Why does "copyright reform" always mean increasing copyright
It doesn't. Around two years ago, the UK government passed a law that created a private copying exception, thus finally legalising things like format shifting or using cloud services as long as someone had a legitimate personal copy and it was not being shared around.
Of course, less than a year later, that law was struck down after a judicial review, because EU.
And that wasn't an isolated incident, as we see here. The EU is fast turning into global enemy #1 for progressive copyright reform. It's a huge supporter of big rightsholders at the expense of everyone else.
Thanks, perhaps that was what they meant and I read too much into it.
In that case, I would completely agree, there needs to be a real deterrent to make it clear that this behaviour isn't acceptable, and it does need to be meaningful for rich people as well. Things like losing the right to drive and ultimately, if they continue to drive anyway, their freedom for some period of time, not just fining them 10% of this year's earnings or crushing their car.
I've played plenty of games over the years that I have enjoyed greatly and wanted to play more. You know what I never found, though? I never found that I couldn't resist the urge to play them at the same time as I was in control of a heavy, fast-moving metal object in a crowded area full of vulnerable people.
Anyone who truly can't control that urge demonstrably has serious mental health issues that make them a danger to themselves and others, and they need to be taken into care and properly looked after for everyone's safety and preferably to help them recover.
But let's be honest, how many people really couldn't resist that urge and have genuine mental health problems, and how many could have controlled themselves just fine but simply didn't care and knowingly did something extremely dangerous without regard for the potentially tragic consequences?
Fine them and remove their licence? Seriously? They killed someone and it looks like they did it in a way that was entirely avoidable with no mitigating factors. This should be tried as whatever form of manslaughter/murder in the local laws represents causing death through gross negligence.
At a minimum, people like this should be locked up on public safety grounds, and should be prohibited indefinitely from controlling any vehicle if and when they are released until they can show that they are now safe and responsible.
Somewhere around 20-40% of the info in these documents will turn out to be wrong or misleading in some critical way.
I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the alleged witches as they drown.
Also, just because some personal data is correct, that doesn't mean the entire world has any right or need to know. People suffer unfair discrimination or worse because of perfectly legitimate personal matters all the time, which is the most compelling argument for the importance of privacy.
Wow, what kind of super-futuristic place did you live in with your fancy-pants downloading and modems and BBSes? In 1983, I think I was still typing the source code for games from books into my little ZX81, and praying that I didn't knock the 32K RAM pack loose and crash everything before I had a chance to play!
So if you are posting with any handle other than "Anonymous Coward" you will need to provide that handle to your friendly neighborhood spy.
Or just not travel to countries that don't treat their visitors with respect and basic human decency.
There are many places I would love to visit in the world, far more than I ever will be able to in one lifetime I expect. Why would I voluntarily subject myself to the kind of culture we're talking about here, when I can be welcomed as both a tourist and a business person in so many other places?
Obviously some people have no choice, and I hope things work out OK for them, but this sort of policy seems absurdly counter-productive for people who do have a choice and do care about the way they are treated.
Actually, there does appear to be a somewhat reasonable third choice: Microsoft will apparently also be offering a security-only bundle each month, though it looks like you'll have to install it manually if you're not using WSUS as it won't be fetched via Windows Update. You still won't be able to cherry-pick individual updates, but at least it won't come with all the other stuff you probably don't want -- unless they decide to call some of that "security".
(There's a specific question about this, and a response from the Microsoft guy confirming that a monthly security bundle will be available for all of the different Windows 7 variants, in the questions below the blog post itself.)
For comparison, the Win 7 Pro machine I'm running this on has a little over 200 installed security updates (relative to Win 7 SP 1, I assume). It also has about 100 other updates, the overwhelming majority of which were installed by the supplier before delivery since I stopped installing non-security Windows updates by default long before this machine arrived.
I, too, would love to see a slipstreamed image that could be used to reinstall Windows 7 if necessary after this new silliness has taken over.
We've stopped installing almost all recent updates from MS anyway, since we basically now consider them more dangerous than not patching anything except clearly identified security vulnerabilities.
My concern with the new plan is whether any machines that need a fresh installation after October will no longer be able to download the currently available updates of our choice. If Microsoft make the Windows Update system only work with the new monthly roll-ups and won't supply the previous individual patches any more, that would be significantly worse than just not offering any new patches outside of the monthly roll-ups.
The entire global technology infrastructure begins and ends with the United States. [...] Intel, AMD, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook.... All US companies.
