I think that a safe is the more common close analogy. If the FBI can prove to a judge's satisfaction that the safe is yours and contains illegal substances, you can be ordered to open it, and failure to comply is contempt of court.
Such an order should be refuseable as per the fifth amendment, as such an action would be self incrimination.
The judge can certainly give the FBI a warrant to open the safe themselves (and in fact it should be required in most cases) but do you know of any cases where a person was ordered to open the safe for a criminal trial and hit with contempt of court charges when they didn't?
The only difference is that if you refuse with a safe, the FBI has (more destructive) ways to open it themselves.
That's a pretty big difference. They will open it if you will not.
Arg cought by the summary. My point is that the absolute maximum flighttime for electric UAVs is less than one hour, in a lab, draining the battery to death(literary)
Um, no.
First, UAV is a mighty broad brush. An inexpensive electric glider with a motor on it and big battery can fly for literally hours -- without even using thermals or other lift, and they can increase it further -- and the battery will be just fine when you land, just recharge it.
Now, this is a multicopter -- far less efficient. Still, with good batteries, keeping the weight down as much as possible, and just sitting there (using as little power as possible) -- 50 minutes doesn't surprise me at all. And the battery will be ready to fly again after recharging it. (Though it's possible that they used non-rechargable batteries to last even longer for that specific test.)
In practice electric UAVs have a flight time of 12-25 minutes depending on payload. Saying it will fly 50 minutes is just wrong.
Most of the hobbyist multicopter models have flight times like that, yes -- we want something that's lively and fun to fly, and don't just want to hover there. But we could make something that lasts 50 minutes if we wanted to and didn't mind spending some money.
If the pilotless plane/multicopter cannot go faster than the sustained wind, it cannot tolerate it, as the plane won't be able to come back to its starting point -- it'll drift downwind no matter what it does, and you'll never see it again (unless you go looking for it.)
Still... while 40 mph isn't much for a R/C plane, it sounds fast for a multicopter. But after looking it up, I guess it's not that exceptional after all. Still, if you're going full throttle just to hover in the wind, you're probably going to greatly reduce your loiter time -- I wouldn't expect 50 minutes of flight time in that situation.
The problem with smartphones is that you still need to get them from your pocket, so you can't film someone without their knowledge.
Well, that's one problem.
Another is that they aren't recording all the time -- and if you try, their batteries die quickly. Many things happen fast and are over before you even have time to pull out a camera and start recording. If you really want to protect yourself, you need something recording all the time.
The EFF and ACLU are only going to take cases that they think are going to have large impacts -- set precedent, get widely publicized, etc. They just don't have the resources.
You are correct, of course. Of course, by responding to the DMCA and getting your stuff put back up, you're telling them exactly who they should hassle legally. And even without a case, they can cause a lot of grief. Which is part of why I wish there was a penalty for bogus claims.
Perhaps, but in practice it doesn't matter what it was *intended* to do, only what the wording allows it to be *used* to do. And in this case, it's being used in an attempt to block unfavorable discussions.
That said, the original discussion's use would almost certainly fall within fair use, so they could just respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up, putting the ball back into the court the company sending the request. And having no case, they should drop it. Still abusive, but at least the damage is minimized.
I do wish the DMCA had provisions to punish for obviously invalid invocations of it, however.
But the bottom line is if you are storing your data on other people's equipment, you have no guarantee of anything.
Does this argument also apply to meatspace?
If you're living in a place that is owned by somebody else, but you're paying rent on it, do you have any guarantee of privacy there?
If you're storing your stuff in a storage locker that you're renting, do you have any guarantee of/right to privacy there?
They're rhetorical questions, I do in general know the answers already, but really... the answers regarding your e-mail, even if it's on a server somewhere, *ought* to be the same.
"Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?"
My first IBM PC-compatible computer was 8086-based. But I got rid of it 20+ years ago, so it's ok if Intel drops support for 8086 opcodes.
