"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties."
The difference being that while I trust no one, I trust the government with the information even less, because they have the power to screw me over to such a greater degree.
The precendent for anything illegal over the past decade has been that anything illegal and not plausibly deniable will be retroactively legalized, rendering the legal question moot.
In other words, they have figured out how to change the past without having to muck around with all the scientific and logistical problems of building a time machine. Brilliant!
Next year every user will encrypt all email, they may try to prevent this domestically, but the international community will lead the way to 100% strong encryption on email seamlessly integrated into the client.
"Next year" is more than optimistic -- it's pollyannaish. PGP and its ilk are great inventions that appeal to a very small handful of geeks and the most anal of privacy advocates. (Not an insult, BTW -- I'm one of those...) PGP does no good unless all or most of your e-mail contacts, from the daily to the occasional, have it as well. And most casual e-mail users lack the incentive or understanding to download a standalone piece of software, make it work with their mail program, and then remember to use it. But, oh yeah, even if they do, it still means that most of THEIR correspondents can't or won't, so again it is of little value.
The key is in the last phrase of your sentence: "seamlessly integrated into the client." Until such encryption is routinely built-in to all e-mail software (end user, client, ISP, servers, etc.) BY DEFAULT and works automatically without the end users having to do much more than turn it on, encryption as a tool against government snooping will have little effect. (And long before the tide turns, the guvmint will probably make using encryption illegal anyway. I'm ready for a new bumper sticker: "If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption.")
Furthermore, the US has yet to ship millions of its citizens to remote gulags, so the original poster's comparison to the USSR is even worse exaggeration.
Operative word = "yet." Be patient -- it takes time to build those gulags.....
I used to do inventory for a number of major chains back in the 80's and 90's, and we ran into this a few times when inventorying stockrooms. Basically, employees will conspire to swipe an item, then replace it with some inert object(s) of roughly equal weight and reseal the box. It's a pretty well-known internal scam, so I'd be surprised if any reputable major chain wouldn't make good for the customer who inadvertantly gets sent a boxed item full of bricks or such. But then, the key word there is "reputable" -- we are talking about Best Buy, after all...
No huge defeat for the RIAA here, but it does show how a savvy judge can recognize when evidence is flimsy or insufficient. That's why the RIAA really doesn't want any of these cases to hit the courts -- it requires a higher standard of proof from them, and that means more time and money proving the case. They know that most folks receiving a "letter of doom" from them will just cave in and pay the extortion money up front.
But to digress to a wider subject here.....do you think the RIAA understands that their tactics are but a finger in a dike? Do they honestly believe that their efforts have made any significant dent in file sharing of copyrighted material? And if not, then why do they persist? Just on principle alone? Despite what some here have implied, this can't be a cash cow for them -- the settlements offered are relatively low, and I can't imagine that they are not running in the red on these endeavors when you look at the bottom line. Even the much publicized recent $200K+ judgement they won, IF they could collect it (good luck with that), probably wouldn't even come close to covering their overall expenses so far.
I'd love to see statistics on what they have spent to go after filesharers versus what they have recovered in settlements. For that matter, I wonder how many active P2P users were sharing copyrighted stuff before the RIAA started their campaign, and how many do so now. I'm willing to bet that the numbers have not decreased, but increased significantly. After all, RIAA goes after a handful of people in the U.S. -- most have not been busted, and they can't even touch those outside the U.S. For that matter, how many folks sharing and downloading music on these networks have ceased to do so on their own out of fear that they will be busted? Probably a modest number, but certainly not a huge percentage. For every person that is busted or just stops on their own, I'm sure there are half a dozen more taking their place.
Maybe it really is just the principle of the thing, and they have to actively do SOMETHING to defend their members' copyrights simply to have a track record of doing so? You know, in the event of any future legal or legislative challenges to these copyrights, or the whole copyright system in general? Is there a provision in copyright law that requires that one to actively defend their copyrights in order to keep them? Help me understand this, please.
I think you've gone way off base here. Yes, "technology is neutral" is a cliche, but believe it or not, sometimes cliches are true. Your specious guillotine example has already been discussed elsewhere. When I say "neutral," I don't mean that the potential uses or motives of the users are neutral -- I'm saying that, for example, a GPS system doesn't know or care who it is tracking or why -- the same technology can be used to protect the eldery or mentally ill, to locate a dangerous criminal, or to violate the privacy of a law-abiding citizen. It all depends on how the item is programmed and for what purpose -- when the human element is applied to the equation, that's when neutrality ceases.
