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They missed some hideously-bad ads for Microsoft.

My favorite "bad Microsoft ad" is a 2000 TV ad, which uses the musical theme of "Confutatis Maledictis" from Mozart's Requiem. The screen says "Where do you want to go today?" while the chorus sings "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" ("The damned and accursed are convicted to the flames of Hell").

There's also a 2009 ad featuring a vomiting woman.

For one thing, nebulous arguments about "government" like this are always weak. "Government" is rarely a single person or institution operating executively (and when it is, that's usually an abuse of the intended system of representation that needs to be fixed for a whole host of other reasons anyway).

Rarely? A single FBI agent can demand records with one of these, with no judicial oversight.

If this is still too nebulous, here are some numbers: "An internal FBI audit found that the bureau violated the rules more than 1000 times in an audit of 10% of its national investigations between 2002 and 2007. Over 20 of these involved requests by agents for information that US law did not permit them to have." Assuming the audit examined a random sampling of reuqests, that means there were ten thousand rule violations and two hundred illegal requests over that five-year period.

As long as we have a culture where both businesses and governments follow this basic principle (because they are required to by law and that law is effectively enforced), ...

Business culture? AT&T volunteered to help the NSA spy on their customers. They even have a secret routing center of some sort just for this task. eBay goes out of their way to help law enforcement. Verizon hands over customer data to the NSA and outrageously tries to claim free speech protection to do so.

The government and its laws? Go read about the National Security Letters linked above, learn about the USA PATRIOT Act, read about the 2,176 secret warrants were issued in 2006, ...just for starters. The law itself authorizes most of these abuses.

I actually have no problem with my ISP and the hosts at Slashdot keeping sufficient records to identify me in combination as the author of this post, as long as there are sufficient safeguards such as not releasing it without proper legal requirement to do so and only keeping it for a reasonable period of time.

As I hope you can see now, there aren't. One FBI agent can demand data from Slashdot under the authority of an NSL and can get your IP, then he can go over to your ISP and demand your name and address under another NSL. A third request under CALEA to your ISP or their upstream, and your every online move is being monitored for whatever he's looking for. And who knows how long businesses keep IP data around? There are currently no data retention laws in the US -- and if the government ever passes any, I assure you that they won't be to protect you by demanding businesses delete data after n months, they'll be to surveille you by demanding businesses keep data for at least n months. And if a businesses has it, and the government demands it, they have to yield it up.

In other words, the above means of identifying someone only works if all the parties involved are in countries where the law is compatible on these concerns.

Oh, you think being in Canada or the Netherlands or something is going to protect you from all this? That hole has been plugged, too.

Everytime the topic of Africa crops up I always realise how many people are ignorant of Africa. To borrow a line from this site which I would recommend for anyone who wants to know something about africa to read first,

So please guys, Africa is NOT a country but a continent!

There are conflicts at the moment I only know of 3 actual ones being covered by the media: Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast. The interesting fact is that you can travel to the capital cities of this countries (for example Khartoum in Sudan) with the same risk involved as travelling to Tel Aviv in Israel.

There are other places with a history of ongoing conflict mostly natural resources propagated or land and border disputes and at the moment are enjoying some sought of peace: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ethiopia-Eritrea and the Central African Republic, Angola, Mauritania and Algeria. Then there is the politically motivated violence here at the moment only Zimbabwe is experiencing this. Then there is the lawless Somali. All this countries add up to 11... Africa has 50 countries and a little math leaves 39 countries WITHOUT conflict. Are we now to say that this countries are not safe to visit or invest in?

There are 300 million Swahili speakers in the world. That is far more than the German speakers. Swahili qualifies as an International language. It makes sense to create Swahili software translations.

Instead of shouting about the conflicts, famines and drought we should be looking at Africa the Indian way. India has an ongoing conflicts; border disputes and religious tensions, has a huge poor population, but is able to send satelites to space and create software solutions that are recougnised worldwide. This is so because no one keeps on rubbing their noses and holding huge placards infront of their faces with the conflicts and poverty problems everytime they want to try developing technical solutions!

The German parliament which has just adopted DMCA-style provisions to outlaw the circumvention of technical protection measures that control and curtail the fair use of intellectual property (and only needs the other House's assent for part of the new legislation) makes Germany the third country, following Denmark and Greece, to implement the highly controversial "monstrosity" known as the European Union Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC.

This move, allegedly a "propaganda victory" dubbed "lex Bertelsmann" (after the giant media conglomerate expected to line their corporate pockets under the new laws) in furious disapproval by tech-savvy parts of the news media, makes Germany one of the early adopters setting an unfortunate precedent for further European countries like the UK and France whose citizens, and notably developers like Linux kernel guru Alan Cox, will probably not be spared from similar legislation for much longer either.

Although open-source researchers, cyber-rights activists and even the ruling Social Democrats' very own IT experts as well as hardware manufacturers underlined the severe dangers and inconsistencies of this new and doubtful philosophy extending copyright law to reduce many of the general public's rights to insignificance, in a debate focusing only on academic exemptions from the publishers' power grab, the opposition even tried to tighten the government's bill, ignoring widespread experiences of Chilling Effects such as censorship and assaults on the Freedom to Tinker during the past four years under the EUCD's U.S. counterpart of draconian "bad law and bad policy", the flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another overreaching implementation of the

I was hunting for this quote from the NAZI era, but I found an 'update' with a more direct bent.

