Star Wars was hardly original with any of that content, overall story line and plot. So outside of special effects George Lucas must have pirated the entire story by your illogical thinking.
He remixed some of the best and worst of 1950s Sci-Fi movies (including gooofy robots), some of the best and worst of 1920s and 30s Sci-Fi short stories and novels and, most notably, for the emperor, borrowed freely from Issac Asimov's character The Mule from the Foundation Trilogy.
Governments and special interest groups now negotiate treaties in secret. Particularly if said special interest groups are wealthy and donate tons of money to politicians the world over.
If it hadn't been clear before it is now. The citizenry means nothing to politicians. The people mean nothing. Just the money means something.
It's sad. And infuriating.
It's also sad that even if the US wants to toss it's weight around in special 301 reports there's less and less weight to throw around.
Supporting largely legacy industries that don't contribute all that much to the American GDP at the expense of industries that are contributing a larger and larger part of American GDP directly and indirectly is senseless.
But it happens when politicians become captive to the big spending lobbyists rather than the good of the country as a whole.
So you kill the technology rather than actually make it work.
That cloud computing and file lockers are possible, and attainable, doesn't mean that such things are automatically used for illegal or immoral purposes. (However you define immoral which is problematic in and of itself.)
And yes, while criminality is often hidden by becoming mainstream in some form or another it doesn't mean that the cloud or file lockers are automatically criminal or ought to be considered so.
Your attack on BitTorrent would be laughable except that it reads like it's been taken from a playbook somewhere rather than from any personal knowledge on your part. And your answer, as far as you give one, appears to be to shut it down rather than anything else. But overarching and overstating damage caused is also part of how the game is played. As in how your game is played. Of course, never mind that BitTorrent would be hard to shut down because it is a protocol not a web site and you don't seem to get it that people will still send files back and forth for legitimate and other reasons using it no matter what you think.
Further it's a false equation to compare Megaupload to BitTorrent because how they function is entirely different. Yes, it may have had DVD rips, software and "the like" (and probably did) but to downplay the damage done to "the few" legit" users out there is another way the game gets played. Downplay the damage done when a site such as Megaupload is siezed and shut down. Also pretty common when these things are defended. How do you KNOW there were only "a few" legit users? Do you have access to information that hasn't been made public yet or is that just a postulation on your part. It was used for some piracy ergo it can ONLY have had "a few legit" users. Obviously for cover.
Jotform has it's issues. Though you focus on the forms that MAY have been used for phising as an excuse to shut that down. Even after the site owner said he's co-operate with authorities investigating the issue. Sounds more like someone wanted a score rather than to solve a problem to me.
Nor does it equate with a 10% failure in internet connections or a vehicle starting. They're entirely different. Again, overstating the problem logmarithmically, which is, laughable but a commmon enough tactic. One used for SOPA/PIPA and bills now in the US Congress about cyber security and the Canadian House of Commons about for warrantless access to people's internet accounts for a raft of reasons. Make the problem sound far worse than it is or is likely to become and you may persuade people to support bad legislation.
Nice try bringing pedophiles into this. I recall someone else recently doing that. Name of Vic Teows. It was met, understandingly, with outrage. So let me be outraged with you. I AM a survivor or childhood sexual abuse, shithead. And I'm really getting tired of what I and others went through (you can't imagine the horror and the damage done to the child). I and others like me are NOT here to be used as fodder by you or anyone for your narrow political or other purposes. We've been used by others quite enough, asshole. Quite frankly, I expect I speak for most of us, when I say that those with otherwise useless and failing arguments play the "it's for the children" card. Total bullshit. You played the card, as did Teows, in the hope of getting some support. You failed, kiddo. And I hope and pray that one day you're in a room with a bunch of us as we tell, honestly and openly, what we went through and why guys like you are as bad or worse than the people who abused us.
That leads me to wonder about the other "illegal" activities people using Megaupload or other file lockers you think people might get up to. I'm guessing it's copyright infringement but I can't tell.