But if they do, I would not expect any current PC OSes to be able to boot. And you probably won't be able to run DOS apps without some sort of emulator (which might be just fine.) And I imagine a lot of hardware (PCI, PCI-E, for example) will require new firmware at the very least, if not a complete replacement.
It could be done, but it would not be a trivial change.
DEC chips, including the Alpha, could do all the memory management and protection necessary to keep the system stable in the early 1990s, while Intel x86 chips STILL cannot do the same thing. Pretty much every BSOD that you've experienced is directly attributable to that lack.
Just for the record, I don't normally get BSODs under Linux, FreeBSD or MacOS, all of which run on Intel x86 chips.
Now, being a little less specific, I don't usually get other sorts of kernel panics or oops from those OSs as well, though MacOS does seem to give more than I'd prefer. But Linux and FreeBSD? They generally just work, in spite of that "flawed" Intel x86 memory management and protection.
Based on the (very limited) evidence we've got here, I'd say the problem with BSODs seems to be more about Microsoft Windows and less about Intel x86. Though there was a version of WIndows that ran on Alpha chips -- NT 4.0 ran on DEC Alpha chips too -- and while I don't have any experience with it, it giving plenty of BSODs under it (or the equivalent) would not surprise me at all.
I wasn't talking about about reality, I was talking about perception.
The general public isn't going to be concerned about "drone rights" or all the good things drones can do because when they think about drones, they think about people being blown up with Predator drones or being spied upon with drones.
They *don't* think about a drone being used to take a picture of their house to help sell it, maps being made, science being done, search and rescue operations, taco delivery, or even a guy building model planes as a hobby. They only think of the bad, and mostly only of people being *killed* by drones. They don't want any of that here, and are perfectly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they don't even realize there's a baby in there.
When they say "minimal laws", what they *really* mean are "minimal laws that prohibit what we want to do, but plenty of laws that prohibit what we don't want others to do".
For example, the GOP's general platform talks about generally unrestricted gun ownership and prayer in the classroom but wants carefully restricted rights to abortion and pornography (or to have them banned completely if they could pull that off.) Guns, abortions and pornography are all related to businesses, so there's a business interest here, but it's minor. But I could probably find some Democrat examples of this too if I thought about it -- it's not just the GOP that thinks this way.
And the Texas bill mentioned does explicitly limit the police in quite a few ways -- but gives them a few exceptions too, especially if they have a search warrant. It explicitly requires a search warrant for things that wouldn't require one if a manned aircraft weren't used.
As for the federal government, it's generally not subject to state laws anyways, so the state can pass all the laws the want there, though at least the writers of the Texas bill seems to think it applies to the federal government too somehow.
It could be the commercial pilots (especially the photographers) ensuring that their business model stay relevant, though the New Hampshire bill shoots them down too.
As I see it, it's a knee jerk reaction motivated by a perceived lack of privacy. But there's also a fear element involved, as when they think "drone" they think an armed predator drone, which I'm pretty sure many believe are flying over US airspace as we speak in great numbers.
I do agree that the Texas bill doesn't really help privacy that much, as people can still be spied upon from manned aircraft. And yes, there's already laws against many sorts of spying.
But if you don't think it's about privacy, I'd love to hear what you really think it's about. Especially in New Hampshire.
Ahh yes, the feared "crash thirty feet from you and catch fire, maybe burning a square foot or so" drone weapon.
By this reasoning, cars are some of the most feared weapons ever, killing over 33,000 people each year in this country alone. Bonus points if the gas tank is wired to explode, so Pintos are especially deadly? Predators can't come close to this record!
I suspect that "supported by the ground" means connected to the ground. So a camera on a long stick would be OK, but a camera on an airplane would not. A kite would be a gray area -- there's a string that helps keep it up, but the string itself doesn't "support" it. I'm guessing the intent would be to prohibit the camera on a kite.
