Holder said US District Judge Vaughn Walker, who is handling the case, was given a classified description of why the case must be dismissed so that the court can 'conduct its own independent assessment of our claim.'"
Would any (real) lawyers on Slashdot care to comment on how the Federal Rules of Procedure regard ex parte communications between the respondent and the judge, held secret from the plaintiff?
This doesn't even work in licensing with proper commercial corporations like the record labels and film studios. It will fall foul of "Hollywood Accounting". Normally this is applied to rip off artists who are promised a percentage of profits (they find the company they've dealt with has made no profits, they've all been moved into a different company). This is slightly harder with gross revenue, but not much.
Will this achieve anything more than raise funds for the ACLU?
Of course certain extreme kinds of speech are not protected by law. But there are criminal standards for incitement, harassment etc and this appears to go well beyond them. It's so overbroad not only doesn't it stand a hope of surviving constitutional scrutiny, it won't even persuade a unduly deferential junior court to ignore/deny that there is a constitutional bar.
One of the most controversial aspects of this proposal is China's involvement. Although the EU maintains that Galileo is only for civilian use, it appears that China disagrees.
Russia and China each have a 20% stake in the Galileo project, having invested 200 million euros. India has also pledged 300 million euros.
Apparently the EU has promised India that Galileo would not be denied to them in the event of anything less than "global war", making its use available during more limited military conflicts. It is hard to imagine that China has negotiated anything less.
This had led to speculation that the USA would simply shoot it down to prevent its use by hostile military powers.
The EU Referendum blog has been covering this assiduously.
On a slightly related note, a Firefox extension that searched links ahead and removed the link rendering for those that return a 404 might be handy (albeit fairly evil).
On a less related note, I've long been disappointed that some 300 series status codes in HTTP are so under-exploited, both by clients (e.g. automated bookmark management) and people running web sites.
The LINX Best Current Practice on Unsolicited Bulk E-mail ("the spam BCP") is carefully written so as to avoid being a way to create denial of service attacks.
LINX does not adjudicate complaints; our ISPs members do. You can complain to an ISP for tolerating spamvertised web sites just like you can complain to them for tolerating someone sending spam. If they follow Best Practice they will cut off the web site if, only if, and not before they satisfy themselves that the spam was sent by or with the consent of the web site owner.
Of course, it is possible that they could get it wrong; miscarriages of justice do occur in every area of life. This is not a reason not to have any rules at all. It is up to the ISP to take care when considering a complaint so as not to cut their customers off without good reason. Naturally, some will consider this an unnecessary delay - and even evidence that the ISP is not serious about cancelling the account. Well, it's not possible to please everybody all the time; you've just got to craft the best policy you can and run with it.
I'm disappointed the Slashdot editors didn't notice that e164.org is in essentially competition with e164.arpa; this is very important to understanding what e164.org is about. As the parent says, it's like Alternic or, to avoid the unfair comparison with Altnernic's business practices, New.net.
I don't accept my sibling post's claim that e164.org is not in competition with e164.arpa but is merely "supplementary": that's like saying ".travel" is "supplementary" to.com. The fact is, while any old joe can say that you should register your telephone number in their DNS zone, e164.arpa is the domain the RFC says to do it in. Having two such domains is to have two roots for this mapping, with the possibility of discrepancy between them. Surely that's significant enough for the editors to mention?
PSTN-DNS mapping is not an easy topic. For example, how would you like someone else coming along and registering *your* phone number in an ENUM server (and so being able to receive SIP VoIP calls intended for you)? I'd be interested to hear how e164.org plan to prevent this.
And finally, VoIP is pronounced as a single syllable, with the vowel sound rhyming with "boy":-)
I have to agree with the parent to this reply: having a policy blocking based on referrals is, except on a very temporary basis, just incredibly stupid.
Other sites should avoid copying this, not for "our" good, but for their own good.
