Moreover, their portrayal of the approach the secret service takes to civil liberties was on the ball. The secret service arrested Craig Neidorf for publishing a document that had been sent to him by someone else in the magazine he edited, Phrack. They also failed to recognize that non-corporations could operate communication services during their raids on bulletin board systems. They searched the backpacks of people at 2600 meetings in the early 90s, regardless of whether those people were suspects in any investigation and without obtaining any search or arrest warrants.
I guess referring to them as the SS would not be too far from the truth...
He was able to hack their systems by spear-phishing, sending trojans directly to specific employees. This isn't necessarily a security flaw of the system, but rather lack of training for users (who may not care and may not want to be trained).
Except that users are part of the system that is being attacked. As Bruce Schneier put it, only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.
It is true that user training is hard. It is equally true that the system should be resilient to stupid users, just as it should be resilient to malicious users. Spear-phishing and trojans are just a way to get non-malicious users to behave maliciously, and the system should be designed to contain the damage that malicious users can cause. There are a variety of technical measures that can be taken to prevent malicious users from leaking information or otherwise violating the security of the system; a large company should be taking these sorts of measures.
The secret service has been involved in investigating computer crime for decades now. They are well-known for their attacks on free speech, their violations of civil rights, and their propensity for exaggerating the economic cost of hacking.
Since the mid-80s, the Secret Service has had the authority to investigate cases of computer hacking. They became famous for bungling these cases in the early 90s:
Wow how wrong you are, you simply say to the corporation "I'm a security consultant want to watch me get through your security?" they say "yes", you say "pay me" and then show then how insecure their network truly is.
Right, because the company is not going to ask to see your credentials before they pay you to attack their system. How do you get your credentials as a security consultant in the first place? How does anyone know that your time is worth paying for?
Unfortunately, proving that you are better than a company's security staff often involves committing a crime, which looks bad when you are applying for a job later in life. Not everyone can be an independent consultant like Kevin Mitnick.
copyright isn't property; it gives you the "right" to control use of the property
No, copyright gives you the right to control how other people use their property, by bringing them to court and having a judge rule on whether or not their use of their property violates your copyright. There is no way that system is going to work when everyone and their mother has a machine that can pump out copies of creative work sitting on their desk.
So in this case you couldn't legally clone the band
Nor can you legally cross a street when the light says "don't walk," but there is no technical or moral reason that people cannot do so, and people do in fact cross streets illegally. Our system for enforcing that law is to ticket people, sometimes, if they are caught; most people are never caught. That is pretty much the best compromise on copyrights in the 21st century: ticket people who get caught violating copyrights (and use those tickets to pay for the public education / library system).
I replied to someone else with some ideas on how musicians can use the Internet, with its copying and downloading systems, to their advantage. I am not going to claim to know all the answers, or to know the right answer; I am just saying that the current approaches are dead wrong and are based on misguided notions of what problem we are trying to solve.
In the case of songwriters/performers/etc., I think that concerts and other live performances are the most obvious source of income in the future. I have heard that right now, that is the biggest source of income for musicians, so it is not too much of a stretch. Live shows are an experience that really cannot be downloaded, and so there is a legitimate economic justification for shows being profitable.
For an up-and-coming band, downloading can actually help bring people to live shows, since it is basically a no-cost way to spread some good songs and entice people to come to the concert. We could even develop technologies to help this effort -- perhaps a system where music players can fetch information on a band's upcoming shows, with location search so that people only see shows that are within some distance of their homes. It might also be interesting to embed an identifier for the band as a robust watermark, so that if a bar or restaurant plays a downloaded song people could look up information on the band using their cell phones (and perhaps the band could use watermarking equipment during the show, so that bootleg recordings serve a similar purpose). Perhaps we could enable location-based search in the downloading system itself, so that people can hear local or regional bands that are not yet ready to play for a national or global audience. Maybe the watermark could contain a digital signature, so that original songs could be distinguished from cover songs automatically (and this could be integrated with the download system, so that people could search only for originals if they wanted to).
Now, I am not going to claim to know all the answers. Maybe some bands cannot make money doing live shows, and I am just not aware of that fact (I am assuming here that such bands are producing quality music, and so society would be missing out if the band stopped playing). I may be overly optimistic about the number of people who would pay to see a live show, or the willingness of bands to travel to faraway places to play a show. Maybe it is asking too much for a band to spend more time playing live shows than they spend in a recording studio. Maybe live shows would take up too much time, and musicians would not be able to write as many new songs as they do now.
