And this is yet another reason why AES256 in double containers should always be the rule, period. Let them seize something, they won't be able to get into it to actually verify there's any infringement there, and attempting to force me to "unlock" that data will be a violation of my 4th and 5th Amendment rights.
They can take my porn when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.....
The question is: who doesn't have something on their computer that infringes copyright in some manner? It's not just the P2P crowd -- they might well share some of their booty with others, maybe even providing tracks on a CD-R to friends who have slow connections, or not enough savvy to use or desire to risk torrents. If you've ripped tracks from someone else's CD, technically you're violating a copyright. (Hell, the RIAA thinks that ripping your own CDs is infringement). How many people have software of dubious origin on their machines, either by design or ignorance? (All those grey market Windows and Photoshop CDs that are ubiquitous on eBay, for example.) For that matter, what about the mass of infringing material on YouTube? Download a clip from last night's American Idol before Fox has it pulled, and now your computer is ours....mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha. Even more damning is that there is hardly a website in existence that doesn't have SOMETHING on it -- a graphic, photo, quote, musical background -- that is, by the strictest standard of the law, an infringement of someone's copyright. Just viewing the website puts those items in your cache -- voila, you are now guilty...please hand over the computer quietly and there won't be any trouble.
Maybe this is a plot to help balance the budget. Instead of spending money on computers for all the federal agencies, they just seize as many as they need from all us hardened criminals.
.....for doing this now (and it is, nevertheless, a good one) is that there will be a neat and tidy permanent summation of the misdeeds Herr Bush is accused of in the Congressional Record. It will at least provide a handy "Cliff's Notes" overview for future historians -- a starting point for research. Obviously, there will be no actual action taken. Even more obviously, Bush would be long out of office before the process could possibly end anyway. It may be a naively quixotic quest on Kucinich's part, or just a means for him to get attention (and I discount either theory -- Kucinich may be a bit of an eccentric, but I believe him to be an honorable man). No, I think his only motivation is to make sure it's all "on the record" in an official and permanent manner.
If I am an Islamic terrorist bent on blowing up a plane and myself in the process, it won't matter that I show you an ID -- in a few hours, I will be with Allah and enjoying those celestial virgins. Remember that many of the 9/11 hijackers had legitimate IDs with actual personal information on them. If you are on a suicide mission, being able to ID you after the carnage doesn't do a fucking thing to make anybody safer.
OTOH, if I am a terrorist, and planning a non-suicidal attack, the last thing I am going to do is give you a legit ID that tells you who I am and where you can find me to come arrest me. Nor am I going to give you that information if I know I am on a watch list somewhere. No ID is secure or immune to counterfeiting -- the bad guys will find a way to beat the system. Records can be falsified, photos can be manipulated, chips can be cloned. If all the gazillions spent on security can't keep bombs, guns, liquid kablooie, or box cutters off a plane, an ID check is going to do nothing to help prevent it. I'm all in favor of better technology that can spot those things before they get airborne -- Barney Fife of the TSA looking at a tiny, badly shot photo on a little plastic card is useless if you have C4 in your underpants.
Today's corporate controllers feel their companies not only have the right to exist, and therefore receive massive tax-payer bailouts the magnitude of entire state budgets, but think they have the right to profit. This is particularly blatant with the music and film industries world wide, who count a person's refusal to buy as "stealing" and characterize emerging business models as murderous.
Not just the right to make a profit, but the right to ever-increasing profits. Used to be if a company's profit dropped, there would be soul-searching to see how they could change and adapt their methods and products to better suit the current economic situation, to more accurately meet consumers' needs, or to effectively compete against other companies. That has changed -- now, if the bottom line starts dropping, it's never the company's problem, it's all those outside forces that must be bullied, threatened, lobbied, bribed, or regulated into submission. "We've been doing it this way for X number of years, and we want to make sure that we can still do everything the same way, only keep making more and more money."
It's not just the record and film industries that see the Internet as a threat. Newspapers, magazines and other traditional media are running scared. Governments fear the notion of people actually forming and sharing their own opinions instead of being told what to believe, and corrupt governments and politicians fear their carefully obfuscated dirty laundry being hung out on the Net for all to see. As the Net grew in popularity, the initial corporate attitude was, "aw...how cute." Then it became, "hmmm.....how can we make a profit off this thing?" If they failed to do so, it then became "the Internet is evil and must be killed, or at least molded and shaped to serve OUR needs."
