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Now that the bill has been posted, The question is a little clearer.

From the bill:


40.2 (1) A person described in paragraph
40.1(1)(a) or (b) [ie, an ISP] who receives a notice of
claimed infringement that complies with subsection
40.1(2) has an obligation, on being paid
any fee that the person has lawfully charged for
the performance of that obligation,


So, the upshot, if I interpret this correctly, is that if you provide Internet access or proxy services or hosting free of charge, you're not obligated to forward an infringement claim notice or keep identification records. ...That's a little better. So projects like or Dijjer are not required to keep tabs on everyone that uses the network.

Whew!

If you haven't figured it out yet, every time you buy a product you are voting with your dollars.

You can fax and email appropriation committee members for free at the EFF's action center.

If it were that simple, the EFF wouldn't have bothered getting involved. The DMCA has exceptions specifically allowing reverse engineering! So I think your last statement ("Whether bnetd folks agreed to the EULA or not they would still be liable under the DMCA") is highly debatable, and apparently so does the EFF.

The EFF's page on this case can be found here. The important part is this: "As it stands, the lower court's decision makes it unlawful in most cases to reverse engineer any commercial software program, thus making it impossible to create new programs that interoperate with older ones. This squeezes consumer choice out of the marketplace by essentially allowing companies to outlaw competitors' products that interact with their own."

The problem I see (and here I'm relying entirely on my own feeble analytic skills) is that they might win on the DMCA point and still lose on the EULA point. In fact, I think they should win on the DMCA point, and might still lose on the EULA point, which would be unfortunate and stupid for reasons I pointed out earlier.

As PJ wrote in the Groklaw coverage, "I hear you cynics saying that the courts let the DMCA trump everything, and in this case you may prove correct, but don't forget that the issue of the DMCA and the aftermarket was also at issue in the Lexmark and Skylink cases, and those cases worked out fine."

So...we'll see.

p.s. I should throw in a reminder at this point to donate to the EFF, and help keep one of the few groups that's on our side going.

Why is it that people always see public and private services as mutually exclusive options?

You got that wrong. The private sector sees public and private services as mutually exclusive options. Most "people" don't really give a damn either way, unfortunately.

The private weather sector is trying to do the same thing with weather information. They actually have a bill in congress that would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing basic, watered-down weather information on the web and from providing free online access to raw real-time weather information (used by educators and researchers around the world).

Basically, this asinine bill would force consumers to pay for weather information TWICE. Once through taxes (who do you think pays for the thousands upon thousands of weather stations situated around the nation?) and once again to a private service that merely "packages" the information for public consumption.

Now that information distribution is incredibly easy and insanely cheap, there is a GREAT need for laws that require taxpayer-funded research and data-gathering from being locked down or monopolized by private interests.

Actually , no, they don't. First Sale clearly says that they have no control over the product once thay sell it to me.

The goal is not to take all our freedoms and privacies all at once. They just want to get the ball rolling. They will ask the ISPs to log a totally unreasonable amount of data knowing they will settle for a lesser but still privacy killing amount.

Well, I guess I'll have to stick to sending all everything throughOnion Routing proxies like i2p and tor.

That'll be a real shame.
--
Need Referals? The ref stops here

I feel like SNL's impression of Alex Trebek here durring a session of Celebrity Jeapardy.

Sean Connery: Preserving your Privacy for $1000

Alex: "Distributed Anonymizing Proxy network of Onion Routers"

Sean Connery: What is your mother's onion sized breasts! I hear she distributes them pretty well, pansy boy!

Alex: I'm sorry, the answer is 'What is Tor?', found at http://tor.eff.org./ And if you talk about my mother again... I will be forced to thrash you.

A better solution is to use an encrypted proxy-chaining network, so your ISP can't know what you're doing, and the proxy servers can't know who's doing it. So let them log a bunch of public-key-encrypted data, see if it'll do them any good. http://tor.eff.org/

(Ironically, Tor is a product of the Onion Routing project of the United States Navy. But don't worry about spyware or anything -- it's all open-source and peer-reviewed.)

They are looking for needles?
Make BIGGER haystacks.

Tor, now than ever.

Thankfully, technologies like tor render any ISP's logging capabilities, even if they were to log every single packet, completely useless. You can even run some p2p apps through it.

(Before I used it, I assumed it would be too slow to use. Boy was I wrong - I hardly even notice the difference in web browsing).

