Unless I misunderstand separation of powers in the US, the ability of your legislature to set the budgets within which the executive must operate is a fundamental check on the power of the executive. Failing to exercise the authority to set the budget on the basis that a president might veto it is cowardly, unprincipled politics.
At the very least, Congress should force the President to make that veto, and when he counters with some statement about not supporting the troops, they should counter with some factual arguments about tax-and-spend policies in the White House and how much it's costing everyone, and perhaps question why so many troops are still out there needing support after all this time anyway. They should do this especially now, when you have a lame duck President who almost no-one likes and who has neither the authority nor the credibility left to challenge much of anything.
I'd be surprised if the government here in GB plays along for long. Privacy, surveillance and the database state are becoming big issues here right now, both legally and politically, while support for the US throwing its weight around is a pretty universal vote-loser, all of which are bad news for a government so weak it can barely stand up. I expect a significant change in approach in time for the next general election in a couple of years, if not sooner if they give their current leader the boot and find yet another one after the summer recess.
In any case, the government doesn't have much choice about European data protection rules, which our businesses are bound to follow regardless of the government saying nice things to the US. There are already concerns in the business press about issues such as more distributed data storage and processing facilities, which can't be set up in locations that don't adhere to the same data protection standards as European law requires without jumping through hoops with customers and/or incurring negative PR. The US is one such location.
And even without legal obligations, the costs and risks associated with travel to the US are reaching the point that a lot of businesses will no longer make the trip. There have already been reports of business people being refused entry for the most stupid of reasons because of so-called anti-terrorist measures, and as I said before, it probably won't take more than a few high profile leaks after business laptops went missing while containing confidential data to start a serious backlash. Make it impossible to transfer data securely via the Internet as well, and the US just became one of the most business-hostile countries in the Western world, and no amount of sucking up by European governments is going to make European businesses run risks they don't need to in the current economic climate. Many of those that don't have well-established, substantial operations in the US will probably just give up on it until sanity returns.
In general, you're absolutely right about the problem of getting rights back once forfeited.
However, I suspect that if the US did permit arbitrary low level staffers to intercept and redistribute any information crossing the border that they wanted to, that permission would be revoked fairly quickly as the rest of the world started rerouting the Internet to guarantee not going via the US.
Of course, it would never come to that. Businesses and public figures concerned about the dangers to themselves of sensitive information leaking would lobby their governments, who in turn would make their feelings known to the US, who would make loud and significant-sounding noises about the importance of national security and the terrorist threat, but who would then quietly reverse the position.
I imagine when the abuses of the current situation with physical devices start, things will go much the same way anyway, but the US is already regarded as a threat to data security by many European businesses (which have things like European data protection legislation constraining them) and any further steps are likely to hasten the proceedings.
Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
And how many of those are there, for the average home or business user?
Distributed data has obvious potential advantages, but even then only for probably a minority of people, and it comes with several pretty major caveats.
But distributed processing? What can't you do on an entry level home or office system today, which already costs very little for the power and flexibility it offers compared to other devices? The only things where many home users would want more power are applications like gaming and multimedia, and in that case the power needs to be local to respond in near real time anyway. For business users, I guess the equivalent would be the few people who do serious calculations or data mining, but how many people really do that with their office PC rather than writing a document, giving a presentation, reading their e-mail or using the corporate intranet?
Cloud computing is a solution looking for a problem, and it always will be other than in certain niches (who are already doing just fine with their development of distributed processing, thanks all the same). This is just the next cycle in the local-vs-remote processing cycle, and each time we go around the advantages of the remote side decrease while the advantages of the local side increase. If someone finally invented an operating system with decent remote administrative controls and software packaging/installation APIs, the remote argument would probably already be on its deathbed apart from the aforementioned niche markets.
Sure, but frankly, anyone who relies on the "trust" aspect of SSL certificates today for anything serious needs their head examined. In this world, trustworthy == willing and able to pay.
The encryption is by far the most important aspect of SSL for most applications, and you can use that regardless of any issues with CAs and trust.
He didn't say it was legal for students to do this
I've just reread his post, and it still reads like that's what he's saying to me!
Seriously, under what line of crazed reasoning does the university bear responsibility for three jackasses in the dorm stairwell singing "Dancing Queen"?
I would imagine it's not the random sing-alongs in the dorm stairwell that are covered by the licence, but rather the public performances.
