Let me translate for you: the "interception" here was by the government. The "security issue" is that somebody in the government leaked that info, or (less likely) that it was swiped by someone outside the government. The real "issue" isn't that the info was leaked, its just that it revealed that the government has it.
Even if this was intercepted by A government it need not have been the US Government. They need not have been any government and need not even have done so in the US, radio signals not being stopped by international borders. For all anyone knows the interception could have happened at the Burkina Faso Embassy in Ottawa or such like...
Yes pager traffic is unencrypted but you could make a claim that the uses have a valid assumption of privacy. Email is also not encrypted, how you like all your email published on the net?
Email generally isn't sent by broadcasting it to large parts of the planet. Most pagers being selective call radio receivers.
For the most part I find Wikileaks to be nothing but tabloid press at it's worst. They have a right to freedom of the press but they are not knight in shinning armor that many people on slashdot hold them up to be. Frankly they seem to miss the difference between secret and private.
We now know that someone was intercepting and recording pager traffic, in the US, more than 8 years ago. What we don't know is when this actually started, if it is still happening or where else in the world this sort of thing may have happened...
No, his voters were given the choice of voting for him or for his opponent. The political machine and wealthy connections gave him the money to run his campaign, gave him the support to run, and most importantly, ensured he runs unopposed in the primary every election cycle... he's a breadwinner for the Republican party because of his wealthy IRA-supporting contacts.
He's funded by terrorists? Or does IRA mean something other than Irish Republican Army here.
As pager traffic is totally unencrypted, it's not a surprise that someone might be intercepting them. Especially on Wall Street, like the article states, because it's high valued information.
How would you pick up only the pager traffic for pagers in Lower Manhatten? As opposed to that for most of North America.
Software is already protected by copyright, and should not be protected by patents.
Up until about 25 years ago it was quite hotly debated if sooftware (especially compiled object code) was actually covered by copyright law or not.
Patents are required on physical objects because they are not covered by copyright, and so absent patent protection an engineer could simply disassemble your new vacuum cleaner (for example) and produce a clone, cheaper than yours as they don't have to cover the R&D costs.
In plenty of industries buying your competitors' products and having your own people take them apart is the norm.
Is heat output. More or less, any energy that isn't becoming light is becoming heat. Now in some areas of the world, that matters little to none. However in hot climates, it does. An incandescent produces more heat which gets dumped in to the air in your house.
This is also an issue where it is cold enough to need heating.
You then have to run your AC more often. So you end up paying double for the power, in terms of using it and then eliminating the excess.
It dosn't help that many AC systems move excess heat from inside to outside a building, typically into an all ready hot environment, rather than do something like pre-heating hot water.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works,
This kind of creativity is something intrinsic to humans.
i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request).
X years after the artist dies is unlikely to be meaningful to the artist for any value of X:). Also I can't see how any modern study could possibly consider terms of 5-20 years, which are more likely to be meaningful to people...
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Or maybe the whole world would have known about him in his lifetime. Thing is that putting on any sort of play is certainly not "near-zero cost".
1. Perhaps it's true that most popular musicians would be better off working at 7-11... but if that were true they'd be spending their time working at 7-11, not making music. So that doesn't actually address the point.
Nothing stops them making music outside the time they are working their "day job". Not having to rely on their music as a sole income may result in their being more creative.
2. Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
What was kept in the Library of Alexandria? How about about all the things which went on in Al-Andalus?
As a self-employed game developer, I own the copyright on all the stuff I sell. While I can recognise the need for a unified global copyright system (and unified global laws on sales and export/import tax),
One thing that the entertainments industry appears very much against is a unified global market, however.
my sales model assumes I can sell any given product for 10 years, and I would be perfectly happy if copyright durations were reduced to that. That said, 10 years may well be optimistic, and I doubt I would have any problems if it was reduced to 5 years.
Possibly starting the "clock" with first publication/sale.
Short duration IP-monopoly-rights are non-issues for rapidly moving industries, and shorter durations make it easier to move faster.
Indeed they might well encourage it to move faster. Since even a highly sucessful thing isn't going to be worth anything for very long. Even disregarding the effects of changes in fashions...
A friend of mine in the Navy used to rig a massive air cannon / spud gun to the side of his destroyer, for fun. The recoil on it would actually drive the ship backwards in the water.
