Then you need to catch up on all the research. What people are finding is that with the high frequencies 5G uses, and all the information states within each signal element, the sheer number of bits being beamed right through your ineffective/obsolete skull into your brain is overwhelming. Physicists have concluded that the bits can be arrayed in a matrix of where each element's light frequency varies, and if you use 5G to provide more variance over time, users have reported their ocular sensors locking on and in some situations they perceive things inside the transceiver which cannot possibly fit, such as spaceships, other people engaged in copulation, and even feline actvity. These illusions can sometimes encourage the human nervous system to direct its sensors and attention at the transceiver's screen instead of where they're walking. And that causes health problems such as people falling down manholes, stepping out in front of cars, etc. Worse, if the 5G victim happens to be operating a motor vehicle, they can make mistakes with the machine's guidance and collide with other vehicles or persons (possibly ones that previously weren't even infected with 5G at all). These kinds of things have been found in some studies to cause bone fractures, bleed outs, tissue and organ trauma, or even worse.
Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as “platform utilities.”
These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform...
Apple's not mentioned explicitly, but there it is. Their store couldn't be owned by either their hardware or software business.
Let's go a little crazy, with a goofy thought experiment. Suppose this weren't America, and as a society we generally agreed that we don't care at all about civil rights. Suppose we also thought that people who want to secure their computer storage and communication from criminals, snoops, nosy neighbors and insurance companies were being drama queens. Your own government is the only adversary that people ever want to protect their stuff from (criminals and foreign powers aren't real-life threats), and protecting yourself from your government is.. oh, let's just say that alone is highly suggestive of criminal intent. Just pretend you agree with Wray. No, please, do it.
But I need you to pretend one more thing. Pretend it's still 2019 in this alternative universe, so the genie is already out of the bottle, just like it is in real life.
What would you do about it? What can you?
I think the only reasonable answer is: Jack Shit.
The time for this discussion was in the 1940s, at the very latest. And for whatever reason, even after the authoritarian leadership needed during that most colossal of fuckups in all human history (WW2), America did still value civil rights "enough" (even as we told blacks to get to the back of the bus), so for whatever reason, Wray's opinions became irrelevant, way back then. Wray was born 70 years too late for his silly religion to not be mocked. He might as well be bitching about horseless carriages.
Everyone eventually has their own proprietary-software-abandoned/fucked-me experience. Some peoples' experiences are delayed, some people have it quick. Some people lose $20, some lose $200, some lose $2000. Some people get attached and then angry at the loss; some people shrug and let it go. Some people need simply a larger quantity of lessons than others.
It took me a couple decades, from about 1980 to somewhere around 1999-2002, before I finally had enough, so I'm not going to mock the people who threw away $900, I guess. But I would ask 'em, "Is that enough yet? Or do you wanna go for another round of abuse?" Whatever floats your boat, man.
If we don't extend permanent copyright protection to the bible and derived works, then its authors will retroactively lose all their incentive to have created the work.
Actually, the goal of a speed trap is to make you worry that you could get caught speeding, so you slow down everywhere
Well, either slow down or else pay much better attention. Every time I've gotten a speeding ticket, it wasn't really because I was speeding. I speed all the time but haven't gotten a ticket in over a decade now. The reason I got tickets, was because I wasn't on my game and paying sufficient attention to detect the cop (and slow down).
If I see him in time and demonstrate that I saw him by slowing down, I've passed the test, so no ticket for me. I'm not the problem that society is trying to solve by having and occasionally enforcing speed limits.
If I fail the test by not reacting, gimme my ticket because I could have just as easily killed someone. I should have been watching the road ahead more carefully instead of daydreaming or whatever fuckwitted thing I was doing. I am the problem and tickets are a solution.
Of course, this isn't really the law. But it's how things actually work.
This is not entirely clear. They were pretty darn intelligent, one of the world leaders. But to say they were as smart as anatomically-modern humans would require evidence that, AFAIK, nobody has found. That's merely a reasonable guess.
