Surely he didn't prevent 22,500 people from paying a dollar for the song.
I don't know. Is that figure so hard to believe? How many people use file sharing networks.... millions? It wouldn't have to be a very popular song to quickly rack up 22,500 downloads from people who might otherwise have just used iTunes.
It's always hard to hear about huge fines levied against individuals who have no way to pay but what does the guy expect? He knew what he was doing was illegal. If there's no punishment at all you might as well just roll back copyright law and say, well, everyone making music, books, movies and computer programs - you are now all volunteers, or buskers at best. I wouldn't want to see that.
TFA says some scientists have done such an experiment and it appeared to indicate the subject actually could detect radio waves. There was no link to more info unfortunately.
However in practice this is what the resulting hacks are always used for. I understand that hacking these systems is fun, but you can do that in privacy. I've never been able to get behind these guys who think it's funny or clever to unlock consoles for the world, because they know perfectly damn well that the end result will be PC levels of piracy (90%+) which is what pretty much destroyed the platform for gaming. I like playing high-budget games like Mass Effect and frankly the recent failures of the PS3 and now Xbox security don't impress me much, as it makes it less likely I'll be playing similar games in future, at least until the platforms are resecured and the free riders booted out.
And yes, before some smartarse replies, I know it's possible to pirate 360 games already using a series of awkward mods, as long as you aren't worried about the box being banned from Xbox Live and do some hard work. Unsigned execution is different as it allows for completely undetectable piracy, along with piracy of games that were previously uncopyable like indie/arcade.
Well, there will probably always be some kind of cap, just because a tiny minority of users (invariably pirates) tend to use whatever bandwidth they have available. But the question is how big is that cap and what does it cost you?
In any consumer ISP network there are several bottlenecks, and in many cases it's not actually the "last mile", it's in the core network. The issue isn't actually the fibre itself - good, modern optical cables can easily carry terabits/sec of data. The problem is switching and routing it at each end. Those packets might jump down the cable at the speed of light but when they arrive at the other end they have to turned back into electrical signals, processed into packets and then routed around. There are machines that can do this at 10 gigabits/sec but they are incredibly expensive because they rely on, eg, high precision optics that only a handful of companies in the world are able to make. As far as I know no commercial equipment can go faster than 10 Gb/sec, if you see links claiming to be faster than that it means multiple routers are connected at each end and they are using different wavelengths (colours) on the same bit of glass.
What this research has done is improve the efficiency of a material that can turn light into electricity at rates much faster than traditional devices can. That means that a single router can potentially handle much more traffic on the same link, ie, at lower cost. If you can get a lot more routing bang for your buck, you can upgrade your core network significantly, and then raising the caps or lowering prices is just a matter of policy. Whether that actually happens of course depends on whether there's local competition or government regulators interested in forcing the hand of monopolies, but there are technical reasons why bandwidth is limited and non-free.
Don't have much to add really. Slashdot is one of the best and most interesting reads on the net, and has been consistently so for many years. I've been a loyal reader for a decade now and hope to have another decade behind me soon. Good luck!
it's absurd to be typing a by-definition-weak password into an unauditable terminal.
A hacked terminal isn't enough to break card security, obviously, the whole point is that you need both the card and the PIN. Merely having the PIN isn't enough. Modern cards can't be cloned unless you live somewhere still in the stone age, like the USA;)
The debates didn't disappear, they just moved. Real debates now take place on forums like Slashdot (yes scary I know). These are much better suited to the critical exchange of ideas because they're structured as a conversation rather than an essay from just one person who may or may not have anything useful/worthwhile to say. I've encountered more new ideas on Slashdot than all the newspapers I've ever read, and I've seen plenty of ideas that initially sounded good be debunked as well.
I have to say, I've always wondered why the Slashcode type format hasn't been more successful on other non-tech sites. I suspect the user interface, especially the partially hidden tree structure, isn't very easy to handle for many people. I also suspect the very wide and huge space devoted to comments wouldn't mesh well with many sites pre-existing designs. Sadly the result is that too often the comments are just a long list of unmoderated, artificially shortened blurbs with no reward system in place for producing something worth reading.
