Yep, so I was wondering why did you bring it up at all.
It is only tangential to the main point, which is how sad I am that the US has moved from an open defender of the rights of people to expose state dirty secrets to an open extrajudicial executioner of an international news organization that helps people who do exactly that.
This is very sad, because it devalues everything US proclaims to stand for - freedom, human rights, justice, and it is bad for those of your compatriots who, however cynical your government may be, believe in these values.
decided on their own initiative to close the related account
Come on now, that's a trollin, even you don't believe this.
A financial institution that is servicing people put on the blacklist is risking to lose its business in the US.
This is a 100% pure, sterling blackmail of Moneybookers to get at Wikileaks, and the reasons are shifting the blame, and desire to revenge and frighten. It isn't brave, just or proper.
It is worse than awful. Google seems to sincerely believe they have the right to do what they please. And it seems lots of government agencies, both foreign and domestic, concur.
Few days ago they let possibly dangerous and certainly illegal self-driving vehicles on the road, apparently without prior authorization and definitely without proper safety testing.
The interesting thing is what are they doing so that government lets them get away with this kind of shit.
Between google and facebook, the US now has the most comprehensive international spy network ever created.
The U.S. isn't trying to stamp out "bad news" they are trying to protect classified details of ongoing military involvement,
BS. You don't secure information by going after the banks of foreign news organizations.
The attack on Wikileaks is driven by two motives - trying to shift the blame away from the real culprits - that is, the architects and managers of the information system of the army, and revenge.
To me, that wasn't a surprise at all. Divide et impera was not invented by the British, but they certainly perfected it.
Hell, most of the current Middle East mess is, if not directly caused, then largely precipitated by the British policies in the region prior to them losing their status as a world power to the US after WWII.
Still, by Thatcher time, Britain didn't have the clout to influence international politics that much, and the Germans wouldn't have cared anyway.
Maybe the reception of Deutche Welle was better in Berlin than the BBC:D
The radio stations of which you speak were a propaganda tool
Well, to those who listened to them, they were mostly a very valuable alternative source of information, and a strong message that it can be free;)
It is the loss of this message that makes me sad, because it is a worthy ideal to have.
meant to weaken the communism regimes and recruit internal supporters.
Haha. I like this phrasing, it is straight out of the newspapers on the other side. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. The "recruit internal supporters" part is not even interesting to comment.
As for "weaken the regime", well, any regime that does things, which it wants to hide, deserves all the exposure and "weakening" it can handle.
US government was smart enough to realize that exposing "bad" information is a powerful weapon.
They ought to be smart enough to realize that trying to stomp bad news out will work as well for them, as it worked for the evil communists.
It is funny (and, in a way sad) that the same country that sponsored all those radio stations I used to listen to as a young girl for (freedom-)free information during the Cold war years from behind the Iron curtain is now trying to stomp out a website that does exactly the same.
The person in the TFA goes on some random blabbering about "attacks on infrastructure" and "thousands at risk", proposes "cold-war, nuclear deterrence"-like strategy, then contradicts itself by saying "then... incapacitating the platform used to attack is something that you have to do", then goes again to talk about "overwhelming force" and what not.
There's no logic in that, and, if anything, it is the opposite of MAD, the dominating war strategy of the Cold war.
The premises of MAD were clear -- a few powers with nukes, nuclear attack's originator cannot be hidden, each party has enough nukes to flatten the other even if it is hit first. These obviously don't hold for the kind of threats TFA is discussing.
Also, MAD didn't work quite well, if at all, and it became ill and died a quiet death in the late 80s.
Ironically, precisely the perceived ability to "incapacitate the platform of attack" is what killed it, because, as ballistic missile accuracy rose, the military went into fantasies a "surgical" strike combined with a "shield" platform to take out the MAD capability.
The death of MAD became obvious and official in the nineties - US gave up first, Russia following, as it became clear that nuclear proliferation is very likely unstoppable, and that MAD doesn't work very well against rogue states and terrorists. Currently both the Russian and the US military doctrines envision tactical nuke usage scenarios.
Trying to resurrect this rhetoric against a class of threats that doesn't resemble the premises of the original MAD doctrine at all is only hype, marketing and justification for subsequent funding requests.
It will work just as well as the effort for closing the mineshaft gap did.
Considering the distances and the sizes involved, I'd say it is a huge improvement that we can even try to attempt detecting planets at light year distances.
It was only 120 something years ago when Schiappareli "discovered" the Martian canals, and stirred the great debate about civilization there.