And I'm not not even completely sure that older "anatomically-modern" humans were as smart as the current humans. The negative space of the hardware (i.e. the skull) looks about the same, but thoughts don't fossilize, so we're just making best guesses from whatever evidence they left behind. Personally, I'm suspicious about how art seems to only go back so far (about 40k years ago?), though it's probably just due to pigments not aging well. People back then sure as hell took their sweet time getting technology and an industrial base going. (Yes, I understand that it's hard to do that when you're pre-occupied with mere survival, and nobody has the leisure time to geek out.) Why no farming until about 12k ago? Why no cave are until about 40k-50k ago?
I'm not saying people weren't as intelligent as us back then, but don't tell me they were unless you can back it up. Craniums aren't enough to do it for me, though I'll admit they're probably the best we have to work with.
If it all comes down to people getting and spreading some software upgrade (i.e. culture as opposed to brains) and if that had an effect on what people were able to intellectually accomplish, I call that intelligence. And if Neanderthals didn't have it (I'll admit I'm piling a lot of "if"s on) then they weren't as intelligent.
This whole submission strains to avoid any examples of what it's talking about. Maybe if you could be a little more specific than asking us all to search for different things and attempt to find some case of "scientifically impossible." Did someone travel faster than light or something like that, and I just missed it? That would be a good case to talk about, if that's what you mean. Or was it something else?
Bots don't have rights, but people do. And if a bot is a person's agent, then that's that.
Asking the bot "are you someone's agent?" is a totally fair question, though. And if it doesn't/can't answer the question, then perhaps there really isn't someone there.
Though you're totally right about getting spied upon, it wasn't a walled garden. Chromecast was open enough that you could really use your way, instead of their way. Your own UI, your own controller, your own music storage. It doesn't lock you into anything, other than having to have some Android device around somewhere, for the initial installation. And after that, you don't even need Android if you don't want it. So it's more like a weird Google brick column in your garden, than like being trapped inside walls like you get with the videogame-console-like situations (Sony, Apple, etc).
Not really a point in chrome cast audio devices except for legacy hardware. The people that want to cast to legacy hardware aren't buying them anymore, they already have the ones they need and they're legacy hardware is most likely going to die before their chrome cast audio.
Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but in my case this legacy hardware is decades old and it will continue to be used for decades, because it sounds fucking incredible and was built before the current trend of everything immediately falling apart after you buy it. It will almost certainly outlast the Chromecast. But..
the far more likely scenarios is simply that no one wants these things anymore.
..I think you're right about that too. I expect the Chromecast to last 5-10 years so it would be a long time before I bought another one, and I know not many people are doing this stuff.
It's unfortunate, though. The nice thing about the Chromecast is that it's so damn small and cheap (even if you cloned it using a Pi or something, it wouldn't be as small and cheap and elegant). It really was a great low-impact way to deliver music to an old stereo. Very high quality, different league than bluetooth. Chromecasts can decode FLAC so it really is CD quality all the way to the amp, if you're already storing your music that way.
And just in case not everyone really understands what you could do with a Chromecast: the protocol was apparently documented and open enough that we got the pychromecast library out it. So you could talk to these things and control them. Have mpd output to stream, have homeassistant watch for play events and tell the Chromecast to connect to the stream, and you're got top notch audio over wifi to high-end oldschool stereos. All without putting a "computer" in that room. I really can't overstate how well it works, for so little investment. AFAIK nobody else sells anything like that.
Alternatives?
One is to not use legacy equipment and just get a new amplified speaker with Chromecast built in. That's what we use on the back patio, with a boombox we carry back'n'forth. That's ok for that situation. But now I'm wondering if Chromecast-enabled boomboxes are still going to be available (why the fuck did I trust Google to not kill their product!? I know better than that, but for some reason I really thought they wouldn't abandon Chromecast), so if anything happens to that speaker, I worry I might be back to square one with the outdoor solution.