...but a privacy problem for ordinary citizens who do not use caps.
Sure, but this sword cuts both ways. If (big if) Britain did somehow become an oppressive police state overnight and ordinary citizens needed to protect themselves from it, they'd just start wearing baseball caps. You can't realistically stop anyone from doing that given they fit inside a pocket. Apparatus of oppression dismantled, just like that.
But contrary to frequent Slashdot fantasty, the UK is the exact opposite of a police state. It has a police force stretched so thin it took days to build up a big enough force to stop the riots, and water cannons had to be imported as there were none on the mainland. Despite that the police budget is going to be cut dramatically in the near future. The riot was triggered by (but not caused by) a special division of the police shooting someone who seems to have been a violent gangster.... note that normal police such as those quelling the riots don't have guns and so anytime someone is shot by the police it triggers a massive investigation, press coverage etc.
As a British citizen living abroad, I worry that we're going to see the exact opposite of a police state develop..... rather, a state so enfeebled by huge budget cuts it can't even oppress those most deserving of it, let alone (largely hypothetical) political dissidents.
You might be fine with all of this and say I'm worrying over nothing and I might be, but the only thing that would make me 100% comfortable with this is if the public CCTV cameras' records were publicly available so that we all could defend ourselves.
Fortunately, they are (kind of). I don't remember the name of the show (anyone know?) but some years ago there was a comedy series that involved the creator going in to shops, stores, etc and making a fool of himself. The astonished onlookers reactions were being recorded by CCTV but otherwise there were no cameras. Then the TV company used data protection laws to claim the footage of themselves and turned it into a TV show. I don't think it lasted very long after the novelty wore off, but it made the principle clear - you can request CCTV of yourself. I think it may be gated on having some kind of reason or maybe you have to pay a small fee to compensate the owner for their time.
CCTV, facial recognition, these things are complex issues. The limits of state power are something that have been debated for thousands of years. The people in Parliament are not stupid and recognize that government power has benefits and costs, they weigh it up when they pass laws as they know they too will be subject to those very same laws they passed. Politicians dislike being hoisted by their own petard, so that acts as one of many brakes on abuses of power.
This is the big test of the surveillance state that London has become. Are all those cameras effective, or just taking a toll on privacy without bringing added security?"
OK, firstly, London is a city not a state. But it's the second part of this sentence I have problems with. There are two possibilities. One is that the cameras are effective and allow their owners to identify people. Note that most CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned, they aren't a part of some kind of government super network. But imagining they were, this could pose a privacy problem.
The second possibility is that they don't work reliably and you usually can't identify people due to hoods, baseball caps, or low quality images, in which case they aren't a privacy problem.
I don't see any way cameras can be both ineffective and a privacy problem simultaneously. If they don't work then they are, at best, an expensive placebo.
Judging from the quality of pictures put up by the Met, I'd imagine they're good enough to provide evidence in court if you already have an idea of who it is, but they probably aren't good enough to reliably identify you out of millions of possibilities, even assuming facial recognition tech was really good. There might be a few successes but most images are of too low quality or the intruders too well disguised for it to have any impact.
The wheel and fire are certainly damn important inventions, but looked at purely in terms of number of lives affected the web probably beats anything else, just because there were so few people back in the stone age, whereas there are now a billion or so people online. The web is a staggering success story, and the story of the internet as a whole has barely even begun.
The first change made is adding "Whoever knowingly conducts, or attempts or conspires to conduct, a financial transaction (as defined in section 1956(c)) in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowing that such transaction will facilitate access to, or the possession of, child pornography (as defined in section 2256) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Unsurprising but concerning. This type of law seems to be more and more common, ie, banning not only the objectionable thing, but also assisting with financial transactions related to that objectionable thing.