And nothing is too big to check. There are processes in place to have things taken down under the DCMA and other laws in other countries. You know, sort of like YouTube does.
Yes there is liability attached to everyone's actions. Even yours. Playing the "protect the children" card reveals you as someone who really doesn't have an argument or a position that can be defended. I wasn't someone's plaything when I was abused. I'm not yours either. You're a total and complete waste of space.
As do Brazil and India. Not to mention various countries in Eastern Europe who have better communications and ways to free themselves from dependence on Russia.
There's a bit or irony in that they introduced the bill near Valentine's Day a day kids just love then attached it to kiddie porn.
Anyway, back to the leak, News reports say that they've tracked down the IP of the poster and it comes from an IP address in the House of Commons. Toews has asked the Speaker of the House to conduct and investigation into who it is or who it might be.
One way or another, you know, when you live your life in public people are going to find out things about your past even including a very nasty divorce. And that's what got spread all over Twitter.
Worse than the warrentless search itself is that Teows went back of the promise of his predecessor that such a thing would never happen.
It's not, for the moment, that Google's ads are littering the landscape with this kind of thing or that they may or may not be the only ones. They aren't.
But still, from a company whose slogan is Do No Evil there's something seriously wrong here when an ad on a site bypasses a browser's privacy settings. So now there's one more things to guard against.
For the post's other point that the EFF and Google are and always have been joined at the hip, according to certain people, I'm sure the same people who make that argument will find ways to spin it so that the EFF and Google are still joined at the hip no matter what this open letter shows.
While the two are allies in a number of things that doesn't now and never has meant that they have never been on the opposite side of serious issues. Most often privacy in how the ad cookies get set and why and how. The EFF has taken a round or two out of facebook too.
Thing is though, that had they made their services easy to access, easy to use and accessible along with little or no DRM they'd have had the public running to them because, at the time, TV, Radio and the Movie house experience was largely all there was. They'd have had their internet/web version of tv, radio and movie houses with some changes and made a killing and the public would have gone along with it.
Instead. They told people "no singles from cds" which gave birth to Napster. They kept idiotic windows in place which sent people to video and movie pirate sites and kept geographical restrictions in place which sent people off to video sites. Sometimes industries create their worst nightmares and the piracy issue is one glaring example of that. Live music thrives because there really is no alternative to being at a show even if there's hundreds of people dancing and crowd surfing around you. You're a part of something. An important part of something, at least in your own mind which is where it really matters. Recordings not so much to hear the RIAA tell it thouhgh they've never addressed the issue of 13 cuts on a CD and 9 of them trash at an expensive price. Movies not at all because. apparently, they're all losing their shirts while continuing to drag in record revenues and profits.
What the monitoring agency/company is telling them is STOP making things so difficult or there will always be piracy. Seems a simple enough thing to figure out. But the RI/MPAAs of the world just can't seem to grasp it.
The way you did business, the pre-Web models you used are dead and gone. Accept it and adapt and you'll do fine. But just remember this you made things so hard or impossible to do legally the underground you were afraid of is alive, well and thriving and it's not going away. More people seem to trust pirate sites that they do Hollywood or whatever sites Hollywood might set up to respond to this in an intelligent way. So the opportunity to carve out part of the web to be the "new" radio, tv and movie houses has come and gone and they weren't there for it. The orderly mall has become a bazaar. So now they're going to have to try harder to convince customers to try them out after the customers have been treated as criminals (DRM), locked out (sliding release windows), geographic restrictions that make no sense (gee I can record a program from an American channel in Canada or I can record the same program on a Canadian channel but I can't watch a clip???? WTF?).
They had the chance, they blew it. The chance isn't coming back again. So much for some kind of new monopoly steam, four or five years ago it MIGHT have worked. Not now.
Not totally because if some corporations have their way we'll be arrested just for HAVING a camera.
