Nope, its another case of the first footsteps down the slippery slope. Once you allow them to do things like this, its a lot easier for them to "Expand" such violations....
You have to draw the line at ANY violation, lest it move further to where you DON'T like...
The right to counsel implies (and has a LONG standing precedent and bunches of laws to reinforce) a "privacy" called attorney-client privilege. That is, that anything said between the attorney and his client cannot be told to anyone. Otherwise, the justice system would simply amount to "arrest individual, bug the room he and his lawyer converse in, and use those tapes as evidence."
Not to say "I told you so", because I'm preaching to the choir, but this is just another step towards ensuring that the citizens of this modern day Republic can become subjects of an oppressive government again.
This is completely useless against terrorists. Terrorists don't hire lawyers and chat about their actions beforehand. Terrorists plan long and quietly, and then without warning even their friends and roommates, they blow shit up.
The only excuse for policies such as this is to enable fishing expeditions where people "suspected" of something can have their rights and privacy stripped away from them without them even knowing it.
(a) determining if "IP is in france" isn't always that easy (e.g., if the IP address is registered to "AOL.COM of Dulles, VA", but belongs to a dialup pool in Paris, does that count as US or FR? How does the remote system determine if it is such a dialup pool?)
(b) France's law also demands that the server somehow magically know that you are a Parisian user dialed into a Chicago,IL,USA Earthlink modem pool. It concerns itself with "the recipient of the content", not "the path the content takes to get to the recipient", so such a recipient would, according to the French law, mean that the US company would have to "know" that there's a user in Paris sitting behind that Chicago dialup, or that Munich dialup.
It's also not cheaper in that if you agree that you have to deal with nonsense like that, you also have to deal with the Chinese, the fundamentalist religious societies, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Now you can, after a single court case, stop spending time/money/energy/resources dealing with them at all, and simply say, "Nah, we don't hafta!"
No, actually, the French Court didn't even go after Yahoo France, the french subsidiary, because everything under the control of Yahoo France was in compliance with.FR laws, and always had been. Nazi memorabilia had never BEEN available on the French site.
They did, in fact, file suit against Yahoo!,Inc., a Delaware Corporation based in (then) Santa Clara, CA (now Sunnyvale), charging that because the US Auctions site "reached" France, it was bound by French law.
Where? I've yet to live anywhere in the US where the USPS would allow anyone but themselves to come between the mail and the recipient. (in fact, it's a law that they can only deliver to the recipient, which would seem to rule out delivering to an apartment complex mailroom.. the only exception I can think of from experience is mail delivery to APO/FPO addresses, but that gets handed off to "a different Federal agency", the military.;-) ).
Even when I've lived in high-rise apartments or private gated apartment complexes, the guy or gal who got my mail to me wore the USPS uniform.
You cannot opt into or out of MAPS as an end-user,
Sure you can. Change to an ISP that doesn't use MAPS. Free market economy at work. No company HAS to do what you tell them to. Find one who behaves the way you want them to.
The problem is that they are NOT typically voluntary by the people to whom it matters -- the email recipients. If an ISP wants to offer a service to block spammers, then then it should up to the individual to opt-in to the blocking.
It IS voluntary... the customer continues to pay the ISP each month for service.
If an ISP decides that "the cost of accepting mail from $ROGUE_SENDER_NETWORK is too high for me to accept", that's the ISP's decision, not the end user's. If you want "unfiltered" mail, you should be prepared to pay MORE for that service, because it costs your ISP more, in terms of bandwidth, disk space, etc.
hey, it was a long time ago, and the company was 3 months from going out of business anyway. Someone was going to get their consulting bloodmoney, and my landlord at the time really preferred it would be me.;-)
Telephone marketers use what are called "predictive dialers", which (if you examine the problem from their end) is a nifty solution to the problem of "maximising the time a telemarketer is on the phone".
Telemarketers don't dial the phone at all. They are repeatedly presented with calls that a computerized system has made. The system is tracking calls and knows "how long an average call takes", "how long it takes on average for a called-party to answer", etc.
So telemarketer is talking on the phone to you for 30 seconds. The system knows that "60 seconds is an average call" and it takes 15 seconds for a called-party to answer. So, when you reach 45 seconds, it dials the next number, figuring that "on average" you [or one of your cow-orkers] will be ready for the call when they answer the phone.
