your SSN to from having a data breach.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/not-so-gentle-persuasion-us-bullies-spain-proposed

You also have your OS version, your system fonts, (sometimes installed by certain apps you installed), your screen resolution, your timezone, etc. Or you could just go to the website in the summary: http://panopticlick.eff.org/ and test yourself

not traceable back to me

I remembered a story about browser fingerprinting months ago, but couldn't be bothered finding it. There is a story up today about the same kind of thing though, and it even lets you see your browser's fingerprint: http://panopticlick.eff.org/

It may be useless for targeting ads since you have them blocked anyway, but it does make you significantly more traceable.

I block ads too btw. Slashdotters' habits don't really matter in this discussion though, only the habits of the majority of web users. I find it ludicrous that it's such a lucrative business, but there it is.

Here is a list of printers that do and do not include the watermark...

You mean like printers?

I've been strongly offended by software patents ever since I learned over a decade ago about how meager the "innovations" they protect can be. I think most of us will make one or two "patentable innovations" per day before lunch, or at least infringe with some fundamental task like throwing an exception (never realizing we were "innovating" or "infringing" in the process).

So where should we send the money? I want to donate to an org that shares my opinions and is doing something about it. The two I know of are as follows, but would appreciate additional suggestions.

EFF Patent Busting Project: http://w2.eff.org/patent/wp.html
End Software Patents: http://endsoftpatents.org/donate

You can buy a $5 Mini LED flashlight from the EFF that makes the yellow dots much more visible. I like to keep it around for when people accuse me of being too paranoid when I'm ranting about privacy and such. Grab the nearest color printout, shine the blue light on it, and show there are hidden yellow dots that can be used to track you; that's a good way to make people really nervous as they consider what else I'm saying is true. More fashionable than tin foil, too.

https://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots

https://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots

Apple doesn't hide rootkits in their software or media files.

Maybe not. But they were summoned to the US Senate to answer questions on privacy concerns over what they track & why they track it unencrypted.

Google, who is responsible for Android, was also called to those hearings. Apple sent a vice-president in charge of software development. Google sent a lobbyist. Apple voluntarily has already taken steps, and has promised to take further steps, to reduce both the amount of "tracking data", and to encrypt what data the user's phone does store. What has Google done/promised (I honestly don't know on that one)? But don't let facts available for nearly two months stop your rant.

Apple doesn't actively prohibit "rooting" of their devices.

I think you need to read the last 2 lines about possibly denying sevice on this page.

Yeah, EULAs always sound terrible. But point to me one instance of Apple actually doing that. [Crickets]

Apple doesn't pursue the iOS "hacker" community with legal threats, DMCA takedown notices, etc.

It has put the mechanisms in place to do so in the future though.

Again, the potential of doing it; but obviously Apple is just putting that in as a guard against an unforseeable "worst-case-scenario" threat. And again, please show me a single instance of Apple actually making good on any sabre-rattling. And didn't it get settled nearly a year ago that "Jailbreaking" was NOT illegal? Do you see Apple actively fighting that with signed bootloaders, security fuses, etc, like some Android Device manufacturers? So, your point, again?

Apple doesn't embrace DRM every day, and in every way (they DO have to put up with SOME DRM due to pressures from "content providers"; but it is obvious they chafe against it).

Apple dropped DRM from iTunes about 2 years ago. It could be argued that they bowed to pressure from their user base after the Sony rootkit and CD DRM fuss. I have not come across a DRMed CD for some years now because of the stink DRM caused.

ANYTHING "can be argued". But at least Apple's CEO published an Open Letter publicly decrying DRM. Has Sony? Howabout Google?

Apple doesn't infest its products with an OS (Windows 7) that has DRM from the driver-level up.

I'm mainly a Linux guy, I'm still using XP for some stuff but haven't played with Windows 7 much beyond setting up some laptops for colleagues - therefore I'm no expert on it. However, I am not aware of any restrictions on Windows 7 that stop you running non-DRMed formats on it exactly as you can do on previous iterations of Windows. I am led to believe that it provides a *platform* for DRM, again probably bowing to the same pressures from the RIAA that you said it was perfectly okay for Apple to have done during the early days of iTunes.

