Agreed; Kinthelt's post was not flamebait (in fact, I think he very well distilled what the court's ruling was) and it's almost embarrassing to have participated in a thread that gets this kind of stupid moderation.
As a conservative, freedom of expression means freedom from government intervention into my everyday life. I do not need government regulation on what TV I choose to watch, what food I wish to eat, and how I wish to use the Internet.
The answer to every problem is *not* more laws and regulation. This should be an absolute last resort, and personally I do not believe we are there yet.
So you think that the limited liability protection (i.e. unaccountability to market forces) that society has (though government) given to the corporations that provide these things, the easements phone and cable companies receive to run wires through private property, the monopoly granted by the FCC so that only particular parties are allowed to use certain parts of the radio spectrum, the existing regulations for telecommunications services and information services, copyright laws, the existing truth-in-advertising laws, he existing campaign finance laws, and a shitload of other things that I can't even imagine much less describe.. these laws and uses of government power have happened prematurely? The time has not yet come for us to abandon a free market approach to liability, a free market approach to securing rights to run cabling, and a free market approach to radio broadcasting, a free marker approach to publishing, and so on?
Fair enough! It can be a consistent and logical position. But you're a few centuries behind the current debate.
Nobody is suggesting getting government involved in these things; they are suggesting changing government's already neck-deep involvement. You already watch TV, eat food, and use the internet in a manner that is heavily shaped by government. The current debate is about altering the tit-for-tat arrangement, whereby people have already used government to give up certain freedoms for the public good. Some people think altering it may make things better, and some think it may be worse. None of them are pretending that there aren't already tens of thousands of pages of laws in play, though.
If your approach is to repeal all the existing laws, to go back to before FCC regulation, before the granting of corporate charters, etc, go ahead and describe your vision. I think wireless is likely to suck under your system, but I've never been a big fan of wireless anyway, and maybe you know something I don't. I will hear you out. You know, maybe having wireless suck more is worth it to protect our freedom. Maybe. I'll listen.
If your approach is that the FCC just happens to be exactly perfect as of today, that the conditions under which corporate charters are granted happens to be exactly perfect, and that government interference with private property rights happens to have the exactly perfect balance -- that generations of politicians were elected by a perfect system to represent the interests of perfectly wise and informed voters, used a perfect process to enact perfect legislation that is founded upon just the right principles rather than compromises or corruption, and resulted in just the the right public policies -- then I don't believe it. This is the first time I have ever heard anyone suggest the government got everything right.
But nevertheless, if that's your position, then it's pretty silly to refer to yourself as a conservative, don't you think? How many commies wrote all the laws that you're thumbing like a bible?;-)
Once, just once, I want to see a so-called conservative, who always just happens to be arguing against some particular regulation, also to simultaneously argue for the repeal of some weird-ass perk that the special interests have obtained at the public's expense via government expansion. Please, with your "let them use their network however they want" proposal, also include a proposal that they have to negotiate with me to get rights to run cables through my yard or beam si
the lawsuit is over a third-party program that knowingly and intentionally bypasses the security protection scheme in a network client. Hell, I'm fairly sure any other program that does something like this would be considered malware!
But software designed and intended to serve the interests of the user, can't ever possibly be malware. Oh wait, I see what you did there.. very clever. You used the word "security" without saying whose goals you were talking about. Security is subjective, and when people have conflicting interests (as is usually the case whenever proprietary software is involved) then once party's security is another party's insecurity.
Honestly, I don't know why Blizzard didn't just sue Glider over intent to induce contract violations (whatever the legal term is for that).
They did (that's the tortuous interference part of the case) but decided to use everything they thought might stick.
WoW put safeguards up (via Warden) to prevent unauthorized access to this content.
But that's the point. Maybe we disagree what the purpose of the act was?
Preventing "access" for reasons completely unrelated to trying to prevent copyright infringement, was one of the radical new things DMCA did which wasn't part of the naive/surface interpretation that I stated. DMCA was described to laymen as giving copyright holders new ways, useful in the "digital age," to fight or prevent infringement, rather than giving them completely new types of powers (and conversely, creating totally new prohibitions for the public which aren't related to fighting copyright infringement).
Of course, one of the core things about this decision, is that it rejects the need for there being anything related to copyright infringement, for a DMCA violation to apply. This court would have ruled opposite to how the garage door opener case's court would have ruled, whereas that court probably would have only said a DMCA violation happened, only if the bot was did things like help people capture the "dynamical nonliteral elements" of the game so that people could sell WoW experience movies (presumably with the "literal" elements removed, since good old' fashioned copyright would already prohibit that).
