I fail to see, how the same group of people can see nothing reprehensible in copying songs, movies, and even designs and patents without the "owners'" permissions (indeed, the very possibility of owning information is rejected with high peer-approval), but object so loudly to others capturing, recording, and analyzing information about themselves.
Was your phone call interrupted because of the NSA's tapping? Has your e-mail ever gotten lost because of it? No — as with all digital content, your "originals" are perfectly safe, aren't they? Whether it is a picture of your privates, a birthday-note to your mom, or bomb-making instructions, the message arrived safely to its recipient(s). So, what's the objection?
(And, yes, for the particularly pedantic among us, sometimes the wiretaps probably do cause actual disruption, but that's rare and is not the primary cause for objections.)
Now, I dislike others accessing my information without my permission as a matter of principle. But I afford the same right to object to music and movie-companies and others, who produce information and wish to control its use. That so many otherwise reasonable people would be so self-inconsistent as to support one, but not the other, baffles me...
And shield is a weapon. Try exporting a Kevlar suit out of your country, and you'll know, what I'm talking about.
It protects people from spies, fraudsters, and other 3 letter criminals
From your list, the spies and the objectionable 3-letter agencies are what the taxes pay for. The government-adoring "buyers of civilization" pay for it — and force the rest of us to pay for it...
There's an obvious difference. The "infringer" gains something different than the copyright holder loses.
You didn't think this through. Because you just allowed people to steal copper-cable running to your house: they just get some copper, you lose electricity and/or phone service. Their gain and your loses are different and therefore — according to your own argument — whatever they've done is not theft.
Worse, there is no law against it, so it is perfectly legal — congratulations!
Trying to think, what the guys like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson would've said, had anybody told them, that mere 200 years later the Republic they founded will have millions of Federal-government employees and that the collective spending of governments will dance around 50% of the nation's GDP...
Oh, some of those aren't employees, but are contractors. Sure, that changes everything...
And yet, the collection of links I presented each calls the respective company's misdeeds "theft".
"Getting something for nothing" is not, and never has been stealing. Taking something from someone, such that they no longer have full use of it, is.
You got it! The thief of a movie takes something from the movie's owners — their use of it is diminished, however slightly.
Because if someone else has that idea, you still have that idea.
Irrelevant. Your exploiting my idea prevents me from exploiting it for all its worth. A squatter living in a house can not claim, that he welcomes the actual owner from sharing the house with him...
copyright is socialist
No, it is not — not any more than enforcement of any other property-right.
just remember that it's the heavy hand of government that makes it possible.
Exactly! Just as that very hand protects my car, house, and even person...
Encryption is a weapon. Like other weapons, it can be used to defend one's own self or someone else, and to commit murder. Like other weapons, it is dangerous and governments hate it like they hate all weapons — they make governing harder.
So, it is not surprising to see governments agreeing here.
What is surprising is to find other Statists — those enablers of the governments' mission-creeps, the lovers of taxes (with which they are "happy" to "buy civilization") to suddenly disagree.
And this is the problem with industry thinking. It is NOT stealing.
In that case, NSA, Google, Facebook et al. collecting our data aren't "stealing" anything either.
They are NOT property law.
Distinction without difference. The infringer gets something for nothing — like a thief. The copyright holder loses something — like a theft-victim.
The term "intellectual property" is an intentional obfuscation
Had the Commandments been the "living and breathing document", that certain folks like to pretend the US Constitution is, something like "thou shall not enjoy artwork against the artist's wishes" would've been found in it by now.
Ideas can NOT be owned.
Why not?! Inasmuch as anything can be owned, why can't ideas be? The deed on my house is just as much a "piece of paper" as anything granting rights to a song. If you can download a song against its owner's wishes, why can't you move into my home while I'm away and change the locks? It is (or ought to be) just as socially (un)acceptable...
They do not exist for the benefit of the copyright holder. They exist for the benefit of society as a whole. [...] Read Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
There is nothing in the article affirming your Socialistic view, that my idea exists for "society as a whole". All the section says on the matter is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
So, you said an untruth (most likely, lied): the Constitution acknowledges the benefit the authors may derive from their writings and discoveries and leaves it to Congress to develop a system to reward them. Which Congress did — long ago — and it is referred to as "intellectual property".