That looks like a reasonable list of most of the biggest US companies in computing today. You might have added a few more, notably Amazon, and perhaps the big PC manufacturers like Dell.
However, for their size and resources, many of these companies have done remarkably little to advance technology infrastructure in the last few years. Almost all of them became big on the back of a small number of very successful products or services, but many of their more recent attempts to diversify have failed horribly. Today they mostly survive because they're so huge that they can afford to buy almost any other business that is actually innovative and potentially disruptive to their market dominance, and that's also how a lot of "their" innovation happens. Most of them are going to be in trouble if one or two geee that lay golden eggs die, and in several cases there are warning signs already.
Meanwhile, you kind of forgot all the Asian giants and quite a few European companies that actually make most of those smartphones you mentioned, not to mention many of the household appliances we buy, huge amounts of telecomms infrastructure, huge amounts of transportation tech...
Keep your regulations out of my voluntary exchange and contracts.
The trouble happens when your deal is no longer voluntary in practice, because the service is becoming essential to normal life but the service provider(s) available to you are all imposing undesirable terms so you have no option to choose an alternative.
I'm expecting that TTIP is dead at this point. It seems to have become a toxic issue in several EU member states and senior government officials have started overtly challenging its credibility. Plus with the US election coming up and Hillary Clinton publicly saying she won't support TPP, it would be difficult for her to come out in favour of TTIP, and with Brexit still a big issue, the last thing the EU needs is to be seen to be weak in international trade negotiations.
Regulations typically only set minimum standards. Showing you followed regulations might help to demonstrate good faith, but I don't see why it should be a get out of jail free card.
The irony is that if we applied those sorts of measures to our governments, the world would probably be a better place. It is far more important that governments are transparent and accountable to their citizens than the other way around.
And the thing is, that applies at any scale. My sig around these parts used to point out that throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and quality of life has not been terrorism but the power of the state.
We have populace where they think that if you do nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.
Indeed, a disturbing number of people do seem to think that way. Humans aren't good at evaluating the risk of serious damage if it only happens rarely and has never happened to them.
Meanwhile, one of the most celebrated quotations of modern times goes something like this:
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Its origin is uncertain and it's obviously sexist phrasing by modern standards, but otherwise it's as true today as it ever was.
Here's another well-known quotation, also of uncertain origin (commonly attributed to Cardinal Richelieu but this is dubious) and also very telling:
Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find there something with which to hang him.
In short, if you do nothing wrong then bad people can still hurt you, and if you do nothing at all then sooner or later they probably will.
Sure, in the same way that it's painfully obvious any packet using the expression "shake it off" is an infringement of copyright on a well-known pop song.
Not only that, but to make this actually stand up in court against a technically competent argument by the other side, you would probably need to ensure that the iPlayer always sends some unusual and therefore distinctive sequence of packet sizes (which is far from a trivial issue if you're serving via HTML5 video, for example) so you have some sort of signature to look for. Then you would need to be able to recognise that signature in real world wireless traffic, in the presence of encryption, fragmentation, control traffic, and arbitrary other data being transferred between the same systems at the same time.
Good luck with that. It would be like looking for needles in a haystack, when each needle was made by cutting and drying vegetable matter, and each needle had similar but slightly varying dimensions like hay, and you didn't know how many needles, if any, were actually there in the first place.
The European Convention on Human Rights and its associated court aren't EU institutions, so Brexit won't directly affect them. However, all EU member states are required to be signatories of the ECHR, so Brexit does mean that the UK could at some future point do things like withdrawing from the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act (which is the associated national law), while such actions are not permitted as long as the UK remains a member of the EU.
(Just to confuse the issue, there is also a separate Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which would typically be enforced in the European Court of Justice, which is one branch of the Court of Justice of the European Union. At least one other high profile case regarding the British government's surveillance powers, brought by two serving MPs no less, recently followed that path rather than relying on the ECHR. And to think, some people argue that European politics is overcomplicated...)
Personally, I don't really understand that. We have a few different remotes in our main living room, because all the other devices we plug into the TV have their own anyway. The remotes just go next to each other, within arm's reach, on a table near wherever one of us is sitting.
That depends. A lot of TVs and other "smart" devices sit in your main living areas. Many have sensors like cameras and microphones attached. Many are connection to household networks and to the Internet. Few of those network/Internet connections have any sort of isolation or firewall to limit access to only relevant systems.
Personally, I find it creepy that people across the Internet could be watching and listening in as a family do or discuss whatever they do or discuss in the "privacy" of their own home.