What you're seeing is that the calls in the call center are taking longer than average (which is actually sorta unusual because the more calls they make, the better the sample-rate is, and from the experience I had deploying two of these systems, they're REALLY good at it). So, because there's no telemarketer "Ready for your call", you're getting silence... the dialer is "hoping and praying" (so to speak) that one of the marketers gets off the phone quickly so it can hand you over to them.
And it only takes a couple of times, of you returning the same CD over and over again before they finally give in and give you your money, especially if you tell them "I'm trying to rip it to MP3 for my car player, but its got some wonky protection that disallows that, which makes it unusable for its marketed purpose, please return my money".
And pay on a credit card, so in the worst case, you can go for the chargeback route.:) Visa will happily do that when the product doesn't work and the merchant won't accept the return for a refund (or, alternatively, give you a CD that isn't protected, and thus works for you).
It's not the government engaged in taking away your freedoms, it's terrorists.
No, it's not. Its the government taking it away BECAUSE of the terrorists, but make no mistake, nobody from bin Laden's camp is signing the bills into law.
Because the concept of making a choice between "free speech vs. safety" is a moral/ethical decision. It's a value judgement of sorts.
Your comment about "And if I was a doctor and was required to do it by the state i would rather do it than die." doesn't ring true for any stanch Roman Catholic, who would believe that would be an Express Ticket to Hell.
Lots of people, throughout the history of this country, have decided for themselves that "living free" was more important than "living at all". Those men and women bled and died on battlefields from Saratoga forward...
For someone to say that "living" is worth more than "living free" disgraces the memory of those many who died specifically to prove otherwise.
I have to say, honestly, "What good is free speech if you're DEAD?"
What good it is, is that if we're going to die, let's die with our morals intact. I would rather die free than live in shackles.
Once you're willing to give up your morals, where do you draw the line? If the government tells you that they need to be able to randomly search your house, because you might be a terrorist (and they blow things up, so you could DIE!), would you stand for it? If the government says "this internet thing is letting too many people exchange terrorist plans, and if they do that, you could DIE!, so we're going to censor the net.", would you stand for it?
The bottom line is that once you acknowledge that you're willing to trade your moral values for your life, your life isn't worth possessing any more.
Data in and out of.CN is most definitely going through a semi-transparent proxying firewall. We've seen it here with our own eyes.
We have servers in Beijing that send e-mail to US employees. The user account they send from is <watchdog@DOMAIN> because they're doing system monitoring (they're the WATCHDOGs, get it?)
Anyhow, ANY mail they send to the US bounces. But here's the cool part, it bounces back to the sender (watchdog) but when that (as an alias) gets forwarded to the US again, it goes through, probably because of the null-sender envelope on the bounce.
We know that its some active proxying mechanism that's intercepting the messages because the bounce message is something that the MX's in the US can't possibly generate (e.g., we have the source code for the MTA and the string that the "remote side allegedly sent" to cause the bounce doesn't exist).
So, yes, despite your anecdotal "evidence" of there not being any firewalling mechanism, there most assuredly is one, and it plays havoc with my mail on a daily basis.
Except that the masses HAVE united. The EFF may have taken a position orthoganal to "the masses" in this one, possibly out of cluelessness [unlikely], possibly out of the knowledge that they could in fact make the concession knowing that the masses would do what they were planning to do and the EFF "postponement request" would have no effect (allowing them to say "Hey, we tried, but you can see this is getting very emotional out there..."), etc.
What is important in this is NOT "why did they do it", but the distinction that "EFF is saying its postponed, but the masses have already said otherwise."
Despite EFF's requests, the majority of the protest participants believe that EFF is caving too quickly. Adobe has agreed "to talk to the EFF" Monday morning, but solely on the grounds that the EFF "calls off the dogs" so to speak.
Most of us feel that this is proof positive that the effectiveness of the protests is working, and that they must continue to operate under a deadline of Monday.
EFF folks were quoted as saying that (paraphrased) "Adobe couldn't get the right people in the room" over the weekend. There's nowhere on the planet they couldn't get the right people into the room if they wanted to, so they obviously value "something else" (whether its a business deal or someone's tee-time) more than they value solving this dilemma they're in.
Nothing stops until that guy is on a jet in international airspace departing the US a free man.
