(Ad hominem attacks involve disqualifying a party in the discussion in the eyes of third parties,... Not that my ethics allow me to make such attacks....)
Eladio McCormick, Parent Post
This very last bit, of course, means that I am right, and my interlocutors wrong. Yet you couldn't bring yourself to say denounce them. This says a lot about you and your morals.
Obviously, the point is that I conjectured that your interluctors were wrong in that they are using a bad definition, as opposed to being racists. It seems excessive to "denounce" someone for using a bad definition.
If you want to make a more substantive arguement, such as pointing out a place where your interluctors use communication skills in a manner inconsistent with my proposed definition, please do so.
Race is the immediately visible correlate of etnia and language. Discriminating against ethnic or linguistics groups is far more than significantly correlated to discriminating against a race.
There is obviously a correlation, but I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would gauge someone's intelligence based on their ability to speak English with an American accent, with little regard to race. Basically, though, I just don't like the use of loaded words like "racism" unless they are being used in a manner consistent with their exact denotation.
Due fairness my ass. In a clearly racist context statements like that are not to be accepted.
It is well known that colleges require their students to take a standardized test, the TOEFL, to evaluate the English skills of applicants, and that there are clear guidelines
as to what is a minimum score for somebody to be qualified to TA in English. If this guy thinks his univerisity is breaking such guidelines, then he should complain to the
proper authorities.
All my foreign TAs spoke English fine, but I had no specific knowledge of the difficulty of the TOEFL, so I just gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he got a TA that didn't speak English well. Either way, I see no point in arguing over whether some third party is lying, so I withdraw that point.
"America" is the land mass that extends from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Alaska and Nunavut in the North. By the morphological regularity of the association of the meanings of base forms to derivative forms, "American", as a gentillicium, means "from America", that is, somebody from the aforementioned landmass.
"United States" is the name of our country. By morphological derivation, the gentillicium for us is "unitedstatesian", which I abbreviate to USian.
In language, actual usage by the majority of speakers of the language trumps all else in determining what words mean. In American English (and possibly other English dialects), by usage, "America" means the United States, and "American" thus means a resident of the United States. If you want to refer to the landmasses in American English, you should use "South America" and "North America". If you want to refer to the landmasses together, you can simply use the conjunction "and".
Again, it's only "the truth" if you redefine "communication" as "speaking English to your insatiable standards".
The obvious reason why this discussion is going in circles is that your opponents are using a definition of "communication skills" that is more or less like the following: "ability to communicate with the particular people that live around you". Let's review how this definition might work:
Myself, living in America: good communication skills
Myself, living almost anywhere else in the world: bad communication skills
Person who speaks French, German, and Italian, living in Switzerland: good communication skills
Same person, living in America: bad communication skills
This isn't a very good definition of communications skills, since it means that they change as you travel, but it's nonetheless not prejudiced on the basis of language ("racist", as you put it). It just appeared prejudiced because America was the only country in the topic of discussion. Of course, it's possible that people did mean to be prejudiced. However, I think my explanation is more likely, as it explains why people were so indignant at being called "racist".
First of all, my comment was aimed at a guy who equated "communication skills" with "skill at speaking English", which is a plainly racist statement.
Racist? Since there are large numbers of non-whites that speak English, and large numbers of whites that don't speak English, how does that work? That's like calling someone racist because they say that all South Africans are dumb. It's prejudice by language and ethnic background, not race.
Second, if you don't understand your TA's accent it's your own fucking fault. You're in college, for god's sake. The best time to hang out with different people, who speak differently from you, and work on your communication skills.
In due fairness, he didn't say he couldn't understand their accents, he said they couldn't "speak English worth shit". The normal iterpretation of that statement is that they can't speak the English language well, not that they have thick accents.
Lats week it was revealed that in California, 1999 was the year when the percentage of the population who is white dropped below 50%. This is the way of the future. Start adapting now.
Again, you exhibit confusion between race and language. Maybe you should work on your communications skills.
