Welcome to the world of proprietary software! Where the programmers, and NOT YOU, have control over your computing. To be fair, the programmers have control over your Linux system too, if you're a non-programmer. It's just a different bunch of programmers, who tend to be significantly less evil.
Unless you're one of the very, very few people who are capable of sitting down and writing their own fully-functional OS and all the applications for it (if such a person actually exists), you're pretty much always going to be at the mercy of somebody else. The trick is in evaluating and choosing whose mercy you want to be at.
Also, OLPC initiated the "Buy 1, 1 Gets Donated" program in time for the holiday season, so it would be possible for an American school district to shell out $200 a copy for them and thereby send an equivalent number to under-developed countries. Yeah, I'm sure that would be a real winner come election time. "Your taxes are going up because last year's school board sent half the budget to Africa by buying overpriced laptops!"
I've lived in some of the bluest of the blue states and even there I can tell you it'd be a non-starter.
So you think because Wikipedia includes some poor content, it's unjustified to try to improve it? Not when you're burning the village in order to save it, no.
While it may seem strict, it's necessary to prevent the vanity and spam pages from appearing all over Wikipedia. And this matters...why?
No, seriously, I want to know. Preventing "vanity pages" and "ads" is one of the major justifications for the periodic 'notability purges' which basically amount to book-burnings; untold hours of people's effort being put to the torch by Wikipedia admins who don't like something about the content. (And they really go out of their way to destroy the information, too; it's not just a logical delete, the database is apparently scrubbed, it's as if the articles in question never even existed except in the delete logs.) And of course it opens the door to all types of censorship via selective enforcement.
All to keep the precious namespace clear of "low quality" articles (as if there aren't enough low-quality articles already -- it's kind of par for the course when you have user-editable content).
I bet there is some invisible/secure IRC channel too. They're not that smart. They just use #wikipedia on Freenode, and then bitch incessantly if you post logs.
Quite true. If you're in the habit of downloading and running binaries from untrusted sources, you're in for a world of hurt.
Now, in the case of Microsoft and Apple, you can probably trust them not to put a virus in their compiled code (well, at least not on purpose; they're not Sony...), but they might put something even nastier there by design -- say a DRM module, or a watermarking system that identified all the files you encoded as yours.
It's all about levels of trust. I trust Microsoft and Apple to not give me a virus for the lulz, because to do so would be counterproductive for them. But for the same reasons, I don't trust them not to fuck me over for an extra buck from a 'corporate partner.'
If you're running anything that you haven't code-reviewed and compiled yourself (which because of the bootstrapping problem you are inevitably), you're trusting somebody. But "trust" isn't a black and white state. You can trust someone for some things and not for others.
There's all sorts of commercial mail that's not spam. If I order something from you, and you send a reply back confirming my order, that's both commercial and definitely not spam. As is any other reply to an inquiry.
Where it crosses the line and becomes spam is when it's unsolicited. That's the key. Unsolicited commercial email is the very definition of spam, and no amount of hand-waving about opt-outs or the selectivity of the lists is going to change that.
Businesses that have relied on cold-calling via any medium to drum up sales have always been sleazy in my book, but when you do it via email, you're pushing the cost out onto the recipient and onto uninvolved third parties. That's at best unethical, and at worst flat-out theft.
Sure it would. It would create an immediate economic incentive to not leave your machine turned on and connected to the Internet 24/7, fall behind on patches, and generally own and run a machine that you don't know how to operate, but is capable of causing harm to others.
One of the reasons the zombification problem is so bad is because many people just don't notice or care about it. If you had a meter on your wall showing your monthly Internet/e-mail bill and suddenly it started running up like a gas pump on Labor Day, you'd pull the plug pretty damn quick.
A few class-action lawsuits later, and the quality of software intended for clueless users would probably improve dramatically, too. There'd probably be a whole market for "computer operator liability insurance," that would pay for any unauthorized charges or damages provided you only used certain software and kept your systems up to date.
I think this is the inevitable direction of things in the long term. No, it probably won't happen anytime soon, because god knows it's the lawmakers who are the most clueless users of all, and they'll probably avoid making themselves responsible for as long as possible, but it's going to happen. We're becoming more and more reliant on the Internet every day, and "my PC got zombiefied" isn't going to be an excuse forever.
Frankly, given that I think liability is going to eventually come to computers just like it has any other facet of life, I think an economic cost- and damages-driven model is a better one than a top-down restrictions-driven one. (E.g., the cost-driven model says "you're responsible for what comes out of your PC onto the public network, secure it accordingly" while the restrictions model says "it's in the public interest to protect the network as a whole, therefore you can only attach systems which have passed a security inspection to it." I'd rather begin to implement the former slowly, because I think the latter is more likely to be pushed through in a knee-jerk response to some catastrophic failure at some point in the future when the politicians finally decide to have a change of heart.)
