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Blocking cookies is not enough. Your IP address plus a hash made from your user agent, list of plugins and other bits of data would be more than adequate for an advertiser to track you without ever issuing you a cookie. The EFF has suggested there are 10.5 bits of uniqueness in the standard user agent. If that were combined with an IP, it would be quite sufficient for an advert to be able to follow you from one site to the next.

This is Obama's America, not Stalin's Russia.

Not Stalin's USSR yet, but Obama definitely represents a continued worsening of the neo-con BS Bush II took to heights once thought unsurpassable.

You may think that the reason you're dissatisfied with theObama administration is because of substantive objections to their policies: ... Or because thePresident has escalated a miserable, pointless and unwinnable war that is entering its ninth year. Or because he has claimed the power to imprison people for life with no charges and to assassinate American citizens without due process, intensified the secrecy weapons and immunity instruments abused by his predecessor, and found all new ways of denying habeas corpus. Or because he granted full-scale legal immunity to those who committed serious crimes in the last administration. Or because he's failed to fulfill -- or affirmatively broken -- promises ranging from transparency to gay rights.

Source: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/10/gibbs/index.html

OK, I just read the transcript here: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html

And I'm not saying I don't respect Eben Moglen, or what he says there. Sure, he lays out great ideas, ideas worth doing.

But he is still misguided. The war he is proposing to fight mainly with distributed home-based technology to ensure some privacy through encryption can't be won. As long as we have an economic system based mostly on greed (and also ignorance), everything he tries to do will fail, if only because, after he wins, greed will buy new laws from ignorant people and put him in jail, and then greed will go house to house and pull every one of those wall warts out, getting neighbors to turn in neighbors who have them ("If you see something, say something"), same as people with radios were turned in in various countries in WWII. See:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, But Then It Was Too Late"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

He should know that ISPs will be able to track down every one of those things in short order, if only by hiring a million people out of the 20 million or more unemployed in the USA to go house-by-house with blanket search warrants and portable packet sniffers looking for "unlicensed" equipment. And other countries will find the things even faster. So, his approach is, at best, a slightly delaying and confusing action. Greed and ignorance will win unless we directly address greed and ignorance (well, even addressing greed and ignorance indirectly and subtly may be OK, too. :-).

Do I have an alternative? Yes I do. As I outlined here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
where I wrote the following paragraph:

As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach)
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/genoaII.php
to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.

Now, might such a public intelligence system run well on a system of wall warts like he describes? It probably would. But it does not absolutely need them. So, while they may be useful, the conception of cooperative sensemaking and cooperative design of a better future is by far more important.

And here is a document I put together that decribes four heterodox economic alternati

You think people should have to walk around wearing disguises instead of having a reasonable expectation of privacy.

And where did I say that?

It's as if every business you visited in public decided to identify you and report your whereabouts to a central party.

Do you use a credit card? They do.

Expecting the average citizen to keep up in a technological arms race...

Not particularly -- pick a few reputable sources and follow them.

Regarding Flash cookies, well, the simple/paranoid approach is to not install Flash, or any third-party proprietary plugin, without good reason.

Then fuck 'em. Visitors using those browsers can get the old Flash version.

That's not "fuck 'em", that's "oh shit, now we really do need to keep two versions around."

YouTube is big enough that they can dictate the terms here.

And yet, even you don't seem to be suggesting they can -- you're suggesting YouTube spend huge amounts on disk space, bandwidth, CDNs, etc, to keep both the old Flash version and the new HTML5 version, when they could just keep the old Flash version.

Not that this would necessarily stop them -- they do host a few WebM videos, as I said -- but you seem to be saying that they have no good reason not to do this.

But let's consider what would happen if they actually did try to dictate terms. Seems to me, they'd instantly lose the people who are "not technical" enough to install a new browser, and these are likely the same people who never try to use a higher-quality version, or can't (not enough bandwidth) yet don't realize they need more bandwidth.

In other words, the same people the low quality version is meant for would be the people least likely to have anything capable of HTML5 at all, let alone something which will play Theora in HTML5.

Verizon has delegated enough authority to let the UAE write SSL certificates impersonating any site which will get automatically accepted by most browsers, so don't you think it's getting hard to know if your communications are actually secure from eavesdropping?

