The right to free speech, for instance, doesn't mean anything if a community is controlled by some bigwig's followers who intimidate or disappear anybody who complains. Likewise, the right to not have your own property improperly seized doesn't exist if there's nobody who'll enforce such a stricture. And legal disputes over contracts and so forth do work best with a theoretically neutral instituition serving as an arbiter instead of relying on the principle of he who can hire the most muscle rules.
On the other hand, anybody who's browsed that site and hears about this might reasonably conclude that his IP address at time of access, access history, and any posting history has now been compromised. Subpoenas to ISPs to reveal identities may follow should there be specific people of interest (and there likely are, if the FBI's looking at this site).
What are those people going to do except conclude they are potential and perhaps even likely targets? If somebody's been advocating the armed actions against the government on that site, I don't think he's going to twiddle his thumbs and consider himself safe just because full details haven't been released. The server has been compromised; the logs, which might be quite detailed, have been compromised. Sane practices dictate a certain suspicion about what's to come.
That does tell me that either the FBI is not particularly worried that the release of this information will precipitate attacks (people lashing out before being caught, say) or any flight that they can't stop... or that the FBI has reason not to mind, such as wanting to see if somebody who's already under investigation suddenly decides to skip town or contacts others that the Feds don't yet know about.
I think that legally, this would hinge on whether you can reasonably have an expectation that the logs would be relevant to an suspected investigation. If you *do* have such reason, it's not very different from trying to shred potentially incriminating documents while the police are marching towards your door.
If you're a hands-off administrator whose sole role was to provide connectivity and maintenance for a political forum which you did NOT monitor and whose specific contents you have ignorance of, and therefore you would lack awareness of conspiracies, threats, etc that would bear investigating, perhaps it would be easier, but in that case you probably shouldn't be monitoring for the FBI...
Once the material is under subpoena, sure. That's destruction of evidence, and the Feds aren't happy when you obstruct an active investigation.
If one has a content-agnostic policy of not keeping logs prior to awareness of any investigation, however, and can show a rational explanation beyond destruction of potential evidence such as limited storage space as well as ignorance of any legally overriding reasons to collect such logs, then I'm not convinced that the Feds could do anything about it.
It's not a suit against P2P, however. It's a suit against specific businesses employing P2P as a central part of their for-profit business model.
This raises interesting questions regarding whether they're deliberately facilitating and profiting from the illicit behavior of users, and whether and possibly how much they're obligated to do in order to stop that. The lines here may be greyer than you portray this since in this market infringement's a huge portion of the traffic, and unlike a phone company or other utility a specific P2P business that implements its own client can take steps to reduce it (e.g. allowing only files with a certain DRM type, etc).
Certainly not the other personalities that take over when you're sleepwalking.;)
Regarding the post office, it's presumably been a long-studied problem about how to eavesdrop on letters. Hell, monarchs of old used personal seals partly for that reason (also to authenticate, probably); and the CIA and KGB probably practiced on diplomatic pouches whenever possible...
Re:Uhh, VoIP is digital
on
VoIP Wiretapping
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hm. Even if the content is encrypted, one could still conduct traffic analysis since each forwarding system has to know where to forward the packet.
Granted, there may be a way to use client-level multihop source routing with encryption so that each stage only knows the next link the client wants the packet forwarded to, but that's a step that may be less obvious to take than merely encryption of content. Running a server that permitted this might also be rare enough to raise red flags.
Authenticating isn't really meaningful without code audits and rigorous regression testing.
Do Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds authenticate users who send patches for the Linux kernel? Yes. They've been gatekeepers. Random code doesn't get it.
Has, say, the 2.6 branch been a minefield? Were their stretches of the "stable" 2.4 branch which had nasty bugs? Are their considerable numbers of authentic but broken packages in distributions? Yes; look at how many fixes they need to push out for *official* *authentic* packages in each distribution. I'm not talking feature updates; I'm talking fixes.
If you want it to actually -work- well, you have to take your damn time and test it. This works better in a centralized BSD-style system where packages are authenticated/and/ tested. Hell, OpenBSD even preemptively audits code. Yes, they aim for six months between releases -- but six months of a stable, functioning, secure system is better than continually updating a broken system full of incompatible parts because developers push out entirely authentic but broken or mutually exclusive packages.
