And yet funnily enough despite not being illegal, shortly after the cable leaks it became a lot harder to send money to WikiLeaks. And that's with Democrats in charge. Did you know that a leading house Rep wanted WikiLeaks and Assange added to the "Specially Designated Nationals" list? This is a government maintained blacklist of people and firms you're not allowed to trade with. It often contains entries consisting only of a name with no other identifying information. There is no appeals process. No explanations are given for why people end up on the list. It is enforced through the financial system and there are severe penalties for violating it.
The problem with all-electronic money today isn't the concept of being electronic - that's good. The problem is bad laws passed over the past 30 years that are wide open to abuse, and excessive centralization which mean often laws aren't even needed: just leaning on the right executives at payment processors./p
The average person has much more pressing matters in life than global politics. Such examples of these are getting enough money to pay rent/mortgage
You're completely right, which is why the fact that Iran comes up at all is so ridiculous. As I said, 90% of people don't give a crap about Iran or what it does. That's why in an actual democracy, which we don't have, they would be left alone.
I think you're looking at this backwards. You start with the assumption that there's a problem, and work backwards to "democracy would not address this, therefore democracy must be flawed". The actual flaw is in your own starting point. That's because this entire "problem" is artificially manufactured - to ensure the US continues to have an excuse for large amounts of protectionist military spending, to play the politics of power in Jerusalem and so on. Once you look at what people actually care about it becomes clear that Iran would go unaddressed because there isn't anything to address.
Democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct. The society is made up of egoistic individuals. Most of us would buy products from Iran. Heck, I am buying stuff from Apple, produced at "the evil Foxconn". Because it's affordable and cool!
Your argument is one I've often seen from people who claim to believe in freedom and democracy. Sometimes when you dig in, those people don't really, truly believe in self governance. As soon as it looks like a decision might not go their way, they start to say that people can't really rule themselves and need a benevolent dictator (or two). When you say "democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct", you need to go through a reality check. What is "morally or ethically correct" is decided by society and society alone, not bureaucrats or politicians. The moment you stop believing that, you are simply arguing for religious dictatorship of the type you claim to oppose!
Perhaps you honestly believe everyone should be banned from buying Apple products because you read (somewhere) that Foxconn are bad. I think you'd find yourself on the losing end of that argument if it looked like it might actually happen. I don't think people would appreciate being forced to follow an "ethically correct" position according to root_42s view of the world.
Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
This clearly has not happened, perhaps because 90% of the people don't give a shit about Iran. Faced with overwhelming democratically proven apathy the "powers that be" have decided to force their citizens hand with decisions that cannot be voted on, or overridden. This is the opposite of democracy, and the kind of blatant hypocrisy that makes people jaded and cynical.
You know what? When the war comes I'll be rooting for Iran. I don't sign on to this perpetual war bullshit but was never asked, won't BE asked, and thanks to our wonderfully centralized financial system won't be able to do anything about it independently either.
And please STFU about Iran being a religious theocracy. Last time I checked every remaining candidate for the Republican nomination is competing on how much they love Jesus and how much they'd oppress people who don't follow their own stone age religious views. American is going to end up in the same place soon enough.
He's claiming that they used to let the engineers spend 20% of their time on whatever they thought was cool, but now there's an ultimatum (it's not clear if it's official or not) that everything has to be subservient to the goal of pushing "social" and "sharing" in general
BTW, this is not true. I work for Google, have a 20% project that has nothing to do with social or sharing (in fact it's an open source Bitcoin related project), and before this one I had a different 20% project which now has a team of two full time engineers on it, which is also not related to sharing or social.
The guy who wrote this blog was not actually an engineer. As somebody who is, I can say that at least in my part of the company 20% time is alive and well. It has not been killed. It requires managerial "approval" only in the sense that your manager needs to know about it, but they aren't allowed to pick/choose your 20% projects or tell you what to do. As a way to stimulate research it's very effective and one of my favourite things about working here.
Over the years I've read a lot of stuff about 20% time and how it's supposedly just a scam, or whatever. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that it's always been somewhat vaguely defined. As far as I know there's no precise, written set of policies for 20% time. It's just a tradition that's always been there. The result is that whether you succeed with it or not is largely up to the individual - you need a certain amount of confidence and drive to make it happen. And bad managers can potentially try and discourage you, even if they aren't supposed to, or give you insane deadlines so you feel you can't use it. But there are ways to report such situations and try to fix them.