The other alternative is to use a "real computer." Reading the files over NFS and just run a cable from the computer's output to the amp, and it will obviously be every bit as good. So of course you can do that... in situations where you can do that, but that's going to be more than $30. That's probably what most Chromecasts will get replaced with. And of course once you add a real computer to that room, that adds to the things you can do in there.
All that said, it's also a proprietary device that I allowed onto my LAN!!! And it really does phone home, and I think the stream provided metadata, so it's probably telling Google what music I listen to, plus that I stream from my own server. So the spy angle is right too, which won't apply to having just another Ubuntu box hidden somewhere.
[Heh, just realized I keep calling them Chromecasts instead of Chromecast Audio. I sometimes forget there is (was?) a video version too.]
I'm not surprised to hear this and used to agree, but there was an apparently-obscure movie a few years ago that I had to have called to my attention, and now I'll pass that favor onto you: watch Edge of Tomorrow. For two hours, anyone can stop hating Tom Cruise. And you can always go back after the movie is over.
Once again, the wrench cartoon is unironically used in a situation where it actually indicates that the citizen ends up being protected against the most common and concerning attacks.
Here is why a $5 wrench does not completely compromise the privacy given by cryptography: it is impossible to hit someone with a wrench without them knowing about it. In fact, you can't even show a wrench to someone purely for intimidation purposes, without them knowing about it.
Massive slurping on an internet backbone, using wrenches? Can't do it.
Secretly investigating someone by wrench-cracking their crypto without them at least being able to talk to a lawyer? Can't do it.
It's a technological measure, and it works. Crypto nerds have already beaten the wrench is most conceivable scenarios. The situations where the defense doesn't work? Doesn't matter, because those scenarios are someone's silly movie fantasy.
It's a good thing that customers always figure out the specifications prior to purchases. Of course, it's unfortunate that the vendor's product doesn't always measure up to those specifications, but post-sale maintenance might be able to repair the shortcomings.
If the public phone system is too insecure for a president to use, then it's probably too insecure for anyone else to use, too. Maybe it should be.. oh, I don't know.. fixed?
Does this allow someone to actually distribute a tool to enable breaking DRM for these purposes?
Nope. The Librarion of Congress does not have that power; they can mess with 1201(A)(1) but can't do anything about 1201(A)(2).
Thus: You can patch the software, but creating the patch is still illegal. Importing the patch is illegal. Trafficking in the patch or offering it to the public is still illegal. But if you magically have the patch ex nihilo (you didn't write the patch nor did you get it from someone else) then yes, you're allowed to use it.;-)
The LoC exemptions are virtually worthless and were not intended as a real concession for fair use. Anyone celebrating this stuff has been conned.
no one was ever going to honour it without being forced to which is why we need legislation.
So.. I suppose this is a good day to come clean and admit that I'm one of the people who thought (and said) DNT is basically a good idea. I still do think it's a good idea.. or rather, it was. And while I can see you probably disagree with me, you've also put your finger on how we might come together (but see below, because we still might not).
We had to ask, before we could justify making demands. DNT was a way of asking.
And yes, Microsoft undermined it so that if you ran MSIE, then your browser said you were asking, even though you hadn't actually asked. But really, how many people run MSIE? (Even 5 years ago.) How responsible is Microsoft for the strategy of asking, ultimately failing? Even as a DNT proponent, I can't really throw a lot of blame on them, and I think their conscious effort to kill DNT isn't really why it failed. It might have played a role, but the bigger reason that asking failed, is that we were asking one of the most wretched hives of scum and villainy in the entire history of human civilization: the modern ad industry.
Anyway, though, asking did fail. But I'm glad we tried. Check off that box. We can now say we asked nicely and our request was ignored. Escalating the conflict is no longer unreasonable, and we have something to point to the next time the adversary says "trust us."