The filtering seems to work on several levels. One is that the spam percentage on a per-user level is going to be very different: someone who is very careful with their address might have a low spam percentage, say like 10-15% spam, but someone who uses their email to post on Usenet may receive hundreds of spam messages for each legitimate message. So, when you're applying mailbox filtering, you can basically rank all the messages by spamminess and then "cut the deck" at their normal spam-level. If they get 99% spam, toss all but the top 1%. If they get 10% spam, keep the top 90%. That seems to be the first part of it. (This is sort of described on their front page.)
The real key, AFAICT, is that if a user gets 90% spam, any new message that comes in automatically starts out with a 90% chance of being spam. Just by coming into that user's account it's at a disadvantage, regardless of content. But another message coming into a user's account who only gets 10% spam wouldn't necessarily face the same bad odds.
Whether the system actually uses the reputations of various users to rank messages for other users I'm not sure.
get very few opt-outs Might this be because nobody with two neurons to rub together actually uses an opt-out link? (After all, if you're scummy enough to send me unsolicited email, you're probably scummy enough to use that "opt out" as a test to determine whether my address is real, and thus to be sold to other scum for more profit.)
You may be a nice person and run a respectable enterprise in all other respects, but if you're sending out unsolicited emails on anything more than an individual basis, you're a spammer.
Furthermore, "This should definitely be legal, it's a great marketing tool and helps my business very well," is not a legitimate justification. It would really help my business if I could hunt down my competitors and kill them, but somehow I doubt that's going to go over very well at the inevitable murder trial. Why? Because nobody cares what's good for you or me, what matters is what's good for society as a whole. And both murder and spam are (admittedly varying degrees of) harmful.
As much as I'd like to forget it, I think your post made me realize that some spam is actually filling a market need. Ugh. Yay, capitalism! Well, it's filling a market need but only does so economically because it externalizes the costs of message distribution on other, uninvolved, third parties.
Frankly I think this is a problem with email in general. If we were designing email today, it's pretty easy to see the flaw: everyone basically pays the same amount for email (some very small portion of the amount you pay to your ISP every month) which means those who don't use or under-use the system subsidize it for those who heavily use or abuse it.
If you did the same thing with physical mail -- paid for the entire system out of taxes and let everyone use it as much as they wanted -- you'd have 300 pounds of junk mail on your front doorstep every day, too. It's doomed.
I happen to think the solution is metered billing and micropayments. Obviously this changes how email would function, and keep it from being the great democratic equalizer between rich and poor that it sometimes gets trotted out as being, but such is life. Internet exceptionalism was cool in the 90s and I liked the ideas too, but a whole lot of it is and was just naiveté.
For what it's worth I think we probably share the same feelings regarding the ridiculousness of copyright terms; I simply don't think that enforcing a terrible law more widely is productive. While it may seem satisfying to say "fair's fair" and extend stupid laws as far as possible, it's childish if it doesn't help eliminate the law any faster -- all you're doing is adding to the mess, not solving anything.
Forcing the laws that Disney, et al bought and paid for onto some random organization that's trying to build an IRC log database isn't going to make Disney sit up and say 'wow, that was dumb of us.' It's not going to get the law changed (it's not like the people who pay for the periodic copyright extensions and DMCA-like laws give a shit about IRC logs or Usenet archives). At best, it's just cutting off our collective nose to spite our face.
There are obviously a lot of things that are wrong with the copyright system (and not insignificant among them are the many ways you noted in which a person can use the law as a cudgel to restrict others' right to record what they hear or see in public); we need to fix them, not extend their stupidity as far as possible.
There are lots of ways that people wanting to have 'private' conversations on IRC could restrict access, changing the venue from a public forum to more like a private salon or a theater, where everyone who is allowed entry has agreed not to make recordings. That's perfectly fine, and people desirous of privacy should be encouraged to do that, not to use the twisted mess that is the current copyright system to further destroy the concept of a public space.
If you are, in fact, a lawyer, I'll happily defer, but in my layman's opinion I don't think that's the correct conclusion.
If you violate one of the GPL terms, your license to use the software is terminated. Fine. However, as long as the software is still being offered to anyone under the GPL, you can just go, conform to every part of the GPL, and use it again. You can think of it as one license being terminated, but then going and getting a new one; the GPL is an "infinite stack" of licenses: all you need to do to get a new one is to play by the rules.
