"You seem to have very little grounding in network engineering. You don't have to monitor all the computers. You just have to monitor the border routers. And you don't have to story all the traffic, you just need to store the 40 byte IP headers."
YOU seem to have little grounding in the field. You are incorrect.
First, if the traffic is inside the "borders", monitoring the border routers is 100% ineffective.
Second, simply storing the IP headers does NOT give you the information you were implying: realtime packet hash data.
Your thesis appears to be that it is possible to trace traffic based on the timing of the packets. And that is true, as far as it goes. But you didn't think it through.
The resources needed to do that for a specific case of suspected data transfer are such that it generally must be configured for the traffic between those two specific nodes. You could simply not monitor the whole internet that way.
To clarify: I did not mean that it could not track any two nodes without being huge. What I meant was that it could not be big enough to store all the data such that any two nodes could be picked out at any given time. Such a beast cannot exist.
"o_O Already exists in Europe: It's called the Data Retention Directive. This exists now. Today. And it requires very much less than "all the resources of the human race". In fact, it merely requires an extra 1U unit here and there at the border routers for major ISPs, and sometimes an extra fiber link to duplicate traffic."
Then it cannot do what you implied. Elementary-level information theory says that it cannot effectively track the kind of information (packet hashes in realtime) between ANY two given network nodes, unless its resources are specifically pointed at them. Anything else would take more hardware than currently exists to support the Internet.
This is very basic, low-grade application of math and physics. You can claim otherwise all you like; that does not make it so.
"I did not. I read it and found it did not say what you implied it did, but then I've got the advantage over you of a career in Engineering and Materials Science and a first exposure to thermite in 1985."
"Did not say what I implied it did"??? Are you sure you are referring to the same paper that I was? It not only DOES say what I implied it did, I challenge you to give me specifics about how you are pretending to refute it.
Now, it is possible that I did confuse you with someone else, but there was someone who argued with me about the veracity of the evidence based merely on the fact that Alex Jones had (later in the process) become involved in publicizing the evidence. That was nothing more than ad hominem and I give it no respect. I am not a fan of Alex Jones, nevertheless, shooting the messenger is not a valid scientific argument.
There is other evidence that thermitic materials were found in the debris: FEMA's own ("Building Performance Study" (see Appendix C) suggests as much, including micrographic evidence.
And it must be noted that "nano-thermite", even according to Wikipedia, has properties that are very different from conventional thermite. That was part of the point I was making.
Yes, there most definitely *IS* a misunderstanding on your side. I have had this same discussion with lots of other people and NONE of them have ever had such a problem understanding it as you have demonstrated.
"Come on now - you're written: "By law, they ARE a religion", which is why I asked for where the legal ruling is - you said it was a law after all."
Good Grid, you have a comprehension problem. It's not on my end... nobody else has seemed to have trouble understanding this.
Look at the statement by the Supreme Court above. A religion is a religion because its members say it is. No other "ruling" by any authority is necessary (or even possible) in the U.S. I have stated that at least 3 times now, in different ways, and if you still refuse to understand it, stop blaming me.
"Hence it is not a church because this highly organised criminal gang is not accepted as a religion."
But they ARE accepted as a religion... in the United States. They ALMOST were not accepted as a Church, but they somehow managed to just barely get past that little obstacle. See the link I posted previously about Scientology vs the IRS.
"
No, I'm suggesting you misread and misinterpereted it - or are pretending to do so, just like you misread that abstract about debris ending up just like thermite in our previous discussion."
I didn't misread it. Obviously you never actually looked at the EVIDENCE about the thermite, or examined the paper. All you did was insult the source. That's not valid arguing.
You weren't in the debate club in school, were you? You have trouble formulating genuine, valid arguments, then claim you have "won" using arguments that would have gotten you kicked out of any genuine debate.
Please see my previous reply. Your Scientologist acquaintence, and you, are both mistaken.