But yes, you're right, the English language is imprecise, and support means more than "hold up". But context does suggest that they meant "hold up".
What they're really trying to prevent is someone from taking videos of them in their backyards sunbathing in the nude or doing something with the neighbor's daughter.
The problem is... there's already laws against that.
[Talking more about the proposed Texas legislation here than the New Hampshire one, as I'm in Texas.]
I think they're more worried about stuff like this where a guy just flying his R/C plane around with a camera found that a slaughterhouse was illegally leaking blood into a creek. He interfered with a business by reporting this, and legislators don't like that sort of stuff here, even though the business was breaking the law by doing so and the guy wasn't doing anything illegal.
And there's also the fear that the police/military/whatever will park a bird sized drone over your house just to watch whatever you do. Not that this happens, but it's the thought. (And really, if the police needed to do that, they'd just use their manned helicopter for $1000/hr.) And of course when people think "drone" they think "armed Predator drone", which further mucks with the issue.
Unless NOAA is going to get permission from every landowner in Texas! Also no more satellite views from any thing like Google/Apple/Yahoo/Garmin/Tomtom/etc... Maps.
NOAA uses manned airplanes. They would not be affected by the legislation in Texas, but would be affected by the proposed New Hampshire law.
Same goes for google. Their "satellite view" is mostly taken by manned aircraft rather than satellites, and in general satellites aren't considered to be under the jurisdiction of the countries underneath them anyways.
Good catch. Technically it is a policy to give you six chances to stay in compliance with an actual law DMCA.
No, I don't think so.
I think it's a policy where they have a system in place to tell you when you're accused of violating copyrights, and to punish you (through a slower connection) for being repeatedly accused of violating copyrights. Not that I said "being accused of violating copyrights", not actually doing it, because at the later stages, you can pay $35 for an actual investigation (I wouldn't expect much actual investigating, however) into if you really were violating copyrights.
(I'll bet there's no penalty for making false accusations that somebody is violating your copyrights. Man, that would take trolling somebody over a/. post that pissed you off to the next level... start making bogus copyright complaints to their ISP.)
I see nothing in this that benefits the customer, beyond telling them that they're on somebody's radar now. More precisely, I don't think this will stop somebody from suing you if they think they see you uploading their copyrighted stuff, even once. Or sending a DMCA complaint against you or your system, even if you did something only once.
This is a policy. It's not a law. It does not affect or replace the laws already in place.
This is important to me. I don't use my ISP's DNS because I have kids and use openDNS for content filtering. On my unfiltered machine, I use google because it's faster than my ISP's server. My other device is on VPN 24x7 and uses the corporate DNS. Given that I've got kids I'd really like to ensure I get a notice in a timely manner so I could do something about it before getting into more trouble. I've told them a hundred times, don't download copyrighted stuff here. Kids will be kids, though.... Throttling the heck out of my connection would mean I have to drive to the office.
Just to be clear here....
1) I mentioned that they can muck with DNS because HTTP is not the only thing they can muck with. (They guy I was responding to seemed to think SSL was the answer.) And even if they do it with DNS, just because you run your own DNS server, that doesn't mean you're safe from it.
2) As ledow said, they can (and probably will) give you your own network rules where *everything* fails and *all* roads (except those that they haven't programmed for) lead to their captive copyright warning. Public WiFi acccess points do this all the time when you first use them -- you have to click on OK to their ToS at the front page before anything works.
3) It's not like the mucking is extreme -- click on "Click to Close" and it's gone. (Though you'll need to do a bit more at the later levels.)
This would be a bigger problem for systems that aren't run by a human, however. For example, suppose you've got a security system that uploads pictures from your camera, and one of these messages comes up, and that breaks everything until you click on it, but the script uploading pictures doesn't know how to click on it, so your pictures don't get uploaded, and while this is happening -- your computer gets stolen.)
