If the rioters are not religious zealots, what exactly are they rioting about?
Hm...what might people in those countries be angry about...
Wars in their countries.
Wars next to their countries.
Foreign governments exploiting their countries.
The lack of democracy.
The lack of democracy following a hard-fought revolution.
The lack of democracy following a revolution against a government installed by foreign countries that wanted to exploit them.
The general realities of living in those countries.
Really, do you need this list made for you? Do you think the rioters were sitting on their lounge chairs beneath some palm trees in their own personal gardens, and then suddenly saw this video and went nuts?
Nothing excuses killing and destruction in response to a mere insult
Funny how American Muslims, even orthodox Muslims, are not rioting, even now that they know about the video and presumably have had the chance to watch it.
Angry people do not need much to set them off, and the rioters have been angry for a long time. They live in awful places, they have seen multiple wars (no, not "seen" as in "live from a foreign country," but actually seen tanks rolling down their streets and bombs dropping from planes), and most have not lived under any sort of democratic system. The video was just a spark, and it just happened to be right next to a crate full of dynamite.
As for Muslims, what delicate sensibilities would you be referring to? I look around my town and I see Muslims going about their business, not killing anyone or burning anything. Do you think they have not heard of the video? What, are they a different kind of Muslim? Some of my Muslim friends moved to America from the very countries where these riots are happening and I have at least a few very orthodox Muslim friends who are not rioting.
The issue here is not any specific religion. Muslims in America are not watching police crackdowns, they are not seeing foreign occupying forces in their lands, they did not have their government replaced with a brutal dictatorship which was then overthrown by another brutal dictatorship, etc. Life in America is nice; they have no reason to be angry, and they take offensive remarks about their religion the same way I do (and trust me, as a Jew, I see plenty of offensive things on the Internet), by shrugging it off and calling the people who made those remarks idiots.
If those countries where the riots are happening were nice places to live, there would be no riots, regardless of this video.
What happens when someone says, "That video might cause people to revolt against their government!" -- does Google take that down too?
Either we have free speech, or we do not have free speech. If Google is going to be the service provider for an important communications medium, they need to respect free speech. The video did not say, "Go out and riot." People who were already angry saw the video and exploded.
The Chinese government claims their censorship is to keep the peace as well. How ironic for Google to follow that same logic, after all they went through with China...
Unfortunately, the religious zealots are not the problem here. Religious zealots are a minority, both of the rioters and in general. The religious zealots certainly would be content to see the videos removed, and much as I would criticize them for that sort of censorship, at least nobody would be killed.
The rioters were angry before the video was posted. The video was nothing more than an excuse (perhaps to themselves) for this sort of behavior; it could just as easily have been a book, idiotic comments by some preacher, a bomb dropped by the air force hitting a day school, etc. I doubt that most of the rioters had even heard of the video prior to hearing of riots elsewhere, and I doubt that most of them have even seen the video.
You send messages using a public social network, you take your privacy in your own hands.
Unfortunately, most people are so poorly educated when it comes to basic computer use that they do not even understand the privacy implications of using a system like Twitter, let alone how to protect their own privacy. It is not as though a basic understanding of computers is included in K-12 education -- if it were, we might draw an analogy between a failure to use Tor and a failure to correctly compute 2+3 (although even that may be hard for some people, given the inadequacies of American education).
This was not a parade of hackers; these were ordinary people engaged in a political protest. We have not yet progressed to the point of teaching ordinary people how to use a computer effectively, and there are very few people who are actually pushing for such a thing.
Minimizing crime to a reasonable level IS improving society
That depends on the definition of the word "crime." Society is benefited when murder rates are kept low by law enforcement; society is not benefited in any way when college students are bankrupted for downloading their music.
Let's put it this way: it was once a crime for two men to dance together in the state of New York. How was society benefited by the enforcement of that law? I would argue that copyright law, in the age of widespread PC and Internet availability, is equally worthless and counterproductive.
