It varies, depending on to whom you give your information.
In most of Europe, companies are bound by laws implementing the EU's Data Protection Directive, which makes it clear that your data is not just another asset of the company which collects it, and that companies can only process it for the purposes for which you gave them the data.
In the US, companies howl with outrage at the prospect that they should treat their customers with similar fairness. You could argue that resisting even the smallest extra expense is in the short term interests of their shareholders. Of course that ignore the possibility that ethical policies may increase customer loyalty, and better serve their shareholders' longer term interests - as well as being "The Right Thing".
There is a lot of nonsense spoken about "impersonal corporations". Folk forget that it's actual human beings who make the "decisions of the corporation". Some of those people do good and some do evil.
However emotively he put it, surely it's quite different to take tissue from a consenting human donor than from a subject whose life has just been ended - however "potential" its (his? her?) humanity may be.
Don't all but the most extreme "it's the woman's body till it's born" zealots regard the abortion of a foetus (with its potential to grow into a human adult) as a necessary evil, rather than a simple lifestyle choice?
Why not start with human cells, thus saving the effort of transferring the techniques later?
A bit like saying why deploy changes onto a test system instead of straight onto the live system - after all, you'll only have to migrate to live later?
There are too many things that could go wrong - I'm not a molecular biologist, but I guess it's possible that if cells are persuaded to change their pattern of development (by switching on/off certain areas of the DNA, in a process that is not fully understood), a set of cells that briefly become, say, liver cells, could switch again to something altogether less benign? A tumour, say? Or maybe something that could spread and infect other regions of the body, or other people?
I'm sure a proper specialist could think of more plausible potential problems - but the point is, it's seriously unproven technology, and experimenting on humans would be highly unethical.
If DNA is like a library of code, would you install on your own system patches with lots of unknown and untested system calls, that you'd got from some site on the net?
If it's going to be a paid-for service (directly funded by the ISP) then presumably having an ad-free display is one of the customisation options that ISPs are being offered to differentiate themselves.
Thus, Google will not necessarily be "searching" your email (if by that you mean having some kind of dumb script matching keywords to show you somewhat relevant ads).
And you probably shouldn't be using ANY unencrypted mail service for anything where confidentiality is important.
I have no doubt that if the enforcement of laws against organ harvesting was lax enough, to the point where a person could expect to get away with it, corporations would probably get into that business, too. It's a straightforward calculation: what is the risk of getting caught, times the consequences of getting caught, and is that greater or less than the chances of succeeding, times the possible payout. If the latter exceeds the former, and it's greater than the opportunity cost, then the corporation does it. (And if they don't, someone else will. There's no such thing as universal ethics; you can always find somebody who'll "go there" regardless of how repugnant the opportunity for profit might be.)
Corporations limit investor's liability to financial loss (you can't lose more than you put in - investors don't inherit a bankrupt company's debts) -- but corporations do not and cannot limit managers' and employees' criminal liability.
If a company started harvesting organs illegally, the individuals would be liable to prosecution.
The problem is sometimes that laws are weak, and the authorities fail to punish the individuals. But the risk is there, and it has to be part of the equation.
Also, however much the corporate environment encourages "sociopathic" personalities, not all directors and managers are evil (or "amoral", if you feel better about that label). That might be one of those "irrationalities" another poster mentioned - but I prefer to think of it as people doing the right thing.
Finally, some people and companies take a more enlightened view of self-interest, and a longer-term view of benefit. That can lead to better behaviour all round. The "iterated prisoner's dilemma" in game theory illustrates this idea.
How do you "prove" an assertion about what "ought" to happen?
Take the statement:
as the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, the individual properly has no obligation to "society" or the state or the "collective" but only to his own rational self-interest. If they deem their actions to be in their own rational self-interest, not only do they have every right to pursue them, but they are morally obligated to do so.
You can only prove that if you start with a system of more basic beliefs about the way things ought to be - and if those starting points can lead logically to the desired conclusion.
"Might makes right" and "you should 'love your neighbour as yourself'" are not propositions which can be proved - they are assumptions about how we ought to behave.