There's nothing in the GPL that says 'if you violate this once, you're out for good,' although I'm not sure that would be an entirely terrible idea. But that license-termination clause doesn't necessarily imply that.
then you must "Accompany [the program] with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code". Unless you count disassembling the install CD, they haven't met this at all. Remember also: that's only an option for noncommercial distribution. I think what they're doing is pretty close to commercial distribution -- I'm not intimately familiar with how the GPL defines "commercial" but I wouldn't simply assume that because they're not charging for it directly that they're allowed to fall under non-commercial, particularly if they're using it in order to advance a business position or working on behalf of for-profit entities.
For the changed packages it would be interesting to know what the changes were, to the extent that can be determined without the source. It would be interesting, I suppose, from an academic point of view, but it doesn't really matter. As long as they changed them, even the slightest bit, they're required to distribute (or offer / provide a method for users to obtain) the complete sources to the modified components -- specifically not diffs -- or they're in violation of the GPL.
Even if all they did was change a few strings or customize an interface, they have to distribute the changed components in source form along with the binaries.
yeah wow so creative at cable box makers/companys have been trying the same nonsense for the better part of 10 years and look how well it's worked for them - it's spawned a legion of hackers all trying to out do each other at the speed they can create hacked cable cards. Yeah, and how many people do you know who have hacked cable boxes? I don't know any, and I have some pretty geeky friends.
The point isn't what a few elites can do, it's what regular people can do. That's the benefit of technology, because it's what drives social change. (Incidentally, I think it's what a lot of geeks don't "get" sometimes.) History books will write about the Internet as a 1990s phenomenon, even though it existed long before, because only in the 1990s could most people use it. And it was only when lots of people started using it that it started to have effects that could be felt everywhere; that's when it started to change everything.
Dismissive hand-waving about hackers misses the point: when you limit the number of people who can effectively use a technology to a small number of hackers or hobbyists, you hobble the technology and you sharply reduce the effect that it could have had.
It's a pernicious problem because it's difficult to quantify the loss due to technology that the masses either never get, or never get in a form that's useful to them. How do you quantify the social benefits of a CableCard or DVR standard that doesn't suck royally? (The ability for everyone to do what I can do on a MythTV box: pause a program on one TV, walk away, and resume it from another one in a different part of the house an hour later?) It's not something that's easy to measure, but there's obviously some benefit there, even if it's not exactly a cure for cancer. Every time a company locks a product up and makes it difficult for a user to really take full advantage of its capabilities, we all lose a little. Or rather, we just fail to get something that we could have.
So I should expect there to be a microphone in every lamp post and park bench, recording every public conversation on the street, in a public and searchable database? Yawn -- a ridiculous straw man.
IRC and Usenet aren't like having a private conversation on a park bench in an otherwise-deserted area. It's like standing on a soapbox in a public forum (the real kind not the Internet kind) and shouting at anyone and everyone who chooses to wander up.
And in that case, I think you're quite right to assume that everything you're saying is being recorded, because you can't ensure the reverse. Unless you are in a place or situation where it's reasonable to assume that you can't be overheard by anyone else, you must assume that it is. If you don't know the people who are listening, how do you know that one of them isn't taking notes? You don't; and without taking steps to control who can walk up and listen, you're in no position to demand that people not take notes (or photographs, or whatever) in a public place.
What your tortured example is closer to would be using DCC between two users; that's a private conversation happening (arguably) within the context of (initially meeting in) a public space. There, the assumption of privacy isn't too stupid (we can get into whether all plaintext protocols are non-private, but that's for another day); it's like sitting on a park bench in an empty area and whispering. But that's not what's being logged; it's a red herring.
If you had to import these things from other countries (unless you want a hunting rifle) that wouldn't be nearly as easy.
Right, because that would be terribly difficult. Do you have any idea of how many thousands of cargo containers come in and out of the U.S. each day, totally uninspected?
We can't stop the flow of people across our borders, and people require food, water, air, and dislike being kept outside of a fairly narrow temperature range for very long. Guns can be disassembled into parts, stored indefinitely, and don't care about temperature or moisture if they're packed right. They're even easier to transport than drugs! And unlike drugs, they're not products that are quickly consumed.
Besides, once you start actually importing them illegally, then you might as well stop bringing in pissant semi-autos and go for real weapons, full-autos, SMGs and the like.
We've seen from the "war on drugs" how stupendously ineffective import controls are when you're trying to restrict a good that there's a demand for. That's exactly what you'd have with guns, if you ever tried to ban them. And beyond the import problem, making a gun (even a fairly sophisticated one) isn't terribly hard. Anyone with a basement machine shop could do it -- we're talking about 19th and very early 20th century technology here. (I can't find it at the moment but there's a region of Afghanistan that's renowned for its home-grown weapons; armorers there can reportedly reverse-engineer, repair, and even clone most types of modern firearms, using extremely primitive equipment.) Here's a guy who scratchbuilt an AR-15 receiver (that'd be the part that's legally regulated) at home. Here's a book on manufacturing and storing your own ammunition. I could go on.
