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
Not just you. Also all the users of your website have to follow it!
The ars technica article has some useful background: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/secret-service-asks-for-shutdown-of-legit-website-over-user-content-godaddy-complies.ars
Sounds like a good reason to leave GoDaddy, IMO.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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
The problem is that most companies doesn't like the US law, so they are leaving.
Wasn't that the entire point of this article?
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 but they'd been shut down anyway, and Rojadirecta (which is still offline) actually had a court judgment saying it was legal.
Is slashdot scaring away developers with more political submissions? Remember when there used to be a Developer section instead of all this political BS?
Are you trying to make a point? Do you not remember that Slashdot has always had technology related political articles going way back? Do you remember when Slashdot had all those articles in the 90s about the Microsoft trials about their monopoly?
Can you explain to me why we're posting with rhetorical questions?
Is this some sort of method of attracting attention?
I don't know. Awe shit! Did I just blow the rhetorical question there here?
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.
"Is slashdot scaring away developers with more political submissions? Remember when there used to be a Developer section instead of all this political BS? I swear YRO has ruined this site."
Politics is about resource allocation. Much of computing design is about resource allocation, too. So they are more connected than you might think at first.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
At this rate data, information and knowledge will be the new thing to smuggle. But there doesn't seem to be a "border"... yet. We will all be the mules. Like anything good they will try and cut it off. Who will be the 21st century's Pablo Escobar?
Good questions. Please keep digging...
Some of my own thoughts on that:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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".
... through arguing over resource allocation. According to "Conceptual Guerilla", mainstream economics is just mainly a mythological cover story to justify elites:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Example:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."
Other ways to look at economics:
http://debunkingeconomics.com/
And also the similarly named:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rest-Us-Debunking-Science/dp/1595581014
"Why do contemporary economists consider food subsidies in starving countries, rent control in rich cities, and health insurance everywhere "inefficient"? Why do they feel that corporate executives deserve no less than their multimillion-dollar "compensation" packages and workers no more than their meager wages? Here is a lively and accessible debunking of the two elements that make economics the "science" of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined. The first is used to justify the cruelest policies, the second grand larceny. Filled with lively examples--from food riots in Indonesia to eminent domain in Connecticut and everyone from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham to Larry Summers--Economics for the Rest of Us shows how today's dominant economic theories evolved, how they explicitly favor the rich over the poor, and why they're not the only or best options. Written for anyone with an interest in understanding contemporary economic thinking--and why it is dead wrong--Economics for the Rest of Us offers a foundation for a fundamentally more just economic system."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Money quote from the ARS article, from a non-American user of Internet services: "I will now have to question purchasing any more services from US internet related providers."
Australian businesses are now being urged to avoid doing any business at all with American companies, as the simple use of outsourcing data processing to an American-based company gives Uncle Sam the impression that he owns the data.
If you don't see the severity of this, then your eyes are most definitely NOT OPEN.
I'm an American living in Europe, and am slowly migrating all of my Internet "things" away from the States as I fear a corrupt, power-hungry US government run amok. Let me respond to your statement with two simple questions and answers:
1) Am I trafficking in child porn, pirated software or anything else illegal? OF COURSE NOT.
2) Am I concerned that parts of my websites will suddenly be unavailable due to some police investigation on a third party that I do business with, causing financial damages to me that the US Gubment could care less about? HELLZ YEAH.
We need to start moving more away from human labor. In 30 years we should not need money. You do a job because you love it. Robot slaves can do the work Humans don't want to do.
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.
Of course the US governments attitude to websites is going to have an affect on the confidence of website operators to be able to locate there and may make many look at other countries to host it instead. The prosecution of the web site owners for the actions of their users, which they cannot control, most stop, as well as the PIPA and SOPA nonsense, and the country needs to implement full Network Nuetrality. That is a recipe for creating a truly pro-consumer, pro-jobs environment that is also good for website operators.
