If one props open the security door of an apartment building so that friends can come over to his pool party, can he escape all culpability for the robbery or rape that occurs in some apartment upstairs by miscreants who saw the security door wide open?
You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.
I would argue that unless they can prove what I've been sharing or downloading on the service was copyright infringement, I think they haven't got a case -
You are probably correct in this, up to the point that someone implements the proposed proxying scheme. Once you turn that on, you, in a sense, take the risk of being accused of participating in a illegal enterprise.
My bit-torrent client is used to fetch Linux Distros and nothing more. And, being a good torrent user, I reseed those and leave the client running.
Fast forward to the inclusion of proxying in some bit-torrent client, and I am on less firm ground.
Because by simply using such a client, and leaving it run to be a good netizen, I've knowingly opened a hole that might be used for illegitimate purposes. At least that will be the reasoning the prosecutors will use. They will view me as kind of like the guy who is not a thief or a murderer, but props open the security door of an apartment building on a hot day to improve ventilation, only to have other apartments robbed.
Unless or until the proxy feature became not only common but mandatory, it would offer little protection, and puts each user at risk of having to defend themselves in court.
This cyberwarfare has been going on for more than five years now. Do you know how many banks, medical facilities, etc. as well as research institutions have been hit by the Chinese? I won't say whom, but a major US aerospace research corporation has been undergoing an almost constant stream of attacks since 2005...
So has my ssh server. Except that has been going on for much longer. And when I turn on logging in iptables I see a constant patter of attempts on common windows networking ports as well.
Is this is what constitutes an "attack" in these reports?
My guess is that with public news articles coming out daily and homeland security trying to convince every little public utility of grave danger and stampede them to harden their system, that these script kiddie attempts, which are almost universally unsuccessful, are exactly what is being touted as a cyber warfare attack.
All things being equal, if the win3.1 machine and the old jalopy still perform the tasks that they were built for, and those tasks don't change over time, and the cost to do those tasks didn't change, there would be no reason to upgrade.
True, But as I pointed out, all things aren't equal, and the list of tasks that the jalopy was made for are NOT the only tasks in the world.
Increase in possible tasks (benefits) become available as new things come along. (This is more so in computers than in trucks and cars). While the costs of THOSE old tasks didn't change, the cost of missed opportunity grows daily.
And, as you correctly surmised, that's when the incremental costs of NEW computers quickly overwhelm any cost saving of maintaining the OLD, even if you have a junk drawer full of spare parts.
If you copy the data, you are infringing copyright, even if you don't keep the copy. Only reason the ISPs don't get hit with this as is is the DMCA protects them.
But is merely accepting a packet and sending it on actually a copy? It you retain nothing that was sent thru your proxy, how can there be a "copy". Like unknowingly passing a counterfeit dollar bill, its arguably not a crime. No one claims that Viewing a Movie that you purchased on a DVD constitutes copying even though we know the data is copied thru disk buffers, cached in ram, sent on to video buffers and displayed on the screen.
Proxies would / should be chosen explicitly to exclude those already seeding any of the files being sent through them.
But unless these were triple hopped, with the selection of each hop not under control of the proxy, it would be easy for big-media to set up honeypot proxies to gather IP addresses and build a map of all proxies. Sooner or later over time they would find both the sources and the sinks.
If you allow each proxy to choose the next proxy, a honeypot could capture the entire traffic flow in no time. If you allow only the Server to specify the proxy, a honeypot proxy would gather all servers in short order.
Didn't they already try to sue the proxy user for something like this. You aren't off the hook legally just because you disguise who you are dealing with. All I see this doing is having them shifting from suing the download'er to the proxy'er.
Plausible deniability. Probably not the best defense, because its still going to cost you lots of money to defend yourself.
However if ALL Bittorrent clients had proxying built in and turned on by default, and if none of them provided any logging, then plausible deniability could probably be used as a defense. But only if the provider of the proxy was clueless as to the proxy's existence on his machine. If you have to go out of your way to install a proxy your intent becomes pretty clear.
Anyone serving as a proxy would never want to retain any of the proxied material, and the proxies should be nominated by the server to specifically not use as a proxy any bittorrent client having any of the files that the server is trying to serve, and provide very little information as to the addresses or files flowing thru the wires.
Unless proxies were double or triple hopped, there is nothing to prevent honeypot proxies from being set up with deliciously fat pipes to trap all IP addresses and requests. Hmmm, now who would want to set up something like that. Let me think about that for a couple milliseconds.
The gist of the story (quoted from the original post is this:...
but as long as it's not against the law to simply proxy a connection for someone else, that would not be grounds to subpoena the user D3's identity.