To also clarify an earlier statement I made, this is what I meant when I wrote that I felt you were conflating to very different things. The US government has some power to regulate whether they are a tax-exempt CHURCH. But it has no power at all, by its own admission at the highest levels, to decide what is a RELIGION.
And that, I think, is how we ended up misunderstanding one another.
"How do these two things go together? Who made the legal ruling that Scientology is a religion if the United States Supreme Court can't do it?"
Repeat: THEY DON'T HAVE TO BE "RULED" BY ANYBODY TO BE A RELIGION, IN ORDER TO BE ONE IN THE UNITED STATES!
And I also repeat: this is the fundamental thing that you are not understanding.
Look. I'm not trying to be condescending, I'm trying to explain. There is a legal difference -- and a very big one -- between a religion and a Church.
A "church" is an institution that practices or teaches religion. A church can be for-profit or non-profit. If it is non-profit, then it is also non-taxable.
For-profit institutions, in the past, were often not considered "churches" by the IRS, and were therefore taxed. But the Supreme Court decision in regard to whether the Universal Life Church could call itself and be tax-exempt, because the IRS did not feel it qualified for 502(c)(3) exemption. See this IRS document which states on page 4 exactly what I have already told you: "In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that government has no authority to pass on the legitimacy of a religious belief or to define permissible religious belief."
So... it is your ACTIONS, whether or not they be criminal, and in some cases your profit motive, in which case you might not be a 501(c)(3) eligible Church, that determine whether you are prosecutable or taxable.
But NONE of that has ANYTHING to do with whether you are (or are a member of) any particular religion.
I should add that also, according to one of the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA, a "provider" cannot be held liable for infringement committed by others, as long as (A) it has a policy for removal of infringing material once notified of its existence, or (B) it only passed through their network without being stored on it.
"Until its tested we don't really know. They may well be liable for what transverses across their networks."
Yes, we do know, because it's a matter of statute.
I'm trying to remember the exact name of the statute. But the "electronic something something act" a few years back, passed by Congress and signed into law, specifically says that someone who provides internet access to others cannot be held liable for the actions of those others.
Most importantly, it very definitely does NOT say that it applies only to ISPs or ISP-like companies. It applies to anybody who supplies "access". And an open router is definitely "supplying access" to other people.
You are simply muddying the waters here, by getting the procedure wrong, and conflating several things that are actually quite separate.
(A) First, the procedure. You have items (1) and (2) right, but it has almost never gotten to (3), and that will probably happen even less in the future. Why? Because the courts have finally realized (and so ruled) that an IP address does not identify an individual. You can't prosecute a neighborhood or a house or even a family. You can only prosecute individuals.
(B) Good luck identifying that individual. You may have an IP address, but few judges these days will allow a search or issue a subpoena on an IP address alone. And even if they find a computer with many downloads, that STILL doesn't identify the guilty party. It could have been the husband, it could have been the wife, it could have been one of the kids, or a friend who visits often.
(C) The reason it has almost never gotten to (3), is that the "copyright trolls" are not interested in prosecution at all. They merely intimidate the people they identify into voluntarily paying an outrageously large settlement, so they don't have to go to court. It is nothing more than coercion, in a moral and also (in my opinion) legal sense.
"The fundamental issue we have to come to terms with is either this is going to be a non-crime and copyright is meaningless or not."
Nonsense. It already isn't a "crime" in the United States, and never was. What is a crime is "piracy", which is actually a legal term. Essentially, piracy involves making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works, and distributing them for profit. P2P filesharing is almost never genuinely "piracy". So it is NOT a crime. It is a civil infraction.
But more to the point: even if it were a crime, the punishment should fit the crime. In the case of a downloaded movie, the copyright holder would be hard-pressed to show damages (in the form of lost profits) of more than maybe about $1. A CD that was downloaded rather than purchased might have brought the copyright holder $0.50 in royalty payments.
So, the issue we REALLY have to come to terms with is: should we allow corporate Mafias to punish people to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, over lost profits of a couple of bucks AT MOST???
"The thing that most people don't understand today is just how much of the economy is related to promotion of coopyright-protected works."