Some performance rights are normally acquired by the performers, others by the venue. I don't know the usual rules of the game in the US, but here in the UK it's normal for recorded music to be dealt with by the people playing it in public, but for venues to have a blanket licence for live performances of music under copyright given on their premises (the costs of which may be passed on to the performers to some extent in the hire costs for the venue). I'm not quite sure how things evolved to this state; presumably at some point in the past it was easiest to keep track of performances and distribute royalties appropriately or something.
A law that tries to control the right to copy makes no sense in a world where everyone has every day access to copying machines.
Sure, and a law that tries to control the right to take a human life makes no sense in a world where everyone has every day access to guns.
Didn't your parents teach you that just because we can do something, that doesn't always mean we should?
The direct social benefits of copying cannot be denied by the naive backwards belief that restriction of that copying is the best way to encourage the creation of new works. We now know that is wrong. We now know that, in fact, the exact opposite is true - people create more new works when they have free access to the work of others.
So a few frequent posters on Slashdot keep saying, but where is your evidence?
We have an Internet full of freely available writing, but what deep, original, comprehensive work of true value is produced this way? The WWW is one big echo chamber, and blogs are the worst culprits: take a look at the front pages of sites like Slashdot, Digg and Reddit one day, and see if you can spot more than one or two original ideas on the subjects they cover in the entire Internet.
Likewise, we have an open source world full of freely available software, but how much of it is just a substandard clone of a popular commercial offering? There are a few pearls, to be sure, but much of it is a second-rate knock-off, inferior to the commercial alternatives. Moreover, even the original stuff mostly isn't in original areas, it's "mass market": essential systems software, multimedia tools, basic office software, games and graphics.
In other words, on the evidence to date, letting people use existing work freely results in a large amount of derivative work that adds little value, but there remains a shortage of evidence that substantial amounts of original, creative, high quality work are being given away for free. Meanwhile, those taking advantage of copyright continue to produce such work in abundance in many fields.
Even if they're performing copyrighted works (doing an artistic interpretation), just in this case they can't do that for profit without obtaining the rightowner's permission. So it looks someone is extorting money from the universities...
Cite, please? In most jurisdictions, including the US as far as I'm aware, public performance is a protected right under copyright, and just because something is not for profit, that does not automatically qualify it as a fair use (or whatever your jurisdiction calls the equivalent exemption).
I admire your integrity on this matter, and you're absolutely right about protecting the freedom for legitimate growth. Killing P2P because of music sharing is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
At the same time, clearly there is a problem with illegal sharing via P2P, in that most use of P2P is surely for that purpose. That is unfair both on you as the sysadmin and on those students who do want to use the service legitimately but may find the available bandwidth limited because of what others are using it for. Both of these apply regardless of your perspective on the ethics of breaking copyright law (which I personally don't agree with either, but I recognise that there are plenty of people on Slashdot who disagree).
Perhaps it would suffice to send a polite but unambiguous message to your users reminding them that illegal file sharing is not a valid use of the resources you provide for students and warning that abusers will be disconnected? That seems perfectly fair, you could use a proportionate scale of responses (e.g., disconnection for a couple of days for a first offence, up to permanent disconnection for repeat offenders), and as long as it's not automatic and a real person is available to sort out any problems quickly (e.g., if someone does get disconnected but can later demonstrate that they need access for legitimate purposes) it seems unlikely to do any serious damage to anyone.
I don't know who I fear the most, Al-Queda, or the US government, It's pretty much a toss-up at the moment, and I'm not so sure that the needle won't end on the latter.
It's not even close.
My sig used to say something like this:
“Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has not been terrorism, but the power of the state.”
FWIW, I'd guess Google Groups has accounted for well over 90% of the spam in the assorted groups I follow since their captcha system was compromised, particularly in the groups outside the Big 8 (e.g., there are a handful of groups relating to the city where I live). A couple of the regular posters mentioned trying to contact the abuse address in the headers of GG posts and apparently being redirected to/dev/nul, but I can't say I ever tried myself.
For one thing, Google Groups is currently acting as the equivalent of an open relay to all of Usenet, resulting in a vast increase in the amount of junk messages. They should be treated by other Usenet servers in the same way that we treat any other open relay: ignore anything coming from it until it gets its house in order. I fail to understand why Google being Google exempts them from this treatment.:-(
For another thing, Google Groups sucks as a Usenet interface, and numerous clients do a much better job of it.
