Slashdot Mirror

What I was alluding to in another post is absolutely true. There is nothing unconstitutional about this law, it is completely permitted under the powers granted to Congress in the Constitution. It is absolutely legal that the government do this.

The following articles dicuss some related US Court rulings This article dicusses random monitoring by ISPs.

AbstractThis article takes the position that the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) does little to provide protection against internet service providers (ISPs) that randomly monitor e-mails for the purpose of turning over evidence of criminal activities to law enforcement officials. The article provides a background to the special privacy issues that arise in the context of computer technology and ISPs. An analysis of the Wiretap Act, as amended by the ECPA, reveals that an implicit statutory prohibition against random surveillance by ISPs for the purpose of assisting law enforcement does in fact exist. Further, remedies for violations of this provision are deficient because of many exceptions, and because criminal sanctions and the exclusionary rule are not included. Recent court decisions are analyzed which collectively suggest that the Fourth Amendment does not protect against evidence obtained from ISP surveillance. Finally, the article concludes by providing suggestions as to how the public's privacy interests against random ISP monitoring can and should be protected.

In Councilman v. United States, the court considered precisely when the Wiretap Act forbids the interception of e-mail. The statute and prior judicial decisions made clear that electronic communications -- unlike wire communications such as telephone calls -- were not protected once the communication was complete and the message was in storage. ... Councilman told the court to go further, ignoring whether a message was still in transit and asking only if it was obtained from computer memory or a hard drive.

Twice, the Americans have voted into office GW Bush, and such can only be interpreted as support for his policies. That he won by a significant margin in 2004 is proof that the majority of Americans believe in what he is selling.

The phrase "Democracy just means you get the government you deserve" might be more fitting than "a majority believe what he's selling"

When you get a chance give the following Greg Palast article a read: Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program

Additional articles related to questionable activities related to the 2000 & 2004 elections can be found at: Greg Palast columns

Also interesting is an article at Online Journal about Black Box Voting's finding of questionable code used in Diebold's optical scan voting machines.

"fair use" doesn't allow anything you want to put under it. I'm not the one declaring this so - judges are doing that.

You're the one declaring things that no judge has declared -- specifically that reverse engineering is disallowed by copyright law.

Reverse engineering is not protected under fair use. Would that it were! People go to jail for such things, though...quite often, in fact.

Yes it is; you're simply wrong. Here's a summary of two cases regarding reverse engineering. One interesting note is that while the judge in the Atari case upheld reverse engineering as fair use, since Atari did not hold a legal copy of the software they did not have the right to reverse engineer and thus lost the case. On the other hand, Accolade actually copied a small portion of the reverse-engineered code necessary for interopability, and was deemed non-infringing.

Sadly, the right to reverse engineer has been challenged recently in the blizzard vs bnetd case. It is important to understand, however, that the EULA was understood to be a contract imposing additional restrictions and not a license under copyright law because no such license is needed to use, run, or reverse engineer the program. The right to reverse-engineer under copyright law was upheld; it was the contract that prohibited r.e. Click-wrap EULAs acting as real binding contracts is the danger here, and it is very recent (much more recent than the copyright law provisions allowing reverse engineering). That's why it is important for people (like you) to understand that reverse engineering is a right that we have enjoyed and benefitted from for decades that they are now trying to eliminate.

And again with the IBM clone thing - there were IBM clones for 2 reasons. 1) IBM licensed some people to make clones. Bad move. 2) The US government stepped in and broke up their monopoly.

You are mistaken about this important piece of computer history. This is sad, because understanding what a vital role r.e. plays in the development of all the technology that these companies so rabidly try to protect is important to understand why the protections they seek go too far.

Phoenix did not have a license for the IBM BIOS. They reverse engineered the BIOS, and then passed the specifications derived by the reverse-engineering team to a development team that had never viewed IBM BIOS code, and thus implemented an original but functionally identical BIOS. It was this that allowed IBM-compatible computers to be made. IBM did not choose to allow them to use it; it was only possible due to reverse engineering.

The licensing mistake you may be thinking of regards Microsoft: IBM purchased a non-exclusive license to MS-DOS from Microsoft, so when clone machines using Phoenix's BIOS arrived Microsoft was free to license MS-DOS to them creating a 100% "IBM-compatible" system. If IBM had an exclusive DOS license or had bought it outright, they may still be in control since a full OS is much more difficult to reverse engineer.

The anti-trust case had nothing to do with it, by the way, as the case was dropped. The government did not break up their monopoly. Which isn't to say the suit had no effect in terms of time, money, and reputation.

Paperback lost because it lacked the money to appeal the decision. Lotus would later sue another software company and lost in appeals court. Read more about Lotus v. Borland