Yes, I heard that after a long and challenging, but well-planned and spotlessly executed migration, the system now works on a future-proof fully 32-bit operating system, capable of accessing more than 640k of RAM.
I don't mean to belittle the Russian achievements in the beginning of the space age, but all of their program was just PR, which cost them a hell of a lot of money, without giving them a lot in return. This is not a problem with their experts, or their cosmonauts -- they were no less capable, but unlucky to have a regime that valued PR more than anything else.
The biggest difference in the two competing programs would be obvious to anyone who claims familiarity with it as you do.
The Russians went in only to claim records. The first satellite was such a huge PR success, that it shifted the Russian program into being just a justification for the front Pravda article for many decades.
Sputnik itself did nothing, except to orbit and broadcast a signal. The first US satellite, launched a few months later (i.e. no big difference, really), made a major discovery - the Van Allen belts.
The Russian space program went on to send a man, a woman, set some records for time spent in space, etc.
But, these were done on basically the same equipment. Vostok and Voshod, the first two types of space vehicles, were almost the same (tried and tested) thing, because the Russian space program didn't have the political backing to do new stuff and possibly fail setting new PR records.
At the same time, the Americans were experimenting. While the Russians were basically repeating Gagarin's flight, the US did a ton of innovation.
Unlike the Russian variants, even the first US manned spacecraft could (and did) maneuver in space. US spacecraft did the first orbital maneuvering, US was first to put two spacecraft simultaneously in orbit for the first time, first to try approach and docking in space.
When the Russians lost the race for the moon (their Soyuz program, which culminated in the the Salute and Mir stations) was designed for a Moon flight. When they, predictably, lost, the political elite totally gave up on the space program. Finally, Yeltzin buried what was left. Sad, indeed, with better political leadership USSR might have given the States a much bigger scare.
It is even worse for the USSR in the field of the unmanned programs. There, US has dominated from the start, and the lead is still unassailable.
There are many ways to compare space programs. If you go for the space, comparing actual technological achievements strikes me as a much more meaningful comparison than going for the records in the beginning.
It will answer all your questions above, and more, and provide quite a lot of examples. It is also free.
The 1930s were a miserable time to live in the US.
How is that even related to the topic at hand, which is history of copyright and related rights?
(Incidentally, US may have been bad, but the rest of the world had it a lot worse, and a large part of that was due to the myopic protectionist legislation US passed in the wake of the recession)
I'm pretty sure the US has never had the chance to abuse international trade in much the ways China has.
US has been directing more or less unilaterally most of the international trade for its own benefit since the end of WWII. I'm pretty sure the effects of China's trade policies don't quite measure up in comparison.
Do you know what does, for example, the phrase "Nixon shock" refer to?
In what I have read the claims are the opposite -- that authors were rarely paid anything if the work wasn't properly copyrighted in the US by the author (which wasn't easy back then, so it wasn't typically done).
Do you know some specific authors that made money without taking out a US copyright? That would be quite an interesting sideline to the supposed general trend.
Sorry, my last paragraph is not very clear. I meant about 80 years since US started to consider the various copyright organizations seriously, and move towards being protective of copyright and related rights internationally.
As for the WTO/WIPO treaties, correct me if I'm wrong, but they are more of a negotiating framework that facilitates resolution of trade disputes and coordination of domestic legislation than bodies that actually draft binding agreements.
The rulings of the WTO are, more or less, fact-finding, not binding, even less so than your typical bilateral or UN agreement.
So much so, that US government is drafting and pushing ACTA outside of the WTO/WIPO framework so that it has more teeth.
That is, China can (and does) view its treatment of copyright and related rights as totally in line with WPO, and even disagree and ignore rulings of the WTO that say different.
The only recourse WTO gives is a justification of retaliatory measures, which the US government was never shy to apply liberally anyway, justified or not (see, e.g. the infamous Section special and super 301, probably the best known US law in Asia).
The mighty US publishing industry was built on infringing (or stealing, or whatever) the copyrights of European authors for so many decades it may be close to a century or two.
Then, the markets grew and Hollywood developed a solid relationship with Washington during WWII doing propaganda shit. The studios and the publishing companies started making money off American productions.
And suddenly - lo and behold - the US government changed its mind on the matter, joined the various copyright conventions and went on to become the world champion of copyright and related rights.
You're seeing China doing exactly the same thing, only 80 years later, using (and perhaps abusing) the very framework US put in place.
Cryptome.org's SOP is to report on all interviews, he's been doing that for ages now.
From the interview, even the Wired clueless bimbo was aware of this.
Knowing the SOP before you call a site about them being defaced, and still asking for exceptions while you hide the perpetrators of the defacement doesn't come across as building bridges to me.
