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Jailbreaking the Internet For Freedom's Sake
snydeq writes "With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"
For great justice?
Any alternative internet technology relies on encryption, and as long as courts have to ability to require you to decrypt data upon request, any discussion of workarounds is pointless.
To really address the real problem, the laws themselves must be the focus.
it's not about connectivity, it's about accessibility: presence in the search results, being properly indexed.
There could be million free pages under any super-free Internet. What's the point of it if nothing could be found?
Main battle is going to be around google search results and there have been several front pages on that: content providers are already fighting with google.
If a movie is getting NC-17 rating, forget about profit (in this case most rightfully so, that's Islam speaking).
If a website is accessible only via Tor, forget about business.
Imagine isntead of banning megaupload website were still accessible through Tor or some other kind of superfreeandsecretnet. Do you really think Dotcom would be leaving in 22M mansion?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/
Are people so dumb now they can't pick from three or four installers the one appropriate to their system?!
If they are so dumb, doesn't this give us a chance to turn the clock back to August of '93 by leaving them behind?
(Tongue-in-cheek, of course, my love of freedom exceeds my loathing of noobs who refuse to educate themselves, and the more people using such a tool, the less feasible prosecuting everyone caught becomes.)
I would go further and suggest that this is a desired outcome by both governments and content holders: to drive the subversives, the perceived anarchists, and in short, all of the non-mainstream consumer users of the Internet off of it into their own "underground". This keeps the nominal Internet "market" sanitized from both subversive content and disruptive behavior, as well as segregates the undesirables into their own sandbox where keeping an eye on them may not be easier, but lowers the degree of urgency for doing so.
I can see this tightening of regulation creating an all new internet that is build amongst non-profit communities and connected together in fashions so that no one owns the transmission means. Unlike today's internet which is essentially owned by oligarchy consisting of AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon (i.e. Big Telecom) communities may end up either laying their own transmission lines or use multipoint wireless. This might just be the tipping point at which the pricing and collusion of Big Telecom leads to their ultimate demise and irrelevance.
Oh god, it burns.
...but in all seriousness: okay, Mr. Venezia, you can jailbreak it. Just be careful you don't brick it. No one needs a bricked Internet. While you're at it, can you install a SIM unlock, too? I hear the service provider that the Internet comes with is terrible.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...that is what Moglen et al have been saying all along: don't trust the lawmakers and people in power to make you free. Guarantee your freedoms one by one, by building them - free speech, anonymity, etc. can be engineered!
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
People go where the content is. If The Pirate Bay were only accessible over the Tor network there would be tons more traffic there, thus more information on how to access it. If enough content were only accessible over Tor soon there would be extensions for web browsers that would make it as easy to get there as any other site.
"They said we drink horse urine and sleep with our own kin. You say it's comedy, but how can someone laugh at that?"
And who trusts Tor anyways?
From TFA:
and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services.
It ain't a picture. This software already exists, look for example vidalia ( https://www.torproject.org/projects/vidalia.html.en ). I'd say this bundle is unnecessary for most GNU/Linux users (we have package managers) but still handy if we need to quickly deploy anonymizing software in a public machine.
Awesome, because nothing is more important than ensuring our supply of free entertainment continues.
Oh, I'm sorry, I mean dissident thought. Yeah, totally. Not first-run movies and PS3 game images at all. This is about freedom.
as Tor's own site will say, having the software is only one step. you have to change your habits.
it also requires the entry and exit to be trusted.
VPNs are private by definition.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Kind of difficult to connect to servers that are unplugged and sitting in a guarded evidence closet somewhere.
The other problem is that people might stop creating these great sites/services because you can't "just browse" to them or venture capitalists won't fund the startup. Anonymity and an underground internet is useless if all the cool stuff is just taken down (as opposed to blocked) or even worse, never created in the first place. For example, can we secretly get to megaupload now? What about it's competitors that have disabled file sharing?
It must be nice to be so retardedly rich that you can be ignorant as hell like this fellow and not have to give a shit.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
What the first step is to do is encrypt communications, then worry about the medium the bytes are flying over, be it E-mail, IM, FB messages, FB walls, tweets, or smoke signals. To do this, we need to go back to basics with a web of trust, and PGP (technically PGP or gpg, but will use PGP for clarity's sake.)