4) Even if you foil this, all you're foiling is an ad. A single ad. Is it really worth it? If it progresses to the later stage where things are slowed, well, foiling the ads previously won't stop that.
5) And even if you make the ad go away, I don't think this system is replacing the "sue a few thousand John Does in court" system, but instead supplementing it. So maybe you need to better control your kids if you don't feel like paying somebody $3,000 because it would cost $30,000 to fight them in court even if you won.
6) I never said I was in favor of the system (I'm not.) All I said is that it's not going to be foiled by simply using SSL.
7) Don't like it? Complain to your ISP, and if (in reality: when) they don't care, vote with your feet. If they're a monopoly, complain to your city -- cable and DSL companies generally have a lot of agreements with the local city, and the city has a lot of control over them. Though really, I wouldn't expect much help from them, as they'll immediately assume that "you're a criminal, who cares if you're inconvenienced (or innocent)?"
Personally, what *really* pissed me off is that you can appeal a later complaint... for the fee of $35. Really? I have to pay to clear my good name? And apparently I can't do anything to clear my good name until it gets to the point that bad things happen.
And I have to wonder how secure the channel is for content providers to say you're infringing upon their copyrights. And is there any penalty on them if they're wrong? How long will it be before somebody claims that their copyright was infringed on "Butthole Pleasures 12" by thousands of innocent people, and that appears on their screens? How many marriages will be damaged? Want to hack something? Hack *this* system!
(Looking more carefully, at least Comcast's messages give zero information about what the violation really was. That's even worse.)
That is complete and utter non-sense. Checking a certificate is sufficient to solve this problem.
The "problem" being that your http streams are mucked with? You don't seem to understand the situation then...
1) certificates are only used by SSL connections. Most web pages are still plaintext HTTP, not HTTPS.
2) even if you do look at the certificate and see that it's not what it should be (and therefore reject it) -- you're still not getting the page you asked for. At best, "checking a certificate" will allow you to avoid seeing their warning. Which might be nice, but things are *still* going to break until you see it and click "Click to Close" or whatever they have on it.
3) they might not do MITM attacks on http requests, but instead DNS requests. So you look up *anything*, and it gives you the address of their server that gives these notices. That will break *everything* until you click on it, not just http requests. (Thought it would work if you didn't rely on DNS requests going out for whatever reason.)
You can be pedantic about what exactly spread spectrum and frequency hopping mean if you want, but the military (and other users) often use them together, especially when they want something that's difficult to jam and intercept (and they often throw encryption on top of that, of course.)
Ya, but that's triangulating a signal, which is pretty easy, but you have to put people in the field to do it.
Well, they have to care enough to do it.
A cell phone booster doesn't put out much power. It likely doesn't interfere with anybody.
But a thousand watt CB radio? The amplifiers they used were never very good, they spewed noise all over the spectrum. But they'd be picked up by everything.
For example, I used to leave my stereo playing FM radio. Well, the guy who lived across the street had a grass sodding company, and the trucks would occasionally be parked in front of his house. When they got on the CB radio there, it came through my stereo at full volume. They were using a few hundred watts (I found out by asking.)
Most truckers didn't exceed one thousand watts, but a few took it to absolutely extreme limits. The biggest I'd ever heard of was 20 kW.
I didn't get into ham radio until later, but when I did I'd hear about the FCC tracking down truckers doing this. Not too many -- most got away with it -- but a few got hit with large fines.
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I think that a safe is the more common close analogy. If the FBI can prove to a judge's satisfaction that the safe is yours and contains illegal substances, you can be ordered to open it, and failure to comply is contempt of court.
Such an order should be refuseable as per the fifth amendment, as such an action would be self incrimination.
The judge can certainly give the FBI a warrant to open the safe themselves (and in fact it should be required in most cases) but do you know of any cases where a person was ordered to open the safe for a criminal trial and hit with contempt of court charges when they didn't?