I am a capitalist because I have not seen a better way. But I don't let it rule me. If I did, I would never show compassion for others, I would never strive to do anything that was without material gain even if it be at the expense of my spirt,
Technically, in capitalism, you should be trying to get the greatest possible net benefit to yourself. That's why, under capitalism, people buy luxury items, because they intend to get pleasure or some other benefit from those items greater than the benefit of cash in the bank. Often, the emotional/mental benefits of showing compassion, not to metion the benefits you incur as a result of reciprocal altruism, outway the minor financial benefit of being miserly, in which case showing compassion is not inconsistent with capitalism.
and I would have the
wrongheaded belief that if the freedoms that all men have been endowed with by God got in the way of petty averice, averice would win over freedom.
I think whether you believe petty avarice would win over freedom depends more on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist than on whether or not you are a capitalist.
perhaps companies should stop using OUR computers to hold the information they need?
why can't they have s db that maintains my user id and password? I'll tell you why, because they can USE us to save them money.
Because you could have a dynamic IP address, they have no way to identify you until you give them a user id and password, or some other unique identifier. It doesn't save them storage space either, they obviously have your user id and password in a database anyway, or there'd be no point in asking for them.
2) Here in MD, the police at a state school are yes, real police. Private colleges I dunno -- I'm guessing they're Keystone Kops.
I'm sure it varies depending on the school, but at MIT, our private campus police are all deputized by the county, and can thus do the same things that government-paid police can do.
"It starts becoming a major world issue when record and movie companies buy laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which say that I cannot even listen to SDMI
music or watch DVD movies except under their terms."
Don't buy the product if you don't like the licnese. It's morally wrong for you to tell others what they should do with thier own property.
The problem is that the license not to use DVDs on unlicensed players is created by enacting criminal legislation, rather than being negotiated at time of sale, and affects more than just people who buy DVDs.
If you think it's morally wrong to tell others what they should do with their property, you should certainly agree that it's morally wrong to pass a law preventing a person, who might not have ever purchased DVDs and therefore would not be subject to any agreement with the MPRAA, from distributing a program which they have a license from the author to distribute, merely because it is possible to use that program in a way that might break some third party's agreement with the MPAA.
"It's a major issue that even if I have the technical skills to circumvent their restrictions, I can't utilize or publicize those skills for fear of turning into a Jon Johansen"
Don't break the law, and you'll not have any problems. Simple.
But the law in question, by your own statement about the morality of telling others what to do with their property, is immoral. Distributing or creating a program that decrypts CSS-encrypted material violates no one's property rights. Even if it is possible to use it in such a way, that should not be grounds for its creation and distribution to be prohibited by law.
It seems pretty ridiculous that the campus police are enforcing copyright law.
They were executing a search warrant that involved an area where they presumably had jurisdiction, the campus dorms, just as they probably would have for any other search warrant.
In 1995, an MIT student named David LaMacchia was prosecuted for allegedly distributing copyrighted software via and FTP server he set up on MIT's Athena workstations.
He was prosecuted by the federal government under federal wire fraud statutes, but the case was dismissed because the judge found that copyright infringement cannot be prosecuted under the wire fraud statute.
I wonder if the DMCA has superseded this precedent (though the Massachusetts case may not apply in Oklahoma), which seemed to make FTP sites into "common carriers" in the eyes of the law. More information here.
I believe the reason they were prosecuting under the wire fraud statutes in the first place is that, at that time, they could not prosecute for copyright infringement unless the person was doing it for commercial or financial gain. That was changed, not by the DMCA, but by the No Electronic Theft Act, which allowed prosecution regardless, as long as the total amount of copyrighted material distributed exceeded a specific dollar value (IIRC, a few thousand dollars).
I wonder if I feel moved to change my sig in a while (for whatever reason) I may be liable to 5 years in gaol.
Clever. I always wondered how that provision of the RIP law would work. Clearly, if someone were to ask me (pretending for the moment that I'm in the UK) whether I've been required to provide encryption keys to the government, and I were to answer "I can't say," instead of simply "No," then that is practically telling them that I have. The only way the law can work is if (a) people are required to lie, always answering "No," or (b) people are required to never confirm or deny, always answering something equivalent to "I can't say," even if they have never been asked to provide encryption keys.
