Slashdot Mirror
Is the Government Scaring Web Businesses Out of the US?
suraj.sun sends this quote from an article at Techdirt:
"The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the U.S. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. ... With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the U.S. government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the U.S is not safe for internet startups. Lots of folks have been passing around [a] rather reasonable list of activities for U.S.-based websites."
Perhaps there is too much politics on /., but this topic is highly relevant to a large portion of the user base here who own/operate web businesses, so I think your rant is misplaced.
weinersmith
If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear. Just make sure you follow the law.
That only holds true for law-based definitions of right and wrong.
Many would diverge rather sharply from the law in their personal ethical equations, so it's best not to confuse the two.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
It's rather fuckin moot to try to plan ten years ahead when the laws change to being more and more draconian and unconstitutional every couple days/weeks.
This is full spectrum disruption. Who dare run a music blog when the lables don't even know what the current law is? Who dare hire employees when health-insurance, and tax is unstable and unpredictable, with a monetary system that is unregulated and corrupt to the fuckin core? Who dare take a loan in this depression/inflation enviornment? Who wants to pay for video bandwidth, when streaming a video is now a felony?
Who suffers? ebay, paypal, amazon, domain sellers, hosting, isp's, software developers, bloggers, bands, labels, video production, video promotion. You want real people to discuss fixes, better get rid of all this fascist, war on terrorism, cyberwar propaganda psychopathic bullshit.
Put hosting in countries where the RIAA hides its money from the tax man, Switzerland, Luxumbourg, etc... Being a bully to a country that has dirt on you is a line they won't cross. I think.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
What we're actually seeing is the open source community maturing. Since Slashdot was one of the first major gathering points for open source advocates, we're seeing this maturation happen here first.
While open source software had its roots in the political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, the number of true old-timers ("neckbeards", if you will) pales in comparison to the younger generation who really made open source software take off. I'm talking about the Linuses and the Alan Coxes and now even those open source advocates born after 1990.
These younger people are finally seeing how important politics is in any movement. They're now seeing that the technology is one part of the pie, but playing the political game is another big chunk. You're damn right that politics is becoming more important to these people!
Technology is so intertwined with politics these days that you can't unwind them. You get them both, and you need to learn to enjoy it this way.
Not sure if you're a troll or an idiot. JotForm and Dajaz1 both had their sites returned after the feds admitted that there had been no wrongdoing
Oh, how kind of them! Were the companies compensated for their losses? Did they issue a formal apology so the businesses could demonstrate to customers that they had been wrongly accused?
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? This seems like the opposite. How about "prior restraint" of speech and trade? That's supposed to be illegal in the US.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
...until they change the law to make what you're doing illegal. And these days it's "the competition" writing the law through the use of their lobbyists and contributions. It's not like they are even trying to hide this fact. It's right in front of your face.
This "political BS" effects the livelihoods of many of the people that read /..
Honestly, I come here to read stories like this more than anything, because lord knows that the Mainstream Media doesn't give a fuck about covering this shit. We didn't even hear a peep about SOPA in the media until the fucking boycotts, months after it was making waves through the tech sites.
Companies will always try to invest as little as necessary to keep their revenue high. For most companies, the best of all changes would be exactly none. ANY change means having to adapt to it, and adapting costs money.
Now that the last of the big corps has caught on that it's cheaper to buy laws than to change strategies, the "new" (ok, not soooo new, but think of it in terms of magnitude) way to increase or at least keep revenues high is not to adapt, innovate and improve past the competition, the strategy is to buy laws to eliminate the competition.
And the biggest competition for big (and hence wealthy, and thus able to buy said laws) companies is "the internet". Face it, few of the big ol' ones really benefited from the internet's success. New competition arose and they have an edge. Faster to respond, easier to use for their customers, there's just very little big old ones can do against that directly.
So what they can do is change the rules of the game.
Changing those rules, though, means that the power stays in the hands of old companies and new startups get squashed, not by superior products or better service, but simply by the monetary power to change the rules.
And that's pretty much anathema to capitalism, folks. What we're getting here is the worst kind of socialism. Remember why the USSR fell? Outdated production means that were artificially kept alive while the rest of the world passed them, which made them completely uncompetitive on the global market.
Welcome to the future USSA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, economics is about resource allocation. Politics is about compelling others to serve your interests.
If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear.
Yeah, right. That's about as stupid as the "If you have nothing to hide..." bullshit.
The government doesn't even need to prove that you (or your users) did anything wrong before they punish you. Look at the Jotform crap for proof of that. That business is more than likely ruined now; who's gonna trust a cloud storage site that could get nuked off the face of the internet again because some random asshole posted something that violates IP somewhere on it?
I really hope to God you were being sarcastic, and if so, will gladly accept my "WOOOOOOSH".
Sounds like a good reason to leave GoDaddy, IMO.
How many more do people fucking need?
That only holds true for law-based definitions of right and wrong
except when it comes to JotForm the law wasn't followed, so they had noting to fear, had done nothing wrong, and still the law enforcement agencies stomped on them.
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
Oh, that takes far too long for the MAFIAA's tastes. "Better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty person escape" should be their new motto.
and they are going to lose.
The thing is in order to expand and grow you need new ideas. tougher IP laws actually restrict new ideas and slow down development. That is why China and India have or ignore IP laws. It is why after WWII the USA ignored IP laws for 30 plus years.
however when you get complacent you make tougher IP laws, which prevents someone else from taking a good idea and moving it in another direction. Think of the number of Patents in a cell phone or even worse a smart phone and realize that those patents are from the 1990's.
