The "end-to-end" bit is the problem. You can't do QoS over the public Internet, only along network connections where the providers have explicit relationships, where traffic is well-defined and where QoS couldn't be abused by random Internet traffic. In other words, it would require dedicated network connections that the content provider would presumably have to pay for, which is what Net Neutrality advocates seem to oppose. You simply can't do 3rd-party IPTV with a "neutral" Internet, as usually defined, unless you're fine with YouTube-quality video or video that cuts out whenever BitTorrent or some online game competes for bandwidth.
I don't mean any disrespect here, but you continue to use terms like "encoding" and "unicode" in ways that suggest you don't actually know this topic very well. Again, I don't intend this as an insult. We all have our great ideas on how to make the world a better place when we start dipping into new subjects. Please consider doing some more reading on what Unicode actually is, what a character set is, what an encoding is (and how it is different from a character set), how font (glyph) mappings work, how transliteration works, how IRIs work and how Unicode characters are embedded into them today, Punycode, etc.
I suspect you're going to find that some of your assumptions here are faulty.
Finally, consider the impact of your change. People aren't going to like having to stick a new identifier onto the end of their existing hostnames, and hostnames using the old syntax are going to have to continue to work. Every application that uses hostnames would seem to require changes to understand and properly filter characters. It also seems to be a partial solution in cases where the scripts are not similar to Latin1, since you have to identify the character set in ASCII, right?
I think a better solution is to advocate using URIs (IRIs) as things you use to locate resources, not as things you use to authenticate resources. I should never be tempted to glance up at the URL in the Location field of my browser and, from a visual inspection alone, "authenticate" the site I'm at as Paypal, or my bank. TLS/SSL certificates are quite capable of identifying a site using a real-world identity that can be vouched for by an authority qualified to do so. Perhaps the information in these certificates needs to be presented to the user as prominently as the URL? Sounds like a bug report I opened against Firefox nearly 5 years ago.
The font is the important part, because that allows the software to map one character to another.
That's the problem, though. Fonts do not map characters to characters, they map characters to glyphs. You're never guaranteed to be able to associate a font with a particular language, because the glyphs contained within the font will map to characters that could be used by multiple languages. Any association you intend to make is going to be arbitrary and subjective. When you type a character into a text field, a logical character is entered into the field, not a glyph from a font. If the renderer can't render that character with the available fonts, you get a replacement character (like boxes or question marks), but the character is still there.
What is important is ensuring that the font you get breaks foreign character sets that use the same symbols
You're still making the erroneous assumption that fonts will only contain glyphs for one specific language (script). It is very common for fonts to contain glyphs for multiple scripts covering many languages. The stock Arial font that you've mentioned in your posts contains, in XP at least, glyphs for Latin (Western European), Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, on top of what you normally see in fonts.
If your goal here is to de-internationalize applications (or at least the Location field of the browser) so that it only shows you glyphs from scripts that you're familiar with, you might be able to accomplish this by instructing the renderer (or the application, before it sends its text to the renderer) to ignore/replace characters outside of a certain range (such as Latin-1 for English and other Western European languages). I don't think messing with font selection, or crippling fonts by restricting them to a certain subset of Unicode characters is the answer. The general direction here is to move toward more complete Unicode-aware fonts, not away.
How would you bookmark these pages? How would you copy/paste the URL to give to someone else? How would the system know that the URL you just typed in should be transliterated to some other script? Do you have to remember the language tag associated with each URL? What happens when languages are mixed in the URL, such as a TLD in English and a second-level domain in Japanese? What if the URL path was in Russian?
Class action lawsuit? Exactly how have you been harmed? I can't imagine a court awarding you more than the ability to cancel your service without cancellation fees (perhaps retroactive to the date of this event). But then you're going to have to pay the law firm representing the class somehow. This is not an appropriate or effective use of a lawsuit.
The "academics" of whom you speak had an excellent "clue" about the problem they were attempting to solve at the time, and how well that solution solved it.
