No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you.
Except that, as evidenced by the fact that movies available as DVD rips on The Pirate Bay subsequently make a non-zero number of DVD sales, that isn't what actually happens.
It's possible for people who have no money to get media for free and yet still have people who can afford to do so pay money to support the creation of new works. It is, in fact, what is happening today: A great many people pay, even though they have the option not to, because they support providing that incentive for artists to create future works.
As long as those people are providing a sufficient incentive, there is no problem. If it ever comes to pass that so few people are paying that artists decide to stop making new works, the pirates won't have enough material to pirate and the market will sort itself out: Either enough of the pirates who could afford to pay realize what is going on and decide to pay more so that more works are produced and the problem goes away, or artists will start demanding to be paid in advance and use crowd-sourced funding methods to raise money.
In theory you could have a market failure where not enough people pay to create new works (through any means) and new works then stop being created, but until that is what is actually happening there is no reason to implement extremely expensive countermeasures to fight a purely theoretical problem.
Have you ever noticed the Google logo in the corner? That's them getting their name in front of your customers (an advertisement), which is worth more to them than the near-zero it costs to actually serve the maps. Now try clicking on it -- you end up at maps.google.com on a page that contains more ads, this time the kind Google gets paid cash for.
Google was the dominant player in that space, period.
Because they're offering the best product for the lowest price while still making a profit, right? You do know that it's not illegal to a have a large market share as a result of all your competition sucking.
And yes, Google was giving away use of Google Maps FOR FREE. Not Free+Ads, but FREE. If you were a developer, you were allowed to use the Maps API for free.
If you go to maps.google.com, you see ads. If you click on the "Google" logo in the corner of a map on a site that uses the Google Maps API, it takes you to maps.google.com, where you see ads.
On top of that, the antitrust problem comes when someone sells below cost. Google's cost for providing an additional website with access to the maps API is effectively zero -- certainly it's less than the value of the advertising benefit they get from being able to put their logo and a link to their own service on that site.
It's blatantly obvious that they weren't selling below cost, because even before they changed the price, Google Maps was making a profit. You can't simultaneously sell below cost and make a profit -- they're mutually exclusive.
Microsoft was punished for pumping a market with a free product, with its development supported by revenues from a monopoly product, so that they could afford to give it away where competitors could not.
Can we at least try to have a less tenuous relationship with facts? Microsoft wasn't charged with dumping (which is what you're accusing Google of), they were charged with tying, which means refusing to allow someone who wants to buy Windows to get it without Internet Explorer (ostensibly discounted for the value of Internet Explorer). They're totally different things.
Incidentally, the reason Microsoft wasn't charged with dumping -- and the reason that isn't what Google is doing now -- is that software and web services have as close as makes no difference to zero unit cost. It's pretty hard to sell below cost when your cost is zero.
If a company is generating massive revenues from a dominant product (in this case web search advertising), using that revenue to fund development of a free product in another market can be viewed as an anticompetitive abuse of monopoly position.
No, it can't. The source of the money isn't the thing that matters. If Warren Buffet is preposterously wealth, but has no dominant market position in anything (just a lot of money), and he decides he wants to start giving away eyeglasses for free (i.e. below cost) until all competing eyeglass makers go out of business so that he can subsequently monopolize the market, he's going to be in trouble. It has nothing to do with the source of the money used to sell things below cost.
By contrast, Google, who wasn't selling below cost (because free + ads is profitable and therefore not below cost), wasn't doing anything wrong. They were doing exactly what competitors in a free market are supposed to do: Providing a competitive product for a low price while still making a profit. The fact that some of their competitors couldn't hack it in a market with aggressive competition is not the fault of the company offering the best product for the lowest price.
This is made blatantly obvious by the fact that they raised their prices before they had anything close to a monopoly in the market in question. They still compete with Microsoft, OSM and others. If customers don't want to use Google Maps or decide that the higher rates are too high, they still have multiple alternatives.
France is just butthurt that the French competitors were among those who couldn't compete.
Which is preferable, and who's gonna pay collateral damages in latter two cases?
It's pretty obviously preferable that they take down the whole website. Then people notice. There is a large hole in the Internet where the site used to be, things still link to it, and people realize that and start looking for ways around the block. Then many people have sufficient incentive to take countermeasures and the censorship is thwarted.
