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Information Preservation and Data Havens?
tiltowait asks: "An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens. There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls. But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary? For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?"
You mean like Cheney being kept in an undisclosed location?
It is wrong to copy textbooks....I'm not going to condone it...
But here's where I call bullshit...Why does there need to be a new edition every two-plus years on subjects that do not change at all? What new discoveries come in math? Do derivatives change at all? How bout sine and cosine? Hmm?
Anybody have an answer?
My MythTV HowTo
just spread your data around. Jurisdictional nightmare.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I like how not one legitimate use is listed among the reasons given.
and after i got a usb watch for xmas last year, i have gotten into the habit of archiving all of my company email every 3 monhhs, and walking out with the archive on my wrist
i always wondered about the constitutionality of that... it's not really MY email, even though, for all practical purposes, the content of it is more important to me than my company (records of who said what to whom, my ideas, my code, etc.)
we live in a day and age where corporate rights encroach on individual rights more and more
i think we should all do our best to fight that, in big ways and small
walking out with "corporate intellectual property" on my wrist is my way of doing that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I seem to remember reading that some organization was setting up servers on abandoned oil rigs in international waters for just such a purpose. I don't know what happened to them. Something about a giant squid maybe?
This place was referred to in the Wiki article via the link to HavenCo. HavenCo sounds like it's free of any type of outside infringement. Cool.
Cryptonomicon. (a book by Neal Stephenson)
Off-site backup might help in case of an FBI raid, but what if FBI has a warranty to intercept your data prior to the raid?
So the night before raid, while you're happily doing a off-site backup, another copy has been acquired by FBI.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Reminds me of South Korea.
;-)
The copyright laws there are pretty much non-existant.
For example you can purchase a jacket or article of clothing, and they will embroider it with just about anything you want, including emblems/logos that in America are Trademarked (Starter, Nike, etc).
You can also buy fake oakley sunglasses (AKA Foaklies/Oakies) in many parts of the world for $5 a pop.
The rest of the world doesn't always play by America's rules. But we're working on that.
Slashdot = ((Technology + Politics) / Trolls) % Grammar Nazis
Plus, going to Mexico isn't all that cost-effective. I'm betting you can find someone who will run anything through his copier as long as you pay him as easily in the USA as in anywhere in the world.
Unforunetely students copy textbooks a ridiculous amount now adays. Plus, for the popular ones, you could actually just google/emule the textbook name and chances are someone has already done it. With some of the engineering books costing easily over 100 dollars....then running into professors that hardly use the book...one can see why students think this is a viable option.
I remember I took a class in Emperical Methods. The text book was 150 dollars and was very poorly translated from Spanish to English...almost to the point of not being able to use it. Definitely a waste of money on that one.
As far as data backup goes, I know there are viable options for potentially important data. The Medical Industry always has a company that they outsource all the PAX system data to. Losing data in these systems is simply not a option. Unfortunetly, I don't think its cheap or viable for non-commercial use.
If your business model suffers from the possibility of a FBI raid, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your business? Just a thought...
Off-site backups are good for other things, such as preparing for natural disasters, fires, etc...
I thought thats what a gmail account is for.
who needs one gig of email
how about compressing your data and keeping it in your gmail account.
how can you associate bighardnipples@gmail.com with something like say enron
Anyone remember Sealand? They bought an oil rig or somesuch in international waters and started advertising as a place to store data outside the reach of governments.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I work in the mortgage industry, and in this industry, no-compete clauses are very common
Among the restrictions of the clause, there is one that specifically mentions theft of company information and not directly soliciting any of the company's clients for a period of time.
If you are in a sales position, taking the archives could represent theft of company data, which would violate privacy laws.
If you are in a customer service position, taking the archives could also represent theft of confidential information and trade secrets.
It's good that you back up your data, but if your company ever found out that you are removing it from the company, you could be subject to criminal prosecution.
An example of this would be the AOL employees that sold aol e-mail accounts to spammers. Granted, they acted on the information, but in today's litigation-happy society, they may not wait for you to act.