You ask "The only question is whether you as an individual can qualify as a "service provider".
But I don't think its necessary to reach that conclusion in order to go after the proxy provider any more than it is necessary to equate a drug mule to a licensed Bus Line like Greyhound.
The very act of proxy-ing could be found to be "aiding and abetting" which would probably be sufficient to get a warrant to search a proxy's server, even if there was no ultimately no arrest for the act of providing that proxy.
Further, to the extent it became common it would be explicit outlawed as it is in China today. There is a reason that Microsoft's first act when acquiring Skype was to kill off the entire concept of Skype Super-Nodes, and run all skype conversations through its own servers, and that reason had nothing to do with performance.
Trying to read a law set up to provide safe harbor to ISPs as applying to Joe Sixpack seems unlikely to be successful in the long run.
"Why, on Earth, do we update our tech so often? What, exactly, can I do with the latest stuff that wasn’t possible with the previous version?"
I think in most ways we are coming to better terms with this. Long Rant Warning. Every so often you see someone driving a '70s F250 Hi Boy, or a mid 80s K20, or an early 90s Dodge Cummins......
Yes, we can find examples from virtually every walk of life.....
BUT, you got lost in your car analogy, and never made it back to the point of the question.
Lots of safety, fuel efficiency, and rust-out problems force vehicle upgrades.
But about the only thing forcing computer upgrades is the user's desire for more speed. You can still find all the parts of old windows 3.1 era machines. And there are still places in the world where Windows 98 is commonly run, on ancient gear. You can "repair" it piecemeal with newer software, even newer disk drives, making it still a viable email and web surfing machine. For users who do that, and pretty much only that, sitting on the end of a dial-up line in some rural African town its all you need.
The answer to the original question is we upgrade our tech because we can. Because we see a benefit in doing so of ease of use, saving of time, and being able to do things that the old tech simply could not do. Because we see a benefit in portability, and smaller size. And lets face it, the old computers and the old software just wasn't as good as we seem to remember, and neither was the F250 Hi Boy.
Even the old fart shooing whippersnappers off his digital lawn is as likely to do so from a laptop or tablet at his couch rather than from the computer that monopolizing his desk, which monopolizes his spare bedroom.
Much as I can agree with the sentiment, we cannot allow every single consumer out there to dictate what constitutes privacy data. Perhaps google should publish what it deems as privacy information, and then allow the consumer to decide to play along or not.
I find Google far more forthcoming than most companies, and offering a much finer grained level of control.
I would also wager, that Judith Vidal-Hall has a facebook page, a Linkedin page. As far as I'm concerned, anyone signing up for either of those two services has abdicated all semblance of Privacy. Living in a country with CCTV cameras on every street corner, and a government hell bent on capturing every keystroke on your computer forever, how can she object if Google complies with her country's laws?
That's not the only downwind effect than can be attributed to human activity. Science News had an article on down wind rainfall being affected by large scale irrigation projects in California.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to research downwind effects of some of the huge wind farms that have been built. Taking that much energy out of the atmosphere should theoretically have an effect that might be measurable.
You get the work you can earn. What you deserve has nothing to do with it.
Exactly.
These graduates are acting as if getting through school was all they needed to do and they would be set for life.
Truth is, (both in China and in the west), getting through school only prepares you for your real life's work.
They have nothing to do. They are sitting around un-employed. Why not get 6 or 8 of them together and DO Something, anything, learn music, form a band, design buildings or trucks, try to sell those designs, or just publish them for free, while they eat what their unemployment benefits pay them. Hack together a lab or an office to do what they really want to do, even if they don't make any money for a while.
Maybe take a factory job (horrors!) and work in the evenings. I worked my way through college via factory work. A great deal of factory work leaves your mind free to work on other problems. And you can leave it all at the factory door. Try that with any other profession.
This device is not a dumb phone on the same number. It is merely a peripheral I/O device, like a bluetooth headset. It can't make or receive calls unless it is close to the main phone/tablet.
The little handset does not have its own phone number or sim card. It connects to your bigger phone (which is more like a small tablet) via NFC. This allows you to leave your big phone in your inside jacket pocket, or purse, and answer calls on the small handset.
It avoids the duchebaggery of holding a monstrous tablet up to your ear in public, or appearing to be talking to no-one in particular on a Bluetooth headset.
So you only need one number, one data plan, and it goes on your phone/tablet. That tablet/phone uses this as an ear-piece+mic.
The linked story says it uses NFC, but I suspect that is only for pairing. Because, everything the manufacturers have been telling us about NFC to date has made a point of telling us it was only going to work if you tapped the phone on the pay terminal. To suddenly release a device that suggests the NFC chip can be read from several feet away wouldn't sit well with a lot of people.