Once people have a web of trust in place, where Alice can fetch Bob's PGP key from a keyserver, find that there are trust links from that key to people Alice knows who are not goobs, then she can send a message to Bob, and no matter how compromised the system is underneath, it will be secure.
With RIPA where a judge can ask someone 20 times in a row for a key, and if said magistrate gets 30 "no"'s, can toss someone in pretty much for life, and the US courts demanding encryption keys, the next step is to use functionality put in PGP over 15 years ago -- have one signing key, and change decryption keys out fairly often. This way, expired decryption keys can eventually be deleted. This also lets someone hand a key over to the guy in the XKCD ad with the $5 wrench without loss of knees, elbows, or brain tissue, but still maintain security.
The rub is that not just people using this for sensitive communication need to use PGP; EVERYONE does, even if it is just a message on FB to a friend telling them how awesome smelling their cats fart after feeding them curly fries from Jack in the Box. Once people start using envelopes for their communication, it will bring security to a higher level. Hell, PRZ detailed exactly this in the PGP introduction over 20 years ago.
It boils down to this: Do you do your own encryption with your own keys, and your own trust, or do you trust that some for-profit group whose interests are likely not in your security to do it for you?
ie, filled with errors, out of sequence, dropped and maybe even faked packets (I know, that goes beyond what UDP is supposed to do).
but assume that the network is evil and fake and someone is always trying to do bad things (listen, change, realtime trap-on, etc) and write your layered app protocols on top of THAT assumption.
its a good assumption, in fact. if you assume your transport is bad and your app fills the gap to make the end to end connection, *now*, reliable and trustable, then you can deal with both honest and less-than-honest physical and logical transports (ethernet, atm, cable, dsl, etc).
the problem is that our protocols and apps have assumed no mess-ups internally in our networks. this is no longer true anymore! the evil bastards have gotton a hint of how cool our internet toy is and they want to pervert it to suit their will.
if we don't start taking a defensive posture on our network, we will LOSE control (arguable we have already) of our networks.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The money will always be in the "mainstream", or the particular mainstream of every place and time, by definition.
Megaupload exists because it makes money. It makes money because millions of people watch movies and download shit off it, not because it makes a few hackers "free" to share stuff.
No mainstream = no money = not *existing* in any noticeable capacity.
I was just about to make the very same point myself. It's called Perfect Forward Secrecy. Use protocols in which the users do not have the ability to decrypt content after the session ends. Courts can't require you to do the impossible.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
While not minimizing the possibility that the Federal government will go full throttle and do for the internet what it has done for most everything else (fuck it up beyond belief), I sincerely doubt that Paul Venezia and the like are actually very concerned with the concept of freedom and liberty as most of us understand it.
Rather, they are more concerned with the ability to download music, movies, programs, etc. for free.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The way I see it, accessibility loss is just a precursor to connectivity loss. When ACTA fails to stop piracy what do you think they're going to do next? It's not two separate problems, just two degrees of the same problem.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There are already millions of pages on the internet. And guess what? There are very few that make it on Google's first page. Which in essence means, they don't exist. But they still do, and they still have traffic. Not the same, true, but not exactly on the edge of oblivion.
And Tor isn't successful for two reasons, people don't understand YET that the free internet is in danger, and second, it should come as an firefox applet, with two check boxes, "I want to host a Tor server", "Enable Tor", and two buttons, OK and Cancel.
For everyone to use encryption, it needs to be made so easy that they don't even need to know what encryption is. Like with SSL - all people need to know is that if their banking site doesn't show a padlock icon, something is suspicious. That probably means accepting 'good enough' encryption for a lot of things - encryption that could be broken by a fairly advanced MITM attack, but which is sufficiently annoying to the evesdropper so as to render mass-monitoring impractical.
As a darknet I2P is clearly superior to Tor, both in speed and security - Tor still relies on trusted directory servers while I2P is fully distributed and requires no trusted servers of any kind. Tor is better as an anonymizing proxy.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"
Kind of breath-taking when you contemplate it.
Given that the "War on Sharing" is just getting started and will follow the arc of the "War on Drugs", expect the above along with:
Of course, the question will become - are you with the Empire or the Alliance?
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
The problem with this approach is that it focuses on the end user's connectivity and not the effect such laws would have on the web sites themselves. Who cares if you have unfettered access to all sites when the sites don't exist due to legal threats.
