Pray tell, where in the decision is that limitation made? I don't see it anywhere. The summary of the facts at the beginning of the decision only talks about "gray market", not "illicit market", and does not state that the goods were (necessarily) illegally imported. They may have been, but AFAICS, the decision doesn't depend on that.
Just because the brand owner didn't authorize the importation, doesn't make it illegal.
Not yet.... it seems that the countdown has started, tho.
my point was that a sensible starting point when considering the highly developed work of educated and intelligent men is the assumption that you are unlikely to know better than them.
Oh, I don't think of myself as very sensible. I totally agree with you, which means, of course, that it's only us unreasonable ones who can propose/cause any non-incremental changes.
I simply find it infuriating when people attempt to make proclamations on subjects they know little or nothing about
In this case, I recommend that you work on yourself so you will suffer less in this new era, and merely relate to posts like mine as opportunities to see the established order through new eyes, even if they are largely ignorant ones.
are you suggesting that the judiciary is corrupt and that superior judges will "close ranks" and uphold decisions that are wrong on the law?
No, I was merely suggesting that this was a possibility and qualified it as an unlikely one. Actually, of the three branches of government in the US, I'd guess that the judiciary is probably the least corrupt one from my point of view (although, of course, one hears about the occasional bad apple), with the legislature leading by far because of US law (and public apathy) allowing practically unbridled influence of industry lobbying. And if we look at the three "branches" in the courtroom, the legislature, the judiciary, and the jury, I think that the judiciary would probably be the branch which, on the average, does the most good (because the jury has both been largely stripped of its power by the other two, and in addition it seems to me that the jury is easily manipulated by the lawyers in the courtroom, and also by the ability of industry advertising/PR to sway societal opinion even before they enter the courtroom).
See, I'm actually even more utopian than you, it seems! Silly me for hoping for a world where the average citizen searches for truth, rather than plopping down on the sofa in front of the TV after a hard day at work...
Anyway, I'd like to thank you for explaining your point of view, and I hope I didn't give you too much heartburn up to now.
If I may risk being impertinent, it seems to me that you are trying to criticise a system of which you know nothing. Given that, it would perhaps not be unreasonable for you to assume that the old and well-respected system is sound rather than expecting your uninformed opinions to expose hitherto unseen problems. This rather reminds me of a post I made recently in which I suggested that the main problem with people using the internet to learn is that it leads to the idea that someone can be knowledgeable after a few minutes on Wikipedia. I'm afraid it's rather more difficult than that.
My, my, my, what a polite flame!
Unfortunately, it seems to have several problems.
"of which you know nothing" is a great exaggeration compared to the reality, which is that my knowledge is limited, and quite certainly less than yours.
"not be unreasonable for you to assume that the old and well-respected system is sound" is an direct argument from authority; in addition, the whole paragraph itself is a nicely phrased argument from authority. Not particularly convincing by itself, but I appreciate its elegance compared to the last time I was flamed.
To get back to the rest of your post, which is much more interesting. I thank you for the information about the judge consulting with counsel about non-standard jury instructions. However, I don't understand how this consultation could lead to a situation where the judge doesn't effectively have the final say about how he instructs the jury. Otherwise, either counsel involved could deadlock the proceedings, no? Please enlighten me further on this topic (if it would not be too much of a waste of your time considering how boorish and ignorant I am, and how impossible it would be that from such comments I might eventually become, wondrously, less ignorant).
Your comment about review by a more senior judge doesn't seem to undercut my comment in a qualitative way, merely in a quantitative way --- yes, I agree that it makes it less practical for the judiciary to "game" in this way, but it makes it far from impossible. (By the way, in the US, at least, there is a similar way for a jury to "game" the system, via "jury nullification". Many people believe that this was not because the Founding Fathers overlooked the possibility, but rather because they found it basic and important.)
The alternative would mean that people with no legal education would make up their own minds on what is and isn't the law.
