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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.