I was, actually, hoping for a couple of +1 Funnies, rather than Trolls. I guess, Illiberals aren't all that open-minded and mirthful either, when caustic humour is aimed at them... Please, don't hate.
Well, this is what you get when the govt. is fully *bought* and paid for by interests other than the "people".
And this is why we absolutely must through BushCo and the rest of RethugliKKKans out and elect a decent, well-educated, sophisticated, and peace-loving man like Barack Obama.
Some times they certainly do. Consider — killing a man is wrong, right? But adding the second wrong of killing an attacker trying to kill you makes a right...
Likewise, cheating an entity, that cheats you may be perfectly ethical — when you can not, as is the case with governments, to simply stop dealing with the cheater.
Once that attitude is developed, it becomes hard to shed and is often applied even when unjustified and, indeed, quite unethical.
What I wrote was not an excuse, but an explanation...
People growing up under oppressive governments have much fewer problems with cheating — because cheating government is a fair game. It rubs off — and the attitude is quickly extended to non-governmental institutions large and even smaller ones.
This is not "racism" — ex-Soviets like myself often have the same problem... A cheating Western student fears (or used to fear) the shame of being exposed. A Chinese — or a Soviet — fears merely getting caught. Like a speeding ticket — there is no shame in driving fast, only in being stopped by "the bear".
I'm not saying the banning of the Sikh pages makes any sense. I just don't think there is any jurisdiction here.
It raises the stink, which may push FB to reconsider this or related decisions.
Ukrainians should do the same because Facebook — its "Ukrainian" office located in Russia — regularly shuts down pro-Ukrainian pages, while leaving the openly hateful and violence-threatening pro-Russian ones running... Whether it is evidence of the employees' bias, or simply a factor of there being too many Russian-bots filing automated complaints 24x7, a lawsuit filed by Ukrainians in the US might help...
Bzzz! A lie! The article makes no mention of "an effort". It only describes a discussion within the military, on whether such recruitment might be a good idea. Paying such bloggers — the way Russia pays its trolls as discussed in TFA — is a separate topic too.
This is the second time in this very thread, that I catch you misrepresenting the contents of the links you are offering. So I am not interested in continuing the discussion, liar.
In this particular case, I was simply being pedantic. This is slashdot after all.
If that were all there was to it, a Constitutional scholar like yourself would not have missed an opportunity to correct the earlier poster, who claimed, that Hastert was "2nd in line to the presidency"...
Obviously, Speaker of the House is the 3rd in line — vice-President is the 2nd. And this difference — though still irrelevant to the point made — is much more "material" than the exact numbering of the Amendments.
There aren't many appliances sold today, that would accept the DC input directly. Ripping the converting power-supply out from each one to wire it directly into your DC-circuit will void warranties and ultimately cost a lot more than the "20% losses".
I do find the ability to charge USB-devices without the annoying "black bricks", but that's easily achieved by simply replacing the power outlets with something like this (I have four such in my house already).
If he simply runs CAT6 (or better) Ethernet cables to every room, he can later use some of them as simple DC-electricity conductors...
However that doesn't make the laws bullshit. If you have a better way to catch criminals engaged in money laundering
The primary objection to these laws — and the reason they are considered "bullshit" — is that they allow confiscation of funds without having to prove anything. The government does not even need to file a suit!
None of the victims are "criminals" — because nobody is a criminal until found guilty in a court of law — and your above-quoted excuse for the law is thus automatically invalid.
Worse, the practice — and the bullshit laws "authorizing" it — are in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment, which purports to protect us against this exact practice (emphasis mine): "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated".
First of all, I do agree, that neither bank-withdrawals (in whatever "pattern"), nor lying to anyone (unless under oath) should be a crime. Absolutely not.
But, as long as it is a crime, people like Dennis Hastert — who had the power to do something about these laws, but did not, absolutely must be prosecuted under them. To the fullest extent and without mercy. (I argued the same thing about Spitzer — whose case was even worse, for he not only kept the laws he broke on the books, he strengthened them.)
He is not a regular citizen — employee, student, businessman. He had the power — and more of it, than even an "average" Congressman.
All that said about him, I find it disturbing, that the ruling party would prosecute the opposition's politicians. It does not look good. At all... They should be focusing on their own — like the aforementioned Mr. Spitzer, whose sole "punishment" for breaking federal laws, was resignation...