It's remarkable that something you and Google consider unreasonable in such general terms is protected by such fundamental legislation as the European Convention on Human Rights.
While I recognise your implication that there will be grey areas, that is not a counter-argument to the general principle. Laws should codify principles, and courts can decide on the grey areas in the context of specific actions. This is how our legal system works.
I can't imagine any court holding that writing down something you saw in public is illegal in general. But certain very specific factors in Google's actions are quite distinct, black-and-white things, none of which would apply to the guy in the street who happens to see something as he walks past. This is the sort of list I usually give as a starting point, though I make no claim that a more astute or comprehensive list could not be made instead:
deliberate observation (premeditated intent);
systematic collection rather than one-off observation (how comprehensive the observation);
targeted rather than incidental or background observation;
making permanent recordings;
making detailed recordings;
redistribution of the recorded data to others;
providing searching facilities;
doing all of this for commercial reasons rather than as a private citizen.
I note that the effects of these factors can be quite widespread, and there are socially unacceptable boundaries even for behaviour in a public place.
If you are just walking down the street minding your own business and a gust of wind through an open window on a calm day blows a curtain so you glimpse someone getting changed, I suspect almost everyone would say that's just the luck of the draw, and while it might be a little embarrassing for either or both people, there is little real harm done. On the other hand, if you were going out each night and, while standing on public roads, using binoculars to look for small gaps in people's curtains through which you could stand there and watch them getting changed, I think most people would find that behaviour pretty creepy and consider it a deliberate invasion of privacy (and in fact the law explicitly recognises this in some places).
Another example is that if you walk past someone while you're out shopping, no-one would call that invasion of privacy. However, if you followed someone around for a whole day, going in to each shop behind them, recording everything they bought, photographing the cards they used to pay and videoing them as they typed their PINs into the machines, I think almost everyone would consider that harassment and an invasion of privacy.
Respect for privacy is never as simple as some distinction between public and private places. There's a lot more to it than that, but common sense and common courtesy is all it takes to work out the general ideas in fairly objective terms.
Can somebody just camp out in your backyard if they want?
There was an amusing story a while back about some folks who did just this... and woke up a little later to find automatic weapons pointed at them. The "field" they were camped in turned out to be within the grounds of Chequers, the Prime Minister's official residence.
It's true that there are relatively liberal laws on movement in the UK today. There are certain places you cannot go without consent: MOD property, for example, or land owned by the latest incarnation of British Rail, whatever we're calling it this week. Otherwise, the law is rather daft, in that if you're not damaging anything there is no specific prohibition against walking through someone's open front door and sitting down on their sofa to watch their TV. As a police officer visiting my school a few years ago pointed out, however, this is probably not a good idea, because there are numerous other generic laws they could use as an excuse to remove someone in that position should it become necessary. Sitting on my sofa might not be illegal, but disturbing a pattern of dust that I thought was pretty probably is.;-)
It is regrettable, IMHO, that we don't have stronger generic privacy laws at present, and I think things will get worse before they get better. However, I think we will see an inevitable backlash, as the ill-effects of allowing the database/surveillance state and mass corporate profiling to rule our lives start to be felt by more than just the principled liberal type and affect the average voter. This is already starting in the UK, where the government has pushed too far with things like ID cards and the National Identity Register, and then come undone as the dangers of privacy invasion, the excessive costs for little benefit, and a fundamental inability to keep personal information safe have come to light. A few more leaked stories about high government officials or rich celebrities and general privacy laws might just get strengthened the same way. There is a fundamental difference (actually, I would count five fundamental differences) between an average person in a public place being able to see something and a commercial body systematically recording information on a massive scale and republishing it in a searchable form to the whole world.
If people really want "true privacy" in today's world, then they really have to never leave their house, never access the internet, never buy anything with a credit card or debit card, and don't forget your tinfoil hat.
By the same argument, one could argue that if people want not to be mugged then they should not leave their home without an armed escort. In reality, most people consider mugging to be socially unacceptable, so we write laws to make it illegal and then the justice system punishes those few who do it.
There is no reason we cannot do the same for privacy. The fact that today's technology has reached the point where it is economic to conduct mass surveillance and build enormous databases does not mean we have to accept people doing it, any more than the fact that today's technology permits us to kill another human at large distance with a rifle means we condone murder or the fact that today's technology allows us to drive at over 100mph means we condone doing it past a school as kids are going home for the day.