When Apple was starting out with iTunes, NO ONE would have signed up without DRM, and you (and everybody else) knows it. Even when iTunes had DRM on music, it was the weakest DRM possible. Individual songs weren't DRMed, per se; only Playlists were copy-restricted. NOTHING (but trust) prevented the user from deleting the Playlist, and recreating it, thus garnering another seven (then five) copies of a particular song. And let's not forget that iTunes also allows creating an Audi

Apple doesn't hide rootkits in their software or media files.

Maybe not. But they were summoned to the US Senate to answer questions on privacy concerns over what they track & why they track it unencrypted.

Apple doesn't actively prohibit "rooting" of their devices.

I think you need to read the last 2 lines about possibly denying sevice on this page.

Apple doesn't pursue the iOS "hacker" community with legal threats, DMCA takedown notices, etc.

It has put the mechanisms in place to do so in the future though.

Apple doesn't embrace DRM every day, and in every way (they DO have to put up with SOME DRM due to pressures from "content providers"; but it is obvious they chafe against it).

Apple dropped DRM from iTunes about 2 years ago. It could be argued that they bowed to pressure from their user base after the Sony rootkit and CD DRM fuss. I have not come across a DRMed CD for some years now because of the stink DRM caused.

Apple doesn't infest its products with an OS (Windows 7) that has DRM from the driver-level up.

I'm mainly a Linux guy, I'm still using XP for some stuff but haven't played with Windows 7 much beyond setting up some laptops for colleagues - therefore I'm no expert on it. However, I am not aware of any restrictions on Windows 7 that stop you running non-DRMed formats on it exactly as you can do on previous iterations of Windows. I am led to believe that it provides a *platform* for DRM, again probably bowing to the same pressures from the RIAA that you said it was perfectly okay for Apple to have done during the early days of iTunes.

Just because you select a list of reasons why Apple are not evil does not mean they are not evil in other ways.

This is one of those cases that may appear simple on the surface but really isn't. In the past it's been argued that while parody or satire of a work is protected, using that work to create a parody or satire of a different subject might not.

You and I would probably agree that it shouldn't even be up for debate, but Big Content has led the assault on fair use and it's really hard to pity them when their own arguments bite back. Especially when so much of their own material is derivative, one would think it behooves content producers to be at the forefront of defending fair use -- how much do they have to spend in lawsuits and research and licensing agreements just to make their films culturally relevant?

The fact that it makes news when approval is rescinded means that it's exceedingly rare. I can only think of a few notable incidences - the "I'm Rich" icon/app, a publisher gaming the ratings system, and something more recent that escapes me at the moment.

It was a Commodore 64 game where the player could press some keys to reboot the emulated C64 computer into the REPL of ROM BASIC. Apple deemed the ability to enter and run BASIC programs a violation of section 3.3.2 of its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

All they know is that a computer running W7 has connected to the internet with a given IP address. Not exactly the most useful information.

You should take a look at what information your browser sends out when requesting a document via HTTP. And then read https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf to see how accurately you can be identified by this information. "Among browsers that support Flash or Java, the situation is worse, with the average browser carrying at least 18.8 bits of identifying information. 94.2% of browsers with Flash or Java were unique in our sample."

or is duplicating and monitoring all internet traffic at the lowest possible level not something that concerns anyone?

"Anonymous speech will do nothing to ensure a free society - you need to be prepared to stand up and be counted and not hide behind a fuzzy layer of anonymity... I agree with the OP... Why would you want to be anonymous?"

That's GP, not OP, but regardless:

I refuse to go over the last 300-400 years of history to illustrate why this is important. There are so many reasons... but rather than just blow you off (which am half-tempted to do), I will instead point you at the following article: https://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

If you aren't satisfied with that, just google "anonymity 'supreme court'" and read what you find.