Either we need to pursue some new ideas, or we need to stop selling general purpose computers to people / kill the Internet. We cannot have both the current system of monetizing entertainment and the Internet as we know it; one of the two is going to have to change or be killed. That is what SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc. are about: killing the Internet so that we can continue to have the current system of entertainment distribution.
If I have a clone of the band I (and they) have a significant investment in time and materials to be able to write and perform the music
Sorry, I was using the commonly understood definition of the word "clone," which is "exact copy," I guess that was not clear to you.
In any case, recording companies do not write music, they record it and sell copies of those recordings. That is a business model that has been rendered obsolete by technology, because anyone can make copies of recorded music using tools that are commonly available in their homes. If the recording industry does not adapt, then they should die; why should the law be used to protect their business? We did not pass laws banning digital cameras, nor did we call people thieves for abandoning film.
It is more like I try to sell tickets to concert, and you have clones of the band who put on the same show at no cost in a nearby park that anyone can enter. Does it harm my sales? Sure. Does it mean you did something immoral, like stealing? No.
Sales can be harmed for any number of reasons, like new technologies coming out that render old businesses obsolete. Did you cry foul when film developing sales began to whither, or did you enjoy your new digital camera?
I'll give you a third reason: to stay relevant. The RIAA and the MPAA know and have known for a long time that the Internet and the widespread availability of computers are a death sentence for their industries. Copyrights just do not work when consumer electronics can make large numbers of perfect copies of any data, and without copyrights the RIAA and MPAA have no business model at all.
What they want is for computers to be consumption-only devices, and for the Internet to be a fancy broadcasting system. Everything they have been pushing for over the past 15 years is designed to chip away at the P2P nature of Internet communications and to put consumers back in their place. There is a grand strategy at work: kill the Internet, rebuild it as a fancy cable TV system.
Unless you are talking about ships, I cannot really agree with you here. Copyright was designed when specialized industrial equipment was required to make large numbers of accurate copies of creative works. That is not the situation today; today, everyone has such equipment in their homes. We should be completely rethinking the law because it is absurd to tell people not to copy things using their own computers.
A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists, but instead of giving serious consideration to those proposals, we simply ignore them and continue to pretend that copyright is a form of property.
He also rationalizes that downloading is okay because it's not like you actually stole a physical object - so it's not really stealing, right?
One of these things is not like the other:
I steal your car. Now you do not have a car.
I copy your music. Now we both have music.
Which is why we charge people with theft, rather than copyright infringement. Calling it "theft" is meant to shut down an argument against the copyright system, by equating a copyright with a form of property ownership. Copyright has never been a type of property, it exists only to benefit the public, and at this point it is not clear that copyright is the best way to ensure the public's access to art and science.
People are not going to stop using their computers to copy things; we need to accept that and move on. If we really want to save copyright as a system, then we need to punish violations the same way we punish parking violations: a small but annoying fine for each violation. Gone are the days when only people with specialized industrial equipment could possibly commit copyright infringement; the law was not designed to deal with mass numbers of people having copying equipment in their homes. If we are not talking about updating the law, then we are having the wrong conversation.
Personally, I think the whole copyright system should be scrapped, and the industries that were built on copyrights should either adapt to the new world and its new technology or die like other out of date industries. We should be using the Internet to ensure that creative work is never lost, that it never goes out of print, that it is never buried as part of an effort to maintain a corporate image, etc. A lot of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists; why are we not giving any of them any consideration?
Are they saying they support at least 32 bytes of information per message? 256 bits of randomness for those random messages? Perhaps I am just missing out on some cool-hip-web2.0-developer terminology here?
The Democrats have been Hollywood's party for a long time now, so of course they would support this sort of bill more than the Republicans. These "two" parties are differentiated only by which set of corporations they work for the benefit of, after all (and the two sets are not even disjoint).
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, their portrayal of the approach the secret service takes to civil liberties was on the ball. The secret service arrested Craig Neidorf for publishing a document that had been sent to him by someone else in the magazine he edited, Phrack. They also failed to recognize that non-corporations could operate communication services during their raids on bulletin board systems. They searched the backpacks of people at 2600 meetings in the early 90s, regardless of whether those people were suspects in any investigation and without obtaining any search or arrest warrants.