I think the way the **AAs would counter the argument would be the analogy: suppose there is a raid on the local whorehouse, and you are there, and you claim that you weren't actually doing anything illegal, but just "hanging around" or "doing research" or "visiting a friend." The odds are infinitely against that being the case, and while we acknowledge that there is a CHANCE you were actually innocent, if you hang out there you should not be surprised if you get swept up in the dragnet.
And they might also counter the "but there are legitimate uses for p2p" argument with the same scenario. Maybe the madame of the whorehouse also occasionally sells a jar of her homemade chicken soup to someone, but we know 99% of the visitors to that house are seeking to satisfy a different kind of appetite.
(Don't think all of this is farfetched -- after all, most prostitution busts do not rely on any actual proof that money was exchanged or that services were rendered -- the actual passing of bills or manipulation of body parts is rarely observed, but merely inferred. If you are driving at 3 am in a known prostitution area, and you are caught with a known prostitute in your car, you WILL be busted, and the judge will laugh off any "innocent" defense.)
Obviously, they must be running out of people to sue for downloading movies. This new technology is clearly designed to frustrate even more consumers, and drive them to download so they can keep their profit margin high with lawsuits.
Fortunately (for me), there hasn't been a movie coming out of Hollywood in 20 years that I have the slightest interest in either wasting money on, or risking an infringement lawsuit for downloading.
The whole "intent to arouse" thing is troublesome, to say the least. One, how do you discern intent and, two, arouse who? The average person, or someone who happens to have a very specific fetish?
I'm sure, long before the Internet and computers existed, there were individuals who got their jollies looking at the children's underwear photos in the Sears catalog. Sears certainly did not publish those photos with the "intent to arouse," and 99.99999% of those looking at the catalog would not have that reaction. When we start banning things because some teeny tiny minority of users MIGHT derive sexual pleasure from them in a manner that triggers the "eewwww!" factor in most people, we're getting mighty close to thoughtcrime.
So, if a photographer produces photos of underage children in their underwear that are in every way indistinguishable from the Sears photos, but markets them under a website called "hotpreteensintheirundies.com" and uses suggestive, lascivious language to describe them, these otherwise unremarkable images become "child porn." This reminds me of the famous case I recall from my college communications classes where a publication (was it Screw magazine? This was a long time ago...) was judged not to contain obscene material; however, because the publisher marketed it as "obscene," and used that word in promotion, it was considered to be obscene. This is ludicrous.
By rights, there should be no harm, no foul when it comes to images if (a)no children were actually physically assaulted or harmed (as in the underwear images above), or (b)no actual sexual activity is depicted, or (c)the individuals involved are actually 18+, or (d)the individuals depicted do not actually exist (as in computer or manually generated art). In all of these cases, no actual child was in any way harmed or sexually assaulted.
The notion that such images may possibly, maybe, under the right circumstances, in some very few rare and isolated cases inspire a potential pedophile to actually harm a child is irrelevant. (And, as others have pointed out, WE DON'T KNOW if this is the case, because hardly any studies have been done, and probably will never be done, because of the distasteful nature of the subject matter.) ANYTHING can potentially inspire a sick mind to do heinous things. (The book "Catcher in the Rye" and the movie "Taxi Driver" were never intended to inspire a potential assassin, yet they played a significant role in, respectively, motivating Chapman to kill Lennon, and Hinkley to shoot Reagan.) As soon as we start criminalizing things based on "maybes" and "mights" and unproven possible unintended effects on isolated psychopaths, then the Law has become an orderless, featureless blob of goo instead of a carefully crafted guideline to protect the safety of the general society.
But (HEAVY SIGH), we ARE talking about CHILDREN here. And, as we all know too well, anything that even slightly reeks of "protect the children" insures that common sense and logic will quickly be cast aside....
How about situations where you expect there to be at least some security "theater," but when you get there there is no performance at all?