There is no right to privacy. This is a misconception. The word "privacy" does not even appear in the constitution.
United States Constitution, Amendment IX "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Many of the framers of the Constitution did not want a bill of rights because they thought it would end up limiting rights to exactly those rights that were listed. They thought that since none of the enumerated powers of Congress included things like "billet soldiers in private homes" or "confiscate private property without compensation", it was unnecessary to list specific right, and that it would result in the government doing everything not explicitly forbidden. By and large, their fears appear to have been justified. That said, I still think we're better off having a bill of rights than not, especially considering some of the stuff Congress justifies under its enumerated powers, but it's important to keep Amendment IX in mind.
Can search engines find and index pages (html, php, etc.) that are not explicitly linked from the starting index.*htm* page in a given directory?
Search engines only find pages that are linked to from some other page on the web. There is nothing in the HTTP protocol that allows them to get the full directory structure of the server or anything like that. Unless someone links to your page or submits the URL to a search engine, it won't be found.
That said, I advise that you just use a robots.txt file just to be sure.
Actually, "pure" water is easy for any chemist to make (at least, "pure enough"). As for the volume, any moron can build a container with a volume of 1 cm^3, even if the actual shape isn't cubic. And it's then easy to measure the weight of the liquid+container, substract the container's weight, and then build equivalent metallic masses.
1g is too difficult to weight ? Well, current weighting accuracy is more in the nanogram range these days... BESIDES, you can always take one thousand of these cubic centimetres, lump them together, and make a kilogram weight. And you won't have a weird fraction of whatnot in your way.
The original gauges stored in Pavillon Baltard are long since obsolete.... and never really useful, since physical definition (that is, definition using physical features available everywhere) is the whole point of the metric system.
That's all well and good, but the original poster was still right that the kilogram is still defined under the SI to be the mass of some particular piece of platinum-iridium in kept in a vault by somewhere in France by the BIPM.
However, we all know this type of stupidity works in the courts. We have too many previous examples of these things already and I'm sure Metalligreed will win if Harvard doesn't bend over for a buttrock band of elderly hicks.
Well, think about the examples of stupidity in the courts that your'e talking about: Motion Picture Association of America v. Eric Corley, aka Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600 magazine
DVD Copy Control Association v. [dozens/hundreds of people, selected at random]
Recording Industry Association of America v. MP3.com
If someone knew nothing about the cases, just looking at the names they would probably guess that the plaintiffs would win.
Now, think about this: Metallica and Dr. Dre v. Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, etc.
Looking at those names, and knowing nothing about the case, who would you expect to win?
Anyway, any university should fall under the protections provided to service providers by the DMCA. I'm frankly quite amazed that the three universities that were sued earlier settled. If I were a university that were sued, I'd try to have Metallica's lawyers sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit. The protections provided for service providers seem pretty clear cut. But, IANAL, so what do I know?
Surely all you'd have to do is include something that is your copyright in the same encrypted archive. A text file containing a few sentences written by you about the DMCA, DeCSS etc. should do.
I guess you're right. The main problem is that I don't see what damages you'd claim in your countersuit.
Huh? What are you worried about? How would you get in trouble for running a piracy site that allows downloading from a server you own? If anything, people actually downloading warez and accessing the latest child-Pr0n on your server might get in trouble, but I don't see how you would.
That was a completely specious argument. I can't see how running a DNS server that allows tunneling violates any law. Replacing the entire issue at question with an activity known to be illegal is not a valid analogy, it is simply asserting that you are correct.
The key distinction here is that with a warez site, the action of downloading from the server inherently violates the law, and causes the server operator to violate the law by distributing the warez. However, there is nothing about tunneling that inherently violates any law. The people calling Microsoft PPP dialups and tunneling through your DNS might be violating some law about unauthorized use of computers, but that's hardly clear cut, since nobody's breaking into Microsoft's system.