In the original constitution, all reference to the Constitution itself were in the form "this Constitution" or " the Constitution of the United States". It wasn't referred to as "THE Constitution " until after it was ratified, where several amendments started to use that form. (Which is arguably more ambiguous, since each state also had constitutions.
The application of algebraic style parsing of sentences to writing is a relatively new concept, and doesn't reflect the rules of English prior to about 1900.
Any text book that explains the Constitution doesn't fall into this misunderstanding. This was first explained to me in the 9th grade. Hence the advice to stay in school.
Perhaps schools have slipped substantially since then.
Still, even the School of Google doesn't get the interpretation of the establishment Clause wrong.
There are only a few ways to amend the Constitution, and signing a treaty isn't one of them. That fact alone should have been the tipoff.
If you manufacturer something on this list there is a pretty good chance the military is your biggest customer already, and you already know your kit is sensitive.
Seems kind of pointless to even create such a list, when it simply becomes a "Steal me" shopping list for foreign intelligence. Kind of like doing their homework for them. Half the stuff on the list is probably manufactured in other countries already.
If you insist on having such a list, (and presumably keep it secret), the only sensible list would be an automatically "sunsetted" list, where you list something that will automatically fall off the list after X years, where X has a value between 1 and 5. That way, each item could be evaluated every X years to determine if its already been replicated somewhere else, and protection is pointless.
Follow the links. Tesla was a very late arrival in the time line of Alternating Current. Every aspect of AC was under heavy development before he jumped in.
AC is enough to justify it. Of course people also attribute a pile of mysterious weirdness to Telsa and do not understand that on the cutting edge your speculation is sometimes just speculation about what lies out there in the dark.
Slashdot Mirror
If one props open the security door of an apartment building so that friends can come over to his pool party, can he escape all culpability for the robbery or rape that occurs in some apartment upstairs by miscreants who saw the security door wide open?
You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.
I would argue that unless they can prove what I've been sharing or downloading on the service was copyright infringement, I think they haven't got a case -
You are probably correct in this, up to the point that someone implements the proposed proxying scheme.
Once you turn that on, you, in a sense, take the risk of being accused of participating in a illegal enterprise.
My bit-torrent client is used to fetch Linux Distros and nothing more. And, being a good torrent user, I reseed those and leave the client running.
Fast forward to the inclusion of proxying in some bit-torrent client, and I am on less firm ground.
Because by simply using such a client, and leaving it run to be a good netizen, I've knowingly opened a hole that might be used for illegitimate purposes. At least that will be the reasoning the prosecutors will use. They will view me as kind of like the guy who is not a thief or a murderer, but props open the security door of an apartment building on a hot day to improve ventilation, only to have other apartments robbed.
Unless or until the proxy feature became not only common but mandatory, it would offer little protection, and puts each user at risk of having to defend themselves in court.
This cyberwarfare has been going on for more than five years now. Do you know how many banks, medical facilities, etc. as well as research institutions have been hit by the Chinese? I won't say whom, but a major US aerospace research corporation has been undergoing an almost constant stream of attacks since 2005...
So has my ssh server. Except that has been going on for much longer.
And when I turn on logging in iptables I see a constant patter of attempts on common windows networking ports as well.
Is this is what constitutes an "attack" in these reports?
My guess is that with public news articles coming out daily and homeland security trying to convince every
little public utility of grave danger and stampede them to harden their system, that these script kiddie attempts, which are
almost universally unsuccessful, are exactly what is being touted as a cyber warfare attack.
All things being equal, if the win3.1 machine and the old jalopy still perform the tasks that they were built for, and those tasks don't change over time, and the cost to do those tasks didn't change, there would be no reason to upgrade.
True, But as I pointed out, all things aren't equal, and the list of tasks that the jalopy was made for are NOT the only tasks in the world.
Increase in possible tasks (benefits) become available as new things come along. (This is more so in computers than in trucks and cars). While the costs of THOSE old tasks didn't change, the cost of missed opportunity grows daily.
And, as you correctly surmised, that's when the incremental costs of NEW computers quickly overwhelm any cost saving of maintaining the OLD, even if you have a junk drawer full of spare parts.
If you copy the data, you are infringing copyright, even if you don't keep the copy. Only reason the ISPs don't get hit with this as is is the DMCA protects them.
But is merely accepting a packet and sending it on actually a copy? It you retain nothing that was sent thru your proxy, how can there be a "copy". Like unknowingly passing a counterfeit dollar bill, its arguably not a crime.