Hi, I work on the Google accounts team (on spam and security).
I just want to clarify something. We don't merge accounts using non-explicit / ambient information like you are suggesting. I suspect what happened is that at some point, you used your Gmail account on YouTube and we noticed you already had a YouTube account (you were logged in to both). When YT was acquired it obviously had its own account system and over time, that has been integrated with the regular Google account system. As part of that accounts have been merged together. It may be that you don't remember this happening, but we definitely don't try and spot related accounts and merge them without some explicit user action.
I'm not sure why you think people would be able to see your YouTube viewing history. That's a private part of your account, it's hard to imagine that ever changing. Unless your account gets hacked nobody else can see it, and we put a lot of effort in to try and stop account compromises (it's what I work on all day, in fact).
Anyway, a lot of peoples concerns about privacy boil down to (a) transparency and (b) control. That's what BasilBrushes concerns seem to be about and it's completely understandable. The Dashboard (www.google.com/dashboard) might help. This stuff is discussed in the privacy principles document, which is the official voice of the company on the topic. I actually think Google has got a lot better at these principles (transparency, control) over the last few years - we have made things like Chrome incognito mode, the Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager, added better security against hackers (no.1 privacy threat) etc. But peoples expectations have gone up even faster, so there's still lots of work to do.
No, I think the real motivation was ideological if you read the profiles of Hammond. He used the stolen numbers to donate to charity.
The problem is, he's an idiot who doesn't understand how credit cards work. Fraudulent charges to charities actually hurts them because they get fined when chargebacks occur. So they don't get to keep the money, they lose extra money on top, and VISA/MC have a habit of disconnecting you from the credit card system entirely if they get too many chargebacks.
It's really tough to imagine a nastier or more stupid thing to do than use stolen credit cards with charities.
What the summary doesn't make fully clear IMHO is that the cost of this fraud is not carried by VISA or the banks, but rather passed on to merchants... who ultimately pass the cost on to anyone who uses credit cards. That is unfortunate, because it means the organizations financially incentivized to solve fraud are the ones who can't do anything about it. The organizations who can make these things more secure don't pay the price, which may explain why credit cards are still so insecure.
Practical experience suggests students are not able to "know right from wrong" in this case - piracy is both illegal and ethically pretty indefensible (you can always just go and watch something licensed under a liberal CC style license, after all).
That seems a little unfair. It'd be equally valid to say that a scammers dream is an electronic payments system that allows purchases to be made with only a fixed password, which must be given to anyone who accepts payments, which isn't connectable to any kind of second factor and in which the costs of fraud get sunk by the merchants (who can't do anything about it) rather than banks or end users, thus ensuring the party continues endlessly. How many credit card details can be bought on the black market again?
The Bitcoin protocol has built in support for mediated transactions, 2-factor coins and other good things, the support for which will be fleshed out with time. But the TradeHill closure doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoins features per se. Some banks relied on by Paxum decided that they don't want to allow Bitcoin related trade, period. Whether this is really to do with "risk" or they simply don't like/understand it, we will likely never know.
They ain't gonna change because none of the pirates posting on Slashdot have ever elaborated a credible alternative for them. Kodak was killed by superior technology - digital was clearly a better way of taking photos and Kodak just failed to make the leap. But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood? Give everything away for free? The financial physics of that don't work. Maybe they should pay for movies entirely out of popcorn sales.
Please. This kind of 24/7 "piracy is freedom fighting" crap tires me. The linked article is worthless and adds nothing to what precious little debate there is. He claims the problem is "massively overpriced" works. He then ignores the fact that the easy and cheap rental services he asks for already exist (eg, iTunes, Netflix, Apple TV), and oddly enough, if both are as easy as he claims the free alternative will still always win. The guy practically admits he breaks the law constantly and doesn't care, which isn't surprising because he has demonstrated the kind of reasoning skills I'd expect of a small child.
How about the police check his computer then throw him in jail for a bit? That won't stop piracy but it might stop stupid articles about it from clogging up the internet.
Sign your emails. The tech has been out there for two decades. Decades, and that's real world time, not "internet time."