Take guns. Now, I do not own one and am hardly a "gun nut," but there are legitimate reasons for guns to exist. Those might include hunting for food or sport (I personally abhor hunting, but defend your right or anyone else's to the practice), self-defense, stopping a criminal posing a threat to public safety, repelling an invading force, etc. They can also be used to kill or maim a defenseless convenience store clerk after stealing $50, to kill a witness who could potentially put you in jail, or to off your old lady after you've had one beer too many and she mouths off at you. (Though I'm sure a few would put that latter example into the first category.....)
Using this technology to keep alzheimer's victims from wandering off or hurting themseleves is about the least objectionable "tattletale" scenario I can think of. Going to the other end of the spectrum; say, routinely tracking a driver's movements in his own private car....ah, not so much. Technology itself is neutral, and while it can be used for the betterment of mankind, there will always be the temptation to expand a successful tracking technology for use in ever widening circles of privacy violations. That is why we need strong, sensible legislation to prevent abuses and draw boundries. Unfortunately, that requires strong, sensible politicians to make the law, and I don't think they're making any of those anymore.
This is just the sort of outrageously anal action that helps to paint the industry in a very negative light. Yeah, while in any big city you can easily find pirated CDs and DVDs with ease from mass commercial infringers who remain relatively untouched, they are really on the ball when it comes to quashing an innocent little home video of someone's kid. This reminds me of the time Disney sued some day care center because they had the audacity to paint Mickey and Donald and friends on the walls for the kiddies. (As I recall, after the hoopla, Hanna-Barbera stepped in and allowed them to use their characters instead.) We need more of this sort of idiocy to turn public opinion against them.
I expect next they will have a video of teenagers goofing around at some public event (a street fair, carnival, whatever) pulled because there happens to be a band there playing some copyrighted work that can be heard in the background. Or of someone walking down the street and absent-mindedly whistling a few bars of a tune that they have not paid royalties to whistle. What about a video in which someone is wearing a t-shirt with a band's logo? "Free publicity, my ass -- it's trademark infringement, that's what it is!!"
In what world did FEMA think that the truth would not be almost instantly exposed? Who are they employing in the PR dept.? The Three Stooges?
How dare you insult the Stooges by comparing them to goverment employees. (Then again, maybe FEMA can just use the excuse, "I'm a victim of coisumstance!"
At least the Stooges weren't creating their mayhem and disorder with my tax dollars.
"File-sharing and illegally downloading of music has devastated a once-booming music industry. Some observers say the industry is just trying to protect itself."
Last time I checked, the industry's profits were still pretty comfortably in the gaziliions range. If by "devastated" they mean "somewhat less outrageous than before," and "our poor execs are having to get by on salaries and bonuses only 30 times as big as the average workingman's salary instead of 50 times as much" then perhaps it's an accurate statement. It's all a matter of proportion -- the more you make, the more you expect. It's like a baseball player making $20 mil a year, then getting insulted because his team wants to pay him "only" $15 mil this year. Corporations and their royalty seem to think that they have a "right" to consistently make as much or more than they did the previous year. I think Average Joe has little sympathy for them (as do I).
I find most modern movies objectionable from start to end on the basis of insulting my intelligence. Fortunately, it is still legal to "circumvent" their DRM by not watching them at all.
.....is to keep adding names until EVERYONE is on the list. Then we can all be declared enemy combatants, lose what few rights we have left, and the country will be renamed "The United States of Guantanamo."
The nefarious legislation known as U.S.C. Title 18 Section 2257 has never been about protecting the children or battling kiddie pr0n. After all, true child pr0nographers certainly don't have their subjects sign releases anyway, nor do they advertise their wares openly on easily accessible public commercial sites. It is one of many tools of intimidation, to harass and potentially shut down perfectly legal adult sites. They were hoping some sites would simply shut down rather than put up with the burdensome recordkeeping requirements, or that sites with user-generated content would be more vigilant about self-censoring even remotely questionable content out of fear. You can keep the most detailed, pristine, organized records (as any smart adult site would do anyway), and yet fear that if even one model's paperwork is in any way hinky, a felony charge may ensue.