The natural instinct to want privacy has evolved over countless generations, and there are good reasons for it on many levels. On the small scale, everyone makes mistakes that are best forgotten. On a much larger scale, it has major implications for the balance of power between the individual and the state or other groups (such as corporations, in today's society).
When someone from Google, or any other government or corporate body, says something like "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy", they just mean they would prefer that their behaviour remains legally unrestricted regardless of how abusive the people might consider it.
You are just as off-topic as the previous post I replied to. This has nothing to do with Real Player. Whatever your personal beef with that product might be, this is not the place to discuss it. The company Real Networks is involved, but we're talking about Rhapsody, which provides plain, ordinary MP3 files.
How is this offtopic? Experiences with Real Player were so unsatisfactory that many people I know won't use ever use a RealNetworks product.
Perhaps it's off-topic because, as even the summary points out, the alternative being offered is in unprotected MP3 format: hardly a proprietary RealNetworks product, nor likely to suffer from the same problems that plagued early versions of RealPlayer. One man's joke is another man's unconstructive and irrelevant cheap shot; YMMV.
And I am sorry to break it to you, but in the UK there has recently been a wave of media reporting where local councils have been abusing legislation pushed through on the basis of fighting terrorism and serious crime to spy on people suspected of having a dog foul the pavement or trying to get their kids into a school when they lived outside the catchment area.
They might not be calling these people terrorists by name, but they're quite happy to use so-called anti-terror legislation to pursue them. If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck...
We don't normally extradite people to countries where they would face unreasonable punishment anyway, but apparently the US is an exception. This guy is facing being treated as a terrorist (is anyone the government dislikes not a terrorist these days?) and thus getting up to 60 years in maximum security if found guilty on all counts, not to mention the off-hand quips by US authorities about "frying" him. However, if plays nice and owns up to all the stuff he says he didn't do but they claim he did, he gets more like 4 years and probably in the UK rather than the US.
Slashdot Mirror
And even several games later, their NPCs still can't hit anything they shoot at.
Game development companies pay just a bit under market for the positions they fill
Is that absolute salary or realistic hourly rate?
So you're saying that instead of producing magic of their own, successful game developers just steal their ideas from everyone else? ;-)
"Fix the payroll if you want to live..."
Unless I misunderstand separation of powers in the US, the ability of your legislature to set the budgets within which the executive must operate is a fundamental check on the power of the executive. Failing to exercise the authority to set the budget on the basis that a president might veto it is cowardly, unprincipled politics.
At the very least, Congress should force the President to make that veto, and when he counters with some statement about not supporting the troops, they should counter with some factual arguments about tax-and-spend policies in the White House and how much it's costing everyone, and perhaps question why so many troops are still out there needing support after all this time anyway. They should do this especially now, when you have a lame duck President who almost no-one likes and who has neither the authority nor the credibility left to challenge much of anything.
I'd be surprised if the government here in GB plays along for long. Privacy, surveillance and the database state are becoming big issues here right now, both legally and politically, while support for the US throwing its weight around is a pretty universal vote-loser, all of which are bad news for a government so weak it can barely stand up. I expect a significant change in approach in time for the next general election in a couple of years, if not sooner if they give their current leader the boot and find yet another one after the summer recess.
In any case, the government doesn't have much choice about European data protection rules, which our businesses are bound to follow regardless of the government saying nice things to the US. There are already concerns in the business press about issues such as more distributed data storage and processing facilities, which can't be set up in locations that don't adhere to the same data protection standards as European law requires without jumping through hoops with customers and/or incurring negative PR. The US is one such location.
And even without legal obligations, the costs and risks associated with travel to the US are reaching the point that a lot of businesses will no longer make the trip. There have already been reports of business people being refused entry for the most stupid of reasons because of so-called anti-terrorist measures, and as I said before, it probably won't take more than a few high profile leaks after business laptops went missing while containing confidential data to start a serious backlash. Make it impossible to transfer data securely via the Internet as well, and the US just became one of the most business-hostile countries in the Western world, and no amount of sucking up by European governments is going to make European businesses run risks they don't need to in the current economic climate. Many of those that don't have well-established, substantial operations in the US will probably just give up on it until sanity returns.