The only thing you've left out of the possible solutions is the get off your lazy duff and VOTE. Not everyone in the US Congress is safe, though some Senators seem to be "elected" for life. The idea is to toss the bad ones out. Enough of them that those who are left get the idea that they may not be there long enough to get those cushy jobs they've been promised at Cockroach Entertainment Inc because they don't have the connections long timers have.
At the very base of it people have to vote them out. You liked SOPA/PIPA? Get ready to go on the dole and we mean it. Until that sort of thing happens Congress critters will suck up to the man with the money and forget the electorate because the electorate has proven it can be ignored.
It's already becoming a complement in a lot of circles. And not just "freetard" circles. It's become such an overused and abused term that it's lost the meaning the RIAA/MPAA ever wanted it to have.
I didn't honestly expect any better from the leader of the director's guild but in all honesty isn't it time to get by the Google conspiracy here? (Although I see some of our trolls trying to add Facebook and Wikipedia to the list as did Mr Hackford.)
I guess the whole world has to orbit around Hollywood and its self important fantasies about itself and its contribution to the economy. (Including "intellectual" property.)
It couldn't be that SOPA was everything the critics said it was could it? I couldn't be that the public got outraged that one industry was setting the agenda for the United States for the entire internet could it? It couldn't be the total lack of consultation outside the "entertainment industry" on this bill and PIPA could it? It couldn't be censorship could it?
Nahhh. it was Google, of course. According to Hollywood that's who "they" are. Though there must be room for Mike, too!
And that the call in show didn't allow for calls or have an opposing view presented couldn't be very close to undemocratic and "denying information" could it?
Nahhh. It's just that Mr Hackford has no time for other points of view and that's his idea of "meeting in the middle".
There certainly hasn't been the rush to lock down in trademarks and other "IP" that there has been in recent times. You know. Things like "hey, I own part of this guy's name!"
Broad culture isn't owned, it's shared, That's how it become culture.
(The Olympics don't count because they've been at it for decades and in addition to proper trademark enforcement have gone way over the line time and time again.)
The best thing happening here is that ACTA is finally getting the attention it deserves and did from the start. I get very nervous when negotiators get together in private to discuss things like this with no one outside the "select" group taking part and nothing happening in public.
With some luck (and good planning) perhaps this will swing a spotlight over to TPP which is just as bad, perhaps worse. Though we won't know until we ever get to see the complete text of that proposed treaty.
Then again, as I've said before complexity in network defenses leads to vulnerability and simple always works better.
What's behind the secure barrier can be as complex as it wants to be because it's not doing the bulk of the security job.
And still, you have employees what will plug in USB keys they got in the bar last night "with the best porn ever" which will turn out to be a rootkit and the system is broadcasting to the world.
The companies you've listed are more than aware of the need for network security and have a good record in it. (No one is perfect, after all.) Even if it's mostly there to protect them from their competitors rather than cyber-espionage. That and they have well trained and motivated employees who aren't likely to go about inserting unknown USB keys into a computer, open spam or have weak passwords. It's hard to convince most people to take that much care or to simply not be stupid.
Oh, and yes, your second figure for G force makes much more sense if it's ordinance fired from a 155mm field gun. (Says the former artilleryman!)
And probably end up with such a complex stack of security layers and other "defenses" that some half way determined cracker will walk right on in, unnoticed, set up shop, collect data for 6 months or so and suddenly Wikileaks reappears!
Meanwhile the "security experts" won't be able to get to see what happened.
This doesn't need an agency, it needs people running the networks that half know what they're doing.
At some point the layers have to end until there are a stack of them higher than Mt. Logan. And no one quite knows what any of them do anymore.
The reality with this sort of thing is the same as with virtually anything else. Simpler is better than complex. Simple my look easier to attack but because there are only a few things that can go wrong any attack on one of them is noticed faster and countered. Simple responds faster because there are only so many ways and accesses or ports to break in on that would cause a problem.