I get to talk to elected and non-elected officials on a regular basis. They have a tremendous number of people talking at them all the time, with so many opposing points of view they can never keep up. The only bits that stick are the well presented ones, carefully crafted and without repetitions or ambiguities.

I've seen some of the FFII supporters talking to Parliamentarians, and frankly it was embarrassing watching a few of them. They had the nugget of an idea, but couldn't present it clearly and concisely. They would start a beautifully thought out thread, then before getting to a conclusion lose the train of thought and end up talking about something completely different, often repeating ideas already presented. Very annoying for all those very familiar with the issue, and certainly annoying and confusing for the intended audience.

The guy is a busy man ... present for 30 minutes and give the rest for him to either ask questions

Not that you will have time to hone your presenting skills, but the best lobbyists present each idea in one to three minutes, then engage the politico with questions where they have to actually think about the issue. The guys who make the biggest money are schooled in the tradition of rhetoric, where every thought is presented as a series of conflicting questions (with spin) and as if...then statements. This requires the politician to make a concious decision on the spot on which way to think about a subject, and this forced thinking will most likely be the way they will vote later.

There is a whole debate on the best way to word the if...then statements, first, second or third person, singular or plural. Compare and contrast "if you support long term growth in rapidly changing fields, then are you prepared to oppose entrenched laws?" with "if our objectives are to protect ideas of individuals from the oppressive threat of corporate lawsuits, can we obtain a balance...". (N.B. there is no right way) Forcing immediate responses from an audience is orders of magnitude more effective in creating lasting impressions. Even more effective is to word the if...then statements so the politician comes to conclusions on his own, thus becoming his ideas.

Impassioned emotional pleas are no good here, construct a good well founded argument

Precisely. The issue of patents, copyright, and ideas having value goes back thousands of years, and is a very complicated area. Narrow down your arguments to a very limited discussion of a single domain, and be prepared to place it within the larger and global (historical) scope of the battle. The emotion should be evident by the fact you have taken the time to become politically active to protect what you believe in.

Do your homework throughly before going in

This is the most important idea in the post, buried right in the middle. Not only do your homework, but practice the presentation as well. Out loud, on real humans, several times. If you have a lawyer friend, ask them to hear your presentation and offer criticism (then listen to them and correct yourself). Lawyers who practice in front of courts have to be skilled at presenting clear and linear ideas. Even if you don't know any lawyers, just try out your presentation on a few people and ask for feedback. By the third or fourth time you will notice a huge improvement in which ideas get presented, and which ones you drop because they are not needed. Try videotaping your presentation and then review it later with friends, watch where you say "ummm..." or where you repeat yourself.

For material to study, browse the websites of the EFF and the FFII, and read this speech by Alan Greenspan. If you have an entire hour, you can effectively present four to six points with a limited background and context. Limit yourself to only these, avoid digression and monologing.

the AC

Tor: Packages and source

Tor is distributed as Free Software under the 3-clause BSD license.

Do you even think for one nanosecond that the EFF would be supporting it if it were closed???

Anonymouse surfing: http://www.anonymization.net/ http://www.anonymizer.com/ http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/ians/ http://www.guardster.com/ http://www.antiproxy.com/ http://www.attackcensorship.com/ http://proxify.com/ http://www.anonymous.as/ http://www.mezzy.com/s-index.php http://anonymouse.ws/anonwww.html http://unipeak.com/ http://www.urlencoded.com/ http://www.behidden.com/ Full system proxy systems: http://tor.eff.org/ http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ http://internet.flashback.se/ http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.silentsurf.com/ http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circu mventor-instructions.html Ordinary proxies: http://www.atomintersoft.com/products/firewall/cou ntry.aspx/Sweden-se http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html http://www.proxz.com/ http://www.digitalcybersoft.com/ProxyList/ http://www.freeproxy.ru/ http://www.samair.ru/proxy/ http://www.multiproxy.org/anon_proxy.htm http://www.rrdb.org/ http://www.free-proxy-servers.com/ http://www.proxylists.net/ http://www.proxywhois.com/anonymous-proxy-list.htm http://www.openproxies.com/ Plenty, as said.

Try using tor (http://tor.eff.org/) along with privoxy. There are instuctions on the page on how to get the two working well together. Its pretty easy to set up and it only took me a few minutes before I was up and running.