Part of the problem of secure communications is that there are too many governments who don't want people to have them because people can (and do) plot nefarious things with them.

Yes, The Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) was used to seize Indymedia servers in London.

The order was issued by US authorities against Rackspace US for logfiles on servers hosted by their UK registered subsidiary company over the posting of a picture which showed Italian Police murdering a demonstrator in Rome.

Rackspace US responded by delivering the entire servers to the US authorities.

Rackspace lack the spine that Calyx possesses.

http://www.eff.org/cases/indymedia-server-takedown

So the question is, who do you feel is more likely to treat you fairly: a profit-driven organization with absolutely no accountability to anyone, the the same profit-driven organization with *some* rules of fair dealing enforced by a democratically elected government?

Certainly the ISPs have limited accountability at the moment, whether through market competition or through the law. So the question is whether, by enabling the FCC to produce additional regulations covering this business, the ISPs' accountability to their customers will be increased or decreased.

My feeling on this is that their accountability will not increase. The telcos have a long history of skillful lobbying, or to view it another way, the FCC has a terrible record. The FCC protects incumbents from competition and innovation, rather than protecting customers from the incumbents. The EFF and Reason have some good documentation of this:
The FCC and Regulatory Capture
The Central Committee is in Session: The Trouble with the FCC

You may think that the reason you're dissatisfied with theObama administration is because of substantive objections to their policies:that they've done so little about crisis-level unemployment, foreclosures and widespread economic misery. Or because of the White House's apparently endless devotion to Wall Street. Or because thePresident has escalated a miserable, pointless and unwinnable war that is entering its ninth year. Or because he has claimed the power to imprison people for life with no charges and to assassinate American citizens without due process, intensified the secrecy weapons and immunity instruments abused by his predecessor, and found all new ways of denying habeas corpus. Or because he granted full-scale legal immunity to those who committed serious crimes in the last administration. Or because he's failed to fulfill -- or affirmatively broken -- promises ranging from transparency to gay rights.

Remember, a vote for a Democrat or a Republican is a vote for the status quo, no matter what BS they vomit during the campaign.

From TFOpinion (page 33):

We note without surprise, therefore, that the Legislature of California, in making it unlawful for anyone but a law enforcement agency to "use an electronic tracking device to determine the location or movement of a person," specifically declared "electronic tracking of a person's location without that person's knowledge violates that person's reasonable expectation of privacy," and implicitly but necessarily thereby required a warrant for police use of a GPS, California Penal Code section 637.7, Stats. 1998 c. 449 (S.B. 1667) 2. Several other states have enacted legislation imposing civil and criminal penalties for the use of electronic tracking devices and expressly requiring exclusion of evidence produced by such a device unless obtained by the police acting pursuant to a warrant. See, e.g., Utah Code Ann. 77-23a-4, 77-23a-7, 77-23a-15.5; Minn Stat 626A.37, 626A.35; Fla Stat 934.06, 934.42; S.C. Code Ann 17-30- 140; Okla. Stat, tit 13, 176.6, 177.6; Haw. Rev. Stat 803-42, 803-44.7; 18 Pa. Cons. Stat 5761.

So if you're in one of those states, it looks like the answer is yes, it's illegal to plant a GPS tracker if you're not law enforcement (and sometimes even if you are law enforcement).

(And why does Slashdot still not support Unicode?)

Web-Based 'Private' file storage does not exist IMO. This private data that's on the web. The server the data is hosted on will get cracked, or the database will be compromised and then cracked....its just a matter of time...

If you have all this private data in your work email, then its you're fault. Stop sharing now, delete what you can before you die. Use another email client/service when at work to send dirty emails to your wife, and use the work email for work!
br> You should start trying to secure this private data @home where it could be physically secure, as well as offline. Transfer this data from once PC to another with an encrypted USB stick etc.. Just an idea.

Read this from EFF: https://ssd.eff.org/3rdparties/protect/storage
This is a good read too: http://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk

Web-Based 'Private' file storage does not exist IMO. This private data that's on the web. The server the data is hosted on will get cracked, or the database will be compromised and then cracked....its just a matter of time...

If you have all this private data in your work email, then its you're fault. Stop sharing now, delete what you can before you die. Use another email client/service when at work to send dirty emails to your wife, and use the work email for work!
br> You should start trying to secure this private data @home where it could be physically secure, as well as offline. Transfer this data from once PC to another with an encrypted USB stick etc.. Just an idea.

