First off extending existing laws into new domains should be up to the courts to decide. You also miss the point that making exemptions for netadmins is NOT ENOUGH.
This treaty is short sighted and dumb. Once again we are handing over rights to free association and freedom of expression.
Lets go over the points here...
Trying to make "Hacking Tools" illegal.
A tool is already illegal if it has no non illeagl uses. Hmmm... basicly any hacking tool out there can also be used by netadmins to secure there network.
Keeping extensive logs.
Ok, this is a clear privacy violation. Police need to find a better way to catch cybercriminals that do not include violating my right of expected privacy.
Easier asscess to compter files via sopena.
I think this one speaks for itself.
Never let annything become laws with "Dubious" parts. This one is especially bad because nothing is clearly defined, and just imagin what would happen when telnet and ftp are declared illegal by some country and you are exterdited to stand trial for connecting to one of their servers with a fxp client. Remember is the computing community cannot decide on what a hacking tool is, how are misinformed politicians and police?
In the US or most anywhere, it is perfectly legal to snoop on your employees. They are using company propery, and on company time, why not. The biggest problem that I see with the current system, is that is does not go nearly far enough to warn employees exactly what and when they will be monitored.
I would like to see companies bound by a policy that they have to state, and have employees sign every 6 months. This policy would describe what channels are monitored, when, and who to appeal to. Snooping should also only cover outbound calls, or inbound only under suspision, as employees have less control over who calls them.
Personally I don't believe monitoring in most situations is good buisness practice, as it shows that your managers can't do there job of keeping tabs on productive / non-productive employees without employing technology seems a little strange to me, but anyways.
This ONLY covers buisness models. One click purchacing and shopping carts are NOT COVERED AT ALL.
To file a notice of prior art will cost you $200. You have to pay them to do thier job. To file an appeal not based on prior art will cost you $5,000 ouch.
This is a lousy way to start reforming the patent system. All patents need a probationary period after granting to determin scope and possible prior art. After probation another review along with all documentation will be addressed and final pantent award made. It's that simple. Why try and make a special exception for buisness models? And the bill had no refrence specificly to internet patents.
That really suck, and I thought we might be dealing with some intelligance here.
Reading the article, I noticed some red flags to this bill. It's only reforming buisness practices, not inventions. Would this even apply to shopping carts and 1 click purchang? I think this need ALOT of clarification before we start cheering. They may be able to stop more priceline style patents, but without knowing more this could be a lot of election year hoopla.
Remember that this year IS an election, these guys may just want to coast along on this proposition, then poof...
C-net posted an article yesterday on how over half of the FOA documentation released to date has been blacked completely out ( except for page numbers ). All they want is a rubber stamp to proceed to deploy this beast.
The unescapable conclusion that we all must jump to is they are trying to hide something. Why not just have the box pass already established DoD security measures, and have the "Carnivore" application open for peer or government contract review? Because they do not want anyone to know that these things are actually part of the escelon snooping network.
This is a ploy to desguise whole scale privacy violoations to the highest bidders, under the guise of ligitimate govenment wiretapping.
even if it is not today, what happens when the rubber stam goes on this beast and they start to change the source code? Tell me the FBI is without corruption and who would be able to question thier athority?
This is a step in the right direction, but being a state office and not a federal bureau will make it difficult dealing with the majoraty of the offending people / buisnesses. How well do you think a california OPP is going to help if the company is located off-shore? how about a buisness out-of-state?
Any attempt for this office to deal with out-of-state buisness would be shot down under the interstate commerce act unless they are committing a crime.
But as I said it is a good start, esp if the publish statics about the offenders.
The way it's written currently all a company needs is a good legal team and questionable ethics to shut people down. If the ISP does not comply they are then liable as well.
The question everyone should be asking is why did they not just rely on the current system, because then they would have to file a case, and PROVE RESONABLE CAUSE THAT THEY WOULD WIN. Then a judge could file an injunction without question. They still have to file the case if they intend to pursue the case. Under the DMCA they can shoot first and shut people down never never having to prove resonable cause.