This is not a valid argument for getting rid of copyrights. At best, it is an argument against the abuse of copyrights that is perpetrated every day by the entertainment industry.
The defendant has (or had) a secure WiFi access point with secure credentials, but the password was cracked by someone using commonly available, easy to use open source security tools.
In one case it took me 20 minutes to crack somebody's WPA2. And no, the passphrase was not a common dictionary word.
"The IP addresses they record are by PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE (meaning at least a 51% chance) guilty of infringement. 51% chance is a pretty darn low threshold to reach, and we know that millions of people occasionally pirate, so legally it's an open and shut case."
Not true. Since the courts have ruled that an IP address does not identify an individual -- and in some cases not even a household -- then your 51% gets cut down to more like 25% or possibly even less.
"Why on earth there would be need for this mechanism, I can't imagine."
There isn't. These people have historically inept at trying to produce what amounts to actual "evidence" in court. Apparently they are still struggling with the concept.
Now that court after court has ruled that an IP address does not identify an individual, they're still trying to use IP addresses to do that very thing.
You're overstating your case, in at least a couple of different ways.
First, being able to capture packets doesn't equate to being able to capture realtime statistics on those packets at any given moment. It takes a large amount of hardware and coordination to do that for even a relatively small bitstream... trying to do it to everybody and everything would require more resources than the human race currently possess.
Second, it *is* possible to use secure protocols that make this technique useless. Take the OneSwarm program, for instance. With it, you can set up a P2P network, and not only is it not even theoretically possible to determine where files reside on the network (they are kept in discrete encrypted chunks that reside on random servers at any given time, and which changes over time). But also, when you request a file, it is again not even theoretically possible to determine which computer on the network sent which pieces of which file.
When I say "not even theoretically", I mean unless you actually have monitoring equipment between EVERY computer in the network, and monitor the traffic in realtime. The effort would be enormous for even a very small P2P network... and perhaps even then not entirely possible.
"I think you need to have a pretty big head to be able to pull the wool over so many people's eyes to start a "religion" or "cult". Pretty big stones too."
Haha. That's one way of looking at it. But even then, look at what Moses was supposed to have done. Maybe it's all relative, but I argue that Moses still had the bigger stones.
"A cult is just "a system of religious veneration." Or "a system of religious beliefs and ritual." We today think of it as "believing in something bizarre," but it's not. The third given definition by M-W is "a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious." But that's not in conjunction in 1, it's just another way it's used. Christianity is a cult. Whether you think that's derogatory or not is your own personal opinion. A cult is not necessarily something bad or wrong and does not necessarily mean you believe in something bizarre."
Technically you are correct, and I am guilty of using the a modern dictionary definition, which describes popular usage, not technical accuracy.
"There wasn't an income tax code for approximately the first 150 years of the country, so the reasoning given doesn't hold water."
That's fine, because it isn't "reasoning", it's history. Look up the historical documents that discussed this matter when the Constitution was being drawn up, and later waiting to be ratified. There were very energetic debates about the subject.
"I'd be very happy if governments got out of the business of recognizing religion. Let ALL religious organizations compete in the marketplace with no government recognition or support whatsoever!"
Unlike most governments, the US government, according to SCOTUS, *is not* in the business of deciding what constitutes a religion. That is what many people here have been complaining about. But they fail to see the danger (which we were firmly warned about by our Founders) that would result if that were changed.
The only thing the government has the power to decide is whether it is a "for profit" institution or a "non profit" institution.
Slashdot Mirror
"You seem to have very little grounding in network engineering. You don't have to monitor all the computers. You just have to monitor the border routers. And you don't have to story all the traffic, you just need to store the 40 byte IP headers."
YOU seem to have little grounding in the field. You are incorrect.
First, if the traffic is inside the "borders", monitoring the border routers is 100% ineffective.
Second, simply storing the IP headers does NOT give you the information you were implying: realtime packet hash data.
Your thesis appears to be that it is possible to trace traffic based on the timing of the packets. And that is true, as far as it goes. But you didn't think it through.