It might make sense to process referrers to avoid the slashdot effect, while under an effective DDoS because somewhere like Slashdot has effectively overloaded you with traffic. But even that only makes sense if you've got "regular" users you'd rather serve than the unwashed masses of slashdot; if all you want is eyeballs then first-come-first-served matches your requirements.
But the real problem with this policy is that is encourages people not to send referrer data. This field is only provided for the benefit of the server site, it makes damn all difference to the client.
It's ten years since I first started working in commercial web development. I'm opposed to arguments from authority (so feel free to disregard this next comment) but in all that time it's become pretty clear to me that content providers desperately desire better information about their users (why else all those "free registration required" sites?). Persuading users (clients) to send less of it is just unbelievably counter-productive.
I'm not a fan of sending out lawyers' letters, or even quasi-lawyers'-letters, but it sounds like CMP could have readily stopped LinuxToday just by asking. Wouldn't that have made more sense? But this is still a "less bad" option; this isn't a conflict between the "free web" and commercial interests, it's just an example of a company making a mistake as to where their interests lie.
Astonishingly, there is no mention in the report on the United Kingdom of the IRA.
There is a section on the IRA in the appendix on "other Foreign Terrorist Organisations" which notes that the IRA "retains the ability to conduct paramilitary operations" but it accepts that "the IRA reiterated its commitment to the peace process and apologized to the families of what it called "non-combatants" who had been killed or injured by the IRA" without noting that its activities of "kidnappings, punishment beatings, extortion, smuggling, and robberies" are active and continuing.
The report does not mention that two of the leaders of the IRA Army Council were allowed to become Sinn Fein Ministers in the (currently suspended) government of Northern Ireland.
Sinn Feinn, a major political party in Northern Ireland, is acknowledged by everybody except itself as the political wing of the IRA. The name translates into English as "Ourselves Alone" - illuminating its racist basis. Sinn Fein is not mentioned in the report.
Most astonishingly, NORAID's role in fundraising for the IRA within the USA is not mentioned in the report either.
Americans should realise that many British people who are temperamentally and politically inclined to give full support to American foreign policy find it severely compromised by America's sentimental and hypocritical blindness to the IRA threat.
...is that the MPs aren't filtering their e-mail, it's under the centralised control of Parliament's IT Services Dept.
Consequently, MPs are not receiving mail about e.g. the Sexual Offences Bill silently. They can't periodically check their "junk mail" folder for false positives, they have to know (via out-of-band communication) that they've had a false positive block and then go cap-in-hand to the IT Dept to ask for the mail to be released. Anything that gets caught that they don't know about, well, they won't know about.
This is why all spam filtering should be within the control of the user.
From MS license: "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Solution: "This software is licensed under the terms of either (a) GNU Public License or (b) BSD License. It is your choice as to which, but to choose option (b) you must also pay a fee of $1gazillion to FSF."
The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
Clearly, the belief that one class of person, based on their race, is superior to another and that this justifies discrimination in favour and against such persons is a political view. I disagree with that view strongly, but so what?
It is extremely important that all political views can be raised and rebutted. There are many reasons for this, but two are particularly topical.
Credibility. Some racists, especially those who deny the Holocaust, maintain that the only reasons their claimed "proofs" aren't given common currency is because of a global conspiracy of silence. Censorship of their views would make this paraniod claim true, and so give credibility where it is quite undeserved.
Terrorism. In liberal democracies we believe that disputes should be settled by open debate and democratic choice. Those who disagree with the outcome - however much they believe they are in the right - are nonetheless expected to accept it anyway. Their only legitimate choice is to persuade through open democractic debate.
If you take the option of attempted persuasion away from people, then those who believe passionately in something have no way to work within the system, and so are compelled to work outside it. This is what happened in the American War of Independence, and most such Wars of Independence. The word people who live within a peaceful system have for people who use violence outside it is "terrorist". Censorship creates terrorism.