Not to mention, by taking the privelaged information, you are opening yourself up to a legal nightmare if the next company you work for does business with the same people/organizations as your previous company. If you don't have a list of previous clients/customers, it is much easier to deny intentionally soliciting/marketing the clients of your previous employer.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
I'm not american so I don't understand this: what kind of books are you supposed to buy? I'm in college and all the books I would ever need are available at the library (In fact, all my courses are done without books). I only bought two crypto books (Schneier and Zémor) because I told my teacher I wanted to have fun at home.
I'd much rather deal with an FBI raid I know about than NSA scrutiny I don't know about.
Of course, with PATRIOT, the distinction is meaningless. The NSA can snoop on citizens domestically and the FBI raids people overseas.
On further thought. Location of your datastore appears meaningless. Maybe a better idea is good ol' distributed secure p2p (freenet and the like). maybe with some stegonography for good measure.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
It is wrong ethically and ... to engage in work that is violating laws of our country and taking away from owners their hard earned rewards that they have worked and slogged days and nights to produce.
On the other hand...
Better way to address your problems are to support and develop electronic formats and buying books in these formats e.g. LaTeX, PDF etc (which don't yet prevent users from distributing) which individual writers can write and make available in formats that allow them to get returns that they would have normally gotten without going thru a publisher... And also people can print copies of that and mail it to you if you wanted a paperback version. But to not pay for somebody's hard work is akin to stealing and such is not the purpose and intent of our community.
the prinicipality of SEALAND wants to be your data haven.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Offsite backup is a very good idea and not just in case of an FBI raid. If your building burns down, you want to be able to rebuild your business. It's much easier if your books still exist!
It occurs to me that a police raid is enabled by a warrant. The warrant is for a specific location. If they don't know where the backup data is they don't have a carte blanche to go fishing everywhere. Use your imagination.
open source text books, perhaps developed wiki style.
Try this. Exactly what you mentioned. Hopefully the idea will catch on, and information hoarding will cease to cost students so much money.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
DUH! This is why the article specifically mentions going down to Mexico. RTFA. I remember this subject coming up before in comments at least, and numerous people mentioned that especially in larger areas, there are generally independent copy shops that will overlook such concerns if you're in the know. However, this isn't totally necessary. I'm a phd student at a very large research university, and numerous times graduate students have been caught using department copiers after hours to copy textbooks. (grad students get copier codes). This article doesn't make a large enough point. Especially in graduate engineering, from my experience sometimes half of the students use copies, even when cheap bound copies from india are available (still illegal in this country).
As a young(er) Master's student in Computer Science back in 1996, I noted that many of my international colleagues (grad students) photocopying their textbooks and sharing the copies from semester to semester and student to student.
I brought this up at a department meeting I was a student-rep for, and the grad program chair said something like "why should we care?"
I was shocked at this attitude and lack of concern about the actions of those doing the copying. Yes, it is/was illegal and something should have been done/said about it. However, since I knew that several tenured professors didn't care, me saying anything to anyone wasn't going to change the situation. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have alerted the book companies.
many students spend >$350 per semester in order to rent the "proper" edition of a book that has not had any significant changes made to it in years, if ever. after 3 months the students "sell" the books back to the bookstore for around 1/4 what they paid, so the books can be put on the shelf for next semester, assuming there isn't a new edition required for the class.
people tolerate it because "college is important" and you "learn valuable life skills".
but all of your concerns consider the rights and exposure of corporations
not once do you consider the rights and exposure of the individual
and that's the problem, as i see it, and as i think you fail to grasp
how am i to defend myself from unfair accusations without a backup of my communications? how am i to work in an environment where the corporation has claims on not only the whole of my production, but also any production i might do or any potential for production in any ideas i may have?
you can say i might be untrustworthy with those email records, and that is a valid concern, and you outline some valid scenarios for how i can hurt my company
but i assert to you that the corporation is no more trustworthy than i with those records, and if you claim the corporation IS more trustworhty than i am, then i can beat you to your point by noting that one way the corporation IS more trustworthy than me is that it is bound by rules about proper record retention...
well then, how can you use this as grounds for denying me the same right of record retention to earn my trustworthiness?
