Oh yeah, did I mention that he tried a comeback earlier this year? The political class mostly welcomed him back. The public didn't. He went away again. I have no doubt he'll be back.
And let's not forget that this guy has actually got a position within the European Commission, yet another political aristocracy that is quite immune to public criticism and scrutiny. Quite fitting.
The Pirate Bay has already been blocked at the BGP level in the past, at least for a short time. That would be a much more fundamental attack than a mere IP block that is easily circumvented with proxies.
It has been said that adversity breeds tougher organisms. The same holds true for TPB, because the whole concept of a centralized index for BitTorrent was already a step backwards compared to e2dk-like searches. Even with the Pirate Bay moving to magnet links, it was still a centralized index. So it was only a matter of time until the powers that be would choke that single point of failure to death. Expect the same to happen to all those cyberlocker sites: there ain't so many of them after all, and the MAFIAA can and eventually will fight them tooth and nail until they fold.
The more pressure is being put on those highly visible sites, the sooner truly distributed anonymous censorship-resistant and highly resilient p2p systems would not only emerge, but gain widespread adoption. And the more legitimate mainstream sites start appearing on those p2p networks as well, the more those networks will become indispensable and necessary part of everybody's infrastructure. THEN, and only then, governments won't be able to outlaw anon p2p, and we will have won this war, against all odds and against formidable opponents with seemingly unlimited resources. That would be the victory of the free human spirit.
Or, to put in another way: we've grown too lazy by sticking to existing, but highly vulnerable file sharing mechanisms. Only effective pressure from the MAFIAA will help us move forward towards next generation better and more robust architectures. Maybe these Copyright Taliban are doing us a favor, by forcing us to develop and migrate towards a communication system that will be truly uncensorable and that will be our main channel for free speech in the not so distant future.
Where are mod points when you need them? I wish I could moderate the parent +5 insightful! University Libraries are indeed the ideal publishers. It is mind boggling that it didn't happen yet... at least on a wider(er) scale.
His punishment has already been served, without trial and without due process.
But... but... without the trillions dollars of statutory damages from copyright infringement, the Entertainment Cartel will certainly go bankrupt. Would anybody please think of the MAFIAA executives' children?
What does make you think that spam couldn't carry hidden messages destined to thwart traffic analysis? From the point of view of the NSA, collecting all this traffic, and trying to figure out hidden patterns in it does make sense (even though I highly doubt it that they are actually analyzing all this spam).
Most Common Lisp systems compile functions on-the-fly, and this means also each time you edit a function. Some C++ IDEs can also recompile the compile-unit on-the-fly as you go. Sure, recompiling a Lisp function may be a tad bit faster than recompiling a whole C++ compile-unit, but you won't notice this in practice, because compile-units tend to be pretty small(ish) nowadays.
Even though this proposal seems to have been shelved (for now?), it is still a silly move in the context of the EU's Common Market. Here in Germany, there's a similar tax on blank media, but you can always buy them blank-media-tax-free from Luxemburg and other EU countries that don't have this extra tax. And it is perfectly legal to do so too, because EU laws trump local laws (more precisely, EU laws as imported in national laws have higher precedence over other national laws).
The only people who truly don't pay any tax are the ones rich enough to hire the best accountants.
Yes. But don't forget those who pay negative taxes, a.k.a. receiving handouts from the social welfare system. They do pay many indirect taxes like sales tax, but that is more than compensated for by their tax-subsidized income. Sure, it's not huge amounts of money we're talking about when seen on an individual basis, but on a national scale, depending on the size of the country and economy, that's many billions of negative taxes per year.
Let me see: the guy downloaded a copy of the code, he didn't remove the original, right? If code were physical property, the original would have magically and necessarily vanished from GS's system the moment he downloaded it. If it was still there, code cannot be physical property. It's as simple as that. Of course, it could still be considered intellectual property, but that's something entirely different and not what the Court had to decide.
Well, any RFC-822 validator that is based on keeping an explicit whitelist current, is doomed anyway, has always been and will always be. They'll have to be RFC-822 (or its successors) compliant without referring to whitelists, or they'll need to actively query the DNS for a valid MX record before validating. That's tough, but it's inevitable in the long run.
That gives a big "now STFU!" to the anti-US agitators. who expend endless energy hating 'US domination of the Internet".
It won't. DNS and ccTLDs is just one part of the bigger picture. The way the Internet backbones are currently interconnected and its operators being mostly under direct or indirect US jurisdiction, there are multiple ways for the US Government to censor sites them deem undesirable... on a global scale. For example, if the US wanted really hard to kill The Pirate Bay, all it needs to do is to instruct its major Tier-1 backbone providers (one would be enough already) to drop the BGP route announcement to TPB's upstream provider, and TPB is dead, worldwide, without appeal. There are not many major upstream providers that are willing to risk the (BGP-)death penalty w.r.t. Tier-1 backbones. So the US Government's influence on the global Internet will stay, no matter how we reorganize the DNS.