They're taking the position (and they explain it) that DMCA really was intended to be as evil as it reads, isn't necessarily intended to merely make copyright infringement harder at the expense of fair use, and therefore should be applied more aggressively. I'm not saying that's a wrong decision, but it does go against what is often billed as the original purpose of DMCA, and therefore gives the people another good reason to repeal it. They're upholding the "access" prohibitions of DMCA, saying that nobody gives a fuck whether or not anyone's copyright is being violated or anyone is losing money or incentive to create works is effected -- nobody gives a fuck about the purpose and spirit of copyright; Congress prohibited access and tools that help you access, and if you don't like it: tough shit, write your Congressman.
And we should.
the players are licensees (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody since they pay a subscription)
I think that would be a huge surprise to most people, and that most of them think they're paying a subscription for a service, rather than a "dynamic nonliteral element" playback license.
Um, go on. What was the original spirit of the act?
The cynical view was that it was intended to prevent anything that anyone doesn't like. In that respect, you're right.
The naive/front purpose of the act was that it was intended to prevent copyright infringement, by making prohibiting some of the prerequisites to copyright infringement (as well as prohibiting the prerequisites to many fair uses as well, but you can't make an omelet without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others). In that respect, this application of DMCA has nothing to do with its original purpose.
Actually any kind of undercover work ideally should go undetected. Turning off a computer doesn't at all.
Yes, turning it off is very detectable. What's funny here is that Intel is telling everyone up front, that this CPU has a covert/side channel. That's what they're admitting. They're also telling everyone that the one thing it does, is turn it off. Both of these statements are plausible. Are both of these statements complete?
What else does this covert or side channel enable?
More significant is that (according to Snopes) both of Hawaii's major newspapers printed a matching birth announcement in the year and month in question.
That only shows the liberal elite media's diabolical long-range planning! Khrushchev was still doing 5 year plans but the Amerikan left was already on a 50 year plan!!!!!11
it's been used to that affect for decades. You may be right in that the federal judiciary at this point is far too corrupt to ever enforce the law, but that is a different issue entirely
Decades are important, though. You have lived your whole life under this system. The judiciary is corrupt? Where were the presidents who opposed this? Where was the congress that opposed this? Where were The People who opposed it? The entire society is corrupt. How can you hang all this on a corrupt judiciary, when every single living person in the judiciary inherited it on the day they were born, decades before they got jobs as judges?
What were they supposed to do? On the day they got appointed, should they have said, "Fuck all the precedents, I have this piece of paper here called the constitution, and this is what is says."? Will ANYONE back up someone who does this? The two parties who completely dominate government are completely opposed to this and have the support of 99% of the voters. I don't like the situation but you gotta give anyone dealing with this legacy problem a lot of slack. Calling them corrupt is silly.
IMHO the best thing to do is to pass new amendments, even if they are word-for-word identical to the original constitution (although it would probably be a good idea to reword them). Constitutionally overturn stupid SCOTUS decisions that were passed a century ago, reopening public debate on whether or not limited government is a good idea (make the people who are alive today, REALLY OWN IT rather than be heirs to dogma), and so on. Get the people to say it's a good idea or a bad idea, because right now with the public's support, it's just ink on a page.
When I buy a plane ticket I don't get to control the plane, and it's better that way.
If you're the kind of person who paid twenty million dollars expecting to only get a plane ticket, maybe you're right that you shouldn't be in control. Of anything.
..it better trust the machine's owner completely, or else these machines are just Trojan Horses. If the machine doesn't ultimately answer to you, then who does it answer to? Someone who isn't you, that's who.
The definition the excused juror printed out underwent no such review, and wasn't going to appear in the trial record. So what would happen if it was wrong?
I'm not sure that restricting the jurors will really address that concern. You talk about what jurors learn (or to be fair, what legal technicalities they think they learn) during the trial, but what about before the trial?
A juror can look up "burden of proof" from an arbitrary source when he first gets the jury summons ("ooh, I'm gonna be on a jury! I better start reading up on how to do this!") or form an opinion based on watching lawyer TV shows over the course of 10 years, or from taking seriously every slashdot post he's ever read that starts with the words "IANAL, but..."