The "problem" isn't with stupid academics, it's with the unguided evolution of the same technology to a commercialized system. What works well on a privately controlled, academic environment doesn't always work well in a commercialized setting. No one could have predicted that DNS would be abused in the manner that it's abused today. This isn't the fault of the designers of DNS, it's the fault of the entities pushing for commercialization without reworking some of the standards to better fit commercial and international goals.
I think you may be confused about what Unicode is. The Unicode Character Set (UCS) has nothing to do with languages. It's there to standardize on characters. Plenty of languages can use the same characters (like many Western European languages do with Latin characters, or East Asian languages do through Han unification). "Unicode fonts" are simply fonts that are capable of containing glyphs covering at least portions of the UCS. These fonts are "language-specific" only in the sense that they might only cover certain scripts used by certain languages.
Further, you seem to suggest that the software automatically "convert" characters from one "language" to another. If you're talking about translation, you must realize that machine translation (a) doesn't work all that well, and (b) will have difficulty guaranteeing a 1:1 concept mapping between two languages. (Some languages might have two concepts that are only represented by a single word in another language.) If you're talking about transliteration, many languages and scripts do not have absolute rules about this, and much like the translation case, the rules sometimes aren't always perfectly symmetrical.
Finally, not all DNS labels are in a particular "language" to begin with. Many are proper nouns, for example.
Please consider the possibility that a lot of very smart people have already thought about this problem. If you really think this is "problem solved", perhaps you should talk to them directly instead of posting on Slashdot.
What a stupid idea, allowing untypeable and/or lookalike characters in domain names!).
This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone in the world types on American-style QWERTY keyboards. What is "untypeable" to you is easily typeable to others.
In addition, for those that have keyboards that limit the characters they can type, there is such a thing as an IME allowing these users to "type" complex characters.
Now, I'm not suggesting that our implementation of "international domain names" is the best and safest way of doing it, but your comment struck me as a little US-centric.
Perhaps we disagree on what it means to be "free" or "fair". Nobody held a gun to the customers' heads and forced them to buy media subject to the levy. These people are not starving, or forced out into the streets, because they gotta have CD-Rs. They evaluated the availability of the product and its price, and decided they wanted to buy it. If they didn't think the exchange was fair, I don't think it's reasonable that they would have done it.
No one is controlling the supply or the demand of this product, and no one is interfering with the ability of the buyers and the sellers to agree on the price. The government is forcing additional business costs onto the sellers, but that in no way affects the ability of the buyer to agree to the seller's (inflated) price. It's still a free market transaction.
I agree that consumers ought to be compensated for this (and I suggested an alternative way to accomplish that in my earlier comment), but consider that there were other consumers that incurred costs due to the levy, but would probably not be eligible to participate in refunds. For example, a small recording label may have weighed the costs of CD-R distribution versus professional CD duplication, and found that for their quantities, professional duplication was slightly cheaper than CD-Rs, due to this levy. Should they be compensated as a result? If not, isn't that unfair? What about someone that looked at the prices for CD-Rs, and decided they were slightly too expensive (due to the levy) and went out and bought original CDs instead. Should they be compensated? How much would be fair in that case?
I have mixed thoughts on this. This levy was charged to the manufacturers/importers/retailers, right? The consumer made a free market exchange here. They thought the price was fair for the product, and they paid for it. Why should consumers get reimbursed?
If the government retroactively reduced corporate income taxes for last year, should consumers expect checks in the mail for all of the purchases they made? These are all business costs that factor into the price.
Now don't get me wrong: I completely disagree with the purpose of the levy to begin with. But I'm not sure how consumers must necessarily be the ones to benefit from this. Kudos to the corporations that do pass their relief onto their customers, but I don't understand how people are jumping to the conclusion that there's a legal obligation to do that.
It might have made more sense for them to make the adjustment, and simply deduct it from future sales. Consumers get "reimbursed" by virtue of (hopefully) lower prices in the near future, until the surplus is exhausted.