The law against incitement to violence is the appropriate limit of censorship. If you can show that a particular statement actually brought people into danger, then that is an abuse of free speech. Saying "immigrants should be whipped back through the Channel Tunnel" is obnoxious, but not dangerous. Saying "Let's meet up on Saturday at the Channel Tunnel entrance to give some immigrants a whipping" is dangerous. This is a clear and simple distinction.
In conclusion, I don't support racism. But censoring it is wrong, both morally and on pragmatic grounds.
Malcolm Hutty Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain.
Re:From a Tech Support view
on
Pictorial Passwords
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wouldn't know where to begin trying to describe what pictures to use for their password...
That's the whole point. Because our mapping of language to art is so loosely coupled, it's hard to write down and/or describe to another person your password. Theoretically, this dramatically reduces a source of password insecurity.
Securityfocus.com reports Chris Whysopal, formerly of L0pht and now @stake, as supporting Microsoft's attempt to limit disclosure.
Here's @stake's Reseach Lab's mission statement:
It is our belief that to move technology and society forward we must not be afraid to take things apart, understand how they work, and share that information with the world. Our research raises the bar so that the engineers of tomorrow will build a better breed of software and hardware, learning from today's lessons
As I write, this is current on their site.
The thing about mission statements, for all they often seem to be corporate puff, is that in theory they're the organisation's attempt to define its purpose and reason for existence. If you refute your own mission statement, it's time to pack up and go home, because even the Top Bosses have nothing to guide them in their decision-making.
So, @Stake, where do you stand? Are you now afraid to take things apart and share the knowledge with the world? And if so, what's the point of your Research Labs?
MS will have to show that/. acting unlawfully, and also show that is has suffered damage as a result. If there's no damage shown MS will just have to whistle.
Their case has 3 arguments:
You are infringing our copyright
You are disclosing our trade secret
You are breaking an agreement
The/. attorneys are nicely attacking them all, and trying to show there's no damages due besides.
You are infringing our copyright
As everyone is saying there's a decent case in fair use to be established: news reporting, private study (to learn whether it's good enough to buy) and scholarship (to understand how its done and consider whether this is good design) are all arguable.
This point is particularly interesting for the following reason: it is the strongest point legally, but the weakest point practically.
Remember, we are assuming the reason MS care is because they want to prevent Samba interoperating properly, so that people running Win2Kpro are forced to run Win2Kserver. But the copyright only subsists in the document itself: if someone takes the trouble to read the document and rewrite it in their own words then the folks at Samba just need to show that when writing the Samba code they used the latter, and not MS' copyrighted spec.
So it is quite possible/. will be forced to remove the exact reproduction of the document from the server. This wouldn't constitute a commercial victory for MS.
This is a trade secret.
I don't really know that a trade secret is protected as such; however if you do something unlawful in order to disclose it then it'll be assumed that some damage has been done.
The argument that it isn't really secret because anyone can read it ought to be reasonably convincing, if we're not dealing with blackletter legal rules but reasonable estimations of damage.
Potentially the parentage of the protocol might be relevent in law, in order to argue that you can't have a secret codicil to a public spec, but I doubt it. Much more important is that in order to argue that it is secret they would be in danger of admitting the strategy "embrace and extend" for the first time publicly and officially. The potentially wide ramifications of this for a future anti-trust trial (NOT this one!) will not be lost on MS lawyers.
You are breaking an agreement
This is a rather suspect argument. Nobody is alleging Andover accepted the agreement. Andover might be held liable for assisting someone to cause damage to MS in the course of them breaking the agreement. So we've got some nice questions aimed at undermining the assumption that the posters did in fact accept it: they might have used WinZip to extract it without agreement, they might have been based in Cuba etc, or they might have received it at the end of a chain of people which might have been contaminated (in which case their liability would have to be established, given that the provenance is not known to be bad).
I'll be watching this with fascination.
