If you offer a robber a big shotgun and give him the right and immunity to use it on an unarmed little old lady, and even publicly encourage him to do so, would you blame him if he did just that?
Have the law changed, because it's the law that gave those RIAA guys the power to destroy peoples' lives. And those responsible for the laws are the elected representatives, not those who bought them in the first place.
Do you really think this silly law is about DRM? IP rights? Copyright infrigement? C'mon! Just like the anti p2p legislation, it will be ignored by nearly everyone, and the government won't even try to enforce it on normal citizens.
The real reason for such widely disobeyed laws is for the government to have a tool they can smash on the heads of people they don't like and against whom they have no other legal recourse. An example? Merkel doesn't like, say, Germans converting to Islam. Now imagine some government employee at work: "Oh, it's not illegal to convert? Damn those constitutional rights! How can I brown-nose our Angie? I need that promotion pronto! Oh, yeah, let's check out his private CDs / DVDs collection: there WILL be something illegal there to haul him into jail! Hmm.... What would I do with the pay rise?"
Too narrow? Not so many "Konvertiten"? No problem! What about those pesky attac dissenters? Consumer rights groups? People protesting against taxes? Peace activists?... All of them will have compromitting CDs/DVDs somewhere, so government can selectively apply its silly anti-circumvention law to silence them too. Normal population has nothing to fear at all from this: it's a purely political law, that will be used for political purpuses only (plus a few token normal cases, so nobody gets all too suspicious).
Wasn't it Asimov who introduced the idea of the neuron whip as a means to ensure compliance? It's scary we've come down this. What a great way to force people to work on the fields, like they used to in the past. Or in sweat shops somewhere in China... Being lazy? Sweep 'em all broadly one second or so, that'll teach them!
I'm glad to be old enough not to see this happen in my lifetime (or be affected by it should it happen). But young people will have a helluva struggle to turn back the clock and repel this.
Quite the contrary will happen: once it becomes mainstream, riot police will be delighted to use it. They fire water cannons and tear gas at bonded crowds too, don't they? Never underestimate the sadistic streaks of human nature. Give them a weapon to inflict pain, they'll use it. And since our countries are slowly but inexorably morphing into police states, and these weapons are accelerating this downward spiral, we're headed to a painful future.
Wait a moment here! Isn't that a hidden subliminal pernicious message from a RIAA artist: that sharing of music files is actually stealing? But is it really? Since when has it become common to call copying (not moving) of bytes "stealing" instead of "duplicating"? If at all, duplication contributes to the author's popularity, and increases his (but especially his label's) wealth out of residual CD and concert tickets sales. Wouldn't that be free advertising, the very opposite of stealing?
Oh, really? Reminds me of the quote: "Bullets don't kill people. It's the holes that the bullets tear open that do."
Isn't it with words that governments get their populace to wage wars, isn't it with words that nazis pushed their populace to commit the biggest murder of all times, isn't it with words that islamists spread their ideology and hatred, isn't it with (offensive) words, that the enemy gets dehumanized? Yes, bullets (words) don't harm, but the holes (peoples' reaction to words) can do and did in the past on a gigantic scale. Please beware of hate speech.
Most other parts of the BKA bill would have caused hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens hit the streets some 15 or 20 years ago, but go largely unnoticed because of the Bundestrojaner smoke grenade. (And the claim that whoever opposes the bill will have to take the responsibility for the victims of coming terrorist attacks.)
Yes, indeed. But that's not the only reason, neither is it limited to Germany. In all western countries, people have grown very passive w.r.t. increased government surveilliance for quite some time now (starting even before 9/11). Actually, most seem even to welcome that very idea. The frog is already being boiled to death, and still not taking notice. It won't jump out now; it's already way too late. Why is that so? Perhaps because the current generation "24" role models have shifted, and most of us didn't grow up under a dictatorship to know what it's like.
but to build a base, methinks youd need something heftier..
Not necessarily. All you need is more flights and/or round-trips.