Banning encryption will make eavesdropping on your banking transactions so much easier for the common thief; it will make reading out secret data from stolen corporate notebooks so much easier without full hdd-encryption. It will open wireless networks to each and everybody. Congress, please show your incompetence once again, and make this country the laughing stock of the world... again (remember the laws banning exporting encryption software as it was considered ammunition, but allowing publishing of the encryption algorithm on a t-shirt because that was free speech?)
By the way, other countries used to have similar idiotic bans on encryption that made them silly in retrospect: remember France for their laws that made encryption the exclusive domain of the State and the State the sole authorized licensing authority for everything crypto-related? Yeah, let's go back in time and repeat the mistakes of the past.
That's quite true. The only real way to oppose coercion, is by ubiquitous technical means. I.e. by evolving a highly desired network layer on top of the existing one that can only be accessed with solid anonymizing protocols.
Imagine e.g. something like Freenet, but instead of the meager and low-quality mostly demo crap it currently contains, it would be filled with invaluable highly popular sites that everyone including all those politicians and their parents and kids, want and NEED to access on a regular basis. Think of Twitter, Facebook and Google going Freenet-only! Without going through Freenet, those sites would simply be invisible, and this, the general population won't tolerate for long. This is the only way to ensure enduring and unwavering political support and commitment for anonymization protocols on the net: make it required prerequisite on the technical level and have popular sites adopt and embrace it.
... and NO this is not about torrents or PB or any other crap like that the CIA and the NSA could care less about.
This (naively) assumes the Government is working for the benefit of the People, and not for the Corporations. But is this assumption (still?) true in this day and age? And if it was, how long will it remain true in the foreseeable future?
Looks like a deja-vu, considering MIT's Connection Machine. While the interconnect will be less regular (not a hypercube), the message passing between cores will have to be routed in one way or the other, just as with the CM. So how is that news?
If it ever was the case (and it's doubtful), it was a long, long time ago... when Copyright didn't last more then 2 decades from the time some work of art was created. The perversion of Copyright we have today (life + 70/95 years, or perpetual in case of corporations-owned copyrights) has long outlived its usefulness as promoting art-creation.
Personally I'm rather surprised Europe hasn't had more civil unrest than they have, with countries like Spain at 23% unemployment and rising. That's a lot of people with no bread and you don't enjoy the circus on an empty stomach.
Chalk this up on comparatively higher social welfare standards that are the norm in Europe, handouts which tend to keep people passive, even when unemployed.
I love our cute red squirrels too, and it's great when they're in one's backyard. Maybe the reason some Americans don't like squirrels is that they're of another type.
Why would that be ridiculous? It all depends on the interpretation of said number. And who said that a number has only one possible interpretation? What is a, say, MP3 file for one person, could be interpreted as white noise (and thus a having zero-creativity value) when rendered as an image by another person, for example. Why would that particular number be protected, regardless of its interpretation?
The point here is that EVERY file is basically nothing more than a huge bignum, and the question is whether numbers (as huge as they may be) are copyrightable or not.
Slashdot Mirror
And let's not forget that this guy has actually got a position within the European Commission, yet another political aristocracy that is quite immune to public criticism and scrutiny. Quite fitting.
Stop Piracy pronto, or we'll level Toronto!
The Pirate Bay has already been blocked at the BGP level in the past, at least for a short time. That would be a much more fundamental attack than a mere IP block that is easily circumvented with proxies.
The more pressure is being put on those highly visible sites, the sooner truly distributed anonymous censorship-resistant and highly resilient p2p systems would not only emerge, but gain widespread adoption. And the more legitimate mainstream sites start appearing on those p2p networks as well, the more those networks will become indispensable and necessary part of everybody's infrastructure. THEN, and only then, governments won't be able to outlaw anon p2p, and we will have won this war, against all odds and against formidable opponents with seemingly unlimited resources. That would be the victory of the free human spirit.
Or, to put in another way: we've grown too lazy by sticking to existing, but highly vulnerable file sharing mechanisms. Only effective pressure from the MAFIAA will help us move forward towards next generation better and more robust architectures. Maybe these Copyright Taliban are doing us a favor, by forcing us to develop and migrate towards a communication system that will be truly uncensorable and that will be our main channel for free speech in the not so distant future.
Where are mod points when you need them? I wish I could moderate the parent +5 insightful! University Libraries are indeed the ideal publishers. It is mind boggling that it didn't happen yet... at least on a wider(er) scale.
But... but... without the trillions dollars of statutory damages from copyright infringement, the Entertainment Cartel will certainly go bankrupt. Would anybody please think of the MAFIAA executives' children?