If you allow only the target of the censorship to be removed, maybe nobody notices, or more people conclude it isn't worth working around because they don't need to read solely the things the government has classified as unprintable. It makes the censorship more effective, because only the target of the censorship is removed and nothing more, which substantially reduces the incentive for that country's people to fight it.
If the government indulges in web censoring, what makes you think it would even as much as say "sorry" to a luckless SoB who lost his site along with whole blocked hosting domain?
When there are only a small few people who are disadvantaged, certainly. That's how they get away with it -- if the government screws over one person at a time, everybody else goes on with their lives with insufficient incentive to work together to help the one victim. If a government screws over everyone at once by taking down major websites, it's a lot more likely they'll have to answer for it.
Obviously some countries are more resistant to public pressure than others (e.g. Iran, China), but even they are not totally immune -- and even if they don't actually change their position and remove the blocking in the short term, at least people will have more incentive to bypass it and make it ineffective. They're more likely to ultimately give up trying to block information if their attempts to do so are ineffective.
1) it's evil-- censorship of all but exploiting images is inherently evil
To which they'll respond that the censorship is already taking place (by the country blocking the entire site), and by doing this they reduce the amount of censored material.
Of course, that argument is bullshit, because what they're really doing is making it less expensive for the countries that censor things to censor even more things, since those countries then don't have to pay the cost of the collateral damage caused by censoring people with a bomb instead of a switchblade.
But it's the argument they're making, and I'm not really sure how you can actually prove it wrong. The problem is it's weighing one evil against another: The evil of more censorship now vs. the evil of more censorship later. The latter is probably worse because the things getting censored in that case are the things that are intentionally censored rather than accidentally, which are more likely to be the things people have a need to know. But it's a judgment call -- you may think they're wrong, and you may be right, but how do you prove it?
An "out"? What are you, a K-Street lobbyist?
I wish. Do you have any idea how much those guys get paid?
That's a good point. My initial thought was that it wouldn't help anything because the US law couldn't be enforced against a company that chose to violate it unilaterally, but if you think about it there are probably a lot of laws that are unconstitutional but that nobody is willing to be the first to challenge because appealing all the way to the Supreme Court is very expensive (and in the meantime getting prosecuted for a crime is generally bad PR). Letting an industry put up a united front would go a long way toward fixing that because they could contract to share risks and litigation costs, and it would also blunt any charge by foreign governments that the US is being hypocritical.
Sure you can. The Nuremberg defense is not a defense.
Personally, I think the US needs an antitrust exemption for companies who want to collude strictly for the purpose of refusing to comply with, or otherwise opposing, foreign legislation that would violate the US First Amendment.
If Google has "Don't Be Evil" enshrined in their corporate charter, which I believe they do, then they must take that into consideration, even if it means lower profits. However, I think it would be difficult to objectively prove that Google is being evil (or rather that they are violating that provision of their charter).
I think you're misunderstanding what that provision is good for. Proving that something is evil is pretty hopeless unless they're committing mass murder or something like that, which seems pretty unlikely for an internet company. But now suppose Google's board would otherwise have a "duty" (for whatever inane legalistic reason) to screw over some honest people, and they don't want to. It lets them claim that doing that would be "evil" and if you (the soulless plaintiff's attorney) want to challenge it they could demand that you prove it's not, which you can't really do any more easily than you can prove that something is.
In other words, it gets them an out if they want to do the right thing and otherwise wouldn't be allowed to.
Is the EFF really thinking through what they're doing?
You seem to somehow be under the impression that the goal of the EFF is to promote piracy. The goal of the EFF is to prevent honest people from getting fucked over by the industry in their misguided and futile attempts to stop piracy. Does that clarify things?
Do you really think that you can legitimately be held in contempt for failing to do something that it is physically and mathematically impossible for you do to?
Obviously if the judge is willing to break the law then he can do that, but if he wants to break the law then he can do the same thing because he doesn't like your face, or because you're taller than he is and he's jealous. Encryption keys have nothing to do with it.
Unless I'm mistaken, session keys are symmetric keys sent from client to the server. If the government has the private key of the server and all of the session data, they can decrypt the session key when it is sent.
All the private key does is authentication. You can conduct a man in the middle attack if you have the private key, but that is too computationally expensive to feasibly do it on every connection. On top of that, to do the man in the middle attack for everyone, the intermediary device would have to have every private key for everyone, and would thereby have access to the plaintext of all encrypted internet communications by everyone. The amount of espionage that could be conducted by hacking into that piece of equipment is totally unfathomable -- and you would need to have one at every NOC in the world.