While I enjoy the occasional US bashing, this is completely wrong.
If you just look at the structure of China's manufacturing, you'll see why. Their value added is still almost 100% coming from cheap labor. For every $100 of exports, China imports about $95, and adds about $5. Almost anything high-tech is still not manufactured there, just assembled. As for the "IP"... they hold the schematics, true, but without the US, Japanese and Korean chips to fit in those PCB boards, what good does it do to them?
This is why they try to keep their currency cheap so desperately - with low margins, dependent on cheap labor, pushing wages up even a tad too much can erode their competitiveness totally and send them into a very serious recession.
China also relies heavily on trade for energy and raw materials, and to foreign capital -- that means not some abstract money symbols, but tools and equipment produced elsewhere. They are far from self-sufficient, unless it is the 60s and 70s kind of self-sufficiency.
Also, when people talk about China's "owning" of US, or "dumping" US assets, they seem to forget the central bank of China still carries the huge negatives of the 1998 crisis, and who knows how much in bad assets from the 07-08 financial assplosion. All financed with government money that is now more or less worthless in real terms, government money that China will need 20 years down the road to care for its aging population. They can't afford to devalue what they are holding anymore than US can do so.
If it would close its borders, virtually all of China's modern manufacturing will stop working overnight, and the roughly 300 million people who have made the spectacular growth we have seen in the past three decades will be out of work.
If it would try to devalue US assets, it will condemn to hunger most of its "graying" population 20 years down the road.
In short, it won't work.
Trade isn't a weapon, it is means for people to get more value out of shit than they'd have if they just hoarded it. The sooner people grasp the point, the better things will be. It ain't rocket science.
Slashdot Mirror
http://tcritic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/greaterdickwad.jpg
Yep, so I was wondering why did you bring it up at all.
It is only tangential to the main point, which is how sad I am that the US has moved from an open defender of the rights of people to expose state dirty secrets to an open extrajudicial executioner of an international news organization that helps people who do exactly that.
This is very sad, because it devalues everything US proclaims to stand for - freedom, human rights, justice, and it is bad for those of your compatriots who, however cynical your government may be, believe in these values.
decided on their own initiative to close the related account
Come on now, that's a trollin, even you don't believe this.
A financial institution that is servicing people put on the blacklist is risking to lose its business in the US.
This is a 100% pure, sterling blackmail of Moneybookers to get at Wikileaks, and the reasons are shifting the blame, and desire to revenge and frighten. It isn't brave, just or proper.
It is worse than awful. Google seems to sincerely believe they have the right to do what they please. And it seems lots of government agencies, both foreign and domestic, concur.
Few days ago they let possibly dangerous and certainly illegal self-driving vehicles on the road, apparently without prior authorization and definitely without proper safety testing.
The interesting thing is what are they doing so that government lets them get away with this kind of shit.
Between google and facebook, the US now has the most comprehensive international spy network ever created.
The U.S. isn't trying to stamp out "bad news" they are trying to protect classified details of ongoing military involvement,
BS. You don't secure information by going after the banks of foreign news organizations.
The attack on Wikileaks is driven by two motives - trying to shift the blame away from the real culprits - that is, the architects and managers of the information system of the army, and revenge.
I think you're referring to the Smith-Mundt Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith–Mundt_Act
The motive isn't "state-funded propaganda", it is a bit more subtle than that.
To me, that wasn't a surprise at all. Divide et impera was not invented by the British, but they certainly perfected it.
Hell, most of the current Middle East mess is, if not directly caused, then largely precipitated by the British policies in the region prior to them losing their status as a world power to the US after WWII.
Still, by Thatcher time, Britain didn't have the clout to influence international politics that much, and the Germans wouldn't have cared anyway.
Maybe the reception of Deutche Welle was better in Berlin than the BBC :D
The radio stations of which you speak were a propaganda tool
Well, to those who listened to them, they were mostly a very valuable alternative source of information, and a strong message that it can be free ;)
It is the loss of this message that makes me sad, because it is a worthy ideal to have.
meant to weaken the communism regimes and recruit internal supporters.
Haha. I like this phrasing, it is straight out of the newspapers on the other side. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. The "recruit internal supporters" part is not even interesting to comment.
As for "weaken the regime", well, any regime that does things, which it wants to hide, deserves all the exposure and "weakening" it can handle.
US government was smart enough to realize that exposing "bad" information is a powerful weapon.
They ought to be smart enough to realize that trying to stomp bad news out will work as well for them, as it worked for the evil communists.