My DVD player has an insanely bright blue light indicating when it's off (well, standby). It's bright enough to see in the dark, which is irritating when I'm trying to watch TV in the dark.
Actually, after reviewing http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506 again, I suppose it's possible they could try to make a criminal case out of this, which certainly complicates things more than I, as an employee of this company, would probably be comfortable with. The only sane thing to do in this situation is refuse and document.
Your harsher language suggests that you believe this type of misuse is criminal in nature. I don't believe it is. At most, the company would simply be liable for either copyright infringement, or breach of contract if an existing contract governs their use of other licensed copies of the software. The software vendor would be able to recover monetary damages in the event of copyright infringement, or pursue whatever other form of remedy the contract allows them to pursue if the contract itself is breached.
Incidentally, this also makes the question of who's responsible less interesting. The software vendor isn't going to sue the individual employee; they're going to sue the company. The company is free to turn around and try to recover those costs from the employee, but even if we pretend they could make a case, and the damages they're trying to recover are significant enough (and they'd have to be significant to justify the costs of litigating), some random Joe Employee probably isn't going to have the cash to give them, so a lawsuit here probably isn't going to make economic sense.
But that doesn't mean the company won't try anyway, if some vindictive people are in charge, and they could always fire you. Documentation is still your friend here, but I wouldn't be too paranoid about it.
COMPLETELY AGREED. Anyone just getting into the technical details of gaming is going to want to make their own levels and maps. Since it is not unusual for these individuals to be in school (high school or college), it's fairly typical for these individuals to build maps that are similar to their schools. I don't know anyone into gaming and map-building that *didn't* at least make an attempt to make a map of a familiar location like this.
I think people should be required to take a quiz on every issue before they vote on it, which tests whether they understand the issue and its possible consequences. The weight of their vote would be multiplied by their score on the quiz.
The judge wasn't saying "you should have known the risks." He was saying "that's no reason for the cops not to search your apartment." This "defense" had nothing to do with the CDs, but the legality of the search warrant used to find them.
We are not yet at the point in the US where a "reasonable person", beyond reasonable doubt, understands the risks and assumes criminal liability for the acts of other people using their open access point. Usually laws like that are written with verbiage like "..knows or consciously avoids knowing.." Remember that crimes in the US require the prosecution to prove criminal intent. Your attractive nuisance theory is more meaningful in the context of a civil suit.
Your analogy might be improved by placing a lit "TAXI" sign on top of the car. Broadcasting an SSID is equivalent to announcing that an access point is available, and disabling security features allows it to accept instructions from everyone.
If you go and buy a used car, see that it has a "TAXI" sign on the top of it, but don't do anything to remove it, you can't complain when someone hops into the back seat one day and your dim-witted driver takes them on a tour of the city.
If the transponder as a whole is unused, they might be able to do that. If it's just one small portion of the frequency spectrum managed by that transponder, I don't think it's likely they'll be able to block it at the satellite. It's my understanding that transponders simply repeat what they hear across the frequency spectrum they're responsible for. If that transponder is sub-divided into different channels, that's an administrative/policy thing that the satellite doesn't have to care about. It just rebroadcasts, and each individual carrier is sent on its way exactly as the satellite heard it.
I'm not an expert on this, however. I've dealt with amateur radio satellites, but I'm not sure how well that experience maps to what the commercial satellites do.
The satellites that carry a lot of the TV and telephone transmissions are decades old. They simply aren't capable of doing any of this, and it's impractical to attempt to upgrade them. You can put measures like this in newer communications satellites that go up, but those old satellites aren't going anywhere, and so long as they're still running, it's not economical to abandon them.
It's always been assumed that it would be cost-prohibitive for random malcontents to obtain access to the hardware needed to successfully uplink a signal (or interfere with one) to a satellite, and for all intents and purposes, it is, to this day.
