What do you want, someone to say "I have a solution to Warner's troubles!" right here?
No, I just want anyone who claims to have a solution to Warner's troubles to back it up by providing that solution.
They're still in the buggy-whip industry, when we're all starting to buy cars.
Bad analogy. Buying cars isn't illegal. It's more like they're in the sports arena industry, and someone just came out with a device which can print perfect replicas of tickets.
At this point, Warner can do one of two things to survive: (1) change their business model, or (2) "go to war" against the many innovations that are making their business model obsolete.
Just what change of business model would you suggest which could allow Warner to survive without going to war against P2P?
My point is, as you can see from another reply somebody wrote, many people believe that the way the GPL and other licences are written, they can command people who use modified GPLd code in a modified program they distribute to place their modifications under the GPL and to publish the source.
I certainly can't see that "many people" believe that from another reply one person wrote.
This is untested and probably not true.
It's almost certainly untrue. The GPL is no more enforcible than any other EULA. If you claim you didn't agree to it, you can only be sued for copyright infringement.
But the point I am making is, in spite of the claims that some make, I don't think you can command them to release the source to their program.
Perhaps you'd be better off writing this as a reply to those who claim this, because the majority of people I assume already know this.
the FBI are a lot more tech-saavy than your average CEO.
The answer as to when you need a lawyer depends on just how much money you have and how much legal knowledge you have. Don't forget, if you don't have much money, you're not a very good target for a lawsuit.
These licences all say, "the only terms under which you can copy this work is if you agree to this licence."
Sure, as long as you understand that "can" means "are permitted to".
But that's misleading. If you copy a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder (ie. without agreeing to the terms set out) then you have made a copyright violation. That's it.
True, but there's nothing misleading about it.
I think if you violate a viral licence like the GPL or this one, they can sue you to stop publishing the original code or the derivative work. They can ask for damages. But they can't command you -- other than in negotiation to drop the lawsuit -- to follow other terms.
Mine, the qingPL. (the qing is not gnu Public License).
Re:Promoting progress through copyright extension
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 2
First, you should read the briefs on this case (I have read both the Petitioners--Lessig's--and the Respondents--the Government).
I have as well, though it was shortly after they came out so I'm sure my memory isn't 100%.
"If the CTEA is limited in regards to future works, it must necessarily be limited as it applies to existing works as well."
"Why? The argument is that "limited" means limited to that which promotes the progress of science and useful arts."
That is Eldred's argument, but it is not a foregone conclusion that the SCOTUS will buy it.
Of course not, but what it means is that your simple answer of "if it's limited to future works then it's limited to existing works" is not sufficient. If "limited times" means "not for an infinite amount of time," and the preamble is completely inactive, then Eldred loses WRT the copyright clause part of the argument. But that's a big "if," and personally I find it to be an invalid argument. Eliminating the "preamble," the sentence reads "Congress has the power... by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." That's not a sentence.
In fact, the supremes give quite a bit of deference to past congressional practices
"neither long-standing congressional authorization nor widely prevailing practice justifies a constitutional violation" - United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543, 566 n.19 (1976).
and as the government points out (respondent brief p. 11), every copyright law passed by congress (starting in 1790) has retroactively extended terms.
See, there's a huge difference between the 1998 Act and all the previous ones, though. The 1790 Act stepped in and superceded State Law. Had they not made the law effect both new works and existing works, then states would be free to enact any legislation they wanted with regard to existing works. So the 1790 Act actually placed limits on copyright that weren't already there. It didn't extend copyright on existing works at all. It simply moved it into the realm of federal law. It also required registration, unlike the 1998 Act, which gave the extended terms under no conditions whatsoever.
Likewise, the 1976 Act also stepped in and superceded state law. Before the 1976 Act, published works were handled by federal law, and unpublished works were handled by state law. Once again congress stepped in and superceded the state law. Again, this is much different from extending copyright on works already published.
Now I can't find the text of the other Acts, so I can't be certain, but I am under the impression that before 1976 Copyright consisted of two different rights, those for unpublished works, and those for published works. So it was still necessary to publish and register a work in order to gain this protection. Also, you needed to place a copyright notice in order to receive benefits. So all of these things further encouraged the progress of useful arts and science, something which we no longer have in the 1998 Act. The sole benefit from the 1998 act is with regard to the possibility of the creation of the work. Thus it differs greatly from all the previous Acts.
