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FTC To Take a Second Look at P2P
BlueMerle writes to mention that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has asked the FTC to take another look into the world of peer-to-peer file sharing. This time around however the inquiry has nothing to do with copyright. "But a USPTO report earlier this year stirred up the issue again by claiming that P2P installs could adversely affect national security when they made confidential government information available. This has already happened several times, as the Oversight Committee learned in July when it held hearings on the USPTO report and its findings. At that hearing, representatives were also shown real-time P2P search data. While most of the searches were for porn, movies, and music, the committee noted a surprisingly number of searches for private financial information."
Now, instead of RIAA, I have to worry about the Secret Service and the NSA when I'm browsing pirate bay looking for some mus
*bright flash of concussion grenade*
$#(FRe2%DEK#NO CARRIER
Kid-proof tablet..
But wouldn't the real solution be to train government employees in the arcane art of not installing P2P applications on government computers in the first place? Or does that just make too much sense to be effective?
But a USPTO report earlier this year stirred up the issue again by claiming that P2P installs could adversely affect national security when they made confidential government information available.
How is this even remotely related to any P2P protocol? That's an issue no matter what protocol used. Hell, in Norway there have been lots of screaming because some soldiers have put information and pictures that were confidential in one way or the other up on Facebook. Making confidential information available is a breach of security no matter what protocol you use to distribute it. Perhaps things get distributed more with P2P, but you still have to look for information and download before (while) you distribute it yourself.
How much pr0n does the government have laying around, and why isn't it on Limewire yet?????????
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Brilliant! Bribery didn't work, so let's make it about national security. Why, precisely, is this any more dangerous than "ssh encrypted file transfers" (aka sftp), or this newfangled thing called FedEx and "paper"? Sure, because it's an information-sharing protocol you can (drum roll) share information. That, in of itself is not a heinous thing.
Financial information is more important data. All those numbers take up lots of tube space. Soon we'll have all those tubes clogged up with dollars and cents* unless we can cut off the P2P box from trying to get this data! *Dollars and cents are number figures, not actual coins. Please don't go digging around and cutting open the tubes for money.
I love it when qualitiative terms are applied to quantitative data. Out of 100% of searches made, there'll be A% for porn, B% for music, C% for movies... and D% for "sensitive financial information?" What was that number? "A surprising amount." (Skimmed the article too). What number were you expecting? 0%? 0.001%? 1%? I'd like to know a) exactly what the numbers are, b) what constitutes a search for "sensitive financial information". Searching for a credit report on someone is a lot different than searching for how much money some celebrity makes.
Isn't the entire Internet a P2P network?
Why are classified documents even on a computer that's connected to the internet in the first place? The government has their own separate networks for that stuff.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
Last year Javed Iqbal, a satellite installer, was thrown in jail. His crime? He allowed people in the US to watch Al-Manar, the television station of Hezbollah. Of course Hezbollah is legally considered to be a terrorist group - if you're a country that is or formerly was a British colony. Or, for some reason, Holland. Outside of Holland and current/former British Dominions, the rest of the world considers Hezbollah to be what it is, a representative of Palestinians pushed into southern Lebanon by the Israelis from 1948 on. But anyhow, the US and UK are at odds with the rest of the world on this as so often they are, Iqbal was thrown in the slammer, and nary a word is heard about it or the supposed First Amendment. Meanwhile, narcissistic attention-seekers like Salman Rushdie are feted and praised year after year. In fact, this is done by the same corporate media propaganda machine which is working to dismantle things like peer-to-peer, all the while of course never reporting on what they are in fact doing, or about many things that are going on in the country of interest but that we'll never know about.
P2P is always to blame because there is a group with money ready to blame it. The finger prints are all over this.
How could a legislative committee discover, discuss and decide to take action on a problem like this before the leading edge of the community, which is to say here, has even heard about it? Remember these guys don't even type themselves, they have people to do that. That intertube guy genuinely thought he was being insightful at the time.
There may be other evidence. Where an when did these guys hear about the problem? That one could say a whole lot
Groups like the senate oversight commitee are cherry appointments. They go to senators that have been in office more or less forever. That means these guys are OLD.
OLD legislators don't go online that often but the do generally make a point to read their district's local paper. Is there a suspicious cluster of spontaneous articles that have appeared there more than other equivalent publications that are not home town news for pertinent legislators?
There may also be a few various motivating factors for making an argument over this.
Is there unequal use of P2P for political purposes? I have not been following the Obama campaign but I understand he is leveraging the internet pretty heavily. If P2P is being heavily used by on party more than another, it behooves the other party to kill the medium.
The solution for this one is for supporters of both P2P and the legislator in question need to start making use of it to prove the personal need.
Espionage has recently become a hot issue. The beauty of this particular subject is it's at least superficially non-partisan, it appears, truthfully or not, to address a major news subject making them look like heroes, and of course there's the money from the RIAA to make it all tastier.
...and suggest that to even connect to the Internet as a client in the future, you'll need a licence and an approved software stack. The licence will be in the form of an officially endorsed key pair, and your OS will (1) sign all your outgoing packets with this key pair, and (2) respond to remote attestation requests about the software running on your machine. You'll be able to opt out of this, of course, but if you do, you can't connect to the Internet, because routers at your ISP will refuse to carry traffic lacking a valid signature from the central authority.
One consequence of this is that you will lose anonymity, because everything you send will be traceable to your licence. It will also enable censorship and the destruction of information, because when licences are revoked, information sent using them will simply disappear. That's perfect for any organisation that wishes to control the movement of information, from Fascist governments to record companies.
The expense of this will be justified in the usual ways ("think of the children"/"the poor starving musicians"/"the dying film industry"/"OMG TERRORISTS!1!!!!1!"), and the technology that will be used to implement it already exists. It's funny to think that possession of an unlicensed computer might be a crime in the future, since an unlicensed computer might enable someone to copy information without restriction, and obviously only a criminal would want to do that. Will possession of Linux land you in jail?
Truly the present day is the best time to be alive, because we have all this advanced technology and it is not restricted yet.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?