Actually, building a moon station, while farther away, may still cost less energy than building a space station, if done right, because you don't have to lift as much mass from the Earth! Most of the heavy materials needed for the superstructure is already on the moon. Just dig out some caves (which can be done by robots which don't need a costly artificial atmosphere), seal 'em off with light titanium or similar stuff flown in from the earth, fill it with the usual set of cables, pipes etc... and there you have a nice, perfectly usable permanent underground moon base! It may take some years to build, but since it's a modular design, it can be done over an extended period of time. And if you're already on the moon, you could start mining and using the local minerals etc... to extend the station.
So would moving the bittorrent protocol to UDP solve this specific problem? UDP doesn't have a reset bit
IMHO that would be terrible and not advisable. UDP doesn't have flow-control; and you can easily get overwhelmed with misbehaving UDP clients endlessly sending layer-7 connection-request packets at a mind-boggling rate. Even ICMP source quench packets back to those misbehaving hosts won't help because they're often blocked on the path due to the increasingly firewalled nature of the backbones themselves.
Even non-Muslim Arabs can be Israel's enemies, like Christian Arab George Habash, founder and leader of the PFLP; while some members of the Knesset are (apparently) loyal Arab Muslim Israelis.
That would be a pretty dumb thing to do for a federal agency. Normally, they'd use IPs mapped to innocuous.com addresses. If they're using their "real" (as in: official) DNS PTRs, it's probably NOT meant as surveillance, but as random noise like we get from everywhere... unlikely something targetted.
If you have detailed logs (not just summaries), you may be able to analyze where this bot came from, and what pages it started crawling.
Soon, encryption for private e-mails will be forbidden as well. But don't worry: hide your communication in spams: I'll coin the term spamenography for that (like steganography). Ideal to thwart traffic analysis and it provides a lot of plausible deniability.
I'm a huge fan of TMDA, but I've dropped it a few months ago, because greylisting, DNSBLs and very stringent checks at SMTP level managed to drop the amount of spam to less than 0.5% of all legit mail, while keeping the amount of false positives to a bare minimum. Almost all mails that TMDA autoresponded to were legitimate anyway after all the previous combing. Basically, there was no need to use TMDA anymore.
Actually, I was lucky, because shortly after I've stopped TMDA, my domain was hit by a huge tidal wave of spam. Amongst the few spams that still managed to sneak in, there were at least 3 fake addresses whom I know as being spam traps for DNSBLs. Had TMDA auto-responded to those, my subnet would have been immediately listed there. Clearing it wouldn't have been a problem, just a (well-deserved) hassle.
Why would that be impossible? Technically, it's quite feasible:
The COFF-PE format is well documented, so a dynamic linker for that is trivial to write in a clean-room environment. Probably been done already.
The Win32 API is stable and well documented as well, so wrapping it in an emulation library is also easy. Been done in the Wine project.
A registry is nothing more than a little database: implement it anyway you like, e.g. with flat files, with a DB server, SQLite etc... and provide hooks in the supporting emulation libraries.
Other Windows idiosyncraties are similarly relatively easy to duplicate / emulate.
The real problem is not as much technical as it is legal / red-tape: the APIs are copyrighted by Microsoft, and some stuff is almost certainly patented as well. So any emulation that we can come up with will necessarily by encumbered in some way. This is completely different from FreeBSD's Linuxulator, which doesn't suffer from legal interoperability problems (and which was MUCH easier to write and maintain since the mapping between both very similar systems is almost trivial).
The problem is, that many people don't agree with your definition of property. Stealing means taking away something from someone, so that they don't have it anymore. With p2p, nobody is stealing the masters from the record companies; hell, they're not even stealing the CDs like in shop lifting. The labels STILL have the music, and can still sell it. No loss, no theft. It's exactly as if you listened to music on radio, recorded that music to listen it again and again. It's been done since recording on cassettes was possible, and it didn't ruin artists or labels. Exactly the opposite happened: it helped spread their music even more, as in free advertisememnt. Thinking that copying is stealing is exactly what the IFPI cartell and their cronies wants you to believe nowadays. Some politicians seem to fall for it (after conveniently obtaining generous donations for their campaigns), and big media conglomerates, themselves IFPI members or affiliated, keep on the brainwashing. But unlike what Goebbels said, repeating a lie often enough still doesn't magically turn it into the truth.