In general, you can safely assume that any legislation regarding adult material has this sort of ulterior motive. The powers that be have never accepted the notion that it is legal (for now, until the Roberts Court rules on the next big case) for adults to choose to view adult material depicting consenting adults engaged in adult activities. To them, all pr0n is bad, and if they could, they would outlaw all of it. Whenever "think of the children" is bandied about in these things, you can bet that they are thinking of far more than "the children" -- they are also thinking about you and me and every other potential legal peruser of naughty pics.
This thread is so typical of what/. has become -- perhaps setting a new record for irrelevant or plain ignorant comments. At the time I'm viewing it, there are about 200 posts. It looks like perhaps a couple dozen at most actually discuss the article in question. Of the rest, they seem to be roughly evenly divided between (a) people who totally misconstrued the subject matter (even if you failed to RTFA, the summary makes it very clear as to what "age verification" legislation is being referenced), and (b) those who go off on tangents totally unrelated to the subject matter (including the ubiquitous and almost mandatory posts from the "right to bear arms" crowd, who somehow manage to interject comments on gun ownership into almost any thread).
It's one thing to change the course of a hurricane -- it is quite another to do so in any sort of predictable fashion. Even storms that are (for now) unaffected by human intervention have a substantial margain of error on their predicted path. (That's why the maps show the classic "cone" instead of a straight line.) Remember that Katrina would have struck an even more devastating blow to New Orleans had it not veered from the predicted course at the last minute.
So, what if the storm, left alone, would have veered away from a populous area at the last minute on its own, and by screwing with it you have now caused it to strike a more direct and deadly blow?
This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.
Given the amount of work that would entail, I doubt they will provide "decades" worth of comparison files -- they will likely concentrate on recent and/or popular (i.e., majorly profitable) material. NBC may well want to prevent "Heroes" from turning up on YouTube, but something tells me they aren't going into the archives to provide "fingerprints" of "Supertrain" or "Hello, Larry" or the Jean Doumanian era of SNL. (Well, in the latter case they might wish to keep those shows off YT out of sheer embarassment....)
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"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties."
The difference being that while I trust no one, I trust the government with the information even less, because they have the power to screw me over to such a greater degree.
No warrant, no searches or seizures of my stuff. They are particularly prohibited from searching through all of my correspondence without a warrant.
A warrant? That's so 20th Century.....
The precendent for anything illegal over the past decade has been that anything illegal and not plausibly deniable will be retroactively legalized, rendering the legal question moot.
In other words, they have figured out how to change the past without having to muck around with all the scientific and logistical problems of building a time machine. Brilliant!
The NSA does not care about monitoring geeks in their Mom's basement.
Except maybe on breaks, when they need a good laugh...It's called "sarcasm." Look it up.
This is one more reason not to pay money to watch grown men sweat a lot and scratch themselves.
Hell, I agree. There are plenty of neighborhoods around here where I can see that for free all day long...
Next year every user will encrypt all email, they may try to prevent this domestically, but the international community will lead the way to 100% strong encryption on email seamlessly integrated into the client.
"Next year" is more than optimistic -- it's pollyannaish. PGP and its ilk are great inventions that appeal to a very small handful of geeks and the most anal of privacy advocates. (Not an insult, BTW -- I'm one of those...) PGP does no good unless all or most of your e-mail contacts, from the daily to the occasional, have it as well. And most casual e-mail users lack the incentive or understanding to download a standalone piece of software, make it work with their mail program, and then remember to use it. But, oh yeah, even if they do, it still means that most of THEIR correspondents can't or won't, so again it is of little value.
The key is in the last phrase of your sentence: "seamlessly integrated into the client." Until such encryption is routinely built-in to all e-mail software (end user, client, ISP, servers, etc.) BY DEFAULT and works automatically without the end users having to do much more than turn it on, encryption as a tool against government snooping will have little effect. (And long before the tide turns, the guvmint will probably make using encryption illegal anyway. I'm ready for a new bumper sticker: "If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption.")
Furthermore, the US has yet to ship millions of its citizens to remote gulags, so the original poster's comparison to the USSR is even worse exaggeration.
Operative word = "yet." Be patient -- it takes time to build those gulags.....
I used to do inventory for a number of major chains back in the 80's and 90's, and we ran into this a few times when inventorying stockrooms. Basically, employees will conspire to swipe an item, then replace it with some inert object(s) of roughly equal weight and reseal the box. It's a pretty well-known internal scam, so I'd be surprised if any reputable major chain wouldn't make good for the customer who inadvertantly gets sent a boxed item full of bricks or such. But then, the key word there is "reputable" -- we are talking about Best Buy, after all...