The fact is that the GOP pretty much is an enemy of freedom, and has for years been the paid agent of the large media corporations which seems to want to trample over free speech turn the webpage in to a one way TV MTV equivalent. Another concerning thing is the fact that the conservatives are regressives and often driven by extreme theocratic tendancies, ready to force their religious ideas and moralities on others and trample over freedom of speech as a result.The high levels of income inequality that the GOP has caused through our low taxes on the wealthy has also been detrimental to other businesses, by draining money out of the pockets of the middle class, and shrinking the middle class significantly. if we really wanted to live in a country that was healthy we would restore the millionaire tax bracket to what it was in the 50s and 60s and elect liberals to office that will respect our freedoms, are not religious whackjobs, who will eliminate ridiculous laws that conservatives try to pass that lead to censorship and try to force the government into deciding what is "indecent", the government has no right to decide such a thing and things which are indecent cannot be censored, but we have social conservatives in the GOP who are basically totalitarian theocrats who would like to destroy free speech and force their religious moralities on everyone. We dont need a bigoted, theocratic religious whackjob religious nutjobs banning harmless and consensual activities such as pornography and other harmless, indecent things.
There needs to be a internet bill of rights that would also ban any censorship, that would prohibit ISPs or government from storing any information on traffic that can be used to monitor individual users such as source and destination IPs and so on, would stop ISPs from discriminating against certain traffic and so on. The fear based tactic they so often used exploits anxieties, and obscure the fact that any action or policy is not justifiable to prevent crime, such as survellience, tracking and monitoring without warrant are unacceptable in a free society and these things cannot be justified in order to prevent crime. If we allow these activities we open the door as well to their abuse by corporations and governments, they are perfect tools for trying to keep track of people who have unpopular views and opinons, and use that information against them. The less right to privacy people have, the less safe they are.
Many large corporations , such as the major record labels, have interests opposite that of small businesses and common people. Their goal is to maintain and consolidate wealth and that means hoarding and consolidating wealthy by suppressing the wages of other workers and using their control over large parts of the money to basically consolidate wealthy. We need common, average people to have a lot of money in their pocket and to avoid having certain corporations dominating much of that, through suppression of wages, thus crowding out small businesses as well as impoversiing common workers. The policies that the wealthy elite hate the most, a high income and corporate tax on the wealthy, is exactly what the country needs to put more money back into average peoples pockets and to give workers more power such as through unions, all things that will give common people more spending power, money to buy things other than to shop at wal mart. The attacks on unions and the demands for more tax cuts for the rich are ultimately unhealthy, they allow a few corporations t
Dude, the days when slashdot was read attentively by developers and other IT decision-makers is long past (just don't tell that to InfoWorld, which still pays a premium to astroturf here).
This is a tech-and-gadget flavored Newser.com, with open-source stories replacing the celebrity bits ("Linux instead of Lohan!"). Wired Magazine was exclusive and tech-elite when it started as well, and now it's all "Green Energy" and Rolex ads.
The word "geek" has lost all meaning; one need only note all the slick sales-and-marketing suits now smugly referring to themselves as "movie geeks."
Language changes. Media evolves. And writers and media-owners gotta pay the bills somehow...
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.
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.
I agree with you, but isn't part of the issue certain people in law enforcement pay attention to the laws in their favor but ignores the others they're breaking?
The complexity of current law can enable some pretty nefarious actions.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
so why hasn't someone made a complaint against them> I mean, if a cop decides to beat me for no reason, he gets investigated (and if there's evidence) gets convicted. If a federal agent shuts down a website with no court order, are they just as much breaking the law?
You completely missed the point of his rant. He was arguing for your point.
One of the main reasons I opted for the ISP I'm using for my business is not the fact that they're cheaper (it's only $10/month difference), but the fact that SaskTel hosts their data center in Florida, and the one I'm using is hosted in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
I don't want my business anywhere near US regulation and control without oversight and intervention by Canadian authorities. The US has been proving to be insanely jackbootish about their approach to the internet for the past 2-5 years, and I simply do NOT want to take the chance of having them interfere with my business.