This happens each and every day, tens if not hundreds of times, in the life of everyone without a legal education (and we are talking about hundred of millions of individuals). Most of the time, if they make a wrong decision, nothing happens; occasionally they receive a small fine; and very, very rarely, their life is severely affected (as in the case of Brian Aitken). Only in the courtroom do we suddenly appoint a nanny for our jurors. I acknowledge that your justification ("Even the most simple of trials would be farcical, as the decision could be changed by just a couple of jurors who had misunderstood the law - and what of the more complex areas of law and policy, like the extent to which economic loss should be recoverable, or the effect of intoxication on criminal intent?") has merit in that the efficiency of the court system might depend upon this artificial division of responsibility --- i.e., there is no better way to do it.
On the other hand, I find your view of the legal system extraordinarily utopian for someone, I assume, who has firsthand experience with it.
"putting the legal decision in the hands of the jury would create a legal lottery"
The outcome of any trial is by necessity a "legal lottery". This can be seen most cogently in the case of Capitol v. Thomas where
Thank you for your insightful post which shows that having complex laws leads to the ability for the government (judges) to game the system and work around the right to due process (fifth and fourteenth amendments) --- they merely have to instruct the jury about the too-complex law in question in whatever way they feel will sway it to the decision they want to attain.
The case cited by the GP is a perfect example --- it seems likely that the judge could have instructed the jury in a totally different manner, and gotten the exact opposite verdict.
> but then present a very muddled set of allegations
I think this is because the reality of the situation is being intentionally muddled, making it very hard to understand what is going on. Other reports say that Assange was brought before a judge in court, and the judge more or less threw out the case on the spot. Assange then asked for permission to leave the country and was granted it.
The perfect irony would be for the case to end up with a decision that he's guilty with extenuating circumstances, and the punishment is a term of public service --- and then the judge also rules that running Wikileaks qualifies as public service.
That would show all of the conspiracy theorists! (Well, not really of course, nothing can disprove a good conspiracy theory.)
> You can be punished whether or not you distribute copies of a copyrighted work for financial gain.
Even worse, my understanding is that you are liable even if you had no knowledge that you were infringing. This is based on something posted by another Slashdotter, who pointed out that copyright infringement is a special kind of tort (I think it was a statutory tort), and that means that there is no defense based on not having the intention to infringe.
This puts your average citizen in the situation where countless things he does every day might end up costing him up to $150K in court (or paying O($1K) to settle out of court). Considering that copyright law is obtuse ("Patry on Copyright" runs 5,500 pages and sells for over $1K), it's clear that something is wrong. See the paper (PDF) "Infringement Nation" by John Tehranian.
Interesting flame. Unfortunately, it's a bit stupid, since I actually use NoScript exactly as you recommend. The only disagreement we have is this 90% statistic you pull out of your ass. Any disagreement we have, however, could easily be explained by the fact that neither of us samples a representative sample of the set of all websites, and it's unlikely that the set of websites I visit has any large overlap with the set that you visit. In addition, your definition of "working" for a website might be quite different from mine.
As for "alternatives" always being available, that's kind of a reach --- or are you monitoring my web habits? LOL
A pity you couldn't actually comprehend my post, or at least relate to it like a normally socialized human being.
I agree that in the abstract, detecting malware is equivalent to the "halting problem" and therefore uncomputable. I suppose since you seem to like absolutes (based on your other post), this would be enough for you to just "give up". OTOH, it's obvious you do use computers, since you post on Slashdot.
> If it's not in a VM, I won't ever consider the code to be "sandboxed".
I find it peculiar that you don't worry about human errors in the VMs. Effectively, a browser JS interpreter is a kind of specialized VM. I understand that because of the way VMs work vs. browser JS interpreters, one might be easier to write in a secure manner than the other, but the argument over which is easier to write in a secure manner is similar to the argument whether Linux is more secure than Windows (i.e., neither is absolutely secure, and the security attained actually has more to do with their use scenarios than with any structural feature in either OS).
Curious. Your post makes you sound like you work in computer security, and then you spout
> If you run any JS, you are then no longer secure.
which just seems, well, stupid, considering that it's equivalent to
>> If you use a computer, you are no longer secure.
since, of course, nothing is "secure" (as an absolute).