so your one-sided list of concerns binds me to a catch-22 situation: i can't be trusted with ownership of records which affect me as an individual, and the rules do not allow me to increase my trustworthiness by proving my fairness with the records i retain... only the corporation takes risks in your view, only the corporation has something to lose with your one-sided view of rules of data retention
then all you can say is that corporate rules about electronic records exist to increase confidence and trust in corporations, and to instill distrust and doubt of individuals
frankly, i take umbrage with your remarks because you represent the vanguard of a crisis of giving corporations more rights than individuals
at the very least, your obsession with the rights of corporations, and complete lack of concern for the rights of the individual, contributes to a very real problem
what i suggest to solve the impass is not to denigrate the rights of corporations to the level of individuals: distrusted and bound by no confidence, but to increase the rights of individuals to that currently enjoyed by corporations: allow them access to and retention of records which share infuence on the life of the individual and the corporation in equal or proportionate measure
fairness should be the whole point, and the current legal environment about electronic data is not fair to the individual, and allows corporation too much leeway for abuse
so elevate the rights of the individual, as if the individual were another corporation going into legal agreement with the corporation when they accept employment with the corporation
fairness
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just to make it clear. IT is ilegal to photocopy a book in Mexico. If you get caught you could have serious problems. The thing is that the people who attend the copying machines doesn't give a crap if you are doing something ilegal, you don't even have to bribe nobody, that's why it is "easier". But it is ILEGAL anyways. And yes, I live in Mexico.
Why in today's tech savvy world can't we just get the E-book for a cheaper price. Printing optional. You pay your tuition to the school, they (the school) subsidise the content maker based on enrollment, you get an E-book and you can either use your computer or pay to have it printed.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
- Librarians
to the Rescue
- Copyright
Crusaders Hit Schools
- Internet
Publishing Can Pay Off
- It's
Just the 'internet' Now? (story from here)
- Open-ILS.org | Library software by librarians for librarians
And since a lot of IT crosses over with what librarians do nowadays, this site really is worth a look-see. Just don't feed the GNA^H^H^H Boston Public Library troll (no, really!). So sign up now while we're still on 4-digit UIDs!ps. Yes I've read Cryptonomicon and have heard of what Sealand is doing, but was wondering about any other efforts.
Because that price in Mexico includes labor.
Basically you hand them the text book and come back a few hours later to find it all nicely copied and bound....assuming, of course, that after spending the $100 you saved on drinking Coronas and dodgy prostitutes, you are able to work out where the hell it was you left the book
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Among other things you can download Orwell's complete works and The Great Gatsby.
The University of Adeliade has a slicker version of the same texts.
Is anyone paying fucking attention to what is happening here in America? The conspiracy between the schools, the professors, the bookstores and the publishers is just one example of how America is run for and by those at the top. What I want to know is why the country of parent poster here, which apparently is a country run by the people, for the people, is able to do for him what our America, the "Greatest Country in the World" cannot do for us....
Free market, my ass....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I'm taking a macroeconomics class and I had a choice between an internet version of the class, which all class materials, including the text are part of a pay to access website. Its $40 for the whole semester. The website is run by the professor who wrote the class materials, and after hosting costs, all of the money goes to him. The other choice was to buy a $100 text book which may or may not be bought back by the bookstore, and I have no want to look at after the semester is over. Guess which section of the class I chose. This is what should be making publishers scared, not some people in a border town making photo copies. I got a cheaper class, my professor makes more money, and the publisher can go to hell.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Why do they have to go to Mexico?
.agrippa.
When I was a student at University of California, San Diego I had to go to Kinkos to copy some material a fundraiser for Boy's Club my fraternity was putting on. I had to wait an hour while a team of medical students copied every page of all their textbooks and monoplized all the copiers. I asked them what they were doing and was told point blank that they had just bought those books and they were copying them with the intention of returning them the next day for a refund. I pointed them to a sign hung above the copiers that had a warning about duplicating copywrited material and they just shrugged.