If the jury's decision weren't going to be based on a near-infinitely diverse variety of opinions, knowledge, values, cultures, etc that are totally outside the judge's instructions and the trial record reviewable by appeals, then we wouldn't bother to have juries. The whole point of juries is that the government doesn't get to make the rules and the jury's thinking can't be at all codified, with all the advantages ("yay, the citizens have a democratic check on the powers of courts!") and disadvantages ("oh no, mob rule!") that injects into the system.
If people are convinced this is too dangerous to the cause of justice, then let them (in USA) repeal the 7th Amendment. But let's not pretend that if only judges can get juries to act properly during the trial, that the jury's instructions and the trial record will be complete. They're not, and they never were.
In the end, and really no matter what political system people adopt, justice is our (We The People) power, whether directly by jurors or indirectly by judges appointed by legislative bodies whose members were elected after they raised enough money (by doing Cthulhu-knows-what) to buy enough advertising to convince people who eat at McDonalds that they're name sounded good during the primary that 20% of the population bothered to vote in. And what actually happened during the trial isn't part of any reviewable record; it's in the mind of some guy who entertained fleeting thoughts as he dipped his McNugget into "hot and spicy" mustard sauce. That guy ends up making the decision, either way, and the appeals court won't be able to point at some point in his thinking process and say he made an error. And I'm not saying it's pointless to have a trial record and appeals, just that let's not kid ourselves that this is some inviolate sacrosanct thing that is suddenly being threatened by cellphones.
Instead of worrying about what some idiot looks up on Google, let's persuade people to think about justice and the world they want to live in. That's all we really can do, anyway, so get to work on it instead of running around scared of the mob.
Except the first amendment only applies to the government. If a company wants to impend your speech they can.
Many people believe feel this denial of service was caused by government.Paypal has admitted it. I don't know if Mastercard and VISA have admitted it yet, but it's not hard to guess. We're not talking about private action.
If I own the printing press which you rent to print things I consider obnoxious, and then I decide I don't want to be associated with your bullshit anymore and stop letting you use my printing press, then you're right, there's nothing to suggest the government has overstepped its constitutional limits.
If I own the printing press which you rent to print things the government considers obnoxious, so they send goons over to point a gun at my head and explain that I will not let you use my printing press anymore, then the government has overstepped its constitutional limits. And that's what happened here, assuming money==speech.
I had the same problem. I didn't understand WTF the summary was saying, so I had to RTFA.
Hey, wait a minute. googleblog.blogspot.com is gaming the system to get more pageviews, by getting people to post bad summaries to Slashdot!
Slashdot's editorbot should use the coherency engine on summaries, and if the summary doesn't make sense or has too much non-humorous ambiguity, it should penalize the linked articles.
Anyone got a more direct source for this "prosecutor's application?" This is fascinating and believable, but it is a quote by Assange's lawyer, who might be (hey, it's his job) twisting the truth a little.
What Wikileaks needs to do is focus on stuff like exposing Bank of America..... If I had his ear, I'd tell him to go after Goldman Sachs.
Send him the documents.
He's a publisher, not an investigative journalist.
You're acting like Assange is spending all his time trying to break into government computers to steal information that needs to be public. Uh, I don't think he does that. I think what he does, is run wikileaks and try to protect its sources. Wikileaks "focuses" on the topics that it does, because information about those topics is what it has.
Go for the mother load of information from them.
That's not something for you to ask of Assange; it's something for him to ask of you.
Most people who mod their XBoxes do so in order to play pirate games.
If this was the primary purpose of the mods then he's committed a crime
If that's what this trial was about, they should have charged him with contributory copyright infringement.
Instead they blew off all the concerns about game piracy, and charged him with two bullshit counts of DMCA violations, in an attempt to widen the application of DMCA beyond its original wording. This is about prohibiting people maintaining their own equipment, not copyright. RTFA, it says DMCA. The government is doing something very slimy here.
To go back to the gas meter analogy, suppose it were against the law to steal gas. (Analogy to copyright.) Suppose it was also against the law to make curved pipes that happen to be well suited for going around gas meters (analogy to DMCA). Suppose you modify boilers to have two gas inputs (analogy to what this guy is alleged to have been doing). Instead of prosecuting you for helping people steal gas, they're claiming you were making curved pipes. (Except he didn't do that, and they're not putting forth any evidence that he did.) They're hoping the court will get confused and conflate curved pipes and double-input boilers (because there's overlap in the kinds of people who use those things) in the hopes of expanding the prohibition against making curved pipes, into a prohibition against people doing any sort of work on boilers. Fuck that.
