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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!
...firewall off the entire United States, like they've done with Red China? I live outside the US and the odds of my complying with this asinine request are about...zero!
America we hardly new ye!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Wow! Stop the presses, this is a big shock. In 2004 here's the synopsis on how much milk each of these candidates sucked from the Entertainment titty. (They open in a new window).
Lamar Smith received a little over $21,000 from the TV/Music/Music lobbies in 2004
In 2002 he received almost $25,000
Howard Berman received a little over $4,000 from the TV/Music/Music lobbies in 2004
In 2002 he received almost (can you believe this?) $223,000!
John Conyers received almost $5,000 from the TV/Music/Music lobbies in 2004
In 2002 he received almost $50,000!
The ROI on congressional payoffs is insanely high..
Don't laugh -- many incompetent managers think this way. I am sitting behind a firewall that blocks all outbound traffic, with the exception of ports 80 and 21. This, I am told, will help prevent viruses from entering the network. Moreso, I might add, than any kind of coherent patching strategy.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
maybe the congress should fine Darpa for funding the creation of TCP/IP too.
These kind of laws are showing how the government has always treated citizens, with mistrust. They are doing more for copyright protection then they are for things like healthcare, it really shows their prorities.
-Seriv
It would be nice if companies set up bittorrents of those files. Say the new LOTR trailer comes out and they set up a normal server and a bittorrent for it. When more people get on the normal server, it goes slower and slower until everyone is waiting hours for it to finish. When more people get on the torrent, it goes far FASTER (it also uses up less of their bandwidth). I've been seeing more torrents lately, but not nearly as many as I'd like... and most of them are set up by users, not the company. I have no clue why they don't do it (except maybe not knowing about BT), there doesn't seem to be any disadvantages...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
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.
It is possible that this is meant in part to help RIAA attack users' machines through the P2P medium... if everyone accepts the risk, the RIAA could claim that this is a sort of consent to allow projected electronic damage by those running the software, or at least an acknowledgement that it may happen. I know it is a stretch, but why else would the RIAA push for this?
Isn't it funny how whenever Microsoft builds something in, people complain about bundling or lack of modular design (and usually point out how the Unix way of having separate components for each part of a job is better), but when Microsoft does something the Unix way (e.g., the browser browses, and if you want pop-up blocking, get a pop-up blocker component), and the major Unix browsers do it the Microsoft way (incorporate the pop-up blocker into the browser), suddenly that is the right approach?