The bar for slander and libel is much higher when the person being slandered is a celebrity (not necessarily in the Brangelina sense, but a celebrity within the community where the slander occurred). It's much harder for a person of note to show damage from an anonymous commenter on the Internet than it is for a normal person, who might only be known to others via the slander.
If you look at the court's treatment of slander and libel, at least in the U.S., the tend to err on the side of the speaker except in pretty egregious cases (and even in some egregious cases depending on the circumstances).
The law was never written to allow you to forcibly unmask anyone saying unflattering things about you, particularly if you're in a position of power or authority.
I predict that 50% of the comments here will be thinly-veiled racial attacks on Russia. Yeah, because if there's one problem we have here on Slashdot and the Internet in general, it's the pervasive anti-white sentiment.
The thing is, all the channels that want archives - the software development channels, etc - already run their own which they control and can prune information out of that they don't want public. (In practice, I think a decent proportion of the Freenode-based channels I spend time in have some sort of official public log.) I can't see this going down well at all. That same argument existed about Usenet, too. Many groups had their own archives, but it's not like they were terribly easy to find. If you wanted to read a group's archives, it generally meant finding their FAQ and scanning through it and hoping the address was in there, and if it was, that it was still up-to-date and maintained.
In short, it was a patchwork system and not very handy. Deja changed that and put all the archives in one place. You didn't need to specify or worry about figuring out where a particular group's archives were, because they were all in the same place. That's inherently different than having each podunk group run their own archive somewhere and try to maintain it.
Put bluntly: the very idea of a plaintext, publicly accessible protocol where everything you say isn't being logged and retained forever is stupid. The only reason Usenet and IRC haven't always been logged is because it was impractical early on. Now, the technology has caught up, and it's going to happen.
You can't have a conversation in public that's being broadcast all over the place and still expect to be able to easily repudiate it. The only way you can have a deniable conversation (whether electronic or for real) is to limit the number of people involved (via encryption or physical proximity) to those who have a vested interest in keeping it deniable. Once you start blasting it all over the world, you need to start acting like everything you say is going to be recorded and kept, forever.
What's most unfortunate about all this is that the IRC ops have blocked Tor, which is really the solution to the "logging problem." Logging isn't a problem as long as you have anonymity; thankfully while technology will only lead to more logging, it also provides some nice ways to safeguard anonymity. The knee-jerk reaction to block Tor eliminated one way of ensuring anonymity but really won't do much in the long run to stop logging -- it's a lose-lose for users.
The only people who are stopped from getting guns by the gun-control laws are the law-abiding. Getting an illegal gun isn't particularly hard in any major city, and I've been told by LEOs that the market price for them is in some cases substantially lower than you'd pay for one legally (especially if it's already been used in a crime and been discarded).
If you want to get a gun for some nefarious purpose, it's not hard at all. And in return for this situation, we create an onerous burden on people who have no criminal intent, and never would use their guns for any illegitimate purpose.
Likewise, if you want to cross either the northern or southern border of the U.S. without going through the CBP rectal-probing, you can do it. By piling the restrictions on people who come through legal checkpoints while basically ignoring the massive challenge that actually trying to seal a thousands-of-miles-long border would entail, we're creating the same black/white-market division that exists with guns. Only the people who are committed for some personal reason to staying legitimate will go through the official channels. Everyone else will go around it. The result is nothing but a false sense of security and the imposition of unnecessary, do-nothing procedural requirements on those who follow the law.
It's DejaNews all over again. The first thing I thought of was DejaNews, too. There was a lot of knee-jerk resistance to the idea of a universal Usenet archive when it first got going (although there have always been smaller archives of particular groups, and there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it), but now I think it'd be tough to find someone who doesn't find it occasionally useful. (Google Groups, the web-to-news system separate from the archive, on the other hand...) Many newsreaders today are even built with integrated support for it.
I think this is the same thing. There's going to be resistance to the idea at first, because people aren't used to it and nobody likes something that works to change. But there's no reason why the change has to be for the worse and not for the better. I think an IRC log service could actually be pretty cool. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that goes on there, that I doubt anyone is going to care about later, but particularly in the technical channels there's a lot of good information given out from time to time. A good, well-known archive might prevent a lot of repetition, and allow users to make sure they're not asking things that get covered all the time.
There's no way to have a communications system where you're just screaming unencrypted bits out into the ether for anyone who wants to listen to them -- which is basically what both IRC and Usenet amount to -- and not let people archive them. There's no technical solution (you can try to keep blocking the logbots, but it's a losing battle if they're determined), and there's no real legal solution either (you could just set the archive up in some country that doesn't care about user's copyrights).