Read this from EFF: https://ssd.eff.org/3rdparties/protect/storage
This is a good read too: http://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk

And right now, the "free market" continues to be at the mercy of a handful of parasites who, on getting into the right positions...

These "positions" are government-granted and ENFORCED monopolies.

The only reason comcast, verizon and whomever else is able to even *threaten* to do away with net neutrality is because they have government granted monopolies and *I* as a consumer, don't have elsewhere to go.
If they were not government-granted monopolies and tried to do away with net neutrality, I would immediately switch to a different provider.

The fact is that while the government played a beneficial and very early role, it is now first and foremost playing a deleterious role on net neutrality, freedom of speech and freedom from persecution. Not only through it's private partnership monopolies, but also through laws like the Patriot Act , No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act) and The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 .

Let us not forget that the U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001. And also the U.S. government is no longer providing full habeas corpus on domestic soil, to United States citizens.

The truth is much more complicated than "is the government good or evil". The government, as in fact a single individual, can be both good and evil; And the issues have to be fought individually.

In this case though, the most important thing to point out, is that the government is not "our saviour" with respect to net neutrality, because it is the oppressor pointing the guns at us and enforcing the monopolies of the private firms who are trying to fuck up the internet.

Take away the government-granted monopolies, government spying, government oppression and government control and you take away just about all of the threats we are fighting against with this net neutrality issue.

Stuff like this is why I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/

Both are incredibly difficult to stop without also impacting useful functionality.

Were you being facetious? The EFF are the lawyers - when you make a donation to them, you're helping to pay for litigation for people who may not otherwise be able to afford lawyers. Check out some of the legal battles they've won here, and consider making a donation.

Interesting... are you talking about how things are, or how you want them to be?

The reason I ask is, if such a blanket statement were a true description of civil liability, I don't think the EFF would spend so much time talking about how to limit your liability when you publish a vulnerability (i.e. utter true statements).

For example...

What I'd really like to see is a citation to some case history, since little else is meaningful in predicting how civil liability will play out; but I've been unable to find one.

Here ya go:

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/07/26

> while Apple considers you to be a criminal if you jailbreak

From the iOS Jailbreak Wiki: "Jailbreaking, according to Apple, voids Apple's warranty on the device, although this is quickly remedied by restoring the device in iTunes." Can you please site your references?

Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal
PDF

Now whether it actually is or not, is a completely different question.

From what I've read, it doesn't matter as it was not intended to be public. This relates to the same situation police officers faced attempting to record thermal data by reading the thermals off the side of a person house. They argued that since they were not entering into a private residence, but rather reading the data from the external walls, that there was no invasion of privacy. The supreme court threw the argument out, indicating that there was an expectation of privacy involved, and that it was not legal to collect such data without a warrant.

https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy

(although the Supreme Court has held that more invasive technological means of obtaining information about the inside of your home, like thermal imaging technology to detect heat sources, is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant).

There is no such thing as illegal information in the US.

That may be true, but it wasn't always so
There's a difference between illegal and unconstitutional.

because a 100 billion dollar corporation wouldn't want to risk losing $30k in attorneys fees to say, shut down a critic

Except that the critic they're trying to shut down wouldn't have to go hunting for a good lawyer if the case is solid. Presumably, lawyers for the defense would be lining up to take the case.

Imagine how powerful the EFF could become if they had all their expenses reimbursed for all the huge cases they've won.

I'm having a hard time trying to think of good reasons to oppose loser-pays, especially since we (U.S.) don't have the asinine defamation laws of the U.K.

Notice-and-notice is better than a notice-and-takedown system. In notice-and-notice, the ISP simply passes any letters on to the subscriber, instead of taking down the content by default in response to the letter. The subscriber and the letter sender can then settle the issue. Notice-and-notice is harder, as far as I understand it, to abuse in the name of censorship than notice-and-takedown is.

I didn't post about what is ideal. I just said that I think what we have now, with respect to certain concerns, is better than what we had before.

I'm just saying that before DMCA the majority of ISPs were scared shitless of lawsuits and would freak out if they got a cease-and-desist relating to one of their subscribers and would take down content without any review process. The current procedure is less onerous than it used to be.