It you want to say TV isn't a failure, then cut off CAFR funding for it. Cut off Obama's giveaway to the networks. Let's have the FCC panel made up of engineers who the public votes in, not the one's the POTUS appoints. Today you have to get your daily dose of propaganda BS along with your local news (which could possibly warn if a tsunami is on the way) what a nasty trade off, listening to how jobs are so good, and the economy is recovering, and OBL shot and dumped at sea, just to try to know if the rain might have nuclear fallout or if some earthquake has a 100' wave headed your way. Let us not forget the switch to DTV which sucks more money people don't have. Plus when it's really windy from the haarp technology mucking with the weather, the DTV packets break up. Where in analog, it was just snow and noise, now it's BSOD (black screen of death)

Ya want to talk about the telcos? Start with NSA fios splitters, move on to wiretaps, spying, and all the rest of the crap. You couldn't GIVE me a mobile phone.

You want to talk about the internet and law? Miserable failure. *.AA , DMCA, streaming stations, copyright/patent trolls, SEO blackhats, the intelligence community spying, Chamber of Commerce, facebook. You can't look me in the eye and tell me that's not a failure for the US Constitution which is now intermittent.

When the monetary system financial terrorism come to fruition and mark to market is realized and the funding sources are added up, and the financial terrorists are prosecuted, these technologies will be a failure. It's just that it isn't measured this way currently because of the corruption and payola.

Watch: sock puppet / trolls will vote this message off the radar they don't like the truth.

I always dreamed to get something like what is used at Panoptickick ( http://panopticlick.eff.org/ ).
They obviously work with enormous efficiency to identify you in an unique way, but for the good (they want to *warn* you).

Having a public wifi setup with Panopticlick tools would allow tracking anonymous users, and ban their profile as soon as some 'unfair' use is detected (here you decide what you put, wrong port numbers, excessive throughput during too long a time, watever)

A setup like that, which would be openly distributed, would I believe allow both helping passers-by and demonstrably banning 'unfair users'.

(Then comes the contractual terms of their ISP provider, which most generally will explicitly forbit this anyway, but this is yet another issue...)

This is the price of "free" services.

on the flipside, if you're a privacy advocate (which I absolutely get!), then don't sign up.

And sometimes you pay the price anyway, without your consent, and when the services aren't "free". Given the (lack of) choice of my data and money going to a company that isn't really innovating that much, or to an entity that's ostensibly trying to move the state of the art forward and using data at least partially to this end, I can't see how a privacy advocate would consider GV worse than their current voice service.

A "false-sense-of-privacy advocate", perhaps, or one who refuses phone or voicemail service entirely on these grounds.

Let's make it harder for websites to use cookies for legitimate purposes such as persistent logins, habituate Swedish computer users to clicking on the "yes, allow" button, and make foreign companies face trial in Swedish courts for using standard web technologies, while doing nothing about advertisers' ability to track users without permission!

"loners is right. JQP, you might want to get some case experience before you "Hahaha I don't think so." Trust me, it happens everyday. The Prosecutor is "forced" to upgrade the charges simply because the cost of prosecution (not necessarily reaching a trial) is less than the cost of a botched arrest. Statistically, the Defendant is more likely to take a plea bargain than fight the case through and risk prison. Once the Defendant accepts the plea, and pleas guilty "on his own accord", the Prosecutor has averted a potential lawsuit since the Defendant has already plead guilty to a lesser (original) offense. Think before you type."

Nope. Sorry. You are both wrong. Here is just one example of several federal court cases that have been in the news over the last year or two.

Violating the Terms of Service is not a crime, and does not make you a "hacker". It is a breach of contract. Period.

Otherwise, what it would mean is that the law could be simply made up by any company's lawyer... put some ridiculous clauses in your TOS, and anybody who breaks them is a criminal hacker. Which is clearly not the way our legal system is supposed to work.

Like I said earlier: it's a nice legal theory, but it isn't flying, and it won't.

This is precisely why I don't give most companies this information -- because I don't trust them with it. Not to keep it safe, not to use it as they say, and not to provide it to someone else.

We are Internet. We know who you are. Resistance is futile.