Key disclosure laws are pretty meaningless when the user doesn't have a key to disclose. SSL (among other things) uses session keys that change every few minutes. Once the session is over, the key no longer exists. You can't be forced to disclose it if it doesn't exist.
About your other "point", I will try to answer to the other guy that had the decency to contribute instead of flaming.
If you don't want an indignant response, don't suggest an inflammatory course of action. You have to consider the damage that would occur if someone who didn't know any better actually took you seriously and tried to impose what you're suggesting.
Really? And how is that, exactly? Please structure your reply as code that will take a bitstream as input and return a boolean value as to whether it is encrypted or not.
As a prerequisite, control usage of encryption. Make it illegal without government authorization.
Yes, sending all passwords to all websites in the clear is obviously on the Good Ideas list.
Very few can pull that off. And it takes a lot of work over a very long period of time.
Not only that, Apple has made its billions by being very good at identifying a market where the existing participants are not meeting the needs of consumers, then entering the market and using its clout to exert leverage over the existing participants who are fouling things up.
Think about it: Before iTunes and the iPod, the RIAA had been ruining the consumer experience in the market for digital music. Before the Mac, Microsoft had been ruining (and continues to ruin) the consumer experience in the personal computer market. Before the iPhone, AT&T et al had been ruining the consumer experience in the smart phone market.
They're all markets where some dastardly monopolist or cartel had been putting their foot up the ass of anyone who tried to innovate in those markets, and Apple came in with enough money and influence to tell them to pound sand and yet still get what they want.
The problem for Apple now is that when you're at the top, there is nowhere to go but down. The incumbent monopolists they've humbled and profited billions from are still around, and they don't really like playing second fiddle. They're going to be fighting to reclaim their power, either (as Microsoft has) through various dirty tricks, or (as the telcoms have) by opening up the previously tightly controlled market to more open competitors like Android that they can subsequently exert more influence against, or (as the RIAA has) by lobbying Congress to screw over the entire tech industry with unconscionable legislation.
That's a lot of fronts to be fighting at the same time, especially when you're the new incumbent with everything to lose and little to gain than what you already have.
it also requires the entry and exit to be trusted.
No it doesn't. The whole point of TOR is that the only way to determine who is doing what is for the nodes to collude with one another (although there are traffic analysis attacks that ISPs can do if they can see all the traffic through all the nodes).
I'm sorry, but there's absolutely no evidence of anything you've said here actually happening.
What are you talking about? It's the entire history of the industrial revolution. People lost their jobs in agriculture because they were replaced by cotton gins and diesel-powered tractors, which provided savings to the consumers of agricultural products and allowed them to use those resources to hire the displaced workers as bookkeepers and salesmen and artists.
This example is pure an utter horse shit. If the jobs don't pay enough, then they aren't taken, thus the idea that you don't have enough jobs is valid.
"Validity" does not exist in a vacuum. Yes, you still have a problem, but the problem is not that the jobs "don't pay enough" in absolute terms, it's that they don't pay enough relative to the cost of living. Of the two ways to fix that, increasing the qualifications of workers so that they can command higher wages or reducing the cost of living to match the wages available, reducing the cost of living will frequently be easier to achieve.
Displacing more jobs in the process.
This is not Xeno's paradox. The closer you get the cost of living to zero, the more jobs pay enough to meet the cost of living. It works because there are still people who have well-paying jobs whose costs are not included in the cost of living, because the things they're paid to do are not necessities -- nobody needs anything Zynga makes, but if you get the cost of food and shelter down to the point that one of their employees (or a knowledge worker at Boeing or UBS or Tesla Motors) can afford to pay the cost of living of dozens of people with plenty left over then you won't want for jobs, because those people will find it extremely attractive to buy the labor of the unemployed at a price that allows the employees to meet the low cost of living.
And you're making the HUGE assumption that the company in question isn't just going to pocket the savings.
That is what happens in a competitive market. Even in a collusive market, if customers have less money then companies will have to lower prices or lose business. You can't have it both ways: Either hardly anybody is actually losing their job and sellers can maintain high prices, or lots of people are and it reduces demand which requires sellers to reduce prices to keep their customers.
Not every deplaced worker has access to the training, or is capable of actually making use of it. Sad to say, but there are a number of people who's only real skill is their brawn. They probably have a good enough work ethic, but if there isn't a job needed for them, what do they do?