That people are currently using DMCA takedowns for silly things is irrelevant. All of these same people were using copyright related cease-and-desist letters for the same purposes before.

Notice-and-notice is better than a notice-and-takedown system. In notice-and-notice, the ISP simply passes any letters on to the subscriber, instead of taking down the content by default in response to the letter. The subscriber and the letter sender can then settle the issue. Notice-and-notice is harder, as far as I understand it, to abuse in the name of censorship than notice-and-takedown is.

They already can do a good job of that by monitoring cookies (i.e. they see the cookie from the previous account you were logged into when you login as the other), and they could probably get close with only IP and User-Agent. Ok, so that wouldn't differentiate two people sharing the same PC but with separate accounts (like husband/wife or siblings), but it would narrow it down that far.

The summary for the submitted article misses almost EVERY important aspect to this story, as it was initially reported! It almost looks like an attempt to deliberately minimize concern over the dubious legality and suspect agenda for "Perfect Citizen".

In fact, Samzenpus and "Wiggles" seem content not to mention the program's Orwellian name, nor the specific use of the term "Big Brother" by Ratheon contractors associated with the NSA on this effort.

Here is the summary I supplied, when submitting this story as a front-pager for Slashdot. I believe that it is more cogent and INFORMATIVE than the blandness offered us.

The WSJ is reporting on an $100M NSA program "to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants." All of which sound nice enough, if one does not become critically focused on the name they chose for this effort: 'Perfect Citizen'. Releasing this to the WSJ has the appearance of PR cover for the expansion of both warrantless surveillance and the intrusion of the NSA into a theatre of domestic operations.
Ratheon, the NSA contractor charged with realizing the NSA vision for the 'Perfect Citizen' program openly called this the "Big Brother" system, in internal communications.

For once, I really wouldn't mind a "dupe" story, either my summary or that of another poster with some insight to the implications of "Perfect Citizen".

Have they not been doing this already for certain artists that have opped into it? I know that Youtube has thrown me an error when attempting to upload a video with licensed music in it before and gave me the option of uploading with a disabled audio track. In fact, this system seems to have been rolled out in 2007.

Are you kidding? As far back as 1997, we knew that anonymizing identity information was a hard problem. See http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-personally-identifiable. Note that (gender, zip, birthdate) are enough to identify 87% of the population. With a full name, some idea of age, gender, and general geographic location, I expect that you can get much better results. I've got a fairly common first and last name, and there are only 53 people in the US that share it with me. Figure out what state I'm in (easy enough), and you've narrowed that down to less than a half dozen people. Make a guess as to my age, and... well, what do you know. Flip a coin, and figure out which person you're going to visit first. This is a bad idea. Period. It's like your bank deciding to publish a list of the names of everyone who has an account with them. There may be some value, but it's vanishingly small compared to the potential abuses such a list could be used for.

Why is it the university's job to police this stuff ... ?

It's not. It that there are many after the dot-bomb period and the ongoing Bush Depression that see the Universities as a captive market for failed business models that need greater than 100% subsidy to stay even in sight of being in the black.

In the digital era, the cost of making a new copy in not only negligible, but the copy itself is made with 100% fidelity and indistinguishable from the original. MPAA, RIAA and the companies they represent, like Microsoft and Disney, have a very out-dated business model based around an attempt to create an artificial scarcity for electronic media. Back when physical medium was important and reproduction and transport costs were high, the model worked. Now it is just stupid. Around 10 years ago, the sale of physical media took off due to the old (real) MP3 services. MPAA, RIAA not only did not see numbers but also went to great lengths to bury the facts and even go against the interests they claim to be defending.

The real bite from the current war against the Universities will hit a generation down the road. The pipe from basic research, to research, to applied research, to development, to product development, to product packaging, to training and maintenance, is long. The tap has been turned off and the pipe is filling with air while some flow is still visible. By the time the flow stops completely, there will be no mechanism or skills left to get going again. We're already seeing this in "IT" and Microsoft Resellers ponce around pretending to be teachers or developers, making sure that no one with skills is allowed through.

But seriously...... the whole point of the DMCA was to protect third-party companies.