What does make you think that spam couldn't carry hidden messages destined to thwart traffic analysis? From the point of view of the NSA, collecting all this traffic, and trying to figure out hidden patterns in it does make sense (even though I highly doubt it that they are actually analyzing all this spam).
Most Common Lisp systems compile functions on-the-fly, and this means also each time you edit a function. Some C++ IDEs can also recompile the compile-unit on-the-fly as you go. Sure, recompiling a Lisp function may be a tad bit faster than recompiling a whole C++ compile-unit, but you won't notice this in practice, because compile-units tend to be pretty small(ish) nowadays.
Even though this proposal seems to have been shelved (for now?), it is still a silly move in the context of the EU's Common Market. Here in Germany, there's a similar tax on blank media, but you can always buy them blank-media-tax-free from Luxemburg and other EU countries that don't have this extra tax. And it is perfectly legal to do so too, because EU laws trump local laws (more precisely, EU laws as imported in national laws have higher precedence over other national laws).
Yes. But don't forget those who pay negative taxes, a.k.a. receiving handouts from the social welfare system. They do pay many indirect taxes like sales tax, but that is more than compensated for by their tax-subsidized income. Sure, it's not huge amounts of money we're talking about when seen on an individual basis, but on a national scale, depending on the size of the country and economy, that's many billions of negative taxes per year.
Let me see: the guy downloaded a copy of the code, he didn't remove the original, right? If code were physical property, the original would have magically and necessarily vanished from GS's system the moment he downloaded it. If it was still there, code cannot be physical property. It's as simple as that. Of course, it could still be considered intellectual property, but that's something entirely different and not what the Court had to decide.
Well, any RFC-822 validator that is based on keeping an explicit whitelist current, is doomed anyway, has always been and will always be. They'll have to be RFC-822 (or its successors) compliant without referring to whitelists, or they'll need to actively query the DNS for a valid MX record before validating. That's tough, but it's inevitable in the long run.
It won't. DNS and ccTLDs is just one part of the bigger picture. The way the Internet backbones are currently interconnected and its operators being mostly under direct or indirect US jurisdiction, there are multiple ways for the US Government to censor sites them deem undesirable... on a global scale. For example, if the US wanted really hard to kill The Pirate Bay, all it needs to do is to instruct its major Tier-1 backbone providers (one would be enough already) to drop the BGP route announcement to TPB's upstream provider, and TPB is dead, worldwide, without appeal. There are not many major upstream providers that are willing to risk the (BGP-)death penalty w.r.t. Tier-1 backbones. So the US Government's influence on the global Internet will stay, no matter how we reorganize the DNS.
By the way, other countries used to have similar idiotic bans on encryption that made them silly in retrospect: remember France for their laws that made encryption the exclusive domain of the State and the State the sole authorized licensing authority for everything crypto-related? Yeah, let's go back in time and repeat the mistakes of the past.
Imagine e.g. something like Freenet, but instead of the meager and low-quality mostly demo crap it currently contains, it would be filled with invaluable highly popular sites that everyone including all those politicians and their parents and kids, want and NEED to access on a regular basis. Think of Twitter, Facebook and Google going Freenet-only! Without going through Freenet, those sites would simply be invisible, and this, the general population won't tolerate for long. This is the only way to ensure enduring and unwavering political support and commitment for anonymization protocols on the net: make it required prerequisite on the technical level and have popular sites adopt and embrace it.
This (naively) assumes the Government is working for the benefit of the People, and not for the Corporations. But is this assumption (still?) true in this day and age? And if it was, how long will it remain true in the foreseeable future?
Looks like a deja-vu, considering MIT's Connection Machine. While the interconnect will be less regular (not a hypercube), the message passing between cores will have to be routed in one way or the other, just as with the CM. So how is that news?
Well, they're about to jail their entire population...
As a matter of fact, Eurozone countries are already paying back the Greek for the privilege. They just do it under a false pretext.
If it ever was the case (and it's doubtful), it was a long, long time ago... when Copyright didn't last more then 2 decades from the time some work of art was created. The perversion of Copyright we have today (life + 70/95 years, or perpetual in case of corporations-owned copyrights) has long outlived its usefulness as promoting art-creation.
It's also an excellent excuse in case something went wrong: "sorry, I couldn't help it: my car caught a virus!"
Chalk this up on comparatively higher social welfare standards that are the norm in Europe, handouts which tend to keep people passive, even when unemployed.
I love our cute red squirrels too, and it's great when they're in one's backyard. Maybe the reason some Americans don't like squirrels is that they're of another type.
Why would that be ridiculous? It all depends on the interpretation of said number. And who said that a number has only one possible interpretation? What is a, say, MP3 file for one person, could be interpreted as white noise (and thus a having zero-creativity value) when rendered as an image by another person, for example. Why would that particular number be protected, regardless of its interpretation?
The point here is that EVERY file is basically nothing more than a huge bignum, and the question is whether numbers (as huge as they may be) are copyrightable or not.