The reason governments like this is that processing electronic payments is handled entirely by the private sector, meaning that this is a good way to sidestep the judicial system on the fly. What it means is that somebody (anyone, but usually politicians) can assert that business XYZ is "at risk of facilitating child porn" or whatever, and banks/visa/mastercard/paypal suddenly won't want to know you at all. Businesses can't operate without the ability to accept payments, so this is pretty much a death sentence for the affected organization. There is no court of appeals. No proof is required, just enough noise to ensure the payment processing firms can't deny knowing about it. The criminal penalties for 'money laundering' are so insanely severe that you can't really blame them for having a knee jerk reaction to even tiny perceived risk.
This parallel justice system is quite complete. For example, consider the US "Specially Designated Nationals" list (OFAC) and the European equivalent. If you're on the list you can't trade with the US or European organizations. Names appear on this list with no supporting evidence for why they are there. Some companies on the list don't exist or haven't done for years. There is no formal appeals process, but you could try taking the government to court. Unfortunately this could set you back over half a million dollars, non-recoverable.
The trend of using the catch-all crime of "money laundering" to try and suppress activity the US Government doesn't like is troubling due to lack of judicial controls and the US monopoly on payment processing. It's an effective way of extending US law around the world - the Wikileaks fiasco is just one example of how such a thing can go wrong.
Sure, pirates tend to be idealists while companies usually will do anything to get my money.
Just stay clear of those few pirates who pirate as a company.
LOL. No son, pirates tend to be people making money by getting you to install malware. If you think otherwise you are naive. Anyone who pirates banking apps of all things is going to get completely screwed.
Last I checked, the only country claiming credit for Stuxnet was Israel, ie, a country that refuses international inspections of its atomic facilities and "neither confirms nor denies" that it has the bomb (confirming would mean losing US aid that is contingent on not developing these weapons). Israel also has a track record of invading other countries whereas Iran does not.
Measured by past actions, Israel is a far more dangerous country than Iran. It certainly has nukes, has a power mad and oppressive government that regularly ignores basic human rights, is warlike, and shows zero interest in making peace with its neighbours. Infecting 100,000+ computers with a virus and assassinating scientists in order to achieve its foreign policy objectives is exactly the kind of reckless behavior I'd associate with madmen.
Hmm, big claims require big proof, anonymous coward. In the complaint DataCell has filed they say their merchant agreement explicitly mentioned Sunshine Press, and that they also provided hosting and software development services.
They also say Teller (the acquirer) claims there was no violation of VISA/MC rules, and that they audited DataCell and found them to be in 100% compliance.
But anyway, not that any of this matters. As you point out, the actual cause of this is certainly that "somebody" in the US Government had a quick word with these companies. That's completely unacceptable behavior and I hope VISA/MC get slapped for it.
People like you are the cause of this kind of action. Yes, you are. Do you really believe ISPs want to be thinking about this stuff? No, they'd rather be doing other things. But the huge number of people who rely on even the flimsiest justifications to pirate things mean it was kind of inevitable.
Here's a genius idea - how about you pay for what you use, and then if you are unfairly targeted you can kick up a huge storm and demand "pro freedom" ISPs? This isn't some kind of secret government prison we're talking about here. If you get whacked and you're not pirating things you'll easily be able to tell people about it. And if you were a pirate, shouldn't you be grateful that you're only being throttled instead of, you know, prosecuted?
Wualas "web access" is in fact a Java applet. It's not really satisfying because Java is so horribly insecure it's increasingly disabled by default in modern web browsers.
However, I will say that I use Wuala myself and it works quite well. It's generally more on the geeky side than Dropbox - the app has quite a lot of features, but it does everything I need and the client-side encryption gives me peace of mind. What's more - guess what, they accept Bitcoins!
The whole point of providing "internet in a suitcase" or whatever is so people in repressive countries can talk about things that government doesn't want them talking about. Otherwise why bother - every country has some kind of internet-like communications network and if all you want to do is discuss local sports results, the local governments will happily let you do so. Even China has "public access to the public internet", the difference is it's the public internet minus the parts the government doesn't want you to see.