Nope. Copyright was intended "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by granting a government-sponsored monopoly to content creators with built-in checks and balances such as limited time and fair use. It's just getting systematically reshaped to allow for unlimited time, market control, and unaccountable censorship. It just looks like it's intended to protect tyrannical trade associations and unaccountable corporations, and effectively accomplishes, because that's who is amending it for congress.

I think Slashdotters aren't in any position to know what Steve really wants. But given that Apple has never come out with any kind of public statement even remotely resembling what you just said, then I suspect that Steve doesn't care what you do with the hardware once you buy it.

I know you don't read much, but really...

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking-illegal

I know you don't much about the law but Apple really doesn't care if you jailbreak your iPhone/iPad. I've talked to Apple guys in the company. *They don't care*. Just don't come crying to them after when something goes wrong and you need some tech support. That's the problem with slashdotters. They think they should be able to tear a product apart and rework its innards and software, and then the manufacturer should somehow be responsible for fixing or replacing it when it some piece of core functionality stops working thanks to their tinkering. You're just pissed that Apple says, "heck, no."

In the interest of combating piracy - and taking a 30% cut of software sales - Apple will continue to close it's ecosystem, and shove iAd further and further down your throat.

I also know that you don't understand capitalism, but it actually costs money to run an online App Store and a 30% cut doesn't give Apple much of a profit. Do the math, genius. Apple has returned a $1 billion to developers. That means Apple earned a grand total of ~$400 million from the App Store, which has been online for two years now. Given the costs incurred by running a massive datacenter, that doesn't leave much profit teh Jobso. In fact, Fortune magazine calculated that the App Store is eithera loss-leader costing Apple money or, at best, earning 1% of Apple's total annual profit. Yeah, that's a real cash cow.

And, BTW, iAd hasn't even gone live yet; so it's not being shoved down anybody's throat. And when it does go live, it certainly won't be any more offensive that those Google ads I have to see every time I run a search.

Owning a Mac that was apparently forced on you because you "need it for work" hardly gives you a pass to criticize people who bought Macs because they actually like them.

Sure it does. I can criticize anyone for anything. Just like someone who needs a car to work can recognize that our transportation infrastructure is unsustainable. Thinking critically is totally awesome. You should try it sometime.

Criticizing "anyone for anything" doesn't make you smart. It just makes you a jerk. Criticizing people who buy the same product out of desire that you own only because it was forced on you by your job doesn't make you better or more insightful than them. And given the astonishing amount of biased bile that you've injected into your comments at every step, I daresay that I'm not the one who needs to work on his critical thinking skills here.

3-D performance has been a distinctly secondary concern--why worry about 3D performance when there are no real games that even stress the graphics cards?

Some people use computers for architecture, 3d modeling, and things besides games. Like anyone who wants to use Revit, AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA...

You're now trying to change the topic. Your original (erroneous) criticism was that most of the apps available for iPhone were games, thereby implying that somehow it wasn't a serious platform for people who want to be productive. And nobody uses their CELL PHONE for architecture or 3D modeling. Plenty of people use their Macs for exactly that and the 3D performance is just fine, thank you very much.

And for that criticism to be valid, you'd have to go after every other company that has an app with a closed file format.

I think Slashdotters aren't in any position to know what Steve really wants. But given that Apple has never come out with any kind of public statement even remotely resembling what you just said, then I suspect that Steve doesn't care what you do with the hardware once you buy it.

I know you don't read much, but really...

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking-illegal

As for the DMCA violation, Apple casts its lot with the likes of laser printer makers and garage door opener companies who argue that the DMCA entitles them to block interoperability with anything that hasn't been approved in advance. Apple justifies this by claiming that opening the iPhone to independently created applications will compromise safety, security, reliability, and swing the doors wide for those who want to run pirated software.

In the interest of combating piracy - and taking a 30% cut of software sales - Apple will continue to close it's ecosystem, and shove iAd further and further down your throat.

Owning a Mac that was apparently forced on you because you "need it for work" hardly gives you a pass to criticize people who bought Macs because they actually like them.

Sure it does. I can criticize anyone for anything. Just like someone who needs a car to work can recognize that our transportation infrastructure is unsustainable. Thinking critically is totally awesome. You should try it sometime.

3-D performance has been a distinctly secondary concern--why worry about 3D performance when there are no real games that even stress the graphics cards?

Some people use computers for architecture, 3d modeling, and things besides games. Like anyone who wants to use Revit, AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA...

