Absent a contractual obligation to the contrary (such as "We will never look at your data" in the TOS) they can look at anything on it. If you don't like that negotiate a special arrangement (not likely) or go back to a co-lo where you own the hardware.
> How can a state tell you that you are allowed to violate a federal law? > And, what happens if the feds do raid? Would you be able to make an arguable case in > court on the premise that the state in which you reside said it is ok to violate the > federal law?
The state of California has said no such thing. They have simply said that it is not a violation of state law and that you cannot, therefor, be prosecuted for it by state authorities. The Federal government's jurisdiction is questionable in some circumstances, but that is an unrelated issue.
While any such communication could, in theory, be bugged, I doubt that anyone with access has any interest in your scatological conversations with your mistress, and I doubt that anyone who is interested has access (unless your name is Sarkozy). Security is a matter of putting up a barrier that would cost more to surmount than the protected information is worth. For at least 99.999% of conversations Skype's encryption is good enough.
> As soon as you implement that policy, users will write their password on a post-it note, > stick it to their monitor, and replace it with a new one every week.
Which, for some threat models, can be an entirely reasonable thing to do.
To prove false advertising you need only prove that an advertisement was knowingly false. To prove fraud you must also prove the specific people were swindled. The first is obviously easier.
> However, precisely because it has been so long in coming, it could mean a major shakeup > of a number of things. One important example is listed right in the summary: Google's > PageRank patent. With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank, > without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
So what? Why is it not good for Google to have competition? Are "not evil" monopolies desireable?
Under that system if I invent something that is an improvement on an existing patent and so cannot be practiced without the permission of the owner of that patent they can simply refuse to either buy the patent from me or license theirs to me and mine will fall into the public domain.
You also then have the problem of defining "use it". It would be quite easy for a big company (or well-funded patent troll) to make and sell a few hundred units a year of a device incorporating the patent and keep the patent alive while the individual inventor would be forced to sell out quickly.
Invalidation of a class of patents as not properly issued is not "taking". "Taking" is what the US government did when they took Fermi's fission reactor patent and assigned it to themselves. They were eventually required to pay his estate $10M. In this case they are deciding that the material in question is not patentable at all and so was always in the public domain.
> We do have a method here of converting a physical waveform into a stream of bits/storage > space.
MP3 and MPEG4 have nothing to do with physical waveforms. They transform pure data to pure data. They could, in principle, be carried out with pencil and paper. Microphones and A/D converters convert physical waveforms into bits.
> I mean, if we allow patents for gramophone or magnetophone (or radio, or telephone), > this is quite like these.
A gramophone is a machine: a composition of matter. These are algorithms.
> In my mind if someone does this for say badmachine.slashdot.org they are pretty much > guilty of criminal trespass, trademark violation, and/or fraud.
Fortunately, your mind is not a court of law.
> Within the TLD space say www.badurltest.org where the typo isn't already someone else's > claimed property
Most of the uploads they are interested in have already been taken down by Google after Viacom filed takedown requests. Yes, they probably could generate data nearly as good by setting up an expensive project to do as you say, but Google already has the data conveniently saved in their logs.
As for the judge, Google failed to explain that the logs contain both IP numbers and access times which can, in combination, be used to identify users. They only clearly mentioned IP numbers which, as the judge correctly noted, are not sufficient to identify (most) users.
Slashdot Mirror
Absent a contractual obligation to the contrary (such as "We will never look at your data" in the TOS) they can look at anything on it. If you don't like that negotiate a special arrangement (not likely) or go back to a co-lo where you own the hardware.
They mean they don't log IPs.
They say "not by cookies" yet they try to set three of them when I visit their "info" page.
Hint: MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are not "Ivy League".
> How can a state tell you that you are allowed to violate a federal law?
> And, what happens if the feds do raid? Would you be able to make an arguable case in
> court on the premise that the state in which you reside said it is ok to violate the
> federal law?
The state of California has said no such thing. They have simply said that it is not a violation of state law and that you cannot, therefor, be prosecuted for it by state authorities. The Federal government's jurisdiction is questionable in some circumstances, but that is an unrelated issue.
While any such communication could, in theory, be bugged, I doubt that anyone with access has any interest in your scatological conversations with your mistress, and I doubt that anyone who is interested has access (unless your name is Sarkozy). Security is a matter of putting up a barrier that would cost more to surmount than the protected information is worth. For at least 99.999% of conversations Skype's encryption is good enough.
> As soon as you implement that policy, users will write their password on a post-it note,
> stick it to their monitor, and replace it with a new one every week.
Which, for some threat models, can be an entirely reasonable thing to do.
> ...he didn't really have the authority to do that...
You don't know what he did. You only know what the aforementioned "fuckwits" allege that he did.
...supports six different version control systems. It is enabled by default. Read the manual.
Pathalias.
UUCP (with Mapalias)
To prove false advertising you need only prove that an advertisement was knowingly false. To prove fraud you must also prove the specific people were swindled. The first is obviously easier.
> However, precisely because it has been so long in coming, it could mean a major shakeup
> of a number of things. One important example is listed right in the summary: Google's
> PageRank patent. With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank,
> without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
So what? Why is it not good for Google to have competition? Are "not evil" monopolies desireable?
Under that system if I invent something that is an improvement on an existing patent and so cannot be practiced without the permission of the owner of that patent they can simply refuse to either buy the patent from me or license theirs to me and mine will fall into the public domain.
You also then have the problem of defining "use it". It would be quite easy for a big company (or well-funded patent troll) to make and sell a few hundred units a year of a device incorporating the patent and keep the patent alive while the individual inventor would be forced to sell out quickly.
Invalidation of a class of patents as not properly issued is not "taking". "Taking" is what the US government did when they took Fermi's fission reactor patent and assigned it to themselves. They were eventually required to pay his estate $10M. In this case they are deciding that the material in question is not patentable at all and so was always in the public domain.
If the patent is really like that it is useless.
> We do have a method here of converting a physical waveform into a stream of bits/storage
> space.
MP3 and MPEG4 have nothing to do with physical waveforms. They transform pure data to pure data. They could, in principle, be carried out with pencil and paper. Microphones and A/D converters convert physical waveforms into bits.
> I mean, if we allow patents for gramophone or magnetophone (or radio, or telephone),
> this is quite like these.
A gramophone is a machine: a composition of matter. These are algorithms.
Proving that the Higgs boson does not exist would be a much more exciting result than would merely finding it.
2, 3, and 4 are excellent rules. 1 is just an arbitrary convention, but the code will be more readable if everyone does it the same way.
They don't know that the URL was wrongly typed (or typed at all, for that matter). All they know is that they can't find a DNS record for it.
> Every ISP does that now.
CenturyTel isn't doing it here.
> In my mind if someone does this for say badmachine.slashdot.org they are pretty much
> guilty of criminal trespass, trademark violation, and/or fraud.
Fortunately, your mind is not a court of law.
> Within the TLD space say www.badurltest.org where the typo isn't already someone else's
> claimed property
No string of characters is or can be property.
Why so you have to use their router? Can't you put the modem in bridge mode and use your own router?
Most of the uploads they are interested in have already been taken down by Google after Viacom filed takedown requests. Yes, they probably could generate data nearly as good by setting up an expensive project to do as you say, but Google already has the data conveniently saved in their logs.
As for the judge, Google failed to explain that the logs contain both IP numbers and access times which can, in combination, be used to identify users. They only clearly mentioned IP numbers which, as the judge correctly noted, are not sufficient to identify (most) users.
> It says something about the collective intelligence of our vaunted "market" economy, no?
Copyright and patent laws prevent it from operating freely.