In addition, a lot of the transmissions going over these satellites remains analog, either audio or video. An encryption scheme like the one you're suggesting would only work if the satellite were data-only, which would require costly upgrades for a lot of the people using satellites for analog transmissions today. It's not just the broadcasters (the uplink) that would need to digitize the data, but everyone that receives those transmissions would have to have equipment to decode it.
With that said, digitized signals and data encryption are used on a lot of transmissions today, but the satellites generally play no role in that layer of the transmission. They remain "bent pipes" and simply retransmit what they hear (analog). This can be useful to differentiate on the ground between authorized and unauthorized transmissions (no "hijacking" of an encrypted transmission), but won't help if the authorized transmission is simply overpowered by the interfering one. (And, indeed, even in the data-only case, you'd still have this problem.)
When did we start talking about criminal copyright infringement? In order to be found liable for the tort of infringement, you must have caused harm. Making something *available* to be downloaded by the general public harms no one until the public starts downloading it. With no harm, there's no remedy needed, and thus no basis for an infringement action. The purpose of a civil suit is not punishment, but remedy.
That aside, your discussion about criminal intent seems sound, but typical copyright infringement is not a criminal act.
It is more likely that the author of the article is somewhat ignorant. The purpose of injunctive relief is to provide relief from harm, not punishment. Verizon probably told the court that Vonage was actively exploiting their patent, and the injunction was intended to prevent further harm (Vonage profiting from Verizon's work), at least until the case is decided.
I would think it would be both. The person responsible should be punished criminally and be forced to compensate the landlord for the damages civilly. If the culprit was the evicted tenant, this would be no different from a civil perspective from any other pissed off tenant that damages the property before they leave. I'm sure it happens all the time.
HIV doesn't seem to fit the definition of a "dumb" virus, in my opinion. Infected individuals live years, and have ample time to spread the virus on to other people. A "dumb" virus would kill the individual it infected before the virus could be spread to others, thus limiting its ability to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
The "end-to-end" bit is the problem. You can't do QoS over the public Internet, only along network connections where the providers have explicit relationships, where traffic is well-defined and where QoS couldn't be abused by random Internet traffic. In other words, it would require dedicated network connections that the content provider would presumably have to pay for, which is what Net Neutrality advocates seem to oppose. You simply can't do 3rd-party IPTV with a "neutral" Internet, as usually defined, unless you're fine with YouTube-quality video or video that cuts out whenever BitTorrent or some online game competes for bandwidth.
I don't mean any disrespect here, but you continue to use terms like "encoding" and "unicode" in ways that suggest you don't actually know this topic very well. Again, I don't intend this as an insult. We all have our great ideas on how to make the world a better place when we start dipping into new subjects. Please consider doing some more reading on what Unicode actually is, what a character set is, what an encoding is (and how it is different from a character set), how font (glyph) mappings work, how transliteration works, how IRIs work and how Unicode characters are embedded into them today, Punycode, etc.
I suspect you're going to find that some of your assumptions here are faulty.
Finally, consider the impact of your change. People aren't going to like having to stick a new identifier onto the end of their existing hostnames, and hostnames using the old syntax are going to have to continue to work. Every application that uses hostnames would seem to require changes to understand and properly filter characters. It also seems to be a partial solution in cases where the scripts are not similar to Latin1, since you have to identify the character set in ASCII, right?
I think a better solution is to advocate using URIs (IRIs) as things you use to locate resources, not as things you use to authenticate resources. I should never be tempted to glance up at the URL in the Location field of my browser and, from a visual inspection alone, "authenticate" the site I'm at as Paypal, or my bank. TLS/SSL certificates are quite capable of identifying a site using a real-world identity that can be vouched for by an authority qualified to do so. Perhaps the information in these certificates needs to be presented to the user as prominently as the URL? Sounds like a bug report I opened against Firefox nearly 5 years ago.