That's the same article, that the AC above linked to, while making an allegation I rebutted. Your description of it is misleading — at the time it was written, the software did not exist. Only the contract to develop it is actually asserted as existing. Moreover, that is the article, from which I quoted the following: "none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology". You are citing that same link again to "prove", that "US audiences" were targeted after — and even before — the law banning the practice was abolished? Wow...
phony fan club websites, were set up to disparage USA TODAY reporters [...] Camille Chidiac, admitted to setting up some of the sites
So, it was not done by a government program, but by one guy — seemingly at the behest of one private tax-evading company. And he got punished for it...
Slim pickings — your earlier bold claim, that "the domestic propaganda has been going on since before 2013" is not supported... At all.
In which case people would just use putty or cygwin or openssh instead
Or they'll expect remote servers to implement whatever changes Microsoft will require for interoperatibility. We've been through this in the 1990-ies, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was introduced with subtle incompatibilities in HTML-rendering...
Firstly I can see why you had to write "attempts", because it seems none of those actually killed anything
Well, a successful attempt is still an attempt: Netscape died. Kerberos survived because the world wised up by then — this very site had helped by hosting an anonymous coward's post documenting Microsoft's "extensions" to Kerberos so developers world-wide could implement them without signing an NDA of their own.
if they create an incompatibility here it is going to completely break their system making it such that Linux, BSD, iOS, Android, etc... can no longer connect to it.
Or not — depending on the nature of incompatibilities and the marketing/advertising... For example, the regular connections will work, but compressed ones will not (either at all, or requiring client to support some new compression algorithm). Or port-forwarding will be disabled (or not working at all). Or WINCH will not be sent to the remote servers, when the local window is resized — or, in the other direction, arriving WINCH will be ignored or misinterpreted. The possibilities for both honest errors and deliberate breakage are immense...
PuTTy is already an incompatible mess all of it's own. It even has it's own special format for keys
The second sentence implies some other incompatibilities, in addition to special format for keys. I'm not aware of anything else — could you list examples?
Well fuck me, time to look up the command to convert that stupid shit again
Slashdot Mirror
They never promised anything other than what was duly delivered.
Yes, thank you for this illustration. NSA has not stolen anything either — so what's your problem with them?
I fail to see, how the same group of people can see nothing reprehensible in copying songs, movies, and even designs and patents without the "owners'" permissions (indeed, the very possibility of owning information is rejected with high peer-approval), but object so loudly to others capturing, recording, and analyzing information about themselves.
Was your phone call interrupted because of the NSA's tapping? Has your e-mail ever gotten lost because of it? No — as with all digital content, your "originals" are perfectly safe, aren't they? Whether it is a picture of your privates, a birthday-note to your mom, or bomb-making instructions, the message arrived safely to its recipient(s). So, what's the objection?
(And, yes, for the particularly pedantic among us, sometimes the wiretaps probably do cause actual disruption, but that's rare and is not the primary cause for objections.)
Now, I dislike others accessing my information without my permission as a matter of principle. But I afford the same right to object to music and movie-companies and others, who produce information and wish to control its use. That so many otherwise reasonable people would be so self-inconsistent as to support one, but not the other, baffles me...
And shield is a weapon. Try exporting a Kevlar suit out of your country, and you'll know, what I'm talking about.
From your list, the spies and the objectionable 3-letter agencies are what the taxes pay for. The government-adoring "buyers of civilization" pay for it — and force the rest of us to pay for it...
You didn't think this through. Because you just allowed people to steal copper-cable running to your house: they just get some copper, you lose electricity and/or phone service. Their gain and your loses are different and therefore — according to your own argument — whatever they've done is not theft.
Worse, there is no law against it, so it is perfectly legal — congratulations!
How is this relevant? Is access to American entertainment a Canadian's right? Is it a human right — of the kind given to us by our creator?
That's not for the infringer to decide. My not using whatever is in my pocket does not entitle you to it.
Trying to think, what the guys like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson would've said, had anybody told them, that mere 200 years later the Republic they founded will have millions of Federal-government employees and that the collective spending of governments will dance around 50% of the nation's GDP...
Oh, some of those aren't employees, but are contractors. Sure, that changes everything...