You're way behind the times. Go read up on email authentication and DKIM. You will find that a significant fraction of all email on the internet is being signed automatically - that is how DKIM works. The difference is, it's signed with the email providers keys instead of the users keys. But this is good enough to stop phishing because if an email claims to be from info@paypal.com or sloppy@gmail.com, the signature proves it came from PayPal or Gmail and you can then trust that they won't sign such mail unless it really did come from that address.
DMARC solves a problem that real world DKIM deployments have - merely signing your mail is not enough. You need to tell people what to do if signature checks fail. And you need a way to learn about failing signature checks, because large organizations often have incredibly complex mail streams, including mail they know nothing about because some random guerilla marketing team contracted a third party provider and told them to send as "campaign@foo.com", even though it's not being sent via foo.coms servers. This has made real deployments of DKIM quite tricky and ad-hoc affairs. DMARC will standardize this and make deployment feasible even for smaller organizations.
DKIM has other problems, like the number of mail relays that think it's OK to modify mail in transit whilst claiming it comes from the original sender, but those are all issues you get with retrofitting digital signatures onto an existing infrastructure./p
That's a huge document. I'll read it fully some other time.
Suffice it to say, I find the premise (from the introduction) to be flawed, or at least, not balanced. It argues that the DMCA is "anti competitive" because it seeks to protect DRM systems, which are typically not open.
I have a few problems with this argument. Firstly, it assumes that DRM systems are by definition "closed systems" without interoperability. This is an intellectually vague argument that can be sliced any way without reaching resolution, due to imprecision about what "open" is. Take the BluRay protection system. You can't just download a few PDFs and make a working BluRay player. That isn't possible. So from that perspective BluRay is a closed system. But if you sign some contracts and pay some licensing fees you certainly can, and there is a highly competitive market of both player manufacturers and content creators. Typically we'd say an infrastructure in which there is a free and competitive market, is an open infrastructure.
The paper argues that the "interoperability" provision of the DMCA is self contradictory because the purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized devices interoperating with it. That's a good argument and one the framers of the DMCA should have addressed. But I think the question of open vs closed in DRM systems is something that'll become clearer with time. Technological progress is solving some of these issues, it's letting us have our cake and eat it to some extent. Trusted computing systems mean you can have hardware that runs anything (is open), but can cryptographically prove what it's running to third parties and seal encryption keys under those verified states. So it sets up a framework where two parties can trade without having to fall back on slow, expensive and overworked law courts to ensure both sides follow the agreed contract.
The PS3 was, for a long time, a good example of this. It ran copy-controlled games, but also Linux (just not both at the same time). Sonys big mistake was to take that away and thus incentivize people who want to run Linux on all their hardware. Also, their hypervisor was weak and their code signing contained serious mathematical flaws - but I guess in their next generation (assuming there is one) they'll fix those issues.
With TC in a regular PC, in theory, you can use Linux or FreeBSD or an OS you wrote entirely yourself, AND you can gain access to highly DRMd content, IF the other side is willing to trust your software. The platform itself is both open and entirely neutral. For that reason it even has non-DRM applications in areas like intelligent agents, virtual currencies, etc. The big remaining question is how to make certification of custom platforms really really cheap, so you can prove that your Linux/BSD/whatever will follow the rules required by the content creators (if you're willing to do that). Intels LaGrande technology had some interesting approaches to this, by avoiding the need for the host OS to be trusted at all, but it was unfortunately never finished. So I suspect we'll see either/or approaches dominate in the coming years.
For all the nerd-rage it caused at the time, the DMCA was a remarkably balanced and far-sighted law. Some other nations have copied it, and others haven't, I don't know if NZ has such a law or not, but it doesn't matter much - the MegaUpload guys are also accused of plain old copyright infringement, which is certainly illegal under laws and treaties NZ has signed.
Oh, and they're also accused of money laundering, which again would be considered an extraditable crime. I don't personally pay much attention to accusations of money laundering because those laws are extremely vague, poorly thought out and there's no distinction between actually hiding the sources of illegally gained funds and simply failing to follow the byzantine regulations intended to make value flows trackable - they are both considered "money laundering", although plenty of innocent people with no criminal intentions can fall foul of the latter. As a result convictions purely for ML and nothing else are very rare and have often been overturned by courts. That's one reason it usually comes attached to accusations of other crimes.
