Actually, BT Wholesale is a separate unit from Openreach. Openreach manages the 'final mile' services: all the copper wire, the local exchange buildings, and some but not all of the equipment in there. A few UK ISPs build their services on top of Openreach's products directly: TalkTalk and Sky, for example, went and installed their own DSLAMs in those exchange buildings, paying Openreach to connect the copper wires to them. BT Wholesale also takes those Openreach products, adds in their own national backbone and offers a service to other ISPs: they'll install a fast fibre backbone link to the ISP's premises/facilities, and connect the customers through that to the ISP.
This can cause problems; my own ISP is a BT Wholesale customer, so when I had a fault earlier this year they had to report it to BT Wholesale, who passed it on to Openreach to deal with. Openreach came out and tested their bit - my phone line, and the VDSL equipment on each end - and found nothing wrong there, so closed the fault. After six visits, BT Wholesale (or rather, BT TSOps and the Adhara Ops team at Adastral Park, where the fault got escalated to in the end) eventually found the problem was on their own backbone (a faulty router was corrupting traffic between certain IP addresses - one of which happened to be a core router at my ISP).
I agree with the overall approach, though, having a separate and regulated entity run just the local loop portion. (In practice, Openreach is still a part of BT - hence I got a sales pitch from at least one of the six Openreach engineers about BT Retail being a better option. Against all the rules - Openreach are officially supposed to be neutral - but could that ever really happen in practice while they're still the same company?)
Others such as Eli Lily or the UK Gov Dept of Pensions really don't need so many addresses
Someone in the UK government pointed that out recently - it turns out that "Dept of Pensions" allocation is actually used across most of the government as some sort of VPN extranet with various external contractors. Apparently, since they all use different RFC1918 blocks internally, they can't all be VPNed into any single RFC1918 block: they needed a globally-unique block for that purpose.
British Telecom uses the 30.0.0.0/8 block for managing all their customer modems - that block is actually allocated to the US DoD, but they don't allow external access to it anyway, so there's nothing to stop you using that block internally yourself as long as you don't need to communicate with any other networks using the same trick. Better than wasting an entire/8 of global address space just for internal administrative systems - or a/9, like Comcast grabbed back in 2010.
My inner geek - who cares about efficiency - would love to see all the legacy blocks revoked. I'm sure the DoD could use 10/8 instead of 30/8 quite easily for their non-routed block; the universities could easily fit in a/16 instead of a/8, or smaller with a bit of NAT. Still, we should be moving to IPv6 instead now: give each university and ISP a/48, or/32 for big complex networks needing multiple layers. I just have a nasty feeling we're in for a long time of CGNAT spreading instead - where we currently have ISPs that don't offer static IP addresses, in a few years they'll be refusing to issue anything other than a NATted 100.64/16 address.
I wonder when microsoft will get around to getting their vendors to stop accepting kickbacks for shitty adware on new systems.
This practice is one of the reasons why I still build my own desktop systems. Getting rid of the junk is a massive hassle, and restoration of the system from partition brings it all back.
I hate the usual crap that gets shovelled on too, but to be fair Microsoft have apparently been pushing against that for a few years now for exactly that reason. Of course, they need to tread carefully there for legal reasons: if they block, say, Dell bundling a limited-time version of Norton Anti-virus, Dell won't be happy (they lose the $5 or whatever kickback) and Symantec will probably lawyer up and come knocking, particularly with Microsoft offering their own AV product now. Remember all the fallout when they killed off Netscape, when they stopped IBM from bundling OS/2 as a dual-boot setup with Windows? We both know this is different, but Microsoft's lawyers are apparently paranoid about crossing that line again.
I'm told they also offer crapware-free machines in their own stores, which makes sense. I just wish they'd make OEMs ship a plain vanilla Windows install disk like they used to, no more "restore" BS - so anyone wanting a clean machine can just re-install.
The article does not make it clear that the satellite signals in question are those of ARINC's ACARS data system, developed in 1978.
Probably because ACARS was turned off hours earlier in the flight, back before the aircraft flew back over Malaysia! Had it been active, ACARS would have reported the aircraft's location, altitude, speed and other useful data, making finding it much easier; it was switched off with the other cockpit systems, though, leaving just the Inmarsat terminal's hourly "ping" active, so until the Doppler analysis, all they knew was the distance between the satellite and aircraft.
Unfortunately, 127.0.53.53 is a perfectly valid IP address already in use globally - try pinging it on most machines for proof. Remember, the loopback address is not just 127.0.0.1 - it's that whole/8 subnet, all the way up to 127.255.255.255. Indeed, two of my own DNS servers are bound to 127.0.0.53 right now (there's another DNS server bound to the public IP address, which forwards certain queries to this one).
This seems like a really, really stupid hack to me. If they are effectively revoking the domain, why not just return NXDOMAIN instead of bad data? Apart from the "people seeing it for the first time will be curious and go and Google 127.0.53.53 to see why", the rationale just doesn't hold up. Apart from anything else, returning that will cause mail servers to attempt delivery to themselves. Yes, it contains the traffic within the host - but NXDOMAIN would stop the traffic having anywhere to go too, and is the correct response. (One clueless hosting company did something very similar - any departing customer's DNS entries were updated to route mail to 127.0.0.1 - with the result mail bounced until the new delegation propagated fully. 127.0.53.53 would have exactly the same effect.)
Data capping isn't really relevant to that - a hundred megabytes of, say, LAPD beating up a suspect or university campus police tear-gassing non-violent protesters is no bigger a datastream than a hundred megabytes of my cat chasing his toy mouse round the floor, when it's being uploaded to the likes of YouTube; once it hits there, I don't think Google use cable modems to send it from their datacenters. A hostile power would just cut the connection, whether you have an "unlimited" connection or a pay-as-you-go one - as has happened a few times in recent disturbances (Egypt or Syria?) - they don't bother looking at individual data packages anyway.
The poster further up had it exactly, I think: it's all about killing off competition from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Any guesses why else it would be Time Warner and Comcast - i.e. the cable ISPs - pushing this, rather than AT&T and Verizon? (Not that those two would be unhappy either, of course: more money, an easier market for their FiOS and U-verse TV offerings - but it's obviously Comcast and TW who have the most to lose.)
Backdoor way of limiting bandwidth usage. On TCP/IP, really a "server" is just the one that sends SYN|ACK packets in response to SYN packets, rather than sending out SYNs - but ISPs latched on to "no servers" as a more marketable way to kick heavy users off without being honest about usage limits.
With cable, downstream bandwidth is more abundant and more efficient (the upstream channel is vulnerable to collisions, since there are multiple senders on a channel) so heavy upload usage can actually be a problem to some extent. On ADSL and its derivatives, though, it's only your own link you're filling up with upstream traffic: the backhaul connections are invariably symmetric, so those gigabit+ links between you and the ISP are only full up in the other direction.