My elderly mother has been in and out of the major hospital in our city quite a few times over the last decade. You name a part of the building, she's been there: ER, ICU, various floors and wards, various testing and imaging areas, the adjacent short-term rehab facility, etc. Because I am such a nice son, I frequently visit her when she's there. Amazingly, no matter where I wander in that huge facility, no matter the time of day or night, no matter how I am dressed (in the most casual mode, I probably resemble a homeless man) I have never been stopped, challenged, or questioned about my intentions. The ONLY exception is the ER treatment area, and that probably because they simply don't want kibitzers getting in the way. Hospitals, at the very least, used to enforce visiting hours, and restrict visitors to immediate family and/or people specifically authorized or requested by the patient. Every time I have found myself wandering around the hospital (it's easy to get lost in that large and poorly-designed thing) trying to find where they have moved my mother or where she is having some test done, I often think how I could be ANYBODY, and with the vilest of intentions, and no one would stop me. You'd think they'd at least manufacture a reasonable facade of security: a uniformed security guard or two (I have never seen a single one) at the main entrances, checking an ID when entering certain areas or wings, having to check in with the nursing station before entering a patient's room, etc. But....nothing.
Simple. Flat-out time limits. They may have a limited ability to be renewed, but cannot be extended. Seven years is probably plenty for most copyrighted works, possibly with an option to extend to another seven, resulting in fourteen total.
And really, that concept is more and more relevant in a society that is increasingly impatient, fickle, easily bored, and quick to latch onto "the next new thing." The Disneys of this world are dinosaurs -- how much of today's popular music, television, or cinema will still be marketable and profitable in a few decades? Just look at music -- very little modern popular music endures for long as a "hot" commodity, and very quickly becomes the more niche interest of fanatics and nostalgists. Look up the songs and artists that were hot 20, 10, or even 5 years ago. How many of them still top the charts? Few to none. A decent TV show like "Law and Order" may endure in a relative degree of popularity for years to come, but will the owners of "Wife Swap" really still need copyright protection in 10 or 15 years? Very few artistic creations these days are destined to remain majorly profitable for long, and in most cases the majority of potential profit is made in a very brief time, with rapidly diminishing returns afterwards. So, in such a case the question becomes whether there is a right to continue to desperately milk every last dollar from a work of diminishing interest ad infinitum while the handful of individuals who even still care about it are penalized for copying, modifying, or sharing that work among themselves.
Under current copyright law, nothing ever becomes public domain and they have turned it into a perpetual right to milk a creation forevermore without ever giving anything back to the public that gave them that monopoly to begin with.
Even after the teets have run dry, and there's no more profit to "milk" from a work, they will still hang onto the copyright to prevent anyone else from possibly themselves gaining any benefit from it. Sometimes there is no effort even made to profit from a work -- there are quite a few older TV shows and movies and such that are locked up in vaults, sitting there making zero profit for their rights holders, usually because the remaining appeal of the work is considered too narrow to be profitable. (Too small of a customer base for a corporation's lofty financial desires.) If they are no longer making money off it, whether through market forces or by calculated choice, the work should pass into the public domain instead of being held hostage.
But isn't only profit taxed, not income? So they can't really use this for anything.
Well, they could use it as a benchmark to see if the reported profit sounds realistic. If you show $20,000 in gross receipts, but are claiming only $2,000 profit, they're going to take a much closer look at your deductions and business expenses. It may simply mean you had a bad year, or your business model needs a lot of work. OR it may mean that your itemized expenses are, shall we say, a tad exaggerated?
Considering how many people worldwide are involved not just in the actual downloading/uploading of such material, but also the number of folks involved in indexing P2P, writing software for same, and creating and marketing those "online privacy tools," if they are going to criminalize such activity, I hope this treaty makes provisions to allocate funds for a whoooole lotta new prisons.
That's why this is a quixotic fight. When you have so many people involved in an "illegal" activity, any attempt to enforce laws against it becomes a lost cause. But then, such logic has yet to mitigate the "War on Drugs"(TM) -- yeah, how's that working out for everyone? They'll make a few high-profile busts of Pirate Bay-ish sites here and there (and those will probably just relocate their servers to a country that is not a party to the treaty), and maybe hit a few random private citizens to try and throw a scare into everyone, but most file sharing will go merrily on, unimpeded. What's that quote about insanity consisting of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
But don't you understand? All this -- the surveillance, the monitoring, the foolproof IDs -- is going to ultimately eliminate crime in the UK and enable everyone to live in blissful peace and safety and harmony, correct? I mean, hasn't crime already slowed to a trickle because of all the CCTV and stuff?
What? It hasn't? But...but...how could this not work? I thought for sure...
Unless.....maybe this has nothing to do with battling crime and terrorism, but instead to establish total control over the lives of citizens? NO!!! NO!!! Perish the thought...not in a Western Democracy...we have freedom and all that other good stuff, not like those nasty totalitarian regimes, right? Must...eliminate...negative...thinking....all is well...all is well....all is well.....
