A single hidden volume creates plausible deniability, because the default configuration is no hidden volume.
Except that you still have an encryption system on your hard drive that supports deniable encryption. Governments respond to deniable encryption by attacking its users until people are too terrified to use it, lest it become so commonplace that evidence gathering and prosecution become impossible. The US government is no different; if they can present even the slightest indication that you were using a hidden partition, that will be enough in court: "Here we see ISP logs that show Mr. So-and-so was connected to an email server at 6:45am on the date in question; yet on the logs obtained from the decrypted partition, we see that the computer had not even booted up until 8:00am."
Deniable encryption is like steganography: the warden problem kills you. You cannot hide that you have the capability of using deniable encryption, and judges are not going to let that sort of argument fly (and in some countries, you will be tortured until you produce the evidence or until you cannot speak).
I can easily see how supplying a password or decryption key would not be covered
Except that supplying a decryption key is evidence that you controlled a computer -- even if the prosecution does not say it, that is what it says to the jury. Even if we are going to compromise on the 5th amendment to the point where we consider people giving decryption keys to be OK, the prosecution should first be required to present evidence that the defendant was actually in control of the computer in question (or had actually sent the messages in question, etc.). Having a computer in your home does not mean that you control it, nor does having controlled a computer at one point in time mean that you controlled it at some other point in time.
Or, we could stick with the simpler answer: passwords cannot be demanded in criminal proceedings.
Which are sandwiched between years of Democrat rule. The Clinton administration fought tooth and nail to keep encryption of out the hands of US citizens, or have you forgotten how hard we had to fight just to make PGP available? Perhaps you forgot that it was Democrats who passed CALEA? The Democrats have just as little regard for the bill of rights as the Republicans do.
However, I would like to suggest an alternative. As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff?
More laws will be passed until you are doing illegal things. The problem with giving the police so much power is that it enables the passage and enforcement of even more laws. Eventually it gets to the point where nobody can live their life without being a criminal.
This is why we have a bill of rights -- to prevent the government from making so many things illegal that laws become irrelevant and anyone can be detained by the government at any time. Unfortunately, people forgot this a long time ago, and so today we have so many laws that even the government has lost track of how many are on the books. When even courts are ignoring the importance of the constitution, you know we are in trouble.
Officer: "Hm, this looks like an innocent partition. Wait, what's this? You are using TrueCrypt? What is the other passphrase for your hidden partition?"
Later, in court
Defense: "Your honor, my client provided the decryption password as requested, can he go free now? There is no evidence in this case."
Prosecutor: "He's using TrueCrypt! There is a second password that would reveal the incriminating evidence, and we are subpoenaing him for it! And we want to tack obstruction of justice onto the charges!"
Judge: "OK, reveal your other decryption password! Let's see it!"
The only reason you are not being beaten up throughout the process is that the law protects you from that sort of thing. If you were in, say, Saudi Arabia trying to pull this"deniable encryption" stunt, you might be tortured until you give up the suspected second password.
In general, attempts to hide things in plain sight are guaranteed to make your life harder. Steganography means having steganography tools lying around. Deniable encryption means having deniable encryption tools lying around. This is why we need legal protections like the 5th amendment, and why we need them to actually apply -- the fact that a computer is involved should not render the constitution meaningless.
I predict this: should such technology be realized, it will be illegal for ordinary citizens to use it (except as part of carefully restricted appliances), but the police will use it to scan all of us as we walk around.
Yes, but the free copy you have acquired, still has a value. The producer loses there an opportunity to sell it to you with the intended price.
Which has always been a dubious argument:
If I elect to buy something else, the producer will lose that opportunity as well, yet nobody says that "buying things from competitors is theft."
What reason is there to think that I would have spent the money in the first place, or that I even had the money to spend in the first place?
Copyright law is not about ensuring profits for anyone, it is about improving the public's access to science and art. Profits are incidental to that goal, but there may be (and likely are) other, more effective ways to achieve that goal now that we have computers and global computer networks.
the idea that you can take something from someone else
If I take your car, you no longer have a car. If I download a picture of your car from your website, then upload that picture to my own website, you still have a picture of your car. That is why copyright infringement is not and has never been a form of theft and why nobody has even been charged with theft because they committed copyright infringement.