In the USA things work differently, there's no censorship of the internet. However the government does try and suppress publication of information it doesn't like in other ways. For example, by getting payment processors to refuse payment to legal organizations they don't like. It's just a different way of achieving the same thing - circumventing the judicial system.
Indeed. There are lots more merchants these days, which is impressive because the software is still pretty rough. One I recommend is SpendBitcoins which allows you to purchase things from Amazon (the guy is an Amazon Affiliate). The process is a little odd, but the guy running it is super helpful.
The problems with Unicode aren't to do with legacy. They're to do with a poorly implemented anti-abuse system. Some people were using control characters to screw up the page rendering. Their solution was to simply break Unicode rather than come up with blocks for the different types of abuse.
But Bitcoin does not deflate. It inflates until it reaches stability and then stops. There might be small amounts of erosion over time, but it's a huge pool of coins (not 21 million as each one is subdivisible into 8 decimal places). The "deflation" people talk about is assuming the Bitcoin economy grows. If the economy grows and the currency doesn't, the coins become worth more. It's a circular argument because if increasing value leads to hoarding, the economy will shrink and the currency will become worth less. And as pointed out, there are lots of examples where waiting gets you more, yet people still buy.
I remember that episode. I got curious after watching it again, seeing as it's so old now. What happened to the people mentioned in the video?
Apparently the "Georgia Research Inc" company changed its name a couple of times and eventually collapsed. The reason was some kind of internal argument over patent rights, so I guess it's not true that phages cannot be patented. Some of them later created another company called Intralytix which is focussing on phages for farm animals instead of humans. Apparently the FDA regulations aren't geared up for phage therapy at all, and having it work on humans will require changes to the approval rules (because each phage is so specific and the approval time so huge).
I guess at some point phages will be used on humans, but it seems like we have to wait a long time for it to happen:(
If by "taking off" you mean sees more usage by people who value its inherent properties, then that's not a bubble because people want to actually trade them for goods and services. They won't simply sit on them and sell out when they think they can by definition. The supply will continue to increase for decades yet anyway - plenty of time for Bitcoin to either sink or swim.
No, you're pretty much right. There are arguments against both inflation and deflation. Mainstream economists will usually tell you they prefer inflation to deflation, however, inflation practically forces people to put their money into potentially risky investments in order to try and beat the system. The result has been a series of bubbles, with the most recent and worst caused by an entire society simultaneously deciding that house prices could only rise.
Lots of people are describing Bitcoin as deflationary. It's misleading because the currency actually inflates pretty severely at the moment and will eventually stabilize.... after many many decades of inflation. Seeing as how both deflation and inflation can be harmful, stability sounds pretty good to me, even if that means the value of a coin will slowly rise along with general growth of the global economy. People will still invest if they want their wealth to grow faster than that.
Bitcoin right now is almost certainly in a bubble. That doesn't make it a scam or stupid, no more than internet companies are scams because they once went through a bubble. Its value comes partly from the currencies inherent flexibility, but also from the general brokenness of the existing banking systems.
If you were to list the properties wanted in an ideal electronic payment system you might get: speed, security, privacy, flexibility, predictability. Impressively the government/banking industry run systems offer none of these. Wiring money is slow due to banks speculating with the money whilst it's "in flight". Credit card payments seem fast but can actually reverse months after the transaction took place. Security is mediocre at best, downright terrible if you bank with one of the (many??) US banks who don't offer two-factor signing. Privacy is poor: all electronic transactions today go straight into a US Government run database regardless of whether the money has anything to do with the USA. What kind of protections does that database have? Nobody can know because it's all classified. Flexibility is poor, for example, you cannot make your own security/usability tradeoffs with your own money, that's up to the banks or CC networks. And finally the system lacks predictability because the currencies we use are inflated due to political issues or mistakes made by bankers.