Obviously, if you were acting in concert with the people using Microsoft's dialups, and those people broke the law, you would be their accomplice, but I thought that went without saying. If you just set up one of these servers for the hell of it (or to bypass your firewall at work), and somebody uses it to do something illegal, I don't see why you'd be responsible. You can't possible know which IP addresses are from Microsoft dialups. Someone might call you negligent, but many admins do far more negligent things (like leave open mail relays) without being legally responsible for the resulting problems.
More to the point, if someone uploads a bunch of warez to the incoming directory of your non-warez ftp site, and people download them, and you truly don't notice, you're not going to be sued for copyright infringement.
> Personal responsibility? The law doesn't punish individuals for their violations
It most certainly does.
I think what he meant is that it is possible, but not yet decided by the courts, that individuals using Napster are immune from suit under the Audio Home Recording Act.
The next step would be to see how this might work through an intermediary DNS server in cases where you can only access an internal name server which is the only system allowed to query external nameservers. Might need a ttl of 0 though, don't know if that would be respected.
Um... I think an itermediary DNS server is how it's intended to be used. After all, if you're able to connect to port 53 of arbitrary servers, you can just use a regular IP tunnel through that port.
I've heard of IP over uucp email, but this is really, really clever. Only, if you were running the server side of things, presumably, you could be traced. So, you would NOT want to use a server you owned. Who would set these up? Or does one rely on being able to compromise some host where the root password is "secret"?
Huh? What are you worried about? How would you get in trouble for running a DNS that allows tunneling on a server you own? If anything, people actually calling Microsoft PPP lines and accessing the Internet through your server might get in trouble, but I don't see how you would.
The problem is that only the copyright holder of the encrypted work could sue for a DMCA violation. You'd have to write your own version of DeCSS to be the copyright holder (not that that's impossible, you could probably do it based on Frank Stephenson's paper, for example).
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Eladio McCormick, Post #353
(Ad hominem attacks involve disqualifying a party in the discussion in the eyes of third parties, ... Not that my ethics allow me to make such attacks....)
Eladio McCormick, Parent Post
This very last bit, of course, means that I am right, and my interlocutors wrong. Yet you couldn't bring yourself to say denounce them. This says a lot about you and your morals.
Obviously, the point is that I conjectured that your interluctors were wrong in that they are using a bad definition, as opposed to being racists. It seems excessive to "denounce" someone for using a bad definition.
If you want to make a more substantive arguement, such as pointing out a place where your interluctors use communication skills in a manner inconsistent with my proposed definition, please do so.
Race is the immediately visible correlate of etnia and language. Discriminating against ethnic or linguistics groups is far more than significantly correlated to discriminating against a race.
There is obviously a correlation, but I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would gauge someone's intelligence based on their ability to speak English with an American accent, with little regard to race. Basically, though, I just don't like the use of loaded words like "racism" unless they are being used in a manner consistent with their exact denotation.
Due fairness my ass. In a clearly racist context statements like that are not to be accepted. It is well known that colleges require their students to take a standardized test, the TOEFL, to evaluate the English skills of applicants, and that there are clear guidelines as to what is a minimum score for somebody to be qualified to TA in English. If this guy thinks his univerisity is breaking such guidelines, then he should complain to the proper authorities.
All my foreign TAs spoke English fine, but I had no specific knowledge of the difficulty of the TOEFL, so I just gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he got a TA that didn't speak English well. Either way, I see no point in arguing over whether some third party is lying, so I withdraw that point.
"America" is the land mass that extends from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Alaska and Nunavut in the North. By the morphological regularity of the association of the meanings of base forms to derivative forms, "American", as a gentillicium, means "from America", that is, somebody from the aforementioned landmass.
"United States" is the name of our country. By morphological derivation, the gentillicium for us is "unitedstatesian", which I abbreviate to USian.
In language, actual usage by the majority of speakers of the language trumps all else in determining what words mean. In American English (and possibly other English dialects), by usage, "America" means the United States, and "American" thus means a resident of the United States. If you want to refer to the landmasses in American English, you should use "South America" and "North America". If you want to refer to the landmasses together, you can simply use the conjunction "and".