In almost no other case does the US government get involved in protecting private property to the extent they rush in and protect the music and film industry
Sorry, but where in the list of charges against Megaupload do you see anything having to do with "private property?" Let's see...copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, copyright infringement via electronic means, money laundering...nope, not seeing anything relating to property rights.
Have your patent ripped off, or your house broken into, they won't even listen to you
What do patents have to do with private property? Does your home ownership expire after 20 years?
Why is the US government acting as a mob enforcer for the Media Giants?
Probably because America is importing too many things and selling too much of its actual property to people in other nations, and so the only thing we can do to close the trade gap is to export ideas. That and the fact that the media giants have been bribing politicians in this country for decades now.
How about voting third party? How about not continuing to vote for politicians that are not working for your benefit? The choice has never been restricted to Democrats and Republicans, and for the past 30 years both parties have been the "pro-corporations" party -- yet we continue to vote for them, as if they are going to follow the will of the people once in office.
So here is an idea for you: stop asking the criminals to crack down on crime, and start working on bringing in a fresh set of politicians.
It is not about laying down and dying, it is about choosing how to spend your energy. You do not ask mafia bosses to crack down on organized crime. I have little faith that the Democrats or the Republicans would ever do anything more than put on a show of investigating bribery; it is so commonplace, and would implicate so many people that we would need to vote in a completely new set of politicians in order to fix the problem.
That is what we should be spending our energy on: getting rid of the Democrats and the Republicans, and replacing them with politicians who work for the benefit of their constituents. Asking the Obama administration to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery is like asking Billy the Kid to head a posse to catch bank robbers. The Obama administration already accepted bribes for Dodd and co.; now they have backed off a bit and Hollywood is saying that the bribes will be withheld. It will take "new blood," politicians who are untainted by a history of bribery, to end the cycle of lobbying.
I am suggesting that whether or a not a baby is living on its own, breathing on its own, outside of the womb, without an umbilical cord, is the determining factor. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and as far as I am concerned this is the least problematic place to draw that line.
At best, all the petition will do is prove what everyone should already know: Democrats and Republicans are the servants of big businesses and not the American public. Lobbying / bribery is so commonplace in American government that I doubt we could find a politician with any influence who would not be implicated in any hypothetical investigation.
We need to start voting for different people -- people who are not connected with big business, people who will work for the benefit of their constituents. Would you ask a mafia boss to crack down on organized crime?
That would result in pretty much every lobbyist and politician in America being investigated for giving or taking bribes. We will not see this happen, just like we never saw electronic voting machines being properly audited.
Hmm, so a baby at 36 weeks but still in the womb isn't alive? Even though, were the child to be outside the womb, it would survive on its own without any medical intervention?
Do you see a problem with this? I am not seeing why this should be a problematic thing to accept.
How does a belief that there is no God not count as a belief system?
Well, first of all, atheism is not "a belief that there is no God," it is a lack of belief in any gods at all (for some reason, Christians insist that there is only one deity anyone could believe in). Someone who had never heard of any deities in their entire life would be an atheist: people must be taught to follow religions or believe in gods.
That being said, atheism is not a system at all. I am an atheist, but I still practice my religion -- I simply do not believe that deities exist, because there is no evidence to support that notion. Yet I still keep traditions, moral beliefs, and philosophies that emerged from my religion -- that is the "system." I am not alone in this -- it is more common in my religion than people would like to admit, and I suspect that it happens in other religions as well.
When did Richard Dawkins start beating people up? Did you ever hear of Dawkins throwing Molotov cocktails into someone's home? How about threatening to kill someone? No? None of that?
You can be critical of others without getting violent. Dawkins is critical of religion, sure, but publishing a book is not even close to beating someone up over a comment on Facebook.
when does an embryo switch from being a mass of cells, to a baby?
I will take my own religion's answer: at birth. This is neatly aligned with medical practice, easily adapts to advances in technology that keep premature babies alive, and does not require us to hold funerals every time a sexually active woman has a period. It is even supported by the bible, in case anyone cared (not that expect anyone outside of the religion to care).