If only this had been developed 20 years ago, I'd still be married. (I'd have ordered two right off the bat -- one for her and one for her mother.....)
The submitter should familiarise themselves with (off the top of my head) three ongoing terrorist trials where CCTV evidence is important to gaining a possible conviction. One in particular, that of the prosecution of associates of the 7th of July London bombers who travelled with them to London in advance to case targets, relies heavily on CCTV to link these people to the bombers, and will help obtain convictions (should that be what the jury decides).
Ah, yes, the venerable old "closing the barn door....." trick. Maybe that evidence will help get a conviction, fine and dandy. But those cameras certainly didn't prevent all those innocent folks from being killed and maimed on 7/7, now did they? And it's all supposed to be about saving lives. The cameras don't prevent crime -- they only record it and/or its perpetrators. Maybe. If they are positioned properly, pointing in the right direction at the time, the light is good, and the planets are properly aligned. And have sufficient resolution to identify suspects to the exclusion of all others.
OK, anticipating your next argument: "But by arresting and convicting those terrorists, we may well have prevented them from carrying out future attacks so, see, the cameras really do save lives!" A big stretch there. Unless you show me a significant number of serious criminal cases of this sort in which the CCTV surveillance was the key, "make or break" piece of evidence, and not just icing on the investigative cake, I'm not prepared to justify the expense and privacy implications of mass surveillance for the good of the results.
Some people still swear at Windows 2000 to this day, so I don't doubt that there will be people who will swear at Windows XP several years from now anyway.
Wow, thanks for mentioning that book -- I am downloading it as I type this.
The problem is that, as with most things of this sort, the people who most need to understand it -- those who blindly support our guvmint's invasive, Constitution-busting, rights-trampling data mining in the name of the "War on Terrorism" (less known under its true internal working title as "The War to Gain More Complete Control Over ALL Citizens' Lives") -- fall into one of two categories. They are either (1)too math-illiterate to understand it, or (2)have the potential ability to understand it, but will not accept the argument because of their own personal emotional prejudices. Just like the "War on Drugs" -- any thinking, rational person looking at the numbers and the logic has to conclude that it is a vast waste of time and money and harms far more lives than it protects, but too many people have that emotional investment in the "Just Say No" mentality and cling to simple mantras instead of reality. Many of the same folks who think "Drugs are bad, therefore anything the government does to fight against drugs is good" will think the same on the current subject -- just insert "terrorists" wherever it reads "drugs."
"In an attempt to convince U.S. prosecutors to crack down on music piracy, the National District Attorneys Organization has said that downloading music will lead to "everything from handguns to large quantities of cocaine [and] marijuana," as well as terrorism, according to published reports."
Not to mention bestiality, fallen arches, and the heartbreak of psoriasis....
If the Miller case in Arizona is any guide, I imagine they'll just order you to bring your data in for imaging.
"I'm so sorry...on the way here, I stopped by the Cut-Throat Convenience Store for some coffee. (Yes, I know it's a bad neighborhood, but they make such great coffee there...) Anyway, in my half-asleep state, I accidentally left the computer on the front seat, with the car unlocked and the door partially ajar. And, wouldn't you know it -- some young rogue must stole my computer! Honestly, what is this world coming to?"
Copyright appears to be largely unenforceable on pseudo-anonymous networks, due in part to the difficulty of gathering evidence on these networks. This will only lead to the members of the RIAA buying stronger laws which either allow a suit for weaker evidence, or allow seizure of computer equipment in order to gather evidence of copyright infringement. In the latter case, such a law is already making its way through the congressional process.
And who is going to do the actual "seizing" of the equipment? Feds? Local gendarmes? (I can imagine that will go over big in some jurisdictions.....devoting time and manpower to seizing some geek's equipment for sharing music...) What happens if no infringing material is found? (A real possibility given some of the RIAA's other faux pas in the past.) Can the victim turn around and sue them? Will this be like the seizure/forfeiture laws under the War on Drugs in which they take your assets on the merest suspicion, then if you are not guilty, you have to jump through 197 legal hoops to even have the remotest hope of getting your stuff back?