Let's take Slashdot as an example. Say something like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc eventually succeeds and it becomes very easy to shut down any website with just a suggestion of copyright infringement on the site. That is, if somebody posted a link to The Pirate Bay in the comments, then somebody else could get Slashdot as a whole effectively shut down as a result. And yes, that's what could happen with laws such as SOPA.
What do you think happens to sites like Slashdot in an environment like this? The only reasonable response would be to drastically limit, if not eliminate, all user comments.
Meanwhile, the Slashdot user deftly installs the circumvention software and is easily able to get to Slashdot... but who cares? Without the comments, the entire site has only marginal value.
That's why circumvention software is only a tiny part of a workaround and one that will eventually fail. It's the sites that need to be protected, not the access.
And anyone caught with it will be treated as a child pornographer and will be attacked by vigilantes.
... aren't in home desktop machines or laptops. They're in 4GWhatever smartphones. Those are what's being pushed now. Your nifty installer might work on a desktop or laptop or even one of the few surviving netbooks, but let's see it work on a smartphone and still have plenty of storage space to do useful stuff with. And be prepared to pay out the ass for your data plan.
And what you gonna do with that pirated data you do manage to download onto your home machine? What's to stop antivirus makers from adding the hashes of popular movies to their virus databases, with appropriate scary-sounding descriptions ('FuzzyWuzzy virus detected! Multiple incidents! Clean these? ')?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The point has been to try and control the flow of information not merely to watch it.
I'm fairly certain that the government has an eye on everybody who can write code. If you are a programmer you probably
at some point have an FBI file just as a gun owner or bomb maker would. Remember the government considers encryption to be a munition so what does that make a programmer?
And yet we have people running covert operations to let corn rot and then distill the runoffs. They have to hideout in the woods to perform one of the simplest operations you can do with fire and liquid. The laws are justified and sold, claiming that they protect people from bad alcohol, when we all know it is about tax revenue.
In 1914, the federal government went on record outlawing a weed that covered the banks of the Potomac. A huge cadre of policemen have since been converted to an army to prevent people from talking stupid and getting the munchies. The claim is that marijuana is a "gateway" drug, when we all know that the taxed alcohol the authorities allow is the real gateway drug.
Anyone that calls these regimes into question is labeled with an outlaw, rebel, or some other less than "proper society" title. Any politician that claims that it is a matter of personal liberty is called "bat shit crazy" when they aren't being completely ignored.
Why, oh why, would anyone think that the powers that be would allow an alternative internet? "If you're on the alternative internet, it must be because of child pornography!!! Or you might be a terrorist! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" The excuse to bust down doors to lock people up for talking in chatrooms is prepared already, and the people have been conditioned to swallow it already.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Anyone who uses encryption will be flagged as some sort of pedophile or terrorist. So encryption is not the answer.
While circumventing censorship is better than nothing this is not technical problem but a legal one. We need to stand up against censorship on the streets, not on some dark unknown meshnet.
If it weren't for pirated content, few people would need big hard drives. I mean, really, a terabyte on the desktop?
It's really hard to fill a big hard drive without pirating stuff. I was just looking at my hard drive space consumption. I have on it:
This all adds up to about 200GB.
If it weren't for piracy, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.
The *AA's have declared war on the free internet, and governments everywhere are getting on board with that after seeing the Arab Spring use its tools to overthrow their governments and generally stop doing what they're told. We saw with the SOPA protest how effective we can be when we work together, because there are vastly more of us than there are of them.
What we need to do now is to take it to the next level and take the fight to them. Revising copyright is probably a good place to start because there is a greater degree of public awareness about it now. If we push for the complete abolition of the notion of copyright, and push very hard, then the *AA's will be put on the defensive.
More generally we need to expunge government of the clueless, supine creatures who lay down for all this nonsense as well as the pure evil who are screwing us with full awareness of the damage they're doing. With the advent of additive manufacturing this same set of issues is about to spread to every industry, and it's going to intensify with those larger stakes. We can see a new era of human freedom or unprecedented repression, but we won't tilt the balance in our favor unless we all fight hard.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Even saying they're "uncomfortable with the Internet" is to drink the Koolaide. The long-term and repeated historical trend has been that they're uncomfortable with sales, and this time the threat that people will shove more money down their gullets than the Hollywood companies can handle, is just as grave, and they are fighting it just as tenaciously.
