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New P2P Battle is Heating Up
Digital Dharma writes "News.com has an article about a new P2P war just getting underway in congress. With Senator Hollings retiring, the RIAA and MPAA have found suitable replacement hosts in three key members of the House of Representatives. Lamar Smith, R-Texas; Howard Berman, D-Calif; and John Conyers, D-Mich are taking up arms against P2P networks with a bizarre new bill that would require companies that create certain types of software such as web browsers, instant messaging clients and e-mail utilities to add a warning that it 'could create a security and privacy risk.' How this would deter P2P activity is a bit of a mystery. The article also talks about putting software company executives in jail for failing to correctly label said software, empowering the FBI to release anti-P2P propaganda and other typical RIAA/MPAA sponsored oddities." A network application can create a security risk? Best firewall off every port!
I believe p2p is the future. Copyright issues aside, I doubt I'm the only one that's noticed that there are some downloads that are getting extremely large. Maybe it's a game demo, a movie trailer, or a software upgrade. How often has it happened that some thing comes out like, say, a Matrix trailer or a new game mod and people swamp the main server and mirrors alike to download it? Why else would recent Slashdot articles on popular downloads be linking .torrent files?
The problem is further escalated by the fact that the ranks of broadband users are growning every day. I hear that Verizon is wanting to dump somewhere around 11 billion dollars into their network to ensure that all of their customers are able to get DSL, and they have lowered their prices across the board...You can now get 1.5 down/128 up for a flat $30/mo, similar to what SBC's been offering. With all this broadband around, popular web sites will not be able to keep up, expecially if they have downloadable goodies. The answer is distributed computing. p2p represents the infancy of the inevitibility of distributed storage, processing, and bandwidth.
Web browsers, instant messengers, and basically every other thing you use to do anything on the internet is going to give you one of those warnings. So pretty much everyone is going to be constantly assaulted by these messages and therefore get used to them and start to ignore every message like that they see. Not only will this NOT deter people from using P2P programs (since they'll just ignore the message anyways), it's DANGEROUS since they'll ignore warning messages that actually have some meaning behind them.
Yeah, this sounds like a great idea.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
People in (government) power usually have very little idea as to what there doing when they make legislature about technology. For example, most slashdotters could have told them the DMCA was a bad idea, especially the way it was written. But the legislatures only listened to what the big corporations wanted.
M$ Lawyer: But `gcc
Now, give people free content without restrictions and you have something that everyone wants. Why are search engines the most popular websites? because the user types in what they want and gets it. From a users point of view, kazaa is the same as google except you can get everything that you cant get on google - its like the too hot for google channel. Are you seriously telling me that people dont want to be able to download all the music, films, porn, software, games, books and southpark they want for free!?!?! get real!
The only things that might kill p2p filesharing as we know it are:
Governments (well in the UK anyway) are pushing broadband for all sorts of PHB reasons like "education" and obviously the ISPs - AOL etc are gonna try and sell it. Sen. Hollings is even for it. The absolute irony here is that the very same people who are pushing broadband so they can sell content are the same ones who will be fucked out of their money by filesharing! its brilliant, serves them right for their evil DRM plans.
It's a good thing the senate doesn't apply this warning to every piece of technology. Pretty soon we might wind up putting warning stickers on telephones and whatnot
The way it would create a security and privacy risk is that you would be at risk because your privacy would be interrupted by Ashcroft's stormtroopers weilding the DMCA in their hand. They would put your personal security at risk by opening a can of Patriot Act whoop ass. That's how.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
... that fail to label "copy protected" CD's properly. It's simple fraud (you're not buying a "CD" per se), plus, with some schemes, it's outright vandalism.
Since this measure would apply to all developer-provided software dealing with network traffic, I'd be less likely to write my own network-enabled (read: internet-enabled) software.
Perhaps this is the point of the bill: to keep software writing in the hands of those rich enough to hire a group of lawyers who can keep away other lawyers.
Please, do keep in mind that this IS America. You know, that place that has safety labels on laundry detergent that say "Not for oral consumption."
Of course, then again, we all know that thousands of people still die every year from a nice warm class of bleach. Don't quite see how Internet Explorer can cause people to die. Well, on second thought...
Trent Polack
www.polycat.net
Not a mystery to me!