I'm waiting for someone in guvmint to start making the argument that sharing copyrighted music is a terrorist act intended to undermine the economy of the U.S. Then they'd also get to use the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, and all those other fun tools to nail file sharers to the wall.....Yes, postulating that scenario should by all rights be a sign of disturbed paranoia, but the way things are going.....
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"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
Give me six minutes with your computer, and I will find an excuse on it to arrest you." -- The U.S. Government
They can take my porn when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.....
The question is: who doesn't have something on their computer that infringes copyright in some manner? It's not just the P2P crowd -- they might well share some of their booty with others, maybe even providing tracks on a CD-R to friends who have slow connections, or not enough savvy to use or desire to risk torrents. If you've ripped tracks from someone else's CD, technically you're violating a copyright. (Hell, the RIAA thinks that ripping your own CDs is infringement). How many people have software of dubious origin on their machines, either by design or ignorance? (All those grey market Windows and Photoshop CDs that are ubiquitous on eBay, for example.) For that matter, what about the mass of infringing material on YouTube? Download a clip from last night's American Idol before Fox has it pulled, and now your computer is ours....mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha. Even more damning is that there is hardly a website in existence that doesn't have SOMETHING on it -- a graphic, photo, quote, musical background -- that is, by the strictest standard of the law, an infringement of someone's copyright. Just viewing the website puts those items in your cache -- voila, you are now guilty...please hand over the computer quietly and there won't be any trouble.
Maybe this is a plot to help balance the budget. Instead of spending money on computers for all the federal agencies, they just seize as many as they need from all us hardened criminals.
.....for doing this now (and it is, nevertheless, a good one) is that there will be a neat and tidy permanent summation of the misdeeds Herr Bush is accused of in the Congressional Record. It will at least provide a handy "Cliff's Notes" overview for future historians -- a starting point for research. Obviously, there will be no actual action taken. Even more obviously, Bush would be long out of office before the process could possibly end anyway. It may be a naively quixotic quest on Kucinich's part, or just a means for him to get attention (and I discount either theory -- Kucinich may be a bit of an eccentric, but I believe him to be an honorable man). No, I think his only motivation is to make sure it's all "on the record" in an official and permanent manner.
If I am an Islamic terrorist bent on blowing up a plane and myself in the process, it won't matter that I show you an ID -- in a few hours, I will be with Allah and enjoying those celestial virgins. Remember that many of the 9/11 hijackers had legitimate IDs with actual personal information on them. If you are on a suicide mission, being able to ID you after the carnage doesn't do a fucking thing to make anybody safer.
OTOH, if I am a terrorist, and planning a non-suicidal attack, the last thing I am going to do is give you a legit ID that tells you who I am and where you can find me to come arrest me. Nor am I going to give you that information if I know I am on a watch list somewhere. No ID is secure or immune to counterfeiting -- the bad guys will find a way to beat the system. Records can be falsified, photos can be manipulated, chips can be cloned. If all the gazillions spent on security can't keep bombs, guns, liquid kablooie, or box cutters off a plane, an ID check is going to do nothing to help prevent it. I'm all in favor of better technology that can spot those things before they get airborne -- Barney Fife of the TSA looking at a tiny, badly shot photo on a little plastic card is useless if you have C4 in your underpants.
Not just the right to make a profit, but the right to ever-increasing profits. Used to be if a company's profit dropped, there would be soul-searching to see how they could change and adapt their methods and products to better suit the current economic situation, to more accurately meet consumers' needs, or to effectively compete against other companies. That has changed -- now, if the bottom line starts dropping, it's never the company's problem, it's all those outside forces that must be bullied, threatened, lobbied, bribed, or regulated into submission. "We've been doing it this way for X number of years, and we want to make sure that we can still do everything the same way, only keep making more and more money."
It's not just the record and film industries that see the Internet as a threat. Newspapers, magazines and other traditional media are running scared. Governments fear the notion of people actually forming and sharing their own opinions instead of being told what to believe, and corrupt governments and politicians fear their carefully obfuscated dirty laundry being hung out on the Net for all to see. As the Net grew in popularity, the initial corporate attitude was, "aw...how cute." Then it became, "hmmm.....how can we make a profit off this thing?" If they failed to do so, it then became "the Internet is evil and must be killed, or at least molded and shaped to serve OUR needs."
I think the way the **AAs would counter the argument would be the analogy: suppose there is a raid on the local whorehouse, and you are there, and you claim that you weren't actually doing anything illegal, but just "hanging around" or "doing research" or "visiting a friend." The odds are infinitely against that being the case, and while we acknowledge that there is a CHANCE you were actually innocent, if you hang out there you should not be surprised if you get swept up in the dragnet.