Re: the DMCA. Like I said, in hindsight I think it's actually worked out very well for the net. The lightweight framework of copyright enforcement it created kept huge workloads away from the courts without creating unworkable levels of abuse (there is some, but there's abuse of the regular legal system too). It has made copyright enforcement available to the little guy, again without huge legal fees. It has protected sites like YouTube and search engines. And whilst measures like making circumvention systems illegal caused a lot of fuss, their impact was trivial - last time I checked this part of the law has neither prevented circumvention software being readily available nor wiped out Linux. In fact its impact on both sides of the copyright fights have been negligible.
I couldn't actually find any mention of Google in the document that was released. Much was blacked out, but can anyone see the evidence that Google took part in this?
ActiveX was an "open" standard in the sense that Netscape could have implemented it if they wanted to..... on Windows only. That's because the bulk of the APIs you needed to use to write an ActiveX control were just the regular Win32 APIs. Netscape had a policy of supporting not just Windows but all operating systems. That's why Microsoft made ActiveX - they saw weakness (other platforms gui frameworks kind of sucked at the time, so pandering to them restricted developers a lot), and they attempted to exploit it (by allowing developers to build better apps that were Windows only).
Was ActiveX "evil"? Well, it was certainly platform specific. Making things like this NOT platform specific is a ton of work, NaCL uses techniques and technologies that didn't exist back then, and they had no incentives to do it. Whether it was wrong to do depends on your views on the importance of features vs platform independence.
NaCL is different to ActiveX in some really important, fundamental ways. Firstly, the APIs it exposes to native code are really small: just Pepper, which provides you with the real basics along with some well accepted cross-platform APIs like OpenGL. Importantly there's no GUI toolkit. If you want buttons and sliders, you need to use HTML, not Win32/GTK/Cocoa. In fact NaCL will prevent you from accessing these APIs entirely!
Secondly, it's got a strong focus on security. NaCL code has security properties that are provable using static analysis. It also runs in a sandbox for a second level of defence. This is very different to ActiveX, which relied entirely on Authenticode, and suffered some serious UI problems that made it vulnerable (modal dialog boxes).
Thirdly, everything you need to implement NaCL is open source, so other browser makers can (and maybe will) adopt it. The core runtime and execution technologies are all open source, with the bulk of the integration work being joining Pepper to your browser. Mozilla already supports Pepper and I guess other browsers will too soon (maybe not IE). It really wasn't possible for Netscape to support ActiveX for all their users in the 90s, but it's quite feasible for Apple, Microsoft, MozCorp and Opera to support all their users with NaCL, especially now the dependency on x86 has been broken.
The Swiss have very little in the way of content industry. They have a large drugs industry though, and unsurprisingly, they still believe in patent enforcement.
This is about someone who committed acts in the UK that were not illegal in the UK (let us assume, given that his equipment was taken by British police in November 2010 but no criminal charges followed).
The judge addressed this too. It's not valid to assume "I was raided by the police, and not charged, therefore what I am doing is legal". That's not how the law works.
I believe some countries are basically trusted to not lodge garbage prosecutions (ie for things that clearly could not have been done by the defendant or completely trivial offences), and it's assumed people get fair trials there. So as long as the law being violated as a local analogue it's not a problem.
Now whatever you may believe about copyright law, this guy ran a site called "TVShack", made over 10,000 GBP a month off ads and only allowed piracy-related links onto his site. Prosecuting him for copyright infringement isn't a garbage prosecution.
Where it does run aground is in cases where some countries are trusted to be reasonable and then are not. The Polish habit of extraditing people for speeding offences has caused a lot of grumbling because the cost of the extradition is so ridiculous compared to the size of the offence. So there are some talks of revisiting the blanket assumption that all EU countries have trustworthy legal systems.
He did not infringe the copyrights of the owner of the medias he had been linking too, as he himself didn't make any copy of them. Is there a law against this in the UK ?
Courts of law and judges in particular are not algorithms that can be beaten by finding an edge case to exploit. I see this fallacy on Slashdot time and time again. They consider the intent of the law as well as the wording. If you read the ruling you will see that this was taken into account - the judge considered the intent of Parliament when writing the law. He also considered the meaning of the phrase "make available" in the context of a different part of the law and concluded that O'Dwyer was doing so when common sense ("plain reading") is applied.