That's the problem, though. Fonts do not map characters to characters, they map characters to glyphs. You're never guaranteed to be able to associate a font with a particular language, because the glyphs contained within the font will map to characters that could be used by multiple languages. Any association you intend to make is going to be arbitrary and subjective. When you type a character into a text field, a logical character is entered into the field, not a glyph from a font. If the renderer can't render that character with the available fonts, you get a replacement character (like boxes or question marks), but the character is still there.
You're still making the erroneous assumption that fonts will only contain glyphs for one specific language (script). It is very common for fonts to contain glyphs for multiple scripts covering many languages. The stock Arial font that you've mentioned in your posts contains, in XP at least, glyphs for Latin (Western European), Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, on top of what you normally see in fonts.
If your goal here is to de-internationalize applications (or at least the Location field of the browser) so that it only shows you glyphs from scripts that you're familiar with, you might be able to accomplish this by instructing the renderer (or the application, before it sends its text to the renderer) to ignore/replace characters outside of a certain range (such as Latin-1 for English and other Western European languages). I don't think messing with font selection, or crippling fonts by restricting them to a certain subset of Unicode characters is the answer. The general direction here is to move toward more complete Unicode-aware fonts, not away.
How would you bookmark these pages? How would you copy/paste the URL to give to someone else? How would the system know that the URL you just typed in should be transliterated to some other script? Do you have to remember the language tag associated with each URL? What happens when languages are mixed in the URL, such as a TLD in English and a second-level domain in Japanese? What if the URL path was in Russian?
Class action lawsuit? Exactly how have you been harmed? I can't imagine a court awarding you more than the ability to cancel your service without cancellation fees (perhaps retroactive to the date of this event). But then you're going to have to pay the law firm representing the class somehow. This is not an appropriate or effective use of a lawsuit.
The "academics" of whom you speak had an excellent "clue" about the problem they were attempting to solve at the time, and how well that solution solved it.
The "problem" isn't with stupid academics, it's with the unguided evolution of the same technology to a commercialized system. What works well on a privately controlled, academic environment doesn't always work well in a commercialized setting. No one could have predicted that DNS would be abused in the manner that it's abused today. This isn't the fault of the designers of DNS, it's the fault of the entities pushing for commercialization without reworking some of the standards to better fit commercial and international goals.
I think you may be confused about what Unicode is. The Unicode Character Set (UCS) has nothing to do with languages. It's there to standardize on characters. Plenty of languages can use the same characters (like many Western European languages do with Latin characters, or East Asian languages do through Han unification). "Unicode fonts" are simply fonts that are capable of containing glyphs covering at least portions of the UCS. These fonts are "language-specific" only in the sense that they might only cover certain scripts used by certain languages.
Further, you seem to suggest that the software automatically "convert" characters from one "language" to another. If you're talking about translation, you must realize that machine translation (a) doesn't work all that well, and (b) will have difficulty guaranteeing a 1:1 concept mapping between two languages. (Some languages might have two concepts that are only represented by a single word in another language.) If you're talking about transliteration, many languages and scripts do not have absolute rules about this, and much like the translation case, the rules sometimes aren't always perfectly symmetrical.
Finally, not all DNS labels are in a particular "language" to begin with. Many are proper nouns, for example.
Please consider the possibility that a lot of very smart people have already thought about this problem. If you really think this is "problem solved", perhaps you should talk to them directly instead of posting on Slashdot.
This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone in the world types on American-style QWERTY keyboards. What is "untypeable" to you is easily typeable to others.
In addition, for those that have keyboards that limit the characters they can type, there is such a thing as an IME allowing these users to "type" complex characters.
Now, I'm not suggesting that our implementation of "international domain names" is the best and safest way of doing it, but your comment struck me as a little US-centric.
Perhaps we disagree on what it means to be "free" or "fair". Nobody held a gun to the customers' heads and forced them to buy media subject to the levy. These people are not starving, or forced out into the streets, because they gotta have CD-Rs. They evaluated the availability of the product and its price, and decided they wanted to buy it. If they didn't think the exchange was fair, I don't think it's reasonable that they would have done it.