Espionage laws are already in place and while there may be a need to slightly modify them there is probably no need to completely rewrite them.
While it may seem confusing to some the reality still is that systems like Linux and the BSDs are more attack resistant than closed source boxes because the security layer or layers, usually no more than two, respond and react quickly to the threats. Even as the attacker knows or can look up every line of code in the operating systems on the server they're attacking.
All complexity does, and more layers is more complexity, is increase the number of attack vectors and a larger possibility of more weaknesses an attacker can walk through.
I will grant you that there is some sensitive information that ought not be declassified because of security concerns. Though I'd also suggest that the serious baddies, whoever they are, already know about most of it. And are quite capable of wreaking havoc as it is. Mostly what stops them is the the United States is even more able to wreak greater havoc in return.
Including plans and details of ruggerdizing and other steps being taken in that area. Probably not most "terrorist" organiations as none of them are that well organized anymore.
In what passes for the normal world of espionage, yes, there's a threat. Is it all that big? Who knows. Judging from statements by those in charge of "cyber-defense" it is being overblown by several orders of magnitude which is, sadly, normal in these cases as they're in there looking for budget space and allocation.
I'd be more concerned with a concentration of contracts between a few large companies to be bidding on and working on security system wide. I agree with Mike that the people who are actually running the networks have more at stake than a third party and are far more likely to pick up something unusual on their network than a brilliantly written bit of software acting as a detection thing-a-ma-jig by people who know little or thing about the network they're supposedly protecting which is far more likely to yield false alarms than anything usable.
Civilization lasted for thousands of years without either copyright or patent law. In fact, most of the developments needed for the Industrial Revolution to begin and, in the early days, continue occurred in such an environment.
If most of the stories surrounding the passage of the Statue of Anne which brought the concept of copyright to the English speaking world the primary reason for it coming into being was to protect publishers from themselves in that they'd publish the same title at the same time putting themselves in danger of going under. Particularly if the author was popular. The states reason in the preamble to the statue was to encourage education not make publishers wealthy.
Patent law largely came around so that advancements in engineering and design would become public instead of trade secrets where the trade off was a monopoly for a limited (LIMITED) period of time.
Both worked reasonably well until the Internet came along and disturbed(!) the assumptions both copyright and patent law were based on. That is that it's expensive to create a copy of something in time, effort and money and then to share/sell them. In the case of a lot of so-called intellectual property that isn't the case anymore. In fact the effort needed to copy something like a song, book, video or movie is relatively trivial.
In the case of "real world" developments, if one ignores the lunacy of patents on business processes and software, as the 3D printer moves ever closer to reality and ever closer to a consumer product a large part of the reason for a monopoly in things covered by patents begins to vanish. As would the effort required to develop and test and prove such items. (Big Pharma excluded if only because of the complexity of the products and the potential danger of them.)
None of this means that the creators themselves shouldn't have some reward for their work. But, frankly, most of them don't under current laws given the incredibly creative accounting of the people they sign their rights over to or are compelled to by employment contracts. We may have to come up with some other framework than the what we have now. One that allows creators to keep control of their work as the cost of production of their work has fallen off dramatically.
Face it, if I come up with a better widget, patent it and all that there is nothing at all to stop the guy down the street from reverse engineering it putting the data into a 3D printer and come up with better widgets indistinguishable from mine,covered by my patent.
Another observation here is that people and companies seem only to become IP maximalists AFTER they assemble a couple of warehouses full of the stuff whereas before they were likely doing end runs around existing copyright and patent law to develop their own products.
The reverse side of that is that countries only start to care when they have a few battleships full of the stuff whereas before, like the United States as it was developing and up to something like 55 or 60 years ago didn't give a damn about patents and copyrights held in other countries.
We've already had a world without IP and it worked just fine. Right now the world with IP seems to be charging down a path to take civil and moral rights away from citizens for the enrichment and preservation of a few corporate entities. Note the I deliberately left out creators. They're still stuck in creative accounting hell no matter what system's in use.