I also find it worrying that someone could be sitting there exploiting a vulnerability in something like a "smart" TV to download whatever else is available on the home network or to access other connected devices with sensors of their own.
And that's just what a remote attacker could do. The same vulnerabilities are a gift to burglars or worse who are willing to physically visit the property, since they potentially give the criminal a real time feed of when a home is occupied and who is in or out (which could also be recorded over time to look for patterns of occupation).
Seriously, none of this is news. Nor is it a hypothetical threat: many "smart" devices, including plenty from major brands, have already been very publicly compromised. Anyone paying attention should be terrified at the potential intrusions these systems can and evidently often do allow.
Your post is predicated on nonsense that even a small child could see through.
No, you just apparently aren't familiar with trends in the industry. There are already plenty of devices that make their own arrangements for remote communications.
Do you give the SatNav in your car a WiFi password? Of course not, if it's one of the models with real time traffic updates, then the vendor normally has a deal with one of your mobile/radio networks to push those updates out. Various accident/breakdown functions built into modern cars also come with their own plan for literally phoning home.
Here in the UK, certain major ISPs already offer packages where you install their device as your wireless router, but it doubles up as an access point to another network the ISP operates, piggybacking on your own landline/fibre connection to allow others who aren't on their own WiFi network to gain access via your ISP. In any big city here, you're probably within range of several such access points most of the time.
Those might be the two biggest examples by total number of connected users/devices, at least here in the UK, but there are plenty more.
The thing is, other than streaming or catch-up services that provide online alternatives to receiving broadcast signals, probably nothing of value would be lost by turning off all those smart features for most people. And even then, you could provide the actually useful online sources via a separate device that just feeds signals to the TV anyway, meaning if you needed to update anything as those services change, you could swap the device out or mess around with its firmware safe in the knowledge that your expensive TV hardware would still work just fine.
The smartest TV is still the one that lets me watch stuff with as much quality as possible while doing as little as possible to get in the way of that experience. The only controls I have actually needed on any TV in at least a decade are input selection and things that affect the display/sound. Everything else is just junk that gets in the way, slows things down, breaks long before the hardware does, compromises security or privacy in some way, or too often all of the above.
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Why does "copyright reform" always mean increasing copyright
It doesn't. Around two years ago, the UK government passed a law that created a private copying exception, thus finally legalising things like format shifting or using cloud services as long as someone had a legitimate personal copy and it was not being shared around.
Of course, less than a year later, that law was struck down after a judicial review, because EU.
And that wasn't an isolated incident, as we see here. The EU is fast turning into global enemy #1 for progressive copyright reform. It's a huge supporter of big rightsholders at the expense of everyone else.
Thanks, perhaps that was what they meant and I read too much into it.
In that case, I would completely agree, there needs to be a real deterrent to make it clear that this behaviour isn't acceptable, and it does need to be meaningful for rich people as well. Things like losing the right to drive and ultimately, if they continue to drive anyway, their freedom for some period of time, not just fining them 10% of this year's earnings or crushing their car.
I've played plenty of games over the years that I have enjoyed greatly and wanted to play more. You know what I never found, though? I never found that I couldn't resist the urge to play them at the same time as I was in control of a heavy, fast-moving metal object in a crowded area full of vulnerable people.
Anyone who truly can't control that urge demonstrably has serious mental health issues that make them a danger to themselves and others, and they need to be taken into care and properly looked after for everyone's safety and preferably to help them recover.
But let's be honest, how many people really couldn't resist that urge and have genuine mental health problems, and how many could have controlled themselves just fine but simply didn't care and knowingly did something extremely dangerous without regard for the potentially tragic consequences?
Fine them and remove their licence? Seriously? They killed someone and it looks like they did it in a way that was entirely avoidable with no mitigating factors. This should be tried as whatever form of manslaughter/murder in the local laws represents causing death through gross negligence.
At a minimum, people like this should be locked up on public safety grounds, and should be prohibited indefinitely from controlling any vehicle if and when they are released until they can show that they are now safe and responsible.
Somewhere around 20-40% of the info in these documents will turn out to be wrong or misleading in some critical way.
I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the alleged witches as they drown.
Also, just because some personal data is correct, that doesn't mean the entire world has any right or need to know. People suffer unfair discrimination or worse because of perfectly legitimate personal matters all the time, which is the most compelling argument for the importance of privacy.
Wow, what kind of super-futuristic place did you live in with your fancy-pants downloading and modems and BBSes? In 1983, I think I was still typing the source code for games from books into my little ZX81, and praying that I didn't knock the 32K RAM pack loose and crash everything before I had a chance to play!