And for that criticism to be valid, you'd have to go after every other company that has an app with a closed file format.

Yes, everyone sucks for doing it. Again, Apple isn't inherently evil. They are just exactly the same as Microsoft. You just don't think so because you have been glazed over with too much marketing.

What Apple has done with those programs is hardly unique

Actually, it is. Does HP release programs that require an HP computer? How about Microsoft, do they require anything besides compatible software? Apple is alone in legally chaining their operating system to their hardware, and their software to their operating system.

As far as fully open file formats, no one offers that except for the ODF in OpenOffice. It's not an option for export with any Apple program.

See, when I predicted the iPhone I was hopeful it would be a really cool product. And it was - I bought a 3G when my old phone died. But Apple has locked it down more and more with each update. They're getting ready to transition iOS to all of their hardware. (Here's a rumor right here. I sort of doubt it will happen that quickly, but it's going to over the next year.) And since I need a phone for phone calls, iPhone 4 is off the table. Apple will again learn the lesson that they did in the 90s: closed ecosystems don't work for computers (appliances may be another story). But you're going to have to suffer with iOS on your desktop before they relearn that lesson.

Don't sweat it, though. Things will be exactly as you like them. Steve will tell you what you're allowed to do with your computer, you'll consider it revolutionary, and you will line up to pay a 30% premium for your lifestyle computing product. You can then sit proudly in your local coffeeshop, smiling quietly to yourself as you read /. with the correct logo on the backside of your screen.

Check out their proposal: http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing They want everyone to put money in a pool and then the artists split it based on how often their music is actually paid. But it requires bugging everyone's computer/ipod and building a huge db of what everyone listens to. This didn't make the privacy people at EFF very happy.

Here's the link. http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing It's like Rhapsody, but with greenwashing.

They should find a better use for my money than the music industry.

Here's the EFF donation page, for those who'd want to contribute as well.

Support the EFF: http://www.eff.org/helpout
Support Creative Commons: https://support.creativecommons.org/

A quote from a few months ago: The BBC has indicated that third party content owners are seeking to ensure that reception equipment will implement ... copy protection. Because [these] requirements are not mandatory, representatives of content owners have asked the BBC to take steps to ensure that reception equipment will implement the specified content management arrangements.

The "standards issue" is that certain parties want the government to define and impose a DRM system and for the government to make it MANDATORY for all hardware to include and enforce this DRM system.

The guardian.co.uk story contains a link to dtg_bbc_trust_canvas_response.pdf were they say they want a new Digital Rights Management expert working group (diagram on page 2), and where they want a "high integrity receiver conformance regime" for receivers. That is a fancy way of saying want all receivers to the securely welded shut and they want circuitry and software securely locked down to prevent device owners or third party services from unscrewing the box to upgrade them in unapproved ways. And most of all it means strictly prohibiting any open platform such as MythTV or or a generic GPL Linux PC reception where people can modify the software. On page 10 they have a section explicitly titled "Conditional Access and DRM" where they explicitly state their concern is for Canvas to ensure the inclusion of DRM components in receivers.

The EFF has a good article discussing how it's the same thing that went on in the U.S. with the same people demanding the "Broadcast Flag" and demanding the FCC to make it mandatory for all receivers to include a government imposed DRM system on the entire public. There were the same demands for "high integrity receiver conformance regime" to lock down the hardware and software against modification by owners or third party services.

-

Your EFF donation link is broken. Instead, use this link. I am a bit worried that I was the first to point this out...

Although the focus is on arists of media and music, the implications to the software industry are staggering. Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid as a result of ASCAP and similar lobbying. All that work you and I have put into creating a free software ecosystem are for nought, because some some media execs want to get paid for performances by musicians who didn't sign with them.

I donated to Creative Commons, EFF, and FSF for the first time today. You might not care about the media aspects but our industry absolutely depends on copyleft licenses and creative freedom, so I encourage all of you to do the same.

I suspect that ASCAP is not going to ask congress to stop people giving away their work with no restrictions (hence allowjng other "artists" to make money from it), rather they will ask the lawmakers to remove copyright protection from works that people want to release under a Creative Commons or similar license.

In other words, it is an attack on the GPL and similar licenses.

