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I agree entirely. But how are we to convince the rest of the population who take pride in the fact that they have nothing to hide from the government?

A family member of mine claimed she changed her stance after I gave her a copy of Bruce Schneier's essay, "The Eternal Value of Privacy."

Schneier also recommends Daniel Solove's essay, "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy."

Someone else posted this very good article earlier today: "Debunking The Dangerous 'If You Have Nothing To Hide, You Have Nothing To Fear.'"

Would you rather see big corporations doing it for them?

I don't understand this. My understanding of the article is that if the police apprehend you and take your phone, if it's an iPhone, they won't be able to crack the encryption.

Is this a bad thing? Are you a criminal? If you're not a criminal, you have nothing to hide, citizen.

I agree with Stallman that 110 year copyrights are repressive. But so too is complete abolishment of copyrights.

No, it's not. Because copyrights serve the middlemen, not artists. In fact, since the copyright got weakened a lot thanks to the Internet, the revenues of the artists are increasing notably .

I know, the world really seems flat at the first glance. But sometimes, things are not what they seem to be.

>So AT&T can listen to your phone conversations and read your text messages?

That's why UK's Big Brother criminalizes encryption:

> the UK will send its citizens to jail for up to five years if they cannot produce the key to an encrypted data set.

Rick Falkvinge comments. It seems CETA was written sometime in february when ACTA looked like a done deal, so it is natural that it contains the same language. But it is true that we can expect the European commission to try to bring ACTA in through the back door, so we should keep our eyes open.

I have already made order to be delivered on 9th June.

What are they extraditing him for?

The United Police States of America Inc. feels that one of their Fascist rules was violated by Wikileaks allowing the world to read the truth about the Fascists and now the Fascists want to get their evil slimy mitts on Assange in order to make sure that the world observes that the practice of Genuine Freedom (forget the meaningless American buzzword "freedom" which really just means "the freedom to do as ordered by the government") is against the rules made by the Fascists and punishable by torture and perhaps death in the interest of maintaining and expanding the United Police States of America's Fascist grip.

The American Fascists turned Sweden into a gutless America sycophant wannabe a few years ago (see http://www.falkvinge.net/ for much more on this) and Gutless Sweden would just turn Assange over to United Police States of America Inc. the moment the American Fascists ordered Gutless Sweden to do so.

Fascists suppressing Genuine Freedom and teaching the world a lesson by punishing the practice of Genuine Freedom - that's what this is about.

Oh, and only slimy evil Fascist cowards and their low-life knob-shiners would dare mod this post down. If you do dare mod this post down, you will die painfully and spend eternity roasting in the flames of hell along with Osama bin Deadman and countless other evil vermin. May you suffer horribly forever.

This is nothing to do with partisan politics anyway.

It's about how effective Microsoft's lobbying is nowadays.

Since Ballmer took over lobbying activity has massively increased, whilst growth of new and useful product lines has basically flatlined.

I've historically been quite supportive of Microsoft here on Slashdot as I like a lot of their products, XBox 360, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Windows Server etc. but I'm so sick and tired of all the anti-Google shilling from Microsoft and Facebook, that when I see something like this I'm more likely to be correct if I assume it's yet another Microsoft lobbying victory, than if I assume it's not.

See shit like this to understand where I'm coming from:

http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8184065/Dark-forces-gunning-for-Google.html

It's pretty fucking clear there's a problem, and not only is Microsoft failing to produce new product lines to grow the things people buy from them, they're actively pushing away people like me away, who, as a primarily Windows based developer/architect, is precisely the sort of person they've depended on to maintain the strength of their main product lines within the business world.

Between the failure of Microsoft in mobile coupled with the increase in importance of mobile, and this sort of shit, they really run the risk of losing everything in the long run. I fucking hate Apple too, but it's getting to the point where my next computer will run iOS, just to make a fucking point of not buying Windows and not funding Microsoft until they grow the fuck up and start focussing on products, rather than what basically amounts to corporate trolling.

If they spent as much time on producing innovative and cool new stuff as they did corporate trolling, they wouldn't need to worry about corporate trolling in the first place.

Gates may have been too aggressive against his competition resulting in the anti-trust stuff being brought against him, but at least he didn't engage in this corporate trolling. I wish Ballmer would die of a heart attack and Gates would come back frankly. It's no wonder he was ranked as the worst tech CEO or whatever - because it's absolutely fucking true.

"exactly who was inconvenienced by their OOXML standard?"

