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The White House supports this version? Then why did they send the goon squad to gut the already weaker House version? https://www.techdirt.com/artic... If this bill makes it to the President in tact, it'll be a miracle.

Ah! Right. Same kind of answers as Verizon about throttling their mobile network users.

Is this the same as throttling?
No, this is not throttling.

How is this different than throttling?
The difference between our Network Optimization practices and throttling is network intelligence.

Sure. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Sounds like a great idea

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Actiblizzard [has the option of] DMCAing them for infringement of the copyright in Starcraft

I have no idea why they would do it.

For the same reason as the Let's Play takedowns. Sega DMCA'd videos containing footage of the Shining Force games (but later issued a non-apology). Some publishers, such as Nintendo, might instead choose to put a Content ID* claim on videos containing "images or audio of a certain length" (such as a game's title screen or cut scenes), diverting ad revenue away from partners.*

* YouTube terminology used. Feel free to substitute.

Actiblizzard [has the option of] DMCAing them for infringement of the copyright in Starcraft

I have no idea why they would do it.

For the same reason as the Let's Play takedowns. Sega DMCA'd videos containing footage of the Shining Force games (but later issued a non-apology). Some publishers, such as Nintendo, might instead choose to put a Content ID* claim on videos containing "images or audio of a certain length" (such as a game's title screen or cut scenes), diverting ad revenue away from partners.*

* YouTube terminology used. Feel free to substitute.

> My guess is that someone wants the hole (if there is one) kept open a while longer or the suspicion
> that TOR is somehow ineffective alive. Let your mind run wild with speculation.

Or...

The lawyers are worried that the testing violated wiretap laws and are trying to reduce CMU's legal liability.

LOL wtf? Your comment got modded +1 within minutes? Holy shit Slashdot has officially been taken over.

Do you really think your tactic still works, or do you really need that GCHQ/NSA paycheck.

By the way, your comment history on Slashdot make you look like a complete GCHQ/NSA shill, time to make a new account.

I am not even going to bother responding, for those uninformed and are wondering how the fuck can people be that stupid online, on a supposedly geek site:
  New Snowden Doc Reveals How GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'
  ir Force research: How to use social media to control people like drones (July 17 2014)

NSA/GCHQ agent detected, filter used: Baseless accusation that got +1 immediately.

New Snowden Doc Reveals How GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'

NSA/GCHQ agent detected.

New Snowden Doc Reveals How GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'

Already -1? Why? Because it followed logic instead of the CNN/Fox party line?

Geez it's like half of the Slashdot community are NSA/GCHQ agents:
  New Snowden Doc Reveals How GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'

.
Odd That Microsoft Demands Google Take Down Links That Remain In Bing

"Couldn't they just buy a bunch of computers with no network hardware whatsoever?"
The NSA and GCHQ can cover that air gap with some extra hardware added when shipped.
A tiny burst wireless then sends logged text over a short range to a waiting collection device for storage or other networking.
"NSA Spying Includes Wireless Transmitters To Get Data Off 'Air Gapped' Computers" (Jan 14, 2014)
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
ie the ideas behind RF transceivers eg SPECULATION, HOWLERMONKEY and CONJECTURE
NSA Codenames
http://cryptome.org/2014/01/ns...

Just claim the data was lost due to a "hard drive crash." I mean, it worked for the IRS, right?

It worked for the CIA video recordings of interrogations.

It worked for the CHP & KCSO after they confiscated, w/o warrant, the two cell phones which had video of the deadly police beating. The phones were later returned, sans video.

And so on. . .

...including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, "amplif[y]" sanctioned messages on YouTube,

Snowden has documents showing GCHQ was also behind those page widening posts in the early days of Slashdot as well as posting countless goatse and tubgirl links and other assorted crapflooding.