So when people ask where Bitcoin gets its value from, there's your answer: it gets its value from being a fast, secure, private, flexible and predictable way of moving value around. Now how valuable should a Bitcoin be relative to a dollar? I have no idea. I'm pretty sure it's not $8-$10 per coin given the current size of the Bitcoin economy, but then again I don't know how to measure demand for a better financial system... except I'm sure the demand is there. I'll probably sell most of my Bitcoins soon before the bubble pops, but I'll definitely be keeping some, just because they'll come in handy in future.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. Is that figure so hard to believe? How many people use file sharing networks .... millions? It wouldn't have to be a very popular song to quickly rack up 22,500 downloads from people who might otherwise have just used iTunes.
It's always hard to hear about huge fines levied against individuals who have no way to pay but what does the guy expect? He knew what he was doing was illegal. If there's no punishment at all you might as well just roll back copyright law and say, well, everyone making music, books, movies and computer programs - you are now all volunteers, or buskers at best. I wouldn't want to see that.
TFA says some scientists have done such an experiment and it appeared to indicate the subject actually could detect radio waves. There was no link to more info unfortunately.
However in practice this is what the resulting hacks are always used for. I understand that hacking these systems is fun, but you can do that in privacy. I've never been able to get behind these guys who think it's funny or clever to unlock consoles for the world, because they know perfectly damn well that the end result will be PC levels of piracy (90%+) which is what pretty much destroyed the platform for gaming. I like playing high-budget games like Mass Effect and frankly the recent failures of the PS3 and now Xbox security don't impress me much, as it makes it less likely I'll be playing similar games in future, at least until the platforms are resecured and the free riders booted out.
And yes, before some smartarse replies, I know it's possible to pirate 360 games already using a series of awkward mods, as long as you aren't worried about the box being banned from Xbox Live and do some hard work. Unsigned execution is different as it allows for completely undetectable piracy, along with piracy of games that were previously uncopyable like indie/arcade.
Well, there will probably always be some kind of cap, just because a tiny minority of users (invariably pirates) tend to use whatever bandwidth they have available. But the question is how big is that cap and what does it cost you?
In any consumer ISP network there are several bottlenecks, and in many cases it's not actually the "last mile", it's in the core network. The issue isn't actually the fibre itself - good, modern optical cables can easily carry terabits/sec of data. The problem is switching and routing it at each end. Those packets might jump down the cable at the speed of light but when they arrive at the other end they have to turned back into electrical signals, processed into packets and then routed around. There are machines that can do this at 10 gigabits/sec but they are incredibly expensive because they rely on, eg, high precision optics that only a handful of companies in the world are able to make. As far as I know no commercial equipment can go faster than 10 Gb/sec, if you see links claiming to be faster than that it means multiple routers are connected at each end and they are using different wavelengths (colours) on the same bit of glass.
What this research has done is improve the efficiency of a material that can turn light into electricity at rates much faster than traditional devices can. That means that a single router can potentially handle much more traffic on the same link, ie, at lower cost. If you can get a lot more routing bang for your buck, you can upgrade your core network significantly, and then raising the caps or lowering prices is just a matter of policy. Whether that actually happens of course depends on whether there's local competition or government regulators interested in forcing the hand of monopolies, but there are technical reasons why bandwidth is limited and non-free.
Don't have much to add really. Slashdot is one of the best and most interesting reads on the net, and has been consistently so for many years. I've been a loyal reader for a decade now and hope to have another decade behind me soon. Good luck!
A hacked terminal isn't enough to break card security, obviously, the whole point is that you need both the card and the PIN. Merely having the PIN isn't enough. Modern cards can't be cloned unless you live somewhere still in the stone age, like the USA ;)
The debates didn't disappear, they just moved. Real debates now take place on forums like Slashdot (yes scary I know). These are much better suited to the critical exchange of ideas because they're structured as a conversation rather than an essay from just one person who may or may not have anything useful/worthwhile to say. I've encountered more new ideas on Slashdot than all the newspapers I've ever read, and I've seen plenty of ideas that initially sounded good be debunked as well.