While this is true, it's also true that most pirates are opportunists. There are no shortage of valuable cargoes (and ransomable crews) travelling through their waters, and given the choice between boarding a ship whose crew are unarmed and one whose crew are carrying AK47s and warning that anyone attempting to board them will be shot, they aren't going to choose the latter.
Rifles, even shotguns, would be a better choice for the crew. Since the effective range of something like the AK47 isn't that high. Thus the crew can hit the pirates but the pirates can't hit the crew.
200 miles out to sea and you've just disabled their boat perminately - i'd say you've basicly killed them anyway by leaving the to die slowly from thirst.
In which case you need to carry some additional life rafts that you can give them. Anyway according the the article this only diables the boat for under an hour.
I don't understand why everybody is hung up on this fear of 'making mistakes'. Why is it every time that somebody suggests arming potential victims somebody else comes along and starts worrying about friendly fire? It rarely works out that way in the real world.
If anything the "friendly fire" argument would make more sense in the context of not arming/disarming "cops". Especially given that when this happens the shooter tends to get special help to keep them out of jail.
Putting arms in the hands of the good guys does not turn them into trigger happy nutjobs that kill random innocent people at the slightest provocation.
If anything this is less likely to happen when regular people are armed than when police and soldiers are armed. Possibly because being paranoid is always considered to be a bad state of mind to the average person.
If a government feels threatened by small arms contained within a ship that wants to dock then that government is a lost cause. Please explain to me how a weapons locker aboard ship containing rifles, pistols and shotguns represents a threat.
It would be really ironic if the same government were to ever allow foreign warships into it's territorial waters.
Sorry but they did do something with the notices, they forwarded them to the Western Australian police.
Even if postage is free to the police this would have still cost the ISP something. Maybe they should be complaining to the police and thanking the ISP for providing them with a service for free.
They are upset because when notification of infringement is sent they essentially send it to the circular file and do nothing at all.
Is the ISP obliged to do anything else? Especially as it appears that they are not following a previously agreed procedure.
All they are asking for is that when the infringed party reports copyright infringement, the ISP actually investigates it In all honesty, this does seem reasonable,
The ISP is not an investigative agency (and may simply not have the resources to investigate the complaint), nobody is paying them to do any such thing, it also isn't a good business practice to act against customers.
provided they don't flood their offices with garbage reports..
Without investigating they have no idea how valid (if at all) the complaint is.
To be even fairer, the ISPs and AFACT already have a procedure in place to do this. AFACT agreed to it and choose to blissfully ignore it in favour of asking the ISP to illegally do their dirty work.
In which case it appears perfectly reasonable for ISPs to "deal with it" by filing AFACT's communications in the circular file and/or invoicing them for their time.
This is a test case of provisions in the AU-US free trade agreement
How is this legitimatly part of a "free trade" agreement? If anything one business being able force another business to do something which increases the latter's costs (and interferes with their ability to carry out their actual business) is more "restraining trade".
Why is it the ISPs responsibility? They don't work for the music industry, and last I checked copyright infringement for non-commercial use was still a civil matter. Therefore the ISP has precisely zero responsibility to do anything since the law doesn't require it.
Presumable this is the ISP's case.
What the music industry is asking is for the ISP to _spend_ money so the music industry _doesn't_ have to.
If the music industry wants the ISP to do something for them then they should either pay the ISP (with the ISP setting the price) or stop sticking their nose into other people's business.
Not to mention the media industry is well known for making fraudulent claims.
Or at least "mistaken" claims. Without there being a penalty for bogus claims then there is no incentive for the party making such claims only make valid claims.
Under the assumption that the party sending out the letters is doing the due diligence thing, they'd connect to the IP claiming to seed and ask it for a chunk of the torrented bit sequence. If the client doesn't get one, there's no infringement going no.
If they do get one then either they themselves are a "pirate" or they are data they are entitled receive thus there can be no infringement. There's also the issue of how possible it is to reconstruct a file from a random file fragment.
Now, we can discuss whether the due diligence assumption is realistic, of course, but if I were them and I was genuine about preventing piracy (as opposed to going scaremongering), that's what I'd do. (fwiw...)
Really what they'd need to do would be leech the whole file, taking note of where they got each bit from, then have person look at what they had downloaded.
If you got such a letter, tell them to go fuck themselves, because they don't even know what "proof" is in computers, because they know shit about how computers work.
You just need to rephrase that in the appropriate legal jargon.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me translate for you: the "interception" here was by the government. The "security issue" is that somebody in the government leaked that info, or (less likely) that it was swiped by someone outside the government. The real "issue" isn't that the info was leaked, its just that it revealed that the government has it.