Although the focus is on arists of media and music, the implications to the software industry are staggering. Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid. All that work you and I have put into creating a free software ecosystem are for nought, because some some media execs want to get paid for performances by musicians who didn't sign with them.

I donated to Creative Commons, EFF, and FSF for the first time today. You might not care about the media aspects but our industry absolutely depends on copyleft licenses and creative freedom, so I encourage all of you to do the same.

It's always funny when those who try to wrap themselves in the veils of freedom and democracy are generally the first ones who don't want others to know what they're up to.

Yeah, ban secret elections too as obviously you need to own up to who you voted for. I very much like the supreme court quote here:

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.

However, in the context of a petition I don't think anonymity makes sense. The whole point of a petition is to show that X individuals chose to sign a petition, and unlike voting there's no process to make sure each person only gets one vote. The closest you can come is scrutiny of the list and you can't assume the government will - particularly if it supports the government's position. So if you want to post a scathing opinion on the subject, I'll support your anonymity. If you want to count in a petition I won't.

+1 informative. NOW I understand the advice not to contribute unless it's GPL copyleft. It protects your volunteer work.

Exactly right; lots of of the anti-GPL FUD spread around has it's origin in people, like Microsoft, who don't want you having their work, but feel they have the right to steal yours. There's another group which is specifically doing the free stuff now with the hope of getting people addicted and then doing a bait and switch later (look for FreeBSD developers who switched over to Apple e.g. or Nessus which was under the GPL but with one primary copyright owner who could just change the license). The MIT / X11 people made a really big effort to try to get people to switch from copyleft to unprotected licenses and then almost got away with completely closing X; a big warning against contributing without some protection.

However there's also a bunch of people who simply disagree. E.g. some of the OpenBSD developers. They really do believe what they say and (I believe) they are doing something good for the sake of it. When you work with these people you get some protection simply from who they are and what they believe. If you have some simple fixes e.g. to OpenSSH, then contributing them back really does save effort and get more F/OSS software written, so the general advice is that you should contribute smaller / more integrated changes directly back to them. When it comes to bigger / more independent changes, e.g. a new library, those might be better in a separate project with a copyleft license.

Question:

It appears the TACO tool only stops the behavioral advertising. It doesn't stop them from spying on you and seeing which sites you visited. Right?

TACO seems to opt out of as much as it possibly can. The advertising networks should be "voluntarily" stopping tracking you at that point in order to comply with various privacy laws/regulations/standardards/policies. However, you can't be sure of that. You might find looking at the EFF Panopticlick and other similar privacy tools will help you find out how easily you can be tracked by people who aren't following the "rules".

For the last time, that's not the discussion. No one is arguing that point.

Glad to hear it.

GP: "Today's S. Ct. decision in Quon v Ontario at http://eff.org/r.4mq [eff.org] (pdf) assumes w/o deciding that 4th am protects privacy of txt msgs (yay!)"
Me: "No, they didn't"
You: "That is not accurate on two fronts: (1) they did say exactly that, and you've been given the citation, which does matter for future Fourth Amendment causes of action"

I agree they did indicate that the 4th amendment applies to government employer review of text messages by government employees using government equipment. They most certainly did not say that the 4th amendment applies to the private employer review of the text messages of private employees using employer equipment. That question wasn't even before the court.

The court did not assume that "that the 4th amendment protects privacy of text messages" private intrusion in general, it assumed that the 4th amendment protects privacy of text messages where a government employer or other state actor is involved, subject to typical constraints and exceptions.

Now perhaps the person originally quoted understood that, and thinks that it is an enormous victory for fourth amendment jurisprudence that text messages are assumed to be protected in any circumstance, but that is not the impression I got.

No. In other words, the standard is the Fourth Amendment standard, as set forth by the exploration in the case you cited. You are, despite having it pointed out to you numerous times, continuing to conflate Fourth Amendment causes of action with areas of law relying on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence

I have no doubt that the Fourth Amendment standard has great influence over the standards adopted by courts in other circumstances - common law, state constitutional law, etc. The point is the "Fourth Amendment" standard is not binding on courts making decisions in cases not governed by the fourth amendment, except to the degree (and only to the degree) it has been adopted as part of the pertinent common law governing a non Fourth Amendment case.