Basically an anonymous proxy network. The site owners will see the tor endpoints in the logs

http://tor.eff.org/

The EFF does a lot of good work fighting things like the PATRIOT Act, the Broadcast Flag (which we won!), etc. Go here to find a form letter that you can send to your representatives automatically through the EFF (and/or print and snail mail).

https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?JServSessionI dr005=4z3rtw4op1.app6a&page=UserAction&cmd=display &id=143

Think about donating some money (tax deductable) to help as well.

Instead of complaining on /. we should all try to stop it.

yeah, no kidding, especially when browsing https://gmail.google.com/gmail using Privoxy to Tor (anonymous proxy network - see http://tor.eff.org/ ) plus pgp, then f****rs can go to hell! Well, unless they've got everyone keylogged.

Any changes to the laws to support 100 years or more are unconstitutional and would be struck down.

Unconstitutional? Nope.

From the Constitution (linked above): To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

One hundred years is "limited Times". It may be absurd, but as I understand it (though IANAL), it's not unconstitutional. Congress has passed a number of unconstitutional laws in the few years that I've been paying attention that the Supreme Court has ignored. Why would they care about this? Going further back, Congress has probably passed thousands of unconstitutional laws. Just about everything FDR did was unconstitutional. Welfare, WPA, CCC. None of those powers are "delegated to the United States by the Constitution" [1].

Congress and the President have been usurping powers little by little for 200 years.

If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing they'd notice would be that the federal government now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it -- powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated.
http://www.sobran.com/tyranny.shtml

2. You can't fight back without money for a solicitor.

3. If he fights it and loses (which would be inevitable without legal support), he will likely spend the rest of his life in debt, lose his house and quite possibly spend a non-trivial amount of time in prison.

And I am sure there are loads of independent UK lawyers who would gladly take his case pro bono. However, it appears that he chose to roll over to their totally unreasonable conditions at the first hurdle.

Late Friday afternoon, C|Net News published an extremely valuable trade secret about Apple and Intel, days before Apple was scheduled to announce it ( Apple to Ditch IBM, Switch to Intel Chips ). So, where's the friggin' lawsuit against C|Net to find out who leaked? Where is the judge who is going to claim that what C|Net published was "stolen property"?

From: http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/06 /05/apple_intel_wheres_the_lawsuit_against_cnet.ph p

Fuckheads.

The Court finds that the license agreements are enforceable contracts under both California and Missouri law. California courts have enforced end user license agreements, which are valid under California law. See Adobe Sys. Inc. v. One Stop Micro, Inc., 84 F.Supp.2d 1086, 1089-93 (N.D. Cal. 2000) (end user license agreement valid under California law); Hotmail Corp. v. Van$Money Pie, Inc., No. C-98-20064, 1998 WL 388389, at *6 (N.D. Cal. 1998) (applying California law, plaintiff likely to prevail on breach of contract claim regarding clickwrap agreement).

Fuck, that was dumb. Tor is here.

How would you compare / contrast I2P with Tor?

So far Tor has been pretty good to me. I'm happy to switch if there is a benefit though.

Why not just use TOR???

TOR

http://tor.eff.org/

Well, technically, this is already happening. A FISA warrant can allow government agencies to enter a premises without anyone being home, take what they want, leave and never notify you that it happened. Same thing with phone taps, ISP taps, etc.

Kinda scary imho, but at the same time, I'm not worried. Why? Because I haven't done anything wrong.

Seriously, once we have won the MGM v. Grokster case in the US Supreme Court, I am sure that arguments about both communists and terrorists using p2p are going to be used in an attempt to pass laws banning p2p.

the rub is that if BF is re-enacted, HDTV tuner cards that are needed to make MythTV, etc. useful will need to be manufactured to respect the BF.

*Shrug* The DMCA would probably still apply (unfortunately) as it's not about breaking encryption it's about circumventing copy controls.

e.

BTW: Be sure to Contact Your Representative to tell them where to stick the BF/MPAA legislation.

OK I WILL flame. And massively:

I'm sick and tired of slashdot doing free advertisement for apple. OK some personns are switching to apple. So.. Big news

Apple is not the nice and ethical company some of you seem to think. Take a look at what they say on eff site about Itune's EULA, that's creepy...
http://www.eff.org/wp/eula.php

They have contributed only mildy to open source (imho). They have behaved very badly with khtml and the technologies they have open-sourced are either:
_technologies where they have a direct interest in seeing them being adopted (rendez-vous).
_Stuff they haven't really an edge on. It's in their interest to see them neing improved.