Is anyone planning to go to the Supreme Court on October 9 to let the Justices know their opinion?
Yeah, the lawyers.
Re:Promoting progress through copyright extension
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
According to the government, if they can come up with just one reason that retroactive copyright extension promotes progress, the law is constitutional.
They also have to show that the law is not unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
By extending copyrights, congress is allowing large copyright holders to continue generating revenue from old works. The copyright holders then invest that revenue in new marginal and high risk works.
Maybe. And maybe is probably enough, because ties go to the defendent.
Historical practice confirms that "Limited Times" does not mean a single, inalterable, limited time. Every single copyright extension has extended the copyright of existing works.
That's irrelevant as to whether or not copyright law which does not "promote the progress" of science and arts is constitutional.
The CTEA's application to existing works increases incentives for copyright holders to restore and disseminate their works.
As opposed to increasing incentives for everyone to restore and disseminate their works. I don't buy it.
The CTEA's impact on international trade promotes progress in the United States.
You need to be more specific there. How does this promote the progress of science and useful arts in the US?
The CTEA is not part of a string of infinite expansions, but rather a means to harmonize copyright with the European Union.
Harmonizing with the EU is not a valid reason to pass an unconstitutional law.
If the CTEA is limited in regards to future works, it must necessarily be limited as it applies to existing works as well.
Why? The argument is that "limited" means limited to that which promotes the progress of science and useful arts. Just because the CTEA WRT future works arguably promotes progress, that doesn't imply that the retrospective parts do. Further, it doesn't go to the First Amendment part of the argument, for the same reasons.
Thomas Jefferson signed the 1808 and 1809 patent term extensions into law, and James Madison signed the 1815 patent term extension into law. Thus the nation's founders never meant "limited times" to mean "unalterable limited times".
Eldred is not arguing that "limited times" means "unalterable limited times." Your strawman is irrelevant.
Let me note that I still think it's about 50/50 here, based upon your argument #1 and similar ones like it. Actually the best argument I've heard is that this law encourages those who have created works in the past that are protected under trade secret law to publish those works. The problem is that while it seems obvious to me that this retrospective extension is not going to promote the progress of science or the useful arts, the fact of the matter is maybe it could. And that's enough, because it's the job of Congress to make that decision, not the job of the Supreme Court.
All of that said, the Appeals Court seemed to have made a terrible mistake by saying that copyright law is "categorically immune from challenge under the First Amendment." I think there's a good chance that the case will at least be remanded back with instructions to consider the First Amendment issues.
If you look at Mark Ishikawa's business card, you'll notice that it lists no street address for his company, BayTSP, just a post office box. This is for good reason, since Ishikawa is one of the few Silicon Valley CEOs who regularly receives death threats. Uninvited visitors are not welcome at BayTSP, which has a post office box in Los Gatos, CA, but could really be anywhere in the Bay Area.
I certainly have no idea where the company lives, but I know why Ishikawa has so many enemies. It is because BayTSP acts as the primary enforcer for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that is widely reviled in the technical community.
The DMCA, which was put in effect in 2000, was an attempt by the U.S. Government to bring copyright law into the cyber age. But many people -- including, oddly, Mark Ishikawa -- think the DMCA goes too far by making it illegal for me to even tell you how to circumvent encryption or copy protection technologies. It makes the very passing of knowledge against the law whether or not that knowledge is ever used.
"It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop.
BayTSP is paid anywhere from $200 to $50,000 per month by owners of intellectual property -- primarily software companies, movie studios, and record companies -- to find who is illegally copying, distributing, or helping to distribute without permission their intellectual property. For example: Adobe Systems arranged to have Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov arrested at the 2001 DefCon security conference in Las Vegas for violating the DMCA by showing how to circumvent copy protection in Adobe's eBook software. The arrest was made on information supplied by BayTSP.
Now I am not in any way a fan of the DMCA. The purpose of this column this week is not to examine the DMCA, but rather, to gain some understanding of how it is enforced. BayTSP is an interesting company, and coming to understand how it does what it does can be very useful as you will shortly see. So please don't write to me complaining about the DMCA. Write to your Congressional representatives.
Mark Ishikawa came to the data security business from the Dark Side, having been busted years ago for breaking into the network at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Preferring employment to jail time, he became a security consultant for the Lab and a lot of other places. Eventually, Ishikawa started a large ISP and web hosting company that he sold at a profit. Now he runs BayTSP.