I would like to call you troll but unfortunately they were caught Man In The Middling slashdot.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Evidence of business attempting to censor: The perils of posting scathing reviews on Yelp and Angie's List

Evidence that business lies: Cable industry finally admits that data caps have nothing to do with congestion.

US capitalism was still using slavery when it started to take off. US technology won World War II. What business would invest in computers or the nuclear bomb? Government did, because business was too short-sighted and focused on immediate profits.

Business's idea of the internet was Prodigy and Compuserve.

Government nourished the computer industry by ordering chips for TI during the 1960s, when hardly anyone else was.

I've worked for big corporations, I've worked for small businesses. The ability to make small talk, chat up the boss, and scapegoat trumped any technical skills. One boss used to "spin the fickle finger of blame" when a project overran its budget.

I'd like to get involved in government. I email representatives, sometimes getting replies. Maybe I will go to some public meetings.

Oh that DMCA was issued by Cyveillance - the incompetent company Hollywood and music labels hired for policing P&P by string matching filenames and then carpet bombing service providers with DMCA requests, even though the content was not infringing at all. I bet they simply crawled Github for Qualcomm copyright notices, something that is often left in source code, even though it was relicensed long time ago already. Unfortunately, their bot is not that smart.

Some references:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

etc.

These bozos are known and someone at Qualcomm should get fired for hiring them. This is going to backfire at Qualcomm in a spectacular way, IMO.

The FBI has been able to listen to any cell phone mic, even when off (as long as it has battery power) for quite some time now.

Also illegal, so far... It's illegal to use something other than the ActiveX plugin authorized by the Korean government to do online banking in South Korea. The current president promised to change things, but so far, nothing has changed. Here's his promise being reported:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/So...

The problem is that Korea requires use of their own national encryption standard, which has a governmental back door (and for which exploits have already been demonstrated at BlackHat) in order to "secure" banking transactions from snooping by foreign powers (guess they called that one correctly).

Here are some other articles about where the plugin is required to establish secure communications channels:

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/intern...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

It gets more fun too
"Immigration officer fired after putting wife on list of terrorists to stop her flying home (31 January 2011)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
"US Has A 'Secret Exception' To Reasonable Suspicion For Putting People On The No Fly List" (Apr 17, 2014)
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
That other list:
"DHS ‘hands off’ list allowed suspects with terror ties into U.S."
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
'Hands off' list? Senator questions whether DHS allowing those with terror ties into US (May 07, 2014)
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...

Judge Anna Brown

Think I'm kidding? How about that oh-so-convenient-but-WTF case where a witness to a case concerning the *legality of the No Fly List* was put on the No Fly list while the DOJ lied about the facts about the blocking, delaying her testimony [1].

The corruption in Washington has been festering for at least a dozen years. Forget Skynet - this is the dystopian menace that is going to ruin our world.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Are you refering to things like this quagmire?

Sure, one could just as easily point to a "quagmire" of that magnitude in the automotive industry years back. And yet, there are automobiles everywhere.

But your original argument seemed to consist of: "We don't have graphene products yet because patents." and my response was "Perhaps it's just too early for them to be fabbing up the products yet and silicon was equally patent laden (and continues to be) yet it is utterly pervasive."

Do patents really stifle the onset of a technology or are you just preying on knee-jerk reactions that score well on Slashdot?

I'm not here to defend patents, just would like to see some rationality exercised. Who would research graphene if someone could just take that research and make their own product? Personally I find it easier to argue that adoption would be much much slower without patents.

Are you refering to things like this quagmire?

It's time to abolish patents completely.

Ten, twenty years ago we were hearing all about this 'wonder material' .. then suddenly we stopped hearing much at all, and didn't really see applications come to market. Now we know why. It's been all but killed by this patent minefield. Your children someday might have a terminal illness that could have been cured by some graphene-based medical product? Sorry, they must rather die so that the corporations who control these patents and patent lawyers can sit on the tech forcibly preventing anyone else from benefiting from it. We could help green deserts and make new regions of the planet liveable with cheaper desalination? Sorry, that must be killed by patents. Cheaper solar? Kill it. Potential electronics applications? Kill it.