They have not opened interesting things like core-image.

They have also proven to do everything to try to ensure a monopoly where they could (itms and itunes, closed policy on quicktime etc..).

For a defaut user the security is better under Os-X. However they have mad some major conception mistakes (such as using the same engine for safary and dashboard). And also I cannot any os-X listed in netcraft performance analysis:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/performance.html

To sum things up: they make very nice looking machines, a nicely finished os, but they have proven to be nearly (if not as much) unethical as microsoft. And os-X has some flaws, it is very usuable but in no ways perfect.

I read slashdot to be informed about what goes on in the computer world (specially the free software world). I don't read slashdot to learn that some obscure uninteresting chap has switched from windows to os-X.

I will stop reading slashdot if it continues annoying me with free apple advertisement.

Till Varoquaux

Sure most have one or two innovative features, but what applications in the OS world are really innovative, especially from an end user perspective?

Certainly not desktop environments, servers, remote shells, anonymizing (or swarming) networks, or compilers.

Because all of those things are just replacements for commercial applications, and did nothing new.

...in what way was Revenge of the Sith ripping people off?

I actually liked Revenge of the Sith, so I let others argue over whether the ticket price was a ripoff to see that particular movie. :-)

However, I don't need to argue about that. I can think of a few other ways we're being ripped off pretty quickly:

• The studios diligently working to illegally take away my fair use rights of the movie.
• The studios screwing movie theaters by making unreasonable monetary demands of the theaters that show their movies during the opening weeks. (Thus forcing theaters to pass the cost on to us by making us finance popcorn if we actually want a snack.)
• The studios undermining my Constitutional freedom to copy the movie after a limited time.
• Imposing excessive fines and punishment on a minor crime when copyright violators are caught. (I can't dig up the link offhand that I saw comparing the punishment for downloading a movie vs. stealing it from a store. Can anyone else help?)
• The corporate executives at the studios screwing the vast majority of the people who worked on the film to keep most of the profit in the hands of a very small minority of people who did nothing to contribute to the film. (A big problem in big corporations, not limited to the film industry.)
• The studios working together to keep the prices of DVDs artificially high.

That's just off the top of my head. Anyone else care to add to the list?

So no, not all profit-making is a ripoff. But that doesn't change the fact that some of it certainly is. And no, illegally downloading and/or sharing movies isn't legal or ethical. But in the grand scheme of things, I think it's a hell of a lot less serious an offense than what the movie studios and especially the **AA are doing.

Rather than making guesses as to whether legal efforts against Bram would be successful, he could've just waited a few weeks and found out for certain. A much safer bet (from a purely legal perspective) would've been to see how the Supreme Court Case MGM v. Grokster was decided. The ruling is due any day now (tm).

See this EFF page where you can download the MP3 of oral arguments. Start listing at about 25:15 into the oral arguments to hear the "harsh terms" and "abusive language" remarks.

Also see this.

Hope that helps. Try Googling.

Should be tor.eff.org [eff.org].

I'd really like to allow legit use of Tor on my services, but there are some jackasses that flood from within Tor that make it impossible.

there's nothing stopping you from blindly blocking access to your own servers; however in most cases, that'd probably be just an overreaction.

there are hundreds, if not thousands, of publically accessible proxys and anonymous surfing tools besides tor. you'd likely spend more time trying to keep your filter or block lists up-to-date than you would dealing with any mess left behind if you didn't bother.

you could set up multi-tiered authentication for whatever services you needed to.

for instance. you run a web blog or wiki that allows anonymous postings. you could easily disallow anon postings from users coming in via tor exit nodes or other anon services, while not restricting the anon posting privs to others.

note that tor's default configuration disables outgoing port 25 traffic. it is up to an end node to enable it if they wanted to (deal with the potential flood of abuse emails).

read more at tor's faq: http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/Tor FAQ#head-ee021d915c36011fbd7dd70bd922b14d3aaed95a

besides tor's anon features (and using privoxy to scrub out the junk); tor has the added benefit of an encrypted connection from client to the tor 'network' (see http://tor.eff.org/overview.html) meaning it's a nice added layer of web security when you're connected to the web via a wireless connection, whether it's a home network, your isp connection, or you're at a hotspot somewhere; especially considering the number of sites and services out there that don't use SSL at all, not even for authentication.

the tor url is http://tor.eff.org/ not http://eff.tor.org/

The link given in the summary was http://eff.tor.org/ , but that leads to some site that... well, Im not sure what it is (one link leads to a list of what appears to be footraces, the other link goes to some photos.)