BayTSP's business falls into two areas -- law enforcement and anti-piracy -- and it uses the same tools for both businesses. These tools are spider programs that scour the most traveled parts of the Internet looking for users who are offering to others files that are either illegal to even own or at least illegal to share. An example of the former is child pornography. BayTSP tracks for the FBI the global carriage of kiddy porn. When a big child pornography bust takes place, it is generally on the basis of evidence gathered by BayTSP.
"There seems to be an increase in child abductions and murders in the U.S.," says Ishikawa, "and when the abductors are caught and you look on their home computers, you inevitably find kiddy porn. So it is a precursor to this bad behavior, and just as the Internet makes it easy to distribute child pornography, it effectively encourages these criminals. We are working to end that."
BayTSP's spider programs use patented algorithms to scour public web sites looking for pictures, video, and music files. "Our algorithms are adaptive," claims Ishikawa. "You can cut a picture in half and we'll still find it, matching the cut-down version against a database of originals, effectively matching the electronic DNA of the target."
One thing BayTSP's spider programs don't do is sit at the Internet peering points sniffing all packets as they go by. "That would be wiretapping, which is illegal," he says. "All we do is go to the same places any user could go, look at the same files anyone else could look at, and we only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public."
Now we get to the part I find especially interesting, and where I think there is a lot of confusion among users. This has to do with how BayTSP finds out who is distributing kiddy porn or pirated music files. If you think your activities on the Internet are anonymous, you are wrong. When BayTSP finds an IP address that appears to be the source of child pornography or pirated music or video files, under the DMCA, it can subpoena ISP logs. These logs can directly connect even dynamic IP addresses to user accounts, making it clear very quickly who owns the offending account. Every ISP keeps these http logs, and even products for so-called anonymous surfing aren't effective in circumventing the technique.
"We have 100 percent coverage of peer-to-peer file sharing," Ishikawa claims. "If you are illegally sharing copyrighted materials, we know who you are."
Then why aren't there more arrests? In part, this is because the intellectual property holder who is paying BayTSP gets to set its own comfort threshold for exactly how much file sharing is too much, and how BayTSP should deal with offenders. "Adobe only wants to send out cease and desist orders, while some movie studios want to put people in jail," Ishikawa says. "There are people on the Net offering 50,000 to 60,000 files at a time for sharing. These people will get busted for sure."
For lesser offenders, under the DMCA an intellectual property holder can make your ISP remove the offending content from its servers. So while you may not go to jail, you might find that your Gnutella songs are no longer available. Repeat offenders lose their accounts completely. One issue is how quickly ISPs remove the offending material. "Sony wants it gone in an hour, but Uunet takes two weeks," says Ishikawa.
According to Ishikawa, we'll see major arrests in October of people who have been illegally (and flagrantly) sharing movies. With the evidence already gathered, the game is afoot, meaning this week is too late to stop sharing those movies and expect to get away with it. This might be a good time to get a lawyer.
Not even Osama bin Laden can escape the gaze of BayTSP. According to Ishikawa, the FBI thinks terrorists are sharing information by hiding it in images posted on eBay using a process called steganography. Doesn't that sound a little too sophisticated for al-Qaida? Can that picture of a dented Ford F-150 pickup with a For Sale sign really be saying, "Bomb the infidel Cringely's house?" Maybe, maybe not.
"The FBI has us looking for certain specific things," says Ishikawa, "but we haven't found anything yet."
At least if you don't profit you can't go to jail. Of course, going to jail is a necessary part of civil disobedience, isn't it?
Re:Sponsored by your local electric company...
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 1
I'm assuming your figure of 300 Watts is the average computer load?
Yeah, I got it from a website somewhere (can't find it, but I'll agree 150 is probably closer to the average.
many workstations would have been sitting idle anyways
They should be turned off, or at least in low power mode.
the point of this exercise was to prove that short key lengths (ie 56 bits, 64 bits) are bad for any organization or individual who needs to keep data encrypted for long periods of time (say, until after 20, 30 years, or until the end of someone's lifetime.)
Anyone with half a brain already knows that, and I fail to see how anyone without half a brain is going to have his mind changed because of this demonstration.
I suppose they could have spent that time pedaling on bikes equipped with generators to help with the energy shortage... but then you'd incur the expenses associated with the extra food they'd be eating!