I guess referring to them as the SS would not be too far from the truth...
He was able to hack their systems by spear-phishing, sending trojans directly to specific employees. This isn't necessarily a security flaw of the system, but rather lack of training for users (who may not care and may not want to be trained).
Except that users are part of the system that is being attacked. As Bruce Schneier put it, only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.
It is true that user training is hard. It is equally true that the system should be resilient to stupid users, just as it should be resilient to malicious users. Spear-phishing and trojans are just a way to get non-malicious users to behave maliciously, and the system should be designed to contain the damage that malicious users can cause. There are a variety of technical measures that can be taken to prevent malicious users from leaking information or otherwise violating the security of the system; a large company should be taking these sorts of measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_hacker_history#1984
The secret service has been involved in investigating computer crime for decades now. They are well-known for their attacks on free speech, their violations of civil rights, and their propensity for exaggerating the economic cost of hacking.
Since the mid-80s, the Secret Service has had the authority to investigate cases of computer hacking. They became famous for bungling these cases in the early 90s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
Wow how wrong you are, you simply say to the corporation "I'm a security consultant want to watch me get through your security?" they say "yes", you say "pay me" and then show then how insecure their network truly is.
Right, because the company is not going to ask to see your credentials before they pay you to attack their system. How do you get your credentials as a security consultant in the first place? How does anyone know that your time is worth paying for?
Unfortunately, proving that you are better than a company's security staff often involves committing a crime, which looks bad when you are applying for a job later in life. Not everyone can be an independent consultant like Kevin Mitnick.
copyright isn't property; it gives you the "right" to control use of the property
No, copyright gives you the right to control how other people use their property, by bringing them to court and having a judge rule on whether or not their use of their property violates your copyright. There is no way that system is going to work when everyone and their mother has a machine that can pump out copies of creative work sitting on their desk.
So in this case you couldn't legally clone the band
Nor can you legally cross a street when the light says "don't walk," but there is no technical or moral reason that people cannot do so, and people do in fact cross streets illegally. Our system for enforcing that law is to ticket people, sometimes, if they are caught; most people are never caught. That is pretty much the best compromise on copyrights in the 21st century: ticket people who get caught violating copyrights (and use those tickets to pay for the public education / library system).
I replied to someone else with some ideas on how musicians can use the Internet, with its copying and downloading systems, to their advantage. I am not going to claim to know all the answers, or to know the right answer; I am just saying that the current approaches are dead wrong and are based on misguided notions of what problem we are trying to solve.
In the case of songwriters/performers/etc., I think that concerts and other live performances are the most obvious source of income in the future. I have heard that right now, that is the biggest source of income for musicians, so it is not too much of a stretch. Live shows are an experience that really cannot be downloaded, and so there is a legitimate economic justification for shows being profitable.
For an up-and-coming band, downloading can actually help bring people to live shows, since it is basically a no-cost way to spread some good songs and entice people to come to the concert. We could even develop technologies to help this effort -- perhaps a system where music players can fetch information on a band's upcoming shows, with location search so that people only see shows that are within some distance of their homes. It might also be interesting to embed an identifier for the band as a robust watermark, so that if a bar or restaurant plays a downloaded song people could look up information on the band using their cell phones (and perhaps the band could use watermarking equipment during the show, so that bootleg recordings serve a similar purpose). Perhaps we could enable location-based search in the downloading system itself, so that people can hear local or regional bands that are not yet ready to play for a national or global audience. Maybe the watermark could contain a digital signature, so that original songs could be distinguished from cover songs automatically (and this could be integrated with the download system, so that people could search only for originals if they wanted to).
Now, I am not going to claim to know all the answers. Maybe some bands cannot make money doing live shows, and I am just not aware of that fact (I am assuming here that such bands are producing quality music, and so society would be missing out if the band stopped playing). I may be overly optimistic about the number of people who would pay to see a live show, or the willingness of bands to travel to faraway places to play a show. Maybe it is asking too much for a band to spend more time playing live shows than they spend in a recording studio. Maybe live shows would take up too much time, and musicians would not be able to write as many new songs as they do now.
Either we need to pursue some new ideas, or we need to stop selling general purpose computers to people / kill the Internet. We cannot have both the current system of monetizing entertainment and the Internet as we know it; one of the two is going to have to change or be killed. That is what SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc. are about: killing the Internet so that we can continue to have the current system of entertainment distribution.