No huge defeat for the RIAA here, but it does show how a savvy judge can recognize when evidence is flimsy or insufficient. That's why the RIAA really doesn't want any of these cases to hit the courts -- it requires a higher standard of proof from them, and that means more time and money proving the case. They know that most folks receiving a "letter of doom" from them will just cave in and pay the extortion money up front.
But to digress to a wider subject here.....do you think the RIAA understands that their tactics are but a finger in a dike? Do they honestly believe that their efforts have made any significant dent in file sharing of copyrighted material? And if not, then why do they persist? Just on principle alone? Despite what some here have implied, this can't be a cash cow for them -- the settlements offered are relatively low, and I can't imagine that they are not running in the red on these endeavors when you look at the bottom line. Even the much publicized recent $200K+ judgement they won, IF they could collect it (good luck with that), probably wouldn't even come close to covering their overall expenses so far.
I'd love to see statistics on what they have spent to go after filesharers versus what they have recovered in settlements. For that matter, I wonder how many active P2P users were sharing copyrighted stuff before the RIAA started their campaign, and how many do so now. I'm willing to bet that the numbers have not decreased, but increased significantly. After all, RIAA goes after a handful of people in the U.S. -- most have not been busted, and they can't even touch those outside the U.S. For that matter, how many folks sharing and downloading music on these networks have ceased to do so on their own out of fear that they will be busted? Probably a modest number, but certainly not a huge percentage. For every person that is busted or just stops on their own, I'm sure there are half a dozen more taking their place.
Maybe it really is just the principle of the thing, and they have to actively do SOMETHING to defend their members' copyrights simply to have a track record of doing so? You know, in the event of any future legal or legislative challenges to these copyrights, or the whole copyright system in general? Is there a provision in copyright law that requires that one to actively defend their copyrights in order to keep them? Help me understand this, please.
I think you've gone way off base here. Yes, "technology is neutral" is a cliche, but believe it or not, sometimes cliches are true. Your specious guillotine example has already been discussed elsewhere. When I say "neutral," I don't mean that the potential uses or motives of the users are neutral -- I'm saying that, for example, a GPS system doesn't know or care who it is tracking or why -- the same technology can be used to protect the eldery or mentally ill, to locate a dangerous criminal, or to violate the privacy of a law-abiding citizen. It all depends on how the item is programmed and for what purpose -- when the human element is applied to the equation, that's when neutrality ceases.
Take guns. Now, I do not own one and am hardly a "gun nut," but there are legitimate reasons for guns to exist. Those might include hunting for food or sport (I personally abhor hunting, but defend your right or anyone else's to the practice), self-defense, stopping a criminal posing a threat to public safety, repelling an invading force, etc. They can also be used to kill or maim a defenseless convenience store clerk after stealing $50, to kill a witness who could potentially put you in jail, or to off your old lady after you've had one beer too many and she mouths off at you. (Though I'm sure a few would put that latter example into the first category.....)
It's kinda sad, but unless your next government truly cleans up, you need a revolution, I'm scared and sad to say that less won't do.
I can tell you why that will not happen in two words:
"Baaaaaa......baaaaaaa......"
Using this technology to keep alzheimer's victims from wandering off or hurting themseleves is about the least objectionable "tattletale" scenario I can think of. Going to the other end of the spectrum; say, routinely tracking a driver's movements in his own private car....ah, not so much. Technology itself is neutral, and while it can be used for the betterment of mankind, there will always be the temptation to expand a successful tracking technology for use in ever widening circles of privacy violations. That is why we need strong, sensible legislation to prevent abuses and draw boundries. Unfortunately, that requires strong, sensible politicians to make the law, and I don't think they're making any of those anymore.
This is just the sort of outrageously anal action that helps to paint the industry in a very negative light. Yeah, while in any big city you can easily find pirated CDs and DVDs with ease from mass commercial infringers who remain relatively untouched, they are really on the ball when it comes to quashing an innocent little home video of someone's kid. This reminds me of the time Disney sued some day care center because they had the audacity to paint Mickey and Donald and friends on the walls for the kiddies. (As I recall, after the hoopla, Hanna-Barbera stepped in and allowed them to use their characters instead.) We need more of this sort of idiocy to turn public opinion against them.
I expect next they will have a video of teenagers goofing around at some public event (a street fair, carnival, whatever) pulled because there happens to be a band there playing some copyrighted work that can be heard in the background. Or of someone walking down the street and absent-mindedly whistling a few bars of a tune that they have not paid royalties to whistle. What about a video in which someone is wearing a t-shirt with a band's logo? "Free publicity, my ass -- it's trademark infringement, that's what it is!!"