Part of me wants to say there's one difference, which is that this time they are winning and achieving the goal of lowering their revenue -- driving people toward piracy because they refuse to offer the files themselves. But that's only a personal perspective and when you look at the actual numbers, it's not true: revenues are continuing to increase.
So once again, even the MPAA can't fuck this up, and they're gagging on the money that we force them to consume against their will.
The issue everyone needs to face, is whether you will disregard their choking noises like a coward at an accident scene, or if you'll be compassionate and help them achieve their long sought-after goal? Are you going to callously defy the MPAA and keep sending money for broken DRMed shit to be earmarked for the purchase of more absurd laws, or are you going to join their leaders in the effort to drive MPAA companies out of business?
I know that their suicide sounds like an insurmountable mountain, a futile effort which has stood the test of many, over decades of repeated attempts. Even the mighty Valenti couldn't prevent the movie rental market; if he, a figure of legend in modern times, couldn't bankrupt the studios, what hope do we the people have now, led by our pathetic Dodd? All I can say is take heart: if we all pull together, We Can Do This!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Let the Censors be hoist on their own petard...
TOR for network transport
Encrypted/Signed DNS local DNS proxy for locating public network resources
Anonymous TOR DNS for locating encrypted network resources
Bittorrent for distributed storage and data transport
Overlay protocols for WEB, MAIL, CHAT, Internet Phone, etc that never leave the TOR network
with local proxy/forwarders and distributed servers or no servers at all
Exit Node proxies with white-lists for Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.
All wrapped up in a simple to use installer for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, IOS and Android.
The internet now threatens the world's government-corporations and so of course, attempts will be made to curtail it. This will inevitably result in a "pirate" internet similar to "pirate" radio. Servers will be set up offshore, on satellites, over the borders and in the woods, on thousands of buildings and in the powerlines. Underground transmission, actually a very old technology, will make a comeback (http://www.cellular-news.com/story/18682.php). Pirate internetworks will shift and bob and weave and never, ever, be discussed in the mainstream media any more than pirate radio is now. But the new interwebs will survive, and thrive.
The "funny" (or not so funny) thing is the end result of restriction is lessened national security as sophisticated methods of alternative internet communications are forced to grow and develop due to government-corporate restrictions. Terrorists *will* use the pirate network just as terrorists will eventually manage to send the USA a nuke or two via the drug cartel networks that wouldn't exist but for Nancy Reagan's obsession with "Just say no."
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.
And then picture being held indefinitely without warrant or trial if any sites you accessed were deemed related to "terrorism" (very loosely defined/open for revision of definitions that may threaten any form of political free speech) thanks to the NDAA recently passed into law (at least here in the US for US citizens anyways).
Yes, it's nice so many people are getting so worked up over the freedom to use the internet- wish there was as much backlash over the NDAA as there was over SOPA...
netcoins?
This is sort of the idea behind the Paranoid Linux distro that Cory Doctorow envisioned in his young adult novel Little Brother. Anybody working on it?
Now, why are you insulting those respectable and successful savannah dwelling primates by comparing them to a lower life form?
Why everybody hope that people with enough power to ban Internet would stop on just some of the sites and'll keep infrastructure intact?
There will be no Internet, alternative or not, if you'll just cut the wires.
Ever heard of the palladium chip ... when they implement it copying anything will be useless ... and I say they will make it illigal not to have one of this chips in the near future
Darkneting won't save us. They can deep packet inspect, or block service to TOR nodes, or simply disconnect anyone who tries. They can - will- turn the internet very quickly into an old fashioned telephone system, with your real name required and full tracking on at all times. Bandwidth throttling, for instance, while ostensibly to stop "hogs" and kill Netflix, is very useful to discourage people from running TOR nodes. Hard to run encrypted virtual pipes when they constrict at will.
They can pass any law they like and criminalize any trick we can come up with. The spooks behind this are not uninformed, and read the same boards we do.
Young people, 30 and below in age, are not concerned. They have never, if you think about it, lived in a free world. They laid face-down on the hallway floors in high school while giant thugs let dogs sniff their crotches, looking for drugs like aspirin and Dayquil. They have been fingerprinted, watched, recorded, and monitored to the point where their school-issued laptops were taking pictures of them in their underwear for years. They have never lived in a world where such things are insane; this is everyday life to them. As they grew up, they have to give pee tests, saliva tests, stop for random searches by cops, swear to moral turpitude, sign up to homeowner and condo associations that pretty much are prison systems with nicer plumbing, and submit every movement on the internet and in person to GPS/IP-registerd locations. They don't understand why privacy is important; they are indoctrinated by the sheer banality of the evil. People who live by sewage filtration plants don't smell the shit, and young people don't smell the loss of their liberties.