By saying that this product that you're willfully installing has a "privacy risk", you're saying you don't mind if the product compromises your privacy.
It's a legal loophole that could allow the RIAA/MPAA to install plugins that will monitor you at your machine. After all - you agreed to it when you installed the software. You said you didn't mind if your privacy was compromised.
This one is very sneaky. I'd never install anything that told me it might compromise my privacy.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
How this would deter P2P activity is a bit of a mystery.
Is it any more of a mystery than the belief that spying on every American citizen will deter terrorism?
Emphasis mine
Same goes for IM. THe only port they can connect on is through the secure port 443. Of course none of the employees have quite figured this out so I am the only one that can IM with outside people. Rendevous only works on the internal network so they can only chat with other employees.
Plus we're not paying people to chat with friends. Funny how project completion times went up after I disabled the port.
Except for you that seems. I'd have little respect for sysadmin that does not honor his own policies.
Sure. Anyone who accepts a dollar from a lobby can no longer run or hold office. You want to lobby, send em brochures and meet with em, but don't give him/her bundles of cash.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
If we would simply produce a P2P app. that was easy to use and popular, then this would be a non-issue. This would ensure our privacy and rights. Additionally, how could P2P be regulated if no-one knew the content of transfers? Without entrapment or illegal snooping it couldn't. It's time for a good encrypted P2P client so we can maintain our privacy.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The key word here is not "security", it's "privacy". Here's what this bill really means:
In the current 9 year-old suing world of the RIAA, victims are found by firing up Kazaa (or Grokster or [insert your favorite gnutella-like p2p client here]) and seeing who is sharing and who is downloading. The "who" is given by the IP address of the P2P client computer. Now.. that doesn't really do the RIAA any good because they cannot sue an IP address. So they bully smaller, weaker ISP's into giving out their private customer information. Thus an IP address leads to a name.
Here comes the problem. Some ISP's aren't buying it. Some are saying "our customer privacy is more important than your rampage". This bill makes it so that the clients have "agreed" that they are not annonymous, and that the federal government has the right to grab your personal information and hand it over to the RIAA as they see fit (or just allow the RIAA to grab the now-non-private personal information directly from the ISP). What's more, you cannot counter-sue for privacy infringment because you've agreed to this (since you're using this software that has these statements embedded, and it's all part of the EULA).
From your site Frank C. Bailey and Kirk A. Fickert founded this company in October 2003.
Wow, your policies must really have stood the test of time. I mean you've been around for how long now, 22 days?
Agreed, firewall off every port. I'm sick of all the worms that crawl through irresponsibly managed computers. Apps with security holes are setting up PCs on broadband as spam relays, DoS drones, and other blended threat tools.
Many current P2P, email, and instant messaging apps are security risks, and cause problems for naive Internet users (i.e., the vaste majority). Those insecure apps, quite simply, pose a risk to network security, privacy of the end-user, etc. They should be behind firewalls. I find no rational reason to disagree with those stated intentions for the bill, aside from FUD relating to the RIAA's intentions and long-term goals for their puppets.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Maybe I am just being nieve here, but aren't movies still posting record setting profits? Both you, and the movie companies (maybe you're just a shill) seem bound and determined to convice the world that piracy is eating into the livelyhoods of the average worker on a move set. I call BULLSHIT! Movies are making more and more money every year, movie companies are allowing larger and larger budgets every year, and I somehow doubt that the workers on the sets are making any less now than they have been. A carpenter is still going to be paid the going wage (or the inflated union wage, depending), a painter will still be paid the same, and more as time goes on. The only people who believe that piracy is truly affecting the average worker on the set are those people who are too stupid to see through the rhetoric the studios are putting out.
Hell, even on a movie that flops tremendously the low level workers are still paid the same. They were paid an hourly wage for the work they did on the set, long before we all realized that Tomb Raider sucked horribly.
Now, does any of this justify copyright violations? No, of course not, but I just really hate all of this bullshit being spread around by the movie companies. If you want to argue about something, don't do it based on lies, it'll just make me respect your position less. If it can't be argued on facts, it probably isn't worth supporting. (End Rant)
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
For those of you who haven't noticed yet, the way to get a crazy ass bill like this passed is to make the first draft lean insanely toward your side. Then as you make changes and cuts to please your opponents, what's left over is what you intended in the first place.