So if you are posting with any handle other than "Anonymous Coward" you will need to provide that handle to your friendly neighborhood spy.
Or just not travel to countries that don't treat their visitors with respect and basic human decency.
There are many places I would love to visit in the world, far more than I ever will be able to in one lifetime I expect. Why would I voluntarily subject myself to the kind of culture we're talking about here, when I can be welcomed as both a tourist and a business person in so many other places?
Obviously some people have no choice, and I hope things work out OK for them, but this sort of policy seems absurdly counter-productive for people who do have a choice and do care about the way they are treated.
Actually, there does appear to be a somewhat reasonable third choice: Microsoft will apparently also be offering a security-only bundle each month, though it looks like you'll have to install it manually if you're not using WSUS as it won't be fetched via Windows Update. You still won't be able to cherry-pick individual updates, but at least it won't come with all the other stuff you probably don't want -- unless they decide to call some of that "security".
(There's a specific question about this, and a response from the Microsoft guy confirming that a monthly security bundle will be available for all of the different Windows 7 variants, in the questions below the blog post itself.)
For comparison, the Win 7 Pro machine I'm running this on has a little over 200 installed security updates (relative to Win 7 SP 1, I assume). It also has about 100 other updates, the overwhelming majority of which were installed by the supplier before delivery since I stopped installing non-security Windows updates by default long before this machine arrived.
I, too, would love to see a slipstreamed image that could be used to reinstall Windows 7 if necessary after this new silliness has taken over.
We've stopped installing almost all recent updates from MS anyway, since we basically now consider them more dangerous than not patching anything except clearly identified security vulnerabilities.
My concern with the new plan is whether any machines that need a fresh installation after October will no longer be able to download the currently available updates of our choice. If Microsoft make the Windows Update system only work with the new monthly roll-ups and won't supply the previous individual patches any more, that would be significantly worse than just not offering any new patches outside of the monthly roll-ups.
The entire global technology infrastructure begins and ends with the United States. [...] Intel, AMD, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook.... All US companies.
That looks like a reasonable list of most of the biggest US companies in computing today. You might have added a few more, notably Amazon, and perhaps the big PC manufacturers like Dell.
However, for their size and resources, many of these companies have done remarkably little to advance technology infrastructure in the last few years. Almost all of them became big on the back of a small number of very successful products or services, but many of their more recent attempts to diversify have failed horribly. Today they mostly survive because they're so huge that they can afford to buy almost any other business that is actually innovative and potentially disruptive to their market dominance, and that's also how a lot of "their" innovation happens. Most of them are going to be in trouble if one or two geee that lay golden eggs die, and in several cases there are warning signs already.
Meanwhile, you kind of forgot all the Asian giants and quite a few European companies that actually make most of those smartphones you mentioned, not to mention many of the household appliances we buy, huge amounts of telecomms infrastructure, huge amounts of transportation tech...
Keep your regulations out of my voluntary exchange and contracts.
The trouble happens when your deal is no longer voluntary in practice, because the service is becoming essential to normal life but the service provider(s) available to you are all imposing undesirable terms so you have no option to choose an alternative.
I'm expecting that TTIP is dead at this point. It seems to have become a toxic issue in several EU member states and senior government officials have started overtly challenging its credibility. Plus with the US election coming up and Hillary Clinton publicly saying she won't support TPP, it would be difficult for her to come out in favour of TTIP, and with Brexit still a big issue, the last thing the EU needs is to be seen to be weak in international trade negotiations.
Regulations typically only set minimum standards. Showing you followed regulations might help to demonstrate good faith, but I don't see why it should be a get out of jail free card.
The irony is that if we applied those sorts of measures to our governments, the world would probably be a better place. It is far more important that governments are transparent and accountable to their citizens than the other way around.
And the thing is, that applies at any scale. My sig around these parts used to point out that throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and quality of life has not been terrorism but the power of the state.
We have populace where they think that if you do nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.
Indeed, a disturbing number of people do seem to think that way. Humans aren't good at evaluating the risk of serious damage if it only happens rarely and has never happened to them.
Meanwhile, one of the most celebrated quotations of modern times goes something like this:
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Its origin is uncertain and it's obviously sexist phrasing by modern standards, but otherwise it's as true today as it ever was.
Here's another well-known quotation, also of uncertain origin (commonly attributed to Cardinal Richelieu but this is dubious) and also very telling:
Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find there something with which to hang him.
In short, if you do nothing wrong then bad people can still hurt you, and if you do nothing at all then sooner or later they probably will.