BTW, back to mushdot's comment:
If you modded the boiler so that it fully or semi bypassed the gas meter in order to provide cheap/free heating then the boiler manufacturer and gas companies would complain.
Fuck the boiler manufacturer in that instance. They have no legitimate grounds to complain, but are doing so because they also happen to be be the gas company and they don't want to open the door to people eventually having boilers that can let them switch over to other gas companies, even if all the boilers are still using their gas right now. And that's what this case is about: the government wants to serve the interests of the boiler manufacturer.
By getting the government to use DMCA in this case, Microsoft is showing that they're afraid of (example; feel free to think up others) someone using a homebrew application to access network services from an XBox instead of people signing up for an XBox Live account. Microsoft should be allowed to fight game piracy but we (society) shouldn't be helping them prevent legitimate competition, or helping to build DMCA precedents that prevent competition on a much wider scale than mere XBoxes. This case is fucked up.
Actually, this would be the proper time for the defense to prove that he did not in fact break the law
This is one time that I agree. If you actually read the DMCA, there isn't any part of it that applies to the situation. Modifying a player that is already capable, on its own, of accessing the work protected by the tech measure, simply isn't an act of making/selling a device that circumvents tech measures that control access to the work. There just doesn't seem to be any part of DMCA as written, that prohibits this sort of thing. All the jury has to do is apply the law that Congress wrote, rather than bad precedents, and it'll be an innocent verdict.
If the industry buys a new law to amend DMCA to prohibit this sort of thing, then I'll start to disagree with you, and say the people should uphold fairness. You say that thinking about fairness is what legislatures and supreme courts do, and that is a noble thing for us to strive to get our governments to do. Yes, it is our responsibility to some day elect legislatures that think about fairness, and if the law isn't fair, then it's our fault.. But if a person does not believe the public has successfully done that yet, then from their point of view, thinking about fairness has not yet happened at any point in the process, so when it's their turn to be on a jury, that is last chance for fairness to play any role in the system. If Congress didn't worry about fairness, then jurors are the only place fairness can be considered before an innocent person is harmed by government force for no good reason. If you're a juror and you don't think the lawmakers have tried to be fair, then you must nullify.
And let's remember, this is DMCA we're talking about here. Go ahead and just try to make a case that congress and the courts even paid lip service to fairness. It's one thing for a racist to disagree with a legislature that insists a black man be allowed to vote. He might wish the legislature hadn't done that and disagree that they should have. But deep down he knows that at least they did that due to public pressure and a shitload of people demanding to be treated like people. Fairness is the whole point of civil rights laws, and a desire to not let fairness go too far, is the "reason" someone would nullify such laws. You can't compare this type of situation to how DMCA got passed. The section 1201 prohibitions are pure bullshit.
Let me try another tack: if nullification has been used for injustice, does that mean it shouldn't be used for justice? A juror can't blow off his responsibility just because some people in the past have fucked it up.
The domain registrations will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers from taking over a brand.
Have to show? Have to show to whom? It sounds like they already have a centralized authority.
If you are so concerned about "preventing scammers from taking over brands" then you're going to have some mechanism for dealing with scammers. And if that mechanism exists, then governments probably can use it to deal with you.
And also, frankly, the narrow focus on one TLD, "p2p" hints that these guys aren't thinking very big.
I think creating a new sabotage/coercion resistant DNS is a worthy goal. Remember that COICA and the recent seizures are just another straw on the camel's back, in a long history of governments interfering with DNS, people disagreeing with ICANN policies, and whatnot. The need isn't going away until it gets solved. But these particular guys have already taken at least 1 step in the wrong direction. That one line about registration shows that protecting freedom of expression isn't their top priority, but if it's not the top priority, then the system won't solve the problem people have with ICANN's DNS.
Smoking the malt is a neat idea, so I'm not going to discount that, but it's not the only option on the table. I won a Maple Bacon Cider competition (!), partly due to the bacon flavor I got into my hard cider, and did it by making bacon extract. Fry up some bacon, eat it, and put the leftover grease in just a little bit of vodka. Steep and occasionally swirl for a few days, and you will end up with the most deliciously-smelling vodka you've ever experienced. Strain it to remove the grease and add it to your final product anytime after primary fermentation.
You don't press the like button? Dude, by the time you have seen the like button, you have already interacted with Facebook. Whatever it was that you wanted to avoid by not pressing the button, you probably didn't avoid.