The resources needed to do that for a specific case of suspected data transfer are such that it generally must be configured for the traffic between those two specific nodes. You could simply not monitor the whole internet that way.
To clarify: I did not mean that it could not track any two nodes without being huge. What I meant was that it could not be big enough to store all the data such that any two nodes could be picked out at any given time. Such a beast cannot exist.
"o_O Already exists in Europe: It's called the Data Retention Directive. This exists now. Today. And it requires very much less than "all the resources of the human race". In fact, it merely requires an extra 1U unit here and there at the border routers for major ISPs, and sometimes an extra fiber link to duplicate traffic."
Then it cannot do what you implied. Elementary-level information theory says that it cannot effectively track the kind of information (packet hashes in realtime) between ANY two given network nodes, unless its resources are specifically pointed at them. Anything else would take more hardware than currently exists to support the Internet.
This is very basic, low-grade application of math and physics. You can claim otherwise all you like; that does not make it so.
"I did not. I read it and found it did not say what you implied it did, but then I've got the advantage over you of a career in Engineering and Materials Science and a first exposure to thermite in 1985."
"Did not say what I implied it did"??? Are you sure you are referring to the same paper that I was? It not only DOES say what I implied it did, I challenge you to give me specifics about how you are pretending to refute it.
Now, it is possible that I did confuse you with someone else, but there was someone who argued with me about the veracity of the evidence based merely on the fact that Alex Jones had (later in the process) become involved in publicizing the evidence. That was nothing more than ad hominem and I give it no respect. I am not a fan of Alex Jones, nevertheless, shooting the messenger is not a valid scientific argument.
There is other evidence that thermitic materials were found in the debris: FEMA's own ("Building Performance Study" (see Appendix C) suggests as much, including micrographic evidence.
And it must be noted that "nano-thermite", even according to Wikipedia, has properties that are very different from conventional thermite. That was part of the point I was making.
"There's no misunderstanding on my side."
Yes, there most definitely *IS* a misunderstanding on your side. I have had this same discussion with lots of other people and NONE of them have ever had such a problem understanding it as you have demonstrated.
"Come on now - you're written: "By law, they ARE a religion", which is why I asked for where the legal ruling is - you said it was a law after all."
Good Grid, you have a comprehension problem. It's not on my end... nobody else has seemed to have trouble understanding this.
Look at the statement by the Supreme Court above. A religion is a religion because its members say it is. No other "ruling" by any authority is necessary (or even possible) in the U.S. I have stated that at least 3 times now, in different ways, and if you still refuse to understand it, stop blaming me.
"Hence it is not a church because this highly organised criminal gang is not accepted as a religion."
But they ARE accepted as a religion... in the United States. They ALMOST were not accepted as a Church, but they somehow managed to just barely get past that little obstacle. See the link I posted previously about Scientology vs the IRS.
We are largely in agreement on this.
But even if the statute allows "punitive damages", we still have the principle that the punishment should fit the crime.
So... if the "damages" are $1, maybe a "reasonable" punitive measure would be to charge 10 times that: $10.
Nowhere else in law are punitive damages set to such an outrageous multiplier of the actual damages. THAT is a crime.
" No, I'm suggesting you misread and misinterpereted it - or are pretending to do so, just like you misread that abstract about debris ending up just like thermite in our previous discussion."
I didn't misread it. Obviously you never actually looked at the EVIDENCE about the thermite, or examined the paper. All you did was insult the source. That's not valid arguing.
You weren't in the debate club in school, were you? You have trouble formulating genuine, valid arguments, then claim you have "won" using arguments that would have gotten you kicked out of any genuine debate.
Please see my previous reply. Your Scientologist acquaintence, and you, are both mistaken.
To also clarify an earlier statement I made, this is what I meant when I wrote that I felt you were conflating to very different things. The US government has some power to regulate whether they are a tax-exempt CHURCH. But it has no power at all, by its own admission at the highest levels, to decide what is a RELIGION.