They got it recognised as an international standard giving it increased legitimacy, when the standard was incomplete and realistically impossible for competitors to support fully. So to answer your question, people who were inconvenienced by Microsoft's hijacking of the standards process, is anyone who wants to be able to use free software, and not pay a Microsoft tax to be able to interoperate with other businesses in the exchange of documents.

"They are also keeping their eye on Apple in the eBook market"

Oooh, keeping their eye on, that'll teach them!

"although I maintain that the consumer has benefited from Apple being able to strong-arm the record industry on removing their DRM"

I maintain that Apple gained far more by continuing to exploit platform lockin through DRM to leave consumers with the choice of losing hundreds of pounds of content, or to buy Apple when their device with it's non-user replaceable battery and hence planned obsolence inevitably became obsolete.

"So the idea that Google should be given a free pass because they are being unfairly picked on is just rubbish."

I don't think they should be given a free pass. I just think that the EU should be targetting everyone else, and doing so by prioritising in order of urgency. In that order of urgency I think Google would be a fair bit down the list. I'd argue that Facebook would be at the top because it's breaches of European data protection acts are out and out illegal.

It seems to go beyond this however, the problem is that this isn't the first time Google has been investigated, the problem is that it's being investigated over a number of other issues - it's privacy policy, it was investigated over street view, it's investigated left right and centre any time it even steps into slightly questionable territory and again, that's not a bad thing, but why just Google? The problem is I suspect precisely because of this type of bullshit that another posted below linked:

http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/

It just seems that if you're a tech giant you can get away with an awful lot, unless you're Google, in which case expect every single little thing to be scrutinised. The problem isn't scrutiny of Google, the problem is the other tech giants getting away with some pretty gross levels of abuse.

Blah blah blah, high UID, never posted before, but gets first post astroturf troll.

The fact is, whilst I may not think these are the most ideal business practices, they're far from unusual. Find me any other search engine in history, whether a general web search engine, or a site specific search engine that's ever promoted competitors equally. They've always had their products illustrated more prominently.

No, this, just like posters like you is more about this:

http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/

I'm not even convinced your last paragraph is even true.

Still, it looks like your campaign is working, the dumb mods on Slashdot can't see the shill for the trolls (see what I did there?), and Google is being investigated by the EU for something that doesn't even come close to the level of abuse Microsoft is guilty of in terms of it's practices over the years, Apple is guilty of in it's abuse of it's ecosystem, and Facebook is guilty of in it's illegal breaches of various data protection acts across the globe.

Ultimately though you must surely realise it doesn't matter, even if you do start to get your astroturfs regularly modded up, by that point anyone that matters will have long left the site, and you'll just be preaching to a bunch of teenage non-factors. Anyone that does matter, or does have influence, or can think for themselves can see your lame astroturfing for what it is. It's just become too common and too transparent, the pattern is too obvious.

Are you saying the judge being paid by the prosecution is OK?

  Brochure

  Story

Or is evidence not good enough for you? you also need 'testimonies'!!

Are you saying the judge being paid by the prosecution is OK?

  Brochure

  Story

Or is evidence not good enough for you? you also need 'testimonies'!!

"In my experience, humans have a tendency to overestimate their intelligence and the intelligence of our species. I specialize in automating "knowledge tasks." The people that I work with are very often surprised at just how much of what they think of as requiring human intelligence can actually be broken down into algorithms that are then applied to the data. Very little of what people actually do on a daily basis is more than the algorithmic application of knowledge.

I agree that there are some things computers cannot do just yet. Those jobs requiring creativity for instance. You could program a computer to imitate Picasso or a certain writer, but I doubt we'll be seeing computers creating truly original works of art or literature in the near future."

Unfortunately, your first paragraph slides is Insightful and your second one is Underrated as "Damn I wish this were true but watch out for my first paragraph".

Taking the writing example (because I know almost zero about painting), in one sense it is Not So Tough to create a computer that can create "truly original works of literature". We're currently playing a No True Intelligence (Scotsman) game against AI because of our crushing need not to get vaporized by automation and end up like the Matrix pods. As I've ranted elsewhere, we've purposely stunted funding into AI because of this zenophobic fear of what happens if we're not on top. The second fallacy is "zero human interaction". That gives us the comfort of watching the threatening AI crash and burn the minute it cannot get a little help. Instead, a "90-10" pattern is the devastating mix of automation.