On the post: When We Copy, We Justify It; When Others Copy, We Vilify Them
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He remixed some of the best and worst of 1950s Sci-Fi movies (including gooofy robots), some of the best and worst of 1920s and 30s Sci-Fi short stories and novels and, most notably, for the emperor, borrowed freely from Issac Asimov's character The Mule from the Foundation Trilogy.
So Lucas MUST be a pirate, right?
On the post: Shining Light On ACTA's Lack Of Transparency
Governments and special interest groups now negotiate treaties in secret. Particularly if said special interest groups are wealthy and donate tons of money to politicians the world over.
If it hadn't been clear before it is now. The citizenry means nothing to politicians. The people mean nothing. Just the money means something.
It's sad. And infuriating.
It's also sad that even if the US wants to toss it's weight around in special 301 reports there's less and less weight to throw around.
Supporting largely legacy industries that don't contribute all that much to the American GDP at the expense of industries that are contributing a larger and larger part of American GDP directly and indirectly is senseless.
But it happens when politicians become captive to the big spending lobbyists rather than the good of the country as a whole.
On the post: How The Megaupload Shutdown Has Put 'Cloud Computing' Business Plans At Risk
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That cloud computing and file lockers are possible, and attainable, doesn't mean that such things are automatically used for illegal or immoral purposes. (However you define immoral which is problematic in and of itself.)
And yes, while criminality is often hidden by becoming mainstream in some form or another it doesn't mean that the cloud or file lockers are automatically criminal or ought to be considered so.
Your attack on BitTorrent would be laughable except that it reads like it's been taken from a playbook somewhere rather than from any personal knowledge on your part. And your answer, as far as you give one, appears to be to shut it down rather than anything else. But overarching and overstating damage caused is also part of how the game is played. As in how your game is played. Of course, never mind that BitTorrent would be hard to shut down because it is a protocol not a web site and you don't seem to get it that people will still send files back and forth for legitimate and other reasons using it no matter what you think.
Further it's a false equation to compare Megaupload to BitTorrent because how they function is entirely different. Yes, it may have had DVD rips, software and "the like" (and probably did) but to downplay the damage done to "the few" legit" users out there is another way the game gets played. Downplay the damage done when a site such as Megaupload is siezed and shut down. Also pretty common when these things are defended. How do you KNOW there were only "a few" legit users? Do you have access to information that hasn't been made public yet or is that just a postulation on your part. It was used for some piracy ergo it can ONLY have had "a few legit" users. Obviously for cover.
Jotform has it's issues. Though you focus on the forms that MAY have been used for phising as an excuse to shut that down. Even after the site owner said he's co-operate with authorities investigating the issue. Sounds more like someone wanted a score rather than to solve a problem to me.
Nor does it equate with a 10% failure in internet connections or a vehicle starting. They're entirely different. Again, overstating the problem logmarithmically, which is, laughable but a commmon enough tactic. One used for SOPA/PIPA and bills now in the US Congress about cyber security and the Canadian House of Commons about for warrantless access to people's internet accounts for a raft of reasons. Make the problem sound far worse than it is or is likely to become and you may persuade people to support bad legislation.
Nice try bringing pedophiles into this. I recall someone else recently doing that. Name of Vic Teows. It was met, understandingly, with outrage. So let me be outraged with you. I AM a survivor or childhood sexual abuse, shithead. And I'm really getting tired of what I and others went through (you can't imagine the horror and the damage done to the child). I and others like me are NOT here to be used as fodder by you or anyone for your narrow political or other purposes. We've been used by others quite enough, asshole. Quite frankly, I expect I speak for most of us, when I say that those with otherwise useless and failing arguments play the "it's for the children" card. Total bullshit. You played the card, as did Teows, in the hope of getting some support. You failed, kiddo. And I hope and pray that one day you're in a room with a bunch of us as we tell, honestly and openly, what we went through and why guys like you are as bad or worse than the people who abused us.