And they might also counter the "but there are legitimate uses for p2p" argument with the same scenario. Maybe the madame of the whorehouse also occasionally sells a jar of her homemade chicken soup to someone, but we know 99% of the visitors to that house are seeking to satisfy a different kind of appetite.
(Don't think all of this is farfetched -- after all, most prostitution busts do not rely on any actual proof that money was exchanged or that services were rendered -- the actual passing of bills or manipulation of body parts is rarely observed, but merely inferred. If you are driving at 3 am in a known prostitution area, and you are caught with a known prostitute in your car, you WILL be busted, and the judge will laugh off any "innocent" defense.)
Obviously, they must be running out of people to sue for downloading movies. This new technology is clearly designed to frustrate even more consumers, and drive them to download so they can keep their profit margin high with lawsuits.
Fortunately (for me), there hasn't been a movie coming out of Hollywood in 20 years that I have the slightest interest in either wasting money on, or risking an infringement lawsuit for downloading.
The whole "intent to arouse" thing is troublesome, to say the least. One, how do you discern intent and, two, arouse who? The average person, or someone who happens to have a very specific fetish?
I'm sure, long before the Internet and computers existed, there were individuals who got their jollies looking at the children's underwear photos in the Sears catalog. Sears certainly did not publish those photos with the "intent to arouse," and 99.99999% of those looking at the catalog would not have that reaction. When we start banning things because some teeny tiny minority of users MIGHT derive sexual pleasure from them in a manner that triggers the "eewwww!" factor in most people, we're getting mighty close to thoughtcrime.
So, if a photographer produces photos of underage children in their underwear that are in every way indistinguishable from the Sears photos, but markets them under a website called "hotpreteensintheirundies.com" and uses suggestive, lascivious language to describe them, these otherwise unremarkable images become "child porn." This reminds me of the famous case I recall from my college communications classes where a publication (was it Screw magazine? This was a long time ago...) was judged not to contain obscene material; however, because the publisher marketed it as "obscene," and used that word in promotion, it was considered to be obscene. This is ludicrous.
By rights, there should be no harm, no foul when it comes to images if (a)no children were actually physically assaulted or harmed (as in the underwear images above), or (b)no actual sexual activity is depicted, or (c)the individuals involved are actually 18+, or (d)the individuals depicted do not actually exist (as in computer or manually generated art). In all of these cases, no actual child was in any way harmed or sexually assaulted.
The notion that such images may possibly, maybe, under the right circumstances, in some very few rare and isolated cases inspire a potential pedophile to actually harm a child is irrelevant. (And, as others have pointed out, WE DON'T KNOW if this is the case, because hardly any studies have been done, and probably will never be done, because of the distasteful nature of the subject matter.) ANYTHING can potentially inspire a sick mind to do heinous things. (The book "Catcher in the Rye" and the movie "Taxi Driver" were never intended to inspire a potential assassin, yet they played a significant role in, respectively, motivating Chapman to kill Lennon, and Hinkley to shoot Reagan.) As soon as we start criminalizing things based on "maybes" and "mights" and unproven possible unintended effects on isolated psychopaths, then the Law has become an orderless, featureless blob of goo instead of a carefully crafted guideline to protect the safety of the general society.
But (HEAVY SIGH), we ARE talking about CHILDREN here. And, as we all know too well, anything that even slightly reeks of "protect the children" insures that common sense and logic will quickly be cast aside....
How about situations where you expect there to be at least some security "theater," but when you get there there is no performance at all?
My elderly mother has been in and out of the major hospital in our city quite a few times over the last decade. You name a part of the building, she's been there: ER, ICU, various floors and wards, various testing and imaging areas, the adjacent short-term rehab facility, etc. Because I am such a nice son, I frequently visit her when she's there. Amazingly, no matter where I wander in that huge facility, no matter the time of day or night, no matter how I am dressed (in the most casual mode, I probably resemble a homeless man) I have never been stopped, challenged, or questioned about my intentions. The ONLY exception is the ER treatment area, and that probably because they simply don't want kibitzers getting in the way. Hospitals, at the very least, used to enforce visiting hours, and restrict visitors to immediate family and/or people specifically authorized or requested by the patient. Every time I have found myself wandering around the hospital (it's easy to get lost in that large and poorly-designed thing) trying to find where they have moved my mother or where she is having some test done, I often think how I could be ANYBODY, and with the vilest of intentions, and no one would stop me. You'd think they'd at least manufacture a reasonable facade of security: a uniformed security guard or two (I have never seen a single one) at the main entrances, checking an ID when entering certain areas or wings, having to check in with the nursing station before entering a patient's room, etc. But....nothing.