Similarly, kmweber's twin assertions that the USA is all about individualism and that people should oppose any acts that counter such "individualism" are just that - axioms chosen to justify a desired conclusion. You could equally well assume that the USA is about a balance of individual freedom and respect for other citizens' rights. Or that one is quite justified in opposing what the USA (or any state) is "about", if it is "wrong" or "harmful to the people" or "bad for the environment" or whatever. It's a matter of belief.
Of course, some belief systems make for happier societies, or more fair societies, or societies in which individuals have more chances to achieve their particular goals, or... You get to decide which you think are the important goals (or you pick a religion or philosophy that tells you).
Just don't pretend it's about logic or proof!
Re:Spam IS a problem for site owners! What to do?
on
The Case for OpenID
·
· Score: 1
That's a sensible point, and is part of what I was trying to get at (only much clearer).
My point was not that OpenID is useless -- I like the idea -- but that for widespread real-world adoption (and for me), it's only one part of an overall solution. I'm not sure what the other parts would look like, but you posted some interesting ideas later.
And solving one problem at a time is sensible -- after the problem has been broken down into clear and understandable parts. The Open ID article and the original summary could have done a better job as saying what it was and what is wasn't about.
Spam IS a problem for site owners! What to do?
on
The Case for OpenID
·
· Score: 1
Once this system is widely used, and spammers begin to register OpenIDs in huge numbers, how will site owners prevent spammy registrations?
With their own registration system, site owners can add features that make spammy registrations difficult (I'm getting 10 or so daily spammy registrations). Blindly trusting OpenIDs and allowing them into a site, or giving them posting rights would be crazy. So what are the options for countering spam? Can you add extra checks and validation? User verification? Black/white/grey lists?
I know the OpenID folk say "this is not a trust system" and that is not the problem they are trying to solve. But it needs to be solved for it to be widely useful!
If it isn't solved we have a one-stop-shop for spammer IDs. If we "solve" it badly, it's nearly as bad as running your own registration system (from a site owner's viewpoint) or registering all over again (from a user's perspective).
An archaeopteryx? We would have killed for an archaeopteryx!
We had to get up 5 hours before we went to bed, and carry the bits backwards and forwards ourselves, while being flogged to within an inch of our lives.
In the UK, the test is (IIRC) you may copy a "portion of a work" for purposes of "education or research". It's quite likely that the US is more liberal - our "fair dealing" rules are notoriously poor.
The courts get to deliberate on the precise meaning of "portion", of course.
As the parent points out, the problem is the word COPY.
While the law may or may not have intended to protect authors from unauthorised "distribution", what it actually controls is COPYING.
"Fair Use" (or "fair dealing" in some jurisdictions) and compulsory licensing may permit some kinds of copying: personal copies, non-commercial copies, etc, but in principle ANY copy is an infringement UNLESS it falls under one of the explicitly permitted categories.
Historical note - it's not just modern copyright law. Ancient Irish Brehon Law had a similar precedent. A book was loaned to another monastery, which made a copy. The original owners complained, and the ruling was "to every cow its calf, to every book its copy". The copy, along with the original, had to be returned. The data, if you like, was protected.
Back to the present. Copying, not distribution, is what the law currently controls.
It would be like saying big muscled body builders who do nothing more than lift weights all the time are stupid just because they have a higher BMI due to their muscle mass
Exactly - High BMI is not the reason why people who do nothing more than weightlifting are stupid!
This is just the same research that was proposed to prevent black people from enrolling as aviators in WWII.
I think you'll find it's actually different research. With, you know, different researchers asking different questions in different countries. Unless of course you imagine some mystical connection between all research into anything that affects any members of a group that anyone dislikes.
You can't invalidate findings by imputing far-fetched motives to the researchers. You challenge the interpretation, the methodology, or the analysis. Or you repeat the study (with better methodology, perhaps) and get different results.
There is a valid point to be made about the uses to which research (or an oversimplified summary of research) can be put, by people with power. But that's another issue.