BTW: all this commentary will be read with interest by Andover and MS attorney's alike. This will surely improve the quality of both sides' arguments. I think we've just invented Open Source Lawsuits!
> Whether ISPs are seen as telecoms operators is IMO not the important issue in this bill.
No indeed, but whether we like the idea of every ISP having a black-box on their network for the convenience of government spooks certainly is the issue. How much surveillance do they have in mind? We don't know. But we do know that the Home Secretary is hereby empowered to force ISPs to do anything he thinks appropriate to protect surveillance capabilities. While ISPs might have to foot the bill, there is a provision to pay government money in case he comes up with some really steep requirements (like dark fibre to GCHQ Cheltenham).
I really recommend reading what STAND have written on the subject. But for starters:
Unlimited tap capabilities at ISP
Unrestricted access to traffic data without warrant for any authorised public official
Burden of proof that you've lost your decryption key on the accused
Warrants last longer, are easier to get, and can be amended by civil servants after they're signed
No public oversight - a private annual report to the Prime Minister
Let's face it, if you were the MS programmer told to insert an NSA key (and had no choice), would you make an effort to disguise it when the order came from so far higher up they'd never even see the debug symbols?
As an anti-censorship campaigner, I have to say that up to now Demon have been doing their best in the face of a bad situation.
I don't agree with their decision to delete these articles, but people should understand they have just lost a High Court taken by a vexatious litigant. Demon are apparently fighting an appeal, thus putting their money where my mouth is. In the meantime they're trying to minimise their liability in case they lose. Not a good decision, but as long as they fight the appeal you've got to feel some sympathy for them.
The real problem is the recent Defamation Act. This gave ISPs protection on condition that they didn't know what had been posted. Unfortunately, they don't have protection if they've been "put on notice" that there is a defamatory article there. Quite unfairly, this means they have to decide for themselves the validity of any article complained about.
What needs fixing is the Defamation Act, which should provide immunity to anyone except content creators and editors until a court has ruled that the item is defamatory.
Pursuit of points won't generally matter to those who produce thoughtful, insightful comments, because if you're the sort of person who has something genuinely interesting and original to say you don't act in such a childish fashion.
However if having a high default AS takes over as a form of competition from "first post!" then we'll all benefit, and some people will have been given an incentive to grow up. Hurrah for Rob!
Slashdot Mirror
Would any (real) lawyers on Slashdot care to comment on how the Federal Rules of Procedure regard ex parte communications between the respondent and the judge, held secret from the plaintiff?
This doesn't even work in licensing with proper commercial corporations like the record labels and film studios. It will fall foul of "Hollywood Accounting". Normally this is applied to rip off artists who are promised a percentage of profits (they find the company they've dealt with has made no profits, they've all been moved into a different company). This is slightly harder with gross revenue, but not much.
Will this achieve anything more than raise funds for the ACLU?
Of course certain extreme kinds of speech are not protected by law. But there are criminal standards for incitement, harassment etc and this appears to go well beyond them. It's so overbroad not only doesn't it stand a hope of surviving constitutional scrutiny, it won't even persuade a unduly deferential junior court to ignore/deny that there is a constitutional bar.
One of the most controversial aspects of this proposal is China's involvement. Although the EU maintains that Galileo is only for civilian use, it appears that China disagrees.
Russia and China each have a 20% stake in the Galileo project, having invested 200 million euros. India has also pledged 300 million euros.
Apparently the EU has promised India that Galileo would not be denied to them in the event of anything less than "global war", making its use available during more limited military conflicts. It is hard to imagine that China has negotiated anything less.
This had led to speculation that the USA would simply shoot it down to prevent its use by hostile military powers.
The EU Referendum blog has been covering this assiduously.
On a slightly related note, a Firefox extension that searched links ahead and removed the link rendering for those that return a 404 might be handy (albeit fairly evil).
On a less related note, I've long been disappointed that some 300 series status codes in HTTP are so under-exploited, both by clients (e.g. automated bookmark management) and people running web sites.