Skills don't come from magic. They come from schools and the internet. Anybody right now can go to a library, put on a pair of headphones and partake in all of the lectures that Stanford, MIT and other universities put online for free. Then go challenge the same classes (by passing the final exam) at a community college that allows you do challenge classes for substantially less than the cost of actually taking them, and get yourself a degree.
People don't need manual labor jobs. All they need is a little financial support to provide the basic necessities during the period of time it takes them to gain new skills. The government will naturally have to provide that if those peoples' families can't, but generally speaking they do: Unemployment insurance, student loans, food stamps, etc. And to the extent that they don't, they could if we wanted them to. Moreover, the cheaper we make the necessities through increasing efficiency, the cheaper it is for the government to provide them to people while they're learning new skills.
Even for the small subset of people who have learning disabilities or some other impairment that prevents them from ever learning to do something that doesn't involve a wrench or a shovel, those jobs d
A gamer who wants to badly fuck other gamers over to make an easy buck.
The most hilarious thing is that he doesn't understand how markets work at all.
People discount the price they're willing to pay by the amount they'll get back later if they sell used. When I go out and sell a used game for $20 that I originally paid $50 for, that's $20 I put toward the purchase of the next new game I buy. If I don't have that $20 in my pocket, I'm not paying more than $30 for the next game because I literally don't have the money anymore. Meanwhile, the guy who would have bought the game used from me has still only got $20 to buy a game, and if the game doesn't cost $20 then he can't afford it either.
There are three actual ways to make more money selling video games: Either you set the price more appropriately (because it's either higher or lower than the sweet spot, which means that volume times price is not maximized), or you make better games so that more people buy them, or you make games that are just as good more efficiently so that you have lower costs against the same revenues. There is no option that says "fuck over your paying customers" because that doesn't work.
There were so many example of Net venture wasted all the money being pumped into them, and yet, the financial world never learn
In this case it's even worse. Think about it: What's the point of an IPO? It's so that a company can raise money, to fund expansion or revitalize the company.
So, does Facebook need money to expand? No, they're undoubtedly sitting on a mountain of cash already. They're not a little company that needs capital to expand, and they're not a big company with aging plant and equipment that needs a capital infusion to get with the times.
The reason for the IPO is obviously so that the existing owners can cash out.
I didn't say that every artist made $100,000. I took that as the average. You can get that average by having everyone make $100,000, or by having 1% of artists make $10,000,000 and the rest make nothing. It doesn't really change the point. I also have no idea how close $100,000 is to the actual average, but that also doesn't matter to the point -- it's just a placeholder number so that you can see that the average artist makes the same amount of money when the average consumer spends the same amount of money, no matter what the price per song is, as long as consumers spend their music budget to buy as many songs as they can afford at the set price.
In addition to that, look what happens if you lower the price: If the price is low enough, you can't have a situation where there are only a few artists who each make millions, because there comes a point at which everybody has all the songs from the most popular artists and yet still has money left over. That money can then go to the less popular artists. By contrast, if the price is higher, consumers having bought the most popular songs have nothing left over for the little guys and so the little guys make nothing as happens now.
Of course it will be a long fight. And it isn't a fight that we necessarily will win. But it's a fight that we can win.
My point is that the attitude espoused in your previous post is what can cause us to lose. "It's too hard, they have too much money, political corruption is an impossible problem to solve, so let's just give up and resign ourselves to serfdom." You can't win by giving up.
In addition to that, these early battles are of vital importance, because they determine the length of the war. I have some confidence that we are going to win eventually (you can't fight progress), but if they succeed in passing a bill that kills many of the decentralizing, democratizing technologies currently in the pipe before they achieve a critical mass, it could set us back decades in dislodging their corrupting influence from a position of power. They are attempting to destroy the means we use to fight them. Even that doesn't stop us from continuing the fight, but it makes it harder and it will take longer.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm tired of the defeatism. They are not gods. They are not even human. They are creatures of legal fiction that exist only at our sufferance, supported by reactionaries who fear a world that makes them irrelevant. They will lose eventually, and there is no time like the present.
Slashdot Mirror
No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you.
Except that, as evidenced by the fact that movies available as DVD rips on The Pirate Bay subsequently make a non-zero number of DVD sales, that isn't what actually happens.