I really need to get my work done so I talked to a Kinko's employee and asked him why he wasn't doing anything about the fact these medical students were blatantly disregarding not only Kinko policy but the law as well. His answer: We put that sign up but we don't really care if they do it. Shocked, I asked for his manager, explained the situation, and was given the exact same reply. Yea, the sign was up there, and the students knew they were doing something illegal in full site of people with the power to stop them, but as long as Kinkos was making money they didn't care.
NetLibrary has a stupid interface - you log in from a member institution, then you can view books online. Good idea, right? Wrong. All of their content is crippled - you can't print it more than a page at a time, save it to a file, or even look at more than two pages consecutively without going through a screen that says "Please type the letters you see in the box. This is to protect against actions you have performed that appear to violate copyright." This is after simply viewing three pages in a row quickly, because I wanted to find a particular equation!
So what did I do?
Right.
I wrote a script that brought up each of 280+ pages sequentially and printed them to TIFF files, popping up a browser so I could perform their human-detection action when required. The I packed the whole thing into a PDF, and ran an OCR on the whole thing. Presto! The original book, in un-DRM'd form, happily readable and printable.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Please stop smoking weed and start drinking real coffee.
TIA
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It would be nice to find offsite backup partners on some kind of P2P network. If you have 80 gigs to back up, you need to have 80 gigs available on your system to trade off. All encrypted, so it's safe. And if you're extra paranoid, find 2 or more partners!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
About ten years ago I worked in Silicon Valley for a company that had an affiliate in the UK.
I got assigned to back up all the hard disks once a week. One day I suggested to my boss that we make an extra back-up and send it to our English affiliate. My reasoning was that with all the:
1) Earthquakes - There was a 7.2 a few years before centered a few miles away. I remember steel tables bouncing several feet in the air off a concrete floor in the warehouse. There was a 7.4 a few months eariler in L.A. and a 7.3 south of Eureka to the north. Serious scare-the-shit-out-of-you earthquakes are not uncommon in California. The 8.4 quake of 1906 destroyed the entire city of San Francisco in only five minutes.
2) Fires - East Oakland had burned the previous summer and Malibu the summer before. People jsut love to build giant wooden houses ten feet apart and then plant trees with flammable oil in the bark all around them. One schmuck tosses a cigarette butt out the window and half the city is gone two hours later. Typical California.
3) Insurrections - In April 1993, Los Angeles erupted in a giant race riot. White cops beat a black guy with sticks on television after he drove 160 Kilometers-per-hour through many neighborhoods. The trial was moved to the most conservative city in the entire state and they were found not guilty. So the blacks burned down the Korean neighborhoods to protest the police presence in their neighborhoods (which have the highest crime rates in the country). Typical California.
4) Tsumamais - As a result of one of those earthquakes happening offshore, the beach rolls back really really far. Then it comes back up to the highest water mark on the beach, and keeps coming up and up and up. Over the beach, the parking lot, the streets, the stores, the houses, the buildings, the trees, the factory, the warehouses...
5) Incompetent back up technician accidently erasing the invaluable company data. - Uh, we won't spend much time on this one. But it's not all that uncommon. Especially when the backups are done on unpaid overtime.
When I explained all this to them as a good reason to have reasonably current set of backups out of the building, out of the city, and even out of the country, they looked at me as if I were stark raving crazy!
If it's legal to bring those photocopies back over the border...
It's not. The people who copy textbooks in Mexico might not be breaking any Mexican laws, but the people who bring those unauthorized copies into the US certainly are breaking US law.
Circumvention might be a different matter though. Under US law you are entitled to make backups, but you are not entitled to circumvent copy protection. If the cicumvention takes place in another country, but you are entitled to own the resulting copy, then I think that would be all legal.
Another situation where this might make a difference is in fair use of textbooks. You are generally allowed to copy as much as a chapter of a book, but you have to make the copy yourself. If someone else, like a copy shop makes it for you then you have to pay licensing fees. Again, if you are entitled to have a copy, and the copying takes place outside the US, you might be all legal. Mexican copy shops might be able to get in on a lucrative mail-order coursepack business.
Yes, for science/eng majors, textbook buying is a huge pain, but for people like me (English grad) textbooks are cheap, the editions are plentiful, and they're not twenty-pound monsters that crush my frail laptop when I'm going from class to class.