Let's do a thought experiment. This will sound a little stilted for reasons of easy conceptual value, but then all you need is a second program to "polish" it. Here we go: (Parentheses used for pseudocode structure instead of other characters, in an attempt to avoid filters)

-------------------
http://falkvinge.net/2012/05/12/dutch-judge-who-ordered-pirate-bay-links-censored-found-to-be-corrupt/
Thought Experiment of Machine Assisted Article
(Find Topic I Like)
      (Topic I Like = Modules Loaded As Expertise)
(IntegrityOfLaw (IsOneOfModulesLoaded)
(Story Matching TopicILike-IntegrityOfLaw)

(Pick ConversationalPhraseOpener)
You may have heard of
(Introduce DeepSubject1)
the Pirate Bay.
(Beginner Mode On. EasyDescription Follows).
That is a site where users post music. However, in most places it is only legal to post music that you own. Some or many people post music that they do not own there. This is illegal. Also, the people that own the music do not like this. Subject to differences in law by countries, if the owner of a song asks for it to be removed, it is supposed to be removed. However, this takes time and time costs money. The music owners do not like this either.
(Intermediate Warmup to Story Follows)
Suppose someone uploaded a song. By itself maybe no one will see it. Then no one downloads any copies. The music owner "feels he has not lost any sales". But if someone posts the exact file name or other method, then many people will see it. Many people will download copies. The music owner "feels he has lost sales". The music owner does not like this. The music owner asked a court to tell people to stop posting file names to songs they do not own. The court agreed.
(Actual Story Begins Here)
The entire concept of the pure theory of law requires a fair judge. When the judge is unfair, this creates a social problem point. Generally, a fair judge has nothing to gain for himself. However, today's news is that the judge made money with the plaintiff. Therefore this is not a fair judge. Rulings by an unfair judge can sometimes still be fair. However, more likely the ruling from an unfair judge is unfair.
(Insert Poll Here)
75% of people polled say this ruling was unfair.
The question now for a higher court is whether the judge is fair.

(End of Pseudo-Generated Story.)

--------------------

and they weren't even a right-wing country back then.

Looks like Microsoft is joining up on the PR front to tag team google in the media: http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/. I long ago stopped responding to all the bogus claims against google. The myriad of bullshit is astounding, and it's too much to go through. Perhaps that is what the PR onslaught against google had in mind: throw everything and see what sticks, much like Oracle's lawsuit.

Well, it sure smells funny. In particular after seeing how the companies that have pressed for this investigation have been trying to lobby MEPs. Maybe in the end they found out that it is easier to sway the commission than the parliament...

Lately, MS has been one of the good guys

So they claim. But it seems to me more that they're on the back foot and therefore incapable of acting too overtly malicious without causing excessively many customer defections. I mean they're still doing this, and patent trolling, and pushing automatic updates to Internet Explorer that default to making Bing your search engine even though nobody likes it, etc.

They've still got a ways to go before anyone ever trusts them again. Like years. That's what happens when you ruin your own reputation.

poetmatt takes any opportunity to slide in an anti-microsoft comment

How can it be anti-Microsoft when it's a simple statement of fact.

http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/07/icomp_productivity_commission/
http://techrights.org/2011/08/08/burson-marsteller-busted/

Taking a random page off of Autosport.com (a site I currently have open), gives me a Twitter button which redirects to a sign in page when clicked, a LinkedIn button which redirects when clicked, a Facebook button which redirects when clicked, and indeed a Google +1 button which, surprise surprise, redirects anyway because I'm logged into a Google+ account which is not my own (business account) and requests permission to continue.

Those are somewhat different species of buttons. The third party website in those cases specifically inserted code for the buttons so that users would +1/like/whatever the website's own content, which directly benefits the website. What I'm talking about is putting the button on an ad, which only indirectly benefits the website it's actually on (by making ads more relevant/profitable), and which might be on websites that hadn't wanted or expected an ad that would spawn a new tab just for that. I could also see how the advertisers themselves would object, since you have a user who was interested enough in their ad to want to +1 it who is now distracted from actually buying the interesting thing advertised by a new tab that has them signing into Google+.

There could also be a million other reasons. Maybe they didn't even think about it, and this was the just the first implementation that came to mind. Maybe they had some internal reasons based on existing infrastructure. We're both just speculating about their motives.

My point is that when you have a competitor playing Cardinal Richelieu it doesn't make any sense to ascribe ulterior motives to ambiguous conduct, because there is no possible way to operate a large corporation such that no one will ever do anything that can't be painted in a bad light by assuming without evidence that their motives are impure.