No one claims that Viewing a Movie that you purchased on a DVD constitutes copying even though we know the data is copied thru disk buffers, cached in ram, sent on to video buffers and displayed on the screen.
Proxies would / should be chosen explicitly to exclude those already seeding any of the files being sent through them.
But unless these were triple hopped, with the selection of each hop not under control of the proxy, it would be easy for big-media to set up honeypot proxies to gather IP addresses and build a map of all proxies. Sooner or later over time they would find both the sources and the sinks.
If you allow each proxy to choose the next proxy, a honeypot could capture the entire traffic flow in no time.
If you allow only the Server to specify the proxy, a honeypot proxy would gather all servers in short order.
Didn't they already try to sue the proxy user for something like this. You aren't off the hook legally just because you disguise who you are dealing with. All I see this doing is having them shifting from suing the download'er to the proxy'er.
Plausible deniability. Probably not the best defense, because its still going to cost you lots of money to defend yourself.
However if ALL Bittorrent clients had proxying built in and turned on by default, and if none of them provided any logging, then plausible deniability could probably be used as a defense. But only if the provider of the proxy was clueless as to the proxy's existence on his machine. If you have to go out of your way to install a proxy your intent becomes pretty clear.
Anyone serving as a proxy would never want to retain any of the proxied material, and the proxies should be nominated by the server to specifically not use as a proxy any bittorrent client having any of the files that the server is trying to serve, and provide very little information as to the addresses or files flowing thru the wires.
Unless proxies were double or triple hopped, there is nothing to prevent honeypot proxies from being set up with deliciously fat pipes to trap all IP addresses and requests. Hmmm, now who would want to set up something like that. Let me think about that for a couple milliseconds.
The gist of the story (quoted from the original post is this:...
but as long as it's not against the law to simply proxy a connection for someone else, that would not be grounds to subpoena the user D3's identity.
You ask "The only question is whether you as an individual can qualify as a "service provider".
But I don't think its necessary to reach that conclusion in order to go after the proxy provider any more than it is necessary to equate a drug mule to a licensed Bus Line like Greyhound.
The very act of proxy-ing could be found to be "aiding and abetting" which would probably be sufficient to get a warrant to search a proxy's server, even if there was no ultimately no arrest for the act of providing that proxy.
Further, to the extent it became common it would be explicit outlawed as it is in China today. There is a reason that Microsoft's first act when acquiring Skype was to kill off the entire concept of Skype Super-Nodes, and run all skype conversations through its own servers, and that reason had nothing to do with performance.
Trying to read a law set up to provide safe harbor to ISPs as applying to Joe Sixpack seems unlikely to be successful in the long run.
"Why, on Earth, do we update our tech so often? What, exactly, can I do with the latest stuff that wasn’t possible with the previous version?"
I think in most ways we are coming to better terms with this. Long Rant Warning. Every so often you see someone driving a '70s F250 Hi Boy, or a mid 80s K20, or an early 90s Dodge Cummins. .....
Yes, we can find examples from virtually every walk of life.....
BUT, you got lost in your car analogy, and never made it back to the point of the question.
Lots of safety, fuel efficiency, and rust-out problems force vehicle upgrades.
But about the only thing forcing computer upgrades is the user's desire for more speed. You can still find all the parts of old windows 3.1 era machines. And there are still places in the world where Windows 98 is commonly run, on ancient gear. You can "repair" it piecemeal with newer software, even newer disk drives, making it still a viable email and web surfing machine. For users who do that, and pretty much only that, sitting on the end of a dial-up line in some rural African town its all you need.
The answer to the original question is we upgrade our tech because we can. Because we see a benefit in doing so of ease of use, saving of time, and being able to do things that the old tech simply could not do. Because we see a benefit in portability, and smaller size. And lets face it, the old computers and the old software just wasn't as good as we seem to remember, and neither was the F250 Hi Boy.
Even the old fart shooing whippersnappers off his digital lawn is as likely to do so from a laptop or tablet at his couch rather than from the computer that monopolizing his desk, which monopolizes his spare bedroom.
Much as I can agree with the sentiment, we cannot allow every single consumer out there to dictate what constitutes privacy data. Perhaps google should publish what it deems as privacy information, and then allow the consumer to decide to play along or not.
What an excellent Idea. I wonder why Google Never Thought About That.
I find Google far more forthcoming than most companies, and offering a much finer grained level of control.
I would also wager, that Judith Vidal-Hall has a facebook page, a Linkedin page. As far as I'm concerned, anyone signing up for either of those two services has abdicated all semblance of Privacy. Living in a country with CCTV cameras on every street corner, and a government hell bent on capturing every keystroke on your computer forever, how can she object if Google complies with her country's laws?