The LINX Best Current Practice on Unsolicited Bulk E-mail ("the spam BCP") is carefully written so as to avoid being a way to create denial of service attacks.
LINX does not adjudicate complaints; our ISPs members do. You can complain to an ISP for tolerating spamvertised web sites just like you can complain to them for tolerating someone sending spam. If they follow Best Practice they will cut off the web site if, only if, and not before they satisfy themselves that the spam was sent by or with the consent of the web site owner.
Of course, it is possible that they could get it wrong; miscarriages of justice do occur in every area of life. This is not a reason not to have any rules at all. It is up to the ISP to take care when considering a complaint so as not to cut their customers off without good reason. Naturally, some will consider this an unnecessary delay - and even evidence that the ISP is not serious about cancelling the account. Well, it's not possible to please everybody all the time; you've just got to craft the best policy you can and run with it.
Malcolm Hutty
LINX Regulation Officer.
Mod parent up: this is an important issue.
.com. The fact is, while any old joe can say that you should register your telephone number in their DNS zone, e164.arpa is the domain the RFC says to do it in. Having two such domains is to have two roots for this mapping, with the possibility of discrepancy between them. Surely that's significant enough for the editors to mention?
:-)
I'm disappointed the Slashdot editors didn't notice that e164.org is in essentially competition with e164.arpa; this is very important to understanding what e164.org is about. As the parent says, it's like Alternic or, to avoid the unfair comparison with Altnernic's business practices, New.net.
I don't accept my sibling post's claim that e164.org is not in competition with e164.arpa but is merely "supplementary": that's like saying ".travel" is "supplementary" to
PSTN-DNS mapping is not an easy topic. For example, how would you like someone else coming along and registering *your* phone number in an ENUM server (and so being able to receive SIP VoIP calls intended for you)? I'd be interested to hear how e164.org plan to prevent this.
And finally, VoIP is pronounced as a single syllable, with the vowel sound rhyming with "boy"
I have to agree with the parent to this reply: having a policy blocking based on referrals is, except on a very temporary basis, just incredibly stupid.
Other sites should avoid copying this, not for "our" good, but for their own good.
It might make sense to process referrers to avoid the slashdot effect, while under an effective DDoS because somewhere like Slashdot has effectively overloaded you with traffic. But even that only makes sense if you've got "regular" users you'd rather serve than the unwashed masses of slashdot; if all you want is eyeballs then first-come-first-served matches your requirements.
But the real problem with this policy is that is encourages people not to send referrer data. This field is only provided for the benefit of the server site, it makes damn all difference to the client.
It's ten years since I first started working in commercial web development. I'm opposed to arguments from authority (so feel free to disregard this next comment) but in all that time it's become pretty clear to me that content providers desperately desire better information about their users (why else all those "free registration required" sites?). Persuading users (clients) to send less of it is just unbelievably counter-productive.
I'm not a fan of sending out lawyers' letters, or even quasi-lawyers'-letters, but it sounds like CMP could have readily stopped LinuxToday just by asking. Wouldn't that have made more sense? But this is still a "less bad" option; this isn't a conflict between the "free web" and commercial interests, it's just an example of a company making a mistake as to where their interests lie.
And it's a masterpiece of plain English and brevity too. Would that more lawyers wrote like this.
My hat off to the judge.
A new web browser beta, that we're all going to use immediately as our main browser.
A new mail client beta, that we're all going to use immediately as our main browser.
And both sites completely slashdotted, with some mirrors not yet updated.
Let's party like it's 1997!
> I call dibs on the pr0n:// namespace!
Quite.
One big flat namespace for domains for namespaces is good...how?
Astonishingly, there is no mention in the report on the United Kingdom of the IRA.