I switched back in 2012 from "unlimited" (but no servers, dynamic IP, ports blocked, sending nastygrams to anyone using "too much" of the "unlimited" bandwidth) to an ISP with actual explicit usage charges (and a small routed subnet with no ports blocked). As long as it's legal I can do what I want: mail servers, web servers, the lot - I just have to pay a bit more if I download more. (It's download traffic that matters to them: upstream, there's bandwidth to spare, because the links are symmetric.) I hated the idea of usage-based charging - but I hate all the other restrictions more; at about $0.30 per Gb, it's low enough not to bother me as much as "unlimited, but use it too much and we cut you off".
E10? in the UK for ITU-T they have E1 through E4.....we're talking about business grade time division multiplex carrier lines, not DSL or cable or other consumer grade shakier and less reliable tech
I imagine 'E10' there is a reference to 10 Mbps metro Ethernet, something like the Ethernet in the First Mile approach. There's nothing inherently "consumer grade" about DSL itself: indeed, even E1 "leased lines" get delivered over HDSL or similar in some cases. Unlike cable, which is contended and prone to collisions, DSL gives you a constant bitrate (unless configured to vary to squeeze higher bitrates when line quality permits) point to point link, just like a conventional leased line - all the performance fluctuations of typical DSL Internet access come further into the network, where your 20 Mbps connection is sharing a 1 Gbps backhaul with a thousand others and gets choked up when everyone is streaming X-Brother Get Me Out Of Here or whatever. Give the DSL link dedicated or uncontended backhaul like leased lines have, you'll get the same performance too.
Is the date on the report questioning Snowden's loyalties the same as the date the material was actually entered into the electronic records? I can think of several strong reasons why the CIA might want to do some rewriting of its own history here. And certainly they have the expertise to do a good of that. In fact it would be routine for them to alter history: that is how you give a mole a credible back story.
The CIA is not just a spy agency. They are also the USA Bureau of Missinformation And Dysinformation.
I can imagine them rewriting history, but in this case I doubt it; surely it would suit them better for him to have been a normal, competent employee at that point, who then went rogue later, rather than saying "oops... yes, we saw all these warning signs, but forgot to do anything about it for a few years. Told you so - er, I mean, we would have told you so, if we'd been more alert..."
Of course, if you're really paranoid, you'd wonder if the CIA computers had been compromised by, say, some other agency with lots of expertise at breaking into high-value targets, and this report had been planted by them, maybe to divert blame for their own failed internal security...
Foxconn have the contract to assemble the Xbox 720 as well - not to mention Nintendo consoles. I remember pointing this out after a smug ex-MSFT blogger posted a link about Foxconn, bragging that Foxconn would never meet Microsoft's supplier criteria, so Apple must have lower standards...
That said, historical company towns that didn't force workers to use scrip [wikipedia.org] avoided some of these issues -- but that would mean allowing workers easily to exit the town by actually paying them real money, which they could take elsewhere.
Why am I suddenly reminded of stock options and the whole "vesting" concept, where if you leave too soon some of the paper you got as part of your remuneration becomes worthless? Not identical of course - I'm guessing even Facebook's "company stores" won't take stock options in payment - but there are more than a few parallels there.
On the other hand, it also sounds like a nice setup if it all works properly, and you'd still be free to leave if you wanted.
I am personally in charge of near a thousand computers on our network. The worst luck I have is with maxtors by far. We had a series of external drives that burned themselves out after a short period, with a light load. I can excuse one but had all 7 fail. Not to mention we run dell here and have a good combination of maxtor and Western Digital. I feel a bit of sorrow when I send a computer with a maxtor drive out, knowing that I will be seeing it again soon. Really hurts when I am sending the unit 400 miles to the site...
Similar experience here - from a batch of 15 machines with Maxtor HDDs bought as a batch three years ago, I think all but one is now on at least its second drive, several on a third. Had we not thrown most of them out, I could hand you a pile of a dozen dead Maxtors in five minutes - any other brand (and we do indeed have others in use), I could probably dig out one or two recent ones. The last two drives I was handed were both 120Gb, one Seagate, one Maxtor - neither of us would be surprised by which one was the failed drive, and which was the good drive to transfer recovered data to.
I am sold on Western Digital, 5 year contract, excellent drives, got a 10K raptor at home myself. Low failure rate in our enterprise environment. Cant vouch for seagate though, havent had too much exposure to them other than the dirt cheap 300GB I bought that was DOA.
Hm. I don't think I've seen a WD drive for a while, although we do have some big Seagates (including pretty heavy use) without any issues to date. Then again, after seeing so many Maxtors eating data lately, I seem to be building a lot more RAID arrays and backup systems around campus...
My foot is currently broken, and I believe I have established that I am both 'uninsured' and an 'American' (one in good standing, too). I do not have the resources to pay for X-Rays, Doctors, a Cast, or possible therapy. How can I get the government to pay for my treatment?
Easily, just like anyone else in the same position. Sorry to hear about your foot, and I do hope you get it fixed soon.
Oh yea, I can't, because we're the only country in the world where our government sponsored healthcare only helps non-Americans
Actually you'll find almost all those other countries have healthcare systems set up for non-Americans:-) Not very good ones, though. As others have already pointed out, US government healthcare helps a great many Americans; you'll also find plenty of countries don't have much if any government healthcare of the sort you seem to want. I have the misfortune to be in the UK, home to one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world; a few years ago, finding myself in need of either an MRI or CT scan, I was told I faced a wait of multiple years for the latter (the former wasn't available at all yet: no funding to buy one, let alone operate it). In exchange for around 13% of everyone's gross income, that seems pretty feeble.
I've tried, I can't get shit for myself. I would be more than happy for you to prove me wrong, because a cast really would be nice.
Go to the ER, get treated. It's not rocket science. Once your bill is written off by the hospital, it gets picked up by the federal government. (To be precise, IIRC 70% of it gets picked up, they have to eat the other 30% as a tax writeoff.) Yes, your credit rating will take a hit - but at this point, you need to make a decision: is your credit rating really worth more to you than your health? For that matter, if you can't afford to make ends meet - and if you're going without important medical treatment, I'd say you can't - maybe you should work part time and study part time, rather than trying to study full time without the funding for it? For that matter: how can you be studying full-time, unable to afford medical care, yet not be below Medicaid eligibility thresholds? You say you "pay your taxes in full every year" - but if you aren't working, are you actually paying any at all?
For that matter, there are also free clinics around which might well help you, although of course that does depend on the area you're in. In Arizona, I can find three in Phoenix and one in Prescott.
Getting back to the earlier topic: if you had cancer, rather than a bad foot, I'm pretty sure you'd take the medical care whatever the impact on your credit rating, wouldn't you? Hence, the government does indeed end up paying for it. If I were in your position, from what you've said (and I am the same age, presently working full-time and about to add studying part-time to that) I'd work enough to pay the bills and study as much as possible on top of that.