How can they legally extradite him, when he didn't commit a crime IN the US? He's not even a US citizen and isn't subject to US law!
Well, read the ruling which is helpfully linked from the summary. What he was doing (is charged with doing) is indeed an offence under UK law. The fact that the CPS didn't prosecute him does not change the act that UK law does contain provisions for "making available" copyrighted materials, and that is what he was charged for.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet funnily enough despite not being illegal, shortly after the cable leaks it became a lot harder to send money to WikiLeaks. And that's with Democrats in charge. Did you know that a leading house Rep wanted WikiLeaks and Assange added to the "Specially Designated Nationals" list? This is a government maintained blacklist of people and firms you're not allowed to trade with. It often contains entries consisting only of a name with no other identifying information. There is no appeals process. No explanations are given for why people end up on the list. It is enforced through the financial system and there are severe penalties for violating it.
The problem with all-electronic money today isn't the concept of being electronic - that's good. The problem is bad laws passed over the past 30 years that are wide open to abuse, and excessive centralization which mean often laws aren't even needed: just leaning on the right executives at payment processors./p
The NSA operates under the assumption that they are permanently compromised and heavily compartmentalize and set up internal firewalls as a result.
You're completely right, which is why the fact that Iran comes up at all is so ridiculous. As I said, 90% of people don't give a crap about Iran or what it does. That's why in an actual democracy, which we don't have, they would be left alone.
I think you're looking at this backwards. You start with the assumption that there's a problem, and work backwards to "democracy would not address this, therefore democracy must be flawed". The actual flaw is in your own starting point. That's because this entire "problem" is artificially manufactured - to ensure the US continues to have an excuse for large amounts of protectionist military spending, to play the politics of power in Jerusalem and so on. Once you look at what people actually care about it becomes clear that Iran would go unaddressed because there isn't anything to address.
Your argument is one I've often seen from people who claim to believe in freedom and democracy. Sometimes when you dig in, those people don't really, truly believe in self governance. As soon as it looks like a decision might not go their way, they start to say that people can't really rule themselves and need a benevolent dictator (or two). When you say "democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct", you need to go through a reality check. What is "morally or ethically correct" is decided by society and society alone, not bureaucrats or politicians. The moment you stop believing that, you are simply arguing for religious dictatorship of the type you claim to oppose!
Perhaps you honestly believe everyone should be banned from buying Apple products because you read (somewhere) that Foxconn are bad. I think you'd find yourself on the losing end of that argument if it looked like it might actually happen. I don't think people would appreciate being forced to follow an "ethically correct" position according to root_42s view of the world.
What evil things?
Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
This clearly has not happened, perhaps because 90% of the people don't give a shit about Iran. Faced with overwhelming democratically proven apathy the "powers that be" have decided to force their citizens hand with decisions that cannot be voted on, or overridden. This is the opposite of democracy, and the kind of blatant hypocrisy that makes people jaded and cynical.
You know what? When the war comes I'll be rooting for Iran. I don't sign on to this perpetual war bullshit but was never asked, won't BE asked, and thanks to our wonderfully centralized financial system won't be able to do anything about it independently either.
And please STFU about Iran being a religious theocracy. Last time I checked every remaining candidate for the Republican nomination is competing on how much they love Jesus and how much they'd oppress people who don't follow their own stone age religious views. American is going to end up in the same place soon enough.
BTW, this is not true. I work for Google, have a 20% project that has nothing to do with social or sharing (in fact it's an open source Bitcoin related project), and before this one I had a different 20% project which now has a team of two full time engineers on it, which is also not related to sharing or social.
The guy who wrote this blog was not actually an engineer. As somebody who is, I can say that at least in my part of the company 20% time is alive and well. It has not been killed. It requires managerial "approval" only in the sense that your manager needs to know about it, but they aren't allowed to pick/choose your 20% projects or tell you what to do. As a way to stimulate research it's very effective and one of my favourite things about working here.
Over the years I've read a lot of stuff about 20% time and how it's supposedly just a scam, or whatever. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that it's always been somewhat vaguely defined. As far as I know there's no precise, written set of policies for 20% time. It's just a tradition that's always been there. The result is that whether you succeed with it or not is largely up to the individual - you need a certain amount of confidence and drive to make it happen. And bad managers can potentially try and discourage you, even if they aren't supposed to, or give you insane deadlines so you feel you can't use it. But there are ways to report such situations and try to fix them.