This is just the beginning. The sad thig is that people would never have stood for such a law if it took place in the real world. Just imagine a law that gave this same power to brick and morter. Just sign a certified complaint that smallbiz is volating bigbiz trademark and the police come in and shut you down. No courts, no judges, they don't need them any more because you have no recouse, and the police don't want to becode responsible is they do not follow the law. Mabye they will file, mabye not, but it's all over anyways becuse you have gone bankrupt in the meantime.
You are right, but those products definatly would limit the scope of the above patent. Adding workflow to an existing set of availble technologies may still be patentable under the US system, but would crop the patent down to size.
Personally I don't beleive putting a secritary, filing cabinate, and workflow system on the internet is unique. Any patent that relies soley on the fact that they are doing something obvious with internet technology does not make it unique.
Hmm... I'de say guilt by association is not allowed in the united states. To say that someone is doing something illegal becuse he is around it without DIRECT proof is one of the things the constitution protects from.
Once we start handing over our speech rights to lawyers where would it stop. I don't pirate software, but I do frequents the boards. The VCD board is one of the few places I can even ask encoding related questions and expect to get an answer. The boards are heavly moderated, and requests, trading, whatever is not allowed.
ISONews may be pussing the limits of good taste, but in not way are they doing anything illegal. Like they said, you must show what parts are infringing. Frankley after reading the letters, it appears more like harrasment than anything else.
You must ask yourself, before damming ISOnews, what if it were YOUR site. You were doing noting you thought was illegal, and they threaten you with vauge refrences to what you are doing wrong. They tell you that litigation will be long and agrivatitig. They force you to retain leagl advice and respond to letters that do not conform to the laws they are refrencing. You know the lawsuit is baseless, but how do you fight a company like sega? What would you do?
Everytime they bully a site down without just cause, and everyone that caves is sending the wrong message. They are saing that it's ok for coperations to strong arm the little guy for their own benifit, and the first amendment means noting. I'm starting to question wether or not any of out bill of right are really still enforcable, as now there are so many laws in place to restrict them, and I'm not just talking about free speach.
Digital recording is the wave of the furure. I wanted to be ahead of the curve. I purchaed a cheap capture card and have been archiving TV shows and movies to SVCD disks that play back in my set top DVD player. I have found myself watching more TV, it's also nice having the control to edit the commercials when I want to.
TiVo and ReplayTV are neat ideas, but untill they can replace my TV with recording archiving and playback functionality... I'll stict to recording it myself. I also am very cautious about TiVo's statements that the recording are copyrighted materal can should not be copied. Time shifting has been held up by the Supreme Court.
I think I'll wait till I can record SVCD ( mabye DVD? ) and edit and save them out to disk. If they make that.... then I'll buy one.
Another related topic. It's a fairly common practice now, I call it the creeping contract. It starts out a regular contract with a clause that gives the company the right to include any new clauses, or chage existing ones at will and without prior notice or recouse for you. As some people have pointed out before, this is contrary to contract law, as all additions have to be a benifit to both parties, or is consitered invalid. But the work to get that proved is more than liklye much more than the cost of paying off such problems. I believe these open-ended contracts should be declared illegal, how can the consumer enter into an agreement, and understand, that the other party can change at any time. With open-ended contracts, EULA's, UCTA, DCMA,... it becomes more effective for the companies to write illegal contracts, and stand back and stomp on consumer rights, because they know that it will be more difficult for the consumer to appeal it than just pony up. This kind of coperate rape will not stop until there is some kind of statitory fines, and revocation for these clauses. There should also be a bounty program for turing in suspisious contracts. This will turn the tides and place the burden of proof on the companies, and their lawyers to make sure the contracts are legal and binding. Until someone places the burden on the companies, not the consumers, these broad and obvious abuses will continure to take place.
So if MSN cannot illegally bundle products with a loan why can the cell phone comanies still do it? They build a repayment schedule into the cost of the service for the phones. Why do you think most of them have early termination clauses in the contract?
We all can ride any censoring product because of incorrect sites that they may block. But what is the real % of completly valid sites that it does block?
Censorship is a necessary evil. So we better just find a good way to make these companies accountable for the censoring that they do. At least this would give us a more accurate view of how these programs react, and give more control to the consumer.