OTOH, I see your point. As a user of NoScript, it's been very, very clear to me that it is a very limited tool, far from the be-all and end-all which is its image here on Slashdot. This is because of the way the web is currently set up, such that the majority of websites are rather unusable unless I enable JS for them, at least temporarily.
> So, what control do you actually have?
Obviously, not the control to be absolutely "secure", since that is impossible. I was talking about the control to decide to trade greater security for greater usability.
FTA: "ZOZZLE makes use of a statistical classifier to efficiently identify malicious JavaScript. The classifier needs training data to accurately classify JavaScript source"
It seems that they're using Bayesian (or other) classification techniques like those in spam identification tools. One wonders what percentage of false alarms are going to be set off. When I use NoScript to disable JS for a website, at least I have control over it.
My guess is that this isn't going to be that much more effective than current tools, unless, perhaps, there is some kind of fast data sharing going on between users via a global database used for classification. Frankly, I think it would be more useful to have the tool interact with an existing anti-malware/anti-virus (so it could use its alarms as part of the classification process --- something like, "Hmm, the A/V says something suspicious happened right after executing this JS code, maybe we should flag it").
That's not going to help much on Linux now, since practically no one runs A/V. OTOH, most Linux JS malware would probably infect the browser itself rather than the OS, I suspect.
> and it's always come back clean, so I'll give him credit that his caution is working OK for now
Current stats I've heard (they may be just flaky numbers pulled out of a certain orifice) is that A/V tools don't detect up to 50% of current professional botnet infections like Zeus, etc.
> Which works, sorta, but you want a Risky Rick who also uses Antivirus as an additional layer, > because there's no such thing as too many layers of security.
By that reasoning, you should instead be investing in educating the 11 other people who only use an antivirus but don't invest effort in security like Rick, no? Assuming you could get them together in groups to improve the return on the effort, I mean.
BTW, the results of a study where all traffic signs and signals were removed from a region which was thoroughly marked as such (the traffic accident rate went down, not up) indicate that Rick's strategy might actually be more effective than the others'.
> The Economist said it recently and they were correct:
I'm glad that they're so much more interesting to believe than, for example, William Patry. The "control" versus "economic incentive" debate is still going strong, and it seems silly to unilaterally name one side as the winner. (In my eyes, it's very similar to debates on religion, BTW.)
See the following links for debate / discussion on this issue:
The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law (read the PDF which reviews US legal decisions and comes to the conclusion that they view the economic side as more important)
Could you possibly post a link to the Founder's texts on which you (or the Economist) base your argument? The wording in the Constitution itself would seem to be on the "economic incentive" side of the argument, no?
> but once they know about it they have multiple ways of fixing the situation and then they are indeed fully in control.
Unfortunately, the fact is that as time goes on, there are more and more components in computers which themselves are programmable (with microcode, for example) yet not easily "format-able" like the magnetic media of a hard disk. Hiding malware in these devices is a hot topic of current research (BIOS-level rootkits, WiFi adapters hosting malware), and could easily become reality for a capable, targeted attack (look at Stuxnet, for example, but imagine what might have been if the industrial controller had been sophisticated enough to have hosted a multihost malware which could spread itself back to "cleaned-up" computers).
I have the feeling that there will be a large gap (because of fear of loss of IP or control, or DMCA-like laws trying to protect copyright) in the tools hardware manufacturers give consumers to "sanitize" possibly infected hardware, and the ability of black hats to use infected hardware to gain more permanent control over infected computers.
Please be more specific. Is it unpleasant because of the sensation in your leg, or is it unpleasant because your metallic implants send you directly to the "feel-em-up" line of the TSA?
Riiiiight. Unfortunately, the most likely truth of the matter is that practically no one has heard of you, and anyone who has downloaded your content because of curiosity is simply similar to someone cracking open your book inside a bookstore. And if you had a magic button which, when pressed, made your content unavailable except for pay, no one would pay you out of curiosity, they would find something else which seemed more interesting, instead.