In general, you're absolutely right about the problem of getting rights back once forfeited.
However, I suspect that if the US did permit arbitrary low level staffers to intercept and redistribute any information crossing the border that they wanted to, that permission would be revoked fairly quickly as the rest of the world started rerouting the Internet to guarantee not going via the US.
Of course, it would never come to that. Businesses and public figures concerned about the dangers to themselves of sensitive information leaking would lobby their governments, who in turn would make their feelings known to the US, who would make loud and significant-sounding noises about the importance of national security and the terrorist threat, but who would then quietly reverse the position.
I imagine when the abuses of the current situation with physical devices start, things will go much the same way anyway, but the US is already regarded as a threat to data security by many European businesses (which have things like European data protection legislation constraining them) and any further steps are likely to hasten the proceedings.
Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
And how many of those are there, for the average home or business user?
Distributed data has obvious potential advantages, but even then only for probably a minority of people, and it comes with several pretty major caveats.
But distributed processing? What can't you do on an entry level home or office system today, which already costs very little for the power and flexibility it offers compared to other devices? The only things where many home users would want more power are applications like gaming and multimedia, and in that case the power needs to be local to respond in near real time anyway. For business users, I guess the equivalent would be the few people who do serious calculations or data mining, but how many people really do that with their office PC rather than writing a document, giving a presentation, reading their e-mail or using the corporate intranet?
Cloud computing is a solution looking for a problem, and it always will be other than in certain niches (who are already doing just fine with their development of distributed processing, thanks all the same). This is just the next cycle in the local-vs-remote processing cycle, and each time we go around the advantages of the remote side decrease while the advantages of the local side increase. If someone finally invented an operating system with decent remote administrative controls and software packaging/installation APIs, the remote argument would probably already be on its deathbed apart from the aforementioned niche markets.
Sure, but frankly, anyone who relies on the "trust" aspect of SSL certificates today for anything serious needs their head examined. In this world, trustworthy == willing and able to pay.
The encryption is by far the most important aspect of SSL for most applications, and you can use that regardless of any issues with CAs and trust.
He didn't say it was legal for students to do this
I've just reread his post, and it still reads like that's what he's saying to me!
Seriously, under what line of crazed reasoning does the university bear responsibility for three jackasses in the dorm stairwell singing "Dancing Queen"?
I would imagine it's not the random sing-alongs in the dorm stairwell that are covered by the licence, but rather the public performances.
Some performance rights are normally acquired by the performers, others by the venue. I don't know the usual rules of the game in the US, but here in the UK it's normal for recorded music to be dealt with by the people playing it in public, but for venues to have a blanket licence for live performances of music under copyright given on their premises (the costs of which may be passed on to the performers to some extent in the hire costs for the venue). I'm not quite sure how things evolved to this state; presumably at some point in the past it was easiest to keep track of performances and distribute royalties appropriately or something.
A law that tries to control the right to copy makes no sense in a world where everyone has every day access to copying machines.
Sure, and a law that tries to control the right to take a human life makes no sense in a world where everyone has every day access to guns.
Didn't your parents teach you that just because we can do something, that doesn't always mean we should?
The direct social benefits of copying cannot be denied by the naive backwards belief that restriction of that copying is the best way to encourage the creation of new works. We now know that is wrong. We now know that, in fact, the exact opposite is true - people create more new works when they have free access to the work of others.
So a few frequent posters on Slashdot keep saying, but where is your evidence?
We have an Internet full of freely available writing, but what deep, original, comprehensive work of true value is produced this way? The WWW is one big echo chamber, and blogs are the worst culprits: take a look at the front pages of sites like Slashdot, Digg and Reddit one day, and see if you can spot more than one or two original ideas on the subjects they cover in the entire Internet.
Likewise, we have an open source world full of freely available software, but how much of it is just a substandard clone of a popular commercial offering? There are a few pearls, to be sure, but much of it is a second-rate knock-off, inferior to the commercial alternatives. Moreover, even the original stuff mostly isn't in original areas, it's "mass market": essential systems software, multimedia tools, basic office software, games and graphics.
In other words, on the evidence to date, letting people use existing work freely results in a large amount of derivative work that adds little value, but there remains a shortage of evidence that substantial amounts of original, creative, high quality work are being given away for free. Meanwhile, those taking advantage of copyright continue to produce such work in abundance in many fields.