I've said it a thousand times: no matter what your major is, GET THE BOOK LIST FROM THE PROF two or three months before the class starts and ORDER ONLINE. Amazon.com ships textbooks free over what, $25? Even if you save a couple of bucks on one book, you're winning and leaving the overpriced univ book store with leftover stock. This is a good thing.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
This is just my personal opinion so if you don't agree feel free.
There is a fundimental difference between information and physical property.
Information can generally be used simultainiously by multiple people without interfering with any of the other users of the information (we can all listen to the same song/hear the same joke/run the same program without 'taking away' from anyone else who 'uses' the information).
Physical property can generally only be utilized by a single person simultainiously (Only I can use my car/socks/toothbrush during a specific point in time).
This is a big fundamental difference.
It would be nice if information could fit into the physical-property category but it simply doesn't.
The reason it sorta-kinda did for so long was that the copying mechanisms were rather slow/expensive and the end result was always a physical item (paper-book, chemical-film, etc).
Now we have finally gotten to a point where the information is more-or-less 'free' from the physical information-carrier.
The major publishing-house people (those that make the physical items that are used to carry information) seem to be hopelessly trying to re-combine the physical with the informational. This isn't going to happen but they are currently causing a lot of harm in attempting to do so. The longer this 'transitional period' takes the longer all the misery is extended.
The really funny thing in my opinion is that so many people in general also buy into the concept of 'information as physical-type property'.
I would ask that you honestly think about the harm this idea causes vs the 'good' that results from it. I think that if you really truely honestly evaluate it you will see that these laws are causing much more harm than any good that they could ever do from this point forward.
I feel that slowly we are outgrowing this outdated idea just like we outgrew other ideas that no-longer worked in our society. The only real question is how long it will take and how much suffering will be caused during this transition.
In my opinion the actions of the students in this article are much more helpful than harmful. They help bring to light the fact that this system is hopelessly broken.
I flat out reject the argument that just because a law exists that it is somehow a 'moral imperitive' that it is followed. Laws have no inherent moral function. Morals in themselves are not objective but always subjective. Think about the laws on slavery that used to exist if you need a point of reference.
I would also like to state that I make my living as a software developer and physical-media artist. I think/read a lot about history and economic issues and consider myself very much a pro-capitalist strong-physical-property-rights sort of person. I am NOT any sort of socialist hippie tree-hugger type that doesn't understand how the world works and wants everything for free.
Why restirct your data to only two locations? Assume you want to spread your data across k locations.
Let F be the file we want to encrypt, and spread over k juristictions, so that all k encrypted files are needed to decrypt F.
1. Create k-1 random files the same size as F, and call them X1,X2,...,Xk-1.
2. Create another file Xk by assigning the nth bit of Xn to 1 if an odd number of ones existed in the nth bit over all the files, and put a zero otherwise.
3. For every bit of Xk, if it differs from the nth bit of F, then set the bit to 1. Else, set the bit to zero.
We now have k random files that together encode our original file F. To get it back count the number of 1's for each bit, and put a 0 for even and a 1 for odd.
As long as one of your locations is secure the attacker has nothing but a collection of random files.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
You can do what my friends and I tried... we setup an online bookstore to sell books to students at our university. At the time, the bookstore was selling for about 2% below list price, so we set our prices about 5% below list. Not much, but it was a start. However, we had some problems with the publishers, shipping, delivery, etc., and didn't break even the first semester. It really is a logistical nightmare, but we didn't screw any students... most got their books, and the rest at least got their money back.
The next semester, we were considering pulling our prices down further, to 8% off list (the problem was we weren't getting enough orders to be taken seriously by the publishers), but just as we were about to do it, the university bookstore pulled their prices down to 10% off list. Good for the students, but it put us out of business at that point.
We thought we had at least accomplished something, but then the prices at the bookstore went back up the next semester to 2% off list.
Oh well, we tried.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
If your business model suffers from the possibility of a FBI raid, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your business? Just a thought...
The problem is that almost every business has proprietary secrets that it can't afford to share with the general public. This usually means using encrypted communications - which may draw the suspicion of the FBI. Take for example:
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.