In what world did FEMA think that the truth would not be almost instantly exposed? Who are they employing in the PR dept.? The Three Stooges?
How dare you insult the Stooges by comparing them to goverment employees. (Then again, maybe FEMA can just use the excuse, "I'm a victim of coisumstance!"
At least the Stooges weren't creating their mayhem and disorder with my tax dollars.
"File-sharing and illegally downloading of music has devastated a once-booming music industry. Some observers say the industry is just trying to protect itself."
Last time I checked, the industry's profits were still pretty comfortably in the gaziliions range. If by "devastated" they mean "somewhat less outrageous than before," and "our poor execs are having to get by on salaries and bonuses only 30 times as big as the average workingman's salary instead of 50 times as much" then perhaps it's an accurate statement. It's all a matter of proportion -- the more you make, the more you expect. It's like a baseball player making $20 mil a year, then getting insulted because his team wants to pay him "only" $15 mil this year. Corporations and their royalty seem to think that they have a "right" to consistently make as much or more than they did the previous year. I think Average Joe has little sympathy for them (as do I).
I find most modern movies objectionable from start to end on the basis of insulting my intelligence. Fortunately, it is still legal to "circumvent" their DRM by not watching them at all.
.....is to keep adding names until EVERYONE is on the list. Then we can all be declared enemy combatants, lose what few rights we have left, and the country will be renamed "The United States of Guantanamo."
Guy's been in Congress since '82. You'd think he'd have learned how things work by now.....
The nefarious legislation known as U.S.C. Title 18 Section 2257 has never been about protecting the children or battling kiddie pr0n. After all, true child pr0nographers certainly don't have their subjects sign releases anyway, nor do they advertise their wares openly on easily accessible public commercial sites. It is one of many tools of intimidation, to harass and potentially shut down perfectly legal adult sites. They were hoping some sites would simply shut down rather than put up with the burdensome recordkeeping requirements, or that sites with user-generated content would be more vigilant about self-censoring even remotely questionable content out of fear. You can keep the most detailed, pristine, organized records (as any smart adult site would do anyway), and yet fear that if even one model's paperwork is in any way hinky, a felony charge may ensue.
In general, you can safely assume that any legislation regarding adult material has this sort of ulterior motive. The powers that be have never accepted the notion that it is legal (for now, until the Roberts Court rules on the next big case) for adults to choose to view adult material depicting consenting adults engaged in adult activities. To them, all pr0n is bad, and if they could, they would outlaw all of it. Whenever "think of the children" is bandied about in these things, you can bet that they are thinking of far more than "the children" -- they are also thinking about you and me and every other potential legal peruser of naughty pics.
This thread is so typical of what /. has become -- perhaps setting a new record for irrelevant or plain ignorant comments. At the time I'm viewing it, there are about 200 posts. It looks like perhaps a couple dozen at most actually discuss the article in question. Of the rest, they seem to be roughly evenly divided between (a) people who totally misconstrued the subject matter (even if you failed to RTFA, the summary makes it very clear as to what "age verification" legislation is being referenced), and (b) those who go off on tangents totally unrelated to the subject matter (including the ubiquitous and almost mandatory posts from the "right to bear arms" crowd, who somehow manage to interject comments on gun ownership into almost any thread).
It's one thing to change the course of a hurricane -- it is quite another to do so in any sort of predictable fashion. Even storms that are (for now) unaffected by human intervention have a substantial margain of error on their predicted path. (That's why the maps show the classic "cone" instead of a straight line.) Remember that Katrina would have struck an even more devastating blow to New Orleans had it not veered from the predicted course at the last minute.
So, what if the storm, left alone, would have veered away from a populous area at the last minute on its own, and by screwing with it you have now caused it to strike a more direct and deadly blow?
"If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em!"
What is this....1996?
This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.
Given the amount of work that would entail, I doubt they will provide "decades" worth of comparison files -- they will likely concentrate on recent and/or popular (i.e., majorly profitable) material. NBC may well want to prevent "Heroes" from turning up on YouTube, but something tells me they aren't going into the archives to provide "fingerprints" of "Supertrain" or "Hello, Larry" or the Jean Doumanian era of SNL. (Well, in the latter case they might wish to keep those shows off YT out of sheer embarassment....)