We're talking about lawyers, so I'm fairly sure "profit" should be in there somewhere. ;-)
Even if they're performing copyrighted works (doing an artistic interpretation), just in this case they can't do that for profit without obtaining the rightowner's permission. So it looks someone is extorting money from the universities...
Cite, please? In most jurisdictions, including the US as far as I'm aware, public performance is a protected right under copyright, and just because something is not for profit, that does not automatically qualify it as a fair use (or whatever your jurisdiction calls the equivalent exemption).
I admire your integrity on this matter, and you're absolutely right about protecting the freedom for legitimate growth. Killing P2P because of music sharing is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
At the same time, clearly there is a problem with illegal sharing via P2P, in that most use of P2P is surely for that purpose. That is unfair both on you as the sysadmin and on those students who do want to use the service legitimately but may find the available bandwidth limited because of what others are using it for. Both of these apply regardless of your perspective on the ethics of breaking copyright law (which I personally don't agree with either, but I recognise that there are plenty of people on Slashdot who disagree).
Perhaps it would suffice to send a polite but unambiguous message to your users reminding them that illegal file sharing is not a valid use of the resources you provide for students and warning that abusers will be disconnected? That seems perfectly fair, you could use a proportionate scale of responses (e.g., disconnection for a couple of days for a first offence, up to permanent disconnection for repeat offenders), and as long as it's not automatic and a real person is available to sort out any problems quickly (e.g., if someone does get disconnected but can later demonstrate that they need access for legitimate purposes) it seems unlikely to do any serious damage to anyone.
I don't know who I fear the most, Al-Queda, or the US government, It's pretty much a toss-up at the moment, and I'm not so sure that the needle won't end on the latter.
It's not even close.
My sig used to say something like this:
“Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has not been terrorism, but the power of the state.”
Ah, but Google's flamethrower tank has to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once. ;-)
FWIW, I'd guess Google Groups has accounted for well over 90% of the spam in the assorted groups I follow since their captcha system was compromised, particularly in the groups outside the Big 8 (e.g., there are a handful of groups relating to the city where I live). A couple of the regular posters mentioned trying to contact the abuse address in the headers of GG posts and apparently being redirected to /dev/nul, but I can't say I ever tried myself.
I do hope not.
For one thing, Google Groups is currently acting as the equivalent of an open relay to all of Usenet, resulting in a vast increase in the amount of junk messages. They should be treated by other Usenet servers in the same way that we treat any other open relay: ignore anything coming from it until it gets its house in order. I fail to understand why Google being Google exempts them from this treatment. :-(
For another thing, Google Groups sucks as a Usenet interface, and numerous clients do a much better job of it.
It's remarkable that something you and Google consider unreasonable in such general terms is protected by such fundamental legislation as the European Convention on Human Rights.
While I recognise your implication that there will be grey areas, that is not a counter-argument to the general principle. Laws should codify principles, and courts can decide on the grey areas in the context of specific actions. This is how our legal system works.
I can't imagine any court holding that writing down something you saw in public is illegal in general. But certain very specific factors in Google's actions are quite distinct, black-and-white things, none of which would apply to the guy in the street who happens to see something as he walks past. This is the sort of list I usually give as a starting point, though I make no claim that a more astute or comprehensive list could not be made instead:
I note that the effects of these factors can be quite widespread, and there are socially unacceptable boundaries even for behaviour in a public place.
If you are just walking down the street minding your own business and a gust of wind through an open window on a calm day blows a curtain so you glimpse someone getting changed, I suspect almost everyone would say that's just the luck of the draw, and while it might be a little embarrassing for either or both people, there is little real harm done. On the other hand, if you were going out each night and, while standing on public roads, using binoculars to look for small gaps in people's curtains through which you could stand there and watch them getting changed, I think most people would find that behaviour pretty creepy and consider it a deliberate invasion of privacy (and in fact the law explicitly recognises this in some places).
Another example is that if you walk past someone while you're out shopping, no-one would call that invasion of privacy. However, if you followed someone around for a whole day, going in to each shop behind them, recording everything they bought, photographing the cards they used to pay and videoing them as they typed their PINs into the machines, I think almost everyone would consider that harassment and an invasion of privacy.
Respect for privacy is never as simple as some distinction between public and private places. There's a lot more to it than that, but common sense and common courtesy is all it takes to work out the general ideas in fairly objective terms.