What we really need is an independant rating of censorware products that rates them by several categories.
1) Does it work as advertized? consistantly? 2) What age range does it work for? 3) Inaccuracy of blocked sites % of sites incorrectly blocked / correctly blocked 4) Inaccuracy of non-blocked sites % of sites not blocked that should be / test sample of no less than 5,000 5) Turn around time on errors 6) How often data is updated 7) How flexable is the product
This does not make the people that use censorware exempt for ridicule either. Anyone who is using censorware should..
1) Use it only for the intended audiance. 2) Install updates immediatly 3) Re-evaluate use and benifit at least once a year. 4) Never use it on adults. 5) Never use it as a "Quick Fix" to a larger problem.
It appears that etoy may have been exploiting the resembilance between etoy and etoys to confuse potential investors. This is not just another big company stealing a website, this is possible fraud. the etoy web site also had graphics of toys on it, leading to further confusion between possible customers and investors. This does not prevent them from setting up web.etoy.com and removing any stock information from the pages.
Although they do have problems some times, the US court system is not totaly screwed up.
----------- Judge ruling ---------
defendant etoy corporation d/b/a etoy ("etoy"), and any and all persons acting on behalf or in concern with etoy, are hereby enjoined from doing any of the following pending final adjudication of this action:
1. operating a website with the domain name of www.etoy.com
2. using, displaying or otherwise exploiting in any way the domain name www.etoy.com in connection with the digital hijack.
3. selling, offering to sell, soliciting offers to purchase shares of unregistered shares "etoy stock" to any person in the united states or in california.
signed november 29, 1999: john p. shook, judge, los angeles county superior court.
I would just like to say, as with the majority of/.'ers I have fit into this profile for at least a decade. I can just hope that my childern can grow up in a more accomidating school environment, not one that labels them just for being who they are.
I find it very amusing to see this become such a big topic for teachers and principals. School age kids are killed every day. Now that the school officails feel threatened, we have to label kids.
And they are going about it all wrong. They are labeling the wrong people
The qeustion that keeps comming back to me is why are they not labeling the bullies, without which most "outcasts" would not feel so "putdown". Without this pressure, would the kids snap? What about the teachers that don't care enough about there students to approach them on occasion and ask them how things are going today. And we could never question why schools are always under funded these days, that would never be tolerated.
I just don't get it anymore. This is just one more Quick Fix(tm) for a broken system.
Now, you assume that a CC generator has no legal uses. A pseudo random CC generator would be very useful in the case of setting up a Billing system where you have to enter lots of data to test a system, including CC #'s for hundreds of thousands of accounts. This would be a completly legitimate use of the above refrenced software. But I will agree with you that this would be marginal.
As for the DVD copying under liunux. The Supreme Court vs Sony RE: the vcr. They held that there was enough legitimate use of vcr in fair use applications. DVD copying for personal use is completly legitimate. Lets face it the criminals can already copy DVD's if they wanted to. And for quite a while Due to costs, it's cheaper to purchace a new DVD than try and copy one. Between the cost of the burnere and media, whoa. The only way to do it at a resonable cost is to use lossy comression like mpg/asf/...
DVD copying was made into a much bigger story because BIG MEDIA wants us all to believe that copying media is a crime. They have twisted and mangled all intent of copyright. This is a much larger issue that I will not get into right now.
Tools for hacking.
The tools that are released by people that are doing security and those that are interested in hacking are usually clear cut. ( I said usually ) People interested in security give a harmless example as the default, and have a source code mod that will enable the real distructive hack. They also go through proper channels, and release only after disclosure to the vendor, or vendor snubbing them.
The conclusion that everyone should be comming to is that all tools have legitimate use, but the "grey" area tools really have a burden of truth to prove that they have legimate use.
All New York state web sites must be designed to be viewed by HTML 3.2 and have ALT's for all graphics. I think there are more standards, but those are the major ones.
Slashdot Mirror
First off extending existing laws into new domains should be up to the courts to decide. You also miss the point that making exemptions for netadmins is NOT ENOUGH.
This treaty is short sighted and dumb. Once again we are handing over rights to free association and freedom of expression.
Lets go over the points here...