The irony -- to DEPART the US to become a Free Man. *sigh*
You can certainly register a trademark after its first use.
What you don't get to do is kick peoples' ass who used it prior to registration. They get grandfathered because they can show "due diligence" (we did a TM search, came up empty), and you can't penalize someone under those conditions.
If you don't include anything like a link to "some other site", and when MS displays it, they alter the page to include links to "those other sites", haven't they - by definition - created a derivative work of your copyrighted web page? Couldn't you (as the copyright holder for said page) give them the cluestick application they so desperately need at that point?
Re:Content Distribution ( was Re:LOTR Trailers)
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
No, actually, the akamai URL itself is fine. What happens is that depending on where you're coming from, you'll get very different DNS resolutions for where "a1.doo.akamai.net" (or whatever the host name is) actually IS.
Laugh all you want, but Western Union had the primo opportunity, historically, and made EXACTLY the same arguments you make and missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.
I don't know much about OS X, but if the upgrades system can be configured to the users taste, and said configuration done in a user-friendly way, then maybe monthly updates might not be a bad thing...
Updates can be configured to happen on whatever schedule the user chooses... daily, weekly, monthly, manually, whenever.
Most of the present day OSX users are power-users, though, so they're either doing it manually when they find out about updates, or they've got it set to check for updates daily.
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You have to draw the line at ANY violation, lest it move further to where you DON'T like...
The right to counsel implies (and has a LONG standing precedent and bunches of laws to reinforce) a "privacy" called attorney-client privilege. That is, that anything said between the attorney and his client cannot be told to anyone. Otherwise, the justice system would simply amount to "arrest individual, bug the room he and his lawyer converse in, and use those tapes as evidence."
This is completely useless against terrorists. Terrorists don't hire lawyers and chat about their actions beforehand. Terrorists plan long and quietly, and then without warning even their friends and roommates, they blow shit up.
The only excuse for policies such as this is to enable fishing expeditions where people "suspected" of something can have their rights and privacy stripped away from them without them even knowing it.
(a) determining if "IP is in france" isn't always that easy (e.g., if the IP address is registered to "AOL.COM of Dulles, VA", but belongs to a dialup pool in Paris, does that count as US or FR? How does the remote system determine if it is such a dialup pool?)
(b) France's law also demands that the server somehow magically know that you are a Parisian user dialed into a Chicago,IL,USA Earthlink modem pool. It concerns itself with "the recipient of the content", not "the path the content takes to get to the recipient", so such a recipient would, according to the French law, mean that the US company would have to "know" that there's a user in Paris sitting behind that Chicago dialup, or that Munich dialup.
It's also not cheaper in that if you agree that you have to deal with nonsense like that, you also have to deal with the Chinese, the fundamentalist religious societies, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Now you can, after a single court case, stop spending time/money/energy/resources dealing with them at all, and simply say, "Nah, we don't hafta!"
D
They did, in fact, file suit against Yahoo!,Inc., a Delaware Corporation based in (then) Santa Clara, CA (now Sunnyvale), charging that because the US Auctions site "reached" France, it was bound by French law.
Know of what you speak before you speak it.
Even when I've lived in high-rise apartments or private gated apartment complexes, the guy or gal who got my mail to me wore the USPS uniform.
Since an apartment complex doesn't bear any of the burden for US Postal Service delivery, you're using a bogus argument.
Sure you can. Change to an ISP that doesn't use MAPS. Free market economy at work. No company HAS to do what you tell them to. Find one who behaves the way you want them to.
It IS voluntary... the customer continues to pay the ISP each month for service.
If an ISP decides that "the cost of accepting mail from $ROGUE_SENDER_NETWORK is too high for me to accept", that's the ISP's decision, not the end user's. If you want "unfiltered" mail, you should be prepared to pay MORE for that service, because it costs your ISP more, in terms of bandwidth, disk space, etc.
D
Telemarketers don't dial the phone at all. They are repeatedly presented with calls that a computerized system has made. The system is tracking calls and knows "how long an average call takes", "how long it takes on average for a called-party to answer", etc.
So telemarketer is talking on the phone to you for 30 seconds. The system knows that "60 seconds is an average call" and it takes 15 seconds for a called-party to answer. So, when you reach 45 seconds, it dials the next number, figuring that "on average" you [or one of your cow-orkers] will be ready for the call when they answer the phone.