That's nearly what I do. I use archive.org for free hosting of the MP3s (no hosting and bandwidth worries, pretty reliable service, open-ish source / creative commons licensed content preferred). The website itself is hosted cheaply elsewhere (and I don't need lots of space or bandwidth for that - one could even use a free service).
And I've been meaning to get around to hacking up something that can automate the generation of the RSS "podcast" feed which describes what has been uploaded. "RSS is simple" is close enough to true that a simple script could read in metadata (or let a user enter it) and produce the necessary rss feed file. Most of the required XML is just static text, really.
Or has someone written such a piece of code already?
Actually there was a large Muslim protest in Britain against the violent extremist protestors, but it was drowned out by the nutters (or very angry and not entirely peaceful protestors). Just as in Northern Ireland a few years back a peaceful protest attended by tens of thousands was deserted by the media when someone drove up to the crowd and shouted abuse. The press to a man hared off to look for a riot (which didn't happen) and printed stories about violence across the province. Peaceful protests are barely news:-(
That said, there do seem to be an awful lot of "very angry and not entirely peaceful protestors". More so than when Jerry Springer produced a somewhat blasphemous (and tediously self-indulgent) opera that offended Christians.
In the middle ages, the world of Islam was more tolerant and more progressive than "christian" Europe. It is not clear that this is still the case on the whole -- even though both faiths (now as then) have their intolerant bigots and their thoughtful and tolerant adherents.
Yes, but if the private eye had said "there might be pr0n" and asked for all your logs, would you have complied? That's essentially what the DoJ are doing, as far as I cas see.
The courts care about crime too, but don't necessarily allow "fishing expeditions" in case there may be some evidence of something somewhere.
Where does the majority of spam start off from? Aren't the majority of spammers outside of the US?
It depends on how you measure it, but according to the ROSKO list, of the 200 spam operations responsible for 80% of spam in Europe and North America, 120 are from the USA, 13 from Canada, 9 from Russia, 2 from Taiwan, and 4 from China. They just use foreign relays (and increasingly "zombied" Windows PCs with broadband connections). This week's top ten is: USA 5, Russia 4, Brazil 1.
Would US companies be held responsbile for the action that spammers take to spread said company's name?
I don't know - but if they got the spammer's details from an unsolicited email, it would be hard to argue that they didn't know spam was going to be involved.
Whether or not those who commission spam could be prosecuted (for conspiracy, or for aiding and abetting, counselling, or procuring illegal spam) these figures show that a major legal clampdown on spammers purely inside the USA could have a dramatic direct effect.
The indirect effect on other countries would be considerable - especially if similar legislation allowed the worst offenders to be extradited. Preferably to the country with the least pleasant Jails. That might even be the USA, if half of the tales are true...
Presumably all this VEIL technology is patented to the hilt. If it is made compulsory for all consumer TVs in the US, is there any chance that someone might get very rich on the royalties? That wouldn't be a motivation for such legislation, would it?
Isn't there still the 10% or so deduction from sales, before royalties are calculated, for breakages? A legacy from the days of shellac and vinyl, I believe. They could use that... (see http://www.scoremusicmagazine.com/scorerocks/bborg 3.html)
Or they could slap on another charge, and make even more money.
registries for the CC TLDs have to pay ICANN $0.20 per subdomain per year
That's not exactly true.
ICANN's 2004-05 budget-increase-and-mission-creep proposals included such a tax, and they have tried to make that a condition of changing the assignment of certain domains, but it was not universally popular (to put it mildly) with the international community of registrars.
There is a lot of nonsense talked about "Control of The Internet". In reality it's not that simple. There is no one organisation that controls all of the net. Different functions are carried out by different groups.
Address allocation (to ISPs) is carried out by Regional Internet Registries, from their allocations. For Europe, it is RIPE. ARIN controls the Americas. APNIC controls the Asia and Pacific regions. AfriNIC is Africa. LACNIC does Latin America and the Caribbean. Allocation of addresses TO those organisations (from the scarce IPv4 address pool, and the much more abundant IP v6 pool) is a different question. ISPs allocate addresses in turn to their customers. IPv4 and IPv6 can interoperate (sort of) and IPv6 is quite widely deployed in Asia, where IPv4 addresses are in short supply.