Or rather, I don't want US media companies interfering with my business. They don't do proper checks before issuing their takedown requests, and were I in the US, I'd be effectively subject to domain seizure and content takedowns without due process and the chance to defend myself. That is an UNACCEPTABLE BUSINESS RISK when it is so easy to avoid.
Worse, the US dollar is in such a sorry state that I will not be accepting payments in greenbacks. I want to be paid in a stable currency that I don't have to pay exchange rates on in order to spend -- namely Canadian dollars. For years I've had to pay extra to convert my Canadian currency to US dollars to pay for goods and services ordered out of the US. The shoe is on the other foot now.
Even if I work a contract in the US for a US company, I'll either be paid in Canadian dollars or charging a 5% premium for the hassle of converting US currency to Canadian dollars (it's a 2-3% bank fee as well, so 5% isn't as much as you might think.) Add in the fact that all foreign payments get held by the bank for 30 days, and the resulting lost opportunity cost of having my money tied up and inaccessible, and I find I really don't have much interest in business south of the border at all right now.
Besides, if I have to travel to service a customer, I may as well visit somewhere I've never been before, preferably China, Australia, New Zealand, or Germany. (I've just always wanted to see those countries some day. I've already spent about 12 years living and working in the US, so I've seen the US. I want to see someplace different next.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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/
Isn't Sweden that is prosecuting Assange on behalve of its American masters? Or went after the pirate bay which wasn't breaking its own local laws on behalve of its Amercan masters?
At least Americans can vote out their leaders, Swedes can only vote for which puppet is stuck on the hand.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't know. Awe shit! Did I just blow the rhetorical question there here?
That's "aww, shit" -- unless, of course, you just looked into the toilet and are indeed in awe of what you beheld there.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
I mean, if a cop decides to beat me for no reason, he gets investigated (and if there's evidence) gets convicted.
Yeah, right. More likely he gets a paid vacation for a few weeks (if even that), a slap on the wrist, and then he's back on the streets to abuse people just like he learned back in grade school bullying his classmates.
Hell, how hard is it to even prove that the beating was "for no reason"? Cops already routinely confiscate any video proof of their misdeeds, even from innocent bystanders. And those dash-cams? Good luck depending on those to exonerate you.
Cops can't get "Top Secret - Classified" stamped all over the wrong things they do which makes it easier to hold them accountable. The Feds on the other hand, just hide everything under the "threat to national security" blanket and good luck proving anything against them while it's still relevant there.
Burn the land and boil the sea........
I had a site shut down, when I get back on my feet, I'm going to take it to Canada... this is NOT as easy as moving the server!
As I plan my recovery, I'm learning that it isn't enough to just move your server over there. You've got to actually *be* Canadian if you don't want your site taken down. (sure, you could lie about it, make it appear to be from Canada or Panama or wherever, but if you're in business, this is hardly a viable option.. they'll find out you're really a US citizen) for me, this means finding a very trusted Canadian to "take over" for awhile, until I can collect enough material to prove myself worthy of Canadian citizenship.
From what I've studied, the problem is the lobbyist influences. Startups do NOT donate money to campaigns, most of them will never donate to campaigns because most start-ups fail. If you want to make it in the US, you have to have enough money to hire lobbyists that are more powerful than competitors lobbyists. It really is that simple.
For most of us, the plutocratic system of government is irrelevant, but if your small niche business threatens the established companies who are running the country, AND they notice you (or your industry), you can expect them to run you out.
Ultimately, we can look forward to these same lobbyists pushing OTHER countries around, much as the US already does for the oil lobby. It'll be interesting to hear them justify a war with Panama or Canada, it'd be nice if the citizens wised up to the game before then, but I'm not holding my breath.
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.
We're arguing on the same side; the parent to my post got modded into oblivion. He said that if you're legal, you have nothing to fear; I'm pointing out that several legal sites have already been blown away for exactly the reasons you describe.