Again, it's only "the truth" if you redefine "communication" as "speaking English to your insatiable standards".
The obvious reason why this discussion is going in circles is that your opponents are using a definition of "communication skills" that is more or less like the following: "ability to communicate with the particular people that live around you". Let's review how this definition might work:
Myself, living in America: good communication skills
Myself, living almost anywhere else in the world: bad communication skills
Person who speaks French, German, and Italian, living in Switzerland: good communication skills
Same person, living in America: bad communication skills
This isn't a very good definition of communications skills, since it means that they change as you travel, but it's nonetheless not prejudiced on the basis of language ("racist", as you put it). It just appeared prejudiced because America was the only country in the topic of discussion. Of course, it's possible that people did mean to be prejudiced. However, I think my explanation is more likely, as it explains why people were so indignant at being called "racist".
First of all, my comment was aimed at a guy who equated "communication skills" with "skill at speaking English", which is a plainly racist statement.
Racist? Since there are large numbers of non-whites that speak English, and large numbers of whites that don't speak English, how does that work? That's like calling someone racist because they say that all South Africans are dumb. It's prejudice by language and ethnic background, not race.
Second, if you don't understand your TA's accent it's your own fucking fault. You're in college, for god's sake. The best time to hang out with different people, who speak differently from you, and work on your communication skills.
In due fairness, he didn't say he couldn't understand their accents, he said they couldn't "speak English worth shit". The normal iterpretation of that statement is that they can't speak the English language well, not that they have thick accents.
Lats week it was revealed that in California, 1999 was the year when the percentage of the population who is white dropped below 50%. This is the way of the future. Start adapting now.
Again, you exhibit confusion between race and language. Maybe you should work on your communications skills.
I am a capitalist because I have not seen a better way. But I don't let it rule me. If I did, I would never show compassion for others, I would never strive to do anything that was without material gain even if it be at the expense of my spirt,
Technically, in capitalism, you should be trying to get the greatest possible net benefit to yourself. That's why, under capitalism, people buy luxury items, because they intend to get pleasure or some other benefit from those items greater than the benefit of cash in the bank. Often, the emotional/mental benefits of showing compassion, not to metion the benefits you incur as a result of reciprocal altruism, outway the minor financial benefit of being miserly, in which case showing compassion is not inconsistent with capitalism.
and I would have the wrongheaded belief that if the freedoms that all men have been endowed with by God got in the way of petty averice, averice would win over freedom.
I think whether you believe petty avarice would win over freedom depends more on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist than on whether or not you are a capitalist.
perhaps companies should stop using OUR computers to hold the information they need?
why can't they have s db that maintains my user id and password? I'll tell you why, because they can USE us to save them money.
Because you could have a dynamic IP address, they have no way to identify you until you give them a user id and password, or some other unique identifier. It doesn't save them storage space either, they obviously have your user id and password in a database anyway, or there'd be no point in asking for them.
2) Here in MD, the police at a state school are yes, real police. Private colleges I dunno -- I'm guessing they're Keystone Kops.
I'm sure it varies depending on the school, but at MIT, our private campus police are all deputized by the county, and can thus do the same things that government-paid police can do.
"It starts becoming a major world issue when record and movie companies buy laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which say that I cannot even listen to SDMI music or watch DVD movies except under their terms."
Don't buy the product if you don't like the licnese. It's morally wrong for you to tell others what they should do with thier own property.
The problem is that the license not to use DVDs on unlicensed players is created by enacting criminal legislation, rather than being negotiated at time of sale, and affects more than just people who buy DVDs.
If you think it's morally wrong to tell others what they should do with their property, you should certainly agree that it's morally wrong to pass a law preventing a person, who might not have ever purchased DVDs and therefore would not be subject to any agreement with the MPRAA, from distributing a program which they have a license from the author to distribute, merely because it is possible to use that program in a way that might break some third party's agreement with the MPAA.
"It's a major issue that even if I have the technical skills to circumvent their restrictions, I can't utilize or publicize those skills for fear of turning into a Jon Johansen"
Don't break the law, and you'll not have any problems. Simple.