If you go on TPB or any other torrent site, you will be hard pressed to find anyone seeking old material whose only protection is lifelong copyright
As for the point about the entertainment industry routinely pumping out worthless remakes and following the same formula over and over, it has nothing to do with "try before you buy." The purpose of copyrights is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. One can hardly say that we are promoting the progress of any sort of art by protecting an entertainment industry that is hard-pressed to develop an original idea. Aside from the woefully outdated notion of copyright law (and don't think that Hollywood is unaware of how hopelessly out of date copyright is -- why do you think they push so hard for DRM, when they already have the law on their side?), there is the simple question of whether or not copyrights are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing (not that our politicians even remember what that is, despite having sworn to uphold the constitution which explicitly states the purpose of copyright).
And destroy the camera how? If each camera is in the other camera's field of view, you will still be on camera regardless of which camera you attack or at what angle you attack it...
That's never the purpose of law enforcement. Purpose of law enforcement is to minimize to a reasonable level.
No, the purpose of law, and by extension law enforcement, is to improve society. Lifelong copyrights have not improved our society, and in fact, the current system protects entertainers who have given up on even trying to be original -- they keep making bad-to-mediocre remakes of old movies and condensing great stories into awful movies. Music is the same formula applied until people are sick of it. Video game makers attack our computers. Why are we enforcing laws that protect these people?
The idea that we can just hack out new innovations is predicated on the existence of PCs and the Internet. Neither PCs nor the Internet are a given, and in fact, powerful people are working harder than ever to kill PCs and kill the Internet -- not just the MPAA, but also companies like Apple and Microsoft, the companies that were made possible by PCs.
If your computer would only run pre-approved software, downloading your entertainment would be substantially harder. Yes, people will find jailbreaks, but without a PC to work with, even that becomes harder.
The only disruptive technology relevant to this discussion is the PC.
have there been any "contact us" or any sort of "are you a pirate and why" surveys, that can be taken anonymously of course, put out by the content owners? If not, why not?
Such a survey would be an admission that, in fact, some amount of blame can be assigned to the entertainment companies for their own difficulty in getting more people to pay them. It would say that they need to actually compete with downloading, rather than just hijack law enforcement agencies and bog down courts with lawsuits. So I would not hold out any hope for such a survey.
Maybe Intel is courting a relationship with Hollywood, and wants to reassure those media barons that they are "coming around" and helping to kill off personal computing. Intel might be trying to position itself as the CPU maker for "media consumption devices," which will not run operating systems that allow users to run unapproved software or (heaven forbid) software that can make a copy of a movie.
That is the point of restricted boot environments, Windows 8, iOS, etc.: to kill personal computing, and build a new world in which home computers are nothing more than glorified cable TV receivers.
which could end up revealing design details about Intel's wireless chipset that would enable competitors - those who make other WiFi chips - to make exact clones of Intel's wireless chipsets
...because Intel's wifi chips are so unique and innovative that knowing how to write a driver for those chips will leak information about those chips? That is like saying that knowing the door to your house is a rectangle reveals what color your furniture is.
I believe the reasoning is that without a market of people that want to watch it, there would be much less incentive to create it. Maybe there's not 100% correlation,. but it seems like a reasonable restriction to help prevent child abuse.
That was a reasonable restriction back in the 1970s, before Internet access was so ubiquitous. In today's world, that logic is dubious -- child pornography is frequently downloaded without any sort of payment or trade, and it is increasingly likely that a person caught with child pornography has no idea where it originated. We also have to deal with new negative effects of the ban, like teenagers becoming criminals for photographing other teenagers (or even their own bodies), or teachers being accused when they confiscate a student's cell phone that happens to store nude photographs of other students. There is also the matter of what people are supposed to do if they unintentionally download child pornography -- do you report it and risk prosecution, or delete it and risk prosecution?
There have always been negative aspects of the child pornography ban. People have been arrested for adult pornography in which an actress is meant to look underage. It is unclear if photographing nudists is legal, or photographing teenage girls who live in villages where women go around topless. There has even been some paranoia about taking photographs of a naked baby. Before the Internet, the positive aspect of the ban -- attacking the flow of money toward child abusers -- might have outweighed these negatives; I would argue that in today's world, these negatives combined with the new negatives mentioned above outweigh the greatly diminished positive effect.
Plus there are other valid reasons for not allowing possession of child pornography - for example, if the name of the child in the video is known, it can cause them even more harm when their forced sex acts are available for viewing by anyone that types their name into a search engine.