Battling malware? On all my systems its automated. I run daily updates in linux, rarely having to deal with it. In windows it works automatically as well, with even less involvement. Contrast that to the days of floppy boot sector virii replicating like crazy, with crappy anti virus software just coming out and no real way to clean everything except wipe it all. I haven't had a virus or malware infection in many many years.
I'd agree with some of that - but try getting Microsoft Update (as opposed to Windows Update) applying automatically across a large-scale rollout. Configuring Windows Update to work automatically out-of-the-box just involved a couple of registry keys - but the switch to Microsoft Update is trickier. Getting the whole 4Gb pile - Office, Project, McAfee Virusscan, AutoCAD, MathCAD, Scientific Viewer, QSE - along with Novell's Zenworks registration and assorted other things? Quite a pain. Up until the move to Windows NT 4, we used diskless Windows 3.1 workstations: *much* easier to maintain.
Being a wiz at a telnet prompt with huge backbone equipment should mean that you are a very intelligent, problem solving type of person. Figuring out Exchange should be cake for someone like that, unless they were just doing what they were told to do to solve specific, repeating problems. When I am 60 this stuff will be even simpler, all I'll have to do to create a new domain and mail setup would be to say "hello computer, make it so."
To some extent, maybe; then again, their automation has a bad habit of backfiring. Later versions of Windows, with their automatic DNS registration - helpful, cutting out some DNS configuration... right? Not when it crashes BIND! Auto-updates? Fine - until the latest update breaks something, as SP2 did with many setups. When that intelligent voice-operated computer of yours a decade from now suddenly starts speaking Japanese or Urdu, will you know how to fix it?
A completely innocent man has been murdered in cold blood by government agents. Jean Charles de Menezes
Actually, he wasn't completely innocent - he was a criminal, albeit not connected to terrorism as far as anyone knows. That doesn't justify shooting him, of course, any more than finding some crack in his pocket would, but he is not "innocent" or "law-abiding".
was shot 10 times, over a period of 30 seconds. Like the fellow in this article, he was doing nothing but his daily routine.
I'd take the witness's "30 seconds" figure with a pinch of salt, too: people are very poor at actually judging time, particularly in high-stress situations (and I think "trapped in an underground train while people shoot at each other" qualifies there!). It was 11 times, too, by the way, not 10. What seems at the time like a 3 second gap could well have been a lot shorter, perhaps well under a second.
I don't know what "industry" you live in, but I've not seen anyone build a mail cluster[*]. NCSU is the closest, but that was simply departmentalized servers; the only reason any department had more than one server was due to storage not scalabilty or reliability. (And that was for ~25k people.) [The largest I've worked with had just shy of 70k mailboxes across about 5k domains... on ONE server. It could've handled much more than that.]
The guys behind Exim (the University of Cambridge Computing Service) have such a cluster, known as Hermes - a couple of years ago (when I was there) it entailed four Sun E450s (named after colours - red, yellow etc) in front of a pair of NetApp Filers (named black and white IIRC) and an authentication master (named prism). There was a bit of downtime when one of the Filers had a multiple disk-failure (or rather, wrongly believed it had), but that was it - everything else had no single point of failure available, except if prism was down you couldn't change passwords.
Expensive, of course, but reliable and fast despite enormous load and a plethora of services (being geek-friendly, you could get your mail via anything from Pine over SSH, SCP, FTP, Telnet, IMAP, POP3 or webmail). Very nice setup - beats the... out of the GroupWise mess my current employer (another university) uses...
I issued the standard "sync; sync; shutdown -r now" command -- and just after I hit I realized that I had been typing into an xterm session ON ONE OF THE BACK-END SERVERS -- not the local X-station!
I did much the same thing a few weeks ago, logged into the print server sitting behind me (intending to shut down my own machine to go home). Fortunately, it only serves the people in this room, and nobody was printing at the time anyway...
Worse, though, a colleague was changing a tape some years ago in a big shared Unix machine while talking to someone. From habit, she put the new tape in, shut the door to the drive, and turned the key next to the door - which, of course, was not a lock for the drive door, but the power switch for the machine - a machine with several hundred users. Oops.
At that point, though, I was the only one using a Sun on my desk - everyone else had regular Windows PCs with an X server and terminal emulator. More common, though, was running 'passwd' to change password - forgetting you were logged in as root rather than yourself. Eventually, the colleague above edited root's profile to make passwd an alias to warn you not to do that!
So are you going to support the trust to have the street in front of your house repaved when it needs it? How much are you going to contribute to snow removal? Do you want to support giving local kids something better to do than break things in your neighborhood? Which company do you want to pay for trash removal? Are you interested in funding airplane inspections so that planes don't fail and crash into your house? How about medical research, which might save your life at some point if enough people decide to fund it to let it get anywhere?
The irony here is, quite a few of those things are already done privately, at least in some cases. The street outside me was built privately (along with the houses it serves), we don't get snow removed (so it's just as well we don't get more than an inch or so at any one time), unless you count school the only program to stop kids breaking things is the threat of jail time, trash removal was privately provided in the last place I lived, aircraft are inspected by the airline for obvious reasons and a lot of medical research is also private, through a combination of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and charities.
I'm not advocating removing all those things entirely from the government's remit - I tend to think it should be at least partly responsible for providing the common infrastructure (roads, utilities). I just wish they'd get out of completely illegitimate activities: funding rather questionable art (one state government recently gave $5,000 to an "artist" who hung 12 dildos on hooks and called it "art"!), speeches by Islamic fundamentalists (as happened in London recently)... Cut that out, I think a lot of people would feel a lot more favorable towards the overall budget - and those who actually want to hand four figure sums to "artists" like that would be free to do so.
Most items on budgets at all levels, from the city to the country, are reasonably likely to be important to you in some way you don't have time to understand. Furthermore, most of them have to be funded at a certain level, or the funding they do get is wasted. The modern world is sufficiently complex that determining what things you want to fund would be more than a full-time job.
I'm not at all convinced by that argument, though. Much the same was tried by AT&T: having to choose a phone company and long distance service would be far too complex, so they should just have kept on gouging as a monopoly. Didn't quite turn out that way...
Not sure where you went to school, but mine was full of "RM Nimbus" PCs with MSDOS and Windows 3.0 (some of the older ones had a heavily customised version of Windows 2 instead). This would have been in around 1989-1992. They upgraded straight to these when it became clear that their 8 bit systems (primarily acorns) were obsolete. They had a brief play with 16 bit acorn machines, but decided they were too expensive.
You're probably right about the "too expensive", but Acorn never produced 16 bit systems: they jumped straight from the 6502-based 8 bit BBC series (Acorn Electron, BBC A/B/B+/Master) to the 32 bit ARM based machines (Archimedes and Risc PC), still available now as the Iyonix. While Acorn itself broke up, the ARM processor they designed for the first Archimedes is now a part of a ridiculous number of cellphone handsets, TV Set Top Boxes and other embedded applications. While the x86 architecture manages 300 million shipments per year, the ARM blows that away at around the one billion mark.
