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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 --
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.
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.
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?
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).
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).
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