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
USA is very dangerous to start ANY business, not just a web business. With all of the taxes, regulations, inflation caused by counterfeiting operation at the Fed and the government banks. The confiscation of private property that was clearly displayed in GM and Chrysler case and just a couple of months ago with MF Global - where cooperation between financial institution (JP Morgan) and government agencies allowed for customer funds to be stolen, in fact gold bars with serial numbers assigned to specific holders of account at MF Global (which is basically an insurance company for farmers - future trading is used to insure against uncertainty of future crop prices) went "MISSING" and nobody is being held accountable for it and apparently everybody is aware that JP Morgan and the feds have agreed on something, which is pretty damning - the bankruptcy court was instructed to run the bankruptcy as if MF Global was an 'investment' company, which makes their counter-parties to be first in line to receive collateral, while actually MF Global wasn't an investment company, it was an insurance company, and under those conditions it would have been the CLIENTS who would be first in line to get their money out.
But this is just an example why it is dangerous to deal in USA now, other things are of-course all of the regulations, all of the executive branch departments acting as if they are the Congress and as if they can pass laws, the fact that US courts are on the side of the government in all of this.
Again, it's not just about web businesses. Don't forget, as Steve Jobs told Obama - those jobs, they are not coming back.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
Exactly, the FBI pretty much signed JotForm's "death warrant" by "oops, we didn't really have a reason to shut them down".
There's no longer a rule of law where you are "innocent until *proven* guilty", they don't need to go to a judge with *proof* of some wrongdoing, they can just shut you down at a whim and kill your business. As long as that continues, it makes sense for business to flee the country.
Much the same idea as the whole MF Global thing - they blatantly *steal* customer money, the big banks collude with the regulators to get placed "1st on the list" in the bankruptcy so the customers who's money was "safely segregated" get screwed - and NOBODY GOES TO JAIL. Money has been fleeing the CME since... gee, wonder why? They've basically said "we can f**k you, and there's nothing you can do about it"... well, yeah, there is - take your money and go elsewhere.
i don't really agree with you, but what i do understand is that in any society where the rich receive too large a share of the wealth, fairness finds a way to reassert itself, by any means possible, including new ideology
conservatives: favoring the rich destroys people's faith in the idea that the system is fair. when that is destroyed, the society is eventually headed towards revolution, as they do not believe their interests are represented by their government
fairness should be the most important thing to your ideology. if it is not, if your ideology is cruel, then you are laying the foundation for the destruction of your society
no to universal healthcare? no to equal access to a good education? ok
then you shall reap what you sow
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd like to see the tech community make an effort to reverse-engineer politician's thinking process. It's clearly different from that of a normal person.
I am facing this "problem" of soon having to choose if I will locate my new company avoiding USA or not. Business will be 100% legal, but the US web-policies appear very unfrindly. Recently I've been thinking (most positively) about using only EU investors, EU-site, EU-domain but it may be hard to avoid all e.g. Visa / Paypal / Mastercard connections to USA. Maybe it's worth it maybe not. But for me the news topic is true, The US Government is Scaring Web Businesses Out of the US - or at least it's doing it's best in keeping me away.
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.
If the value of something depends on government action, or governmental granted monopolies, then don't talk about it being unfair for the government to "steal" it. Unless you enjoy looking like a hypocrit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That should be a lesson that US authorities can reach out and touch you no matter where you are. Granted, they may have been breaking some laws. But the emphasis here is on may. Sites have been shut down prior to a court verdict.
You want a system that features redundancy (multiple hosting sites, distributed between several jurisdictions) and untraceability (feed content through encrypted TOR pipes). Once some sites have been located and their owners identified (and inevitably some will) you'll need to have the ownership of those sites hidden behind some shell corporations. Likewise, you'll have to hide your income source within a different corporate structure. By all means, pay your taxes. But avoid the extravagant lifestyle and braggadocio of Dotcom. The ideal lifestyle to adopt would be that of fictional character Johnathan Higgins. Just a lowly caretaker of some other rich guy's* mansions and yachts. But make sure you pay the taxes on those as well.
*A fictional Saudi Prince would be a good choice. F*ck with him and the US risks losing its middle east ally. A Chinese businessman/Communist party operative would be better. F*ck with him and have all your loans called in.
Have gnu, will travel.