That is why it is misleading to call cases pertaining to private employers "Fourth Amendment cases", because they clearly are not. The NJ Supreme Court said as much: "As is true in Fourth Amendment cases,..." Whatever the NJ court was deciding, and whatever inspiration they drew from federal Fourth Amendment case law, they were not deciding a "Fourth Amendment case", but rather a case governed by the common law and statutes of the state of New Jersey.

Those Fourth Amendment rights have nothing to do with the actions of the private employer though, but rather the actions of a government employer, and you have yet to cite anything to demonstrate otherwise.

For the last time, that's not the discussion. No one is arguing that point.

You said:"GP: "Today's S. Ct. decision in Quon v Ontario at http://eff.org/r.4mq [eff.org] (pdf) assumes w/o deciding that 4th am protects privacy of txt msgs (yay!)"

No, they didn't."

That is not accurate on two fronts: (1) they did say exactly that, and you've been given the citation, which does matter for future Fourth Amendment causes of action, and (2) as also shown to you from your own examples, the REOP standard is adopted outside of Fourth Amendment cases as the basis of tort actions, meaning that Fourth Amendment decisions affect far more than Fourth Amendment cases. You're even aware of this fact, because you have previously stated, "I am aware that the "reasonable expectation of privacy" applies to cases that properly fall under the Fourth Amendment, as well cases that properly fall under statutory privacy laws."

Thus a REOP decision in a Fourth Amendment case properly

The statement you quote starts out "As is true in Fourth Amendment cases, the reasonableness of a claim for intrusion on seclusion has both a subjective and objective component".

In other words, this is not a Fourth Amendment case, it is just similar to one, in this respect.

No. In other words, the standard is the Fourth Amendment standard, as set forth by the exploration in the case you cited. You are, despite having it pointed out to you numerous times, continuing to conflate Fourth Amendment causes of action with areas of law relying on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

You've yet to demonstrate that you even understand what the issue is here. It seems unlikely that you ever will.

Here's the link https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-latest.xpi which is missing from TFS.

This is a link to the extension. Here is the link to the article:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/encrypt-web-https-everywhere-firefox-extension

Here's the link https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-latest.xpi which is missing from TFS.

This is a link to the extension. Here is the link to the article:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/encrypt-web-https-everywhere-firefox-extension

Our code is partially based on the STS implementation from the groundbreaking NoScript project.

Maybe a link to the addon would be useful in the story?

Shouldn't that be https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere ?

Oh wow, this is awesome. I've used greasemonkey scripts with facebook but it's pretty ugly, seems to load the http page before the https page. This sounds perfect. Here's the link https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-latest.xpi which is missing from TFS.

You should read this article from the EFF. The Ninth Circuit case is here. There were two appeals to the Supreme Court. The Court granted certiorari on the Ontario appeal and denied it on the Arch Wireless appeal.

In the Quon v. Ontario decision, the Supreme Court held that what the Ontario Police Department did was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. In its refusal to hear the Arch Wireless v. Quon appeal, it let the Arch Wireless part of the Ninth Circuit decision in Quon. v Arch Wireless et al stand, namely:

We hold that Arch Wireless provided an "electronic communication service" to the City. The parties do not dispute that Arch Wireless acted "knowingly" when it released the transcripts to the City. When Arch Wireless knowingly turned over the text-messaging transcripts to the City, which was a "subscriber," not "an addressee or intended recipient of such communication," it violated the SCA, 18 U.S.C. 2702(a)(1). Accordingly, judgment in Appellants' favor on their claims against Arch Wireless is appropriate as a matter of law, and we remand to the district court for proceedings consistent with this holding. (Quon v. Arch Wireless et al, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (2008))

The Supreme Court denied cert. when Arch Wireless appealed this point. The Court stated in the case it did hear:

Respondents argue that the search was per se unreasonable in light of the Court of Appeals' conclusion that Arch Wireless violated the SCA by giving the City the transcripts of Quon's text messages. The merits of the SCA claim are not before us...The otherwise reasonable search by OPD is not rendered unreasonable by the assumption that Arch Wireless violated the SCA by turning over the transcripts. (Ontario v. Quon (2010))

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Arch Wireless, thus (in the Ninth Circuit at least), that part of the Ninth Circuit decision (that Arch Wireless, as an "electronic communication service" provider, acted illegally, as a matter of law) stands.