It is funny (and, in a way sad) that the same country that sponsored all those radio stations I used to listen to as a young girl for (freedom-)free information during the Cold war years from behind the Iron curtain is now trying to stomp out a website that does exactly the same.
Ah, dreams of my youth, when did you wither away?
The person in the TFA goes on some random blabbering about "attacks on infrastructure" and "thousands at risk", proposes "cold-war, nuclear deterrence"-like strategy, then contradicts itself by saying "then ... incapacitating the platform used to attack is something that you have to do", then goes again to talk about "overwhelming force" and what not.
There's no logic in that, and, if anything, it is the opposite of MAD, the dominating war strategy of the Cold war.
The premises of MAD were clear -- a few powers with nukes, nuclear attack's originator cannot be hidden, each party has enough nukes to flatten the other even if it is hit first. These obviously don't hold for the kind of threats TFA is discussing.
Also, MAD didn't work quite well, if at all, and it became ill and died a quiet death in the late 80s.
Ironically, precisely the perceived ability to "incapacitate the platform of attack" is what killed it, because, as ballistic missile accuracy rose, the military went into fantasies a "surgical" strike combined with a "shield" platform to take out the MAD capability.
The death of MAD became obvious and official in the nineties - US gave up first, Russia following, as it became clear that nuclear proliferation is very likely unstoppable, and that MAD doesn't work very well against rogue states and terrorists. Currently both the Russian and the US military doctrines envision tactical nuke usage scenarios.
Trying to resurrect this rhetoric against a class of threats that doesn't resemble the premises of the original MAD doctrine at all is only hype, marketing and justification for subsequent funding requests.
It will work just as well as the effort for closing the mineshaft gap did.
Well, they must have just realized they didn't move far enough 20 years ago.
Don't be too depressed.
Considering the distances and the sizes involved, I'd say it is a huge improvement that we can even try to attempt detecting planets at light year distances.
It was only 120 something years ago when Schiappareli "discovered" the Martian canals, and stirred the great debate about civilization there.
Yes, I heard that after a long and challenging, but well-planned and spotlessly executed migration, the system now works on a future-proof fully 32-bit operating system, capable of accessing more than 640k of RAM.
Jeez, that's a really awful text
/ hides in shame
I don't mean to belittle the Russian achievements in the beginning of the space age, but all of their program was just PR, which cost them a hell of a lot of money, without giving them a lot in return. This is not a problem with their experts, or their cosmonauts -- they were no less capable, but unlucky to have a regime that valued PR more than anything else.
The biggest difference in the two competing programs would be obvious to anyone who claims familiarity with it as you do.
The Russians went in only to claim records. The first satellite was such a huge PR success, that it shifted the Russian program into being just a justification for the front Pravda article for many decades.
Sputnik itself did nothing, except to orbit and broadcast a signal. The first US satellite, launched a few months later (i.e. no big difference, really), made a major discovery - the Van Allen belts.
The Russian space program went on to send a man, a woman, set some records for time spent in space, etc.
But, these were done on basically the same equipment. Vostok and Voshod, the first two types of space vehicles, were almost the same (tried and tested) thing, because the Russian space program didn't have the political backing to do new stuff and possibly fail setting new PR records.
At the same time, the Americans were experimenting. While the Russians were basically repeating Gagarin's flight, the US did a ton of innovation.
Unlike the Russian variants, even the first US manned spacecraft could (and did) maneuver in space. US spacecraft did the first orbital maneuvering, US was first to put two spacecraft simultaneously in orbit for the first time, first to try approach and docking in space.
When the Russians lost the race for the moon (their Soyuz program, which culminated in the the Salute and Mir stations) was designed for a Moon flight. When they, predictably, lost, the political elite totally gave up on the space program. Finally, Yeltzin buried what was left. Sad, indeed, with better political leadership USSR might have given the States a much bigger scare.
It is even worse for the USSR in the field of the unmanned programs. There, US has dominated from the start, and the lead is still unassailable.
There are many ways to compare space programs. If you go for the space, comparing actual technological achievements strikes me as a much more meaningful comparison than going for the records in the beginning.
Ah, I see what you mean by "early access", thanks.
I can't even guess how significant is that versus the people who allegedly lost on their work being published without payment.
It would be interesting to compare the numbers somehow.
For a good overview of how "intellectual property" became what it is today in the US, see, for example, this book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)
It will answer all your questions above, and more, and provide quite a lot of examples. It is also free.
The 1930s were a miserable time to live in the US.
How is that even related to the topic at hand, which is history of copyright and related rights?