(1) Incumbents have substantial advantages over challengers not already in any public office due to their increased media access in addition to voter intertia and extremely clever redistricting. Reducing the ability of everyone to raise money means that these other advantages which don't require mass spending by campaigns are therefore greatly increased. Result: those in power have even safer seats.
(2) Contributions and unusually high political involvement are associated with the wealthy and corporate PACs (or merely corporations, for those unaware of the fine distinctions between PACs, 527s, etc). Anything that would seemingly target these people more than those looking at their wallets and deciding that they can't contribute, will appeal to the masses -- even if this increases the re-electability of incumbents and lowers the incentive to actually be responsive to one's constituents.
(3) Caring about the Constitution is frankly not a very winning move. Anybody who would support a strict interpretation of it would be extremely unpopular with just about every freakin' issue group out there except possibly the Libertarians, and that latter group seems to enjoy nominating people who drink colloidal silver, want to restore the gold standard, would rather have minimal government at all levels rather than pushing more authority to the states, trend towards isolationism, and abolish the FDA.
This is particularly a problem on emotionally charged issues. For a politician to say that abortion should neither be guaranteed nor prohibited at the Federal level and that it should be left up to the states via the tenth amendment would not be particularly popular with either the rabid pro-death or anti-choice movements, and much of the rest would probably be confused by the very concept of the tenth amendment (what? not everything needs to be done at the national level? But my views should apply -everywhere-!).
If the laws logically lead to such regulations, they *are* actually that onerous.
And for years, "campaign finance reform" has been pushed with an explicit attitude that while political contributions ARE free speech (as SCOTUS ruled years ago), that the state has a compelling interest in ignoring the First Amendment. Once it was determined that contributions of/activity/ could be considered contributions (so that people can't contribute money-equivalent advertising without charging, for instance) everything became fair game.
On the other hand, you're basically creating custom compilations if you download individual tracks and not albums. Custom compilations may carry a certain premium, particularly for people who are looking for specific songs instead of liking everything on a given CD enough to buy it.
Price differences would be interesting. Real-time pricing based on demand might work compared to trying to price every song by hand, but then you run into nasty reactions e.g. Amazon got negative press when it experimented with it. A price formula based on the average retail price of the original CD might work.
50 cents would of course be better from a consumer POV -- if the service is still worth it for the company to offer. I'm not sure how Apple values the service; iTMS should probably be credited with at least some iPod sales. At some low price, it wouldn't be worth it for Apple to maintain the servers and connections and to pay the demanded royalties.
Unless Swedish copyright law is unusually strange, it talks about creative works, not files.
If you split a movie into a dozen files and instructions about how to join them, it's still one work. If you produce a massive file with the last ten winners of the 'Best Picture' Oscars, that's ten works.
The artists owned their rights in the first place. The studios didn't forcibly seize those rights; the artists transferred them through completely voluntary contracts.
Don't want to sign your rights over? That's your choice; find a different distribution method, such as self-publishing via P2P and relying on word-of-mouth, or going through a different service such as CD Baby. Just don't sign a contract that hands over your rights, and then whine about your lack of them.
It's their own damn fault. Same thing as if an IT worker signed a contract forcing him to work 90h/week for $50K/year in the middle of the Silicon Valley and ceding IP rights over stuff created even on his own time with only his own resources and unrelated to company IP; he's an idiot, and it's his fault.
There are also many people who, being aware of the availability of free and easy alternatives, change their "might buy" attitude to "why should I buy" -- or, "why should I but -that- when I can get -this- fore nothing"? Take away the free entertainment, and perhaps people will spend more money on other entertainment rather than standing around. If there were no free online infringement, for instance, perhaps people would pay for more concerts.
Furthermore, there are scenarios in which money is involved -- but very, very indirectly.
For instance, what if one media company obtained a leaked copy of a competitor's movie, and offered 10,000 free copies of the DVD a week before the competitor released its own? Or distributed free copies on the streets of Beijing, metaphorically washing its hands of the obvious consequences? Or if it offered a highly compressed version for free download before opening day, in order to reduce the incentive for people to actually go to the theatres? Or, worse, offered a free download of a version deliberately edited to make it look not worth seeing in the theatres?
Really, now. What is the ratio of non-contributing users of Wikipedia, to contributors? And by contributors, I'm excluding any hypothetical loons who "contribute" merely non-content such as wildly biased political rantings or other bogosities?