This is little more than a phantom -- once photos or videos of child abuse are copied over the Internet, there is always a chance that the imagery is available somewhere. No victim can ever be assured that the imagery is unavailable, no matter how many people are arrested for possessing it. Furthermore, arresting people for possessing images of child abuse from 10+ years ago does nothing to protect today's children, but does take police resources away from tracking down people who are abusing children today.
I'm not sure how you made the analogy between cryptography and porn (other than the fact that strong crypto can be used to hide your porn collection)
The point is not about technology, it is about the law. Cryptography was once classified as "munitions," because at one time, good cryptography was used only by governments and large organizations. That classification is woefully out of date, because computers are now everywhere and cryptography plays an important role in securing computers and computer networks. The arguments for the ban on child porn are similarly out of date: they were developed before the Internet, but unlike crypto law, child pornography law has not been updated to reflect the new realities of the world.
Perhaps someone should point out that anyone who can afford to charter a private jet gets to bypass security entirely, and can bring as much uninspected luggage with them as they can fit on the jet. Only the little people need to have their rights flagrantly denied by the government; important people (i.e. those who are wealthy) and terrorists (at least those who can afford the cost of chartering a private jet) get to bypass the process if they choose to do so.
Child porn is illegal because its production requires the molestation of a child
So why is possession illegal? I can get behind making production of child pornography illegal, since it involves child abuse; but the arguments for making possession illegal are as laughably out of date as classifying cryptography as "munitions."
...or we could stop treating other people like they exist for our benefit and end the cycle of hatred. It is not as though people woke up one day and said, "Let's hate America now!" The United States has done things that have angered people, and instead of working for any sort of reconciliation, we just keep applying the same "make people angrier" formula.
Do you really think that Muslims are killing people because of a single film? That may have set them off, but there has been a lot of buildup to this, and that buildup had nothing to do with the media.
Let's put it this way: South Park depicted Mohammed once, without causing any riots, suicide bombings, or other forms of kililng in response.
Nothing stops someone from sideloading books onto their Kindle. Amazon does indeed have a right to decide what they will or will not sell in their own store, as long as Kindle users have other options -- which they have. I see little to take issue with here.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I must have missed the part where advertisers have an incentive to honor DNT. Care to explain?
Yeah, because we have never seen that sort of thing out of Christians...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_troubles
If the rioters are not religious zealots, what exactly are they rioting about?
Hm...what might people in those countries be angry about...
Really, do you need this list made for you? Do you think the rioters were sitting on their lounge chairs beneath some palm trees in their own personal gardens, and then suddenly saw this video and went nuts?
Nothing excuses killing and destruction in response to a mere insult
Funny how American Muslims, even orthodox Muslims, are not rioting, even now that they know about the video and presumably have had the chance to watch it.
Angry people do not need much to set them off, and the rioters have been angry for a long time. They live in awful places, they have seen multiple wars (no, not "seen" as in "live from a foreign country," but actually seen tanks rolling down their streets and bombs dropping from planes), and most have not lived under any sort of democratic system. The video was just a spark, and it just happened to be right next to a crate full of dynamite.
No signs of Christians throwing a tantrum...
No, all it takes for Christians to throw a tantrum is the existence of a doctor's office:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
As for Muslims, what delicate sensibilities would you be referring to? I look around my town and I see Muslims going about their business, not killing anyone or burning anything. Do you think they have not heard of the video? What, are they a different kind of Muslim? Some of my Muslim friends moved to America from the very countries where these riots are happening and I have at least a few very orthodox Muslim friends who are not rioting.
The issue here is not any specific religion. Muslims in America are not watching police crackdowns, they are not seeing foreign occupying forces in their lands, they did not have their government replaced with a brutal dictatorship which was then overthrown by another brutal dictatorship, etc. Life in America is nice; they have no reason to be angry, and they take offensive remarks about their religion the same way I do (and trust me, as a Jew, I see plenty of offensive things on the Internet), by shrugging it off and calling the people who made those remarks idiots.
If those countries where the riots are happening were nice places to live, there would be no riots, regardless of this video.
What happens when someone says, "That video might cause people to revolt against their government!" -- does Google take that down too?
Either we have free speech, or we do not have free speech. If Google is going to be the service provider for an important communications medium, they need to respect free speech. The video did not say, "Go out and riot." People who were already angry saw the video and exploded.
The Chinese government claims their censorship is to keep the peace as well. How ironic for Google to follow that same logic, after all they went through with China...