Or maybe they could have turned their computer off (the horror).
Meanwhile, the RIAA doesn't feel the same logic applies to record sales in the U.S., and has started an ad campaign to convince the public that sharing music hurts artists.
Of course they do. Both companies are against piracy. Both companies run ad campaigns trying to convince people to not pirate. Both companies sue some pirates, and ignore others.
Of course the RIAA realizes that limited trading over P2P networks can help them. But they'd be incredibly stupid to admit that, cause then the trading would become anything but limited.
Re:Sponsored by your local electric company...
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I'm not going to get drawn into an argument over why we're in a conflict with Iraq, or even whether or not we need the oil.
Nor do I ask you to.
The answer question is 0.
I disagree.
You've forwarded the proposition that
U.S. and Iraqi soldiers had to die to run the decryption.
Which yields the converse:
If wasn't run, no U.S. and Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.
No, the converse is: If it wasn't run, fewer U.S. and/or Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.
Which is patently untrue. You're attempt at an emotional appeal as an argument was not only weak, it was stupid. You might as well have said that not turning off your lights when you're not using them causes soldiers to die.
So somehow has proven that given enough time, money and effort, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of...
BRUTE FORCE.
Nope, we didn't even do that. We proved that given enough time, money, effort, and the first few characters of the decrypted message, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of BRUTE FORCE.
Want something more interesting? Compress the message with a really good english language compression algorithm first, then encrypt it.
Re:Sponsored by your local electric company...
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 1
Oh please... Do you really believe that we would be involved in a conflict with Iraq if we didn't need the oil? Perhaps the answer to my question is less than 1, but it's certainly not 0.
By the way, I'm not in any way protesting military action.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you want, someone to say "I have a solution to Warner's troubles!" right here?
No, I just want anyone who claims to have a solution to Warner's troubles to back it up by providing that solution.
They're still in the buggy-whip industry, when we're all starting to buy cars.
Bad analogy. Buying cars isn't illegal. It's more like they're in the sports arena industry, and someone just came out with a device which can print perfect replicas of tickets.
How many job descriptions include the phrase "Warfare"?
Here's one that probably does.
At this point, Warner can do one of two things to survive: (1) change their business model, or (2) "go to war" against the many innovations that are making their business model obsolete.
Just what change of business model would you suggest which could allow Warner to survive without going to war against P2P?
My point is, as you can see from another reply somebody wrote, many people believe that the way the GPL and other licences are written, they can command people who use modified GPLd code in a modified program they distribute to place their modifications under the GPL and to publish the source.
I certainly can't see that "many people" believe that from another reply one person wrote.
This is untested and probably not true.
It's almost certainly untrue. The GPL is no more enforcible than any other EULA. If you claim you didn't agree to it, you can only be sued for copyright infringement.
But the point I am making is, in spite of the claims that some make, I don't think you can command them to release the source to their program.
Perhaps you'd be better off writing this as a reply to those who claim this, because the majority of people I assume already know this.
the FBI are a lot more tech-saavy than your average CEO.
The answer as to when you need a lawyer depends on just how much money you have and how much legal knowledge you have. Don't forget, if you don't have much money, you're not a very good target for a lawsuit.
These licences all say, "the only terms under which you can copy this work is if you agree to this licence."
Sure, as long as you understand that "can" means "are permitted to".
But that's misleading. If you copy a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder (ie. without agreeing to the terms set out) then you have made a copyright violation. That's it.
True, but there's nothing misleading about it.
I think if you violate a viral licence like the GPL or this one, they can sue you to stop publishing the original code or the derivative work. They can ask for damages. But they can't command you -- other than in negotiation to drop the lawsuit -- to follow other terms.
Correct. What's your point?
Mine, the qingPL. (the qing is not gnu Public License).
First, you should read the briefs on this case (I have read both the Petitioners--Lessig's--and the Respondents--the Government).
I have as well, though it was shortly after they came out so I'm sure my memory isn't 100%.
"If the CTEA is limited in regards to future works, it must necessarily be limited as it applies to existing works as well."
"Why? The argument is that "limited" means limited to that which promotes the progress of science and useful arts."
That is Eldred's argument, but it is not a foregone conclusion that the SCOTUS will buy it.