Furthermore, you're ignoring the opportunity cost related to time. Time spent watching even a lousy downloaded movie may have otherwise been spent in a more entertaining manner actually costing money -- such as reading a book or watching a better movie in a theatre. People will seek free crap because it's free and easy, sometimes to the detriment of non-free alternatives.
The indictments were big news. However, until the trials begin there's unlikely to be any significant news coverage on them in the mainstream press since there probably won't be all that much happening in public. "In other news, Ken Lay is still planning to use the 'I was an ignorant figurehead' defense that didn't work for Bernie Ebbers" isn't much to report.
Agreed on voting with one's dollars, at least in areas in which there are actually alternatives. Creative entertainment tends to be such a field, compared to hypothetical situations in which for profession reasons one -must- have some particular standard DRM'd product with no practical alternative. I don't exactly risk agony or unemployment if I forgo some particular music CD -- and if I feel compelled to fill the silence with something there are alternatives such local public radio stations (one of which I do actually contribute to. I have significant objections to the management of the other public station here, so I don't listen or contribute to them.).
Archival backups and time/space-shifting are even thornier issues.
Being able to listen to a copyrighted song on a different device, or to be able to watch a recorded television show at a different time from its original broadcast are both fair use -- barring infringing circumstances such as presenting the show in an open-air theater with enough people to constitute an unauthorized public performance.
However, if you can space-shift, you can most likely copy unless the only mass-market copy method strictly enforces deletion of the original. Short of having every possible playing device contact some service with a unique personal key to track usage (it might be suspicious if a Photoshop installation registered to a single owner were used on a hundred different computers in a single day... a threshold that probably wouldn't be too hard to cross with wide-scale infringement) it'd be rather difficult to distinguish between space shifting and redistribution.
And I'd rather not have to submit a blood sample to a PCR machine before activating a device.
Guilty of theft? No. Potentially guilty of copyright infringement? Yes. It's rather like the difference between required to pass through an x-ray at an airport versus being incarcerated.
The "treated like criminals" argument is absurd in the face of how criminals actually are treated.
As for integrity, the popularity of copyright infringment on P2P systems even in wealthy countries where the citizens are less likely to be able to plead extreme poverty makes a rather strong statement about the honesty and integrity of the common man with respect to copyrights. It's not like infringement only flared up -after- advances in copy protection; it's been around for years and has only gotten easier and more common. In light of that, it's not unreasonable for content providers to suspect a certain probability of infringement.
It'd have to be well-publicized, however, and the more obscure people might have trouble getting any attention / funding at all given how many people might be asking... although some revenue sharing could be implemented I suppose.
There's a substantial difference in that it's usually much more expensive to produce a reasonable copy of a book than it is to buy one, so long as the book is still reasonably common, whereas a non-protected file can be trivially duplicated en masse for extremely low effort and cost. Hence, the number of copies of a book in circulation will generally not explode in an unauthorized fashion so long as an authorized form IS available -- the authorized form will probably be of similar price and have superior binding, printing etc. So you'll see unauthorized editions in some cases, such as translations of popular books that haven't actually been officially released in that language yet, but the market won't be flooded by free hardcovers available worldwide.
Files aren't like that. They can be trivially duplicated and redistributed, so the number of copies can explode far beyond authorized releases with low effort. So the ratio of bought copies to unauthorized copies may be far lower than with any physical object such as a book. It's cheap and easy to produce a compilation of, say, "Adobe's Greatest Hits" and hawk it in countries which traditionally won't care if you openly sell them on street corners -- or to upload them to P2P services and let people download for free.
Look up the "Audio Home Recording Act". I believe it has specific exceptions for such things granting significantly more rights regarding recordings on tape for personal reasons.
Re:Use nukes to make prime number gamma bursts!
on
How To Talk To Aliens
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure that's really the best way to gain attention, much as wandering around a bad neighborhood loudly banging a sword against a shield or randomly firing a handgun isn't either.
Advertising "we have so many nuclear warheads that we can explode them for broadcasting a cry for attention" might reasonably attract the/wrong/ kind of attention, if anything's advanced enough to actually detect and respond before one runs out of warheads.
It might be highly unexpected for a gaijin to be fluent to the point that it may be denied even in the face of contrary evidence.
On the other hand, I don't think Americans in the US would blink at all if tourist came by speaking perfect American English, unless it was grammatically far more correct than what the locals were used to; the expectation may in fact be the other way around given that English is a very common non-native spoken language.
Slashdot Mirror
In practice, some freedoms do need enforcers.