But the law in question, by your own statement about the morality of telling others what to do with their property, is immoral. Distributing or creating a program that decrypts CSS-encrypted material violates no one's property rights. Even if it is possible to use it in such a way, that should not be grounds for its creation and distribution to be prohibited by law.
It seems pretty ridiculous that the campus police are enforcing copyright law.
They were executing a search warrant that involved an area where they presumably had jurisdiction, the campus dorms, just as they probably would have for any other search warrant.
In 1995, an MIT student named David LaMacchia was prosecuted for allegedly distributing copyrighted software via and FTP server he set up on MIT's Athena workstations.
He was prosecuted by the federal government under federal wire fraud statutes, but the case was dismissed because the judge found that copyright infringement cannot be prosecuted under the wire fraud statute.
I wonder if the DMCA has superseded this precedent (though the Massachusetts case may not apply in Oklahoma), which seemed to make FTP sites into "common carriers" in the eyes of the law. More information here.
I believe the reason they were prosecuting under the wire fraud statutes in the first place is that, at that time, they could not prosecute for copyright infringement unless the person was doing it for commercial or financial gain. That was changed, not by the DMCA, but by the No Electronic Theft Act, which allowed prosecution regardless, as long as the total amount of copyrighted material distributed exceeded a specific dollar value (IIRC, a few thousand dollars).
I wonder if I feel moved to change my sig in a while (for whatever reason) I may be liable to 5 years in gaol.
Clever. I always wondered how that provision of the RIP law would work. Clearly, if someone were to ask me (pretending for the moment that I'm in the UK) whether I've been required to provide encryption keys to the government, and I were to answer "I can't say," instead of simply "No," then that is practically telling them that I have. The only way the law can work is if (a) people are required to lie, always answering "No," or (b) people are required to never confirm or deny, always answering something equivalent to "I can't say," even if they have never been asked to provide encryption keys.
There is no right to privacy. This is a misconception. The word "privacy" does not even appear in the constitution.
United States Constitution, Amendment IX
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Many of the framers of the Constitution did not want a bill of rights because they thought it would end up limiting rights to exactly those rights that were listed. They thought that since none of the enumerated powers of Congress included things like "billet soldiers in private homes" or "confiscate private property without compensation", it was unnecessary to list specific right, and that it would result in the government doing everything not explicitly forbidden. By and large, their fears appear to have been justified. That said, I still think we're better off having a bill of rights than not, especially considering some of the stuff Congress justifies under its enumerated powers, but it's important to keep Amendment IX in mind.
Can search engines find and index pages (html, php, etc.) that are not explicitly linked from the starting index.*htm* page in a given directory?
Search engines only find pages that are linked to from some other page on the web. There is nothing in the HTTP protocol that allows them to get the full directory structure of the server or anything like that. Unless someone links to your page or submits the URL to a search engine, it won't be found.
That said, I advise that you just use a robots.txt file just to be sure.
Actually, "pure" water is easy for any chemist to make (at least, "pure enough"). As for the volume, any moron can build a container with a volume of 1 cm^3, even if the actual shape isn't cubic. And it's then easy to measure the weight of the liquid+container, substract the container's weight, and then build equivalent metallic masses.
1g is too difficult to weight ? Well, current weighting accuracy is more in the nanogram range these days... BESIDES, you can always take one thousand of these cubic centimetres, lump them together, and make a kilogram weight. And you won't have a weird fraction of whatnot in your way.
The original gauges stored in Pavillon Baltard are long since obsolete.... and never really useful, since physical definition (that is, definition using physical features available everywhere) is the whole point of the metric system.
That's all well and good, but the original poster was still right that the kilogram is still defined under the SI to be the mass of some particular piece of platinum-iridium in kept in a vault by somewhere in France by the BIPM.
However, we all know this type of stupidity works in the courts. We have too many previous examples of these things already and I'm sure Metalligreed will win if Harvard doesn't bend over for a buttrock band of elderly hicks.