No one is controlling the supply or the demand of this product, and no one is interfering with the ability of the buyers and the sellers to agree on the price. The government is forcing additional business costs onto the sellers, but that in no way affects the ability of the buyer to agree to the seller's (inflated) price. It's still a free market transaction.
I agree that consumers ought to be compensated for this (and I suggested an alternative way to accomplish that in my earlier comment), but consider that there were other consumers that incurred costs due to the levy, but would probably not be eligible to participate in refunds. For example, a small recording label may have weighed the costs of CD-R distribution versus professional CD duplication, and found that for their quantities, professional duplication was slightly cheaper than CD-Rs, due to this levy. Should they be compensated as a result? If not, isn't that unfair? What about someone that looked at the prices for CD-Rs, and decided they were slightly too expensive (due to the levy) and went out and bought original CDs instead. Should they be compensated? How much would be fair in that case?
There's no fair way to do this except to move on.
I have mixed thoughts on this. This levy was charged to the manufacturers/importers/retailers, right? The consumer made a free market exchange here. They thought the price was fair for the product, and they paid for it. Why should consumers get reimbursed?
If the government retroactively reduced corporate income taxes for last year, should consumers expect checks in the mail for all of the purchases they made? These are all business costs that factor into the price.
Now don't get me wrong: I completely disagree with the purpose of the levy to begin with. But I'm not sure how consumers must necessarily be the ones to benefit from this. Kudos to the corporations that do pass their relief onto their customers, but I don't understand how people are jumping to the conclusion that there's a legal obligation to do that.
It might have made more sense for them to make the adjustment, and simply deduct it from future sales. Consumers get "reimbursed" by virtue of (hopefully) lower prices in the near future, until the surplus is exhausted.
"to see (generally) in the dark", not "to see (the light) in the dark".
My DVD player has an insanely bright blue light indicating when it's off (well, standby). It's bright enough to see in the dark, which is irritating when I'm trying to watch TV in the dark.
It occurs to me that the type of IT job that can be easily done from home is the type of job that could easily be done from India.
Actually, after reviewing http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506 again, I suppose it's possible they could try to make a criminal case out of this, which certainly complicates things more than I, as an employee of this company, would probably be comfortable with. The only sane thing to do in this situation is refuse and document.
Your harsher language suggests that you believe this type of misuse is criminal in nature. I don't believe it is. At most, the company would simply be liable for either copyright infringement, or breach of contract if an existing contract governs their use of other licensed copies of the software. The software vendor would be able to recover monetary damages in the event of copyright infringement, or pursue whatever other form of remedy the contract allows them to pursue if the contract itself is breached.
Incidentally, this also makes the question of who's responsible less interesting. The software vendor isn't going to sue the individual employee; they're going to sue the company. The company is free to turn around and try to recover those costs from the employee, but even if we pretend they could make a case, and the damages they're trying to recover are significant enough (and they'd have to be significant to justify the costs of litigating), some random Joe Employee probably isn't going to have the cash to give them, so a lawsuit here probably isn't going to make economic sense.
But that doesn't mean the company won't try anyway, if some vindictive people are in charge, and they could always fire you. Documentation is still your friend here, but I wouldn't be too paranoid about it.
COMPLETELY AGREED. Anyone just getting into the technical details of gaming is going to want to make their own levels and maps. Since it is not unusual for these individuals to be in school (high school or college), it's fairly typical for these individuals to build maps that are similar to their schools. I don't know anyone into gaming and map-building that *didn't* at least make an attempt to make a map of a familiar location like this.
I think people should be required to take a quiz on every issue before they vote on it, which tests whether they understand the issue and its possible consequences. The weight of their vote would be multiplied by their score on the quiz.
Except none of that applies in this case.
The judge wasn't saying "you should have known the risks." He was saying "that's no reason for the cops not to search your apartment." This "defense" had nothing to do with the CDs, but the legality of the search warrant used to find them.