The right to free speech, for instance, doesn't mean anything if a community is controlled by some bigwig's followers who intimidate or disappear anybody who complains. Likewise, the right to not have your own property improperly seized doesn't exist if there's nobody who'll enforce such a stricture. And legal disputes over contracts and so forth do work best with a theoretically neutral instituition serving as an arbiter instead of relying on the principle of he who can hire the most muscle rules.
On the other hand, anybody who's browsed that site and hears about this might reasonably conclude that his IP address at time of access, access history, and any posting history has now been compromised. Subpoenas to ISPs to reveal identities may follow should there be specific people of interest (and there likely are, if the FBI's looking at this site).
What are those people going to do except conclude they are potential and perhaps even likely targets? If somebody's been advocating the armed actions against the government on that site, I don't think he's going to twiddle his thumbs and consider himself safe just because full details haven't been released. The server has been compromised; the logs, which might be quite detailed, have been compromised. Sane practices dictate a certain suspicion about what's to come.
That does tell me that either the FBI is not particularly worried that the release of this information will precipitate attacks (people lashing out before being caught, say) or any flight that they can't stop... or that the FBI has reason not to mind, such as wanting to see if somebody who's already under investigation suddenly decides to skip town or contacts others that the Feds don't yet know about.
Definitely not good enough assuming any data forensics expertise whatsoever. A radical should use somewhat more radical methods...
I think that legally, this would hinge on whether you can reasonably have an expectation that the logs would be relevant to an suspected investigation. If you *do* have such reason, it's not very different from trying to shred potentially incriminating documents while the police are marching towards your door.
If you're a hands-off administrator whose sole role was to provide connectivity and maintenance for a political forum which you did NOT monitor and whose specific contents you have ignorance of, and therefore you would lack awareness of conspiracies, threats, etc that would bear investigating, perhaps it would be easier, but in that case you probably shouldn't be monitoring for the FBI...
Once the material is under subpoena, sure. That's destruction of evidence, and the Feds aren't happy when you obstruct an active investigation.
If one has a content-agnostic policy of not keeping logs prior to awareness of any investigation, however, and can show a rational explanation beyond destruction of potential evidence such as limited storage space as well as ignorance of any legally overriding reasons to collect such logs, then I'm not convinced that the Feds could do anything about it.
It's not a suit against P2P, however. It's a suit against specific businesses employing P2P as a central part of their for-profit business model.
This raises interesting questions regarding whether they're deliberately facilitating and profiting from the illicit behavior of users, and whether and possibly how much they're obligated to do in order to stop that. The lines here may be greyer than you portray this since in this market infringement's a huge portion of the traffic, and unlike a phone company or other utility a specific P2P business that implements its own client can take steps to reduce it (e.g. allowing only files with a certain DRM type, etc).
Certainly not the other personalities that take over when you're sleepwalking. ;)
Regarding the post office, it's presumably been a long-studied problem about how to eavesdrop on letters. Hell, monarchs of old used personal seals partly for that reason (also to authenticate, probably); and the CIA and KGB probably practiced on diplomatic pouches whenever possible...
Hm. Even if the content is encrypted, one could still conduct traffic analysis since each forwarding system has to know where to forward the packet.
Granted, there may be a way to use client-level multihop source routing with encryption so that each stage only knows the next link the client wants the packet forwarded to, but that's a step that may be less obvious to take than merely encryption of content. Running a server that permitted this might also be rare enough to raise red flags.
Authenticating isn't really meaningful without code audits and rigorous regression testing.
/and/ tested. Hell, OpenBSD even preemptively audits code. Yes, they aim for six months between releases -- but six months of a stable, functioning, secure system is better than continually updating a broken system full of incompatible parts because developers push out entirely authentic but broken or mutually exclusive packages.
Do Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds authenticate users who send patches for the Linux kernel? Yes. They've been gatekeepers. Random code doesn't get it.
Has, say, the 2.6 branch been a minefield? Were their stretches of the "stable" 2.4 branch which had nasty bugs? Are their considerable numbers of authentic but broken packages in distributions? Yes; look at how many fixes they need to push out for *official* *authentic* packages in each distribution. I'm not talking feature updates; I'm talking fixes.
If you want it to actually -work- well, you have to take your damn time and test it. This works better in a centralized BSD-style system where packages are authenticated
It's largely bipartisan, for three main reasons.