Well, think about the examples of stupidity in the courts that your'e talking about:
Motion Picture Association of America v. Eric Corley, aka Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600 magazine
DVD Copy Control Association v. [dozens/hundreds of people, selected at random]
Recording Industry Association of America v. MP3.com
If someone knew nothing about the cases, just looking at the names they would probably guess that the plaintiffs would win.
Now, think about this:
Metallica and Dr. Dre v. Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, etc.
Looking at those names, and knowing nothing about the case, who would you expect to win?
Anyway, any university should fall under the protections provided to service providers by the DMCA. I'm frankly quite amazed that the three universities that were sued earlier settled. If I were a university that were sued, I'd try to have Metallica's lawyers sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit. The protections provided for service providers seem pretty clear cut. But, IANAL, so what do I know?
Surely all you'd have to do is include something that is your copyright in the same encrypted archive. A text file containing a few sentences written by you about the DMCA, DeCSS etc. should do.
I guess you're right. The main problem is that I don't see what damages you'd claim in your countersuit.
Huh? What are you worried about? How would you get in trouble for running a piracy site that allows downloading from a server you own? If anything, people actually downloading warez and accessing the latest child-Pr0n on your server might get in trouble, but I don't see how you would.
That was a completely specious argument. I can't see how running a DNS server that allows tunneling violates any law. Replacing the entire issue at question with an activity known to be illegal is not a valid analogy, it is simply asserting that you are correct.
The key distinction here is that with a warez site, the action of downloading from the server inherently violates the law, and causes the server operator to violate the law by distributing the warez. However, there is nothing about tunneling that inherently violates any law. The people calling Microsoft PPP dialups and tunneling through your DNS might be violating some law about unauthorized use of computers, but that's hardly clear cut, since nobody's breaking into Microsoft's system.
Obviously, if you were acting in concert with the people using Microsoft's dialups, and those people broke the law, you would be their accomplice, but I thought that went without saying. If you just set up one of these servers for the hell of it (or to bypass your firewall at work), and somebody uses it to do something illegal, I don't see why you'd be responsible. You can't possible know which IP addresses are from Microsoft dialups. Someone might call you negligent, but many admins do far more negligent things (like leave open mail relays) without being legally responsible for the resulting problems.
More to the point, if someone uploads a bunch of warez to the incoming directory of your non-warez ftp site, and people download them, and you truly don't notice, you're not going to be sued for copyright infringement.
> Personal responsibility? The law doesn't punish individuals for their violations
It most certainly does.
I think what he meant is that it is possible, but not yet decided by the courts, that individuals using Napster are immune from suit under the Audio Home Recording Act.
The next step would be to see how this might work through an intermediary DNS server in cases where you can only access an internal name server which is the only system allowed to query external nameservers. Might need a ttl of 0 though, don't know if that would be respected.
Um... I think an itermediary DNS server is how it's intended to be used. After all, if you're able to connect to port 53 of arbitrary servers, you can just use a regular IP tunnel through that port.
I've heard of IP over uucp email, but this is really, really clever. Only, if you were running the server side of things, presumably, you could be traced. So, you would NOT want to use a server you owned. Who would set these up? Or does one rely on being able to compromise some host where the root password is "secret"?
Huh? What are you worried about? How would you get in trouble for running a DNS that allows tunneling on a server you own? If anything, people actually calling Microsoft PPP lines and accessing the Internet through your server might get in trouble, but I don't see how you would.
That is the statement I was addressing, which should have been obvious as I quoted it.
You did? Go reread your post.
I'm sure I don't even have to point out the irony of your calling me a "thickheaded nitwit".
And I think the overall irony here speaks for itself.
The problem is that only the copyright holder of the encrypted work could sue for a DMCA violation. You'd have to write your own version of DeCSS to be the copyright holder (not that that's impossible, you could probably do it based on Frank Stephenson's paper, for example).
There's still a bit of money to be made off these games and Hasbro, according to the courts, has the exclusive right to do so.
Not necessarily. The companies settled, so there's no way to know whether the courts would have ruled in Hasbro's favor.
The companies in question settled. No court ruled in Hasbro's favor, no precedent was set.