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for, or do you want something else?

The thing people are continuously forgetting about all of this is that the bug in question was in the open source Webkit, which both Safari and Chrome are based on, and Google had already submitted a patch to fix the bug before any of this even became an issue.

This all seems a lot more about this than any sort of legitimate complaint the government has about what Google is doing. If the government had literally done nothing, the problem had already been solved before they became involved -- but now we have a big dog and pony show. Cui bono? Microsoft.

Even if eventually Google takes PayPal's place as the big, evil payment company? What the hell are you going to do to escape it when the company controlling the entire Internet is evil and now in charge of the payment system too?

How does that have anything to do with anything? They're going to do something extra evil with the payment system because they have a big search engine? Your question boils down to "what will you do when the payment processor is evil." Except that it already is. Paypal is more evil than Google could even pretend to be. I mean for fuck's sake, they're a payment processor that steals users' money at random. How much worse could it possibly get?

On top of that, the amount of public scrutiny Google is under is so far in excess of what Paypal is that they can't get away with doing anything evil. I mean look at the stuff they've been doing lately that isn't even remotely evil but everyone is dumping on them (mostly because of this and this).

And if you did, you'd be foolish, because the way to discover someone's intentions and motivations is not to ask them, but to observe what they actually do. Google is on an evil path.

Do you want to provide some actual examples? Like something more specific than "their marketing sucks" or "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal doesn't like their new privacy policy"?

No, you misread what he said. What he actually said was he wants to be able to transfer money from his bank to another bank directly, using a simple plastic card, rather than having to go through every Guido and Ese who wants his cut. In Europe bank to bank transfers are easy and common. In the U.S. it's expensive and a hassle.

That's correct, but the failure is not on the part of Google, it's on the part of U.S. banks.

I think also the thing to keep in mind is that all the major U.S. banks share ownership of Visa and MasterCard. They don't want to cut out the middle man; they are the middle man.

Because apple has started using microsoft/facebook tactics and pays people loads of money to badmouth google ?

Preferable to you and me, obviously. Ask the shareholders though.

I'm sure the shareholders are happy to keep both the web services and the ads -- it seems to be working out pretty well for them. But the fact remains that they would be a highly profitable company with services but not ads, whereas they would be nobody with ads but no services.

I also think it's worth pointing out why I'm bothering to argue with you. I don't work for Google. I don't own any stock. Nobody is paying me to do this. But I find this to be a profoundly dishonorable, despicable way for Microsoft to do business. So I'm going to do everything I damn well can to make sure it isn't an effective way to do business. This is not something we should allow Microsoft to get away with.

I'd be more worried about data breaches and server seizures due to their crazy politicians, crazy justice system! and willingness to bend over for all manner of privacy invading measures to satisfy foreign interests. It will be a hot day in Iceland before we move any servers to Sweden. Go Iceland!

You have to be careful trusting the Local for news. We have them in Switzerland too, same company, and all they do is poorly translate then over-sensationalize stories. Can't speak for the other sources, though.

I'd be more worried about data breaches and server seizures due to their crazy politicians, crazy justice system! and willingness to bend over for all manner of privacy invading measures to satisfy foreign interests. It will be a hot day in Iceland before we move any servers to Sweden. Go Iceland!

Apparently not even the EU top ACTA people like the way it has been pushed (or rather shoved): http://falkvinge.net/2012/01/26/eu-acta-chief-resigns-in-disgust-over-disrespect-at-citizens-next-steps/

It's not misleading in the slightest to call it non-copied for the simple reason that it was not a copy, and that the copyright monopoly only covers direct copies, nothing else.

The copyright monopoly also covers derivative works. Both Swedish and American copyright laws treat derivative works as separate cases from copies.

I agree with you on the main issue, though - I don't see why the original picture needs protection from someone creating a similar-looking picture.

Yes, they used similar inspiration and similar techniques. But that is specifically not covered by the copyright monopoly, which has always been about protecting a specific expression of a creative idea, and never the idea itself.

For more, see this article on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

It's not misleading in the slightest to call it non-copied for the simple reason that it was not a copy, and that the copyright monopoly only covers direct copies, nothing else.

Yes, they used similar inspiration and similar techniques. But that is specifically not covered by the copyright monopoly, which has always been about protecting a specific expression of a creative idea, and never the idea itself.