OK, now that we settled that problem. What's next?
The difference between that young lady's story and what happened in Indonesia is this: people were just talking, online, about how much they hate her. When she is being beaten up, or people are shooting at her, or Molotov cocktails are being thrown, then maybe the comparison will make sense.
In America, you can voice your dissent, you can call people garbage, and you can do so for any reason -- even if you are calling them garbage for putting an end to a blatant constitutional infraction. The constitution protects the rights of atheists and religious people of all varieties equally, and that includes the right to be rude, insulting, and to hate the very constitution that provides you with those protections.
If God wanted everyone to believe in him with merely faith...
...He would have created a world where not believing was physically impossible. The fact that there are so many religions and that people need to be taught what to believe by the people around them is proof that either:
There are no deities (this is what I would bet the rent on)
Whatever deities are out there do not really care about what human beings believe.
Either way, beating and imprisoning someone for not believing is both morally outrageous and completely unjustified.
Actually, the widely accepted (but completely nonsensical) doctrine of "one God in three parts, each of which is equal to the whole" has probably done more for world peace than anything else Christianity teaches. Before the matter was "settled" people were busy killing each other over the monotheism/tritheism debate. Granted, they would not have been killing each other at all had Christianity not spread in the first place, but at least the Church managed to correct the problem before nuclear weapons were discovered.
Did the Mormons condemn Parker and Stone? Did they condemn people for watching the show? No, they just shrugged it off and went on with their lives.
I am not even a Mormon, and I can see that they took the satire in good spirit. People can have religion without becoming violent in the face of criticism.
They are derivative works of the original script and/or film.
Then practically nothing on the market today should count as original work. It is exceedingly rare for a movie to not be based on some other movie, novel, or story. Music follows the general pattern of other music, often with the same themes and forms. Books are inspired by and based on other books and sometimes movies. It is very rare for an idea to be so original that it is not obviously borrowed some other people's ideas.
So indeed, nobody has been sued over "original content" because there is no original content out there, at least not under your definition (which excludes any derivative work). I would say that fansubs contain a lot of original content -- positioning, fonts, interpretation, cultural notes, etc. -- which is often of higher quality than what studios put out.
Slashdot Mirror
A single hidden volume creates plausible deniability, because the default configuration is no hidden volume.
Except that you still have an encryption system on your hard drive that supports deniable encryption. Governments respond to deniable encryption by attacking its users until people are too terrified to use it, lest it become so commonplace that evidence gathering and prosecution become impossible. The US government is no different; if they can present even the slightest indication that you were using a hidden partition, that will be enough in court: "Here we see ISP logs that show Mr. So-and-so was connected to an email server at 6:45am on the date in question; yet on the logs obtained from the decrypted partition, we see that the computer had not even booted up until 8:00am."
Deniable encryption is like steganography: the warden problem kills you. You cannot hide that you have the capability of using deniable encryption, and judges are not going to let that sort of argument fly (and in some countries, you will be tortured until you produce the evidence or until you cannot speak).
I can easily see how supplying a password or decryption key would not be covered
Except that supplying a decryption key is evidence that you controlled a computer -- even if the prosecution does not say it, that is what it says to the jury. Even if we are going to compromise on the 5th amendment to the point where we consider people giving decryption keys to be OK, the prosecution should first be required to present evidence that the defendant was actually in control of the computer in question (or had actually sent the messages in question, etc.). Having a computer in your home does not mean that you control it, nor does having controlled a computer at one point in time mean that you controlled it at some other point in time.
Or, we could stick with the simpler answer: passwords cannot be demanded in criminal proceedings.
years of Republican rule.
Which are sandwiched between years of Democrat rule. The Clinton administration fought tooth and nail to keep encryption of out the hands of US citizens, or have you forgotten how hard we had to fight just to make PGP available? Perhaps you forgot that it was Democrats who passed CALEA? The Democrats have just as little regard for the bill of rights as the Republicans do.
However, I would like to suggest an alternative. As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff?
More laws will be passed until you are doing illegal things. The problem with giving the police so much power is that it enables the passage and enforcement of even more laws. Eventually it gets to the point where nobody can live their life without being a criminal.