Which registrars take the position contractually that the domain is the property of the registrant and will not be taken down without a court order? Find a registrar that doesn't have "sole discretion" language like this, from Network Solutions: We may terminate this Agreement or any part of the Network Solutions services at any time in the event you breach any obligation hereunder, fail to respond within ten (10) calendar days to an inquiry from us concerning the accuracy or completeness of the information referred to in Section 4 of this Agreement, if we determine in our sole discretion that you have violated the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy ... or for any other reason in Network Solutions' sole discretion upon written
notice to you.
Other failing registrars with "sole discretion" terms include NameKing, Register.com, Name.com, DomainIt, GoDaddy, eNom, Backslap, PairNIC, Best Registrar, Havaname LLC, DomainName, Tucows, Melborne IT...
Do you *ever* follow one of those stories? Even one of the high profile ones, where there is live footage of the assault? A policeman shot a guy after he'd forced him to lie down on the floor, the guy died, the policeman got a month off.
I suppose that sometimes there is a policeman who is punished as the law would require of a normal person, but I haven't run across a report of such an instance. The absolure *worst* I've ever heard of happening is that the policeman was fired. A couple of years later. (In that instance he was hired by someone else almost immediately.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
My thinking is not antiquated, your thinking is antiquated, it's all rotten to the core and it is what is destroying the economies of Europe and US right now, whether you understand it or not.
The only way to fix the problem of overall poverty is to allow markets to work it out, that's what Chinese are mostly doing - allowing capital to come in and create whatever it creates thus improving people's circumstance.
The people can either be left alone and let the market create all the things that they need and set all the prices, and market eventually finds the equilibrium, prices go down so that majority of people can afford everything they need and even most of what they want. Or you can try and enforce some weird notion of 'fairness' (which I completely disagree with you on, I don't believe for a second that robbing anybody to give anybody else anything is fair, so all the Robin Hood stories to me are completely anathema) and you can observe everybody being miserable and only people in government sitting sort of nice, warm and fed on top of that giant shit pyramid.
You can't handle the truth.
"Entre le fort et le faible, entre le riche et le pauvre, entre le maître et le serviteur, câ(TM)est la liberté qui opprime et la loi qui affranchit."
The only justice is that which is defined by society, generally in the form of laws. We give men rights (they are not inherent) so that we may more fairly structure our societies; the rights of society are paramount. What you advocate is totalitarianism in the form of monarchy; the ultimate expression of your philosophy is one man who owns the whole world. Concentration of wealth *diminishes* its utility, even your anarcho-capitalist textbooks should teach you that.
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.
There has to be some logical step between "equal distribution of wealth" and "dictatorship". I think you need to be a little more explicit in step two. Or just y'know, admit that you're scarred by personal experiences and you're trying to rationalize what is inherently an emotional argument that has nothing to do with the real world. There is no useful pure philosophy, in attempting to argue for one you're revealing yourself as a nutcase (and harming your cause).
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Yes, if you host at a (physical) site that is shared with someone they are interested in.
P.S.: While hosting only original content is a legitimate defense, you can only USE the defense after you've already been taken down. Either you didn't bother to read, or you're a troll. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
you have this odd, bizarre belief that natural market forces create wealth distribution is somehow fair
- of-course.
that's because I completely reject your version of 'fair' - take from somebody who has and give it to somebody who does not simply because one of them is suffering more. I denounce and reject this type of social entropy, it does not work and it is absolutely unfair, unproductive and dictatorial in nature. How can any amount of violence be fair?
You are defining something as FAIR and you are using VIOLENCE to define it. You want 'fair'? How about you examine your premises first and realise that what you want is violence against the individual, and individual is always above the collective, because there is no reason to have the collective, the entire human population can burn in acidic fiery hell if it defines use of violence as fairness.
and more bizarrely, you believe government, rather than the reality of a rotten institution that does the deeds of those with the money, is somehow an evil tool that steals from the middle class to do the bidding of poor people with low character who don't deserve anything
- ha ha ha, naive.