On the other side of the coin, though, there are some basic principles that I hope we protect, and I know these things are at risk, and it's one of the reasons I had hoped that maybe, just maybe, DNT would have worked:
I don't think a government should be able to tell people what they're allowed to do internally on their own computers and their own storage. If you don't like that people remember all the information that you constantly go out of your way to give them, then stop sending it! It's the sender's responsibility, not the receiver's.
I hope that any legislative approach is somehow based on the initial acquisition or later exchange of the information, but does not restrict in any way that people are allowed to remember what you tell them, think about it, and act upon their thoughts. And my computer is my agent, so I want this freedom from thoughtcrime extended to my computer. Now, you can regulate me passing the information to other people! I think we all knew that, eventually, every person (yes, you, reader) is going to lose some speech rights in the conflict of the people vs the ad industry (though they're commercial speech rights, so this is hardly unprecedented). But I'd rather we stick to limiting our freedom of speech, before we even consider limiting freedom of thought. And yes, that's how high I really think the stakes are and I don't think I'm overdramatizing it. This has all the potential to lead to DMCA-level of evil. (Another law where I'm not interacting with anyone else, but somehow the government wants to limit what I can internally do on my own computer.)
If you willingly send the info to me, I get to have it. And whatever laws you pass to prevent this, will be selectively enforced because you can't tell what someone is internally doing until you already violate their privacy by crawling into their brain/computer. As if we need more selectively-enforced laws. *sigh*
Regulate the exchange of information between different entities. And possibly regulate (if you must) the policies that result in the info being sent in the first place. Cross-domain requests should be disabled by default; sorry CDN users. Sorry, guy who loads jquery from somewhere else. I'm shocked that this might have to become law, but for whatever fucking reasons, our browsers still do a thing that we all know is bad. That should have been addressed before we even tried DNT.
You know nothing about the USA. We actually love watching nudity. We just don't want other Americans to see nudity. Those people can't control themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think technological progress should be slowed down by prohibition to repair laws.
Then you need to catch up on all the research. What people are finding is that with the high frequencies 5G uses, and all the information states within each signal element, the sheer number of bits being beamed right through your ineffective/obsolete skull into your brain is overwhelming. Physicists have concluded that the bits can be arrayed in a matrix of where each element's light frequency varies, and if you use 5G to provide more variance over time, users have reported their ocular sensors locking on and in some situations they perceive things inside the transceiver which cannot possibly fit, such as spaceships, other people engaged in copulation, and even feline actvity. These illusions can sometimes encourage the human nervous system to direct its sensors and attention at the transceiver's screen instead of where they're walking. And that causes health problems such as people falling down manholes, stepping out in front of cars, etc. Worse, if the 5G victim happens to be operating a motor vehicle, they can make mistakes with the machine's guidance and collide with other vehicles or persons (possibly ones that previously weren't even infected with 5G at all). These kinds of things have been found in some studies to cause bone fractures, bleed outs, tissue and organ trauma, or even worse.
We'll eventually find out Trump is selling duct-taped underage sex slaves out of a pizza restaurant.
Apple's not mentioned explicitly, but there it is. Their store couldn't be owned by either their hardware or software business.
Let's go a little crazy, with a goofy thought experiment. Suppose this weren't America, and as a society we generally agreed that we don't care at all about civil rights. Suppose we also thought that people who want to secure their computer storage and communication from criminals, snoops, nosy neighbors and insurance companies were being drama queens. Your own government is the only adversary that people ever want to protect their stuff from (criminals and foreign powers aren't real-life threats), and protecting yourself from your government is .. oh, let's just say that alone is highly suggestive of criminal intent. Just pretend you agree with Wray. No, please, do it.
But I need you to pretend one more thing. Pretend it's still 2019 in this alternative universe, so the genie is already out of the bottle, just like it is in real life.
What would you do about it? What can you?
I think the only reasonable answer is: Jack Shit.