The only difference is that if you refuse with a safe, the FBI has (more destructive) ways to open it themselves.
That's a pretty big difference. They will open it if you will not.
Arg cought by the summary.
My point is that the absolute maximum flighttime for electric UAVs is less than one hour, in a lab, draining the battery to death(literary)
Um, no.
First, UAV is a mighty broad brush. An inexpensive electric glider with a motor on it and big battery can fly for literally hours -- without even using thermals or other lift, and they can increase it further -- and the battery will be just fine when you land, just recharge it.
Now, this is a multicopter -- far less efficient. Still, with good batteries, keeping the weight down as much as possible, and just sitting there (using as little power as possible) -- 50 minutes doesn't surprise me at all. And the battery will be ready to fly again after recharging it. (Though it's possible that they used non-rechargable batteries to last even longer for that specific test.)
In practice electric UAVs have a flight time of 12-25 minutes depending on payload. Saying it will fly 50 minutes is just wrong.
Most of the hobbyist multicopter models have flight times like that, yes -- we want something that's lively and fun to fly, and don't just want to hover there. But we could make something that lasts 50 minutes if we wanted to and didn't mind spending some money.
hmmm ... I don't see where it says it goes 40. It does say this:
which is clearly different than going 40mph.
If the pilotless plane/multicopter cannot go faster than the sustained wind, it cannot tolerate it, as the plane won't be able to come back to its starting point -- it'll drift downwind no matter what it does, and you'll never see it again (unless you go looking for it.)
Still ... while 40 mph isn't much for a R/C plane, it sounds fast for a multicopter. But after looking it up, I guess it's not that exceptional after all. Still, if you're going full throttle just to hover in the wind, you're probably going to greatly reduce your loiter time -- I wouldn't expect 50 minutes of flight time in that situation.
The problem with smartphones is that you still need to get them from your pocket, so you can't film someone without their knowledge.
Well, that's one problem.
Another is that they aren't recording all the time -- and if you try, their batteries die quickly. Many things happen fast and are over before you even have time to pull out a camera and start recording. If you really want to protect yourself, you need something recording all the time.
The EFF and ACLU are only going to take cases that they think are going to have large impacts -- set precedent, get widely publicized, etc. They just don't have the resources.
You are correct, of course. Of course, by responding to the DMCA and getting your stuff put back up, you're telling them exactly who they should hassle legally. And even without a case, they can cause a lot of grief. Which is part of why I wish there was a penalty for bogus claims.
Perhaps, but in practice it doesn't matter what it was *intended* to do, only what the wording allows it to be *used* to do. And in this case, it's being used in an attempt to block unfavorable discussions.
That said, the original discussion's use would almost certainly fall within fair use, so they could just respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up, putting the ball back into the court the company sending the request. And having no case, they should drop it. Still abusive, but at least the damage is minimized.
I do wish the DMCA had provisions to punish for obviously invalid invocations of it, however.
But the bottom line is if you are storing your data on other people's equipment, you have no guarantee of anything.
Does this argument also apply to meatspace?
If you're living in a place that is owned by somebody else, but you're paying rent on it, do you have any guarantee of privacy there?
If you're storing your stuff in a storage locker that you're renting, do you have any guarantee of/right to privacy there?
They're rhetorical questions, I do in general know the answers already, but really ... the answers regarding your e-mail, even if it's on a server somewhere, *ought* to be the same.
"Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?"
So ... many ... great ... quotes!.
Shodan was one of the best computer game villains ever!
My first IBM PC-compatible computer was 8086-based. But I got rid of it 20+ years ago, so it's ok if Intel drops support for 8086 opcodes.
But if they do, I would not expect any current PC OSes to be able to boot. And you probably won't be able to run DOS apps without some sort of emulator (which might be just fine.) And I imagine a lot of hardware (PCI, PCI-E, for example) will require new firmware at the very least, if not a complete replacement.