Thanks to browser fingerprinting, flash cookies, ad network beacons, content beacons, and traffic bugs we put in every web page (digg, stumbleupon, facebook 'like this', twitter), you cannot escape our eye, we know every site you view. We also know your ip address and where you live.

Oh, and we already know your real favorite pet, you sure were naive back when you had that geocities account. Lying at this point is futile.

First, use https everywhere. They can't hijack google when you use ssl. If you want to block ads, use privoxy. You can block ads for the entire family this way, and also force https on many sites without using plugins. For example:

{ +redirect{s@http://@https://@i} }
.google.com
.twitter.com
.paypal.com
.googleapis.com
.amazonaws.com
www.nytimes.com
.googleusercontent.com
.myspace.com
.facebook.com
.wordpress.com
( -redirect }
www.google.com/imghp
cache.pack.google.com/edgedl/chrome/install/
www.google.com/chrome

Finally, use tor. They can't touch anything that goes through tor.

Well also, keep complaining. It does a lot of good to keep shaming them.

people have the RIGHT to do what they want with hardware they BOUGHT..
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/sony-v-hotz-sony-sends-dangerous-message

Simply put, Sony claims that it's illegal for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn't like. Moreover, because the CFAA has criminal as well as civil penalties, Sony is actually saying that it's a crime for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn't like.

That means Sony is sending another dangerous message: that it has rights in the computer it sells you even after you buy it, and therefore can decide whether your tinkering with that computer is legal or not. We disagree. Once you buy a computer, it's yours. It shouldn't be a crime for you to access your own computer, regardless of whether Sony or any other company likes what you're doing. ....
Sony's core arguments — that it can silence speech that reveals security flaws using the DMCA and that the mere fact of a terms of use somewhere gives a company permanent and total control over what you do with a device under pain of criminal punishment — are both sweeping and frightening, and not just for gamers and computer researchers. Frankly, it's not what we expect from any company that cares about its customers, and we bet it's not what those customers expect, either.

YOU STAND BY THIS?

How does Starbucks and other venues that provide free Wifi shield themselves from liability?

This incident alone makes me want to offer up free Wifi from my own home access point (yes, I know I may be violating my ISP's ToS, but I don't see that as a huge threat, especially with some rate-limiting to make it unattractive for large-scale downloads and port-25 blocking to make it unattractive for sending spam).

Does putting up that ubiquitous clickthrough screen that makes people promise not do anything bad give any legal protection?

What if I log MAC addresses from the DHCP server?

I'm not too worried about what the feds could find on my computer if they seized it - I'd even give them the decryption key to the hard drives if they ask nicely. If they break down my door and seize my equipment, my hope is that I can gain support from the EFF or ACLU (both of whom I've supported for many years) to lawyer up.

what does Apple do to jailbreakers? nothing.
what does MS do to non commercial pirates? nothing. (except for the genuine advantage check)
what does Bilzzard/Activation do to WoW cheaters? ban/suspend account and associated credit cards.
what does MS do the XBLA cheaters? ban account/console

Sony is doing what the RIAA/MPAA does (maybe because they members of both?)

software piracy has been around long before music/movie piracy - i can't rememer a single incident where software companies filed john does against everyone they THOUGHT stole something.

they settled because:
1) the PR shitstorm
2) economic impact (they can't undo the damage - their resources are best spend mitigating it - ban the consoles and credit cards
3) weak case - it's not clear (to me) that GeoHot did anything against their TOS. which clause was violated? win or lose the lawsuit the key is still out there. why did the EFF coume out AGAINST Sony? http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/sony-v-hotz-sony-sends-dangerous-message

i say again - by doing what they did, they brought this on themselves.

printer tracking was taking place for a decade before being made public by EFF

Actually, I'm concerned about both, since I consider them to be the same issue. A thoughtful person minimizes the amount of his personal data he makes public not only for the reasons he knows about, but also because he can reasonably expect that making his data public may be to his detriment in ways of which he is unaware: He knows that he is not omniscient, and that technology advances over time, so that things impractical or uneconomic today may be both trivial and profitable (if only to a criminal) tomorrow.