The tighter you grip on imaginary property the less you are likely to dream up something new.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Have you ever done IT in a professional environment or worked outside a university or small business?
Here is a lesson for you. Rule #1 these systems absolutely, positively, can not go down. Why? Because you are talking tens to hundres of thousands an hour of lost productivity for their customers. Technology is so integrated in corporate America today that the workers will just sit there and chat and browse slashdot and Yahoo news if their work is on JotForm. Business customers can go out of business if they can't work in a day. Razor thin 5% profit margins and uptight customers who need work done YESTERDAY will refuse to do business with them if they fail to meet a deadline. A day or two downtime can cost millions of lost business and productivity to US businesses and JotForm itself.
JotForm is doomed.
For JotForm this means lost customers and a bankruptacy.I sure as hell would not do business with them. If I owned a business I would jump ship and look for a foreign rival in a friendly country like India or Communist China where I do not have to lose all my money I saved going to the cloud that was lost by the US Government. Go read the comments in Jotform? The users do not give a shit and are furious! I would be too if I invested tens of thousands and lost up to millions the past 2 days while this has been sorted out.
Infact if I ever move up the corporate ladder or own a business I will stipulate in my contract that it has to be done overseas or have a backup there if something happens to the US servers. I know I angered some slashdotters who work in IT or are looking for work at cloud providers but tough shit. I have a business to run and sorry but vote for people who wont scare us away from US investments. Yes this is bad as I feel like an asshole for even stating that but with jobs on the line and hundreds of thousands of dollars and hour in lost productivity all risks need to be analyized. People get fired for picking solution providers who fail and yes these customers need to protect themselves.
This and the fact that the FBI just raids ISPs offices and takes servers with hundreds of domains awya with them is scary as hell. It doens't matter Chrylis if they are later found innocent. If you owned the hosting company you are done.
http://saveie6.com/
Slashdot is enduring as the best technology oriented hive-mind on the whole Internet. Insights you get here are often rare and unparalleled. I bet lots of new devs and also industry veterans still around.
I don't think the problem is that there is too much politics, it's that there is too little technical content.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is nothing fair about majority vote using government violence as a proxy to steal money from individuals who are more successful than others.
Also there is nothing fair about some individuals gaming the system by buying access to politicians, who then steal and sell power of government violence.
Both of the above are wrong, that's why your argument is nonsense.
Under a system where government is actively prohibited from stealing from anybody to give to anybody else under any and all circumstances, the freedom of everybody who is not being stolen from is maximised, and the market increases the wealth of all people by allowing some to make it big by inventing and bringing to the market products that make ALL people wealthier.
That's why Steve Jobs and his wealth usually was not bemoaned by people - because everybody got WEALTHIER off Steve Jobs, who himself got extraordinary wealthy.
Of-course Marxists like you, are happy to use any amount of collective government violence to ensure that the wealth is "distributed equally", which means unproductively from people who CREATE wealth, to those who WANT it. Thus eventually you descend into totalitarianism and dictatorship, and you call THAT justice.
No. Justice is about freedom. The only justice is FREEDOM. It's freedom to do what you can as you can do it without hurting others (that's the only main condition), and in the process of helping yourself you help others not as an intention, but as a consequence of your actions.
Nobody can become rich and wealthy without either:
1. Theft based on power of government force.
2. Creation of wealth by selling products to people that they are voluntarily willing to buy and pay enough that there is a profit premium in it.
There is nothing just about "universal" healthcare or any other government forced "universal" thing, because it will create poverty and will bring about totalitarian regime and there is nothing just about such a regime, and I should know I was born in a system like that, and you'll find out, you apparently want to go there.
You can't handle the truth.
there are plenty of people who are poor in this world through their own character failures
there are plenty of people who are rich because of hard work
but you seem unable to understand why some are rich: not because of hard work. but through a power structure that rewards them for doing nothing but knowing the right people
and some are poor even though they have the right character, but they exist in a society that is structured in such a way they have no avenue to better themselves
and, more ominously, why some are rich and some are poor is more and more because of the latter reasons than the former reasons
where you fail in your ideology is that the world is not the cold war world anymore. you have a perception in your judgments of a society that seems fix on 1962 in a certain place that does exist anymore. your thinking is antiquated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if a society does not function fairly, the lessons of history are clear: revolution
it is a shame that societies often have to go through violent, bloody revolution, rather than merely make rules to make wealth distribution more fair, simply because of the existence of blind ignorant fools such as yourself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
May because these days there's less tech and more patents/intellectual-property...
Not that there's not a lot of cool stuff that people seem to work on, but a lot of it seems to get sliced off at the knees because of the toxic legal environment...
Kindergarten kids chose that?
People laid off during the downturn chose that?
If you think one in 6 Americans chose poverty, then you are seriously deluded. Your country has a problem. The rich have commandeered all the resources of the country, and realistically, those 50 million people have to work for them or not work at all. They do not have land (they were born without it), they do not have access to the means of production, and they do not have capital, or access to capital to be able to work themselves out of the mess they are in. Even access to education, the key tool by which the poor could lift themselves out of poverty, is now dependent on money. So basically, they have no realistic hope of competing with the haves.
The American economy is now dominated by super large corporations and there is no way for most small businesses to compete.Yes, a few thousands out of the 50 million may be able to pick themselves out of
I don't think anyone is advocating getting rid of capitalism, but its excesses must surely be tempered. There are many examples of countries that are fantastically wealthy, and yet seem to have a much better balance between wealth and poverty than the USA. Countries were pretty much no one can be bankrupted by medical bills, where access to quality education is based on ability and hard work, rather than whether or not an 18 year old can afford it. America seems to believe it is OK to punish children for the sins of their parents.