It's possible for people who have no money to get media for free and yet still have people who can afford to do so pay money to support the creation of new works. It is, in fact, what is happening today: A great many people pay, even though they have the option not to, because they support providing that incentive for artists to create future works.
As long as those people are providing a sufficient incentive, there is no problem. If it ever comes to pass that so few people are paying that artists decide to stop making new works, the pirates won't have enough material to pirate and the market will sort itself out: Either enough of the pirates who could afford to pay realize what is going on and decide to pay more so that more works are produced and the problem goes away, or artists will start demanding to be paid in advance and use crowd-sourced funding methods to raise money.
In theory you could have a market failure where not enough people pay to create new works (through any means) and new works then stop being created, but until that is what is actually happening there is no reason to implement extremely expensive countermeasures to fight a purely theoretical problem.
There's no ads in Google maps that I'm aware of.
Have you ever noticed the Google logo in the corner? That's them getting their name in front of your customers (an advertisement), which is worth more to them than the near-zero it costs to actually serve the maps. Now try clicking on it -- you end up at maps.google.com on a page that contains more ads, this time the kind Google gets paid cash for.
Google was the dominant player in that space, period.
Because they're offering the best product for the lowest price while still making a profit, right? You do know that it's not illegal to a have a large market share as a result of all your competition sucking.
And yes, Google was giving away use of Google Maps FOR FREE. Not Free+Ads, but FREE. If you were a developer, you were allowed to use the Maps API for free.
If you go to maps.google.com, you see ads. If you click on the "Google" logo in the corner of a map on a site that uses the Google Maps API, it takes you to maps.google.com, where you see ads.
On top of that, the antitrust problem comes when someone sells below cost. Google's cost for providing an additional website with access to the maps API is effectively zero -- certainly it's less than the value of the advertising benefit they get from being able to put their logo and a link to their own service on that site.
It's blatantly obvious that they weren't selling below cost, because even before they changed the price, Google Maps was making a profit. You can't simultaneously sell below cost and make a profit -- they're mutually exclusive.
Microsoft was punished for pumping a market with a free product, with its development supported by revenues from a monopoly product, so that they could afford to give it away where competitors could not.
Can we at least try to have a less tenuous relationship with facts? Microsoft wasn't charged with dumping (which is what you're accusing Google of), they were charged with tying, which means refusing to allow someone who wants to buy Windows to get it without Internet Explorer (ostensibly discounted for the value of Internet Explorer). They're totally different things.
Incidentally, the reason Microsoft wasn't charged with dumping -- and the reason that isn't what Google is doing now -- is that software and web services have as close as makes no difference to zero unit cost. It's pretty hard to sell below cost when your cost is zero.
If a company is generating massive revenues from a dominant product (in this case web search advertising), using that revenue to fund development of a free product in another market can be viewed as an anticompetitive abuse of monopoly position.
No, it can't. The source of the money isn't the thing that matters. If Warren Buffet is preposterously wealth, but has no dominant market position in anything (just a lot of money), and he decides he wants to start giving away eyeglasses for free (i.e. below cost) until all competing eyeglass makers go out of business so that he can subsequently monopolize the market, he's going to be in trouble. It has nothing to do with the source of the money used to sell things below cost.
By contrast, Google, who wasn't selling below cost (because free + ads is profitable and therefore not below cost), wasn't doing anything wrong. They were doing exactly what competitors in a free market are supposed to do: Providing a competitive product for a low price while still making a profit. The fact that some of their competitors couldn't hack it in a market with aggressive competition is not the fault of the company offering the best product for the lowest price.
This is made blatantly obvious by the fact that they raised their prices before they had anything close to a monopoly in the market in question. They still compete with Microsoft, OSM and others. If customers don't want to use Google Maps or decide that the higher rates are too high, they still have multiple alternatives.
France is just butthurt that the French competitors were among those who couldn't compete.
Which is preferable, and who's gonna pay collateral damages in latter two cases?
It's pretty obviously preferable that they take down the whole website. Then people notice. There is a large hole in the Internet where the site used to be, things still link to it, and people realize that and start looking for ways around the block. Then many people have sufficient incentive to take countermeasures and the censorship is thwarted.
If you allow only the target of the censorship to be removed, maybe nobody notices, or more people conclude it isn't worth working around because they don't need to read solely the things the government has classified as unprintable. It makes the censorship more effective, because only the target of the censorship is removed and nothing more, which substantially reduces the incentive for that country's people to fight it.