The IRC community has a chance now to embrace this, and in doing so, find some sort of middle ground (like the "X-No-Archive" header) that wouldn't get them into a fight with the people who want an archive that nobody can win.
I tried that once, too, and won't try it again. Just boring a few holes through it with a drill press is a lot easier. While it's perhaps not quite as destructive as actually scrubbing the platters or shredding them, it does enough for most purposes. It also makes the drive obviously un-usable, which I figure means it's more likely to stay in the trash than one that looks functional.
For the most fun, though, nothing beats shooting them. (I'm a fan of 5.56mm at about 100 yards, since it keeps you well away from any flying debris.)
You're assuming that the storage device (GDrive or what have you) gives you block-level access to your files. I'm not sure that's a good assumption; I think it will probably be geared towards small documents and will require you to download a file in its entirety in order to edit it.
Even if TrueCrypt doesn't require you to read and load the entire.tc file into memory in order to decrypt part of it (I don't know if that's true or not; I really don't know a darn thing about the internals of TrueCrypt), you still might end up having to download the entire file to get it out of GDrive. It all depends on how Google designs it, and I can't imagine that providing block-by-block access to very large files like encrypted sparse files or disk images is really a primary design criterion. If you believe that they're going to monetize the service by scanning and showing context-sensitive ads, they have a strong motivation to only offer file-level access, and even then to only offer access through a web browser (where you can see the ads). Either one would break the ability to use an encryption system like TrueCrypt remotely.
That's not to say you couldn't use encryption at all, even if you only have file-based access: you could write a little script that just encrypted every file with GPG as you uploaded it and then decrypted it as you pulled it down; although it would make it a lot harder to have universal access to your files from anywhere (you'd need to have the client software installed), it would work better for small files.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're one of the very, very few people who are capable of sitting down and writing their own fully-functional OS and all the applications for it (if such a person actually exists), you're pretty much always going to be at the mercy of somebody else. The trick is in evaluating and choosing whose mercy you want to be at.
I've lived in some of the bluest of the blue states and even there I can tell you it'd be a non-starter.
It's not a bad idea for retail sales, though.
No, seriously, I want to know. Preventing "vanity pages" and "ads" is one of the major justifications for the periodic 'notability purges' which basically amount to book-burnings; untold hours of people's effort being put to the torch by Wikipedia admins who don't like something about the content. (And they really go out of their way to destroy the information, too; it's not just a logical delete, the database is apparently scrubbed, it's as if the articles in question never even existed except in the delete logs.) And of course it opens the door to all types of censorship via selective enforcement.
All to keep the precious namespace clear of "low quality" articles (as if there aren't enough low-quality articles already -- it's kind of par for the course when you have user-editable content).
Quite true. If you're in the habit of downloading and running binaries from untrusted sources, you're in for a world of hurt.
Now, in the case of Microsoft and Apple, you can probably trust them not to put a virus in their compiled code (well, at least not on purpose; they're not Sony...), but they might put something even nastier there by design -- say a DRM module, or a watermarking system that identified all the files you encoded as yours.
It's all about levels of trust. I trust Microsoft and Apple to not give me a virus for the lulz, because to do so would be counterproductive for them. But for the same reasons, I don't trust them not to fuck me over for an extra buck from a 'corporate partner.'
If you're running anything that you haven't code-reviewed and compiled yourself (which because of the bootstrapping problem you are inevitably), you're trusting somebody. But "trust" isn't a black and white state. You can trust someone for some things and not for others.
There's all sorts of commercial mail that's not spam. If I order something from you, and you send a reply back confirming my order, that's both commercial and definitely not spam. As is any other reply to an inquiry.
Where it crosses the line and becomes spam is when it's unsolicited. That's the key. Unsolicited commercial email is the very definition of spam, and no amount of hand-waving about opt-outs or the selectivity of the lists is going to change that.
Businesses that have relied on cold-calling via any medium to drum up sales have always been sleazy in my book, but when you do it via email, you're pushing the cost out onto the recipient and onto uninvolved third parties. That's at best unethical, and at worst flat-out theft.
Sure it would. It would create an immediate economic incentive to not leave your machine turned on and connected to the Internet 24/7, fall behind on patches, and generally own and run a machine that you don't know how to operate, but is capable of causing harm to others.
One of the reasons the zombification problem is so bad is because many people just don't notice or care about it. If you had a meter on your wall showing your monthly Internet/e-mail bill and suddenly it started running up like a gas pump on Labor Day, you'd pull the plug pretty damn quick.