Hi, I work on the Google accounts team (on spam and security).
I just want to clarify something. We don't merge accounts using non-explicit / ambient information like you are suggesting. I suspect what happened is that at some point, you used your Gmail account on YouTube and we noticed you already had a YouTube account (you were logged in to both). When YT was acquired it obviously had its own account system and over time, that has been integrated with the regular Google account system. As part of that accounts have been merged together. It may be that you don't remember this happening, but we definitely don't try and spot related accounts and merge them without some explicit user action.
I'm not sure why you think people would be able to see your YouTube viewing history. That's a private part of your account, it's hard to imagine that ever changing. Unless your account gets hacked nobody else can see it, and we put a lot of effort in to try and stop account compromises (it's what I work on all day, in fact).
Anyway, a lot of peoples concerns about privacy boil down to (a) transparency and (b) control. That's what BasilBrushes concerns seem to be about and it's completely understandable. The Dashboard (www.google.com/dashboard) might help. This stuff is discussed in the privacy principles document, which is the official voice of the company on the topic. I actually think Google has got a lot better at these principles (transparency, control) over the last few years - we have made things like Chrome incognito mode, the Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager, added better security against hackers (no.1 privacy threat) etc. But peoples expectations have gone up even faster, so there's still lots of work to do.
No, I think the real motivation was ideological if you read the profiles of Hammond. He used the stolen numbers to donate to charity.
The problem is, he's an idiot who doesn't understand how credit cards work. Fraudulent charges to charities actually hurts them because they get fined when chargebacks occur. So they don't get to keep the money, they lose extra money on top, and VISA/MC have a habit of disconnecting you from the credit card system entirely if they get too many chargebacks.
It's really tough to imagine a nastier or more stupid thing to do than use stolen credit cards with charities.
What the summary doesn't make fully clear IMHO is that the cost of this fraud is not carried by VISA or the banks, but rather passed on to merchants ... who ultimately pass the cost on to anyone who uses credit cards. That is unfortunate, because it means the organizations financially incentivized to solve fraud are the ones who can't do anything about it. The organizations who can make these things more secure don't pay the price, which may explain why credit cards are still so insecure.
Practical experience suggests students are not able to "know right from wrong" in this case - piracy is both illegal and ethically pretty indefensible (you can always just go and watch something licensed under a liberal CC style license, after all).
That seems a little unfair. It'd be equally valid to say that a scammers dream is an electronic payments system that allows purchases to be made with only a fixed password, which must be given to anyone who accepts payments, which isn't connectable to any kind of second factor and in which the costs of fraud get sunk by the merchants (who can't do anything about it) rather than banks or end users, thus ensuring the party continues endlessly. How many credit card details can be bought on the black market again?
The Bitcoin protocol has built in support for mediated transactions, 2-factor coins and other good things, the support for which will be fleshed out with time. But the TradeHill closure doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoins features per se. Some banks relied on by Paxum decided that they don't want to allow Bitcoin related trade, period. Whether this is really to do with "risk" or they simply don't like/understand it, we will likely never know.
They ain't gonna change because none of the pirates posting on Slashdot have ever elaborated a credible alternative for them. Kodak was killed by superior technology - digital was clearly a better way of taking photos and Kodak just failed to make the leap. But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood? Give everything away for free? The financial physics of that don't work. Maybe they should pay for movies entirely out of popcorn sales.
Please. This kind of 24/7 "piracy is freedom fighting" crap tires me. The linked article is worthless and adds nothing to what precious little debate there is. He claims the problem is "massively overpriced" works. He then ignores the fact that the easy and cheap rental services he asks for already exist (eg, iTunes, Netflix, Apple TV), and oddly enough, if both are as easy as he claims the free alternative will still always win. The guy practically admits he breaks the law constantly and doesn't care, which isn't surprising because he has demonstrated the kind of reasoning skills I'd expect of a small child.
How about the police check his computer then throw him in jail for a bit? That won't stop piracy but it might stop stupid articles about it from clogging up the internet.
You're way behind the times. Go read up on email authentication and DKIM. You will find that a significant fraction of all email on the internet is being signed automatically - that is how DKIM works. The difference is, it's signed with the email providers keys instead of the users keys. But this is good enough to stop phishing because if an email claims to be from info@paypal.com or sloppy@gmail.com, the signature proves it came from PayPal or Gmail and you can then trust that they won't sign such mail unless it really did come from that address.