Of course not, but what it means is that your simple answer of "if it's limited to future works then it's limited to existing works" is not sufficient. If "limited times" means "not for an infinite amount of time," and the preamble is completely inactive, then Eldred loses WRT the copyright clause part of the argument. But that's a big "if," and personally I find it to be an invalid argument. Eliminating the "preamble," the sentence reads "Congress has the power ... by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." That's not a sentence.
In fact, the supremes give quite a bit of deference to past congressional practices
"neither long-standing congressional authorization nor widely prevailing practice justifies a constitutional violation" - United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543, 566 n.19 (1976).
and as the government points out (respondent brief p. 11), every copyright law passed by congress (starting in 1790) has retroactively extended terms.
See, there's a huge difference between the 1998 Act and all the previous ones, though. The 1790 Act stepped in and superceded State Law. Had they not made the law effect both new works and existing works, then states would be free to enact any legislation they wanted with regard to existing works. So the 1790 Act actually placed limits on copyright that weren't already there. It didn't extend copyright on existing works at all. It simply moved it into the realm of federal law. It also required registration, unlike the 1998 Act, which gave the extended terms under no conditions whatsoever.
Likewise, the 1976 Act also stepped in and superceded state law. Before the 1976 Act, published works were handled by federal law, and unpublished works were handled by state law. Once again congress stepped in and superceded the state law. Again, this is much different from extending copyright on works already published.
Now I can't find the text of the other Acts, so I can't be certain, but I am under the impression that before 1976 Copyright consisted of two different rights, those for unpublished works, and those for published works. So it was still necessary to publish and register a work in order to gain this protection. Also, you needed to place a copyright notice in order to receive benefits. So all of these things further encouraged the progress of useful arts and science, something which we no longer have in the 1998 Act. The sole benefit from the 1998 act is with regard to the possibility of the creation of the work. Thus it differs greatly from all the previous Acts.
"Enter "GLYCERINE" as a code, then press L1 for a nitro boost."
Is anyone planning to go to the Supreme Court on October 9 to let the Justices know their opinion?
Yeah, the lawyers.
According to the government, if they can come up with just one reason that retroactive copyright extension promotes progress, the law is constitutional.
They also have to show that the law is not unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
By extending copyrights, congress is allowing large copyright holders to continue generating revenue from old works. The copyright holders then invest that revenue in new marginal and high risk works.
Maybe. And maybe is probably enough, because ties go to the defendent.
Historical practice confirms that "Limited Times" does not mean a single, inalterable, limited time. Every single copyright extension has extended the copyright of existing works.
That's irrelevant as to whether or not copyright law which does not "promote the progress" of science and arts is constitutional.
The CTEA's application to existing works increases incentives for copyright holders to restore and disseminate their works.
As opposed to increasing incentives for everyone to restore and disseminate their works. I don't buy it.
The CTEA's impact on international trade promotes progress in the United States.
You need to be more specific there. How does this promote the progress of science and useful arts in the US?
The CTEA is not part of a string of infinite expansions, but rather a means to harmonize copyright with the European Union.
Harmonizing with the EU is not a valid reason to pass an unconstitutional law.
If the CTEA is limited in regards to future works, it must necessarily be limited as it applies to existing works as well.
Why? The argument is that "limited" means limited to that which promotes the progress of science and useful arts. Just because the CTEA WRT future works arguably promotes progress, that doesn't imply that the retrospective parts do. Further, it doesn't go to the First Amendment part of the argument, for the same reasons.
Thomas Jefferson signed the 1808 and 1809 patent term extensions into law, and James Madison signed the 1815 patent term extension into law. Thus the nation's founders never meant "limited times" to mean "unalterable limited times".
Eldred is not arguing that "limited times" means "unalterable limited times." Your strawman is irrelevant.
Let me note that I still think it's about 50/50 here, based upon your argument #1 and similar ones like it. Actually the best argument I've heard is that this law encourages those who have created works in the past that are protected under trade secret law to publish those works. The problem is that while it seems obvious to me that this retrospective extension is not going to promote the progress of science or the useful arts, the fact of the matter is maybe it could. And that's enough, because it's the job of Congress to make that decision, not the job of the Supreme Court.
All of that said, the Appeals Court seemed to have made a terrible mistake by saying that copyright law is "categorically immune from challenge under the First Amendment." I think there's a good chance that the case will at least be remanded back with instructions to consider the First Amendment issues.
how little the term "endangered species" really means.