That's not the only downwind effect than can be attributed to human activity.
Science News had an article on down wind rainfall being affected by large scale irrigation projects in California.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/347691/description/Watering_fields_in_California_boosts_rainfall_in_Southwest
I wonder how long it will take for someone to research downwind effects of some of the huge wind farms that have been built. Taking that much energy out of the atmosphere should theoretically have an effect that might be measurable.
He meant there will be no burned in images on the LCD due to long exposure of static content.
You get the work you can earn. What you deserve has nothing to do with it.
Exactly.
These graduates are acting as if getting through school was all they needed to do and they would be set for life.
Truth is, (both in China and in the west), getting through school only prepares you for your real life's work.
They have nothing to do. They are sitting around un-employed. Why not get 6 or 8 of them together and DO Something, anything,
learn music, form a band, design buildings or trucks, try to sell those designs, or just publish them for free, while they eat
what their unemployment benefits pay them. Hack together a lab or an office to do what they really want to do, even if they
don't make any money for a while.
Maybe take a factory job (horrors!) and work in the evenings. I worked my way through college via factory work.
A great deal of factory work leaves your mind free to work on other problems. And you can leave it all at
the factory door. Try that with any other profession.
Grades 9, 10, 11, 12. Four years.
How may years did it take you to get out of elementary school?
This device is not a dumb phone on the same number. It is merely a peripheral I/O device, like a bluetooth headset. It can't make or receive calls unless it is close to the main phone/tablet.
Click the link in the story.
The little handset does not have its own phone number or sim card. It connects to your bigger phone (which is more like a small tablet) via NFC.
This allows you to leave your big phone in your inside jacket pocket, or purse, and answer calls on the small handset.
It avoids the duchebaggery of holding a monstrous tablet up to your ear in public, or appearing to be talking to no-one in particular on a Bluetooth headset.
So you only need one number, one data plan, and it goes on your phone/tablet. That tablet/phone uses this as an ear-piece+mic.
The linked story says it uses NFC, but I suspect that is only for pairing. Because, everything the manufacturers have been telling us about NFC to date has made a point of telling us it was only going to work if you tapped the phone on the pay terminal. To suddenly release a device that suggests the NFC chip can be read from several feet away wouldn't sit well with a lot of people.
In the original constitution, all reference to the Constitution itself were in the form "this Constitution" or " the Constitution of the United States". It wasn't referred to as "THE Constitution " until after it was ratified, where several amendments started to use that form. (Which is arguably more ambiguous, since each state also had constitutions.
The application of algebraic style parsing of sentences to writing is a relatively new concept, and doesn't reflect the rules of English prior to about 1900.
Any text book that explains the Constitution doesn't fall into this misunderstanding. This was first explained to me in the 9th grade. Hence the advice to stay in school.
Perhaps schools have slipped substantially since then.
Still, even the School of Google doesn't get the interpretation of the establishment Clause wrong.
There are only a few ways to amend the Constitution, and signing a treaty isn't one of them.
That fact alone should have been the tipoff.
No, not the same track. Reread the summary an linked articles. Similar but not same.
Sorry son, you are just wrong. The supreme court settled this issue a long time ago.
We make that stuff in this country?
Who knew?!
If you manufacturer something on this list there is a pretty good chance the military is your biggest customer already, and you already know your kit is sensitive.
Seems kind of pointless to even create such a list, when it simply becomes a "Steal me" shopping list for foreign intelligence. Kind of like doing their homework for them. Half the stuff on the list is probably manufactured in other countries already.
If you insist on having such a list, (and presumably keep it secret), the only sensible list would be an automatically "sunsetted" list, where you list something that will automatically fall off the list after X years, where X has a value between 1 and 5. That way, each item could be evaluated every X years to determine if its already been replicated somewhere else, and protection is pointless.
Follow the links. Tesla was a very late arrival in the time line of Alternating Current. Every aspect of AC was under heavy development before he jumped in.
Follow their sources.
Don't shoot the messenger.
AC is enough to justify it. Of course people also attribute a pile of mysterious weirdness to Telsa and do not understand that on the cutting edge your speculation is sometimes just speculation about what lies out there in the dark.
But again you perpetuate the myth.
Tesla didn't invent AC, and it was being pursued by a wide number of other researchers by the time he got involved. So too, the AC motor was actually invented by others. Anything Tesla added would have been discovered in the course of time. He was not as much of a visionary as you seem to think.
He was a showman, and a self promoter, something he shares with Jobs.
Effectively, it is: See the Verge for a discussion. Unless they used his actual voice, he has no leg to stand on.