Unfortunately, the religious zealots are not the problem here. Religious zealots are a minority, both of the rioters and in general. The religious zealots certainly would be content to see the videos removed, and much as I would criticize them for that sort of censorship, at least nobody would be killed.
The rioters were angry before the video was posted. The video was nothing more than an excuse (perhaps to themselves) for this sort of behavior; it could just as easily have been a book, idiotic comments by some preacher, a bomb dropped by the air force hitting a day school, etc. I doubt that most of the rioters had even heard of the video prior to hearing of riots elsewhere, and I doubt that most of them have even seen the video.
You send messages using a public social network, you take your privacy in your own hands.
Unfortunately, most people are so poorly educated when it comes to basic computer use that they do not even understand the privacy implications of using a system like Twitter, let alone how to protect their own privacy. It is not as though a basic understanding of computers is included in K-12 education -- if it were, we might draw an analogy between a failure to use Tor and a failure to correctly compute 2+3 (although even that may be hard for some people, given the inadequacies of American education).
This was not a parade of hackers; these were ordinary people engaged in a political protest. We have not yet progressed to the point of teaching ordinary people how to use a computer effectively, and there are very few people who are actually pushing for such a thing.
Minimizing crime to a reasonable level IS improving society
That depends on the definition of the word "crime." Society is benefited when murder rates are kept low by law enforcement; society is not benefited in any way when college students are bankrupted for downloading their music.
Let's put it this way: it was once a crime for two men to dance together in the state of New York. How was society benefited by the enforcement of that law? I would argue that copyright law, in the age of widespread PC and Internet availability, is equally worthless and counterproductive.
If you go on TPB or any other torrent site, you will be hard pressed to find anyone seeking old material whose only protection is lifelong copyright
https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5079924/The_Beatles_-_Greatest_Hits_%5BRemastered_2009_MP3%5D%5BBubanee%5D
That took less than a minute to find.
As for the point about the entertainment industry routinely pumping out worthless remakes and following the same formula over and over, it has nothing to do with "try before you buy." The purpose of copyrights is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. One can hardly say that we are promoting the progress of any sort of art by protecting an entertainment industry that is hard-pressed to develop an original idea. Aside from the woefully outdated notion of copyright law (and don't think that Hollywood is unaware of how hopelessly out of date copyright is -- why do you think they push so hard for DRM, when they already have the law on their side?), there is the simple question of whether or not copyrights are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing (not that our politicians even remember what that is, despite having sworn to uphold the constitution which explicitly states the purpose of copyright).
And destroy the camera how? If each camera is in the other camera's field of view, you will still be on camera regardless of which camera you attack or at what angle you attack it...
That's never the purpose of law enforcement. Purpose of law enforcement is to minimize to a reasonable level.
No, the purpose of law, and by extension law enforcement, is to improve society. Lifelong copyrights have not improved our society, and in fact, the current system protects entertainers who have given up on even trying to be original -- they keep making bad-to-mediocre remakes of old movies and condensing great stories into awful movies. Music is the same formula applied until people are sick of it. Video game makers attack our computers. Why are we enforcing laws that protect these people?
The idea that we can just hack out new innovations is predicated on the existence of PCs and the Internet. Neither PCs nor the Internet are a given, and in fact, powerful people are working harder than ever to kill PCs and kill the Internet -- not just the MPAA, but also companies like Apple and Microsoft, the companies that were made possible by PCs.
If your computer would only run pre-approved software, downloading your entertainment would be substantially harder. Yes, people will find jailbreaks, but without a PC to work with, even that becomes harder.
The only disruptive technology relevant to this discussion is the PC.
have there been any "contact us" or any sort of "are you a pirate and why" surveys, that can be taken anonymously of course, put out by the content owners? If not, why not?
Such a survey would be an admission that, in fact, some amount of blame can be assigned to the entertainment companies for their own difficulty in getting more people to pay them. It would say that they need to actually compete with downloading, rather than just hijack law enforcement agencies and bog down courts with lawsuits. So I would not hold out any hope for such a survey.
Two, in each other's field of view. If someone came from behind one camera, they would be seen on the other.
Common sense would say, "Put each camera in the other camera's field of view."