It's all about education. Because today's students will be tomorrow's elites and even lawmakers, harassing them today will help shape their beliefs and awareness of how screwed the copyright system has become in DMCA-land. Once they have positions of influence, some of them will remember their college/U times, and help us get rid of all those mad laws. Because, frankly, the real problem today is that new students are starting to buy the MAFIAAs "copying is stealing" nonsense / myth; and that needs to be reverted, even if it becomes painful.
It's not really different from what happened to RMS at MIT! He too felt so harassed in his freedom to share information that he finally came up with a fantastic alternative. There would be no OSS today, had they been more liberal at MIT AI-lab back then.
So, for now, DMCA-like laws are a regal pain in the a**, but the more they hit prospective elites with it, the sooner they'll dissolve into nothingness once those elites come to power. It just takes some time, that's all. At least I hope so.
Unless there's a world-wide conspiracy or a single supplier of "police spyware" in the world, Anti-Spyware products from other countries will not follow "don't detect us" order
The single supplier of police spyware will ultimately be the OS vendor. And with a near-monoculture based on a closed-source OS, you bet who will open the backdoor for over 90% of all desktop PCs worldwide. Do YOU know what's hidden in all those kernel modules, DLLs etc. of your default Windows install? Ditto for Macs. Only Linux/BSD are (at least for now) somewhat secure, provided you avoided the closed-source drivers like the plague.
The moment it gets really dangerous, is when the police troyans will be embedded in silicon, a.k.a in every network adapter, hard disk controller, keyboard controller etc...; AND when it can be reached/activated from the outside somehow. Let's see: Network adapters: check! Graphic adapters? they could communicate over the bus with the NICs: check! Keyboard controllers? via USB bridge: check! Disk controllers? Again, over the bus, without OS intervention: check!
But at least for now, the easiest way to install a police troyan is to ship it with Windows, or with a popular driver of that platform. Or maybe, it's not necessary to ship anything: just use the pre-installed backdoors (every blackbox has some). Conversely, the easiest way to keep safe (for now), is to use an open source OS, compile everything yourself (Gentoo? BSDs?), and be generally very alert on security; esp. considering that you could slurp a distro over a compromised link (man in the middle attack).
Ueber alles, The National Anthem of the Nazi Party
Ahemm... Ueber alles is not the national anthem of the nazi party. It was and is still the national anthem of Germany (but they don't sing the first two stanzas anymore).
You may be thinking of the Horst-Wessel-Song. And since that guy died 1930, more than 70 years ago, his copyright expired in the countries that implement the Bern Convention on Copyright using the lifetime + 70 years rule.
Sorry to point out the obvious, but when you transform popular culture into (intellectual) property, and enact draconian laws to enforce this, shakedowns like these are the absolute logical consequence.
Perhaps it's time to rethink about IP in general, and in particular about the time it should remain an exclusive private privilege. Something like 2 to 5 years ought to be more than enough; not those silly lifetime + 70 years of the Bern Convention (or even worse/longer in the US). Remember guys: popular culture and artists living on performances existed long before IP/copyright laws were enacted.
Sorry for being naive; but isn't it time to burst this self-imposed bubble of IP (a.k.a. imaginary property) and get free at last?
Why would that be impossible? Google sells advertising. Every company worldwide can buy their service, even if they are located in the US. In fact, Google doesn't have subsidiaries in all countries all around the globe, but they do have paying customers nearly everywhere. For them setting up shop in EU is just a matter of convenience; but AFAIK no company in the EU is required to exclusively deal with EU companies.
Perhaps EU's customs and export/import tariffs for cross-border services could be the real problem? That would be indeed a problem for Google. But even then: they could use an EU proxy company (a.k.a. partnership), and not a true subsidiary for this, or couldn't they? I just don't know.
It's still fact that Google has one of the worst data keeping policies
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If you offer a robber a big shotgun and give him the right and immunity to use it on an unarmed little old lady, and even publicly encourage him to do so, would you blame him if he did just that?