For more, see this article on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

Yes, the images are arguably similar. But there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claim that one would be a copy of the other, thus violating the copyright monopoly. What the judge has done here is to set a precedent that states that the monopoly does not just cover the creative work, but extends to a general creative idea, which completely shatters the traditional notion that the copyright monopoly only covers a specific expression of an idea, and never the idea itself.

So what’s the big deal, then? In this case, they sought to recreate the image and took a similar one. Why is that not a violation of the copyright monopoly?

Because that’s exactly how you do it if you don’t want to pay a license fee on the original terms. You create a similar work yourself, entirely by yourself, and compete. It’s the whole damned idea.

Article by Falkvinge on this verdict.

Rick Falkvinge, basically an unknown guy a few years ago, has become prominent enough to be named one of the top global thinkers along with major political figures and 2011 Arab revolutionaries.

Along with Bill Gates and Dick Cheney, yet people make fun of them all the time.

Really? How's this for influence. The PP of course has people in the European Parliament, which is indeed not a very important institution, but it does stand over the European Commission so it's not exactly a high-school council. Next, they did manage to have 7.1% of the vote in European Parliament elections, which is a number indicative of some actual support and not just a fad.

Rick Falkvinge, basically an unknown guy a few years ago, has become prominent enough to be named one of the top global thinkers along with major political figures and 2011 Arab revolutionaries.

Something else that typically gets overlooked by those dismissive of the PP is that it has significant support among youth, people in their early 20s. And of course PP members are young. This is crucial - as someone else said in a recent /. discussion on copyright, these are the people who started using the Internet a decade ago in their early teens, and who were using the early popular filesharing programs (remember Napster or Kazaa?). These people are now old enough to vote, and they're having kids that they bring up with also a very liberal attitude to copyrights.

No, I do not see the PP becoming a major political force in Sweden before the next election, but I fully expect support for them to rise, where soon enough mainstream politicians will also have to realize that the copyright issue is a very important one to a segment of voters.

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party has a short writing on it, "Filesharing Approved as an Official Religion in Sweden".

They've already had one bubble (a quite marvellous one, straight out of the text books). I think at this point there are many disillusioned "investors" that want out. Some people even claim they invested all their savings in bitcoin. That's gotta smart right now.
As long as they can lure new people with money into the system, they can dump slowly dump their coins without crashing the market again.

I can see where you're coming from, it certainly is cheeky. Perhaps a bit less so when you read the story of how the name came about, but still somewhat and from the very beginning.

It's a matter of taste, but personally, I appreciate a bit of cheek, particularly in the face of hypocrisy such as the *AA, two organizations whose members are famous for their "creative" accounting and for starting out as patent infringers, and the politicians in their pockets.

There are very good reasons for that name, the most obvious being that a party with the same platform by any other name had remained an unseen web page.

For more, check the article "Why the name Pirate Party?" here: http://falkvinge.net/2011/02/20/why-the-name-pirate-party/

The trouble is that the U.S. Congress uses EU insanity as an excuse to "harmonize" its copyright legislation to match what foreign countries offer in a game of copyright leapfrog

Well, it was U.S. interests in the first place which lobbied this into the EU.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-extent-of-lapdoggery-from-swedish-govt-on-copyright-monopoly/

http://falkvinge.net/2011/08/21/bitcoins-deflationary-economy-not-a-problem-in-itself/

I thought the same way, back in the good ol' days (March of this year...). I figured that the increase in difficulty would kill my profits, but a while later it turned out that the dollar price of bitcoins increased right in step with the difficulty so that the dollar return each day stayed roughly constant. (On 1.6 GHash/s, it hovered around $40/day despite huge increases in difficulty.) This persisted until about a few weeks ago, when it seemed to stick around $14/BTC.

I agree that it's less certain that this relationship will hold in the future, as more professional, optimized mining farms come online, but you're right that there's significant danger in assuming a constant difficulty or BTC value. But then, the risk goes both ways -- if bitcoins catch their "big break" and make it mainstream, the value can go up (again) faster than the difficulty.

So, if you're in it for the money, just be aware of how highly speculative this is. Don't pull a Rick Falkvinge and put all your savings in bitcoins, that's for damn sure.

"It is a scam."

You tell them Ecuador what is a scam and what isn't!

Both Falkvinge from pirate bay party, and Jason Calacanis from 'This week in startups' think that it is not:

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/11/with-the-napster-of-banking-round-the-corner-bring-out-your-popcorn/

http://launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html