DMARC solves a problem that real world DKIM deployments have - merely signing your mail is not enough. You need to tell people what to do if signature checks fail. And you need a way to learn about failing signature checks, because large organizations often have incredibly complex mail streams, including mail they know nothing about because some random guerilla marketing team contracted a third party provider and told them to send as "campaign@foo.com", even though it's not being sent via foo.coms servers. This has made real deployments of DKIM quite tricky and ad-hoc affairs. DMARC will standardize this and make deployment feasible even for smaller organizations.
DKIM has other problems, like the number of mail relays that think it's OK to modify mail in transit whilst claiming it comes from the original sender, but those are all issues you get with retrofitting digital signatures onto an existing infrastructure./p
The TPM is just an inert chip. It's off by default on many machines, controlled by the BIOS. So, lose the paranoia.
It'd be better to have no encryption at all and save the battery power.
That's a huge document. I'll read it fully some other time.
Suffice it to say, I find the premise (from the introduction) to be flawed, or at least, not balanced. It argues that the DMCA is "anti competitive" because it seeks to protect DRM systems, which are typically not open.
I have a few problems with this argument. Firstly, it assumes that DRM systems are by definition "closed systems" without interoperability. This is an intellectually vague argument that can be sliced any way without reaching resolution, due to imprecision about what "open" is. Take the BluRay protection system. You can't just download a few PDFs and make a working BluRay player. That isn't possible. So from that perspective BluRay is a closed system. But if you sign some contracts and pay some licensing fees you certainly can, and there is a highly competitive market of both player manufacturers and content creators. Typically we'd say an infrastructure in which there is a free and competitive market, is an open infrastructure.
The paper argues that the "interoperability" provision of the DMCA is self contradictory because the purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized devices interoperating with it. That's a good argument and one the framers of the DMCA should have addressed. But I think the question of open vs closed in DRM systems is something that'll become clearer with time. Technological progress is solving some of these issues, it's letting us have our cake and eat it to some extent. Trusted computing systems mean you can have hardware that runs anything (is open), but can cryptographically prove what it's running to third parties and seal encryption keys under those verified states. So it sets up a framework where two parties can trade without having to fall back on slow, expensive and overworked law courts to ensure both sides follow the agreed contract.
The PS3 was, for a long time, a good example of this. It ran copy-controlled games, but also Linux (just not both at the same time). Sonys big mistake was to take that away and thus incentivize people who want to run Linux on all their hardware. Also, their hypervisor was weak and their code signing contained serious mathematical flaws - but I guess in their next generation (assuming there is one) they'll fix those issues.
With TC in a regular PC, in theory, you can use Linux or FreeBSD or an OS you wrote entirely yourself, AND you can gain access to highly DRMd content, IF the other side is willing to trust your software. The platform itself is both open and entirely neutral. For that reason it even has non-DRM applications in areas like intelligent agents, virtual currencies, etc. The big remaining question is how to make certification of custom platforms really really cheap, so you can prove that your Linux/BSD/whatever will follow the rules required by the content creators (if you're willing to do that). Intels LaGrande technology had some interesting approaches to this, by avoiding the need for the host OS to be trusted at all, but it was unfortunately never finished. So I suspect we'll see either/or approaches dominate in the coming years.
For all the nerd-rage it caused at the time, the DMCA was a remarkably balanced and far-sighted law. Some other nations have copied it, and others haven't, I don't know if NZ has such a law or not, but it doesn't matter much - the MegaUpload guys are also accused of plain old copyright infringement, which is certainly illegal under laws and treaties NZ has signed.
Oh, and they're also accused of money laundering, which again would be considered an extraditable crime. I don't personally pay much attention to accusations of money laundering because those laws are extremely vague, poorly thought out and there's no distinction between actually hiding the sources of illegally gained funds and simply failing to follow the byzantine regulations intended to make value flows trackable - they are both considered "money laundering", although plenty of innocent people with no criminal intentions can fall foul of the latter. As a result convictions purely for ML and nothing else are very rare and have often been overturned by courts. That's one reason it usually comes attached to accusations of other crimes.