And actually, you're being granted the right to rent our "property" back to us, society, for a limited (if currently ridiculously long) period. Because we understand you have to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
> goods imported illegally
Pray tell, where in the decision is that limitation made? I don't see it anywhere. The summary of the facts at the beginning of the decision only talks about "gray market", not "illicit market", and does not state that the goods were (necessarily) illegally imported. They may have been, but AFAICS, the decision doesn't depend on that.
Just because the brand owner didn't authorize the importation, doesn't make it illegal.
Not yet.... it seems that the countdown has started, tho.
Oh, I don't think of myself as very sensible. I totally agree with you, which means, of course, that it's only us unreasonable ones who can propose/cause any non-incremental changes.
In this case, I recommend that you work on yourself so you will suffer less in this new era, and merely relate to posts like mine as opportunities to see the established order through new eyes, even if they are largely ignorant ones.
No, I was merely suggesting that this was a possibility and qualified it as an unlikely one. Actually, of the three branches of government in the US, I'd guess that the judiciary is probably the least corrupt one from my point of view (although, of course, one hears about the occasional bad apple), with the legislature leading by far because of US law (and public apathy) allowing practically unbridled influence of industry lobbying. And if we look at the three "branches" in the courtroom, the legislature, the judiciary, and the jury, I think that the judiciary would probably be the branch which, on the average, does the most good (because the jury has both been largely stripped of its power by the other two, and in addition it seems to me that the jury is easily manipulated by the lawyers in the courtroom, and also by the ability of industry advertising/PR to sway societal opinion even before they enter the courtroom).
See, I'm actually even more utopian than you, it seems! Silly me for hoping for a world where the average citizen searches for truth, rather than plopping down on the sofa in front of the TV after a hard day at work...
Anyway, I'd like to thank you for explaining your point of view, and I hope I didn't give you too much heartburn up to now.
My, my, my, what a polite flame!
Unfortunately, it seems to have several problems.
To get back to the rest of your post, which is much more interesting. I thank you for the information about the judge consulting with counsel about non-standard jury instructions. However, I don't understand how this consultation could lead to a situation where the judge doesn't effectively have the final say about how he instructs the jury. Otherwise, either counsel involved could deadlock the proceedings, no? Please enlighten me further on this topic (if it would not be too much of a waste of your time considering how boorish and ignorant I am, and how impossible it would be that from such comments I might eventually become, wondrously, less ignorant).
Your comment about review by a more senior judge doesn't seem to undercut my comment in a qualitative way, merely in a quantitative way --- yes, I agree that it makes it less practical for the judiciary to "game" in this way, but it makes it far from impossible. (By the way, in the US, at least, there is a similar way for a jury to "game" the system, via "jury nullification". Many people believe that this was not because the Founding Fathers overlooked the possibility, but rather because they found it basic and important.)
This happens each and every day, tens if not hundreds of times, in the life of everyone without a legal education (and we are talking about hundred of millions of individuals). Most of the time, if they make a wrong decision, nothing happens; occasionally they receive a small fine; and very, very rarely, their life is severely affected (as in the case of Brian Aitken). Only in the courtroom do we suddenly appoint a nanny for our jurors. I acknowledge that your justification ("Even the most simple of trials would be farcical, as the decision could be changed by just a couple of jurors who had misunderstood the law - and what of the more complex areas of law and policy, like the extent to which economic loss should be recoverable, or the effect of intoxication on criminal intent?") has merit in that the efficiency of the court system might depend upon this artificial division of responsibility --- i.e., there is no better way to do it.
On the other hand, I find your view of the legal system extraordinarily utopian for someone, I assume, who has firsthand experience with it.
The outcome of any trial is by necessity a "legal lottery". This can be seen most cogently in the case of Capitol v. Thomas where
Thank you for your insightful post which shows that having complex laws leads to the ability for the government (judges) to game the system and work around the right to due process (fifth and fourteenth amendments) --- they merely have to instruct the jury about the too-complex law in question in whatever way they feel will sway it to the decision they want to attain.
The case cited by the GP is a perfect example --- it seems likely that the judge could have instructed the jury in a totally different manner, and gotten the exact opposite verdict.
Sure you're not confused? "Fucking truth" is what we want to find out in a totally different story in the news nowadays.