And really, that concept is more and more relevant in a society that is increasingly impatient, fickle, easily bored, and quick to latch onto "the next new thing." The Disneys of this world are dinosaurs -- how much of today's popular music, television, or cinema will still be marketable and profitable in a few decades? Just look at music -- very little modern popular music endures for long as a "hot" commodity, and very quickly becomes the more niche interest of fanatics and nostalgists. Look up the songs and artists that were hot 20, 10, or even 5 years ago. How many of them still top the charts? Few to none. A decent TV show like "Law and Order" may endure in a relative degree of popularity for years to come, but will the owners of "Wife Swap" really still need copyright protection in 10 or 15 years? Very few artistic creations these days are destined to remain majorly profitable for long, and in most cases the majority of potential profit is made in a very brief time, with rapidly diminishing returns afterwards. So, in such a case the question becomes whether there is a right to continue to desperately milk every last dollar from a work of diminishing interest ad infinitum while the handful of individuals who even still care about it are penalized for copying, modifying, or sharing that work among themselves.
Even after the teets have run dry, and there's no more profit to "milk" from a work, they will still hang onto the copyright to prevent anyone else from possibly themselves gaining any benefit from it. Sometimes there is no effort even made to profit from a work -- there are quite a few older TV shows and movies and such that are locked up in vaults, sitting there making zero profit for their rights holders, usually because the remaining appeal of the work is considered too narrow to be profitable. (Too small of a customer base for a corporation's lofty financial desires.) If they are no longer making money off it, whether through market forces or by calculated choice, the work should pass into the public domain instead of being held hostage.
Well, they could use it as a benchmark to see if the reported profit sounds realistic. If you show $20,000 in gross receipts, but are claiming only $2,000 profit, they're going to take a much closer look at your deductions and business expenses. It may simply mean you had a bad year, or your business model needs a lot of work. OR it may mean that your itemized expenses are, shall we say, a tad exaggerated?
Considering how many people worldwide are involved not just in the actual downloading/uploading of such material, but also the number of folks involved in indexing P2P, writing software for same, and creating and marketing those "online privacy tools," if they are going to criminalize such activity, I hope this treaty makes provisions to allocate funds for a whoooole lotta new prisons.
That's why this is a quixotic fight. When you have so many people involved in an "illegal" activity, any attempt to enforce laws against it becomes a lost cause. But then, such logic has yet to mitigate the "War on Drugs"(TM) -- yeah, how's that working out for everyone? They'll make a few high-profile busts of Pirate Bay-ish sites here and there (and those will probably just relocate their servers to a country that is not a party to the treaty), and maybe hit a few random private citizens to try and throw a scare into everyone, but most file sharing will go merrily on, unimpeded. What's that quote about insanity consisting of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
But don't you understand? All this -- the surveillance, the monitoring, the foolproof IDs -- is going to ultimately eliminate crime in the UK and enable everyone to live in blissful peace and safety and harmony, correct? I mean, hasn't crime already slowed to a trickle because of all the CCTV and stuff?
What? It hasn't? But...but...how could this not work? I thought for sure...
Unless.....maybe this has nothing to do with battling crime and terrorism, but instead to establish total control over the lives of citizens? NO!!! NO!!! Perish the thought...not in a Western Democracy...we have freedom and all that other good stuff, not like those nasty totalitarian regimes, right? Must...eliminate...negative...thinking....all is well...all is well....all is well.....
Somehow, I am not reassured.....
If only this had been developed 20 years ago, I'd still be married. (I'd have ordered two right off the bat -- one for her and one for her mother.....)
Nope -- if you wear rubber gloves, you are also avoiding leaving fingerprints, so you obviously have something to hide -- ergo, terrorist.
(And come on, man....."cary?" "Jsut?" "Alwasy ware?" How many seconds does it take to do a little proofreading?)