It could be done, but it would not be a trivial change.
IBM missed the small OS
Well, they had OS/2. Which was quite superior to what else was out at the time (Windows, MacOS) but something went wrong and it didn't sell well.
DEC chips, including the Alpha, could do all the memory management and protection necessary to keep the system stable in the early 1990s, while Intel x86 chips STILL cannot do the same thing. Pretty much every BSOD that you've experienced is directly attributable to that lack.
Just for the record, I don't normally get BSODs under Linux, FreeBSD or MacOS, all of which run on Intel x86 chips.
Now, being a little less specific, I don't usually get other sorts of kernel panics or oops from those OSs as well, though MacOS does seem to give more than I'd prefer. But Linux and FreeBSD? They generally just work, in spite of that "flawed" Intel x86 memory management and protection.
Based on the (very limited) evidence we've got here, I'd say the problem with BSODs seems to be more about Microsoft Windows and less about Intel x86. Though there was a version of WIndows that ran on Alpha chips -- NT 4.0 ran on DEC Alpha chips too -- and while I don't have any experience with it, it giving plenty of BSODs under it (or the equivalent) would not surprise me at all.
I wasn't talking about about reality, I was talking about perception.
The general public isn't going to be concerned about "drone rights" or all the good things drones can do because when they think about drones, they think about people being blown up with Predator drones or being spied upon with drones.
They *don't* think about a drone being used to take a picture of their house to help sell it, maps being made, science being done, search and rescue operations, taco delivery, or even a guy building model planes as a hobby. They only think of the bad, and mostly only of people being *killed* by drones. They don't want any of that here, and are perfectly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they don't even realize there's a baby in there.
When they say "minimal laws", what they *really* mean are "minimal laws that prohibit what we want to do, but plenty of laws that prohibit what we don't want others to do".
For example, the GOP's general platform talks about generally unrestricted gun ownership and prayer in the classroom but wants carefully restricted rights to abortion and pornography (or to have them banned completely if they could pull that off.) Guns, abortions and pornography are all related to businesses, so there's a business interest here, but it's minor. But I could probably find some Democrat examples of this too if I thought about it -- it's not just the GOP that thinks this way.
And the Texas bill mentioned does explicitly limit the police in quite a few ways -- but gives them a few exceptions too, especially if they have a search warrant. It explicitly requires a search warrant for things that wouldn't require one if a manned aircraft weren't used.
As for the federal government, it's generally not subject to state laws anyways, so the state can pass all the laws the want there, though at least the writers of the Texas bill seems to think it applies to the federal government too somehow.
This isn't about privacy.
OK, then, what is it about?
It could be the commercial pilots (especially the photographers) ensuring that their business model stay relevant, though the New Hampshire bill shoots them down too.
As I see it, it's a knee jerk reaction motivated by a perceived lack of privacy. But there's also a fear element involved, as when they think "drone" they think an armed predator drone, which I'm pretty sure many believe are flying over US airspace as we speak in great numbers.
I do agree that the Texas bill doesn't really help privacy that much, as people can still be spied upon from manned aircraft. And yes, there's already laws against many sorts of spying.
But if you don't think it's about privacy, I'd love to hear what you really think it's about. Especially in New Hampshire.
Ahh yes, the feared "crash thirty feet from you and catch fire, maybe burning a square foot or so" drone weapon.
By this reasoning, cars are some of the most feared weapons ever, killing over 33,000 people each year in this country alone. Bonus points if the gas tank is wired to explode, so Pintos are especially deadly? Predators can't come close to this record!
We should have taken Bin Laden out with a Pinto!
In case you didn't notice, this articles are about proposed state laws, not federal laws. (Not yet, anyways.)
So the smell of bullsh*t would be from Austin and Concord, not Washington DC.