There is a section on the IRA in the appendix on "other Foreign Terrorist Organisations" which notes that the IRA "retains the ability to conduct paramilitary operations" but it accepts that "the IRA reiterated its commitment to the peace process and apologized to the families of what it called "non-combatants" who had been killed or injured by the IRA" without noting that its activities of "kidnappings, punishment beatings, extortion, smuggling, and robberies" are active and continuing.
The report does not mention that two of the leaders of the IRA Army Council were allowed to become Sinn Fein Ministers in the (currently suspended) government of Northern Ireland.
Sinn Feinn, a major political party in Northern Ireland, is acknowledged by everybody except itself as the political wing of the IRA. The name translates into English as "Ourselves Alone" - illuminating its racist basis. Sinn Fein is not mentioned in the report.
Most astonishingly, NORAID's role in fundraising for the IRA within the USA is not mentioned in the report either.
Americans should realise that many British people who are temperamentally and politically inclined to give full support to American foreign policy find it severely compromised by America's sentimental and hypocritical blindness to the IRA threat.
...is that the MPs aren't filtering their e-mail, it's under the centralised control of Parliament's IT Services Dept.
Consequently, MPs are not receiving mail about e.g. the Sexual Offences Bill silently. They can't periodically check their "junk mail" folder for false positives, they have to know (via out-of-band communication) that they've had a false positive block and then go cap-in-hand to the IT Dept to ask for the mail to be released. Anything that gets caught that they don't know about, well, they won't know about.
This is why all spam filtering should be within the control of the user.
From MS license:
"IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Solution:
"This software is licensed under the terms of either (a) GNU Public License or (b) BSD License. It is your choice as to which, but to choose option (b) you must also pay a fee of $1gazillion to FSF."
Clearly, the belief that one class of person, based on their race, is superior to another and that this justifies discrimination in favour and against such persons is a political view. I disagree with that view strongly, but so what?
It is extremely important that all political views can be raised and rebutted. There are many reasons for this, but two are particularly topical.
If you take the option of attempted persuasion away from people, then those who believe passionately in something have no way to work within the system, and so are compelled to work outside it. This is what happened in the American War of Independence, and most such Wars of Independence. The word people who live within a peaceful system have for people who use violence outside it is "terrorist". Censorship creates terrorism.
The law against incitement to violence is the appropriate limit of censorship. If you can show that a particular statement actually brought people into danger, then that is an abuse of free speech. Saying "immigrants should be whipped back through the Channel Tunnel" is obnoxious, but not dangerous. Saying "Let's meet up on Saturday at the Channel Tunnel entrance to give some immigrants a whipping" is dangerous. This is a clear and simple distinction.
In conclusion, I don't support racism. But censoring it is wrong, both morally and on pragmatic grounds.
Malcolm Hutty
Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain.
I wouldn't know where to begin trying to describe what pictures to use for their password...
That's the whole point. Because our mapping of language to art is so loosely coupled, it's hard to write down and/or describe to another person your password. Theoretically, this dramatically reduces a source of password insecurity.
Here's @stake's Reseach Lab's mission statement:
As I write, this is current on their site.
The thing about mission statements, for all they often seem to be corporate puff, is that in theory they're the organisation's attempt to define its purpose and reason for existence. If you refute your own mission statement, it's time to pack up and go home, because even the Top Bosses have nothing to guide them in their decision-making.
So, @Stake, where do you stand? Are you now afraid to take things apart and share the knowledge with the world? And if so, what's the point of your Research Labs?
MS will have to show that /. acting unlawfully, and also show that is has suffered damage as a result. If there's no damage shown MS will just have to whistle.
Their case has 3 arguments:
The /. attorneys are nicely attacking them all, and trying to show there's no damages due besides.
As everyone is saying there's a decent case in fair use to be established: news reporting, private study (to learn whether it's good enough to buy) and scholarship (to understand how its done and consider whether this is good design) are all arguable.
This point is particularly interesting for the following reason: it is the strongest point legally, but the weakest point practically.