A few class-action lawsuits later, and the quality of software intended for clueless users would probably improve dramatically, too. There'd probably be a whole market for "computer operator liability insurance," that would pay for any unauthorized charges or damages provided you only used certain software and kept your systems up to date.
I think this is the inevitable direction of things in the long term. No, it probably won't happen anytime soon, because god knows it's the lawmakers who are the most clueless users of all, and they'll probably avoid making themselves responsible for as long as possible, but it's going to happen. We're becoming more and more reliant on the Internet every day, and "my PC got zombiefied" isn't going to be an excuse forever.
Frankly, given that I think liability is going to eventually come to computers just like it has any other facet of life, I think an economic cost- and damages-driven model is a better one than a top-down restrictions-driven one. (E.g., the cost-driven model says "you're responsible for what comes out of your PC onto the public network, secure it accordingly" while the restrictions model says "it's in the public interest to protect the network as a whole, therefore you can only attach systems which have passed a security inspection to it." I'd rather begin to implement the former slowly, because I think the latter is more likely to be pushed through in a knee-jerk response to some catastrophic failure at some point in the future when the politicians finally decide to have a change of heart.)
Yeah I don't think that's the full story.
The filtering seems to work on several levels. One is that the spam percentage on a per-user level is going to be very different: someone who is very careful with their address might have a low spam percentage, say like 10-15% spam, but someone who uses their email to post on Usenet may receive hundreds of spam messages for each legitimate message. So, when you're applying mailbox filtering, you can basically rank all the messages by spamminess and then "cut the deck" at their normal spam-level. If they get 99% spam, toss all but the top 1%. If they get 10% spam, keep the top 90%. That seems to be the first part of it. (This is sort of described on their front page.)
The real key, AFAICT, is that if a user gets 90% spam, any new message that comes in automatically starts out with a 90% chance of being spam. Just by coming into that user's account it's at a disadvantage, regardless of content. But another message coming into a user's account who only gets 10% spam wouldn't necessarily face the same bad odds.
Whether the system actually uses the reputations of various users to rank messages for other users I'm not sure.
You may be a nice person and run a respectable enterprise in all other respects, but if you're sending out unsolicited emails on anything more than an individual basis, you're a spammer.
Furthermore, "This should definitely be legal, it's a great marketing tool and helps my business very well," is not a legitimate justification. It would really help my business if I could hunt down my competitors and kill them, but somehow I doubt that's going to go over very well at the inevitable murder trial. Why? Because nobody cares what's good for you or me, what matters is what's good for society as a whole. And both murder and spam are (admittedly varying degrees of) harmful.
Frankly I think this is a problem with email in general. If we were designing email today, it's pretty easy to see the flaw: everyone basically pays the same amount for email (some very small portion of the amount you pay to your ISP every month) which means those who don't use or under-use the system subsidize it for those who heavily use or abuse it.
If you did the same thing with physical mail -- paid for the entire system out of taxes and let everyone use it as much as they wanted -- you'd have 300 pounds of junk mail on your front doorstep every day, too. It's doomed.
I happen to think the solution is metered billing and micropayments. Obviously this changes how email would function, and keep it from being the great democratic equalizer between rich and poor that it sometimes gets trotted out as being, but such is life. Internet exceptionalism was cool in the 90s and I liked the ideas too, but a whole lot of it is and was just naiveté.
For what it's worth I think we probably share the same feelings regarding the ridiculousness of copyright terms; I simply don't think that enforcing a terrible law more widely is productive. While it may seem satisfying to say "fair's fair" and extend stupid laws as far as possible, it's childish if it doesn't help eliminate the law any faster -- all you're doing is adding to the mess, not solving anything.
Forcing the laws that Disney, et al bought and paid for onto some random organization that's trying to build an IRC log database isn't going to make Disney sit up and say 'wow, that was dumb of us.' It's not going to get the law changed (it's not like the people who pay for the periodic copyright extensions and DMCA-like laws give a shit about IRC logs or Usenet archives). At best, it's just cutting off our collective nose to spite our face.
There are obviously a lot of things that are wrong with the copyright system (and not insignificant among them are the many ways you noted in which a person can use the law as a cudgel to restrict others' right to record what they hear or see in public); we need to fix them, not extend their stupidity as far as possible.
There are lots of ways that people wanting to have 'private' conversations on IRC could restrict access, changing the venue from a public forum to more like a private salon or a theater, where everyone who is allowed entry has agreed not to make recordings. That's perfectly fine, and people desirous of privacy should be encouraged to do that, not to use the twisted mess that is the current copyright system to further destroy the concept of a public space.
If you are, in fact, a lawyer, I'll happily defer, but in my layman's opinion I don't think that's the correct conclusion.