Even if this was intercepted by A government it need not have been the US Government. They need not have been any government and need not even have done so in the US, radio signals not being stopped by international borders. For all anyone knows the interception could have happened at the Burkina Faso Embassy in Ottawa or such like...
Yes pager traffic is unencrypted but you could make a claim that the uses have a valid assumption of privacy. Email is also not encrypted, how you like all your email published on the net?
Email generally isn't sent by broadcasting it to large parts of the planet. Most pagers being selective call radio receivers.
For the most part I find Wikileaks to be nothing but tabloid press at it's worst. They have a right to freedom of the press but they are not knight in shinning armor that many people on slashdot hold them up to be. Frankly they seem to miss the difference between secret and private.
We now know that someone was intercepting and recording pager traffic, in the US, more than 8 years ago. What we don't know is when this actually started, if it is still happening or where else in the world this sort of thing may have happened...
No, his voters were given the choice of voting for him or for his opponent. The political machine and wealthy connections gave him the money to run his campaign, gave him the support to run, and most importantly, ensured he runs unopposed in the primary every election cycle... he's a breadwinner for the Republican party because of his wealthy IRA-supporting contacts.
He's funded by terrorists? Or does IRA mean something other than Irish Republican Army here.
As pager traffic is totally unencrypted, it's not a surprise that someone might be intercepting them. Especially on Wall Street, like the article states, because it's high valued information.
How would you pick up only the pager traffic for pagers in Lower Manhatten? As opposed to that for most of North America.
Software is already protected by copyright, and should not be protected by patents.
Up until about 25 years ago it was quite hotly debated if sooftware (especially compiled object code) was actually covered by copyright law or not.
Patents are required on physical objects because they are not covered by copyright, and so absent patent protection an engineer could simply disassemble your new vacuum cleaner (for example) and produce a clone, cheaper than yours as they don't have to cover the R&D costs.
In plenty of industries buying your competitors' products and having your own people take them apart is the norm.
Unfortunately the RIAA already has the patent on that method.
Which was overturned due to prior art. Bogus invoicers having been around for a long time...
Is heat output. More or less, any energy that isn't becoming light is becoming heat. Now in some areas of the world, that matters little to none. However in hot climates, it does. An incandescent produces more heat which gets dumped in to the air in your house.
This is also an issue where it is cold enough to need heating.
You then have to run your AC more often. So you end up paying double for the power, in terms of using it and then eliminating the excess.
It dosn't help that many AC systems move excess heat from inside to outside a building, typically into an all ready hot environment, rather than do something like pre-heating hot water.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works,
:). Also I can't see how any modern study could possibly consider terms of 5-20 years, which are more likely to be meaningful to people...
This kind of creativity is something intrinsic to humans.
i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request).
X years after the artist dies is unlikely to be meaningful to the artist for any value of X
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Or maybe the whole world would have known about him in his lifetime. Thing is that putting on any sort of play is certainly not "near-zero cost".
1. Perhaps it's true that most popular musicians would be better off working at 7-11... but if that were true they'd be spending their time working at 7-11, not making music. So that doesn't actually address the point.
Nothing stops them making music outside the time they are working their "day job". Not having to rely on their music as a sole income may result in their being more creative.
2. Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
What was kept in the Library of Alexandria? How about about all the things which went on in Al-Andalus?
As a self-employed game developer, I own the copyright on all the stuff I sell. While I can recognise the need for a unified global copyright system (and unified global laws on sales and export/import tax),
One thing that the entertainments industry appears very much against is a unified global market, however.
my sales model assumes I can sell any given product for 10 years, and I would be perfectly happy if copyright durations were reduced to that. That said, 10 years may well be optimistic, and I doubt I would have any problems if it was reduced to 5 years.
Possibly starting the "clock" with first publication/sale.
Short duration IP-monopoly-rights are non-issues for rapidly moving industries, and shorter durations make it easier to move faster.
Indeed they might well encourage it to move faster. Since even a highly sucessful thing isn't going to be worth anything for very long. Even disregarding the effects of changes in fashions...
A friend of mine in the Navy used to rig a massive air cannon / spud gun to the side of his destroyer, for fun. The recoil on it would actually drive the ship backwards in the water.
What did the captain have to say about this?