Protocols are defined by groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and working groups - any internet user can participate, if they know what they are talking about. They are adopted by consensus among internet users (and major ISPs and vendors). To a large degree, the protocols determine how much control there can be over any given internet application (like email, or the web, or internet telephony).
Top Level Domain Names are split into Country names (generally controlled by countries, or their nominees), and Generic ones (where control is awarded by ICANN).
This depends entirely on individual ISPs and Users taking their DNS information from the base name servers (and their descendents) controlled by ICANN. There are alternatives, like OpenNIC, which administer their own root servers and top level domains, like.glue) - any internet user can select these.
It's more complicated than that even:-)
But yes, the US Dept of Commerce controls the department that awards ICANN its power. The rest of the world COULD ignore ICANN if they wanted - but they probably won't. Mostly they don't need to.
It's not THAT bad yet. And the UN could be worse... more interfering... more clueless... more corrupt...
Slashdot Mirror
is that an argument for or against Linux?
It varies, depending on to whom you give your information.
In most of Europe, companies are bound by laws implementing the EU's Data Protection Directive, which makes it clear that your data is not just another asset of the company which collects it, and that companies can only process it for the purposes for which you gave them the data.
In the US, companies howl with outrage at the prospect that they should treat their customers with similar fairness. You could argue that resisting even the smallest extra expense is in the short term interests of their shareholders. Of course that ignore the possibility that ethical policies may increase customer loyalty, and better serve their shareholders' longer term interests - as well as being "The Right Thing".
There is a lot of nonsense spoken about "impersonal corporations". Folk forget that it's actual human beings who make the "decisions of the corporation". Some of those people do good and some do evil.
Maybe they should be held to account?
The poster makes a serious ethical point.
However emotively he put it, surely it's quite different to take tissue from a consenting human donor than from a subject whose life has just been ended - however "potential" its (his? her?) humanity may be.
Don't all but the most extreme "it's the woman's body till it's born" zealots regard the abortion of a foetus (with its potential to grow into a human adult) as a necessary evil, rather than a simple lifestyle choice?
Why not start with human cells, thus saving the effort of transferring the techniques later?
A bit like saying why deploy changes onto a test system instead of straight onto the live system - after all, you'll only have to migrate to live later?
There are too many things that could go wrong - I'm not a molecular biologist, but I guess it's possible that if cells are persuaded to change their pattern of development (by switching on/off certain areas of the DNA, in a process that is not fully understood), a set of cells that briefly become, say, liver cells, could switch again to something altogether less benign? A tumour, say? Or maybe something that could spread and infect other regions of the body, or other people?
I'm sure a proper specialist could think of more plausible potential problems - but the point is, it's seriously unproven technology, and experimenting on humans would be highly unethical.
If DNA is like a library of code, would you install on your own system patches with lots of unknown and untested system calls, that you'd got from some site on the net?
Unless you run windows update, I guess ;-)
If it's going to be a paid-for service (directly funded by the ISP) then presumably having an ad-free display is one of the customisation options that ISPs are being offered to differentiate themselves.
Thus, Google will not necessarily be "searching" your email (if by that you mean having some kind of dumb script matching keywords to show you somewhat relevant ads).
And you probably shouldn't be using ANY unencrypted mail service for anything where confidentiality is important.
Wouldn't being technically "guilty" make it a bit difficult to contest a DMCA notice successfully?
So why would they need to write a policy that says they will charge you in such a case?
Hasty, badly-thought-out and excessively severe policy, or chance to rip off their students - you decide.
...call an election!
Corporations limit investor's liability to financial loss (you can't lose more than you put in - investors don't inherit a bankrupt company's debts) -- but corporations do not and cannot limit managers' and employees' criminal liability.
If a company started harvesting organs illegally, the individuals would be liable to prosecution.
The problem is sometimes that laws are weak, and the authorities fail to punish the individuals. But the risk is there, and it has to be part of the equation.
Also, however much the corporate environment encourages "sociopathic" personalities, not all directors and managers are evil (or "amoral", if you feel better about that label). That might be one of those "irrationalities" another poster mentioned - but I prefer to think of it as people doing the right thing.