Anyone else misread McClatchy as McCarthy?
> but then present a very muddled set of allegations
I think this is because the reality of the situation is being intentionally muddled, making it very hard to understand what is going on. Other reports say that Assange was brought before a judge in court, and the judge more or less threw out the case on the spot. Assange then asked for permission to leave the country and was granted it.
The perfect irony would be for the case to end up with a decision that he's guilty with extenuating circumstances, and the punishment is a term of public service --- and then the judge also rules that running Wikileaks qualifies as public service.
That would show all of the conspiracy theorists! (Well, not really of course, nothing can disprove a good conspiracy theory.)
There are many ideas about what copyright is, or should be.
A paper by James Grimmelmann, The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law addresses this (found via his website The Laboratorium).
> You can be punished whether or not you distribute copies of a copyrighted work for financial gain.
Even worse, my understanding is that you are liable even if you had no knowledge that you were infringing. This is based on something posted by another Slashdotter, who pointed out that copyright infringement is a special kind of tort (I think it was a statutory tort), and that means that there is no defense based on not having the intention to infringe.
This puts your average citizen in the situation where countless things he does every day might end up costing him up to $150K in court (or paying O($1K) to settle out of court). Considering that copyright law is obtuse ("Patry on Copyright" runs 5,500 pages and sells for over $1K), it's clear that something is wrong. See the paper (PDF) "Infringement Nation" by John Tehranian.
Interesting flame. Unfortunately, it's a bit stupid, since I actually use NoScript exactly as you recommend. The only disagreement we have is this 90% statistic you pull out of your ass. Any disagreement we have, however, could easily be explained by the fact that neither of us samples a representative sample of the set of all websites, and it's unlikely that the set of websites I visit has any large overlap with the set that you visit. In addition, your definition of "working" for a website might be quite different from mine.
As for "alternatives" always being available, that's kind of a reach --- or are you monitoring my web habits? LOL
A pity you couldn't actually comprehend my post, or at least relate to it like a normally socialized human being.
I agree that in the abstract, detecting malware is equivalent to the "halting problem" and therefore uncomputable. I suppose since you seem to like absolutes (based on your other post), this would be enough for you to just "give up". OTOH, it's obvious you do use computers, since you post on Slashdot.
> If it's not in a VM, I won't ever consider the code to be "sandboxed".
I find it peculiar that you don't worry about human errors in the VMs. Effectively, a browser JS interpreter is a kind of specialized VM. I understand that because of the way VMs work vs. browser JS interpreters, one might be easier to write in a secure manner than the other, but the argument over which is easier to write in a secure manner is similar to the argument whether Linux is more secure than Windows (i.e., neither is absolutely secure, and the security attained actually has more to do with their use scenarios than with any structural feature in either OS).
Curious. Your post makes you sound like you work in computer security, and then you spout
> If you run any JS, you are then no longer secure.
which just seems, well, stupid, considering that it's equivalent to
>> If you use a computer, you are no longer secure.
since, of course, nothing is "secure" (as an absolute).
OTOH, I see your point. As a user of NoScript, it's been very, very clear to me that it is a very limited tool, far from the be-all and end-all which is its image here on Slashdot. This is because of the way the web is currently set up, such that the majority of websites are rather unusable unless I enable JS for them, at least temporarily.
> So, what control do you actually have?
Obviously, not the control to be absolutely "secure", since that is impossible. I was talking about the control to decide to trade greater security for greater usability.
FTA: "ZOZZLE makes use of a statistical classifier to efficiently identify malicious JavaScript. The classifier needs training data to accurately classify JavaScript source"
It seems that they're using Bayesian (or other) classification techniques like those in spam identification tools. One wonders what percentage of false alarms are going to be set off. When I use NoScript to disable JS for a website, at least I have control over it.
My guess is that this isn't going to be that much more effective than current tools, unless, perhaps, there is some kind of fast data sharing going on between users via a global database used for classification. Frankly, I think it would be more useful to have the tool interact with an existing anti-malware/anti-virus (so it could use its alarms as part of the classification process --- something like, "Hmm, the A/V says something suspicious happened right after executing this JS code, maybe we should flag it").