And yet, the collection of links I presented each calls the respective company's misdeeds "theft".
You got it! The thief of a movie takes something from the movie's owners — their use of it is diminished, however slightly.
Irrelevant. Your exploiting my idea prevents me from exploiting it for all its worth. A squatter living in a house can not claim, that he welcomes the actual owner from sharing the house with him...
No, it is not — not any more than enforcement of any other property-right.
Exactly! Just as that very hand protects my car, house, and even person...
Encryption is a weapon. Like other weapons, it can be used to defend one's own self or someone else, and to commit murder. Like other weapons, it is dangerous and governments hate it like they hate all weapons — they make governing harder.
So, it is not surprising to see governments agreeing here.
What is surprising is to find other Statists — those enablers of the governments' mission-creeps, the lovers of taxes (with which they are "happy" to "buy civilization") to suddenly disagree.
In that case, NSA, Google, Facebook et al. collecting our data aren't "stealing" anything either.
Distinction without difference. The infringer gets something for nothing — like a thief. The copyright holder loses something — like a theft-victim.
Had the Commandments been the "living and breathing document", that certain folks like to pretend the US Constitution is, something like "thou shall not enjoy artwork against the artist's wishes" would've been found in it by now.
Why not?! Inasmuch as anything can be owned, why can't ideas be? The deed on my house is just as much a "piece of paper" as anything granting rights to a song. If you can download a song against its owner's wishes, why can't you move into my home while I'm away and change the locks? It is (or ought to be) just as socially (un)acceptable...
There is nothing in the article affirming your Socialistic view, that my idea exists for "society as a whole". All the section says on the matter is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
So, you said an untruth (most likely, lied): the Constitution acknowledges the benefit the authors may derive from their writings and discoveries and leaves it to Congress to develop a system to reward them. Which Congress did — long ago — and it is referred to as "intellectual property".
I was, actually, hoping for a couple of +1 Funnies, rather than Trolls. I guess, Illiberals aren't all that open-minded and mirthful either, when caustic humour is aimed at them... Please, don't hate.
Not until those Eurowussies go all the way and start measuring temperature in Kelvins. Only hardcore!
And this is why we absolutely must through BushCo and the rest of RethugliKKKans out and elect a decent, well-educated, sophisticated, and peace-loving man like Barack Obama.
Mmm, excuse me, I just imagined him in my shower and now my limbs are thrilling...
Some times they certainly do. Consider — killing a man is wrong, right? But adding the second wrong of killing an attacker trying to kill you makes a right...
Likewise, cheating an entity, that cheats you may be perfectly ethical — when you can not, as is the case with governments, to simply stop dealing with the cheater.
Once that attitude is developed, it becomes hard to shed and is often applied even when unjustified and, indeed, quite unethical.
What I wrote was not an excuse, but an explanation...
People growing up under oppressive governments have much fewer problems with cheating — because cheating government is a fair game. It rubs off — and the attitude is quickly extended to non-governmental institutions large and even smaller ones.
This is not "racism" — ex-Soviets like myself often have the same problem... A cheating Western student fears (or used to fear) the shame of being exposed. A Chinese — or a Soviet — fears merely getting caught. Like a speeding ticket — there is no shame in driving fast, only in being stopped by "the bear".
China today uses drones to catch cheaters — America had not felt the need for such measures. Perhaps, it was a foolish attitude, because we the immigrants bring all our traits to the "wonderful tapestry of diversity", not just the good ones...
Anybody dealing with Chinese companies (or Russian ones, if you can find any), ought to be careful and not depend merely on trust.
It raises the stink, which may push FB to reconsider this or related decisions.
Ukrainians should do the same because Facebook — its "Ukrainian" office located in Russia — regularly shuts down pro-Ukrainian pages, while leaving the openly hateful and violence-threatening pro-Russian ones running... Whether it is evidence of the employees' bias, or simply a factor of there being too many Russian-bots filing automated complaints 24x7, a lawsuit filed by Ukrainians in the US might help...
Your suspicions are not citations. Next.
Bzzz! A lie! The article makes no mention of "an effort". It only describes a discussion within the military, on whether such recruitment might be a good idea. Paying such bloggers — the way Russia pays its trolls as discussed in TFA — is a separate topic too.