Remember, we are assuming the reason MS care is because they want to prevent Samba interoperating properly, so that people running Win2Kpro are forced to run Win2Kserver. But the copyright only subsists in the document itself: if someone takes the trouble to read the document and rewrite it in their own words then the folks at Samba just need to show that when writing the Samba code they used the latter, and not MS' copyrighted spec.
So it is quite possible /. will be forced to remove the exact reproduction of the document from the server. This wouldn't constitute a commercial victory for MS.
I don't really know that a trade secret is protected as such; however if you do something unlawful in order to disclose it then it'll be assumed that some damage has been done.
The argument that it isn't really secret because anyone can read it ought to be reasonably convincing, if we're not dealing with blackletter legal rules but reasonable estimations of damage.
Potentially the parentage of the protocol might be relevent in law, in order to argue that you can't have a secret codicil to a public spec, but I doubt it. Much more important is that in order to argue that it is secret they would be in danger of admitting the strategy "embrace and extend" for the first time publicly and officially. The potentially wide ramifications of this for a future anti-trust trial (NOT this one!) will not be lost on MS lawyers.
This is a rather suspect argument. Nobody is alleging Andover accepted the agreement. Andover might be held liable for assisting someone to cause damage to MS in the course of them breaking the agreement. So we've got some nice questions aimed at undermining the assumption that the posters did in fact accept it: they might have used WinZip to extract it without agreement, they might have been based in Cuba etc, or they might have received it at the end of a chain of people which might have been contaminated (in which case their liability would have to be established, given that the provenance is not known to be bad).
I'll be watching this with fascination.
BTW: all this commentary will be read with interest by Andover and MS attorney's alike. This will surely improve the quality of both sides' arguments. I think we've just invented Open Source Lawsuits!
The point is, that by criticising this law, you are demonstrating your ignorance of other cultures.
STAND is a group of British net activists. Even in Britain we're allowed some dissent.
> Whether ISPs are seen as telecoms operators is IMO not the important issue in this bill.
No indeed, but whether we like the idea of every ISP having a black-box on their network for the convenience of government spooks certainly is the issue. How much surveillance do they have in mind? We don't know. But we do know that the Home Secretary is hereby empowered to force ISPs to do anything he thinks appropriate to protect surveillance capabilities. While ISPs might have to foot the bill, there is a provision to pay government money in case he comes up with some really steep requirements (like dark fibre to GCHQ Cheltenham).
I really recommend reading what STAND have written on the subject. But for starters:
Features: China and the MPA
Posted by JonKatz on 04:00 PM January 31st, 2000
from the arrogance-and-stupidity dept.
Says it all really.
A joke, a cock-up, and not the only flaw.
Let's face it, if you were the MS programmer told to insert an NSA key (and had no choice), would you make an effort to disguise it when the order came from so far higher up they'd never even see the debug symbols?
As an anti-censorship campaigner, I have to say that up to now Demon have been doing their best in the face of a bad situation.
I don't agree with their decision to delete these articles, but people should understand they have just lost a High Court taken by a vexatious litigant. Demon are apparently fighting an appeal, thus putting their money where my mouth is. In the meantime they're trying to minimise their liability in case they lose. Not a good decision, but as long as they fight the appeal you've got to feel some sympathy for them.
The real problem is the recent Defamation Act. This gave ISPs protection on condition that they didn't know what had been posted. Unfortunately, they don't have protection if they've been "put on notice" that there is a defamatory article there. Quite unfairly, this means they have to decide for themselves the validity of any article complained about.
What needs fixing is the Defamation Act, which should provide immunity to anyone except content creators and editors until a court has ruled that the item is defamatory.
Pursuit of points won't generally matter to those who produce thoughtful, insightful comments, because if you're the sort of person who has something genuinely interesting and original to say you don't act in such a childish fashion.
However if having a high default AS takes over as a form of competition from "first post!" then we'll all benefit, and some people will have been given an incentive to grow up. Hurrah for Rob!