The time for this discussion was in the 1940s, at the very latest. And for whatever reason, even after the authoritarian leadership needed during that most colossal of fuckups in all human history (WW2), America did still value civil rights "enough" (even as we told blacks to get to the back of the bus), so for whatever reason, Wray's opinions became irrelevant, way back then. Wray was born 70 years too late for his silly religion to not be mocked. He might as well be bitching about horseless carriages.
And that's the case even if you agree with him.
Everyone eventually has their own proprietary-software-abandoned/fucked-me experience. Some peoples' experiences are delayed, some people have it quick. Some people lose $20, some lose $200, some lose $2000. Some people get attached and then angry at the loss; some people shrug and let it go. Some people need simply a larger quantity of lessons than others.
It took me a couple decades, from about 1980 to somewhere around 1999-2002, before I finally had enough, so I'm not going to mock the people who threw away $900, I guess. But I would ask 'em, "Is that enough yet? Or do you wanna go for another round of abuse?" Whatever floats your boat, man.
If we don't extend permanent copyright protection to the bible and derived works, then its authors will retroactively lose all their incentive to have created the work.
Favorite player's leg injured? Get a refund.
Oooh, sorry, it was his elbow and you didn't buy any insurance against arm injuries. This is how we all learn to become smarter shoppers.
Well, either slow down or else pay much better attention. Every time I've gotten a speeding ticket, it wasn't really because I was speeding. I speed all the time but haven't gotten a ticket in over a decade now. The reason I got tickets, was because I wasn't on my game and paying sufficient attention to detect the cop (and slow down).
If I see him in time and demonstrate that I saw him by slowing down, I've passed the test, so no ticket for me. I'm not the problem that society is trying to solve by having and occasionally enforcing speed limits.
If I fail the test by not reacting, gimme my ticket because I could have just as easily killed someone. I should have been watching the road ahead more carefully instead of daydreaming or whatever fuckwitted thing I was doing. I am the problem and tickets are a solution.
Of course, this isn't really the law. But it's how things actually work.
This is not entirely clear. They were pretty darn intelligent, one of the world leaders. But to say they were as smart as anatomically-modern humans would require evidence that, AFAIK, nobody has found. That's merely a reasonable guess.
And I'm not not even completely sure that older "anatomically-modern" humans were as smart as the current humans. The negative space of the hardware (i.e. the skull) looks about the same, but thoughts don't fossilize, so we're just making best guesses from whatever evidence they left behind. Personally, I'm suspicious about how art seems to only go back so far (about 40k years ago?), though it's probably just due to pigments not aging well. People back then sure as hell took their sweet time getting technology and an industrial base going. (Yes, I understand that it's hard to do that when you're pre-occupied with mere survival, and nobody has the leisure time to geek out.) Why no farming until about 12k ago? Why no cave are until about 40k-50k ago?
I'm not saying people weren't as intelligent as us back then, but don't tell me they were unless you can back it up. Craniums aren't enough to do it for me, though I'll admit they're probably the best we have to work with.
If it all comes down to people getting and spreading some software upgrade (i.e. culture as opposed to brains) and if that had an effect on what people were able to intellectually accomplish, I call that intelligence. And if Neanderthals didn't have it (I'll admit I'm piling a lot of "if"s on) then they weren't as intelligent.
This whole submission strains to avoid any examples of what it's talking about. Maybe if you could be a little more specific than asking us all to search for different things and attempt to find some case of "scientifically impossible." Did someone travel faster than light or something like that, and I just missed it? That would be a good case to talk about, if that's what you mean. Or was it something else?
Bots don't have rights, but people do. And if a bot is a person's agent, then that's that.
Asking the bot "are you someone's agent?" is a totally fair question, though. And if it doesn't/can't answer the question, then perhaps there really isn't someone there.
Give credit where it's due. That wasn't close_wait's snark. He stole the joke from Putin.