As an aside, that same ARM architecture is pretty popular for running Linux on as well: pretty good for a very compact, low power consumption Linux system like the LART.
A.torrent doed not provide enough information to reconstruct the file. It could not do that unless it was big as the file itself, or at least as big as an ordinary zipped or other compressed format of the file.
I'm well aware of that (I didn't sleep through all those Information Theory + Coding lectures...); the whole point of that file, however, is to allow you to obtain the original file(s). Unlike a URL, it doesn't just identify a location: it identifies a specific set of data, so distributing that.torrent file indirectly distributes that specific dataset - which, as far as I can see, does meet the legal requirement for involvement in a specific illegal act you alluded to later.
A.torrent is an address where a file may (or may not) be located, along with some checksums to detect accidentall (or intential) curruption of that file.
Actually, it's the location of a tracker, which in turn holds the location(s) which have or want some or all of that particular set of data, but you're close.
Please define the legal criteria you intend to use to discriminate between a website with a.torrent link or even a direct web link to a file being distributed by some other site, and a newspaper or website publishing the addresses of crackhouses and drug dealers.
I don't: that isn't where I draw the line, nor do I believe that's where it should be drawn. The law draws it - as you almost cited later in your post - when there is knowledge of a specific act. Basically, "5th Street is full of hookers in the evening" is fine, sending you to meet a hooker named Daisy on the corner of 5th and E tonight is not. If that newspaper or website crosses the line, it's illegal.
It details that they do not have the power to pass a law making it criminal to publish bomb making information.
Correct: that information is not tied to a specific act. That's the aspect which protects BitTorrent itself - but it does not apply to individual.torrent files. Me telling you how to make a bomb is fine, me telling you the specific amount of Semtex to plant in a specific point on a certain bridge results in jail time if the court considers it serious rather than a joke.
What they can pass laws against are providing that information in a specific intent to cause that crime,
Now, how do you distinguish between that and providing information in a specific intent to cause a specific act of copyright infringement?
If you walk down the street and a record store hands you a free promotional music CD, you are innocent in receiving it. Your presumption is that they have the right to do so. They are responsible for ensuring they are not violating the law.
Trying to convince a court that this should apply to Internet downloads would be somewhat difficult, I think. Could you really claim to believe Suprnova's content's distribution had been authorized by the owners? I'm pretty sure that would achieve nothing more than some laughter in court.
I'm rather certain hash would be considered a peice of non-copyrightable factual information (the same way files names are treated), rather than as a derivative work.
Perhaps, but with hashes there does come a point where you can deduce the original input (trivial example: hash each byte individually...) - and since the whole point of BitTorrent is to use the hashes in conjunction with the tracker's data to reconstruct the original file, it's closer to that situation than the md5sums on kernel.org. If I give you a.torrent file, you can convert that back into the original data; from a legal point of view, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to treat torrents as a compressed form of the original data. An MD5 hash in itself would probably be OK, but once you add enough information to get the complete file, I think you've crossed the legal line.
You cannot find a newspaper liable for publishing the factual address of say a drug house, or the address of a currupt government official who takes bribes. It rapidly becomes extremely broken if you try to hold people liable for simply stating the fact that X is at address Y.
I suspect you can, actually; once the court judges it reaches the point of advertising something (such as helping you find a drug dealer), you certainly should be liable IMO. If I were to give you detailed information on how to carry out a robbery on a particular bank, I go to jail as well. (The legal test is "knowledge aforethought": did I know, or should I have known, you were going to use the information to carry out that act?) There's a legal precedent for this in the US, in which an anti-abortion activist had been publishing information about abortion doctors, and was found legally liable for the resulting violence against these doctors; if publicly stating something like "Dr John Doe of 1234 Some Street, Chicago is an abortion doctor" is enough to result in a guilty verdict, I doubt a.torrent with a tracker location and hashes would be treated differently.
I certainly agree that is an ugly situation, ugly for the RIAA/MPAA, and ugly to the public. But is it worse than attempting to outlaw things like VCR's and P2P becuase some use ends up being infringing?
They did try - many years ago, in the now-famous Betamax case - to outlaw VCRs, but they are not attempting to outlaw BitTorrent or P2P in general: they're going after specific infringement services such as Suprnova. Suprnova wasn't a technology, just an online meeting point for people wishing to infringe copyrights - and that's what they were going after. As for "worse", going after the users would certainly be worse for me, since I was one of them:-) More significantly, I think it would have a far more chilling effect: kill off one hub server of whatever network, the users will just move to another - scare the users themselves out of doing it, they're gone. Napster and Suprnova going offline doesn't scare their users, just inconveniences them - users appearing in court would be a very different matter.
The only valid route is for them to actually go after the people who are infringing. You don't go after non-infringing people and attack technology itself and infringe people's rights simply because that's an easier target than actually going after the people commiting the infringement.
I disagree. If you're offering space in a big building marked "get drugs here" to people doing what the sign suggests, I think you should get nailed for it. Should the inventor of BitTorrent - the technology itself - be attacked? No: they should go after the people involved in actual copyright violation. The legal position of Suprnova, whether it is technically guilty of "infringing" (directly or indirectly) isn't yet clear, but - unlike the technology itself - it would be a big stretch to claim they're uninvolved in the infringement. It has been argued that the getaway driver wasn't actually committing a bank robbery himself - and that's been ruled legally irrelevant, he's still part of the crime. You don't attack the technology (the car), but you do attack those involved in its use in the crime.
However that is obviously no reason for the police to do anything, and the cases will probably get thrown out of court as other.torrent side cases have been tossed out of court - because there was not a single infringing file available on their website.
This could be a problem: part of the GPL's protection revolves around claiming rights over derivative works of copyright material placed under the GPL - and while a.torrent does not contain the copyright material, it certainly is a derivative work, since it's a set of hashes of parts of the file. In addition, the police could probably make a good case that they're aiding and abetting a copyright infringement, in the same way a bank robbery getaway driver is guilty even if he doesn't enter the bank at all. (I know Finnish law has a concept of "aiding and abetting" a crime, but don't know what the details are.)
These "raids" are a travesty, and primarily a means for the copyright lobby to harrass and intimidate non-infringing people associated with any P2P system.
Perhaps - but they'd be much worse if/when the xxAA starts going after the people who are actually infringing. Remember, anyone joining the swarm get a list of all the IP addresses of everyone in the swarm: it would be trivial for the MPAA to grab the list of all IPs sharing a given file, subpoena their addresses and sue them instead, or just go after the people seeding it - and of course, they'd have much less of a defense, since they are actually distributing the material themselves...