One reason not to share data is that you cannot be certain just what data is being shared (even with a packet-sniffer in one hand and a stack of communication and file standards in the other) from a closed-source device. Note that this risk is not limited to the Internet; for example, color printers leave a tracking code on their prints, of which most users are unaware.

Of course, I'm not arguing not to put anything on the Internet, or not to print anything. The point is that, like every other activity, these activities have advantages and disadvantages, and one should first be sure that the benefit one receives is worth the risk one runs.

So did "jay" delete his mp3s when he lent her the CD? Otherwise I'm seeing two copies, in two hands. Not one dude with a backup. If he made 50 backups and lent them to his friends - is that allowed? Not that I agree with the state of copyright or anything, but lending one 'backup' or format shift is just as wrong as lending the same to many people, no? Copies were created. There are multiple people in possession of copies concurrently, with only one licence paid.

I don't think it is that cut and dry.

http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php
3. How Do You Know If It's Fair Use?
There are no clear-cut rules for deciding what's fair use and there are no "automatic" classes of fair uses. Fair use is decided by a judge, on a case by case basis, after balancing the four factors listed in section 107 of the Copyright statute. The factors to be considered include:
a. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes -- Courts are more likely to find fair use where the use is for noncommercial purposes.
b. The nature of the copyrighted work -- A particular use is more likely to be fair where the copied work is factual rather than creative.
c. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole -- A court will balance this factor toward a finding of fair use where the amount taken is small or insignificant in proportion to the overall work.
d. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work -- If the court finds the newly created work is not a substitute product for the copyrighted work, it will be more likely to weigh this factor in favor of fair use.

One mix for your own use that you lend seems farther from commercial type activity than 50 backups lent out. Is lending to discover a new artists an educational act?
Loan and return seems to suggest its not a substitute for a legit CD.

It seems to me that, increasingly, the legislative drive is to criminalize a failure to decrypt data, rather than actually needing the data as evidence. The idea is to give the failure to decrypt data a higher penalty than the actual crime for which you are being prosecuted, thus coercing you into decrypting the data. I mean, why bother trying to crack, break, or coerce the decryption factors when you can just build a stronger case?

There are several examples of this on Slashdot.

Such a drive could just provide you with a straight path to more severe and less-defensible prosecution! The drive seems more useful in the context of preserving corporate and financial secrets from theft rather than protecting one's self from law enforcement.

And by the way, if the aforementioned legislative push bothers you as much as it does me, donate to the EFF; this shit has to stop.

"For the technical research community, our source code as well as a MySQL database dump (August 2010 MySQL dump), the raw data (August 2010 raw data), and the August 2010 CSV database dump are available. You can also use the Observatory in an Amazon EC2 instance we created."

From the main page...

The EFF is fighting a similar battle over a patent on a gene that increases the risk of breast cancer. Appeals Court Hears Argument in the "Breast Cancer Gene" Case

Because Myriad owned the patents, testing on these two genes could only take place in Myriad’s own labs – meaning that others could not develop tests on those genes, depriving women from alternative (and cheaper) tests...in March 2010, the district court found in the plaintiffs’ favor and invalidated the patents....

Open Source generally doesn't have a bankroll funding it. It has a community. Communities of like-minded individuals don't usually have the finances or the will to defend (or instigate) legal battles.
As they say, "You will never know who was really right. But you will know who had more money."

Don't bet on it: communities of like-minded individuals may have enough money to sustain a "legal arm" to protect them - e.g. EFF

EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight — and win — more cases

Though not set in stone, this is from the EFF website.

Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:

        Space-shifting or format-shifting - that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, "ripping" an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)

http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php

This is exactly WHY I was against this stupid feature.
It is just another signature on web browsers that can be used, for example, that test EFF had.
But in saying that, it is only a boolean, whereas something like the font list is much, much more unique, more-so on those who tend to be technology literate since they tend to have other fonts installed.
I think Plugins were also used to ID people, those are probably even more unique due to version numbers.