If you violate one of the GPL terms, your license to use the software is terminated. Fine. However, as long as the software is still being offered to anyone under the GPL, you can just go, conform to every part of the GPL, and use it again. You can think of it as one license being terminated, but then going and getting a new one; the GPL is an "infinite stack" of licenses: all you need to do to get a new one is to play by the rules.
There's nothing in the GPL that says 'if you violate this once, you're out for good,' although I'm not sure that would be an entirely terrible idea. But that license-termination clause doesn't necessarily imply that.
Even if all they did was change a few strings or customize an interface, they have to distribute the changed components in source form along with the binaries.
The point isn't what a few elites can do, it's what regular people can do. That's the benefit of technology, because it's what drives social change. (Incidentally, I think it's what a lot of geeks don't "get" sometimes.) History books will write about the Internet as a 1990s phenomenon, even though it existed long before, because only in the 1990s could most people use it. And it was only when lots of people started using it that it started to have effects that could be felt everywhere; that's when it started to change everything.
Dismissive hand-waving about hackers misses the point: when you limit the number of people who can effectively use a technology to a small number of hackers or hobbyists, you hobble the technology and you sharply reduce the effect that it could have had.
It's a pernicious problem because it's difficult to quantify the loss due to technology that the masses either never get, or never get in a form that's useful to them. How do you quantify the social benefits of a CableCard or DVR standard that doesn't suck royally? (The ability for everyone to do what I can do on a MythTV box: pause a program on one TV, walk away, and resume it from another one in a different part of the house an hour later?) It's not something that's easy to measure, but there's obviously some benefit there, even if it's not exactly a cure for cancer. Every time a company locks a product up and makes it difficult for a user to really take full advantage of its capabilities, we all lose a little. Or rather, we just fail to get something that we could have.
IRC and Usenet aren't like having a private conversation on a park bench in an otherwise-deserted area. It's like standing on a soapbox in a public forum (the real kind not the Internet kind) and shouting at anyone and everyone who chooses to wander up.
And in that case, I think you're quite right to assume that everything you're saying is being recorded, because you can't ensure the reverse. Unless you are in a place or situation where it's reasonable to assume that you can't be overheard by anyone else, you must assume that it is. If you don't know the people who are listening, how do you know that one of them isn't taking notes? You don't; and without taking steps to control who can walk up and listen, you're in no position to demand that people not take notes (or photographs, or whatever) in a public place.
What your tortured example is closer to would be using DCC between two users; that's a private conversation happening (arguably) within the context of (initially meeting in) a public space. There, the assumption of privacy isn't too stupid (we can get into whether all plaintext protocols are non-private, but that's for another day); it's like sitting on a park bench in an empty area and whispering. But that's not what's being logged; it's a red herring.
If you had to import these things from other countries (unless you want a hunting rifle) that wouldn't be nearly as easy.
Right, because that would be terribly difficult. Do you have any idea of how many thousands of cargo containers come in and out of the U.S. each day, totally uninspected?
We can't stop the flow of people across our borders, and people require food, water, air, and dislike being kept outside of a fairly narrow temperature range for very long. Guns can be disassembled into parts, stored indefinitely, and don't care about temperature or moisture if they're packed right. They're even easier to transport than drugs! And unlike drugs, they're not products that are quickly consumed.
Besides, once you start actually importing them illegally, then you might as well stop bringing in pissant semi-autos and go for real weapons, full-autos, SMGs and the like.
We've seen from the "war on drugs" how stupendously ineffective import controls are when you're trying to restrict a good that there's a demand for. That's exactly what you'd have with guns, if you ever tried to ban them. And beyond the import problem, making a gun (even a fairly sophisticated one) isn't terribly hard. Anyone with a basement machine shop could do it -- we're talking about 19th and very early 20th century technology here. (I can't find it at the moment but there's a region of Afghanistan that's renowned for its home-grown weapons; armorers there can reportedly reverse-engineer, repair, and even clone most types of modern firearms, using extremely primitive equipment.) Here's a guy who scratchbuilt an AR-15 receiver (that'd be the part that's legally regulated) at home. Here's a book on manufacturing and storing your own ammunition. I could go on.
It's beyond stupid to even consider.
The bar for slander and libel is much higher when the person being slandered is a celebrity (not necessarily in the Brangelina sense, but a celebrity within the community where the slander occurred). It's much harder for a person of note to show damage from an anonymous commenter on the Internet than it is for a normal person, who might only be known to others via the slander.
If you look at the court's treatment of slander and libel, at least in the U.S., the tend to err on the side of the speaker except in pretty egregious cases (and even in some egregious cases depending on the circumstances).
The law was never written to allow you to forcibly unmask anyone saying unflattering things about you, particularly if you're in a position of power or authority.