Re: the DMCA. Like I said, in hindsight I think it's actually worked out very well for the net. The lightweight framework of copyright enforcement it created kept huge workloads away from the courts without creating unworkable levels of abuse (there is some, but there's abuse of the regular legal system too). It has made copyright enforcement available to the little guy, again without huge legal fees. It has protected sites like YouTube and search engines. And whilst measures like making circumvention systems illegal caused a lot of fuss, their impact was trivial - last time I checked this part of the law has neither prevented circumvention software being readily available nor wiped out Linux. In fact its impact on both sides of the copyright fights have been negligible.
Oh, never mind. It seems that the Scribd search box doesn't work.
I couldn't actually find any mention of Google in the document that was released. Much was blacked out, but can anyone see the evidence that Google took part in this?
ActiveX was an "open" standard in the sense that Netscape could have implemented it if they wanted to ..... on Windows only. That's because the bulk of the APIs you needed to use to write an ActiveX control were just the regular Win32 APIs. Netscape had a policy of supporting not just Windows but all operating systems. That's why Microsoft made ActiveX - they saw weakness (other platforms gui frameworks kind of sucked at the time, so pandering to them restricted developers a lot), and they attempted to exploit it (by allowing developers to build better apps that were Windows only).
Was ActiveX "evil"? Well, it was certainly platform specific. Making things like this NOT platform specific is a ton of work, NaCL uses techniques and technologies that didn't exist back then, and they had no incentives to do it. Whether it was wrong to do depends on your views on the importance of features vs platform independence.
NaCL is different to ActiveX in some really important, fundamental ways. Firstly, the APIs it exposes to native code are really small: just Pepper, which provides you with the real basics along with some well accepted cross-platform APIs like OpenGL. Importantly there's no GUI toolkit. If you want buttons and sliders, you need to use HTML, not Win32/GTK/Cocoa. In fact NaCL will prevent you from accessing these APIs entirely!
Secondly, it's got a strong focus on security. NaCL code has security properties that are provable using static analysis. It also runs in a sandbox for a second level of defence. This is very different to ActiveX, which relied entirely on Authenticode, and suffered some serious UI problems that made it vulnerable (modal dialog boxes).
Thirdly, everything you need to implement NaCL is open source, so other browser makers can (and maybe will) adopt it. The core runtime and execution technologies are all open source, with the bulk of the integration work being joining Pepper to your browser. Mozilla already supports Pepper and I guess other browsers will too soon (maybe not IE). It really wasn't possible for Netscape to support ActiveX for all their users in the 90s, but it's quite feasible for Apple, Microsoft, MozCorp and Opera to support all their users with NaCL, especially now the dependency on x86 has been broken.
The Swiss have very little in the way of content industry. They have a large drugs industry though, and unsurprisingly, they still believe in patent enforcement.
The judge addressed this too. It's not valid to assume "I was raided by the police, and not charged, therefore what I am doing is legal". That's not how the law works.
I believe some countries are basically trusted to not lodge garbage prosecutions (ie for things that clearly could not have been done by the defendant or completely trivial offences), and it's assumed people get fair trials there. So as long as the law being violated as a local analogue it's not a problem.
Now whatever you may believe about copyright law, this guy ran a site called "TVShack", made over 10,000 GBP a month off ads and only allowed piracy-related links onto his site. Prosecuting him for copyright infringement isn't a garbage prosecution.
Where it does run aground is in cases where some countries are trusted to be reasonable and then are not. The Polish habit of extraditing people for speeding offences has caused a lot of grumbling because the cost of the extradition is so ridiculous compared to the size of the offence. So there are some talks of revisiting the blanket assumption that all EU countries have trustworthy legal systems.
Courts of law and judges in particular are not algorithms that can be beaten by finding an edge case to exploit. I see this fallacy on Slashdot time and time again. They consider the intent of the law as well as the wording. If you read the ruling you will see that this was taken into account - the judge considered the intent of Parliament when writing the law. He also considered the meaning of the phrase "make available" in the context of a different part of the law and concluded that O'Dwyer was doing so when common sense ("plain reading") is applied.
Well, read the ruling which is helpfully linked from the summary. What he was doing (is charged with doing) is indeed an offence under UK law. The fact that the CPS didn't prosecute him does not change the act that UK law does contain provisions for "making available" copyrighted materials, and that is what he was charged for.