First they came...

First they came for the hackers.
But I never did anything illegal with my computer,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers.
But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers.
But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users.
But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me.
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

-- Alara Rogers

GRRR!

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.

Reason: Junk character post.
!!!!?

You sir, and your little "copyright", are about the sickest things I've seen on /. in a long time. It shows just how perverted the whole concept of "IP" is.

I assume you allude to the signature you find below all my postings. I created that signature after I found that Slashdot posted a notice on every page it generates that "this page is copyright slashdot.org", which it isn't - I own my words, not slashdot. This has changed since then, but I kept that signature as a reminder that I own my words, nobody else. That proved useful when /. tried to make a book from the comments posted to the Hellmouth stories.

The signature has no legal relevance. Current German copyright law says that you own your works whether you create a disclaimer or not, and US copyright law is the same since 1974. Before that, you had to register your works with some copyright bureau and mark protected works with a © symbol and the year of registration. You US citizend may know the details better than I do, I hope.

Your reaction to my signature shows that the reminder works. You have started to think about copyright and IP, and it's consequences for your life. That's exactly what I want to happen.

Personally I think that current IP law is indeed sick and perverted. It is still law, though, and govers your and my life as well as the life of Deja.

am making a point to post all of your comments on a web page of mine. What are you going to do, sue me?

If you are an US citizen, I don't even have to sue under current legislation. I just have to send you a DMCA takedown notice to you or your provider. You then have to take down these pages, or sue me and so does your provider. In fact, your provider has to take down these pages, unless he wants to become legally liable. It then becomes your duty to prove that you actually have the needed license to host that content and that I have no legal base to force you to take down the pages.

This is sick, and if I remember correctly, ACLU is currently working to have this changed. Also, there is no similar law currently in Germany or the EU, and I hope there never will be (in fact, I am working with groups like Fitug to stop such regulations becoming law in the EU).

But DMCA or not, I still believe that /. does not own my words in a way that they can make a book from it without asking me, and I still believe that Deja cannot turn my posts into their advertisements. The DMCA is just a very convenient way to stop them.

© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

I can see that everyone is worried about privacy and a "Big Brother" coming to get you, but if you aren't doing anything to arouse suspicion, you shouldn't worry.

In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me -
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

More directly, the poster also says:

I care a lot more that the e-mail of terrorists is being read at my small sacrifice than I care that the FBI sees that my friend and I are talking about burritos or whatever.

Second, if these hypothetical terrorists are stupid enough to transmit in plaintext over unsecured routes, then they're so inept that the FBI would capture them without the email surveillance. Let's face it -- the proposed measures won't be effective against true, dedicated opponents. But they'd be perfect against the large, undereducated, unmotivated public.

Existing laws on surveillance, wiretapping, etc., have been (easily) extended to cyberspace. They protect, nominally at least, the rights of citizens. Although the FBI guy intended the oppositie, he's right: These things must be balanced. What worries me is that many (upper) law enforcement officials seem to place no value on citizens' privacy at all. They don't seem clued in as to why people get edgy about this.

Until the government does understand that privacy is a valuable right, I'd rather it not get any more powers to poke around my life.

The Germans want to censor.

That's plain wrong. It's the recording industry who wants to protect their profits by all means. That's not a specific German problem by the way.

But it's very unlikely that they will ever get that far:

• The current laws in Germany are such that a provider is not responsible at all for content they only provide access to. So there's no reason for providers to actually install such software.
• Even in the very unlikely case that the legal responsibility would be extended, it would not possibly go beyond what is currently specified for (web)space providers.
  This means that the blockage of content must be zumutbar (~ acceptable). Blocking whole servers or a large performance penalty is probably not zumutbar, especially if other, legal content would be affected -- something the grounds for the law explicitly state!

You can have a look at the TDG (Teledienstegesetz, ~ Tele Services Statue), including its grounds at http://www.fitug.de/ulf/politik/iukdg.ht ml (German only, sorry). It basically says in 5: (1) You're fully responsible for your own content. (2) You're responsible for content from others if you keep it on your own servers, have knowledge of it and it's zumutbar to block/delete it. (3) You're not responsible for content you only provide access to. Same for content you only cache temporarily.

The recording industry wants to have that changed. Until then, they just spread inaccurate information; ie that this blocking software makes it zumutbar to block that content -- which, even if it's true does not have any effect on content to which only access is provided.
It should be noted that -- according to the grounds for the TDG -- this is not because it was deemed impossible to influcence that content but because an access provider does not attribute to the violation of the provider of the content. The "new" blocking system does not change that.
(Of course, the interpretation of the recording industry is different, just as it is different in other areas of copyright law... But that's another story.)

I don't see any connection to the Holocaust. Some people seem to be extremy paranoid about this.

While it's true that we are much less fettered by export regulations than our neighbours to the south, we still do have some restrictions on the export of software here in Canada. For more information, see the following web pages:

Canada's Export Controls
Excerpts from the Export Control List of Canada
The Wassenaar Arrangement, which Canada has signed
Crypto Law Survey of Canada

And, more generally,
Electronic Frontier Canada