Finally, some people and companies take a more enlightened view of self-interest, and a longer-term view of benefit. That can lead to better behaviour all round. The "iterated prisoner's dilemma" in game theory illustrates this idea.
So it's not necessarily all doom and gloom.
How do you "prove" an assertion about what "ought" to happen?
Take the statement:
You can only prove that if you start with a system of more basic beliefs about the way things ought to be - and if those starting points can lead logically to the desired conclusion.
"Might makes right" and "you should 'love your neighbour as yourself'" are not propositions which can be proved - they are assumptions about how we ought to behave.
Similarly, kmweber's twin assertions that the USA is all about individualism and that people should oppose any acts that counter such "individualism" are just that - axioms chosen to justify a desired conclusion. You could equally well assume that the USA is about a balance of individual freedom and respect for other citizens' rights. Or that one is quite justified in opposing what the USA (or any state) is "about", if it is "wrong" or "harmful to the people" or "bad for the environment" or whatever. It's a matter of belief.
Of course, some belief systems make for happier societies, or more fair societies, or societies in which individuals have more chances to achieve their particular goals, or... You get to decide which you think are the important goals (or you pick a religion or philosophy that tells you).
Just don't pretend it's about logic or proof!
That's a sensible point, and is part of what I was trying to get at (only much clearer).
My point was not that OpenID is useless -- I like the idea -- but that for widespread real-world adoption (and for me), it's only one part of an overall solution. I'm not sure what the other parts would look like, but you posted some interesting ideas later.
And solving one problem at a time is sensible -- after the problem has been broken down into clear and understandable parts. The Open ID article and the original summary could have done a better job as saying what it was and what is wasn't about.
With their own registration system, site owners can add features that make spammy registrations difficult (I'm getting 10 or so daily spammy registrations). Blindly trusting OpenIDs and allowing them into a site, or giving them posting rights would be crazy. So what are the options for countering spam? Can you add extra checks and validation? User verification? Black/white/grey lists?
I know the OpenID folk say "this is not a trust system" and that is not the problem they are trying to solve. But it needs to be solved for it to be widely useful!
If it isn't solved we have a one-stop-shop for spammer IDs. If we "solve" it badly, it's nearly as bad as running your own registration system (from a site owner's viewpoint) or registering all over again (from a user's perspective).
But we were happy!
While the law may or may not have intended to protect authors from unauthorised "distribution", what it actually controls is COPYING.
"Fair Use" (or "fair dealing" in some jurisdictions) and compulsory licensing may permit some kinds of copying: personal copies, non-commercial copies, etc, but in principle ANY copy is an infringement UNLESS it falls under one of the explicitly permitted categories.
Historical note - it's not just modern copyright law. Ancient Irish Brehon Law had a similar precedent. A book was loaned to another monastery, which made a copy. The original owners complained, and the ruling was "to every cow its calf, to every book its copy". The copy, along with the original, had to be returned. The data, if you like, was protected.
Back to the present. Copying, not distribution, is what the law currently controls.
I think you'll find it's actually different research. With, you know, different researchers asking different questions in different countries. Unless of course you imagine some mystical connection between all research into anything that affects any members of a group that anyone dislikes.
You can't invalidate findings by imputing far-fetched motives to the researchers. You challenge the interpretation, the methodology, or the analysis. Or you repeat the study (with better methodology, perhaps) and get different results.
There is a valid point to be made about the uses to which research (or an oversimplified summary of research) can be put, by people with power. But that's another issue.
That's nearly what I do. I use archive.org for free hosting of the MP3s (no hosting and bandwidth worries, pretty reliable service, open-ish source / creative commons licensed content preferred). The website itself is hosted cheaply elsewhere (and I don't need lots of space or bandwidth for that - one could even use a free service).
And I've been meaning to get around to hacking up something that can automate the generation of the RSS "podcast" feed which describes what has been uploaded. "RSS is simple" is close enough to true that a simple script could read in metadata (or let a user enter it) and produce the necessary rss feed file. Most of the required XML is just static text, really.