Have the law changed, because it's the law that gave those RIAA guys the power to destroy peoples' lives. And those responsible for the laws are the elected representatives, not those who bought them in the first place.
Do you really think this silly law is about DRM? IP rights? Copyright infrigement? C'mon! Just like the anti p2p legislation, it will be ignored by nearly everyone, and the government won't even try to enforce it on normal citizens. The real reason for such widely disobeyed laws is for the government to have a tool they can smash on the heads of people they don't like and against whom they have no other legal recourse. An example? Merkel doesn't like, say, Germans converting to Islam. Now imagine some government employee at work: "Oh, it's not illegal to convert? Damn those constitutional rights! How can I brown-nose our Angie? I need that promotion pronto! Oh, yeah, let's check out his private CDs / DVDs collection: there WILL be something illegal there to haul him into jail! Hmm.... What would I do with the pay rise?" Too narrow? Not so many "Konvertiten"? No problem! What about those pesky attac dissenters? Consumer rights groups? People protesting against taxes? Peace activists?... All of them will have compromitting CDs/DVDs somewhere, so government can selectively apply its silly anti-circumvention law to silence them too. Normal population has nothing to fear at all from this: it's a purely political law, that will be used for political purpuses only (plus a few token normal cases, so nobody gets all too suspicious).
Wasn't it Asimov who introduced the idea of the neuron whip as a means to ensure compliance? It's scary we've come down this. What a great way to force people to work on the fields, like they used to in the past. Or in sweat shops somewhere in China... Being lazy? Sweep 'em all broadly one second or so, that'll teach them!
I'm glad to be old enough not to see this happen in my lifetime (or be affected by it should it happen). But young people will have a helluva struggle to turn back the clock and repel this.
Quite the contrary will happen: once it becomes mainstream, riot police will be delighted to use it. They fire water cannons and tear gas at bonded crowds too, don't they? Never underestimate the sadistic streaks of human nature. Give them a weapon to inflict pain, they'll use it. And since our countries are slowly but inexorably morphing into police states, and these weapons are accelerating this downward spiral, we're headed to a painful future.
Wait a moment here! Isn't that a hidden subliminal pernicious message from a RIAA artist: that sharing of music files is actually stealing? But is it really? Since when has it become common to call copying (not moving) of bytes "stealing" instead of "duplicating"? If at all, duplication contributes to the author's popularity, and increases his (but especially his label's) wealth out of residual CD and concert tickets sales. Wouldn't that be free advertising, the very opposite of stealing?
was it a big tag that said "Made in USA"?
If it were from the US, it would have been made in China... as the tag's toxic paint would show: and that would be a helluva expensive recall!
RFID chips do emit radio signals when sending data back to the transmitter. A receive-only RFID is kinda pointless...
Words, even offensive words, harm nobody.
Oh, really? Reminds me of the quote: "Bullets don't kill people. It's the holes that the bullets tear open that do."
Isn't it with words that governments get their populace to wage wars, isn't it with words that nazis pushed their populace to commit the biggest murder of all times, isn't it with words that islamists spread their ideology and hatred, isn't it with (offensive) words, that the enemy gets dehumanized? Yes, bullets (words) don't harm, but the holes (peoples' reaction to words) can do and did in the past on a gigantic scale. Please beware of hate speech.
Most other parts of the BKA bill would have caused hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens hit the streets some 15 or 20 years ago, but go largely unnoticed because of the Bundestrojaner smoke grenade. (And the claim that whoever opposes the bill will have to take the responsibility for the victims of coming terrorist attacks.)
Yes, indeed. But that's not the only reason, neither is it limited to Germany. In all western countries, people have grown very passive w.r.t. increased government surveilliance for quite some time now (starting even before 9/11). Actually, most seem even to welcome that very idea. The frog is already being boiled to death, and still not taking notice. It won't jump out now; it's already way too late. Why is that so? Perhaps because the current generation "24" role models have shifted, and most of us didn't grow up under a dictatorship to know what it's like.
but to build a base, methinks youd need something heftier..
Not necessarily. All you need is more flights and/or round-trips.