Solutions have to be hardware based combined with newer communication tech. Simple WiFi with encryption won't work; they'll make it illegal.
Ideas: go to LEDs in a tube to transmit optical signals over short distances, home to home, building to building. Infrared lasers to act as backbones to a TOR-like network that does-not-interface with the old internet. The old internet is dead, people; they commercialized it, gave to the corporations and the police states of the world.
Wild ideas: finally solve the problem of radio interference- it is a hardware/software limitation, not a real one. Thousands can transmit and receive over a single frequency if we solve this riddle, and then bandwidth is effectively infinite enough that TOR-like radio mesh networks could actually work with low latency and high throughput, with encryption.
3-D printing of custom network nodes that do not conform to the government's ideas of MAC addresses and complete surveillance. We'll need our own custom 3-D printers as well; they will easily require mass-produced printers to ID themselves in the products.
Well out there ideas: Quantum entanglement as a communications method. Don't laugh too hard; think about it. A transmission system that doesn't actually transmit through the air, but instead transmits at a distance without any detectable means. It can be done; I'm not the genius to do it. Believe it that the military will do it if it can be done. We all can do it too.
Now all I have to do is figure out routing in such a chaotic model...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Does I2P offer perfect forward secrecy the way Tor's newer "telescoping" routing does?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Yes, Correct, Getting there. There are already "Black Apps" for mobile devices and "Grey Apps" (depending on who's budget you are treading on). Its all getting far too confusing for the Moron In The Street - so dont expect any thanks - but they get protection for free as the rest of us ramp this War up. Arrg, ranting, but you get the drift. Rowry.
All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future described above, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.
Not that it really matters but one can already get alternative router firmware that gives one alternative DNS, and Tor which IMHO is really were this functionality should be. Add in plug (usually ARM-based) computers with laptop hard drives and the server-storage part of the new internet is there. Or just a router with an USB port and a HDD in an external enclosure for really cheap.
As long as regular people (corporations) are laying down the "tubes" the government will be there laying down the laws that let them see what goes in and comes out of those "tubes". Sure, we could have a 100% encrypted internet, that only trusted people could use. But there will come a day when sending encrypted data at all will be as obvious as painting a bulls-eye on your ass and mooning the police.
Maybe once the internet is truly broken it will only be the geeks using it using encryption/tor/vpns etc just like when I first learnt what computers were(around 1995). And since the population of people using the internet will be so low it wouldn't be beneficial to come after them.
There could be million free pages under any super-free Internet. What's the point of it if nothing could be found?
Presumably someone would build a search engine.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Of course I2P is superior as a Darknet. TOR is not a Darknet.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
I object strenuously to your "30 and under" label, sir.
We are not all a bunch of drooling morons, and generalizations about me based on my age do not encourage me to listen to your argument.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
>Presumably someone would build a search engine
That will become a central point to the whole system, making it also an Achilles heel.
Centralization of the Internet (like centralization of anything else) is both a positive and negative quality: positive, because it allows a fast access to any relevant resource by many quickly and negative, because it makes the functionality of the whole system vulnerable.
I remember Web 0.9 in 1994, decentralized, like a magic forest in a adventure computer game, where Bookmarks were essentials and pages truly were regarded by the number of external links, and the ones that had the most were treasured. Pedro links, etc. Then as it usualy happens with free market based systems (every competition is a positive feedback loop - the more you are winning the more you have the capabilities to win), Internet become imperialized (in Marxist-Leninist definition of imperialism) and monopolized, Google being a central access point to almost everything on the Internet (I am simplifying by disregarding other monster web sites).
Those secretfreenets exist as long as they are at initial romantic decentralized early-adopter wild-West-pioneer robber-barons state. In other words, as long as they are not relevant much.
It seems that a solution to attack on mainstream internet is to maintain a freefloating living network of networks where networks are born, reach golden age of being popular but not centralized yet, and die out being not able to maintain secret security by obscurity character under the pressure of fame and necessity of centralization.