I have to say, I've always wondered why the Slashcode type format hasn't been more successful on other non-tech sites. I suspect the user interface, especially the partially hidden tree structure, isn't very easy to handle for many people. I also suspect the very wide and huge space devoted to comments wouldn't mesh well with many sites pre-existing designs. Sadly the result is that too often the comments are just a long list of unmoderated, artificially shortened blurbs with no reward system in place for producing something worth reading.
Sure, but this sword cuts both ways. If (big if) Britain did somehow become an oppressive police state overnight and ordinary citizens needed to protect themselves from it, they'd just start wearing baseball caps. You can't realistically stop anyone from doing that given they fit inside a pocket. Apparatus of oppression dismantled, just like that.
But contrary to frequent Slashdot fantasty, the UK is the exact opposite of a police state. It has a police force stretched so thin it took days to build up a big enough force to stop the riots, and water cannons had to be imported as there were none on the mainland. Despite that the police budget is going to be cut dramatically in the near future. The riot was triggered by (but not caused by) a special division of the police shooting someone who seems to have been a violent gangster .... note that normal police such as those quelling the riots don't have guns and so anytime someone is shot by the police it triggers a massive investigation, press coverage etc.
As a British citizen living abroad, I worry that we're going to see the exact opposite of a police state develop ..... rather, a state so enfeebled by huge budget cuts it can't even oppress those most deserving of it, let alone (largely hypothetical) political dissidents.
Fortunately, they are (kind of). I don't remember the name of the show (anyone know?) but some years ago there was a comedy series that involved the creator going in to shops, stores, etc and making a fool of himself. The astonished onlookers reactions were being recorded by CCTV but otherwise there were no cameras. Then the TV company used data protection laws to claim the footage of themselves and turned it into a TV show. I don't think it lasted very long after the novelty wore off, but it made the principle clear - you can request CCTV of yourself. I think it may be gated on having some kind of reason or maybe you have to pay a small fee to compensate the owner for their time.
CCTV, facial recognition, these things are complex issues. The limits of state power are something that have been debated for thousands of years. The people in Parliament are not stupid and recognize that government power has benefits and costs, they weigh it up when they pass laws as they know they too will be subject to those very same laws they passed. Politicians dislike being hoisted by their own petard, so that acts as one of many brakes on abuses of power.
OK, firstly, London is a city not a state. But it's the second part of this sentence I have problems with. There are two possibilities. One is that the cameras are effective and allow their owners to identify people. Note that most CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned, they aren't a part of some kind of government super network. But imagining they were, this could pose a privacy problem.
The second possibility is that they don't work reliably and you usually can't identify people due to hoods, baseball caps, or low quality images, in which case they aren't a privacy problem.
I don't see any way cameras can be both ineffective and a privacy problem simultaneously. If they don't work then they are, at best, an expensive placebo.
Judging from the quality of pictures put up by the Met, I'd imagine they're good enough to provide evidence in court if you already have an idea of who it is, but they probably aren't good enough to reliably identify you out of millions of possibilities, even assuming facial recognition tech was really good. There might be a few successes but most images are of too low quality or the intruders too well disguised for it to have any impact.
The wheel and fire are certainly damn important inventions, but looked at purely in terms of number of lives affected the web probably beats anything else, just because there were so few people back in the stone age, whereas there are now a billion or so people online. The web is a staggering success story, and the story of the internet as a whole has barely even begun.
Unsurprising but concerning. This type of law seems to be more and more common, ie, banning not only the objectionable thing, but also assisting with financial transactions related to that objectionable thing.
The reason governments like this is that processing electronic payments is handled entirely by the private sector, meaning that this is a good way to sidestep the judicial system on the fly. What it means is that somebody (anyone, but usually politicians) can assert that business XYZ is "at risk of facilitating child porn" or whatever, and banks/visa/mastercard/paypal suddenly won't want to know you at all. Businesses can't operate without the ability to accept payments, so this is pretty much a death sentence for the affected organization. There is no court of appeals. No proof is required, just enough noise to ensure the payment processing firms can't deny knowing about it. The criminal penalties for 'money laundering' are so insanely severe that you can't really blame them for having a knee jerk reaction to even tiny perceived risk.