The important part of the Oath of Allegiance is: "I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;"
Meanwhile, the important legality is that this has no legal meaning whatsoever to Britain: you're as much a British citizen after saying that as you were before. The only valid way to renounce British citizenship is to walk into a consulate and formally renounce it in person to a consular officer - and even after doing that, your citizenship is automatically restored upon request any time you want. (The first time round, that is; if, having previously renounced citizenship then had it restored, you renounce it for a second time, it is "discretionary" whether or not you can attain citizenship for a third time. I doubt this happens very often, though...)
What L-N has cannot be bought. Most of what they have that makes them so valuable is not on the web and never was. They have farms of people entering print-only stories/articles/etc.
Presumably it could be bought by simply buying L-N itself, hence the speculation - but I'm sure Google has deep enough pockets to hire its own team of copy typists to feed in the relevant paper, if they wanted to. Having said that, big teams of typists doesn't seem to fit with Google's current setup at all, with even their headline collection being totally automated. If they did want to create such a collection, I'd expect them to be using some sort of clever OCR setup - which, IIRC, is more or less what they did to create many of the entries in Froogle, scanning in and processing printed catalogs?
Looking at their track record so far, they won't just do any kind of "me too" service, like a clone of L-N - with Google itself, Gmail, Froogle, Google News and Google Groups, they basically sat in the labs planning until they actually had something new to offer. They've also created them all largely from scratch, only buying in raw materials (like the old Usenet backup tapes for Google Groups) or some specific useful technology - if I were betting, I'd put my money on something from the same mold as Froogle, very highly automated and using their own scans from paper rather than trying to assimilate someone else's database. Having developed sufficiently advanced OCR to digest 5,000 printed catalogs almost two years ago, an automated replacement for L-N's teams of typists wouldn't surprise me at all...
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Actually, BT Wholesale is a separate unit from Openreach. Openreach manages the 'final mile' services: all the copper wire, the local exchange buildings, and some but not all of the equipment in there. A few UK ISPs build their services on top of Openreach's products directly: TalkTalk and Sky, for example, went and installed their own DSLAMs in those exchange buildings, paying Openreach to connect the copper wires to them. BT Wholesale also takes those Openreach products, adds in their own national backbone and offers a service to other ISPs: they'll install a fast fibre backbone link to the ISP's premises/facilities, and connect the customers through that to the ISP.
This can cause problems; my own ISP is a BT Wholesale customer, so when I had a fault earlier this year they had to report it to BT Wholesale, who passed it on to Openreach to deal with. Openreach came out and tested their bit - my phone line, and the VDSL equipment on each end - and found nothing wrong there, so closed the fault. After six visits, BT Wholesale (or rather, BT TSOps and the Adhara Ops team at Adastral Park, where the fault got escalated to in the end) eventually found the problem was on their own backbone (a faulty router was corrupting traffic between certain IP addresses - one of which happened to be a core router at my ISP).
I agree with the overall approach, though, having a separate and regulated entity run just the local loop portion. (In practice, Openreach is still a part of BT - hence I got a sales pitch from at least one of the six Openreach engineers about BT Retail being a better option. Against all the rules - Openreach are officially supposed to be neutral - but could that ever really happen in practice while they're still the same company?)
Someone in the UK government pointed that out recently - it turns out that "Dept of Pensions" allocation is actually used across most of the government as some sort of VPN extranet with various external contractors. Apparently, since they all use different RFC1918 blocks internally, they can't all be VPNed into any single RFC1918 block: they needed a globally-unique block for that purpose.
British Telecom uses the 30.0.0.0/8 block for managing all their customer modems - that block is actually allocated to the US DoD, but they don't allow external access to it anyway, so there's nothing to stop you using that block internally yourself as long as you don't need to communicate with any other networks using the same trick. Better than wasting an entire /8 of global address space just for internal administrative systems - or a /9, like Comcast grabbed back in 2010.
My inner geek - who cares about efficiency - would love to see all the legacy blocks revoked. I'm sure the DoD could use 10/8 instead of 30/8 quite easily for their non-routed block; the universities could easily fit in a /16 instead of a /8, or smaller with a bit of NAT. Still, we should be moving to IPv6 instead now: give each university and ISP a /48, or /32 for big complex networks needing multiple layers. I just have a nasty feeling we're in for a long time of CGNAT spreading instead - where we currently have ISPs that don't offer static IP addresses, in a few years they'll be refusing to issue anything other than a NATted 100.64/16 address.
I hate the usual crap that gets shovelled on too, but to be fair Microsoft have apparently been pushing against that for a few years now for exactly that reason. Of course, they need to tread carefully there for legal reasons: if they block, say, Dell bundling a limited-time version of Norton Anti-virus, Dell won't be happy (they lose the $5 or whatever kickback) and Symantec will probably lawyer up and come knocking, particularly with Microsoft offering their own AV product now. Remember all the fallout when they killed off Netscape, when they stopped IBM from bundling OS/2 as a dual-boot setup with Windows? We both know this is different, but Microsoft's lawyers are apparently paranoid about crossing that line again.
I'm told they also offer crapware-free machines in their own stores, which makes sense. I just wish they'd make OEMs ship a plain vanilla Windows install disk like they used to, no more "restore" BS - so anyone wanting a clean machine can just re-install.
Probably because ACARS was turned off hours earlier in the flight, back before the aircraft flew back over Malaysia! Had it been active, ACARS would have reported the aircraft's location, altitude, speed and other useful data, making finding it much easier; it was switched off with the other cockpit systems, though, leaving just the Inmarsat terminal's hourly "ping" active, so until the Doppler analysis, all they knew was the distance between the satellite and aircraft.
Unfortunately, 127.0.53.53 is a perfectly valid IP address already in use globally - try pinging it on most machines for proof. Remember, the loopback address is not just 127.0.0.1 - it's that whole /8 subnet, all the way up to 127.255.255.255. Indeed, two of my own DNS servers are bound to 127.0.0.53 right now (there's another DNS server bound to the public IP address, which forwards certain queries to this one).
This seems like a really, really stupid hack to me. If they are effectively revoking the domain, why not just return NXDOMAIN instead of bad data? Apart from the "people seeing it for the first time will be curious and go and Google 127.0.53.53 to see why", the rationale just doesn't hold up. Apart from anything else, returning that will cause mail servers to attempt delivery to themselves. Yes, it contains the traffic within the host - but NXDOMAIN would stop the traffic having anywhere to go too, and is the correct response. (One clueless hosting company did something very similar - any departing customer's DNS entries were updated to route mail to 127.0.0.1 - with the result mail bounced until the new delegation propagated fully. 127.0.53.53 would have exactly the same effect.)