This is why we have a bill of rights -- to prevent the government from making so many things illegal that laws become irrelevant and anyone can be detained by the government at any time. Unfortunately, people forgot this a long time ago, and so today we have so many laws that even the government has lost track of how many are on the books. When even courts are ignoring the importance of the constitution, you know we are in trouble.
Officer: "Hm, this looks like an innocent partition. Wait, what's this? You are using TrueCrypt? What is the other passphrase for your hidden partition?"
Later, in court
Defense: "Your honor, my client provided the decryption password as requested, can he go free now? There is no evidence in this case."
Prosecutor: "He's using TrueCrypt! There is a second password that would reveal the incriminating evidence, and we are subpoenaing him for it! And we want to tack obstruction of justice onto the charges!"
Judge: "OK, reveal your other decryption password! Let's see it!"
The only reason you are not being beaten up throughout the process is that the law protects you from that sort of thing. If you were in, say, Saudi Arabia trying to pull this"deniable encryption" stunt, you might be tortured until you give up the suspected second password.
In general, attempts to hide things in plain sight are guaranteed to make your life harder. Steganography means having steganography tools lying around. Deniable encryption means having deniable encryption tools lying around. This is why we need legal protections like the 5th amendment, and why we need them to actually apply -- the fact that a computer is involved should not render the constitution meaningless.
though seriously, this seems to be the standard argument that the overall service is OK because it has legitimate uses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
I predict this: should such technology be realized, it will be illegal for ordinary citizens to use it (except as part of carefully restricted appliances), but the police will use it to scan all of us as we walk around.
Yes, but the free copy you have acquired, still has a value. The producer loses there an opportunity to sell it to you with the intended price.
Which has always been a dubious argument:
the idea that you can take something from someone else
If I take your car, you no longer have a car. If I download a picture of your car from your website, then upload that picture to my own website, you still have a picture of your car. That is why copyright infringement is not and has never been a form of theft and why nobody has even been charged with theft because they committed copyright infringement.
In almost no other case does the US government get involved in protecting private property to the extent they rush in and protect the music and film industry
Sorry, but where in the list of charges against Megaupload do you see anything having to do with "private property?" Let's see...copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, copyright infringement via electronic means, money laundering...nope, not seeing anything relating to property rights.
Have your patent ripped off, or your house broken into, they won't even listen to you
What do patents have to do with private property? Does your home ownership expire after 20 years?
Why is the US government acting as a mob enforcer for the Media Giants?
Probably because America is importing too many things and selling too much of its actual property to people in other nations, and so the only thing we can do to close the trade gap is to export ideas. That and the fact that the media giants have been bribing politicians in this country for decades now.
Anyways, what do you propose?
How about voting third party? How about not continuing to vote for politicians that are not working for your benefit? The choice has never been restricted to Democrats and Republicans, and for the past 30 years both parties have been the "pro-corporations" party -- yet we continue to vote for them, as if they are going to follow the will of the people once in office.
So here is an idea for you: stop asking the criminals to crack down on crime, and start working on bringing in a fresh set of politicians.
It is not about laying down and dying, it is about choosing how to spend your energy. You do not ask mafia bosses to crack down on organized crime. I have little faith that the Democrats or the Republicans would ever do anything more than put on a show of investigating bribery; it is so commonplace, and would implicate so many people that we would need to vote in a completely new set of politicians in order to fix the problem.
That is what we should be spending our energy on: getting rid of the Democrats and the Republicans, and replacing them with politicians who work for the benefit of their constituents. Asking the Obama administration to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery is like asking Billy the Kid to head a posse to catch bank robbers. The Obama administration already accepted bribes for Dodd and co.; now they have backed off a bit and Hollywood is saying that the bribes will be withheld. It will take "new blood," politicians who are untainted by a history of bribery, to end the cycle of lobbying.
I am suggesting that whether or a not a baby is living on its own, breathing on its own, outside of the womb, without an umbilical cord, is the determining factor. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and as far as I am concerned this is the least problematic place to draw that line.
At best, all the petition will do is prove what everyone should already know: Democrats and Republicans are the servants of big businesses and not the American public. Lobbying / bribery is so commonplace in American government that I doubt we could find a politician with any influence who would not be implicated in any hypothetical investigation.