Though you're totally right about getting spied upon, it wasn't a walled garden. Chromecast was open enough that you could really use your way, instead of their way. Your own UI, your own controller, your own music storage. It doesn't lock you into anything, other than having to have some Android device around somewhere, for the initial installation. And after that, you don't even need Android if you don't want it. So it's more like a weird Google brick column in your garden, than like being trapped inside walls like you get with the videogame-console-like situations (Sony, Apple, etc).
Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but in my case this legacy hardware is decades old and it will continue to be used for decades, because it sounds fucking incredible and was built before the current trend of everything immediately falling apart after you buy it. It will almost certainly outlast the Chromecast. But..
..I think you're right about that too. I expect the Chromecast to last 5-10 years so it would be a long time before I bought another one, and I know not many people are doing this stuff.
It's unfortunate, though. The nice thing about the Chromecast is that it's so damn small and cheap (even if you cloned it using a Pi or something, it wouldn't be as small and cheap and elegant). It really was a great low-impact way to deliver music to an old stereo. Very high quality, different league than bluetooth. Chromecasts can decode FLAC so it really is CD quality all the way to the amp, if you're already storing your music that way.
And just in case not everyone really understands what you could do with a Chromecast: the protocol was apparently documented and open enough that we got the pychromecast library out it. So you could talk to these things and control them. Have mpd output to stream, have homeassistant watch for play events and tell the Chromecast to connect to the stream, and you're got top notch audio over wifi to high-end oldschool stereos. All without putting a "computer" in that room. I really can't overstate how well it works, for so little investment. AFAIK nobody else sells anything like that.
Alternatives?
One is to not use legacy equipment and just get a new amplified speaker with Chromecast built in. That's what we use on the back patio, with a boombox we carry back'n'forth. That's ok for that situation. But now I'm wondering if Chromecast-enabled boomboxes are still going to be available (why the fuck did I trust Google to not kill their product!? I know better than that, but for some reason I really thought they wouldn't abandon Chromecast), so if anything happens to that speaker, I worry I might be back to square one with the outdoor solution.
The other alternative is to use a "real computer." Reading the files over NFS and just run a cable from the computer's output to the amp, and it will obviously be every bit as good. So of course you can do that ... in situations where you can do that, but that's going to be more than $30. That's probably what most Chromecasts will get replaced with. And of course once you add a real computer to that room, that adds to the things you can do in there.
All that said, it's also a proprietary device that I allowed onto my LAN!!! And it really does phone home, and I think the stream provided metadata, so it's probably telling Google what music I listen to, plus that I stream from my own server. So the spy angle is right too, which won't apply to having just another Ubuntu box hidden somewhere.
[Heh, just realized I keep calling them Chromecasts instead of Chromecast Audio. I sometimes forget there is (was?) a video version too.]
On the bright side, cars now cost only a fifth what they used to.
No, wait a minute. Hey, WTF?! Where did the other 80% go?
I'm not surprised to hear this and used to agree, but there was an apparently-obscure movie a few years ago that I had to have called to my attention, and now I'll pass that favor onto you: watch Edge of Tomorrow. For two hours, anyone can stop hating Tom Cruise. And you can always go back after the movie is over.
Once again, the wrench cartoon is unironically used in a situation where it actually indicates that the citizen ends up being protected against the most common and concerning attacks.
Here is why a $5 wrench does not completely compromise the privacy given by cryptography: it is impossible to hit someone with a wrench without them knowing about it. In fact, you can't even show a wrench to someone purely for intimidation purposes, without them knowing about it.
Massive slurping on an internet backbone, using wrenches? Can't do it.
Secretly investigating someone by wrench-cracking their crypto without them at least being able to talk to a lawyer? Can't do it.
It's a technological measure, and it works. Crypto nerds have already beaten the wrench is most conceivable scenarios. The situations where the defense doesn't work? Doesn't matter, because those scenarios are someone's silly movie fantasy.
Huh. So you're saying The Orville is just like ST:TNG (as well as quite a few ST:TOS episodes)? Maybe I should give it another chance.