They're tracking him because his user-agent downloads stuff from facebook every time it sees an iframe or script or img tag that points to flickr. Thus, it can do anything a doubleclick "tracking pixel" or "web bug" can do. And while that may be limited, it certainly isn't particularly limited by the fact that he doesn't have a facebook account.
People didn't (as far as they knew;-) have doubleclick "accounts" either, but there was still widespread loathing, until eventually everyone (and by "everyone" I really mean "a tiny fraction of the population") told their local dns to return their localhost whenever it needed to resolve the doubleclick name, or started using more sophisticated browser or proxy based blockers, or whatever. Then once those people did it, they stopped bitching, so laymen stopped hearing that there was a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed; Kinthelt's post was not flamebait (in fact, I think he very well distilled what the court's ruling was) and it's almost embarrassing to have participated in a thread that gets this kind of stupid moderation.
As a conservative, freedom of expression means freedom from government intervention into my everyday life. I do not need government regulation on what TV I choose to watch, what food I wish to eat, and how I wish to use the Internet.
The answer to every problem is *not* more laws and regulation. This should be an absolute last resort, and personally I do not believe we are there yet.
So you think that the limited liability protection (i.e. unaccountability to market forces) that society has (though government) given to the corporations that provide these things, the easements phone and cable companies receive to run wires through private property, the monopoly granted by the FCC so that only particular parties are allowed to use certain parts of the radio spectrum, the existing regulations for telecommunications services and information services, copyright laws, the existing truth-in-advertising laws, he existing campaign finance laws, and a shitload of other things that I can't even imagine much less describe .. these laws and uses of government power have happened prematurely? The time has not yet come for us to abandon a free market approach to liability, a free market approach to securing rights to run cabling, and a free market approach to radio broadcasting, a free marker approach to publishing, and so on?
Fair enough! It can be a consistent and logical position. But you're a few centuries behind the current debate.
Nobody is suggesting getting government involved in these things; they are suggesting changing government's already neck-deep involvement. You already watch TV, eat food, and use the internet in a manner that is heavily shaped by government. The current debate is about altering the tit-for-tat arrangement, whereby people have already used government to give up certain freedoms for the public good. Some people think altering it may make things better, and some think it may be worse. None of them are pretending that there aren't already tens of thousands of pages of laws in play, though.
If your approach is to repeal all the existing laws, to go back to before FCC regulation, before the granting of corporate charters, etc, go ahead and describe your vision. I think wireless is likely to suck under your system, but I've never been a big fan of wireless anyway, and maybe you know something I don't. I will hear you out. You know, maybe having wireless suck more is worth it to protect our freedom. Maybe. I'll listen.
If your approach is that the FCC just happens to be exactly perfect as of today, that the conditions under which corporate charters are granted happens to be exactly perfect, and that government interference with private property rights happens to have the exactly perfect balance -- that generations of politicians were elected by a perfect system to represent the interests of perfectly wise and informed voters, used a perfect process to enact perfect legislation that is founded upon just the right principles rather than compromises or corruption, and resulted in just the the right public policies -- then I don't believe it. This is the first time I have ever heard anyone suggest the government got everything right.
But nevertheless, if that's your position, then it's pretty silly to refer to yourself as a conservative, don't you think? How many commies wrote all the laws that you're thumbing like a bible? ;-)
Once, just once, I want to see a so-called conservative, who always just happens to be arguing against some particular regulation, also to simultaneously argue for the repeal of some weird-ass perk that the special interests have obtained at the public's expense via government expansion. Please, with your "let them use their network however they want" proposal, also include a proposal that they have to negotiate with me to get rights to run cables through my yard or beam si
But software designed and intended to serve the interests of the user, can't ever possibly be malware. Oh wait, I see what you did there.. very clever. You used the word "security" without saying whose goals you were talking about. Security is subjective, and when people have conflicting interests (as is usually the case whenever proprietary software is involved) then once party's security is another party's insecurity.
They did (that's the tortuous interference part of the case) but decided to use everything they thought might stick.
But that's the point. Maybe we disagree what the purpose of the act was?
Preventing "access" for reasons completely unrelated to trying to prevent copyright infringement, was one of the radical new things DMCA did which wasn't part of the naive/surface interpretation that I stated. DMCA was described to laymen as giving copyright holders new ways, useful in the "digital age," to fight or prevent infringement, rather than giving them completely new types of powers (and conversely, creating totally new prohibitions for the public which aren't related to fighting copyright infringement).