Data capping isn't really relevant to that - a hundred megabytes of, say, LAPD beating up a suspect or university campus police tear-gassing non-violent protesters is no bigger a datastream than a hundred megabytes of my cat chasing his toy mouse round the floor, when it's being uploaded to the likes of YouTube; once it hits there, I don't think Google use cable modems to send it from their datacenters. A hostile power would just cut the connection, whether you have an "unlimited" connection or a pay-as-you-go one - as has happened a few times in recent disturbances (Egypt or Syria?) - they don't bother looking at individual data packages anyway.
The poster further up had it exactly, I think: it's all about killing off competition from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Any guesses why else it would be Time Warner and Comcast - i.e. the cable ISPs - pushing this, rather than AT&T and Verizon? (Not that those two would be unhappy either, of course: more money, an easier market for their FiOS and U-verse TV offerings - but it's obviously Comcast and TW who have the most to lose.)
There was a server ban? What for?
Backdoor way of limiting bandwidth usage. On TCP/IP, really a "server" is just the one that sends SYN|ACK packets in response to SYN packets, rather than sending out SYNs - but ISPs latched on to "no servers" as a more marketable way to kick heavy users off without being honest about usage limits.
With cable, downstream bandwidth is more abundant and more efficient (the upstream channel is vulnerable to collisions, since there are multiple senders on a channel) so heavy upload usage can actually be a problem to some extent. On ADSL and its derivatives, though, it's only your own link you're filling up with upstream traffic: the backhaul connections are invariably symmetric, so those gigabit+ links between you and the ISP are only full up in the other direction.
I switched back in 2012 from "unlimited" (but no servers, dynamic IP, ports blocked, sending nastygrams to anyone using "too much" of the "unlimited" bandwidth) to an ISP with actual explicit usage charges (and a small routed subnet with no ports blocked). As long as it's legal I can do what I want: mail servers, web servers, the lot - I just have to pay a bit more if I download more. (It's download traffic that matters to them: upstream, there's bandwidth to spare, because the links are symmetric.) I hated the idea of usage-based charging - but I hate all the other restrictions more; at about $0.30 per Gb, it's low enough not to bother me as much as "unlimited, but use it too much and we cut you off".
E10? in the UK for ITU-T they have E1 through E4.....we're talking about business grade time division multiplex carrier lines, not DSL or cable or other consumer grade shakier and less reliable tech
I imagine 'E10' there is a reference to 10 Mbps metro Ethernet, something like the Ethernet in the First Mile approach. There's nothing inherently "consumer grade" about DSL itself: indeed, even E1 "leased lines" get delivered over HDSL or similar in some cases. Unlike cable, which is contended and prone to collisions, DSL gives you a constant bitrate (unless configured to vary to squeeze higher bitrates when line quality permits) point to point link, just like a conventional leased line - all the performance fluctuations of typical DSL Internet access come further into the network, where your 20 Mbps connection is sharing a 1 Gbps backhaul with a thousand others and gets choked up when everyone is streaming X-Brother Get Me Out Of Here or whatever. Give the DSL link dedicated or uncontended backhaul like leased lines have, you'll get the same performance too.
Is the date on the report questioning Snowden's loyalties the same as the date the material was actually entered into the electronic records? I can think of several strong reasons why the CIA might want to do some rewriting of its own history here. And certainly they have the expertise to do a good of that. In fact it would be routine for them to alter history: that is how you give a mole a credible back story.
The CIA is not just a spy agency. They are also the USA Bureau of Missinformation And Dysinformation.
I can imagine them rewriting history, but in this case I doubt it; surely it would suit them better for him to have been a normal, competent employee at that point, who then went rogue later, rather than saying "oops ... yes, we saw all these warning signs, but forgot to do anything about it for a few years. Told you so - er, I mean, we would have told you so, if we'd been more alert..."
Of course, if you're really paranoid, you'd wonder if the CIA computers had been compromised by, say, some other agency with lots of expertise at breaking into high-value targets, and this report had been planted by them, maybe to divert blame for their own failed internal security...
Foxconn have the contract to assemble the Xbox 720 as well - not to mention Nintendo consoles. I remember pointing this out after a smug ex-MSFT blogger posted a link about Foxconn, bragging that Foxconn would never meet Microsoft's supplier criteria, so Apple must have lower standards...
Why am I suddenly reminded of stock options and the whole "vesting" concept, where if you leave too soon some of the paper you got as part of your remuneration becomes worthless? Not identical of course - I'm guessing even Facebook's "company stores" won't take stock options in payment - but there are more than a few parallels there.
On the other hand, it also sounds like a nice setup if it all works properly, and you'd still be free to leave if you wanted.
Similar experience here - from a batch of 15 machines with Maxtor HDDs bought as a batch three years ago, I think all but one is now on at least its second drive, several on a third. Had we not thrown most of them out, I could hand you a pile of a dozen dead Maxtors in five minutes - any other brand (and we do indeed have others in use), I could probably dig out one or two recent ones. The last two drives I was handed were both 120Gb, one Seagate, one Maxtor - neither of us would be surprised by which one was the failed drive, and which was the good drive to transfer recovered data to.
I am sold on Western Digital, 5 year contract, excellent drives, got a 10K raptor at home myself. Low failure rate in our enterprise environment. Cant vouch for seagate though, havent had too much exposure to them other than the dirt cheap 300GB I bought that was DOA.
Hm. I don't think I've seen a WD drive for a while, although we do have some big Seagates (including pretty heavy use) without any issues to date. Then again, after seeing so many Maxtors eating data lately, I seem to be building a lot more RAID arrays and backup systems around campus...
Easily, just like anyone else in the same position. Sorry to hear about your foot, and I do hope you get it fixed soon.
Oh yea, I can't, because we're the only country in the world where our government sponsored healthcare only helps non-Americans
Actually you'll find almost all those other countries have healthcare systems set up for non-Americans :-) Not very good ones, though. As others have already pointed out, US government healthcare helps a great many Americans; you'll also find plenty of countries don't have much if any government healthcare of the sort you seem to want. I have the misfortune to be in the UK, home to one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world; a few years ago, finding myself in need of either an MRI or CT scan, I was told I faced a wait of multiple years for the latter (the former wasn't available at all yet: no funding to buy one, let alone operate it). In exchange for around 13% of everyone's gross income, that seems pretty feeble.
I've tried, I can't get shit for myself. I would be more than happy for you to prove me wrong, because a cast really would be nice.
Go to the ER, get treated. It's not rocket science. Once your bill is written off by the hospital, it gets picked up by the federal government. (To be precise, IIRC 70% of it gets picked up, they have to eat the other 30% as a tax writeoff.) Yes, your credit rating will take a hit - but at this point, you need to make a decision: is your credit rating really worth more to you than your health? For that matter, if you can't afford to make ends meet - and if you're going without important medical treatment, I'd say you can't - maybe you should work part time and study part time, rather than trying to study full time without the funding for it? For that matter: how can you be studying full-time, unable to afford medical care, yet not be below Medicaid eligibility thresholds? You say you "pay your taxes in full every year" - but if you aren't working, are you actually paying any at all?