That's not going to help much on Linux now, since practically no one runs A/V. OTOH, most Linux JS malware would probably infect the browser itself rather than the OS, I suspect.
> and it's always come back clean, so I'll give him credit that his caution is working OK for now
Current stats I've heard (they may be just flaky numbers pulled out of a certain orifice) is that A/V tools don't detect up to 50% of current professional botnet infections like Zeus, etc.
> Which works, sorta, but you want a Risky Rick who also uses Antivirus as an additional layer,
> because there's no such thing as too many layers of security.
By that reasoning, you should instead be investing in educating the 11 other people who only use an antivirus but don't invest effort in security like Rick, no? Assuming you could get them together in groups to improve the return on the effort, I mean.
BTW, the results of a study where all traffic signs and signals were removed from a region which was thoroughly marked as such (the traffic accident rate went down, not up) indicate that Rick's strategy might actually be more effective than the others'.
Joe job
> The Economist said it recently and they were correct:
I'm glad that they're so much more interesting to believe than, for example, William Patry. The "control" versus "economic incentive" debate is still going strong, and it seems silly to unilaterally name one side as the winner. (In my eyes, it's very similar to debates on religion, BTW.)
See the following links for debate / discussion on this issue:
Could you possibly post a link to the Founder's texts on which you (or the Economist) base your argument? The wording in the Constitution itself would seem to be on the "economic incentive" side of the argument, no?
> What search alternatives exist to the near-monopoly Google and Microsoft's Bing?
Just search for "search engine" in Google and look at the results. Whether any of the competition is good enough or better? That only you can decide.
> but once they know about it they have multiple ways of fixing the situation and then they are indeed fully in control.
Unfortunately, the fact is that as time goes on, there are more and more components in computers which themselves are programmable (with microcode, for example) yet not easily "format-able" like the magnetic media of a hard disk. Hiding malware in these devices is a hot topic of current research (BIOS-level rootkits, WiFi adapters hosting malware), and could easily become reality for a capable, targeted attack (look at Stuxnet, for example, but imagine what might have been if the industrial controller had been sophisticated enough to have hosted a multihost malware which could spread itself back to "cleaned-up" computers).
I have the feeling that there will be a large gap (because of fear of loss of IP or control, or DMCA-like laws trying to protect copyright) in the tools hardware manufacturers give consumers to "sanitize" possibly infected hardware, and the ability of black hats to use infected hardware to gain more permanent control over infected computers.
> When I have to travel, FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU
Please be more specific. Is it unpleasant because of the sensation in your leg, or is it unpleasant because your metallic implants send you directly to the "feel-em-up" line of the TSA?
Riiiiight. Unfortunately, the most likely truth of the matter is that practically no one has heard of you, and anyone who has downloaded your content because of curiosity is simply similar to someone cracking open your book inside a bookstore. And if you had a magic button which, when pressed, made your content unavailable except for pay, no one would pay you out of curiosity, they would find something else which seemed more interesting, instead.
And actually, you're being granted the right to rent our "property" back to us, society, for a limited (if currently ridiculously long) period. Because we understand you have to eat.
It's things like this which will make it so much more likely that I would bother to post such a link in the future --- after firing up Tor, of course!
Without the constant whining of Big Content getting on my nerves (and ruining the legal system), I probably wouldn't bother.
> nothing less than deci-dollars is worth striking up in coin, drop pennies, nickels and quarters
Even a dime is (exactly) a deci-dollar, and a quarter is bigger.
I should know, I need to use one every time I post my Slashdot .sig :-)
That funding scheme would sound a lot more interesting if the industry being funded actually had a reputation for paying a fair return on its profits.
> it should be 'x years from date of first publication'
Unfortunately, the Berne convention (and US law) doesn't define a commercial sale of art as publication. It also doesn't define public performance of music or drama as publication.
Modern copyright law is so bollixed up now it's beyond repair.
Never heard about RFID?
BTW, you'd need a lot more than "a radioactive particle or two", considering that the blind person his/herself is emitting more radiation than that!