That leads me to wonder about the other "illegal" activities people using Megaupload or other file lockers you think people might get up to. I'm guessing it's copyright infringement but I can't tell.
And nothing is too big to check. There are processes in place to have things taken down under the DCMA and other laws in other countries. You know, sort of like YouTube does.
Yes there is liability attached to everyone's actions. Even yours. Playing the "protect the children" card reveals you as someone who really doesn't have an argument or a position that can be defended. I wasn't someone's plaything when I was abused. I'm not yours either. You're a total and complete waste of space.
On the post: How The Megaupload Shutdown Has Put 'Cloud Computing' Business Plans At Risk
Re: Re: opportunity
On the post: How The Megaupload Shutdown Has Put 'Cloud Computing' Business Plans At Risk
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Neither Edison or anyone else from the period needed what we call high tech to do that.
On the post: Canadians Respond To Internet Spying Bill By 'Revealing All' To Politician Backing It
Anyway, back to the leak, News reports say that they've tracked down the IP of the poster and it comes from an IP address in the House of Commons. Toews has asked the Speaker of the House to conduct and investigation into who it is or who it might be.
One way or another, you know, when you live your life in public people are going to find out things about your past even including a very nasty divorce. And that's what got spread all over Twitter.
Worse than the warrentless search itself is that Teows went back of the promise of his predecessor that such a thing would never happen.
On the post: EFF Condemns Google For Circumventing Safari Privacy Protections
But still, from a company whose slogan is Do No Evil there's something seriously wrong here when an ad on a site bypasses a browser's privacy settings. So now there's one more things to guard against.
For the post's other point that the EFF and Google are and always have been joined at the hip, according to certain people, I'm sure the same people who make that argument will find ways to spin it so that the EFF and Google are still joined at the hip no matter what this open letter shows.
While the two are allies in a number of things that doesn't now and never has meant that they have never been on the opposite side of serious issues. Most often privacy in how the ad cookies get set and why and how. The EFF has taken a round or two out of facebook too.
On the post: DMCA Takedown Service Tells Copyright Companies: 'Adapt Your Business To The New Digital World'
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Instead. They told people "no singles from cds" which gave birth to Napster. They kept idiotic windows in place which sent people to video and movie pirate sites and kept geographical restrictions in place which sent people off to video sites. Sometimes industries create their worst nightmares and the piracy issue is one glaring example of that. Live music thrives because there really is no alternative to being at a show even if there's hundreds of people dancing and crowd surfing around you. You're a part of something. An important part of something, at least in your own mind which is where it really matters. Recordings not so much to hear the RIAA tell it thouhgh they've never addressed the issue of 13 cuts on a CD and 9 of them trash at an expensive price. Movies not at all because. apparently, they're all losing their shirts while continuing to drag in record revenues and profits.
What the monitoring agency/company is telling them is STOP making things so difficult or there will always be piracy. Seems a simple enough thing to figure out. But the RI/MPAAs of the world just can't seem to grasp it.
The way you did business, the pre-Web models you used are dead and gone. Accept it and adapt and you'll do fine. But just remember this you made things so hard or impossible to do legally the underground you were afraid of is alive, well and thriving and it's not going away. More people seem to trust pirate sites that they do Hollywood or whatever sites Hollywood might set up to respond to this in an intelligent way. So the opportunity to carve out part of the web to be the "new" radio, tv and movie houses has come and gone and they weren't there for it. The orderly mall has become a bazaar. So now they're going to have to try harder to convince customers to try them out after the customers have been treated as criminals (DRM), locked out (sliding release windows), geographic restrictions that make no sense (gee I can record a program from an American channel in Canada or I can record the same program on a Canadian channel but I can't watch a clip???? WTF?).
They had the chance, they blew it. The chance isn't coming back again. So much for some kind of new monopoly steam, four or five years ago it MIGHT have worked. Not now.