For that matter, there are also free clinics around which might well help you, although of course that does depend on the area you're in. In Arizona, I can find three in Phoenix and one in Prescott.
Getting back to the earlier topic: if you had cancer, rather than a bad foot, I'm pretty sure you'd take the medical care whatever the impact on your credit rating, wouldn't you? Hence, the government does indeed end up paying for it. If I were in your position, from what you've said (and I am the same age, presently working full-time and about to add studying part-time to that) I'd work enough to pay the bills and study as much as possible on top of that.
I'd agree with some of that - but try getting Microsoft Update (as opposed to Windows Update) applying automatically across a large-scale rollout. Configuring Windows Update to work automatically out-of-the-box just involved a couple of registry keys - but the switch to Microsoft Update is trickier. Getting the whole 4Gb pile - Office, Project, McAfee Virusscan, AutoCAD, MathCAD, Scientific Viewer, QSE - along with Novell's Zenworks registration and assorted other things? Quite a pain. Up until the move to Windows NT 4, we used diskless Windows 3.1 workstations: *much* easier to maintain.
Being a wiz at a telnet prompt with huge backbone equipment should mean that you are a very intelligent, problem solving type of person. Figuring out Exchange should be cake for someone like that, unless they were just doing what they were told to do to solve specific, repeating problems. When I am 60 this stuff will be even simpler, all I'll have to do to create a new domain and mail setup would be to say "hello computer, make it so."
To some extent, maybe; then again, their automation has a bad habit of backfiring. Later versions of Windows, with their automatic DNS registration - helpful, cutting out some DNS configuration... right? Not when it crashes BIND! Auto-updates? Fine - until the latest update breaks something, as SP2 did with many setups. When that intelligent voice-operated computer of yours a decade from now suddenly starts speaking Japanese or Urdu, will you know how to fix it?
Actually, he wasn't completely innocent - he was a criminal, albeit not connected to terrorism as far as anyone knows. That doesn't justify shooting him, of course, any more than finding some crack in his pocket would, but he is not "innocent" or "law-abiding".
was shot 10 times, over a period of 30 seconds. Like the fellow in this article, he was doing nothing but his daily routine.
I'd take the witness's "30 seconds" figure with a pinch of salt, too: people are very poor at actually judging time, particularly in high-stress situations (and I think "trapped in an underground train while people shoot at each other" qualifies there!). It was 11 times, too, by the way, not 10. What seems at the time like a 3 second gap could well have been a lot shorter, perhaps well under a second.
The guys behind Exim (the University of Cambridge Computing Service) have such a cluster, known as Hermes - a couple of years ago (when I was there) it entailed four Sun E450s (named after colours - red, yellow etc) in front of a pair of NetApp Filers (named black and white IIRC) and an authentication master (named prism). There was a bit of downtime when one of the Filers had a multiple disk-failure (or rather, wrongly believed it had), but that was it - everything else had no single point of failure available, except if prism was down you couldn't change passwords.
Expensive, of course, but reliable and fast despite enormous load and a plethora of services (being geek-friendly, you could get your mail via anything from Pine over SSH, SCP, FTP, Telnet, IMAP, POP3 or webmail). Very nice setup - beats the ... out of the GroupWise mess my current employer (another university) uses...
In addition, Europe is slowly upgrading to a CDMA derivative ("3g") to replace their current TDMA-based GSM networks - technical details here.
I did much the same thing a few weeks ago, logged into the print server sitting behind me (intending to shut down my own machine to go home). Fortunately, it only serves the people in this room, and nobody was printing at the time anyway...
Worse, though, a colleague was changing a tape some years ago in a big shared Unix machine while talking to someone. From habit, she put the new tape in, shut the door to the drive, and turned the key next to the door - which, of course, was not a lock for the drive door, but the power switch for the machine - a machine with several hundred users. Oops.
At that point, though, I was the only one using a Sun on my desk - everyone else had regular Windows PCs with an X server and terminal emulator. More common, though, was running 'passwd' to change password - forgetting you were logged in as root rather than yourself. Eventually, the colleague above edited root's profile to make passwd an alias to warn you not to do that!
The irony here is, quite a few of those things are already done privately, at least in some cases. The street outside me was built privately (along with the houses it serves), we don't get snow removed (so it's just as well we don't get more than an inch or so at any one time), unless you count school the only program to stop kids breaking things is the threat of jail time, trash removal was privately provided in the last place I lived, aircraft are inspected by the airline for obvious reasons and a lot of medical research is also private, through a combination of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and charities.
I'm not advocating removing all those things entirely from the government's remit - I tend to think it should be at least partly responsible for providing the common infrastructure (roads, utilities). I just wish they'd get out of completely illegitimate activities: funding rather questionable art (one state government recently gave $5,000 to an "artist" who hung 12 dildos on hooks and called it "art"!), speeches by Islamic fundamentalists (as happened in London recently)... Cut that out, I think a lot of people would feel a lot more favorable towards the overall budget - and those who actually want to hand four figure sums to "artists" like that would be free to do so.
Most items on budgets at all levels, from the city to the country, are reasonably likely to be important to you in some way you don't have time to understand. Furthermore, most of them have to be funded at a certain level, or the funding they do get is wasted. The modern world is sufficiently complex that determining what things you want to fund would be more than a full-time job.
I'm not at all convinced by that argument, though. Much the same was tried by AT&T: having to choose a phone company and long distance service would be far too complex, so they should just have kept on gouging as a monopoly. Didn't quite turn out that way...
You're probably right about the "too expensive", but Acorn never produced 16 bit systems: they jumped straight from the 6502-based 8 bit BBC series (Acorn Electron, BBC A/B/B+/Master) to the 32 bit ARM based machines (Archimedes and Risc PC), still available now as the Iyonix. While Acorn itself broke up, the ARM processor they designed for the first Archimedes is now a part of a ridiculous number of cellphone handsets, TV Set Top Boxes and other embedded applications. While the x86 architecture manages 300 million shipments per year, the ARM blows that away at around the one billion mark.
As an aside, that same ARM architecture is pretty popular for running Linux on as well: pretty good for a very compact, low power consumption Linux system like the LART.
I'm well aware of that (I didn't sleep through all those Information Theory + Coding lectures...); the whole point of that file, however, is to allow you to obtain the original file(s). Unlike a URL, it doesn't just identify a location: it identifies a specific set of data, so distributing that .torrent file indirectly distributes that specific dataset - which, as far as I can see, does meet the legal requirement for involvement in a specific illegal act you alluded to later.
A .torrent is an address where a file may (or may not) be located, along with some checksums to detect accidentall (or intential) curruption of that file.
Actually, it's the location of a tracker, which in turn holds the location(s) which have or want some or all of that particular set of data, but you're close.
Please define the legal criteria you intend to use to discriminate between a website with a .torrent link or even a direct web link to a file being distributed by some other site, and a newspaper or website publishing the addresses of crackhouses and drug dealers.