(Incidentally, US may have been bad, but the rest of the world had it a lot worse, and a large part of that was due to the myopic protectionist legislation US passed in the wake of the recession)
I'm pretty sure the US has never had the chance to abuse international trade in much the ways China has.
US has been directing more or less unilaterally most of the international trade for its own benefit since the end of WWII. I'm pretty sure the effects of China's trade policies don't quite measure up in comparison.
Do you know what does, for example, the phrase "Nixon shock" refer to?
In what I have read the claims are the opposite -- that authors were rarely paid anything if the work wasn't properly copyrighted in the US by the author (which wasn't easy back then, so it wasn't typically done).
Do you know some specific authors that made money without taking out a US copyright? That would be quite an interesting sideline to the supposed general trend.
Sorry, my last paragraph is not very clear. I meant about 80 years since US started to consider the various copyright organizations seriously, and move towards being protective of copyright and related rights internationally.
As for the WTO/WIPO treaties, correct me if I'm wrong, but they are more of a negotiating framework that facilitates resolution of trade disputes and coordination of domestic legislation than bodies that actually draft binding agreements.
The rulings of the WTO are, more or less, fact-finding, not binding, even less so than your typical bilateral or UN agreement.
So much so, that US government is drafting and pushing ACTA outside of the WTO/WIPO framework so that it has more teeth.
That is, China can (and does) view its treatment of copyright and related rights as totally in line with WPO, and even disagree and ignore rulings of the WTO that say different.
The only recourse WTO gives is a justification of retaliatory measures, which the US government was never shy to apply liberally anyway, justified or not (see, e.g. the infamous Section special and super 301, probably the best known US law in Asia).
Ignorant troll is ignorant.
How is that different from the good ole US of A?
The mighty US publishing industry was built on infringing (or stealing, or whatever) the copyrights of European authors for so many decades it may be close to a century or two.
Then, the markets grew and Hollywood developed a solid relationship with Washington during WWII doing propaganda shit. The studios and the publishing companies started making money off American productions.
And suddenly - lo and behold - the US government changed its mind on the matter, joined the various copyright conventions and went on to become the world champion of copyright and related rights.
You're seeing China doing exactly the same thing, only 80 years later, using (and perhaps abusing) the very framework US put in place.
Cryptome.org's SOP is to report on all interviews, he's been doing that for ages now.
From the interview, even the Wired clueless bimbo was aware of this.
Knowing the SOP before you call a site about them being defaced, and still asking for exceptions while you hide the perpetrators of the defacement doesn't come across as building bridges to me.
While I enjoy the occasional US bashing, this is completely wrong.
If you just look at the structure of China's manufacturing, you'll see why. Their value added is still almost 100% coming from cheap labor. For every $100 of exports, China imports about $95, and adds about $5. Almost anything high-tech is still not manufactured there, just assembled. As for the "IP" ... they hold the schematics, true, but without the US, Japanese and Korean chips to fit in those PCB boards, what good does it do to them?
This is why they try to keep their currency cheap so desperately - with low margins, dependent on cheap labor, pushing wages up even a tad too much can erode their competitiveness totally and send them into a very serious recession.
China also relies heavily on trade for energy and raw materials, and to foreign capital -- that means not some abstract money symbols, but tools and equipment produced elsewhere. They are far from self-sufficient, unless it is the 60s and 70s kind of self-sufficiency.
Also, when people talk about China's "owning" of US, or "dumping" US assets, they seem to forget the central bank of China still carries the huge negatives of the 1998 crisis, and who knows how much in bad assets from the 07-08 financial assplosion. All financed with government money that is now more or less worthless in real terms, government money that China will need 20 years down the road to care for its aging population. They can't afford to devalue what they are holding anymore than US can do so.
If it would close its borders, virtually all of China's modern manufacturing will stop working overnight, and the roughly 300 million people who have made the spectacular growth we have seen in the past three decades will be out of work.
If it would try to devalue US assets, it will condemn to hunger most of its "graying" population 20 years down the road.
In short, it won't work.
Trade isn't a weapon, it is means for people to get more value out of shit than they'd have if they just hoarded it. The sooner people grasp the point, the better things will be. It ain't rocket science.
modifying evidence (files, dates, etc.) on impounded media, that is.
what if you actually don't know the password/combination?
also, what if they just dump an encrypted file on your computer, somewhere in the system32 or /usr/lib or wherever?
someone just got exonerated in japan from corruption charges after the prosecutor was caught modifying evidence in custody.
laws like these have more than one bad point.
Most likely, you clicked on the "Post Anonymously" checkbox in the left corner of the submit box.