If the government indulges in web censoring, what makes you think it would even as much as say "sorry" to a luckless SoB who lost his site along with whole blocked hosting domain?
When there are only a small few people who are disadvantaged, certainly. That's how they get away with it -- if the government screws over one person at a time, everybody else goes on with their lives with insufficient incentive to work together to help the one victim. If a government screws over everyone at once by taking down major websites, it's a lot more likely they'll have to answer for it.
Obviously some countries are more resistant to public pressure than others (e.g. Iran, China), but even they are not totally immune -- and even if they don't actually change their position and remove the blocking in the short term, at least people will have more incentive to bypass it and make it ineffective. They're more likely to ultimately give up trying to block information if their attempts to do so are ineffective.
1) it's evil-- censorship of all but exploiting images is inherently evil
To which they'll respond that the censorship is already taking place (by the country blocking the entire site), and by doing this they reduce the amount of censored material.
Of course, that argument is bullshit, because what they're really doing is making it less expensive for the countries that censor things to censor even more things, since those countries then don't have to pay the cost of the collateral damage caused by censoring people with a bomb instead of a switchblade.
But it's the argument they're making, and I'm not really sure how you can actually prove it wrong. The problem is it's weighing one evil against another: The evil of more censorship now vs. the evil of more censorship later. The latter is probably worse because the things getting censored in that case are the things that are intentionally censored rather than accidentally, which are more likely to be the things people have a need to know. But it's a judgment call -- you may think they're wrong, and you may be right, but how do you prove it?
An "out"? What are you, a K-Street lobbyist?
I wish. Do you have any idea how much those guys get paid?
That's a good point. My initial thought was that it wouldn't help anything because the US law couldn't be enforced against a company that chose to violate it unilaterally, but if you think about it there are probably a lot of laws that are unconstitutional but that nobody is willing to be the first to challenge because appealing all the way to the Supreme Court is very expensive (and in the meantime getting prosecuted for a crime is generally bad PR). Letting an industry put up a united front would go a long way toward fixing that because they could contract to share risks and litigation costs, and it would also blunt any charge by foreign governments that the US is being hypocritical.
You can't blame Google for following the rules!
Sure you can. The Nuremberg defense is not a defense.
Personally, I think the US needs an antitrust exemption for companies who want to collude strictly for the purpose of refusing to comply with, or otherwise opposing, foreign legislation that would violate the US First Amendment.
If Google has "Don't Be Evil" enshrined in their corporate charter, which I believe they do, then they must take that into consideration, even if it means lower profits. However, I think it would be difficult to objectively prove that Google is being evil (or rather that they are violating that provision of their charter).
I think you're misunderstanding what that provision is good for. Proving that something is evil is pretty hopeless unless they're committing mass murder or something like that, which seems pretty unlikely for an internet company. But now suppose Google's board would otherwise have a "duty" (for whatever inane legalistic reason) to screw over some honest people, and they don't want to. It lets them claim that doing that would be "evil" and if you (the soulless plaintiff's attorney) want to challenge it they could demand that you prove it's not, which you can't really do any more easily than you can prove that something is.
In other words, it gets them an out if they want to do the right thing and otherwise wouldn't be allowed to.
Is the EFF really thinking through what they're doing?
You seem to somehow be under the impression that the goal of the EFF is to promote piracy. The goal of the EFF is to prevent honest people from getting fucked over by the industry in their misguided and futile attempts to stop piracy. Does that clarify things?
Do you really think that you can legitimately be held in contempt for failing to do something that it is physically and mathematically impossible for you do to?
Obviously if the judge is willing to break the law then he can do that, but if he wants to break the law then he can do the same thing because he doesn't like your face, or because you're taller than he is and he's jealous. Encryption keys have nothing to do with it.
But there is no point in sending random noise, so detecting random noise implies encryption (from a law enforcement point of view).
How do you propose to distinguish "random noise" from "I have never seen one of these before"?
Unless I'm mistaken, session keys are symmetric keys sent from client to the server. If the government has the private key of the server and all of the session data, they can decrypt the session key when it is sent.
Nope.
All the private key does is authentication. You can conduct a man in the middle attack if you have the private key, but that is too computationally expensive to feasibly do it on every connection. On top of that, to do the man in the middle attack for everyone, the intermediary device would have to have every private key for everyone, and would thereby have access to the plaintext of all encrypted internet communications by everyone. The amount of espionage that could be conducted by hacking into that piece of equipment is totally unfathomable -- and you would need to have one at every NOC in the world.