Of course, one of the core things about this decision, is that it rejects the need for there being anything related to copyright infringement, for a DMCA violation to apply. This court would have ruled opposite to how the garage door opener case's court would have ruled, whereas that court probably would have only said a DMCA violation happened, only if the bot was did things like help people capture the "dynamical nonliteral elements" of the game so that people could sell WoW experience movies (presumably with the "literal" elements removed, since good old' fashioned copyright would already prohibit that).
They're taking the position (and they explain it) that DMCA really was intended to be as evil as it reads, isn't necessarily intended to merely make copyright infringement harder at the expense of fair use, and therefore should be applied more aggressively. I'm not saying that's a wrong decision, but it does go against what is often billed as the original purpose of DMCA, and therefore gives the people another good reason to repeal it. They're upholding the "access" prohibitions of DMCA, saying that nobody gives a fuck whether or not anyone's copyright is being violated or anyone is losing money or incentive to create works is effected -- nobody gives a fuck about the purpose and spirit of copyright; Congress prohibited access and tools that help you access, and if you don't like it: tough shit, write your Congressman.
And we should.
I think that would be a huge surprise to most people, and that most of them think they're paying a subscription for a service, rather than a "dynamic nonliteral element" playback license.
Um, go on. What was the original spirit of the act?
The cynical view was that it was intended to prevent anything that anyone doesn't like. In that respect, you're right.
The naive/front purpose of the act was that it was intended to prevent copyright infringement, by making prohibiting some of the prerequisites to copyright infringement (as well as prohibiting the prerequisites to many fair uses as well, but you can't make an omelet without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others). In that respect, this application of DMCA has nothing to do with its original purpose.
With current technology, rubber hose cryptanalysis can't ever be used without at least one of the endpoints detecting it..
Yes, turning it off is very detectable. What's funny here is that Intel is telling everyone up front, that this CPU has a covert/side channel. That's what they're admitting. They're also telling everyone that the one thing it does, is turn it off. Both of these statements are plausible. Are both of these statements complete?
What else does this covert or side channel enable?
That only shows the liberal elite media's diabolical long-range planning! Khrushchev was still doing 5 year plans but the Amerikan left was already on a 50 year plan!!!!!11
If you don't read the paper, then you won't know they dug you up.
Yes they tend to, but the top 50 are almost all counter-examples to that tendency. It's the bottom 100000 that you should worry about.
Decades are important, though. You have lived your whole life under this system. The judiciary is corrupt? Where were the presidents who opposed this? Where was the congress that opposed this? Where were The People who opposed it? The entire society is corrupt. How can you hang all this on a corrupt judiciary, when every single living person in the judiciary inherited it on the day they were born, decades before they got jobs as judges?
What were they supposed to do? On the day they got appointed, should they have said, "Fuck all the precedents, I have this piece of paper here called the constitution, and this is what is says."? Will ANYONE back up someone who does this? The two parties who completely dominate government are completely opposed to this and have the support of 99% of the voters. I don't like the situation but you gotta give anyone dealing with this legacy problem a lot of slack. Calling them corrupt is silly.
IMHO the best thing to do is to pass new amendments, even if they are word-for-word identical to the original constitution (although it would probably be a good idea to reword them). Constitutionally overturn stupid SCOTUS decisions that were passed a century ago, reopening public debate on whether or not limited government is a good idea (make the people who are alive today, REALLY OWN IT rather than be heirs to dogma), and so on. Get the people to say it's a good idea or a bad idea, because right now with the public's support, it's just ink on a page.
If you're the kind of person who paid twenty million dollars expecting to only get a plane ticket, maybe you're right that you shouldn't be in control. Of anything.
..it better trust the machine's owner completely, or else these machines are just Trojan Horses. If the machine doesn't ultimately answer to you, then who does it answer to? Someone who isn't you, that's who.
I'm not sure that restricting the jurors will really address that concern. You talk about what jurors learn (or to be fair, what legal technicalities they think they learn) during the trial, but what about before the trial?
A juror can look up "burden of proof" from an arbitrary source when he first gets the jury summons ("ooh, I'm gonna be on a jury! I better start reading up on how to do this!") or form an opinion based on watching lawyer TV shows over the course of 10 years, or from taking seriously every slashdot post he's ever read that starts with the words "IANAL, but..."
If the jury's decision weren't going to be based on a near-infinitely diverse variety of opinions, knowledge, values, cultures, etc that are totally outside the judge's instructions and the trial record reviewable by appeals, then we wouldn't bother to have juries. The whole point of juries is that the government doesn't get to make the rules and the jury's thinking can't be at all codified, with all the advantages ("yay, the citizens have a democratic check on the powers of courts!") and disadvantages ("oh no, mob rule!") that injects into the system.