I don't: that isn't where I draw the line, nor do I believe that's where it should be drawn. The law draws it - as you almost cited later in your post - when there is knowledge of a specific act. Basically, "5th Street is full of hookers in the evening" is fine, sending you to meet a hooker named Daisy on the corner of 5th and E tonight is not. If that newspaper or website crosses the line, it's illegal.
It details that they do not have the power to pass a law making it criminal to publish bomb making information.
Correct: that information is not tied to a specific act. That's the aspect which protects BitTorrent itself - but it does not apply to individual .torrent files. Me telling you how to make a bomb is fine, me telling you the specific amount of Semtex to plant in a specific point on a certain bridge results in jail time if the court considers it serious rather than a joke.
What they can pass laws against are providing that information in a specific intent to cause that crime,
Now, how do you distinguish between that and providing information in a specific intent to cause a specific act of copyright infringement?
If you walk down the street and a record store hands you a free promotional music CD, you are innocent in receiving it. Your presumption is that they have the right to do so. They are responsible for ensuring they are not violating the law.
Trying to convince a court that this should apply to Internet downloads would be somewhat difficult, I think. Could you really claim to believe Suprnova's content's distribution had been authorized by the owners? I'm pretty sure that would achieve nothing more than some laughter in court.
Perhaps, but with hashes there does come a point where you can deduce the original input (trivial example: hash each byte individually...) - and since the whole point of BitTorrent is to use the hashes in conjunction with the tracker's data to reconstruct the original file, it's closer to that situation than the md5sums on kernel.org. If I give you a .torrent file, you can convert that back into the original data; from a legal point of view, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to treat torrents as a compressed form of the original data. An MD5 hash in itself would probably be OK, but once you add enough information to get the complete file, I think you've crossed the legal line.
You cannot find a newspaper liable for publishing the factual address of say a drug house, or the address of a currupt government official who takes bribes. It rapidly becomes extremely broken if you try to hold people liable for simply stating the fact that X is at address Y.
I suspect you can, actually; once the court judges it reaches the point of advertising something (such as helping you find a drug dealer), you certainly should be liable IMO. If I were to give you detailed information on how to carry out a robbery on a particular bank, I go to jail as well. (The legal test is "knowledge aforethought": did I know, or should I have known, you were going to use the information to carry out that act?) There's a legal precedent for this in the US, in which an anti-abortion activist had been publishing information about abortion doctors, and was found legally liable for the resulting violence against these doctors; if publicly stating something like "Dr John Doe of 1234 Some Street, Chicago is an abortion doctor" is enough to result in a guilty verdict, I doubt a .torrent with a tracker location and hashes would be treated differently.
I certainly agree that is an ugly situation, ugly for the RIAA/MPAA, and ugly to the public. But is it worse than attempting to outlaw things like VCR's and P2P becuase some use ends up being infringing?
They did try - many years ago, in the now-famous Betamax case - to outlaw VCRs, but they are not attempting to outlaw BitTorrent or P2P in general: they're going after specific infringement services such as Suprnova. Suprnova wasn't a technology, just an online meeting point for people wishing to infringe copyrights - and that's what they were going after. As for "worse", going after the users would certainly be worse for me, since I was one of them :-) More significantly, I think it would have a far more chilling effect: kill off one hub server of whatever network, the users will just move to another - scare the users themselves out of doing it, they're gone. Napster and Suprnova going offline doesn't scare their users, just inconveniences them - users appearing in court would be a very different matter.
The only valid route is for them to actually go after the people who are infringing. You don't go after non-infringing people and attack technology itself and infringe people's rights simply because that's an easier target than actually going after the people commiting the infringement.
I disagree. If you're offering space in a big building marked "get drugs here" to people doing what the sign suggests, I think you should get nailed for it. Should the inventor of BitTorrent - the technology itself - be attacked? No: they should go after the people involved in actual copyright violation. The legal position of Suprnova, whether it is technically guilty of "infringing" (directly or indirectly) isn't yet clear, but - unlike the technology itself - it would be a big stretch to claim they're uninvolved in the infringement. It has been argued that the getaway driver wasn't actually committing a bank robbery himself - and that's been ruled legally irrelevant, he's still part of the crime. You don't attack the technology (the car), but you do attack those involved in its use in the crime.
This could be a problem: part of the GPL's protection revolves around claiming rights over derivative works of copyright material placed under the GPL - and while a .torrent does not contain the copyright material, it certainly is a derivative work, since it's a set of hashes of parts of the file. In addition, the police could probably make a good case that they're aiding and abetting a copyright infringement, in the same way a bank robbery getaway driver is guilty even if he doesn't enter the bank at all. (I know Finnish law has a concept of "aiding and abetting" a crime, but don't know what the details are.)
These "raids" are a travesty, and primarily a means for the copyright lobby to harrass and intimidate non-infringing people associated with any P2P system.
Perhaps - but they'd be much worse if/when the xxAA starts going after the people who are actually infringing. Remember, anyone joining the swarm get a list of all the IP addresses of everyone in the swarm: it would be trivial for the MPAA to grab the list of all IPs sharing a given file, subpoena their addresses and sue them instead, or just go after the people seeding it - and of course, they'd have much less of a defense, since they are actually distributing the material themselves...
Meanwhile, the important legality is that this has no legal meaning whatsoever to Britain: you're as much a British citizen after saying that as you were before. The only valid way to renounce British citizenship is to walk into a consulate and formally renounce it in person to a consular officer - and even after doing that, your citizenship is automatically restored upon request any time you want. (The first time round, that is; if, having previously renounced citizenship then had it restored, you renounce it for a second time, it is "discretionary" whether or not you can attain citizenship for a third time. I doubt this happens very often, though...)
Presumably it could be bought by simply buying L-N itself, hence the speculation - but I'm sure Google has deep enough pockets to hire its own team of copy typists to feed in the relevant paper, if they wanted to. Having said that, big teams of typists doesn't seem to fit with Google's current setup at all, with even their headline collection being totally automated. If they did want to create such a collection, I'd expect them to be using some sort of clever OCR setup - which, IIRC, is more or less what they did to create many of the entries in Froogle, scanning in and processing printed catalogs?
Looking at their track record so far, they won't just do any kind of "me too" service, like a clone of L-N - with Google itself, Gmail, Froogle, Google News and Google Groups, they basically sat in the labs planning until they actually had something new to offer. They've also created them all largely from scratch, only buying in raw materials (like the old Usenet backup tapes for Google Groups) or some specific useful technology - if I were betting, I'd put my money on something from the same mold as Froogle, very highly automated and using their own scans from paper rather than trying to assimilate someone else's database. Having developed sufficiently advanced OCR to digest 5,000 printed catalogs almost two years ago, an automated replacement for L-N's teams of typists wouldn't surprise me at all...