Fortunately this was a single error, so it was easily detected.
Right. Kind of like how we attacked afghanistan for oil, eh?
No, nothing like that.
By the way, you should probably stop responding to posts because you're killing soldiers every time you make stupid fallacies on slashdot.
Collateral damage.
The Constitution guarantees trial by jury.
For federal cases, not for state ones.
If you look at Mark Ishikawa's business card, you'll notice that it lists no street address for his company, BayTSP, just a post office box. This is for good reason, since Ishikawa is one of the few Silicon Valley CEOs who regularly receives death threats. Uninvited visitors are not welcome at BayTSP, which has a post office box in Los Gatos, CA, but could really be anywhere in the Bay Area.
I certainly have no idea where the company lives, but I know why Ishikawa has so many enemies. It is because BayTSP acts as the primary enforcer for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that is widely reviled in the technical community.
The DMCA, which was put in effect in 2000, was an attempt by the U.S. Government to bring copyright law into the cyber age. But many people -- including, oddly, Mark Ishikawa -- think the DMCA goes too far by making it illegal for me to even tell you how to circumvent encryption or copy protection technologies. It makes the very passing of knowledge against the law whether or not that knowledge is ever used.
"It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop.
BayTSP is paid anywhere from $200 to $50,000 per month by owners of intellectual property -- primarily software companies, movie studios, and record companies -- to find who is illegally copying, distributing, or helping to distribute without permission their intellectual property. For example: Adobe Systems arranged to have Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov arrested at the 2001 DefCon security conference in Las Vegas for violating the DMCA by showing how to circumvent copy protection in Adobe's eBook software. The arrest was made on information supplied by BayTSP.
Now I am not in any way a fan of the DMCA. The purpose of this column this week is not to examine the DMCA, but rather, to gain some understanding of how it is enforced. BayTSP is an interesting company, and coming to understand how it does what it does can be very useful as you will shortly see. So please don't write to me complaining about the DMCA. Write to your Congressional representatives.
Mark Ishikawa came to the data security business from the Dark Side, having been busted years ago for breaking into the network at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Preferring employment to jail time, he became a security consultant for the Lab and a lot of other places. Eventually, Ishikawa started a large ISP and web hosting company that he sold at a profit. Now he runs BayTSP.
BayTSP's business falls into two areas -- law enforcement and anti-piracy -- and it uses the same tools for both businesses. These tools are spider programs that scour the most traveled parts of the Internet looking for users who are offering to others files that are either illegal to even own or at least illegal to share. An example of the former is child pornography. BayTSP tracks for the FBI the global carriage of kiddy porn. When a big child pornography bust takes place, it is generally on the basis of evidence gathered by BayTSP.
"There seems to be an increase in child abductions and murders in the U.S.," says Ishikawa, "and when the abductors are caught and you look on their home computers, you inevitably find kiddy porn. So it is a precursor to this bad behavior, and just as the Internet makes it easy to distribute child pornography, it effectively encourages these criminals. We are working to end that."
BayTSP's spider programs use patented algorithms to scour public web sites looking for pictures, video, and music files. "Our algorithms are adaptive," claims Ishikawa. "You can cut a picture in half and we'll still find it, matching the cut-down version against a database of originals, effectively matching the electronic DNA of the target."
One thing BayTSP's spider programs don't do is sit at the Internet peering points sniffing all packets as they go by. "That would be wiretapping, which is illegal," he says. "All we do is go to the same places any user could go, look at the same files anyone else could look at, and we only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public."
Now we get to the part I find especially interesting, and where I think there is a lot of confusion among users. This has to do with how BayTSP finds out who is distributing kiddy porn or pirated music files. If you think your activities on the Internet are anonymous, you are wrong. When BayTSP finds an IP address that appears to be the source of child pornography or pirated music or video files, under the DMCA, it can subpoena ISP logs. These logs can directly connect even dynamic IP addresses to user accounts, making it clear very quickly who owns the offending account. Every ISP keeps these http logs, and even products for so-called anonymous surfing aren't effective in circumventing the technique.
"We have 100 percent coverage of peer-to-peer file sharing," Ishikawa claims. "If you are illegally sharing copyrighted materials, we know who you are."