Unless we abolish patents, our children and grandchildren are going to be living in a world that is scarcely more technically advanced than our own is now.

Even patent attorneys are starting to agree that patents are not or are no longer encouraging innovation, are stifling it, and are imposing a great cost burden on us, both financially and in terms of being robbed of our 'jetson's future'.

This is also the reason we've stopped seeing much real innovation or cost reductions in smartphone development: "There Are 250,000 Active Patents That Impact Smartphones; Representing One In Six Active Patents Today"

Study: Patent Trolls Cost Companies $29 Billion Last Year (that's a conservative estimate)

There is no way to "reform" this system. It's non-reformable as it's intrinsically unethical. It should be thrown out entirely.

solved using this. You might want to look at https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

In a nutshell, the Post Office has a customer base of only about 400 companies. The actual American public is lost in the noise as far as the Post Office is concerned.

The guy wrote the DMCA. He's in the pocket of every big content industry there is. Don't even pretend he has your interests in mind.

It seems I'm not the only one with my POV.

Violent Crime rates are the lowest they've been for decades: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Yet "Justifiable Homicide" by the police when attacked has almost doubled: http://tacreports.org/storage/...
(i.e. their response is more violent)
While the number of citizens killed by police in general has remained the same despite the reduction in violent crime.

Police murdered while on duty is at a 50yr low, so it's not like they are in some new mortal danger.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

This isn't the first time people have wrongly announced this either.

The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product

"Giving consumers a better product" would be going out and making their own movies that are better than Hollywood's. No laws against that anywhere. It's also not what they're doing. What they're doing would be more akin to me walking into your place of work and offering to do the work you did for the past month, for $50. You've already done the work, you just don't get paid, and I get $50. That's just giving your employer a better product, right? These tired old excuses for piracy are, ironically, from the last century, and I didn't realize people still talked like this in 2014.

To stretch your analogy:
Well, except that, if my employer wanted a copy of the work I've done for the last month, which, BTW, I was already paid for, I wouldn't expect him to pay me my full salary to have it done all over again. Not when he can, and does, have the minimum wage secretary make a Xerox for nothing more than the cost of her time, a little electricity, ink, and paper.

Just because the industry wants to exploit their rape of popular culture and turn every thought or utterance into a money stream for themselves, and has the money and position to get the elected officials to pass laws that are diametrically opposed to the wishes of the electorate that voted them into office, doesn't make it right.

It's a story that was written to match the data.

So, kinda like GEN Keith Alexander?

Lol...enough non-americans here....who can't be called traitors in any case..

US used to be "Land of the Free"...with very strong conditions not allowing the government to become a tyranny, among: The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." Seizure – the taking of private information"

Apparently you are the traitor to your own constitution...I guess it will be come down between Snowden's Constitution and Obma's Constitution

and to speak with Benjamin Franklin... "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both"

The destruction of that data is required by law. EFF tried to go on a fishing expedition.

Both the FISA court and Federal court eventually decided that the NSA was both allowed to, and required to, preserve information relevant to the ongoing cases, and the NSA both knew this and also eventually advocated for this position. See: https://www.techdirt.com/artic....

Court-ordered legal discovery also has force of law and would supercede any legal requirement to destroy information by plaintiffs or defendents.

And the DOJ did not assert the EFF was on a "fishing expedition"; it argued that it misunderstood the scope of discovery, and would not have destroyed the information in question if it did (which seems highly improbable given the circumstances).

> there are a lot of people who would have access to the true information and can benefit from its release, like certain senators,

huh? really? after all that shit about the CIA claiming feinstein's staffers stole files from them and how the agencies have been stonewalling the oversight committees for years and you still think these senators are going to have easy access to documents that can ruin careers of the people who control the documents? Want to bet that no one on the oversight committee even knew about the email that the NSA did release until today?