(1) Incumbents have substantial advantages over challengers not already in any public office due to their increased media access in addition to voter intertia and extremely clever redistricting. Reducing the ability of everyone to raise money means that these other advantages which don't require mass spending by campaigns are therefore greatly increased. Result: those in power have even safer seats.
(2) Contributions and unusually high political involvement are associated with the wealthy and corporate PACs (or merely corporations, for those unaware of the fine distinctions between PACs, 527s, etc). Anything that would seemingly target these people more than those looking at their wallets and deciding that they can't contribute, will appeal to the masses -- even if this increases the re-electability of incumbents and lowers the incentive to actually be responsive to one's constituents.
(3) Caring about the Constitution is frankly not a very winning move. Anybody who would support a strict interpretation of it would be extremely unpopular with just about every freakin' issue group out there except possibly the Libertarians, and that latter group seems to enjoy nominating people who drink colloidal silver, want to restore the gold standard, would rather have minimal government at all levels rather than pushing more authority to the states, trend towards isolationism, and abolish the FDA.
This is particularly a problem on emotionally charged issues. For a politician to say that abortion should neither be guaranteed nor prohibited at the Federal level and that it should be left up to the states via the tenth amendment would not be particularly popular with either the rabid pro-death or anti-choice movements, and much of the rest would probably be confused by the very concept of the tenth amendment (what? not everything needs to be done at the national level? But my views should apply -everywhere-!).
If the laws logically lead to such regulations, they *are* actually that onerous.
/activity/ could be considered contributions (so that people can't contribute money-equivalent advertising without charging, for instance) everything became fair game.
And for years, "campaign finance reform" has been pushed with an explicit attitude that while political contributions ARE free speech (as SCOTUS ruled years ago), that the state has a compelling interest in ignoring the First Amendment. Once it was determined that contributions of
On the other hand, you're basically creating custom compilations if you download individual tracks and not albums. Custom compilations may carry a certain premium, particularly for people who are looking for specific songs instead of liking everything on a given CD enough to buy it.
Price differences would be interesting. Real-time pricing based on demand might work compared to trying to price every song by hand, but then you run into nasty reactions e.g. Amazon got negative press when it experimented with it. A price formula based on the average retail price of the original CD might work.
50 cents would of course be better from a consumer POV -- if the service is still worth it for the company to offer. I'm not sure how Apple values the service; iTMS should probably be credited with at least some iPod sales. At some low price, it wouldn't be worth it for Apple to maintain the servers and connections and to pay the demanded royalties.
Unless Swedish copyright law is unusually strange, it talks about creative works, not files.
If you split a movie into a dozen files and instructions about how to join them, it's still one work. If you produce a massive file with the last ten winners of the 'Best Picture' Oscars, that's ten works.
The artists owned their rights in the first place. The studios didn't forcibly seize those rights; the artists transferred them through completely voluntary contracts.
Don't want to sign your rights over? That's your choice; find a different distribution method, such as self-publishing via P2P and relying on word-of-mouth, or going through a different service such as CD Baby. Just don't sign a contract that hands over your rights, and then whine about your lack of them.
It's their own damn fault. Same thing as if an IT worker signed a contract forcing him to work 90h/week for $50K/year in the middle of the Silicon Valley and ceding IP rights over stuff created even on his own time with only his own resources and unrelated to company IP; he's an idiot, and it's his fault.
Overly simplistic.
There are also many people who, being aware of the availability of free and easy alternatives, change their "might buy" attitude to "why should I buy" -- or, "why should I but -that- when I can get -this- fore nothing"? Take away the free entertainment, and perhaps people will spend more money on other entertainment rather than standing around. If there were no free online infringement, for instance, perhaps people would pay for more concerts.
Furthermore, there are scenarios in which money is involved -- but very, very indirectly.
For instance, what if one media company obtained a leaked copy of a competitor's movie, and offered 10,000 free copies of the DVD a week before the competitor released its own? Or distributed free copies on the streets of Beijing, metaphorically washing its hands of the obvious consequences? Or if it offered a highly compressed version for free download before opening day, in order to reduce the incentive for people to actually go to the theatres? Or, worse, offered a free download of a version deliberately edited to make it look not worth seeing in the theatres?
Really, now. What is the ratio of non-contributing users of Wikipedia, to contributors? And by contributors, I'm excluding any hypothetical loons who "contribute" merely non-content such as wildly biased political rantings or other bogosities?