Non-junk monitors don't need upgrades.
I admit that I missed it initially, probably because it was a bit too close to the truth for my humour sensors to activate...
Sure, in the same way that it's painfully obvious any packet using the expression "shake it off" is an infringement of copyright on a well-known pop song.
Not only that, but to make this actually stand up in court against a technically competent argument by the other side, you would probably need to ensure that the iPlayer always sends some unusual and therefore distinctive sequence of packet sizes (which is far from a trivial issue if you're serving via HTML5 video, for example) so you have some sort of signature to look for. Then you would need to be able to recognise that signature in real world wireless traffic, in the presence of encryption, fragmentation, control traffic, and arbitrary other data being transferred between the same systems at the same time.
Good luck with that. It would be like looking for needles in a haystack, when each needle was made by cutting and drying vegetable matter, and each needle had similar but slightly varying dimensions like hay, and you didn't know how many needles, if any, were actually there in the first place.
But Your Honour... They were transmitting data in packets of... 1024 bytes! What are the odds of a computer system using such an arbitrary number?
The European Convention on Human Rights and its associated court aren't EU institutions, so Brexit won't directly affect them. However, all EU member states are required to be signatories of the ECHR, so Brexit does mean that the UK could at some future point do things like withdrawing from the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act (which is the associated national law), while such actions are not permitted as long as the UK remains a member of the EU.
(Just to confuse the issue, there is also a separate Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which would typically be enforced in the European Court of Justice, which is one branch of the Court of Justice of the European Union. At least one other high profile case regarding the British government's surveillance powers, brought by two serving MPs no less, recently followed that path rather than relying on the ECHR. And to think, some people argue that European politics is overcomplicated...)
Personally, I don't really understand that. We have a few different remotes in our main living room, because all the other devices we plug into the TV have their own anyway. The remotes just go next to each other, within arm's reach, on a table near wherever one of us is sitting.
Also, in response to this:
Are TV apps really "dangerous"???
That depends. A lot of TVs and other "smart" devices sit in your main living areas. Many have sensors like cameras and microphones attached. Many are connection to household networks and to the Internet. Few of those network/Internet connections have any sort of isolation or firewall to limit access to only relevant systems.
Personally, I find it creepy that people across the Internet could be watching and listening in as a family do or discuss whatever they do or discuss in the "privacy" of their own home.
I also find it worrying that someone could be sitting there exploiting a vulnerability in something like a "smart" TV to download whatever else is available on the home network or to access other connected devices with sensors of their own.
And that's just what a remote attacker could do. The same vulnerabilities are a gift to burglars or worse who are willing to physically visit the property, since they potentially give the criminal a real time feed of when a home is occupied and who is in or out (which could also be recorded over time to look for patterns of occupation).
Seriously, none of this is news. Nor is it a hypothetical threat: many "smart" devices, including plenty from major brands, have already been very publicly compromised. Anyone paying attention should be terrified at the potential intrusions these systems can and evidently often do allow.
Your post is predicated on nonsense that even a small child could see through.
No, you just apparently aren't familiar with trends in the industry. There are already plenty of devices that make their own arrangements for remote communications.
Do you give the SatNav in your car a WiFi password? Of course not, if it's one of the models with real time traffic updates, then the vendor normally has a deal with one of your mobile/radio networks to push those updates out. Various accident/breakdown functions built into modern cars also come with their own plan for literally phoning home.
Here in the UK, certain major ISPs already offer packages where you install their device as your wireless router, but it doubles up as an access point to another network the ISP operates, piggybacking on your own landline/fibre connection to allow others who aren't on their own WiFi network to gain access via your ISP. In any big city here, you're probably within range of several such access points most of the time.
Those might be the two biggest examples by total number of connected users/devices, at least here in the UK, but there are plenty more.
The thing is, other than streaming or catch-up services that provide online alternatives to receiving broadcast signals, probably nothing of value would be lost by turning off all those smart features for most people. And even then, you could provide the actually useful online sources via a separate device that just feeds signals to the TV anyway, meaning if you needed to update anything as those services change, you could swap the device out or mess around with its firmware safe in the knowledge that your expensive TV hardware would still work just fine.
The smartest TV is still the one that lets me watch stuff with as much quality as possible while doing as little as possible to get in the way of that experience. The only controls I have actually needed on any TV in at least a decade are input selection and things that affect the display/sound. Everything else is just junk that gets in the way, slows things down, breaks long before the hardware does, compromises security or privacy in some way, or too often all of the above.