This parallel justice system is quite complete. For example, consider the US "Specially Designated Nationals" list (OFAC) and the European equivalent. If you're on the list you can't trade with the US or European organizations. Names appear on this list with no supporting evidence for why they are there. Some companies on the list don't exist or haven't done for years. There is no formal appeals process, but you could try taking the government to court. Unfortunately this could set you back over half a million dollars, non-recoverable.
The trend of using the catch-all crime of "money laundering" to try and suppress activity the US Government doesn't like is troubling due to lack of judicial controls and the US monopoly on payment processing. It's an effective way of extending US law around the world - the Wikileaks fiasco is just one example of how such a thing can go wrong.
LOL. No son, pirates tend to be people making money by getting you to install malware. If you think otherwise you are naive. Anyone who pirates banking apps of all things is going to get completely screwed.
Madmen? Compared to what?
Last I checked, the only country claiming credit for Stuxnet was Israel, ie, a country that refuses international inspections of its atomic facilities and "neither confirms nor denies" that it has the bomb (confirming would mean losing US aid that is contingent on not developing these weapons). Israel also has a track record of invading other countries whereas Iran does not.
Measured by past actions, Israel is a far more dangerous country than Iran. It certainly has nukes, has a power mad and oppressive government that regularly ignores basic human rights, is warlike, and shows zero interest in making peace with its neighbours. Infecting 100,000+ computers with a virus and assassinating scientists in order to achieve its foreign policy objectives is exactly the kind of reckless behavior I'd associate with madmen.
Hmm, big claims require big proof, anonymous coward. In the complaint DataCell has filed they say their merchant agreement explicitly mentioned Sunshine Press, and that they also provided hosting and software development services.
They also say Teller (the acquirer) claims there was no violation of VISA/MC rules, and that they audited DataCell and found them to be in 100% compliance.
But anyway, not that any of this matters. As you point out, the actual cause of this is certainly that "somebody" in the US Government had a quick word with these companies. That's completely unacceptable behavior and I hope VISA/MC get slapped for it.
People like you are the cause of this kind of action. Yes, you are. Do you really believe ISPs want to be thinking about this stuff? No, they'd rather be doing other things. But the huge number of people who rely on even the flimsiest justifications to pirate things mean it was kind of inevitable.
Here's a genius idea - how about you pay for what you use, and then if you are unfairly targeted you can kick up a huge storm and demand "pro freedom" ISPs? This isn't some kind of secret government prison we're talking about here. If you get whacked and you're not pirating things you'll easily be able to tell people about it. And if you were a pirate, shouldn't you be grateful that you're only being throttled instead of, you know, prosecuted?
However, I will say that I use Wuala myself and it works quite well. It's generally more on the geeky side than Dropbox - the app has quite a lot of features, but it does everything I need and the client-side encryption gives me peace of mind. What's more - guess what, they accept Bitcoins!
The whole point of providing "internet in a suitcase" or whatever is so people in repressive countries can talk about things that government doesn't want them talking about. Otherwise why bother - every country has some kind of internet-like communications network and if all you want to do is discuss local sports results, the local governments will happily let you do so. Even China has "public access to the public internet", the difference is it's the public internet minus the parts the government doesn't want you to see.
In the USA things work differently, there's no censorship of the internet. However the government does try and suppress publication of information it doesn't like in other ways. For example, by getting payment processors to refuse payment to legal organizations they don't like. It's just a different way of achieving the same thing - circumventing the judicial system.
Indeed. There are lots more merchants these days, which is impressive because the software is still pretty rough. One I recommend is SpendBitcoins which allows you to purchase things from Amazon (the guy is an Amazon Affiliate). The process is a little odd, but the guy running it is super helpful.