It's a good thing that customers always figure out the specifications prior to purchases. Of course, it's unfortunate that the vendor's product doesn't always measure up to those specifications, but post-sale maintenance might be able to repair the shortcomings.
If the public phone system is too insecure for a president to use, then it's probably too insecure for anyone else to use, too. Maybe it should be .. oh, I don't know .. fixed?
Nope. The Librarion of Congress does not have that power; they can mess with 1201(A)(1) but can't do anything about 1201(A)(2).
Thus: You can patch the software, but creating the patch is still illegal. Importing the patch is illegal. Trafficking in the patch or offering it to the public is still illegal. But if you magically have the patch ex nihilo (you didn't write the patch nor did you get it from someone else) then yes, you're allowed to use it. ;-)
The LoC exemptions are virtually worthless and were not intended as a real concession for fair use. Anyone celebrating this stuff has been conned.
So.. I suppose this is a good day to come clean and admit that I'm one of the people who thought (and said) DNT is basically a good idea. I still do think it's a good idea .. or rather, it was. And while I can see you probably disagree with me, you've also put your finger on how we might come together (but see below, because we still might not).
We had to ask, before we could justify making demands. DNT was a way of asking.
And yes, Microsoft undermined it so that if you ran MSIE, then your browser said you were asking, even though you hadn't actually asked. But really, how many people run MSIE? (Even 5 years ago.) How responsible is Microsoft for the strategy of asking, ultimately failing? Even as a DNT proponent, I can't really throw a lot of blame on them, and I think their conscious effort to kill DNT isn't really why it failed. It might have played a role, but the bigger reason that asking failed, is that we were asking one of the most wretched hives of scum and villainy in the entire history of human civilization: the modern ad industry.
Anyway, though, asking did fail. But I'm glad we tried. Check off that box. We can now say we asked nicely and our request was ignored. Escalating the conflict is no longer unreasonable, and we have something to point to the next time the adversary says "trust us."
On the other side of the coin, though, there are some basic principles that I hope we protect, and I know these things are at risk, and it's one of the reasons I had hoped that maybe, just maybe, DNT would have worked:
I don't think a government should be able to tell people what they're allowed to do internally on their own computers and their own storage. If you don't like that people remember all the information that you constantly go out of your way to give them, then stop sending it! It's the sender's responsibility, not the receiver's.
I hope that any legislative approach is somehow based on the initial acquisition or later exchange of the information, but does not restrict in any way that people are allowed to remember what you tell them, think about it, and act upon their thoughts. And my computer is my agent, so I want this freedom from thoughtcrime extended to my computer. Now, you can regulate me passing the information to other people! I think we all knew that, eventually, every person (yes, you, reader) is going to lose some speech rights in the conflict of the people vs the ad industry (though they're commercial speech rights, so this is hardly unprecedented). But I'd rather we stick to limiting our freedom of speech, before we even consider limiting freedom of thought. And yes, that's how high I really think the stakes are and I don't think I'm overdramatizing it. This has all the potential to lead to DMCA-level of evil. (Another law where I'm not interacting with anyone else, but somehow the government wants to limit what I can internally do on my own computer.)
If you willingly send the info to me, I get to have it. And whatever laws you pass to prevent this, will be selectively enforced because you can't tell what someone is internally doing until you already violate their privacy by crawling into their brain/computer. As if we need more selectively-enforced laws. *sigh*
Regulate the exchange of information between different entities. And possibly regulate (if you must) the policies that result in the info being sent in the first place. Cross-domain requests should be disabled by default; sorry CDN users. Sorry, guy who loads jquery from somewhere else. I'm shocked that this might have to become law, but for whatever fucking reasons, our browsers still do a thing that we all know is bad. That should have been addressed before we even tried DNT.
You know nothing about the USA. We actually love watching nudity. We just don't want other Americans to see nudity. Those people can't control themselves.
Or it'll be like watching Clue (1985). You'll want to see all the endings.