Maybe Intel is courting a relationship with Hollywood, and wants to reassure those media barons that they are "coming around" and helping to kill off personal computing. Intel might be trying to position itself as the CPU maker for "media consumption devices," which will not run operating systems that allow users to run unapproved software or (heaven forbid) software that can make a copy of a movie.
That is the point of restricted boot environments, Windows 8, iOS, etc.: to kill personal computing, and build a new world in which home computers are nothing more than glorified cable TV receivers.
Maybe Intel is betting on Windows 8.
which could end up revealing design details about Intel's wireless chipset that would enable competitors - those who make other WiFi chips - to make exact clones of Intel's wireless chipsets
I believe the reasoning is that without a market of people that want to watch it, there would be much less incentive to create it. Maybe there's not 100% correlation,. but it seems like a reasonable restriction to help prevent child abuse.
That was a reasonable restriction back in the 1970s, before Internet access was so ubiquitous. In today's world, that logic is dubious -- child pornography is frequently downloaded without any sort of payment or trade, and it is increasingly likely that a person caught with child pornography has no idea where it originated. We also have to deal with new negative effects of the ban, like teenagers becoming criminals for photographing other teenagers (or even their own bodies), or teachers being accused when they confiscate a student's cell phone that happens to store nude photographs of other students. There is also the matter of what people are supposed to do if they unintentionally download child pornography -- do you report it and risk prosecution, or delete it and risk prosecution?
There have always been negative aspects of the child pornography ban. People have been arrested for adult pornography in which an actress is meant to look underage. It is unclear if photographing nudists is legal, or photographing teenage girls who live in villages where women go around topless. There has even been some paranoia about taking photographs of a naked baby. Before the Internet, the positive aspect of the ban -- attacking the flow of money toward child abusers -- might have outweighed these negatives; I would argue that in today's world, these negatives combined with the new negatives mentioned above outweigh the greatly diminished positive effect.
Plus there are other valid reasons for not allowing possession of child pornography - for example, if the name of the child in the video is known, it can cause them even more harm when their forced sex acts are available for viewing by anyone that types their name into a search engine.
This is little more than a phantom -- once photos or videos of child abuse are copied over the Internet, there is always a chance that the imagery is available somewhere. No victim can ever be assured that the imagery is unavailable, no matter how many people are arrested for possessing it. Furthermore, arresting people for possessing images of child abuse from 10+ years ago does nothing to protect today's children, but does take police resources away from tracking down people who are abusing children today.
I'm not sure how you made the analogy between cryptography and porn (other than the fact that strong crypto can be used to hide your porn collection)
The point is not about technology, it is about the law. Cryptography was once classified as "munitions," because at one time, good cryptography was used only by governments and large organizations. That classification is woefully out of date, because computers are now everywhere and cryptography plays an important role in securing computers and computer networks. The arguments for the ban on child porn are similarly out of date: they were developed before the Internet, but unlike crypto law, child pornography law has not been updated to reflect the new realities of the world.
Perhaps someone should point out that anyone who can afford to charter a private jet gets to bypass security entirely, and can bring as much uninspected luggage with them as they can fit on the jet. Only the little people need to have their rights flagrantly denied by the government; important people (i.e. those who are wealthy) and terrorists (at least those who can afford the cost of chartering a private jet) get to bypass the process if they choose to do so.
Child porn is illegal because its production requires the molestation of a child
So why is possession illegal? I can get behind making production of child pornography illegal, since it involves child abuse; but the arguments for making possession illegal are as laughably out of date as classifying cryptography as "munitions."
You can say anything you want about Jesus and no Christian will kill you
Times sure have changed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandals
Then again, maybe not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_Davidians
...or we could stop treating other people like they exist for our benefit and end the cycle of hatred. It is not as though people woke up one day and said, "Let's hate America now!" The United States has done things that have angered people, and instead of working for any sort of reconciliation, we just keep applying the same "make people angrier" formula.
Do you really think that Muslims are killing people because of a single film? That may have set them off, but there has been a lot of buildup to this, and that buildup had nothing to do with the media.
Let's put it this way: South Park depicted Mohammed once, without causing any riots, suicide bombings, or other forms of kililng in response.
Nothing stops someone from sideloading books onto their Kindle. Amazon does indeed have a right to decide what they will or will not sell in their own store, as long as Kindle users have other options -- which they have. I see little to take issue with here.