Actually, building a moon station, while farther away, may still cost less energy than building a space station, if done right, because you don't have to lift as much mass from the Earth! Most of the heavy materials needed for the superstructure is already on the moon. Just dig out some caves (which can be done by robots which don't need a costly artificial atmosphere), seal 'em off with light titanium or similar stuff flown in from the earth, fill it with the usual set of cables, pipes etc... and there you have a nice, perfectly usable permanent underground moon base! It may take some years to build, but since it's a modular design, it can be done over an extended period of time. And if you're already on the moon, you could start mining and using the local minerals etc... to extend the station.
L. Frank Baum's books have been in the public domain for quite some time now. They're available in Project Gutenberg, on Wikisource and everywhere.
So would moving the bittorrent protocol to UDP solve this specific problem? UDP doesn't have a reset bit
IMHO that would be terrible and not advisable. UDP doesn't have flow-control; and you can easily get overwhelmed with misbehaving UDP clients endlessly sending layer-7 connection-request packets at a mind-boggling rate. Even ICMP source quench packets back to those misbehaving hosts won't help because they're often blocked on the path due to the increasingly firewalled nature of the backbones themselves.
"Arabs" != Muslims.
Even non-Muslim Arabs can be Israel's enemies, like Christian Arab George Habash, founder and leader of the PFLP; while some members of the Knesset are (apparently) loyal Arab Muslim Israelis.
Have they used hand-optimized assembler because C was not fast enough, or because they broke [GC]C?
That would be a pretty dumb thing to do for a federal agency. Normally, they'd use IPs mapped to innocuous .com addresses. If they're using their "real" (as in: official) DNS PTRs, it's probably NOT meant as surveillance, but as random noise like we get from everywhere... unlikely something targetted.
If you have detailed logs (not just summaries), you may be able to analyze where this bot came from, and what pages it started crawling.
Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!
Soon, encryption for private e-mails will be forbidden as well. But don't worry: hide your communication in spams: I'll coin the term spamenography for that (like steganography). Ideal to thwart traffic analysis and it provides a lot of plausible deniability.
I'm a huge fan of TMDA, but I've dropped it a few months ago, because greylisting, DNSBLs and very stringent checks at SMTP level managed to drop the amount of spam to less than 0.5% of all legit mail, while keeping the amount of false positives to a bare minimum. Almost all mails that TMDA autoresponded to were legitimate anyway after all the previous combing. Basically, there was no need to use TMDA anymore.
Actually, I was lucky, because shortly after I've stopped TMDA, my domain was hit by a huge tidal wave of spam. Amongst the few spams that still managed to sneak in, there were at least 3 fake addresses whom I know as being spam traps for DNSBLs. Had TMDA auto-responded to those, my subnet would have been immediately listed there. Clearing it wouldn't have been a problem, just a (well-deserved) hassle.
Why would that be impossible? Technically, it's quite feasible:
The real problem is not as much technical as it is legal / red-tape: the APIs are copyrighted by Microsoft, and some stuff is almost certainly patented as well. So any emulation that we can come up with will necessarily by encumbered in some way. This is completely different from FreeBSD's Linuxulator, which doesn't suffer from legal interoperability problems (and which was MUCH easier to write and maintain since the mapping between both very similar systems is almost trivial).
The problem is, that many people don't agree with your definition of property. Stealing means taking away something from someone, so that they don't have it anymore. With p2p, nobody is stealing the masters from the record companies; hell, they're not even stealing the CDs like in shop lifting. The labels STILL have the music, and can still sell it. No loss, no theft. It's exactly as if you listened to music on radio, recorded that music to listen it again and again. It's been done since recording on cassettes was possible, and it didn't ruin artists or labels. Exactly the opposite happened: it helped spread their music even more, as in free advertisememnt. Thinking that copying is stealing is exactly what the IFPI cartell and their cronies wants you to believe nowadays. Some politicians seem to fall for it (after conveniently obtaining generous donations for their campaigns), and big media conglomerates, themselves IFPI members or affiliated, keep on the brainwashing. But unlike what Goebbels said, repeating a lie often enough still doesn't magically turn it into the truth.