This is the second time in this very thread, that I catch you misrepresenting the contents of the links you are offering. So I am not interested in continuing the discussion, liar.
If that were all there was to it, a Constitutional scholar like yourself would not have missed an opportunity to correct the earlier poster, who claimed, that Hastert was "2nd in line to the presidency"...
Obviously, Speaker of the House is the 3rd in line — vice-President is the 2nd. And this difference — though still irrelevant to the point made — is much more "material" than the exact numbering of the Amendments.
Ouch! You got me! It is the Fourth... Does it invalidate anything else I said?
There aren't many appliances sold today, that would accept the DC input directly. Ripping the converting power-supply out from each one to wire it directly into your DC-circuit will void warranties and ultimately cost a lot more than the "20% losses".
I do find the ability to charge USB-devices without the annoying "black bricks", but that's easily achieved by simply replacing the power outlets with something like this (I have four such in my house already).
If he simply runs CAT6 (or better) Ethernet cables to every room, he can later use some of them as simple DC-electricity conductors...
The primary objection to these laws — and the reason they are considered "bullshit" — is that they allow confiscation of funds without having to prove anything. The government does not even need to file a suit!
None of the victims are "criminals" — because nobody is a criminal until found guilty in a court of law — and your above-quoted excuse for the law is thus automatically invalid.
Worse, the practice — and the bullshit laws "authorizing" it — are in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment, which purports to protect us against this exact practice (emphasis mine): "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated".
First of all, I do agree, that neither bank-withdrawals (in whatever "pattern"), nor lying to anyone (unless under oath) should be a crime. Absolutely not.
But, as long as it is a crime, people like Dennis Hastert — who had the power to do something about these laws, but did not, absolutely must be prosecuted under them. To the fullest extent and without mercy. (I argued the same thing about Spitzer — whose case was even worse, for he not only kept the laws he broke on the books, he strengthened them.)
He is not a regular citizen — employee, student, businessman. He had the power — and more of it, than even an "average" Congressman.
All that said about him, I find it disturbing, that the ruling party would prosecute the opposition's politicians. It does not look good. At all... They should be focusing on their own — like the aforementioned Mr. Spitzer, whose sole "punishment" for breaking federal laws, was resignation...
That seems to be for the troops' recreation and communications, not propaganda.
That's the same article, that the AC above linked to, while making an allegation I rebutted. Your description of it is misleading — at the time it was written, the software did not exist. Only the contract to develop it is actually asserted as existing. Moreover, that is the article, from which I quoted the following: "none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology". You are citing that same link again to "prove", that "US audiences" were targeted after — and even before — the law banning the practice was abolished? Wow...
So, it was not done by a government program, but by one guy — seemingly at the behest of one private tax-evading company. And he got punished for it...
Slim pickings — your earlier bold claim, that "the domestic propaganda has been going on since before 2013" is not supported... At all.
Or they'll expect remote servers to implement whatever changes Microsoft will require for interoperatibility. We've been through this in the 1990-ies, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was introduced with subtle incompatibilities in HTML-rendering...
Well, a successful attempt is still an attempt: Netscape died. Kerberos survived because the world wised up by then — this very site had helped by hosting an anonymous coward's post documenting Microsoft's "extensions" to Kerberos so developers world-wide could implement them without signing an NDA of their own.
Or not — depending on the nature of incompatibilities and the marketing/advertising... For example, the regular connections will work, but compressed ones will not (either at all, or requiring client to support some new compression algorithm). Or port-forwarding will be disabled (or not working at all). Or WINCH will not be sent to the remote servers, when the local window is resized — or, in the other direction, arriving WINCH will be ignored or misinterpreted. The possibilities for both honest errors and deliberate breakage are immense...
Citations? Given how enthusiastically US media supports the party currently in power, I doubt, you'll find any.
Not until there is another regime-change and dissent becomes patriotic (rather than racist) again.
The second sentence implies some other incompatibilities, in addition to special format for keys. I'm not aware of anything else — could you list examples?
PuTTY's entire source-code is , whereas Microsoft's own implementation of Kerberos was binary-only and developers had to sign an NDA to learn, how to interoperate with it. I linked to that above — the story was all the rage right here on /. 15 years ago...
Probably, because, PuTTY provided a perfectly satisfactory solution...