If people are convinced this is too dangerous to the cause of justice, then let them (in USA) repeal the 7th Amendment. But let's not pretend that if only judges can get juries to act properly during the trial, that the jury's instructions and the trial record will be complete. They're not, and they never were.
In the end, and really no matter what political system people adopt, justice is our (We The People) power, whether directly by jurors or indirectly by judges appointed by legislative bodies whose members were elected after they raised enough money (by doing Cthulhu-knows-what) to buy enough advertising to convince people who eat at McDonalds that they're name sounded good during the primary that 20% of the population bothered to vote in. And what actually happened during the trial isn't part of any reviewable record; it's in the mind of some guy who entertained fleeting thoughts as he dipped his McNugget into "hot and spicy" mustard sauce. That guy ends up making the decision, either way, and the appeals court won't be able to point at some point in his thinking process and say he made an error. And I'm not saying it's pointless to have a trial record and appeals, just that let's not kid ourselves that this is some inviolate sacrosanct thing that is suddenly being threatened by cellphones.
Instead of worrying about what some idiot looks up on Google, let's persuade people to think about justice and the world they want to live in. That's all we really can do, anyway, so get to work on it instead of running around scared of the mob.
Many people believe feel this denial of service was caused by government. Paypal has admitted it. I don't know if Mastercard and VISA have admitted it yet, but it's not hard to guess. We're not talking about private action.
If I own the printing press which you rent to print things I consider obnoxious, and then I decide I don't want to be associated with your bullshit anymore and stop letting you use my printing press, then you're right, there's nothing to suggest the government has overstepped its constitutional limits.
If I own the printing press which you rent to print things the government considers obnoxious, so they send goons over to point a gun at my head and explain that I will not let you use my printing press anymore, then the government has overstepped its constitutional limits. And that's what happened here, assuming money==speech.
I had the same problem. I didn't understand WTF the summary was saying, so I had to RTFA.
Hey, wait a minute. googleblog.blogspot.com is gaming the system to get more pageviews, by getting people to post bad summaries to Slashdot!
Slashdot's editorbot should use the coherency engine on summaries, and if the summary doesn't make sense or has too much non-humorous ambiguity, it should penalize the linked articles.
Anyone got a more direct source for this "prosecutor's application?" This is fascinating and believable, but it is a quote by Assange's lawyer, who might be (hey, it's his job) twisting the truth a little.
Send him the documents.
He's a publisher, not an investigative journalist.
You're acting like Assange is spending all his time trying to break into government computers to steal information that needs to be public. Uh, I don't think he does that. I think what he does, is run wikileaks and try to protect its sources. Wikileaks "focuses" on the topics that it does, because information about those topics is what it has.
That's not something for you to ask of Assange; it's something for him to ask of you.
If that's what this trial was about, they should have charged him with contributory copyright infringement.
Instead they blew off all the concerns about game piracy, and charged him with two bullshit counts of DMCA violations, in an attempt to widen the application of DMCA beyond its original wording. This is about prohibiting people maintaining their own equipment, not copyright. RTFA, it says DMCA. The government is doing something very slimy here.
To go back to the gas meter analogy, suppose it were against the law to steal gas. (Analogy to copyright.) Suppose it was also against the law to make curved pipes that happen to be well suited for going around gas meters (analogy to DMCA). Suppose you modify boilers to have two gas inputs (analogy to what this guy is alleged to have been doing). Instead of prosecuting you for helping people steal gas, they're claiming you were making curved pipes. (Except he didn't do that, and they're not putting forth any evidence that he did.) They're hoping the court will get confused and conflate curved pipes and double-input boilers (because there's overlap in the kinds of people who use those things) in the hopes of expanding the prohibition against making curved pipes, into a prohibition against people doing any sort of work on boilers. Fuck that.
BTW, back to mushdot's comment:
Fuck the boiler manufacturer in that instance. They have no legitimate grounds to complain, but are doing so because they also happen to be be the gas company and they don't want to open the door to people eventually having boilers that can let them switch over to other gas companies, even if all the boilers are still using their gas right now. And that's what this case is about: the government wants to serve the interests of the boiler manufacturer.