I suspect that "supported by the ground" means connected to the ground. So a camera on a long stick would be OK, but a camera on an airplane would not. A kite would be a gray area -- there's a string that helps keep it up, but the string itself doesn't "support" it. I'm guessing the intent would be to prohibit the camera on a kite.
But yes, you're right, the English language is imprecise, and support means more than "hold up". But context does suggest that they meant "hold up".
What they're really trying to prevent is someone from taking videos of them in their backyards sunbathing in the nude or doing something with the neighbor's daughter.
The problem is ... there's already laws against that.
[Talking more about the proposed Texas legislation here than the New Hampshire one, as I'm in Texas.]
I think they're more worried about stuff like this where a guy just flying his R/C plane around with a camera found that a slaughterhouse was illegally leaking blood into a creek. He interfered with a business by reporting this, and legislators don't like that sort of stuff here, even though the business was breaking the law by doing so and the guy wasn't doing anything illegal.
And there's also the fear that the police/military/whatever will park a bird sized drone over your house just to watch whatever you do. Not that this happens, but it's the thought. (And really, if the police needed to do that, they'd just use their manned helicopter for $1000/hr.) And of course when people think "drone" they think "armed Predator drone", which further mucks with the issue.
Unless NOAA is going to get permission from every landowner in Texas! Also no more satellite views from any thing like Google/Apple/Yahoo/Garmin/Tomtom/etc... Maps.
NOAA uses manned airplanes. They would not be affected by the legislation in Texas, but would be affected by the proposed New Hampshire law.
Same goes for google. Their "satellite view" is mostly taken by manned aircraft rather than satellites, and in general satellites aren't considered to be under the jurisdiction of the countries underneath them anyways.
Good catch. Technically it is a policy to give you six chances to stay in compliance with an actual law DMCA.
No, I don't think so.
I think it's a policy where they have a system in place to tell you when you're accused of violating copyrights, and to punish you (through a slower connection) for being repeatedly accused of violating copyrights. Not that I said "being accused of violating copyrights", not actually doing it, because at the later stages, you can pay $35 for an actual investigation (I wouldn't expect much actual investigating, however) into if you really were violating copyrights.
(I'll bet there's no penalty for making false accusations that somebody is violating your copyrights. Man, that would take trolling somebody over a /. post that pissed you off to the next level ... start making bogus copyright complaints to their ISP.)
I see nothing in this that benefits the customer, beyond telling them that they're on somebody's radar now. More precisely, I don't think this will stop somebody from suing you if they think they see you uploading their copyrighted stuff, even once. Or sending a DMCA complaint against you or your system, even if you did something only once.
This is a policy. It's not a law. It does not affect or replace the laws already in place.
This is important to me. I don't use my ISP's DNS because I have kids and use openDNS for content filtering. On my unfiltered machine, I use google because it's faster than my ISP's server. My other device is on VPN 24x7 and uses the corporate DNS. Given that I've got kids I'd really like to ensure I get a notice in a timely manner so I could do something about it before getting into more trouble. I've told them a hundred times, don't download copyrighted stuff here. Kids will be kids, though.... Throttling the heck out of my connection would mean I have to drive to the office.
Just to be clear here ....
1) I mentioned that they can muck with DNS because HTTP is not the only thing they can muck with. (They guy I was responding to seemed to think SSL was the answer.) And even if they do it with DNS, just because you run your own DNS server, that doesn't mean you're safe from it.
2) As ledow said, they can (and probably will) give you your own network rules where *everything* fails and *all* roads (except those that they haven't programmed for) lead to their captive copyright warning. Public WiFi acccess points do this all the time when you first use them -- you have to click on OK to their ToS at the front page before anything works.
3) It's not like the mucking is extreme -- click on "Click to Close" and it's gone. (Though you'll need to do a bit more at the later levels.)
This would be a bigger problem for systems that aren't run by a human, however. For example, suppose you've got a security system that uploads pictures from your camera, and one of these messages comes up, and that breaks everything until you click on it, but the script uploading pictures doesn't know how to click on it, so your pictures don't get uploaded, and while this is happening -- your computer gets stolen.)