And that, I think, is how we ended up misunderstanding one another.
"How do these two things go together? Who made the legal ruling that Scientology is a religion if the United States Supreme Court can't do it?"
Repeat: THEY DON'T HAVE TO BE "RULED" BY ANYBODY TO BE A RELIGION, IN ORDER TO BE ONE IN THE UNITED STATES!
And I also repeat: this is the fundamental thing that you are not understanding.
Look. I'm not trying to be condescending, I'm trying to explain. There is a legal difference -- and a very big one -- between a religion and a Church.
A "church" is an institution that practices or teaches religion. A church can be for-profit or non-profit. If it is non-profit, then it is also non-taxable.
For-profit institutions, in the past, were often not considered "churches" by the IRS, and were therefore taxed. But the Supreme Court decision in regard to whether the Universal Life Church could call itself and be tax-exempt, because the IRS did not feel it qualified for 502(c)(3) exemption. See this IRS document which states on page 4 exactly what I have already told you: "In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that government has no authority to pass on the legitimacy of a religious belief or to define permissible religious belief."
So... it is your ACTIONS, whether or not they be criminal, and in some cases your profit motive, in which case you might not be a 501(c)(3) eligible Church, that determine whether you are prosecutable or taxable.
But NONE of that has ANYTHING to do with whether you are (or are a member of) any particular religion.
I should add that also, according to one of the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA, a "provider" cannot be held liable for infringement committed by others, as long as (A) it has a policy for removal of infringing material once notified of its existence, or (B) it only passed through their network without being stored on it.
"Until its tested we don't really know. They may well be liable for what transverses across their networks."
Yes, we do know, because it's a matter of statute.
I'm trying to remember the exact name of the statute. But the "electronic something something act" a few years back, passed by Congress and signed into law, specifically says that someone who provides internet access to others cannot be held liable for the actions of those others.
Most importantly, it very definitely does NOT say that it applies only to ISPs or ISP-like companies. It applies to anybody who supplies "access". And an open router is definitely "supplying access" to other people.
(A) First, the procedure. You have items (1) and (2) right, but it has almost never gotten to (3), and that will probably happen even less in the future. Why? Because the courts have finally realized (and so ruled) that an IP address does not identify an individual. You can't prosecute a neighborhood or a house or even a family. You can only prosecute individuals.
(B) Good luck identifying that individual. You may have an IP address, but few judges these days will allow a search or issue a subpoena on an IP address alone. And even if they find a computer with many downloads, that STILL doesn't identify the guilty party. It could have been the husband, it could have been the wife, it could have been one of the kids, or a friend who visits often.
(C) The reason it has almost never gotten to (3), is that the "copyright trolls" are not interested in prosecution at all. They merely intimidate the people they identify into voluntarily paying an outrageously large settlement, so they don't have to go to court. It is nothing more than coercion, in a moral and also (in my opinion) legal sense.
"The fundamental issue we have to come to terms with is either this is going to be a non-crime and copyright is meaningless or not."
Nonsense. It already isn't a "crime" in the United States, and never was. What is a crime is "piracy", which is actually a legal term. Essentially, piracy involves making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works, and distributing them for profit. P2P filesharing is almost never genuinely "piracy". So it is NOT a crime. It is a civil infraction.
But more to the point: even if it were a crime, the punishment should fit the crime. In the case of a downloaded movie, the copyright holder would be hard-pressed to show damages (in the form of lost profits) of more than maybe about $1. A CD that was downloaded rather than purchased might have brought the copyright holder $0.50 in royalty payments.
So, the issue we REALLY have to come to terms with is: should we allow corporate Mafias to punish people to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, over lost profits of a couple of bucks AT MOST???
"The thing that most people don't understand today is just how much of the economy is related to promotion of coopyright-protected works."
This is not a valid argument for getting rid of copyrights. At best, it is an argument against the abuse of copyrights that is perpetrated every day by the entertainment industry.