By getting the government to use DMCA in this case, Microsoft is showing that they're afraid of (example; feel free to think up others) someone using a homebrew application to access network services from an XBox instead of people signing up for an XBox Live account. Microsoft should be allowed to fight game piracy but we (society) shouldn't be helping them prevent legitimate competition, or helping to build DMCA precedents that prevent competition on a much wider scale than mere XBoxes. This case is fucked up.
This is one time that I agree. If you actually read the DMCA, there isn't any part of it that applies to the situation. Modifying a player that is already capable, on its own, of accessing the work protected by the tech measure, simply isn't an act of making/selling a device that circumvents tech measures that control access to the work. There just doesn't seem to be any part of DMCA as written, that prohibits this sort of thing. All the jury has to do is apply the law that Congress wrote, rather than bad precedents, and it'll be an innocent verdict.
If the industry buys a new law to amend DMCA to prohibit this sort of thing, then I'll start to disagree with you, and say the people should uphold fairness. You say that thinking about fairness is what legislatures and supreme courts do, and that is a noble thing for us to strive to get our governments to do. Yes, it is our responsibility to some day elect legislatures that think about fairness, and if the law isn't fair, then it's our fault.. But if a person does not believe the public has successfully done that yet, then from their point of view, thinking about fairness has not yet happened at any point in the process, so when it's their turn to be on a jury, that is last chance for fairness to play any role in the system. If Congress didn't worry about fairness, then jurors are the only place fairness can be considered before an innocent person is harmed by government force for no good reason. If you're a juror and you don't think the lawmakers have tried to be fair, then you must nullify.
And let's remember, this is DMCA we're talking about here. Go ahead and just try to make a case that congress and the courts even paid lip service to fairness. It's one thing for a racist to disagree with a legislature that insists a black man be allowed to vote. He might wish the legislature hadn't done that and disagree that they should have. But deep down he knows that at least they did that due to public pressure and a shitload of people demanding to be treated like people. Fairness is the whole point of civil rights laws, and a desire to not let fairness go too far, is the "reason" someone would nullify such laws. You can't compare this type of situation to how DMCA got passed. The section 1201 prohibitions are pure bullshit.
Let me try another tack: if nullification has been used for injustice, does that mean it shouldn't be used for justice? A juror can't blow off his responsibility just because some people in the past have fucked it up.
The Torrentfreak article says:
Have to show? Have to show to whom? It sounds like they already have a centralized authority.
If you are so concerned about "preventing scammers from taking over brands" then you're going to have some mechanism for dealing with scammers. And if that mechanism exists, then governments probably can use it to deal with you.
And also, frankly, the narrow focus on one TLD, "p2p" hints that these guys aren't thinking very big.
I think creating a new sabotage/coercion resistant DNS is a worthy goal. Remember that COICA and the recent seizures are just another straw on the camel's back, in a long history of governments interfering with DNS, people disagreeing with ICANN policies, and whatnot. The need isn't going away until it gets solved. But these particular guys have already taken at least 1 step in the wrong direction. That one line about registration shows that protecting freedom of expression isn't their top priority, but if it's not the top priority, then the system won't solve the problem people have with ICANN's DNS.
Time travelers keep killing Hitler so the Nazis keep moving the date of WWII back.
Smoking the malt is a neat idea, so I'm not going to discount that, but it's not the only option on the table. I won a Maple Bacon Cider competition (!), partly due to the bacon flavor I got into my hard cider, and did it by making bacon extract. Fry up some bacon, eat it, and put the leftover grease in just a little bit of vodka. Steep and occasionally swirl for a few days, and you will end up with the most deliciously-smelling vodka you've ever experienced. Strain it to remove the grease and add it to your final product anytime after primary fermentation.
You don't press the like button? Dude, by the time you have seen the like button, you have already interacted with Facebook. Whatever it was that you wanted to avoid by not pressing the button, you probably didn't avoid.
They're tracking him because his user-agent downloads stuff from facebook every time it sees an iframe or script or img tag that points to flickr. Thus, it can do anything a doubleclick "tracking pixel" or "web bug" can do. And while that may be limited, it certainly isn't particularly limited by the fact that he doesn't have a facebook account.
People didn't (as far as they knew ;-) have doubleclick "accounts" either, but there was still widespread loathing, until eventually everyone (and by "everyone" I really mean "a tiny fraction of the population") told their local dns to return their localhost whenever it needed to resolve the doubleclick name, or started using more sophisticated browser or proxy based blockers, or whatever. Then once those people did it, they stopped bitching, so laymen stopped hearing that there was a problem.