Trying to make "Hacking Tools" illegal.
A tool is already illegal if it has no non illeagl uses. Hmmm... basicly any hacking tool out there can also be used by netadmins to secure there network.
Keeping extensive logs.
Ok, this is a clear privacy violation. Police need to find a better way to catch cybercriminals that do not include violating my right of expected privacy.
Easier asscess to compter files via sopena.
I think this one speaks for itself.
Never let annything become laws with "Dubious" parts. This one is especially bad because nothing is clearly defined, and just imagin what would happen when telnet and ftp are declared illegal by some country and you are exterdited to stand trial for connecting to one of their servers with a fxp client. Remember is the computing community cannot decide on what a hacking tool is, how are misinformed politicians and police?
Grr.... these stupid things make me REALLY mad.
In the UK they can demand passwords to encryped data. Failure to submit and you can be jailed for 1 year.
In the US or most anywhere, it is perfectly legal to snoop on your employees. They are using company propery, and on company time, why not. The biggest problem that I see with the current system, is that is does not go nearly far enough to warn employees exactly what and when they will be monitored.
I would like to see companies bound by a policy that they have to state, and have employees sign every 6 months. This policy would describe what channels are monitored, when, and who to appeal to. Snooping should also only cover outbound calls, or inbound only under suspision, as employees have less control over who calls them.
Personally I don't believe monitoring in most situations is good buisness practice, as it shows that your managers can't do there job of keeping tabs on productive / non-productive employees without employing technology seems a little strange to me, but anyways.
This ONLY covers buisness models. One click purchacing and shopping carts are NOT COVERED AT ALL.
To file a notice of prior art will cost you $200. You have to pay them to do thier job. To file an appeal not based on prior art will cost you $5,000 ouch.
This is a lousy way to start reforming the patent system. All patents need a probationary period after granting to determin scope and possible prior art. After probation another review along with all documentation will be addressed and final pantent award made. It's that simple. Why try and make a special exception for buisness models? And the bill had no refrence specificly to internet patents.
That really suck, and I thought we might be dealing with some intelligance here.
Reading the article, I noticed some red flags to this bill. It's only reforming buisness practices, not inventions. Would this even apply to shopping carts and 1 click purchang? I think this need ALOT of clarification before we start cheering. They may be able to stop more priceline style patents, but without knowing more this could be a lot of election year hoopla.
Remember that this year IS an election, these guys may just want to coast along on this proposition, then poof...
C-net posted an article yesterday on how over half of the FOA documentation released to date has been blacked completely out ( except for page numbers ). All they want is a rubber stamp to proceed to deploy this beast.
The unescapable conclusion that we all must jump to is they are trying to hide something. Why not just have the box pass already established DoD security measures, and have the "Carnivore" application open for peer or government contract review? Because they do not want anyone to know that these things are actually part of the escelon snooping network.
This is a ploy to desguise whole scale privacy violoations to the highest bidders, under the guise of ligitimate govenment wiretapping.
even if it is not today, what happens when the rubber stam goes on this beast and they start to change the source code? Tell me the FBI is without corruption and who would be able to question thier athority?
This is a step in the right direction, but being a state office and not a federal bureau will make it difficult dealing with the majoraty of the offending people / buisnesses. How well do you think a california OPP is going to help if the company is located off-shore? how about a buisness out-of-state?
Any attempt for this office to deal with out-of-state buisness would be shot down under the interstate commerce act unless they are committing a crime.
But as I said it is a good start, esp if the publish statics about the offenders.
The way it's written currently all a company needs is a good legal team and questionable ethics to shut people down. If the ISP does not comply they are then liable as well.
The question everyone should be asking is why did they not just rely on the current system, because then they would have to file a case, and PROVE RESONABLE CAUSE THAT THEY WOULD WIN. Then a judge could file an injunction without question. They still have to file the case if they intend to pursue the case. Under the DMCA they can shoot first and shut people down never never having to prove resonable cause.
This is just the beginning. The sad thig is that people would never have stood for such a law if it took place in the real world. Just imagine a law that gave this same power to brick and morter. Just sign a certified complaint that smallbiz is volating bigbiz trademark and the police come in and shut you down. No courts, no judges, they don't need them any more because you have no recouse, and the police don't want to becode responsible is they do not follow the law. Mabye they will file, mabye not, but it's all over anyways becuse you have gone bankrupt in the meantime.