We need to start voting for different people -- people who are not connected with big business, people who will work for the benefit of their constituents. Would you ask a mafia boss to crack down on organized crime?
That would result in pretty much every lobbyist and politician in America being investigated for giving or taking bribes. We will not see this happen, just like we never saw electronic voting machines being properly audited.
Hmm, so a baby at 36 weeks but still in the womb isn't alive? Even though, were the child to be outside the womb, it would survive on its own without any medical intervention?
Do you see a problem with this? I am not seeing why this should be a problematic thing to accept.
How does a belief that there is no God not count as a belief system?
Well, first of all, atheism is not "a belief that there is no God," it is a lack of belief in any gods at all (for some reason, Christians insist that there is only one deity anyone could believe in). Someone who had never heard of any deities in their entire life would be an atheist: people must be taught to follow religions or believe in gods.
That being said, atheism is not a system at all. I am an atheist, but I still practice my religion -- I simply do not believe that deities exist, because there is no evidence to support that notion. Yet I still keep traditions, moral beliefs, and philosophies that emerged from my religion -- that is the "system." I am not alone in this -- it is more common in my religion than people would like to admit, and I suspect that it happens in other religions as well.
When did Richard Dawkins start beating people up? Did you ever hear of Dawkins throwing Molotov cocktails into someone's home? How about threatening to kill someone? No? None of that?
You can be critical of others without getting violent. Dawkins is critical of religion, sure, but publishing a book is not even close to beating someone up over a comment on Facebook.
when does an embryo switch from being a mass of cells, to a baby?
I will take my own religion's answer: at birth. This is neatly aligned with medical practice, easily adapts to advances in technology that keep premature babies alive, and does not require us to hold funerals every time a sexually active woman has a period. It is even supported by the bible, in case anyone cared (not that expect anyone outside of the religion to care).
OK, now that we settled that problem. What's next?
And the atheist mob will do it to you if you're religious at all?
[citation needed]
The difference between that young lady's story and what happened in Indonesia is this: people were just talking, online, about how much they hate her. When she is being beaten up, or people are shooting at her, or Molotov cocktails are being thrown, then maybe the comparison will make sense.
In America, you can voice your dissent, you can call people garbage, and you can do so for any reason -- even if you are calling them garbage for putting an end to a blatant constitutional infraction. The constitution protects the rights of atheists and religious people of all varieties equally, and that includes the right to be rude, insulting, and to hate the very constitution that provides you with those protections.
If God wanted everyone to believe in him with merely faith...
Either way, beating and imprisoning someone for not believing is both morally outrageous and completely unjustified.
ONE god or three?
Actually, the widely accepted (but completely nonsensical) doctrine of "one God in three parts, each of which is equal to the whole" has probably done more for world peace than anything else Christianity teaches. Before the matter was "settled" people were busy killing each other over the monotheism/tritheism debate. Granted, they would not have been killing each other at all had Christianity not spread in the first place, but at least the Church managed to correct the problem before nuclear weapons were discovered.
They all claim to be peaceful, but criticize them - and you'll see their true nature.
Had you done your homework, you would have seen that this is untrue:
http://newsroom.lds.org/article/church-statement-regarding-the-book-of-mormon-broadway-musical
Did the Mormons condemn Parker and Stone? Did they condemn people for watching the show? No, they just shrugged it off and went on with their lives.
I am not even a Mormon, and I can see that they took the satire in good spirit. People can have religion without becoming violent in the face of criticism.
They are derivative works of the original script and/or film.
Then practically nothing on the market today should count as original work. It is exceedingly rare for a movie to not be based on some other movie, novel, or story. Music follows the general pattern of other music, often with the same themes and forms. Books are inspired by and based on other books and sometimes movies. It is very rare for an idea to be so original that it is not obviously borrowed some other people's ideas.
So indeed, nobody has been sued over "original content" because there is no original content out there, at least not under your definition (which excludes any derivative work). I would say that fansubs contain a lot of original content -- positioning, fonts, interpretation, cultural notes, etc. -- which is often of higher quality than what studios put out.