While this is true, it's also true that most pirates are opportunists. There are no shortage of valuable cargoes (and ransomable crews) travelling through their waters, and given the choice between boarding a ship whose crew are unarmed and one whose crew are carrying AK47s and warning that anyone attempting to board them will be shot, they aren't going to choose the latter.
Rifles, even shotguns, would be a better choice for the crew. Since the effective range of something like the AK47 isn't that high. Thus the crew can hit the pirates but the pirates can't hit the crew.
200 miles out to sea and you've just disabled their boat perminately - i'd say you've basicly killed them anyway by leaving the to die slowly from thirst.
In which case you need to carry some additional life rafts that you can give them. Anyway according the the article this only diables the boat for under an hour.
I don't understand why everybody is hung up on this fear of 'making mistakes'. Why is it every time that somebody suggests arming potential victims somebody else comes along and starts worrying about friendly fire? It rarely works out that way in the real world.
If anything the "friendly fire" argument would make more sense in the context of not arming/disarming "cops". Especially given that when this happens the shooter tends to get special help to keep them out of jail.
Putting arms in the hands of the good guys does not turn them into trigger happy nutjobs that kill random innocent people at the slightest provocation.
If anything this is less likely to happen when regular people are armed than when police and soldiers are armed. Possibly because being paranoid is always considered to be a bad state of mind to the average person.
If a government feels threatened by small arms contained within a ship that wants to dock then that government is a lost cause. Please explain to me how a weapons locker aboard ship containing rifles, pistols and shotguns represents a threat.
It would be really ironic if the same government were to ever allow foreign warships into it's territorial waters.
have fun finding ports that will allow your armed merchant ship to dock.
That's what you'd need a real Anti-Piracy treaty for.
Sorry but they did do something with the notices, they forwarded them to the Western Australian police.
Even if postage is free to the police this would have still cost the ISP something. Maybe they should be complaining to the police and thanking the ISP for providing them with a service for free.
They are upset because when notification of infringement is sent they essentially send it to the circular file and do nothing at all.
Is the ISP obliged to do anything else? Especially as it appears that they are not following a previously agreed procedure.
All they are asking for is that when the infringed party reports copyright infringement, the ISP actually investigates it In all honesty, this does seem reasonable,
The ISP is not an investigative agency (and may simply not have the resources to investigate the complaint), nobody is paying them to do any such thing, it also isn't a good business practice to act against customers.
provided they don't flood their offices with garbage reports..
Without investigating they have no idea how valid (if at all) the complaint is.
To be even fairer, the ISPs and AFACT already have a procedure in place to do this. AFACT agreed to it and choose to blissfully ignore it in favour of asking the ISP to illegally do their dirty work.
In which case it appears perfectly reasonable for ISPs to "deal with it" by filing AFACT's communications in the circular file and/or invoicing them for their time.
This is a test case of provisions in the AU-US free trade agreement
How is this legitimatly part of a "free trade" agreement? If anything one business being able force another business to do something which increases the latter's costs (and interferes with their ability to carry out their actual business) is more "restraining trade".
Why is it the ISPs responsibility? They don't work for the music industry, and last I checked copyright infringement for non-commercial use was still a civil matter. Therefore the ISP has precisely zero responsibility to do anything since the law doesn't require it.
Presumable this is the ISP's case.
What the music industry is asking is for the ISP to _spend_ money so the music industry _doesn't_ have to.
If the music industry wants the ISP to do something for them then they should either pay the ISP (with the ISP setting the price) or stop sticking their nose into other people's business.
Not to mention the media industry is well known for making fraudulent claims.
Or at least "mistaken" claims. Without there being a penalty for bogus claims then there is no incentive for the party making such claims only make valid claims.
Under the assumption that the party sending out the letters is doing the due diligence thing, they'd connect to the IP claiming to seed and ask it for a chunk of the torrented bit sequence. If the client doesn't get one, there's no infringement going no.
If they do get one then either they themselves are a "pirate" or they are data they are entitled receive thus there can be no infringement. There's also the issue of how possible it is to reconstruct a file from a random file fragment.
Now, we can discuss whether the due diligence assumption is realistic, of course, but if I were them and I was genuine about preventing piracy (as opposed to going scaremongering), that's what I'd do. (fwiw...)
Really what they'd need to do would be leech the whole file, taking note of where they got each bit from, then have person look at what they had downloaded.
If you got such a letter, tell them to go fuck themselves, because they don't even know what "proof" is in computers, because they know shit about how computers work.
You just need to rephrase that in the appropriate legal jargon.