Can somebody just camp out in your backyard if they want?
There was an amusing story a while back about some folks who did just this... and woke up a little later to find automatic weapons pointed at them. The "field" they were camped in turned out to be within the grounds of Chequers, the Prime Minister's official residence.
It's true that there are relatively liberal laws on movement in the UK today. There are certain places you cannot go without consent: MOD property, for example, or land owned by the latest incarnation of British Rail, whatever we're calling it this week. Otherwise, the law is rather daft, in that if you're not damaging anything there is no specific prohibition against walking through someone's open front door and sitting down on their sofa to watch their TV. As a police officer visiting my school a few years ago pointed out, however, this is probably not a good idea, because there are numerous other generic laws they could use as an excuse to remove someone in that position should it become necessary. Sitting on my sofa might not be illegal, but disturbing a pattern of dust that I thought was pretty probably is. ;-)
It is regrettable, IMHO, that we don't have stronger generic privacy laws at present, and I think things will get worse before they get better. However, I think we will see an inevitable backlash, as the ill-effects of allowing the database/surveillance state and mass corporate profiling to rule our lives start to be felt by more than just the principled liberal type and affect the average voter. This is already starting in the UK, where the government has pushed too far with things like ID cards and the National Identity Register, and then come undone as the dangers of privacy invasion, the excessive costs for little benefit, and a fundamental inability to keep personal information safe have come to light. A few more leaked stories about high government officials or rich celebrities and general privacy laws might just get strengthened the same way. There is a fundamental difference (actually, I would count five fundamental differences) between an average person in a public place being able to see something and a commercial body systematically recording information on a massive scale and republishing it in a searchable form to the whole world.
If people really want "true privacy" in today's world, then they really have to never leave their house, never access the internet, never buy anything with a credit card or debit card, and don't forget your tinfoil hat.
By the same argument, one could argue that if people want not to be mugged then they should not leave their home without an armed escort. In reality, most people consider mugging to be socially unacceptable, so we write laws to make it illegal and then the justice system punishes those few who do it.
There is no reason we cannot do the same for privacy. The fact that today's technology has reached the point where it is economic to conduct mass surveillance and build enormous databases does not mean we have to accept people doing it, any more than the fact that today's technology permits us to kill another human at large distance with a rifle means we condone murder or the fact that today's technology allows us to drive at over 100mph means we condone doing it past a school as kids are going home for the day.
The natural instinct to want privacy has evolved over countless generations, and there are good reasons for it on many levels. On the small scale, everyone makes mistakes that are best forgotten. On a much larger scale, it has major implications for the balance of power between the individual and the state or other groups (such as corporations, in today's society).
When someone from Google, or any other government or corporate body, says something like "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy", they just mean they would prefer that their behaviour remains legally unrestricted regardless of how abusive the people might consider it.
You are just as off-topic as the previous post I replied to. This has nothing to do with Real Player. Whatever your personal beef with that product might be, this is not the place to discuss it. The company Real Networks is involved, but we're talking about Rhapsody, which provides plain, ordinary MP3 files.
How is this offtopic? Experiences with Real Player were so unsatisfactory that many people I know won't use ever use a RealNetworks product.
Perhaps it's off-topic because, as even the summary points out, the alternative being offered is in unprotected MP3 format: hardly a proprietary RealNetworks product, nor likely to suffer from the same problems that plagued early versions of RealPlayer. One man's joke is another man's unconstructive and irrelevant cheap shot; YMMV.
And I am sorry to break it to you, but in the UK there has recently been a wave of media reporting where local councils have been abusing legislation pushed through on the basis of fighting terrorism and serious crime to spy on people suspected of having a dog foul the pavement or trying to get their kids into a school when they lived outside the catchment area.
They might not be calling these people terrorists by name, but they're quite happy to use so-called anti-terror legislation to pursue them. If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck...
We don't normally extradite people to countries where they would face unreasonable punishment anyway, but apparently the US is an exception. This guy is facing being treated as a terrorist (is anyone the government dislikes not a terrorist these days?) and thus getting up to 60 years in maximum security if found guilty on all counts, not to mention the off-hand quips by US authorities about "frying" him. However, if plays nice and owns up to all the stuff he says he didn't do but they claim he did, he gets more like 4 years and probably in the UK rather than the US.