Panopticlick on EFF for those who want to try.
Could send a message there way to also include that in detection now that I think about it.
I still come up unique. :)

They would store "someone visited page X at date Y and time Z" and they may also be able to store "and they were referred in from page ABC", but they would have no way of seeing where you went from that page, even if it was to another page on the site, because all that page is going to store is the same non-identifiable information.

A cookie allows them to give you a unique identifier, which works for differentiation down to individual browsers on the same machine, and that allows them to get a good picture of your travel around their site (and their affiliate sites etc) - the DNT flag would remove that, only allowing them to track the number of hits on a page and where the visitor came from.

They don't know its "you" each time, because the DNT flag contains no identifiable information - to them, this is the equivilent of you clearing out your cookies after each individual page visit. No cookie, no ID, no tracking beyond the current page. Same deal.

Still, it may not be exactly *you*, but if your IP address shows up several times in the access log within a few minutes (and they're for different articles), you could guess that maybe it's the same person visiting several of the same stories.

Also, does the browser in DNT mode do header santization? After all, didn't the EFF prove that even without session cookies, you can still fingerprint the browser and track that way fairly reliably? (The few that are generic fall into the noise of those who want to screw with the data anyhow).

I don't see anything mentioning if setting the option santizes headers or not.

http://panopticlick.eff.org/

You mean this site? https://panopticlick.eff.org/

To start with, they should rather strip all the unnecessary, incredibly detailed version information off the default user-agent string. Relying on the "goodwill" of ad companies is just absurd.

Oh and, as soon as this Do-Not-Track header becomes a default setting it will be ignored anyway...

here is a plaintext link.

... but I guess this explains why EFF thinks Comodo is "too big too fail", hehe...

It is technically illegal for you to rip CDs for which you do not own the rights to do so.

It is legal in the US. Well, it's not absolutely settled, but precedent seems to support the idea that ripping CDs is fair use. From the EFF:

"ripping" an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)

Other than inertia, is there any reason to give these guys a second chance

You mean, a third chance?

Yes, they are too big to fail. Hey, it worked for the banks...

Maybe CaCert only needs to get 120.000 subscribers on board, and they shouldn't have to bother with that pesky audit either?

freedom of speech does not mean that you can remain anonymous

You do realize you're posting on /., home of the original AC, right?

from http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

Anonymous communications have an important place in our political and social discourse. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A much-cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission reads:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

The tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius," and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized rights to speak anonymously derived from the First Amendment.

The right to anonymous speech is also protected well beyond the printed page. Thus, in 2002, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proselytizers to register their true names with the Mayor's office before going door-to-door.

These long-standing rights to anonymity and the protections it affords are critically important for the Internet. As the Supreme Court has recognized, the Internet offers a new and powerful democratic forum in which anyone can become a "pamphleteer" or "a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox."

The beauty of it is that even if you do not buy your certificate from Comodo, you are still just as vulnerable to false certificates in your name from Comodo (Or any other of the ~650 CAs).

He makes some interesting points on EFF's SSL Observatory mailinglist: https://mail1.eff.org/pipermail/observatory/2011-March/000138.html

*snip*

I don't want anyone to forget their illegal warrantless wiretapping and the massive lobbying effort get themselves retroactive immunity for their cooperation over the illegal spying on you.

Thank You for reminding everyone. I was gonna do that till I saw your post.

GSM is only great when you can buy an unlocked phone, choose a provider and pop in a SIM, then change on a whim while paying lower monthly prices due to the lack of a subsidy.

T-Mobile will give you the code to unlock your phone on request for customers of 3 months or more (I believe).

ATT will not.

I don't want anyone to forget their illegal warrantless wiretapping and the massive lobbying effort get themselves retroactive immunity for their cooperation over the illegal spying on you.

Apple haven't gone after jailbreakers yet, have they?

Yeah, they did. Until the EFF and the FCC smacked 'em down.

Donate to the EFF.

Logical next step - unapproved encryption is illegal.

They already tried that in the 1990s. It didn't work because of the sheer ridiculousness of regulating encryption.