Then why aren't there more arrests? In part, this is because the intellectual property holder who is paying BayTSP gets to set its own comfort threshold for exactly how much file sharing is too much, and how BayTSP should deal with offenders. "Adobe only wants to send out cease and desist orders, while some movie studios want to put people in jail," Ishikawa says. "There are people on the Net offering 50,000 to 60,000 files at a time for sharing. These people will get busted for sure."
For lesser offenders, under the DMCA an intellectual property holder can make your ISP remove the offending content from its servers. So while you may not go to jail, you might find that your Gnutella songs are no longer available. Repeat offenders lose their accounts completely. One issue is how quickly ISPs remove the offending material. "Sony wants it gone in an hour, but Uunet takes two weeks," says Ishikawa.
According to Ishikawa, we'll see major arrests in October of people who have been illegally (and flagrantly) sharing movies. With the evidence already gathered, the game is afoot, meaning this week is too late to stop sharing those movies and expect to get away with it. This might be a good time to get a lawyer.
Not even Osama bin Laden can escape the gaze of BayTSP. According to Ishikawa, the FBI thinks terrorists are sharing information by hiding it in images posted on eBay using a process called steganography. Doesn't that sound a little too sophisticated for al-Qaida? Can that picture of a dented Ford F-150 pickup with a For Sale sign really be saying, "Bomb the infidel Cringely's house?" Maybe, maybe not.
"The FBI has us looking for certain specific things," says Ishikawa, "but we haven't found anything yet."
Set up mirrors of Alterslash, cause that's breaking the DMCA and shit, right?
At least if you don't profit you can't go to jail. Of course, going to jail is a necessary part of civil disobedience, isn't it?
I'm assuming your figure of 300 Watts is the average computer load?
Yeah, I got it from a website somewhere (can't find it, but I'll agree 150 is probably closer to the average.
many workstations would have been sitting idle anyways
They should be turned off, or at least in low power mode.
the point of this exercise was to prove that short key lengths (ie 56 bits, 64 bits) are bad for any organization or individual who needs to keep data encrypted for long periods of time (say, until after 20, 30 years, or until the end of someone's lifetime.)
Anyone with half a brain already knows that, and I fail to see how anyone without half a brain is going to have his mind changed because of this demonstration.
I suppose they could have spent that time pedaling on bikes equipped with generators to help with the energy shortage... but then you'd incur the expenses associated with the extra food they'd be eating!
Or maybe they could have turned their computer off (the horror).
That's fine, but that's an attack on a particular implementation of RC5-64, not an attack on RC5-64 itself.
That's absurd. There is no relationship between the amount of energy americans use to the amount of soldiers that die.
That's absurd. There is a relationship between the amount of energy americans use to the amount of soldiers that die.
Plus, we're not going to attack Iraq, assuming we do, because we want their oil. Maybe you should read up on that?
If Iraq didn't have oil, we wouldn't be attacking them. Hell, if Iraq didn't have oil, they wouldn't be dangerous.
Meanwhile, the RIAA doesn't feel the same logic applies to record sales in the U.S., and has started an ad campaign to convince the public that sharing music hurts artists.
Of course they do. Both companies are against piracy. Both companies run ad campaigns trying to convince people to not pirate. Both companies sue some pirates, and ignore others.
Of course the RIAA realizes that limited trading over P2P networks can help them. But they'd be incredibly stupid to admit that, cause then the trading would become anything but limited.
I'm not going to get drawn into an argument over why we're in a conflict with Iraq, or even whether or not we need the oil.
Nor do I ask you to.
The answer question is 0.
I disagree.
You've forwarded the proposition that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers had to die to run the decryption. Which yields the converse: If wasn't run, no U.S. and Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.
No, the converse is: If it wasn't run, fewer U.S. and/or Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.
Which is patently untrue. You're attempt at an emotional appeal as an argument was not only weak, it was stupid. You might as well have said that not turning off your lights when you're not using them causes soldiers to die.
I believe that to be an accurate statement.
So somehow has proven that given enough time, money and effort, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of... BRUTE FORCE.
Nope, we didn't even do that. We proved that given enough time, money, effort, and the first few characters of the decrypted message, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of BRUTE FORCE.
Want something more interesting? Compress the message with a really good english language compression algorithm first, then encrypt it.
Oh please... Do you really believe that we would be involved in a conflict with Iraq if we didn't need the oil? Perhaps the answer to my question is less than 1, but it's certainly not 0.
By the way, I'm not in any way protesting military action.