Key disclosure laws are pretty meaningless when the user doesn't have a key to disclose. SSL (among other things) uses session keys that change every few minutes. Once the session is over, the key no longer exists. You can't be forced to disclose it if it doesn't exist.
About your other "point", I will try to answer to the other guy that had the decency to contribute instead of flaming.
If you don't want an indignant response, don't suggest an inflammatory course of action. You have to consider the damage that would occur if someone who didn't know any better actually took you seriously and tried to impose what you're suggesting.
5. Encrypted content can be identified as such.
Really? And how is that, exactly? Please structure your reply as code that will take a bitstream as input and return a boolean value as to whether it is encrypted or not.
As a prerequisite, control usage of encryption. Make it illegal without government authorization.
Yes, sending all passwords to all websites in the clear is obviously on the Good Ideas list.
Very few can pull that off. And it takes a lot of work over a very long period of time.
Not only that, Apple has made its billions by being very good at identifying a market where the existing participants are not meeting the needs of consumers, then entering the market and using its clout to exert leverage over the existing participants who are fouling things up.
Think about it: Before iTunes and the iPod, the RIAA had been ruining the consumer experience in the market for digital music. Before the Mac, Microsoft had been ruining (and continues to ruin) the consumer experience in the personal computer market. Before the iPhone, AT&T et al had been ruining the consumer experience in the smart phone market.
They're all markets where some dastardly monopolist or cartel had been putting their foot up the ass of anyone who tried to innovate in those markets, and Apple came in with enough money and influence to tell them to pound sand and yet still get what they want.
The problem for Apple now is that when you're at the top, there is nowhere to go but down. The incumbent monopolists they've humbled and profited billions from are still around, and they don't really like playing second fiddle. They're going to be fighting to reclaim their power, either (as Microsoft has) through various dirty tricks, or (as the telcoms have) by opening up the previously tightly controlled market to more open competitors like Android that they can subsequently exert more influence against, or (as the RIAA has) by lobbying Congress to screw over the entire tech industry with unconscionable legislation.
That's a lot of fronts to be fighting at the same time, especially when you're the new incumbent with everything to lose and little to gain than what you already have.
it also requires the entry and exit to be trusted.
No it doesn't. The whole point of TOR is that the only way to determine who is doing what is for the nodes to collude with one another (although there are traffic analysis attacks that ISPs can do if they can see all the traffic through all the nodes).
I'm sorry, but there's absolutely no evidence of anything you've said here actually happening.
What are you talking about? It's the entire history of the industrial revolution. People lost their jobs in agriculture because they were replaced by cotton gins and diesel-powered tractors, which provided savings to the consumers of agricultural products and allowed them to use those resources to hire the displaced workers as bookkeepers and salesmen and artists.
This example is pure an utter horse shit. If the jobs don't pay enough, then they aren't taken, thus the idea that you don't have enough jobs is valid.
"Validity" does not exist in a vacuum. Yes, you still have a problem, but the problem is not that the jobs "don't pay enough" in absolute terms, it's that they don't pay enough relative to the cost of living. Of the two ways to fix that, increasing the qualifications of workers so that they can command higher wages or reducing the cost of living to match the wages available, reducing the cost of living will frequently be easier to achieve.
Displacing more jobs in the process.
This is not Xeno's paradox. The closer you get the cost of living to zero, the more jobs pay enough to meet the cost of living. It works because there are still people who have well-paying jobs whose costs are not included in the cost of living, because the things they're paid to do are not necessities -- nobody needs anything Zynga makes, but if you get the cost of food and shelter down to the point that one of their employees (or a knowledge worker at Boeing or UBS or Tesla Motors) can afford to pay the cost of living of dozens of people with plenty left over then you won't want for jobs, because those people will find it extremely attractive to buy the labor of the unemployed at a price that allows the employees to meet the low cost of living.
And you're making the HUGE assumption that the company in question isn't just going to pocket the savings.
That is what happens in a competitive market. Even in a collusive market, if customers have less money then companies will have to lower prices or lose business. You can't have it both ways: Either hardly anybody is actually losing their job and sellers can maintain high prices, or lots of people are and it reduces demand which requires sellers to reduce prices to keep their customers.
Not every deplaced worker has access to the training, or is capable of actually making use of it. Sad to say, but there are a number of people who's only real skill is their brawn. They probably have a good enough work ethic, but if there isn't a job needed for them, what do they do?