The government is always a force of evil, that uses the pretence of 'helping the poor', does it by stealing from those who actually work and rewards with it those who are parasitic enough, that they are part of the government trough system. The poor are used as coinage, pawns.
But it's funny, you think there is MORALITY in stealing from some to give to others to equalise their suffering. But how do you measure suffering? If some are fed and clothed because the government system is providing to them while stealing from those who actually work, and have to suffer in fact, through all the nonsense that the system sets in front of them, then even by your definition this cannot work. You can't measure suffering.
You take the edge cases and build your entire system on it. You take the top 0.001% who can STEAL money from people by using government force, then you take the bottom 20% or so who are in worst conditions out of the entire population, and then you say: because there are these people, at the bottom, somebody else must pay for them. But you think you are going to use government to take from the top 0.001%?
No. You are going to steal from the middle, from everybody who actually works and produces and suffers while working and producing. You won't TOUCH those who are on top, you can't, it is absolutely impossible.
You will never help those on the bottom by doing any of it, but you will worsen the situation for the middle, and it's the middle that makes the machine go, and then the machine breaks (one manifestation was the thirties, one was the seventies, one was the nineties and one started around 2008) and then what? You think you can tax your way out of the broken machine?
No, you can push and push all the people, until majority have nothing and some simply escape somewhere else (and that's principally what happened in 1917 to 1923 in Russia as well, and it's been happening for a few decades on a slower scale in US and Europe, because it wasn't an immediate bloody revolution, but it was a slower process of continuous deterioration.)
your understanding of the world and how power and money actually works is completely nonsensical
- oh well, if you established that much, you don't need to reply to me.
You can't handle the truth.
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
"We can't have a society at all where everybody expects to be taken care of by some magic of 'past social credit', somebody has to do the actual work of creating the stuff, whatever it means, and it really means organising land labour and capital in the most efficient manner to give the market something that will be profitable enough to keep the lights on."
Tell that to Linus Torvalds and all the Debian GNU/Linux maintainers. Kids should tell that to their parents and adopters too. There are many ways of organizing how things get done based on what values we want to celebrate.
How much "work" does it take to tell robots what to do?
"PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0
The authoritarian USSR you knew is history, and the quasi-authoritarian USA is going much the same way.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
There were zero net new jobs created in the USA in 2000-2010 while population grew and the GDP went up by 30% or so.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comments
People can deny it and fight it all they want. Probably the best they'll accomplish to protect and obsolete old order is wipe out humanity -- I hope we do better than that.
Also, comparative advantage does not apply when there is local unemployment. Who is the "you" you are referring to in trade anyway? The people without jobs who are at the edge economically and socially in the USA? So much of what people think they know about even mainstream economics is bunk. See also, for just one example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toil
"The paradox of toil is the economic hypothesis that total employment will shrink if everybody wants to work more when "the short-term nominal interest rate is zero and there are deflationary pressures and output contraction".[1] The idea is that total employment will fall when wages, and therefore consumption, are pushed down by the simultaneous efforts of everyone to work more in situations where interest rates are against the zero bound so that rates cannot drop more to increase demand for goods. This is a limited example of the fallacy of composition.[1] where assuming that the increase in production that normally occurs when total labor increases applies in all situations. Put simply, when a recessionary economy is up against the zero bound, having more people seeking work - at lower wages if necessary - can actually reduce the number of jobs due to reduced demand from lower wages."
There are at least four fundamental complementary ways to arrange most work that needs to be done:
* Volunteerism through a gift economy (Wikipedia, Linux, Freecycle)
* Through the exchange market, but softened by transfer payments like a "basic income" (or a more fragmented system like in the USA with social security, public school supports, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc.)
* By local subsistence through advanced technology like 3D printers, personal robotics, solar panels, and similar DIY stuff
* By democratic participatory resource based planning at all levels.
The fact is, neither the USSR nor the USA was talking about "socialism" when they either celebrated it or maligned it. Western Europe is a better example of what "socialism" means. See Chomsky here to see more about the truth about the USSR and the USA and how they played against each other:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
Lots of alternatives:
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Tell that to Linus Torvalds and all the Debian GNU/Linux maintainers. Kids should tell that to their parents and adopters too. There are many ways of organizing how things get done based on what values we want to celebrate.