It's all about education. Because today's students will be tomorrow's elites and even lawmakers, harassing them today will help shape their beliefs and awareness of how screwed the copyright system has become in DMCA-land. Once they have positions of influence, some of them will remember their college/U times, and help us get rid of all those mad laws. Because, frankly, the real problem today is that new students are starting to buy the MAFIAAs "copying is stealing" nonsense / myth; and that needs to be reverted, even if it becomes painful.
It's not really different from what happened to RMS at MIT! He too felt so harassed in his freedom to share information that he finally came up with a fantastic alternative. There would be no OSS today, had they been more liberal at MIT AI-lab back then.
So, for now, DMCA-like laws are a regal pain in the a**, but the more they hit prospective elites with it, the sooner they'll dissolve into nothingness once those elites come to power. It just takes some time, that's all. At least I hope so.
Oh wait, maybe they'll copyright the the trojan so the bad guys can't copy it and use it on other computers...
Whut? P'lice trojan copyrighted? Quick, set up a torrent on TPB to preserve it for posterity!
Unless there's a world-wide conspiracy or a single supplier of "police spyware" in the world, Anti-Spyware products from other countries will not follow "don't detect us" order
The single supplier of police spyware will ultimately be the OS vendor. And with a near-monoculture based on a closed-source OS, you bet who will open the backdoor for over 90% of all desktop PCs worldwide. Do YOU know what's hidden in all those kernel modules, DLLs etc. of your default Windows install? Ditto for Macs. Only Linux/BSD are (at least for now) somewhat secure, provided you avoided the closed-source drivers like the plague.
The moment it gets really dangerous, is when the police troyans will be embedded in silicon, a.k.a in every network adapter, hard disk controller, keyboard controller etc...; AND when it can be reached/activated from the outside somehow. Let's see: Network adapters: check! Graphic adapters? they could communicate over the bus with the NICs: check! Keyboard controllers? via USB bridge: check! Disk controllers? Again, over the bus, without OS intervention: check!
But at least for now, the easiest way to install a police troyan is to ship it with Windows, or with a popular driver of that platform. Or maybe, it's not necessary to ship anything: just use the pre-installed backdoors (every blackbox has some). Conversely, the easiest way to keep safe (for now), is to use an open source OS, compile everything yourself (Gentoo? BSDs?), and be generally very alert on security; esp. considering that you could slurp a distro over a compromised link (man in the middle attack).
Ueber alles, The National Anthem of the Nazi Party
Ahemm... Ueber alles is not the national anthem of the nazi party. It was and is still the national anthem of Germany (but they don't sing the first two stanzas anymore).
You may be thinking of the Horst-Wessel-Song. And since that guy died 1930, more than 70 years ago, his copyright expired in the countries that implement the Bern Convention on Copyright using the lifetime + 70 years rule.
Sorry to point out the obvious, but when you transform popular culture into (intellectual) property, and enact draconian laws to enforce this, shakedowns like these are the absolute logical consequence.
Perhaps it's time to rethink about IP in general, and in particular about the time it should remain an exclusive private privilege. Something like 2 to 5 years ought to be more than enough; not those silly lifetime + 70 years of the Bern Convention (or even worse/longer in the US). Remember guys: popular culture and artists living on performances existed long before IP/copyright laws were enacted.
Sorry for being naive; but isn't it time to burst this self-imposed bubble of IP (a.k.a. imaginary property) and get free at last?
Why would that be impossible? Google sells advertising. Every company worldwide can buy their service, even if they are located in the US. In fact, Google doesn't have subsidiaries in all countries all around the globe, but they do have paying customers nearly everywhere. For them setting up shop in EU is just a matter of convenience; but AFAIK no company in the EU is required to exclusively deal with EU companies.
Perhaps EU's customs and export/import tariffs for cross-border services could be the real problem? That would be indeed a problem for Google. But even then: they could use an EU proxy company (a.k.a. partnership), and not a true subsidiary for this, or couldn't they? I just don't know.
It's still fact that Google has one of the worst data keeping policies
Agreed!