You are right, but those products definatly would limit the scope of the above patent. Adding workflow to an existing set of availble technologies may still be patentable under the US system, but would crop the patent down to size.
Personally I don't beleive putting a secritary, filing cabinate, and workflow system on the internet is unique. Any patent that relies soley on the fact that they are doing something obvious with internet technology does not make it unique.
That is besides the point, saing that they are into warez and iso's is like a layer suing you for being an open source fanatic.
"But you honor, he posts to slashdot."
Guilt be association is not cool, and should never be used. If they can prove that the operators pirate games, that's something else entirley.
Hmm... I'de say guilt by association is not allowed in the united states. To say that someone is doing something illegal becuse he is around it without DIRECT proof is one of the things the constitution protects from.
Once we start handing over our speech rights to lawyers where would it stop. I don't pirate software, but I do frequents the boards. The VCD board is one of the few places I can even ask encoding related questions and expect to get an answer. The boards are heavly moderated, and requests, trading, whatever is not allowed.
ISONews may be pussing the limits of good taste, but in not way are they doing anything illegal. Like they said, you must show what parts are infringing. Frankley after reading the letters, it appears more like harrasment than anything else.
You must ask yourself, before damming ISOnews, what if it were YOUR site. You were doing noting you thought was illegal, and they threaten you with vauge refrences to what you are doing wrong. They tell you that litigation will be long and agrivatitig. They force you to retain leagl advice and respond to letters that do not conform to the laws they are refrencing. You know the lawsuit is baseless, but how do you fight a company like sega? What would you do?
Everytime they bully a site down without just cause, and everyone that caves is sending the wrong message. They are saing that it's ok for coperations to strong arm the little guy for their own benifit, and the first amendment means noting. I'm starting to question wether or not any of out bill of right are really still enforcable, as now there are so many laws in place to restrict them, and I'm not just talking about free speach.
Digital recording is the wave of the furure. I wanted to be ahead of the curve. I purchaed a cheap capture card and have been archiving TV shows and movies to SVCD disks that play back in my set top DVD player. I have found myself watching more TV, it's also nice having the control to edit the commercials when I want to. TiVo and ReplayTV are neat ideas, but untill they can replace my TV with recording archiving and playback functionality... I'll stict to recording it myself. I also am very cautious about TiVo's statements that the recording are copyrighted materal can should not be copied. Time shifting has been held up by the Supreme Court. I think I'll wait till I can record SVCD ( mabye DVD? ) and edit and save them out to disk. If they make that.... then I'll buy one.
Another related topic. It's a fairly common practice now, I call it the creeping contract. It starts out a regular contract with a clause that gives the company the right to include any new clauses, or chage existing ones at will and without prior notice or recouse for you. As some people have pointed out before, this is contrary to contract law, as all additions have to be a benifit to both parties, or is consitered invalid. But the work to get that proved is more than liklye much more than the cost of paying off such problems. I believe these open-ended contracts should be declared illegal, how can the consumer enter into an agreement, and understand, that the other party can change at any time. With open-ended contracts, EULA's, UCTA, DCMA,... it becomes more effective for the companies to write illegal contracts, and stand back and stomp on consumer rights, because they know that it will be more difficult for the consumer to appeal it than just pony up. This kind of coperate rape will not stop until there is some kind of statitory fines, and revocation for these clauses. There should also be a bounty program for turing in suspisious contracts. This will turn the tides and place the burden of proof on the companies, and their lawyers to make sure the contracts are legal and binding. Until someone places the burden on the companies, not the consumers, these broad and obvious abuses will continure to take place.
So if MSN cannot illegally bundle products with a loan why can the cell phone comanies still do it? They build a repayment schedule into the cost of the service for the phones. Why do you think most of them have early termination clauses in the contract?
Why hasn't anyone complained about them?
We all can ride any censoring product because of incorrect sites that they may block. But what is the real % of completly valid sites that it does block?