In short, it was a patchwork system and not very handy. Deja changed that and put all the archives in one place. You didn't need to specify or worry about figuring out where a particular group's archives were, because they were all in the same place. That's inherently different than having each podunk group run their own archive somewhere and try to maintain it.
Put bluntly: the very idea of a plaintext, publicly accessible protocol where everything you say isn't being logged and retained forever is stupid. The only reason Usenet and IRC haven't always been logged is because it was impractical early on. Now, the technology has caught up, and it's going to happen.
You can't have a conversation in public that's being broadcast all over the place and still expect to be able to easily repudiate it. The only way you can have a deniable conversation (whether electronic or for real) is to limit the number of people involved (via encryption or physical proximity) to those who have a vested interest in keeping it deniable. Once you start blasting it all over the world, you need to start acting like everything you say is going to be recorded and kept, forever.
What's most unfortunate about all this is that the IRC ops have blocked Tor, which is really the solution to the "logging problem." Logging isn't a problem as long as you have anonymity; thankfully while technology will only lead to more logging, it also provides some nice ways to safeguard anonymity. The knee-jerk reaction to block Tor eliminated one way of ensuring anonymity but really won't do much in the long run to stop logging -- it's a lose-lose for users.
Who, exactly?
The only people who are stopped from getting guns by the gun-control laws are the law-abiding. Getting an illegal gun isn't particularly hard in any major city, and I've been told by LEOs that the market price for them is in some cases substantially lower than you'd pay for one legally (especially if it's already been used in a crime and been discarded).
If you want to get a gun for some nefarious purpose, it's not hard at all. And in return for this situation, we create an onerous burden on people who have no criminal intent, and never would use their guns for any illegitimate purpose.
Likewise, if you want to cross either the northern or southern border of the U.S. without going through the CBP rectal-probing, you can do it. By piling the restrictions on people who come through legal checkpoints while basically ignoring the massive challenge that actually trying to seal a thousands-of-miles-long border would entail, we're creating the same black/white-market division that exists with guns. Only the people who are committed for some personal reason to staying legitimate will go through the official channels. Everyone else will go around it. The result is nothing but a false sense of security and the imposition of unnecessary, do-nothing procedural requirements on those who follow the law.
I think this is the same thing. There's going to be resistance to the idea at first, because people aren't used to it and nobody likes something that works to change. But there's no reason why the change has to be for the worse and not for the better. I think an IRC log service could actually be pretty cool. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that goes on there, that I doubt anyone is going to care about later, but particularly in the technical channels there's a lot of good information given out from time to time. A good, well-known archive might prevent a lot of repetition, and allow users to make sure they're not asking things that get covered all the time.
There's no way to have a communications system where you're just screaming unencrypted bits out into the ether for anyone who wants to listen to them -- which is basically what both IRC and Usenet amount to -- and not let people archive them. There's no technical solution (you can try to keep blocking the logbots, but it's a losing battle if they're determined), and there's no real legal solution either (you could just set the archive up in some country that doesn't care about user's copyrights).
The IRC community has a chance now to embrace this, and in doing so, find some sort of middle ground (like the "X-No-Archive" header) that wouldn't get them into a fight with the people who want an archive that nobody can win.
I tried that once, too, and won't try it again. Just boring a few holes through it with a drill press is a lot easier. While it's perhaps not quite as destructive as actually scrubbing the platters or shredding them, it does enough for most purposes. It also makes the drive obviously un-usable, which I figure means it's more likely to stay in the trash than one that looks functional.
For the most fun, though, nothing beats shooting them. (I'm a fan of 5.56mm at about 100 yards, since it keeps you well away from any flying debris.)
You're assuming that the storage device (GDrive or what have you) gives you block-level access to your files. I'm not sure that's a good assumption; I think it will probably be geared towards small documents and will require you to download a file in its entirety in order to edit it.
.tc file into memory in order to decrypt part of it (I don't know if that's true or not; I really don't know a darn thing about the internals of TrueCrypt), you still might end up having to download the entire file to get it out of GDrive. It all depends on how Google designs it, and I can't imagine that providing block-by-block access to very large files like encrypted sparse files or disk images is really a primary design criterion. If you believe that they're going to monetize the service by scanning and showing context-sensitive ads, they have a strong motivation to only offer file-level access, and even then to only offer access through a web browser (where you can see the ads). Either one would break the ability to use an encryption system like TrueCrypt remotely.
Even if TrueCrypt doesn't require you to read and load the entire
That's not to say you couldn't use encryption at all, even if you only have file-based access: you could write a little script that just encrypted every file with GPG as you uploaded it and then decrypted it as you pulled it down; although it would make it a lot harder to have universal access to your files from anywhere (you'd need to have the client software installed), it would work better for small files.