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
Fixed that for you.
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?
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.
One problem is that the latest "war of the da"y is always profitable to somebody:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
War is just not usually beneficial to most people who have to pay the costs (which includes the US taxpayer, as well as all the victims abroad or at home who were in the way...)
And so a society consumes itself, burning itself to the ground because every incremental step makes sense to the fire... Where are the "political" firefighters when we need them?
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
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".
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.
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.
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/
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.
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