- ARE you telling me that the is GOVERNMENT force standing behind them, with machine guns, ready to fire?
No, wait, what is the point you are trying to make? Either you are predicating your ideology on government power and violence or you are talking about voluntary exchange of some sort, and I have nothing about voluntary exchanges of any kind for any purpose at any time.
So what is your argument about, do you want government to FORCE people into your paradise or are you talking about voluntary participation?
You can't handle the truth.
i am not required to hold your hand and give you the intellectual charity necessary to lead you out of your current state of colossal blindness in a merry manner. i'm not your father
i merely need to point out the big and obvious falsehoods you so blithely miss in your flawed antediluvian thinking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Doesn't have to be the elite who suffer. In Russia, it was the landowners. They were thrown in gulags in Siberia.
I am a big fan of capitalism. I think communism is a response to excesses, and the world is moving towards that. I recently watched a programme called Panorama on the BBC. The program was looking at the plight of the poor in the USA. The indignity of American citizens having to queue up in the small hours of the morning to get a chance to see a doctor who will work for free was shocking. And that is to a guy who is from Zimbabwe. The wealthiest country in the world, and people live in tents and its OK?!
Once the poor have nothing to lose, they will start a revolution. They will make the tea partiers and the occupiers look like a walk in the park. Do you know the reason that the west has seen a long sustained period of peace? It's because everyone had something to lose if the peace was broken. Once people feel like they don't have a stake in America, and believe me, many people now don't, they will make life hard for everyone else.
If you are not a citizen or resident of the country that shuts down the service that you are a customer of then you are of little or no consequece to the legal system there. If you are so far away that you can't easily arrange a face to face meeting with a lawyer that can do something in the justice system where the service is hosted it's going to be difficult, time consuming and expensive to get anything done at all and even then you may still be ignored as a non-citizen.
So it's not just a US only problem.
I looked into hosting for low volume FTP traffic some years ago and the best option at the time was a virtual machine from Linode in Texas instead of in my own country. Then I heard that some of the first data likely to be hosted there was old Russian seismic data collected in Afganistan (bought by a US company and then processed in Australia), and then some datacentre raids and confiscations hit the news. It's a slim chance that some wanker acting out of imagined patriotism would notice a bunch of suspicious filenames and the stuff would be confiscated and given to a competitor of the US based client and there would be little I could do about it other than lose a client and spend shitloads on international legal hassles. It just was not worth a small saving for the potential legal hassles even if it was a remote chance.
The problem is that most companies doesn't like the US law, so they are leaving. Wasn't that the entire point of this article?
No, the point is that in the US's treatment of Internet sites, the law is now clearly irrelevant. The current poster child is JotForm, whose domain name was shut down for no stated reason, without a court warrant, and there's not even a suggestion that JotForm was violating any law. In fact, the jotform.com name was eventually restored, but the authorities involved haven't stated why the action was taken.
The general understanding is that it was probably a "mistake", i.e., the agencies involved didn't know or care about the law or finding any evidence; they just sent GoDaddy the takedown request without bothering with a court order, and GoDaddy accepted it without question. The silence from officialdom is because they knew they blew it, and don't want to admit their mistake. But this isn't consolation to the businesses that have been silenced by such random, unexplained takedowns. JotForm wasn't an isolated incident; there have been thousands of them in recent months.
Any businesses using a hosting or domain-name service in the US has to now be aware that their online presence can disappear instantly, with no explanation and no recourse. It doesn't matter whether you are following US law or not. It all just depends on the whims and misunderstandings of a flock of agencies that you don't know about and who won't talk to you.
It simply doesn't make sense to do business under such conditions. Sensible businessmen would be looking around for Internet hosting and domain-name services that are stable and reliable. Such services no longer exist in the US, and can't exist as long as the authorities act outside the law, so you should be moving your Internet business elsewhere.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats 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.