We are not yet at the point in the US where a "reasonable person", beyond reasonable doubt, understands the risks and assumes criminal liability for the acts of other people using their open access point. Usually laws like that are written with verbiage like "..knows or consciously avoids knowing.." Remember that crimes in the US require the prosecution to prove criminal intent. Your attractive nuisance theory is more meaningful in the context of a civil suit.
Your analogy might be improved by placing a lit "TAXI" sign on top of the car. Broadcasting an SSID is equivalent to announcing that an access point is available, and disabling security features allows it to accept instructions from everyone.
If you go and buy a used car, see that it has a "TAXI" sign on the top of it, but don't do anything to remove it, you can't complain when someone hops into the back seat one day and your dim-witted driver takes them on a tour of the city.
If the transponder as a whole is unused, they might be able to do that. If it's just one small portion of the frequency spectrum managed by that transponder, I don't think it's likely they'll be able to block it at the satellite. It's my understanding that transponders simply repeat what they hear across the frequency spectrum they're responsible for. If that transponder is sub-divided into different channels, that's an administrative/policy thing that the satellite doesn't have to care about. It just rebroadcasts, and each individual carrier is sent on its way exactly as the satellite heard it.
I'm not an expert on this, however. I've dealt with amateur radio satellites, but I'm not sure how well that experience maps to what the commercial satellites do.
The satellites that carry a lot of the TV and telephone transmissions are decades old. They simply aren't capable of doing any of this, and it's impractical to attempt to upgrade them. You can put measures like this in newer communications satellites that go up, but those old satellites aren't going anywhere, and so long as they're still running, it's not economical to abandon them.
It's always been assumed that it would be cost-prohibitive for random malcontents to obtain access to the hardware needed to successfully uplink a signal (or interfere with one) to a satellite, and for all intents and purposes, it is, to this day.
In addition, a lot of the transmissions going over these satellites remains analog, either audio or video. An encryption scheme like the one you're suggesting would only work if the satellite were data-only, which would require costly upgrades for a lot of the people using satellites for analog transmissions today. It's not just the broadcasters (the uplink) that would need to digitize the data, but everyone that receives those transmissions would have to have equipment to decode it.
With that said, digitized signals and data encryption are used on a lot of transmissions today, but the satellites generally play no role in that layer of the transmission. They remain "bent pipes" and simply retransmit what they hear (analog). This can be useful to differentiate on the ground between authorized and unauthorized transmissions (no "hijacking" of an encrypted transmission), but won't help if the authorized transmission is simply overpowered by the interfering one. (And, indeed, even in the data-only case, you'd still have this problem.)
Yeah I thought the term "hack" was a bit of a stretch. These "hacks" have been occurring for decades.
When did we start talking about criminal copyright infringement? In order to be found liable for the tort of infringement, you must have caused harm. Making something *available* to be downloaded by the general public harms no one until the public starts downloading it. With no harm, there's no remedy needed, and thus no basis for an infringement action. The purpose of a civil suit is not punishment, but remedy.
That aside, your discussion about criminal intent seems sound, but typical copyright infringement is not a criminal act.
It is more likely that the author of the article is somewhat ignorant. The purpose of injunctive relief is to provide relief from harm, not punishment. Verizon probably told the court that Vonage was actively exploiting their patent, and the injunction was intended to prevent further harm (Vonage profiting from Verizon's work), at least until the case is decided.
I would think it would be both. The person responsible should be punished criminally and be forced to compensate the landlord for the damages civilly. If the culprit was the evicted tenant, this would be no different from a civil perspective from any other pissed off tenant that damages the property before they leave. I'm sure it happens all the time.
HIV doesn't seem to fit the definition of a "dumb" virus, in my opinion. Infected individuals live years, and have ample time to spread the virus on to other people. A "dumb" virus would kill the individual it infected before the virus could be spread to others, thus limiting its ability to survive.