You look like the good guy for "fixing" the bill while still getting exactly what you wanted. How many times have we seen people say things like "I'm so glad so-and-so grew a brain and fixed that crazy bill/policy/rule/whatever" and then later realized it was still a piece of crap when finished?
Let me see if we're talking about the same thing. At the top you have your standard menu bar "File / Edit / View / etc.". Below that you usually have some of the navigation buttons (Back, Forward, Reload) and the address area where you can type in an URL.
In the space below that you can put folders such that when you click on each folder you get a drop-down list of bookmarks? Or are you talking about clicking on "Favorites" all the way at the top and then selecting a folder from that drop-down which gives you yet another drop-down with the bookmarks you want?
What I have below my "Back / Forward / Reload / Stop" buttons is a single bookmark bar... A quick link to Google (I don't use the browser search function even though it goes to Google, too), Local (a folder of bookmarks of local files), Tech Reference (a folder of bookmarks to tech information of the net), Resources (non-tech resources on the net), and News/Weather. I can get to any of my bookmarks in two clicks--one click to get the appropriate drop-down menu, then click on the bookmark.
When I first got XP I tried to use the IE that came with it, but I simply could not get the above functionality to happen. All I could seem to get was either the "favorites" that pop-up on the left side of the browser window taking up space, or adding them to the "Favorites" drop-down menu option which then required 3 clicks to get to the page I wanted. So I just installed Netscape.
It doesn't really matter to me now since I'm on Linux and I'll never use IE again. But I'd be interested in knowing if what I wanted to achieve with IE the last time I tried is now possible (or perhaps was possible then and I just couldn't figure it out).
but since there won't be any new versions under this engine, I'll have to wait for Longhorn.
Must be a bummer to have to wait for a new OS to get a new version of your browser. :) Meanwhile, Mozilla development keeps on truckin'.
Making all programs tell people there is a security risk will allow them to put backdoors in the programs to delete illegal/pirated material.
It's kind of a nice way to say that using this product has no garantee that your data is safe from RIAA.
Well that's my paranoid opinion.
First off, slashdot is not one big person. Some of us want our software bundled, and speak up at the appropriate time. Some of us want our software modular, and speak up at the appropriate time. Some of us (Like me) want some stuff modular, some stuff bundled. Secondly, popup blockers being bundled into the browser isn't "The Microsoft way" of throwing everything and the kitchen sink into one application. You get popups when (and only when) using a web browser. Period. So it should be a feature of the browser. And it is in Mozilla (So I use it). What is "The Microsoft Way" is bundling a chat program, web browser, email, news reader, spreadsheet, word processor, and OS into the same application. Sadly, Mozilla does most of this too, which I think is a bit too much (Though I do use their email program. It R0x0rZ).
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Exactly; popups in your browser are a result of the browser engine getting an instruction to open a new window. Would you want to have to download a plugin for CSS or Javascript to work? Or JPEG images? Of course not. Mozilla simply provides a way to respond differently to a combination of window.open and onload instructions.
And yes, Mozilla does bundle several applications into one package, but note that they are moving away from this, and eventually everything will be released as separate components. I suspect that it was done this way originally to cater to Netscape users who were used to getting their "suite".
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
No one has said that all bundling is bad. Popup blocking should belong in a browser, and there is no reason why Microsoft couldn't add more features to their browser. If they hadn't already secured a monopoly in the browser market and couldn't care less about innovation...
But the kind of bundling which kills off competition, with products of lesser quality bundled with the operating system just to push dangerous competitors out of the market, that is the bad kind of bundling.
Microsoft should never have been allowed to secure a monopoly in the browser market anyway, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't have made it a separate download with lots of useful features (rather than a basic browser which doesn't do much and which is very vulnerable to pages that want to exploit security holes, flood you with popups, and so on).
By the way, Opera is a closed-source/commercial browser with a popup blocker (and countless other features that make your everyday browsing faster and more convenient) built in. And actually, Mozilla/Firebird has borrowed a lot of features from Opera. built in popup blocking was first seen in Opera, for example.
Also, bundling applications is far from "the Microsoft way". You are giving Microsoft more credit than they deserve. It is not like they were the first to bundle applications!
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