4) Even if you foil this, all you're foiling is an ad. A single ad. Is it really worth it? If it progresses to the later stage where things are slowed, well, foiling the ads previously won't stop that.
5) And even if you make the ad go away, I don't think this system is replacing the "sue a few thousand John Does in court" system, but instead supplementing it. So maybe you need to better control your kids if you don't feel like paying somebody $3,000 because it would cost $30,000 to fight them in court even if you won.
6) I never said I was in favor of the system (I'm not.) All I said is that it's not going to be foiled by simply using SSL.
7) Don't like it? Complain to your ISP, and if (in reality: when) they don't care, vote with your feet. If they're a monopoly, complain to your city -- cable and DSL companies generally have a lot of agreements with the local city, and the city has a lot of control over them. Though really, I wouldn't expect much help from them, as they'll immediately assume that "you're a criminal, who cares if you're inconvenienced (or innocent)?"
Personally, what *really* pissed me off is that you can appeal a later complaint ... for the fee of $35. Really? I have to pay to clear my good name? And apparently I can't do anything to clear my good name until it gets to the point that bad things happen.
And I have to wonder how secure the channel is for content providers to say you're infringing upon their copyrights. And is there any penalty on them if they're wrong? How long will it be before somebody claims that their copyright was infringed on "Butthole Pleasures 12" by thousands of innocent people, and that appears on their screens? How many marriages will be damaged? Want to hack something? Hack *this* system!
(Looking more carefully, at least Comcast's messages give zero information about what the violation really was. That's even worse.)
That is complete and utter non-sense. Checking a certificate is sufficient to solve this problem.
The "problem" being that your http streams are mucked with? You don't seem to understand the situation then ...
1) certificates are only used by SSL connections. Most web pages are still plaintext HTTP, not HTTPS.
2) even if you do look at the certificate and see that it's not what it should be (and therefore reject it) -- you're still not getting the page you asked for. At best, "checking a certificate" will allow you to avoid seeing their warning. Which might be nice, but things are *still* going to break until you see it and click "Click to Close" or whatever they have on it.
3) they might not do MITM attacks on http requests, but instead DNS requests. So you look up *anything*, and it gives you the address of their server that gives these notices. That will break *everything* until you click on it, not just http requests. (Thought it would work if you didn't rely on DNS requests going out for whatever reason.)
There is *NOTHING* that can be done now about this. It is the law of the land, plain and simple.
As I understand, it's a policy, shared by several ISPs -- not a law. Are you saying that there's actual government laws behind this too?
Spread spectrum and frequency hopping are two different things
Well, sort of. There's multiple types of spread spectrum, and some involve frequency hopping.
You can be pedantic about what exactly spread spectrum and frequency hopping mean if you want, but the military (and other users) often use them together, especially when they want something that's difficult to jam and intercept (and they often throw encryption on top of that, of course.)
Ya, but that's triangulating a signal, which is pretty easy, but you have to put people in the field to do it.
Well, they have to care enough to do it.
A cell phone booster doesn't put out much power. It likely doesn't interfere with anybody.
But a thousand watt CB radio? The amplifiers they used were never very good, they spewed noise all over the spectrum. But they'd be picked up by everything.
For example, I used to leave my stereo playing FM radio. Well, the guy who lived across the street had a grass sodding company, and the trucks would occasionally be parked in front of his house. When they got on the CB radio there, it came through my stereo at full volume. They were using a few hundred watts (I found out by asking.)
Most truckers didn't exceed one thousand watts, but a few took it to absolutely extreme limits. The biggest I'd ever heard of was 20 kW.
I didn't get into ham radio until later, but when I did I'd hear about the FCC tracking down truckers doing this. Not too many -- most got away with it -- but a few got hit with large fines.