Skills don't come from magic. They come from schools and the internet. Anybody right now can go to a library, put on a pair of headphones and partake in all of the lectures that Stanford, MIT and other universities put online for free. Then go challenge the same classes (by passing the final exam) at a community college that allows you do challenge classes for substantially less than the cost of actually taking them, and get yourself a degree.
People don't need manual labor jobs. All they need is a little financial support to provide the basic necessities during the period of time it takes them to gain new skills. The government will naturally have to provide that if those peoples' families can't, but generally speaking they do: Unemployment insurance, student loans, food stamps, etc. And to the extent that they don't, they could if we wanted them to. Moreover, the cheaper we make the necessities through increasing efficiency, the cheaper it is for the government to provide them to people while they're learning new skills.
Even for the small subset of people who have learning disabilities or some other impairment that prevents them from ever learning to do something that doesn't involve a wrench or a shovel, those jobs d
A gamer who wants to badly fuck other gamers over to make an easy buck.
The most hilarious thing is that he doesn't understand how markets work at all.
People discount the price they're willing to pay by the amount they'll get back later if they sell used. When I go out and sell a used game for $20 that I originally paid $50 for, that's $20 I put toward the purchase of the next new game I buy. If I don't have that $20 in my pocket, I'm not paying more than $30 for the next game because I literally don't have the money anymore. Meanwhile, the guy who would have bought the game used from me has still only got $20 to buy a game, and if the game doesn't cost $20 then he can't afford it either.
There are three actual ways to make more money selling video games: Either you set the price more appropriately (because it's either higher or lower than the sweet spot, which means that volume times price is not maximized), or you make better games so that more people buy them, or you make games that are just as good more efficiently so that you have lower costs against the same revenues. There is no option that says "fuck over your paying customers" because that doesn't work.
In fact you could just buy ads during popular TV shows that clearly speak the same instructions...
Or put it in a YouTube video and then Rickroll as many people as possible.
There were so many example of Net venture wasted all the money being pumped into them, and yet, the financial world never learn
In this case it's even worse. Think about it: What's the point of an IPO? It's so that a company can raise money, to fund expansion or revitalize the company.
So, does Facebook need money to expand? No, they're undoubtedly sitting on a mountain of cash already. They're not a little company that needs capital to expand, and they're not a big company with aging plant and equipment that needs a capital infusion to get with the times.
The reason for the IPO is obviously so that the existing owners can cash out.
I didn't say that every artist made $100,000. I took that as the average. You can get that average by having everyone make $100,000, or by having 1% of artists make $10,000,000 and the rest make nothing. It doesn't really change the point. I also have no idea how close $100,000 is to the actual average, but that also doesn't matter to the point -- it's just a placeholder number so that you can see that the average artist makes the same amount of money when the average consumer spends the same amount of money, no matter what the price per song is, as long as consumers spend their music budget to buy as many songs as they can afford at the set price.
In addition to that, look what happens if you lower the price: If the price is low enough, you can't have a situation where there are only a few artists who each make millions, because there comes a point at which everybody has all the songs from the most popular artists and yet still has money left over. That money can then go to the less popular artists. By contrast, if the price is higher, consumers having bought the most popular songs have nothing left over for the little guys and so the little guys make nothing as happens now.
Of course it will be a long fight. And it isn't a fight that we necessarily will win. But it's a fight that we can win.
My point is that the attitude espoused in your previous post is what can cause us to lose. "It's too hard, they have too much money, political corruption is an impossible problem to solve, so let's just give up and resign ourselves to serfdom." You can't win by giving up.
In addition to that, these early battles are of vital importance, because they determine the length of the war. I have some confidence that we are going to win eventually (you can't fight progress), but if they succeed in passing a bill that kills many of the decentralizing, democratizing technologies currently in the pipe before they achieve a critical mass, it could set us back decades in dislodging their corrupting influence from a position of power. They are attempting to destroy the means we use to fight them. Even that doesn't stop us from continuing the fight, but it makes it harder and it will take longer.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm tired of the defeatism. They are not gods. They are not even human. They are creatures of legal fiction that exist only at our sufferance, supported by reactionaries who fear a world that makes them irrelevant. They will lose eventually, and there is no time like the present.
If you accept their nonsense logic, sure. Or we could actually think for ourselves and realize this.