What you're seeing is that the calls in the call center are taking longer than average (which is actually sorta unusual because the more calls they make, the better the sample-rate is, and from the experience I had deploying two of these systems, they're REALLY good at it). So, because there's no telemarketer "Ready for your call", you're getting silence... the dialer is "hoping and praying" (so to speak) that one of the marketers gets off the phone quickly so it can hand you over to them.
And pay on a credit card, so in the worst case, you can go for the chargeback route. :) Visa will happily do that when the product doesn't work and the merchant won't accept the return for a refund (or, alternatively, give you a CD that isn't protected, and thus works for you).
No, it's not. Its the government taking it away BECAUSE of the terrorists, but make no mistake, nobody from bin Laden's camp is signing the bills into law.
Because the concept of making a choice between "free speech vs. safety" is a moral/ethical decision. It's a value judgement of sorts.
Your comment about "And if I was a doctor and was required to do it by the state i would rather do it than die." doesn't ring true for any stanch Roman Catholic, who would believe that would be an Express Ticket to Hell.
Lots of people, throughout the history of this country, have decided for themselves that "living free" was more important than "living at all". Those men and women bled and died on battlefields from Saratoga forward...
For someone to say that "living" is worth more than "living free" disgraces the memory of those many who died specifically to prove otherwise.
What good it is, is that if we're going to die, let's die with our morals intact. I would rather die free than live in shackles.
Once you're willing to give up your morals, where do you draw the line? If the government tells you that they need to be able to randomly search your house, because you might be a terrorist (and they blow things up, so you could DIE!), would you stand for it? If the government says "this internet thing is letting too many people exchange terrorist plans, and if they do that, you could DIE!, so we're going to censor the net.", would you stand for it?
The bottom line is that once you acknowledge that you're willing to trade your moral values for your life, your life isn't worth possessing any more.
We have servers in Beijing that send e-mail to US employees. The user account they send from is <watchdog@DOMAIN> because they're doing system monitoring (they're the WATCHDOGs, get it?)
Anyhow, ANY mail they send to the US bounces. But here's the cool part, it bounces back to the sender (watchdog) but when that (as an alias) gets forwarded to the US again, it goes through, probably because of the null-sender envelope on the bounce.
We know that its some active proxying mechanism that's intercepting the messages because the bounce message is something that the MX's in the US can't possibly generate (e.g., we have the source code for the MTA and the string that the "remote side allegedly sent" to cause the bounce doesn't exist).
So, yes, despite your anecdotal "evidence" of there not being any firewalling mechanism, there most assuredly is one, and it plays havoc with my mail on a daily basis.
What is important in this is NOT "why did they do it", but the distinction that "EFF is saying its postponed, but the masses have already said otherwise."
I hear you. I feel the same way. :(
Most of us feel that this is proof positive that the effectiveness of the protests is working, and that they must continue to operate under a deadline of Monday.
EFF folks were quoted as saying that (paraphrased) "Adobe couldn't get the right people in the room" over the weekend. There's nowhere on the planet they couldn't get the right people into the room if they wanted to, so they obviously value "something else" (whether its a business deal or someone's tee-time) more than they value solving this dilemma they're in.
Nothing stops until that guy is on a jet in international airspace departing the US a free man.
The irony -- to DEPART the US to become a Free Man. *sigh*
What you don't get to do is kick peoples' ass who used it prior to registration. They get grandfathered because they can show "due diligence" (we did a TM search, came up empty), and you can't penalize someone under those conditions.
Why don't you read the article... its NOT the same guy, he's in a completely different line of work.
If you don't include anything like a link to "some other site", and when MS displays it, they alter the page to include links to "those other sites", haven't they - by definition - created a derivative work of your copyrighted web page? Couldn't you (as the copyright holder for said page) give them the cluestick application they so desperately need at that point?
D
Laugh all you want, but Western Union had the primo opportunity, historically, and made EXACTLY the same arguments you make and missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.
Updates can be configured to happen on whatever schedule the user chooses... daily, weekly, monthly, manually, whenever.
Most of the present day OSX users are power-users, though, so they're either doing it manually when they find out about updates, or they've got it set to check for updates daily.