You forgot one:
The defendant has (or had) a secure WiFi access point with secure credentials, but the password was cracked by someone using commonly available, easy to use open source security tools.
In one case it took me 20 minutes to crack somebody's WPA2. And no, the passphrase was not a common dictionary word.
"The IP addresses they record are by PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE (meaning at least a 51% chance) guilty of infringement. 51% chance is a pretty darn low threshold to reach, and we know that millions of people occasionally pirate, so legally it's an open and shut case."
Not true. Since the courts have ruled that an IP address does not identify an individual -- and in some cases not even a household -- then your 51% gets cut down to more like 25% or possibly even less.
"Why on earth there would be need for this mechanism, I can't imagine."
There isn't. These people have historically inept at trying to produce what amounts to actual "evidence" in court. Apparently they are still struggling with the concept.
Now that court after court has ruled that an IP address does not identify an individual, they're still trying to use IP addresses to do that very thing.
"They don't. This guy might be a programmer, but he's got bricks for brains when it comes to proper terminology."
That's not what the description said. They capture a screenshot of the MONITORING computer, which is displaying data that is presumably evidence.
That's why it goes on to say that data that is not relevant to a particular infringement is blocked from the screenshot.
You're overstating your case, in at least a couple of different ways.
First, being able to capture packets doesn't equate to being able to capture realtime statistics on those packets at any given moment. It takes a large amount of hardware and coordination to do that for even a relatively small bitstream... trying to do it to everybody and everything would require more resources than the human race currently possess.
Second, it *is* possible to use secure protocols that make this technique useless. Take the OneSwarm program, for instance. With it, you can set up a P2P network, and not only is it not even theoretically possible to determine where files reside on the network (they are kept in discrete encrypted chunks that reside on random servers at any given time, and which changes over time). But also, when you request a file, it is again not even theoretically possible to determine which computer on the network sent which pieces of which file.
When I say "not even theoretically", I mean unless you actually have monitoring equipment between EVERY computer in the network, and monitor the traffic in realtime. The effort would be enormous for even a very small P2P network... and perhaps even then not entirely possible.
"I think you need to have a pretty big head to be able to pull the wool over so many people's eyes to start a "religion" or "cult". Pretty big stones too."
Haha. That's one way of looking at it. But even then, look at what Moses was supposed to have done. Maybe it's all relative, but I argue that Moses still had the bigger stones.
"A cult is just "a system of religious veneration." Or "a system of religious beliefs and ritual." We today think of it as "believing in something bizarre," but it's not. The third given definition by M-W is "a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious." But that's not in conjunction in 1, it's just another way it's used. Christianity is a cult. Whether you think that's derogatory or not is your own personal opinion. A cult is not necessarily something bad or wrong and does not necessarily mean you believe in something bizarre."
Technically you are correct, and I am guilty of using the a modern dictionary definition, which describes popular usage, not technical accuracy.
You are trying to make some kind of valid argument here?
Personal attacks will be met with a like response. You really don't want to go there.
"There wasn't an income tax code for approximately the first 150 years of the country, so the reasoning given doesn't hold water."
That's fine, because it isn't "reasoning", it's history. Look up the historical documents that discussed this matter when the Constitution was being drawn up, and later waiting to be ratified. There were very energetic debates about the subject.
"You mean I can't increase my Penis size? After I sent all that money for a 'WangRack'! I even upgraded the wieghts to 10kilos."
10 kilos? You could always moonlight as a swing at the neighborhood children's park.
Uh.... wait. Cancel that. Probably not a good idea.
"I'd be very happy if governments got out of the business of recognizing religion. Let ALL religious organizations compete in the marketplace with no government recognition or support whatsoever!"
Unlike most governments, the US government, according to SCOTUS, *is not* in the business of deciding what constitutes a religion. That is what many people here have been complaining about. But they fail to see the danger (which we were firmly warned about by our Founders) that would result if that were changed.
The only thing the government has the power to decide is whether it is a "for profit" institution or a "non profit" institution.
End of story.
Ahem... small enough to fit in a hat is not "big".