Look, I thought you were doing really well with your analysis of the game theory driving conspiracy theories. But your conclusions are based on reasoning that is at least as weak as any conspiracy theory.

http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

"This e-mail says EVERYTHING. It's an admission by the NSA that their program is illegal, they knew it was illegal, and they went ahead with it anyway."

As a former softie, all I can say is that i would trust bitlocker over pretty much any solution on the market and here are the reasons why:

1. Microsoft would not knowingly backdoor bitlocker. The NSA pressured the team leads, but management was adamantly opposed and declined to acquiesce.

2. Suppose bitlocker was knowingly backdoored, the amount of reputational harm that Microsoft would endure would literally be crippling. Crippling not with the OSS crowd, but enterprise customers. The only loser would be Microsoft and they would not recover.

[...]

Given that Microsoft already discloses unfixed vulnerabilities in their products to the US government, I don't find your #1 or #2 arguments either credible or compelling.

It sounds to me like they're finally admitting that this is a basic service that everyone should be provided with.
I wonder how much longer it will take before they regulate it as such (as a utility).

The thing is that the FCC (US government agency that regulates telecoms) can do that. It's what the whole Title II reclassification thing is all about. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Which is why the lobbyists and congress are freaking out. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Fiber to the Press Release

Meanwhile Chattanooga has ~50,000 homes with fiber (either 100mbps at ~$50 or 1gbps at $70), no caps and no google snooping to worry about. It so profitable that the revenue is subsidizing the electric side of the business. AT&T and Comcast are scared shitless too, offering $20/month guaranteed for a year for their fastest service (still with caps though).

Techdirt has a good writeup about the various things done to water-down this bill. Including legalizing things that had previously been illegal and that the NSA was probably already doing anyway.

Stories are circulating that Harry Reid is the one who exerted pressure on Lahey to pull the bill.

Reid is as corrupt as they come.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

RTFG

"As Feared: House Guts USA Freedom Act, Every Civil Liberties Organization Pulls Their Support"

http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

See this.

US?

What a bunch of arrogant, hypocritical pricks. The whole NSA SHITHOUSE comes down around their ears, with backdoored network devices and eavesdropping on world leaders - then these paragons of fucking virtue blame "cyber war" on individuals in a foreign government?

Why the fuck don't they haul meglomaniac Keith Alexander off of his fucking starship and drag his sorry arse, along with Elmer Fudd^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Michael Hayden, into the dock?

China has a developed diplomatic culture. This type of International behavior from the US is pure "play at home" propaganda, with the diplomatic effect of a bull in a china-shop, so to speak. Offensive, ignorant, unnecessary, and duplicitous.

Security researcher and Tor developer, Andrea Shepherd, found something fishy:
http://www.techdirt.com/articl...

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

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;

(emphasis added)

Also, this article quotes and discusses correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that shows their reasoning behind the issue. Jefferson eloquently defined the essence of the Public Domain:

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Kyoto was never made binding to the US, even the Clinton admin knew that. However the Obama admin itself says, and I quote, "ACTA is a legally binding international agreement":

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

You sit there and call bullshit on me, but the man that you are cheerleading for even disagrees with you.

The DOJ has shown its self to be incompetent.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ri...
http://gov.louisiana.gov/index...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

THE SYSTEM working exactly as designed - ex

I don't steal mp3's, I share them. Not saying it's right, just that it's so.

No, it isn't.

Copying and downloading have NEVER been "theft", according to U.S. law.

Further, you want to see how the copyright owners treat the content creators?

Before you start making arguments about ethics and karma, maybe you should make sure you're on the right side of said argument.

> no judge

Well, there are judges, and there are judges.

it doesn't have the catchy logo nor the rounded corners!?!? Also isn't a cell phone covered by like 250,000 patents?

He's takin our Jerbs!!!