I beleive they meant to say http://tor.eff.org/

Note that you can be a server without allowing users to make connections from your computer to the outside world. This is called being a middleman server.

Should be tor.eff.org.

The only one they successfully sued in court (i.e. didn't settle with) used centralized searching (Napster)

My IP address is used by members of my family, my neighbors (via an open wireless access point), and hundreds of strangers (via the TOR anonymization service.)

What good is it to subpoena the name of the person who pays the bill for that IP address? There's no way to find out the identity of the person that actually committed the crime.

Except that right now, the whole network will collapse if it gets some 20-50 new users (it can only handle a couple of hundred users, so it's not really useful for anything). This will be fixed in the coming months, but for now, leave it alone lest you disrupt its development. TOR can do the same things, and works now.

Bittorrent isn't intended to protect your identity. It never was. The fact that it's commonly used for activities that might get people in trouble is just due to lack of a poweful, easy-to-use solution in the arena of programs that do protect your identity (see: Freenet, Tor, and MUTE), and possibly in part to bad planning on the part of an increasingly fragmented and confused base of illegal file-sharers.

Bittorrent isn't designed for distribution of subversive or otherwise contraband content; it's designed to take the load off the backs of legitimate distributors of large files. There's nothing stopping the *AA from shutting servers down, and to the best of my knowledge this feature was not created with the intent of making it difficult for anybody to do so. Bittorrent might be optimal for quickly getting large files, but it isn't intended to protect anybody from anything; for that, you'll want to look into things like MUTE or Tor. The download speeds are not as high, but you aren't going to get caught.

Bittorrent, basically, is a content distribution system, not a copyright-circumvention system. The latter exists, but those need quite a bit more work before they get to the level Bittorrent has attained in terms of popularity and usability (and considering the purpose, this might be a good thing.)

Well, yeah, but [the record labels are] also batting 1.000. They've won every case that's gone to court!

No. See MGM et al. v. Grokster and Streamcast , where et al. includes several record labels. Grokster has prevailed in the Ninth Circuit; a Supreme Court ruling is expected by the end of June.

1. O(1) scheduler
2. Freenet, TOR, I2P
3. Bittorrent
4. Kademlia (as applied in Azureus)
5. Plugger
6. Autocorrelated music downloads (iRate radio)
7. TiVo (Code is GPLed)
8. "Mindstorms" (less earthshattering, but a good example)
9. The concept of the Wiki
10. The Scientific Method

"Tor is simply an anonymous p2p proxy:
http://tor.eff.org/"

With privoxy it doesn't work.

Yes I followed the directions.

"This is Privoxy 3.0.3 on unknown (127.0.0.1), port 8118, enabled
No such domain

Your request for http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/quickstart.html could not be fulfilled, because the domain name www.privoxy.org could not be resolved.

This is often a temporary failure, so you might just try again."

Same with others.

Oh really? So it's illegal to make a backup archive of your own DVD on a hard drive you own?

No, that's covered under fair use. But, the DMCA does make it illegal to circumvent the copy protection: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." So, without decrypting the files, can you do anything with that backup? Can you copy those files back onto a DVD-R and burn them, without modification, and have a watchable DVD? I've never tried it, but my suspicion would be no.

Both Apple and Microsoft are enabling copyright violations by having the ability to open VIDEO_TS folders with their included DVD players?

No, because the files themsleves remain encrypted. You can get at the files, but, without decrypting them, can you do anything with them?

Everybody who rips DVD's they own to their laptop hard drive so they can get more battery life when watching their movies during a long flight is breaking the law?

If they've used any method of decrypting the data on the DVD to facilitate the copying or viewing, yes.

Good luck trying to make that case.

I have no interest in trying to make that case, I think it's a fucked up law. The MPAA, however, just might. The portion of the DMCA that prohibits creating or distributing software to circumvent copy protection has already been tried and held up, in the DeCSS case. They haven't, to my knowledge, sued any individuals for decrytpting DVD's, but they do have the DMCA behind them if they ever actually wanted to.

Don't take this too personally, but I think there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod option.

Trust me, I don't take anything on Slashdot personally. :-) But, in this case, I think my facts are correct. If I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me, and I'll have no problem admitting so if that's the case.

The full text of the DMCA is available from the EFF if you really want to actually read through it all.