That's what is happening right now. So I stand corrected in my overmoderated pessimistic GP post: it's fine now, the king is dead, long live the princes and counts of the Internet.
Same thing happens to Jihaad, by the way.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
[Emphasis mine.] This is what I don't get. How were the old laws worse than the new ones?
With the old laws, it was illegal for someone to pirate, and legal for them to use stuff they bought. People just plugged the cable TV into their tuner, it Just Worked, and they auto-paid every goddamn month. You put the VHS tape into the player, fast-forwarded through ads, and it Just Worked. Worried the kids will get jelly on the tape when they pull it out? Make them play a copy, which Just Works (though with some regrettable degradation; and we looked forward to digital tech fixing that problem).
Under the old laws, public policy was definitely pro-IP. It prohibited, and never incentivized, infringement.
With the new laws, it was illegal for someone to pirate, and illegal for them to work with they stuff they bought. People plugged the cable TV into my digital tuners, and it only get the over-the-air channels. Want anything other than "basic cable?" Tough shit. Or you put the shiney disc into the weirdo player and it does a bunch of stupid shit like insisting you watch ads, and only outputs to the monitor with the right resolution, if the monitor implements HDCP. Put the disc into your computer's optical drive, and playing it requires that you (and the player author) either break the law or do that same stupid shit as the weirdo player does. Worried the kids will scratch the disc (Kids?! I have scratched some discs!), so you wanna make a copy for them to use? Good fucking luck; you're going to have to violate DMCA to do it, and so will the person who sells you the equipment or software.
So now people bittorrent everything and stopped paying the cable company and disc sellers. Way to go, new laws.
The new laws are what is causing creators to not get paid: they FUCKING OUTLAWED non-copyright-infringing activity, and worse (I'm ok with breaking the law inside my home ; no one will ever know) they outlawed the creation and distribution of non-copyright-infringing tools. It's easier to let r3l3a$e gr00pz worry about dealing with all that crap. And as a bonus, it's cheaper to get the Just Works media too.
Are you sure the laws "had to change"? 'Cuz I sure as hell didn't pirate stuff before all this broken tech and crazy new laws which legitimize it, wore me down until I give up on trying to work with the system. And I still don't pirate music because the RIAA eventually gave up on trying to get me to pirate; with music CDs you're back in 1995 when everything Just Worked. (But that's just a consequence of the distribution media and the tech; the law still encourages people to not pay, if publishers use DRM.)
Now with SOPA they're trying to drive the mainstream populace to darknets, so there won't even be online "social" distinction between payers and infringers. Perhaps this is how the laws have to change -- they're trying to make there be more seeds, and further try to get outlaws and law-abiders working together on everything, by making people turn outlaw just to make things Just Work?
They already threatened to make people turn outlaw simply to get DNS to Just Work. DNS! Who the fuck doesn't use DNS? That would have been 100% collateral damage -- telling every single person to get into the routine habit of breaking laws. Once they're already telling you that you'll be in trouble if you use the Internet for .. pretty much anything .. then why not pirate? At that point the system doesn't merely suck; it's over-the-top hostile.
If we're trying to pay people who make things, then the main way the law needs to change right now, is to repeal the last 15 years worth of changes and fire the people who made those changes.
Relax, it's hyperbole. But truer for the under-30's than for the over-30's. We oldsters didn't grow up in the police state system that schools have become. And, I'm in the same give-us-your-fingerprints employment that you are. Young people will tend to not notice that the world has changed - they can't, they weren't here thirty years ago. For oldsters, it's horrifying.
Damn straight you aren't all fools. God, I'm depending on it! We greying-beards ain't gonna last forever. Keep that flag up and think about alternative internet tech - it will be needed.
Oh, I do more than think about it ;)
On the other hand, I do have to admit to rather egotistically grouping myself into a very small percentage to which I apply the "not fool" label. I think - for now - it transcends age, though. Those who are of a certain mental bent and agility will continue to resist the brainwashing, because that's built into human nature, and as long as materials are still out there to study - history, more than anything - we'll know that it's not necessarily "supposed" to be the way we're told it's supposed to be.
No group in history has ever achieved any sort of freedom by sitting back and simply obeying the rules and working within the system, and revolutionaries are always found in the most unexpected times and places.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
For the record, I've been reading things all day that may have put me in a reactionary state of mind, so I apologize.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.