If I have a clone of the band I (and they) have a significant investment in time and materials to be able to write and perform the music
Sorry, I was using the commonly understood definition of the word "clone," which is "exact copy," I guess that was not clear to you.
In any case, recording companies do not write music, they record it and sell copies of those recordings. That is a business model that has been rendered obsolete by technology, because anyone can make copies of recorded music using tools that are commonly available in their homes. If the recording industry does not adapt, then they should die; why should the law be used to protect their business? We did not pass laws banning digital cameras, nor did we call people thieves for abandoning film.
It is more like I try to sell tickets to concert, and you have clones of the band who put on the same show at no cost in a nearby park that anyone can enter. Does it harm my sales? Sure. Does it mean you did something immoral, like stealing? No.
Sales can be harmed for any number of reasons, like new technologies coming out that render old businesses obsolete. Did you cry foul when film developing sales began to whither, or did you enjoy your new digital camera?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One
I'll give you a third reason: to stay relevant. The RIAA and the MPAA know and have known for a long time that the Internet and the widespread availability of computers are a death sentence for their industries. Copyrights just do not work when consumer electronics can make large numbers of perfect copies of any data, and without copyrights the RIAA and MPAA have no business model at all.
What they want is for computers to be consumption-only devices, and for the Internet to be a fancy broadcasting system. Everything they have been pushing for over the past 15 years is designed to chip away at the P2P nature of Internet communications and to put consumers back in their place. There is a grand strategy at work: kill the Internet, rebuild it as a fancy cable TV system.
That is the nature of the enemy here.
Piracy needs to be controlled
Unless you are talking about ships, I cannot really agree with you here. Copyright was designed when specialized industrial equipment was required to make large numbers of accurate copies of creative works. That is not the situation today; today, everyone has such equipment in their homes. We should be completely rethinking the law because it is absurd to tell people not to copy things using their own computers.
A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists, but instead of giving serious consideration to those proposals, we simply ignore them and continue to pretend that copyright is a form of property.
He also rationalizes that downloading is okay because it's not like you actually stole a physical object - so it's not really stealing, right?
One of these things is not like the other:
Which is why we charge people with theft, rather than copyright infringement. Calling it "theft" is meant to shut down an argument against the copyright system, by equating a copyright with a form of property ownership. Copyright has never been a type of property, it exists only to benefit the public, and at this point it is not clear that copyright is the best way to ensure the public's access to art and science.
People are not going to stop using their computers to copy things; we need to accept that and move on. If we really want to save copyright as a system, then we need to punish violations the same way we punish parking violations: a small but annoying fine for each violation. Gone are the days when only people with specialized industrial equipment could possibly commit copyright infringement; the law was not designed to deal with mass numbers of people having copying equipment in their homes. If we are not talking about updating the law, then we are having the wrong conversation.
Personally, I think the whole copyright system should be scrapped, and the industries that were built on copyrights should either adapt to the new world and its new technology or die like other out of date industries. We should be using the Internet to ensure that creative work is never lost, that it never goes out of print, that it is never buried as part of an effort to maintain a corporate image, etc. A lot of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists; why are we not giving any of them any consideration?
The identifiers have 256 bits of entropy.
Are they saying they support at least 32 bytes of information per message? 256 bits of randomness for those random messages? Perhaps I am just missing out on some cool-hip-web2.0-developer terminology here?
Considering that manually entering a URL is classified by some as "hacking..."
http://consumerist.com/2011/06/how-hackers-stole-200000-citi-accounts-by-exploiting-basic-browser-vulnerability.html
The Democrats have been Hollywood's party for a long time now, so of course they would support this sort of bill more than the Republicans. These "two" parties are differentiated only by which set of corporations they work for the benefit of, after all (and the two sets are not even disjoint).
They provide an actual, useful service. Why should we be surprised that they turn a profit without resorting to invasive, annoying advertisements?
Both require hands-on lab demonstrations of skill. (Is RedHat doing that now, too?)
Back when I got my RHCT they certainly required it, and I cannot imagine that they stopped.
Democrats are equivalent to Republicans everywhere, and have been for a long time now.
Different countries have different laws when it comes to freedom of speech and censorship.
If Google does not have operations in a particular country, why should they care about that country's censorship laws?
MegaUpload - piracy = a service used by the music industry:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181201072864644.html
Someone will clone the distro and everyone has the bandwidth to download it.