Furthermore, you're ignoring the opportunity cost related to time. Time spent watching even a lousy downloaded movie may have otherwise been spent in a more entertaining manner actually costing money -- such as reading a book or watching a better movie in a theatre. People will seek free crap because it's free and easy, sometimes to the detriment of non-free alternatives.
The indictments were big news. However, until the trials begin there's unlikely to be any significant news coverage on them in the mainstream press since there probably won't be all that much happening in public. "In other news, Ken Lay is still planning to use the 'I was an ignorant figurehead' defense that didn't work for Bernie Ebbers" isn't much to report.
Agreed on voting with one's dollars, at least in areas in which there are actually alternatives. Creative entertainment tends to be such a field, compared to hypothetical situations in which for profession reasons one -must- have some particular standard DRM'd product with no practical alternative. I don't exactly risk agony or unemployment if I forgo some particular music CD -- and if I feel compelled to fill the silence with something there are alternatives such local public radio stations (one of which I do actually contribute to. I have significant objections to the management of the other public station here, so I don't listen or contribute to them.).
Archival backups and time/space-shifting are even thornier issues.
Being able to listen to a copyrighted song on a different device, or to be able to watch a recorded television show at a different time from its original broadcast are both fair use -- barring infringing circumstances such as presenting the show in an open-air theater with enough people to constitute an unauthorized public performance.
However, if you can space-shift, you can most likely copy unless the only mass-market copy method strictly enforces deletion of the original. Short of having every possible playing device contact some service with a unique personal key to track usage (it might be suspicious if a Photoshop installation registered to a single owner were used on a hundred different computers in a single day... a threshold that probably wouldn't be too hard to cross with wide-scale infringement) it'd be rather difficult to distinguish between space shifting and redistribution.
And I'd rather not have to submit a blood sample to a PCR machine before activating a device.
Guilty of theft? No. Potentially guilty of copyright infringement? Yes. It's rather like the difference between required to pass through an x-ray at an airport versus being incarcerated.
The "treated like criminals" argument is absurd in the face of how criminals actually are treated.
As for integrity, the popularity of copyright infringment on P2P systems even in wealthy countries where the citizens are less likely to be able to plead extreme poverty makes a rather strong statement about the honesty and integrity of the common man with respect to copyrights. It's not like infringement only flared up -after- advances in copy protection; it's been around for years and has only gotten easier and more common. In light of that, it's not unreasonable for content providers to suspect a certain probability of infringement.
Before? Interesting.
It'd have to be well-publicized, however, and the more obscure people might have trouble getting any attention / funding at all given how many people might be asking... although some revenue sharing could be implemented I suppose.
There's a substantial difference in that it's usually much more expensive to produce a reasonable copy of a book than it is to buy one, so long as the book is still reasonably common, whereas a non-protected file can be trivially duplicated en masse for extremely low effort and cost. Hence, the number of copies of a book in circulation will generally not explode in an unauthorized fashion so long as an authorized form IS available -- the authorized form will probably be of similar price and have superior binding, printing etc. So you'll see unauthorized editions in some cases, such as translations of popular books that haven't actually been officially released in that language yet, but the market won't be flooded by free hardcovers available worldwide.
Files aren't like that. They can be trivially duplicated and redistributed, so the number of copies can explode far beyond authorized releases with low effort. So the ratio of bought copies to unauthorized copies may be far lower than with any physical object such as a book. It's cheap and easy to produce a compilation of, say, "Adobe's Greatest Hits" and hawk it in countries which traditionally won't care if you openly sell them on street corners -- or to upload them to P2P services and let people download for free.
Look up the "Audio Home Recording Act". I believe it has specific exceptions for such things granting significantly more rights regarding recordings on tape for personal reasons.
I'm not sure that's really the best way to gain attention, much as wandering around a bad neighborhood loudly banging a sword against a shield or randomly firing a handgun isn't either.
/wrong/ kind of attention, if anything's advanced enough to actually detect and respond before one runs out of warheads.
Advertising "we have so many nuclear warheads that we can explode them for broadcasting a cry for attention" might reasonably attract the
It's probably a local cultural bias.
It might be highly unexpected for a gaijin to be fluent to the point that it may be denied even in the face of contrary evidence.
On the other hand, I don't think Americans in the US would blink at all if tourist came by speaking perfect American English, unless it was grammatically far more correct than what the locals were used to; the expectation may in fact be the other way around given that English is a very common non-native spoken language.