The submitter should familiarise themselves with (off the top of my head) three ongoing terrorist trials where CCTV evidence is important to gaining a possible conviction. One in particular, that of the prosecution of associates of the 7th of July London bombers who travelled with them to London in advance to case targets, relies heavily on CCTV to link these people to the bombers, and will help obtain convictions (should that be what the jury decides).
Ah, yes, the venerable old "closing the barn door....." trick. Maybe that evidence will help get a conviction, fine and dandy. But those cameras certainly didn't prevent all those innocent folks from being killed and maimed on 7/7, now did they? And it's all supposed to be about saving lives. The cameras don't prevent crime -- they only record it and/or its perpetrators. Maybe. If they are positioned properly, pointing in the right direction at the time, the light is good, and the planets are properly aligned. And have sufficient resolution to identify suspects to the exclusion of all others.
OK, anticipating your next argument: "But by arresting and convicting those terrorists, we may well have prevented them from carrying out future attacks so, see, the cameras really do save lives!" A big stretch there. Unless you show me a significant number of serious criminal cases of this sort in which the CCTV surveillance was the key, "make or break" piece of evidence, and not just icing on the investigative cake, I'm not prepared to justify the expense and privacy implications of mass surveillance for the good of the results.
Some people still swear at Windows 2000 to this day, so I don't doubt that there will be people who will swear at Windows XP several years from now anyway.
There....fixed those typos for ya.....
They're using them and a bunch of XBoxes to create a supercomputer possible of calculating what wacky thing the president is going to do next.
Bogus -- no computer is capable of calculating THAT irrationally.....
Wow, thanks for mentioning that book -- I am downloading it as I type this.
The problem is that, as with most things of this sort, the people who most need to understand it -- those who blindly support our guvmint's invasive, Constitution-busting, rights-trampling data mining in the name of the "War on Terrorism" (less known under its true internal working title as "The War to Gain More Complete Control Over ALL Citizens' Lives") -- fall into one of two categories. They are either (1)too math-illiterate to understand it, or (2)have the potential ability to understand it, but will not accept the argument because of their own personal emotional prejudices. Just like the "War on Drugs" -- any thinking, rational person looking at the numbers and the logic has to conclude that it is a vast waste of time and money and harms far more lives than it protects, but too many people have that emotional investment in the "Just Say No" mentality and cling to simple mantras instead of reality. Many of the same folks who think "Drugs are bad, therefore anything the government does to fight against drugs is good" will think the same on the current subject -- just insert "terrorists" wherever it reads "drugs."
"In an attempt to convince U.S. prosecutors to crack down on music piracy, the National District Attorneys Organization has said that downloading music will lead to "everything from handguns to large quantities of cocaine [and] marijuana," as well as terrorism, according to published reports."
Not to mention bestiality, fallen arches, and the heartbreak of psoriasis....
If the Miller case in Arizona is any guide, I imagine they'll just order you to bring your data in for imaging.
"I'm so sorry...on the way here, I stopped by the Cut-Throat Convenience Store for some coffee. (Yes, I know it's a bad neighborhood, but they make such great coffee there...) Anyway, in my half-asleep state, I accidentally left the computer on the front seat, with the car unlocked and the door partially ajar. And, wouldn't you know it -- some young rogue must stole my computer! Honestly, what is this world coming to?"
Copyright appears to be largely unenforceable on pseudo-anonymous networks, due in part to the difficulty of gathering evidence on these networks. This will only lead to the members of the RIAA buying stronger laws which either allow a suit for weaker evidence, or allow seizure of computer equipment in order to gather evidence of copyright infringement. In the latter case, such a law is already making its way through the congressional process.
And who is going to do the actual "seizing" of the equipment? Feds? Local gendarmes? (I can imagine that will go over big in some jurisdictions.....devoting time and manpower to seizing some geek's equipment for sharing music...) What happens if no infringing material is found? (A real possibility given some of the RIAA's other faux pas in the past.) Can the victim turn around and sue them? Will this be like the seizure/forfeiture laws under the War on Drugs in which they take your assets on the merest suspicion, then if you are not guilty, you have to jump through 197 legal hoops to even have the remotest hope of getting your stuff back?
I'm waiting for someone in guvmint to start making the argument that sharing copyrighted music is a terrorist act intended to undermine the economy of the U.S. Then they'd also get to use the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, and all those other fun tools to nail file sharers to the wall.....Yes, postulating that scenario should by all rights be a sign of disturbed paranoia, but the way things are going.....