Or has someone written such a piece of code already?
That said, there do seem to be an awful lot of "very angry and not entirely peaceful protestors". More so than when Jerry Springer produced a somewhat blasphemous (and tediously self-indulgent) opera that offended Christians.
In the middle ages, the world of Islam was more tolerant and more progressive than "christian" Europe. It is not clear that this is still the case on the whole -- even though both faiths (now as then) have their intolerant bigots and their thoughtful and tolerant adherents.
Yes, but if the private eye had said "there might be pr0n" and asked for all your logs, would you have complied? That's essentially what the DoJ are doing, as far as I cas see. The courts care about crime too, but don't necessarily allow "fishing expeditions" in case there may be some evidence of something somewhere.
It depends on how you measure it, but according to the ROSKO list, of the 200 spam operations responsible for 80% of spam in Europe and North America, 120 are from the USA, 13 from Canada, 9 from Russia, 2 from Taiwan, and 4 from China. They just use foreign relays (and increasingly "zombied" Windows PCs with broadband connections). This week's top ten is: USA 5, Russia 4, Brazil 1.
Would US companies be held responsbile for the action that spammers take to spread said company's name?
I don't know - but if they got the spammer's details from an unsolicited email, it would be hard to argue that they didn't know spam was going to be involved.
Whether or not those who commission spam could be prosecuted (for conspiracy, or for aiding and abetting, counselling, or procuring illegal spam) these figures show that a major legal clampdown on spammers purely inside the USA could have a dramatic direct effect.
The indirect effect on other countries would be considerable - especially if similar legislation allowed the worst offenders to be extradited. Preferably to the country with the least pleasant Jails. That might even be the USA, if half of the tales are true...
Presumably all this VEIL technology is patented to the hilt. If it is made compulsory for all consumer TVs in the US, is there any chance that someone might get very rich on the royalties? That wouldn't be a motivation for such legislation, would it?
Isn't there still the 10% or so deduction from sales, before royalties are calculated, for breakages? A legacy from the days of shellac and vinyl, I believe. They could use that... (see http://www.scoremusicmagazine.com/scorerocks/bborg 3.html)
Or they could slap on another charge, and make even more money.
ICANN's 2004-05 budget-increase-and-mission-creep proposals included such a tax, and they have tried to make that a condition of changing the assignment of certain domains, but it was not universally popular (to put it mildly) with the international community of registrars.
Why did ICANN need the money? The Reg has an article about those proposals.
There is a lot of nonsense talked about "Control of The Internet". In reality it's not that simple. There is no one organisation that controls all of the net. Different functions are carried out by different groups.
.glue) - any internet user can select these.
:-)
Address allocation (to ISPs) is carried out by Regional Internet Registries, from their allocations. For Europe, it is RIPE. ARIN controls the Americas. APNIC controls the Asia and Pacific regions. AfriNIC is Africa. LACNIC does Latin America and the Caribbean. Allocation of addresses TO those organisations (from the scarce IPv4 address pool, and the much more abundant IP v6 pool) is a different question. ISPs allocate addresses in turn to their customers. IPv4 and IPv6 can interoperate (sort of) and IPv6 is quite widely deployed in Asia, where IPv4 addresses are in short supply.
Protocols are defined by groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and working groups - any internet user can participate, if they know what they are talking about. They are adopted by consensus among internet users (and major ISPs and vendors). To a large degree, the protocols determine how much control there can be over any given internet application (like email, or the web, or internet telephony).
Top Level Domain Names are split into Country names (generally controlled by countries, or their nominees), and Generic ones (where control is awarded by ICANN).
This depends entirely on individual ISPs and Users taking their DNS information from the base name servers (and their descendents) controlled by ICANN. There are alternatives, like OpenNIC, which administer their own root servers and top level domains, like
It's more complicated than that even
But yes, the US Dept of Commerce controls the department that awards ICANN its power. The rest of the world COULD ignore ICANN if they wanted - but they probably won't. Mostly they don't need to.
It's not THAT bad yet. And the UN could be worse... more interfering... more clueless... more corrupt...