Censorship is a necessary evil. So we better just find a good way to make these companies accountable for the censoring that they do. At least this would give us a more accurate view of how these programs react, and give more control to the consumer.
What we really need is an independant rating of censorware products that rates them by several categories.
1) Does it work as advertized? consistantly?
2) What age range does it work for?
3) Inaccuracy of blocked sites
% of sites incorrectly blocked / correctly blocked
4) Inaccuracy of non-blocked sites
% of sites not blocked that should be / test sample of no less than 5,000
5) Turn around time on errors
6) How often data is updated
7) How flexable is the product
This does not make the people that use censorware exempt for ridicule either. Anyone who is using censorware should..
1) Use it only for the intended audiance.
2) Install updates immediatly
3) Re-evaluate use and benifit at least once a year.
4) Never use it on adults.
5) Never use it as a "Quick Fix" to a larger problem.
It appears that etoy may have been exploiting the resembilance between etoy and etoys to confuse potential investors. This is not just another big company stealing a website, this is possible fraud. the etoy web site also had graphics of toys on it, leading to further confusion between possible customers and investors. This does not prevent them from setting up web.etoy.com and removing any stock information from the pages.
Although they do have problems some times, the US court system is not totaly screwed up.
----------- Judge ruling ---------
defendant etoy corporation d/b/a etoy ("etoy"), and any and all persons acting on behalf or in concern with etoy, are hereby enjoined from doing any of the following pending final adjudication of this action:
1. operating a website with the domain name of www.etoy.com
2. using, displaying or otherwise exploiting in any way the domain name www.etoy.com in connection with the digital hijack.
3. selling, offering to sell, soliciting offers to purchase shares of unregistered shares "etoy stock" to any person in the united states or in california.
signed november 29, 1999: john p. shook, judge, los
angeles county superior court.
I would just like to say, as with the majority of /.'ers I have fit into this profile for at least a decade. I can just hope that my childern can grow up in a more accomidating school environment, not one that labels them just for being who they are.
I find it very amusing to see this become such a big topic for teachers and principals. School age kids are killed every day. Now that the school officails feel threatened, we have to label kids.
And they are going about it all wrong. They are labeling the wrong people
The qeustion that keeps comming back to me is why are they not labeling the bullies, without which most "outcasts" would not feel so "putdown". Without this pressure, would the kids snap? What about the teachers that don't care enough about there students to approach them on occasion and ask them how things are going today. And we could never question why schools are always under funded these days, that would never be tolerated.
I just don't get it anymore. This is just one more Quick Fix(tm) for a broken system.
IANAL
Now, you assume that a CC generator has no legal uses. A pseudo random CC generator would be very useful in the case of setting up a Billing system where you have to enter lots of data to test a system, including CC #'s for hundreds of thousands of accounts. This would be a completly legitimate use of the above refrenced software. But I will agree with you that this would be marginal.
As for the DVD copying under liunux. The Supreme Court vs Sony RE: the vcr. They held that there was enough legitimate use of vcr in fair use applications. DVD copying for personal use is completly legitimate. Lets face it the criminals can already copy DVD's if they wanted to. And for quite a while Due to costs, it's cheaper to purchace a new DVD than try and copy one. Between the cost of the burnere and media, whoa. The only way to do it at a resonable cost is to use lossy comression like mpg/asf/...
DVD copying was made into a much bigger story because BIG MEDIA wants us all to believe that copying media is a crime. They have twisted and mangled all intent of copyright. This is a much larger issue that I will not get into right now.
Tools for hacking.
The tools that are released by people that are doing security and those that are interested in hacking are usually clear cut. ( I said usually ) People interested in security give a harmless example as the default, and have a source code mod that will enable the real distructive hack. They also go through proper channels, and release only after disclosure to the vendor, or vendor snubbing them.
The conclusion that everyone should be comming to is that all tools have legitimate use, but the "grey" area tools really have a burden of truth to prove that they have legimate use.
ISP Going to be running all of there mail/web/shell farms under linux. Biggest problem they face is makeing linux 32bit uid/gid aware.
All New York state web sites must be designed to be viewed by HTML 3.2 and have ALT's for all graphics. I think there are more standards, but those are the major ones.