The problems with Unicode aren't to do with legacy. They're to do with a poorly implemented anti-abuse system. Some people were using control characters to screw up the page rendering. Their solution was to simply break Unicode rather than come up with blocks for the different types of abuse.
But Bitcoin does not deflate. It inflates until it reaches stability and then stops. There might be small amounts of erosion over time, but it's a huge pool of coins (not 21 million as each one is subdivisible into 8 decimal places). The "deflation" people talk about is assuming the Bitcoin economy grows. If the economy grows and the currency doesn't, the coins become worth more. It's a circular argument because if increasing value leads to hoarding, the economy will shrink and the currency will become worth less. And as pointed out, there are lots of examples where waiting gets you more, yet people still buy.
I remember that episode. I got curious after watching it again, seeing as it's so old now. What happened to the people mentioned in the video?
Apparently the "Georgia Research Inc" company changed its name a couple of times and eventually collapsed. The reason was some kind of internal argument over patent rights, so I guess it's not true that phages cannot be patented. Some of them later created another company called Intralytix which is focussing on phages for farm animals instead of humans. Apparently the FDA regulations aren't geared up for phage therapy at all, and having it work on humans will require changes to the approval rules (because each phage is so specific and the approval time so huge).
I guess at some point phages will be used on humans, but it seems like we have to wait a long time for it to happen :(
If by "taking off" you mean sees more usage by people who value its inherent properties, then that's not a bubble because people want to actually trade them for goods and services. They won't simply sit on them and sell out when they think they can by definition. The supply will continue to increase for decades yet anyway - plenty of time for Bitcoin to either sink or swim.
Interesting. Where does the 0.7% come from? You're paying transaction fees even though you don't really need to?
No, you're pretty much right. There are arguments against both inflation and deflation. Mainstream economists will usually tell you they prefer inflation to deflation, however, inflation practically forces people to put their money into potentially risky investments in order to try and beat the system. The result has been a series of bubbles, with the most recent and worst caused by an entire society simultaneously deciding that house prices could only rise.
Lots of people are describing Bitcoin as deflationary. It's misleading because the currency actually inflates pretty severely at the moment and will eventually stabilize .... after many many decades of inflation. Seeing as how both deflation and inflation can be harmful, stability sounds pretty good to me, even if that means the value of a coin will slowly rise along with general growth of the global economy. People will still invest if they want their wealth to grow faster than that.
Bitcoin right now is almost certainly in a bubble. That doesn't make it a scam or stupid, no more than internet companies are scams because they once went through a bubble. Its value comes partly from the currencies inherent flexibility, but also from the general brokenness of the existing banking systems.
If you were to list the properties wanted in an ideal electronic payment system you might get: speed, security, privacy, flexibility, predictability. Impressively the government/banking industry run systems offer none of these. Wiring money is slow due to banks speculating with the money whilst it's "in flight". Credit card payments seem fast but can actually reverse months after the transaction took place. Security is mediocre at best, downright terrible if you bank with one of the (many??) US banks who don't offer two-factor signing. Privacy is poor: all electronic transactions today go straight into a US Government run database regardless of whether the money has anything to do with the USA. What kind of protections does that database have? Nobody can know because it's all classified. Flexibility is poor, for example, you cannot make your own security/usability tradeoffs with your own money, that's up to the banks or CC networks. And finally the system lacks predictability because the currencies we use are inflated due to political issues or mistakes made by bankers.
So when people ask where Bitcoin gets its value from, there's your answer: it gets its value from being a fast, secure, private, flexible and predictable way of moving value around. Now how valuable should a Bitcoin be relative to a dollar? I have no idea. I'm pretty sure it's not $8-$10 per coin given the current size of the Bitcoin economy, but then again I don't know how to measure demand for a better financial system ... except I'm sure the demand is there. I'll probably sell most of my Bitcoins soon before the bubble pops, but I'll definitely be keeping some, just because they'll come in handy in future.