On the post: US Returns JotForm.com Domain; Still Refuses To Say What Happened
Re: Corporatocracy
The only thing you've left out of the possible solutions is the get off your lazy duff and VOTE. Not everyone in the US Congress is safe, though some Senators seem to be "elected" for life. The idea is to toss the bad ones out. Enough of them that those who are left get the idea that they may not be there long enough to get those cushy jobs they've been promised at Cockroach Entertainment Inc because they don't have the connections long timers have.
At the very base of it people have to vote them out. You liked SOPA/PIPA? Get ready to go on the dole and we mean it. Until that sort of thing happens Congress critters will suck up to the man with the money and forget the electorate because the electorate has proven it can be ignored.
On the post: RIAA/IFPI Explored Possible Lawsuit Against Google For Not Ranking iTunes Above Pirate Bay
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On the post: Directors Guild Boss Insists That Everyone Against SOPA/PIPA Was Duped
I guess the whole world has to orbit around Hollywood and its self important fantasies about itself and its contribution to the economy. (Including "intellectual" property.)
It couldn't be that SOPA was everything the critics said it was could it? I couldn't be that the public got outraged that one industry was setting the agenda for the United States for the entire internet could it? It couldn't be the total lack of consultation outside the "entertainment industry" on this bill and PIPA could it? It couldn't be censorship could it?
Nahhh. it was Google, of course. According to Hollywood that's who "they" are. Though there must be room for Mike, too!
And that the call in show didn't allow for calls or have an opposing view presented couldn't be very close to undemocratic and "denying information" could it?
Nahhh. It's just that Mr Hackford has no time for other points of view and that's his idea of "meeting in the middle".
On the post: Directors Guild Boss Insists That Everyone Against SOPA/PIPA Was Duped
Re: Re: Re: Robbed
On the post: Linsanity... At The Trademark Office
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Broad culture isn't owned, it's shared, That's how it become culture.
(The Olympics don't count because they've been at it for decades and in addition to proper trademark enforcement have gone way over the line time and time again.)
On the post: Head of Mozilla Says ACTA Is 'A Bad Way To Develop Internet Policy'
With some luck (and good planning) perhaps this will swing a spotlight over to TPP which is just as bad, perhaps worse. Though we won't know until we ever get to see the complete text of that proposed treaty.
On the post: Cybersecurity Bill Backers Insist This Isn't SOPA... But Is It Needed?
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What's behind the secure barrier can be as complex as it wants to be because it's not doing the bulk of the security job.
And still, you have employees what will plug in USB keys they got in the bar last night "with the best porn ever" which will turn out to be a rootkit and the system is broadcasting to the world.
The companies you've listed are more than aware of the need for network security and have a good record in it. (No one is perfect, after all.) Even if it's mostly there to protect them from their competitors rather than cyber-espionage. That and they have well trained and motivated employees who aren't likely to go about inserting unknown USB keys into a computer, open spam or have weak passwords. It's hard to convince most people to take that much care or to simply not be stupid.
Oh, and yes, your second figure for G force makes much more sense if it's ordinance fired from a 155mm field gun. (Says the former artilleryman!)
On the post: Cybersecurity Bill Backers Insist This Isn't SOPA... But Is It Needed?
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Meanwhile the "security experts" won't be able to get to see what happened.
This doesn't need an agency, it needs people running the networks that half know what they're doing.
On the post: Cybersecurity Bill Backers Insist This Isn't SOPA... But Is It Needed?
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The reality with this sort of thing is the same as with virtually anything else. Simpler is better than complex. Simple my look easier to attack but because there are only a few things that can go wrong any attack on one of them is noticed faster and countered. Simple responds faster because there are only so many ways and accesses or ports to break in on that would cause a problem.
Espionage laws are already in place and while there may be a need to slightly modify them there is probably no need to completely rewrite them.
While it may seem confusing to some the reality still is that systems like Linux and the BSDs are more attack resistant than closed source boxes because the security layer or layers, usually no more than two, respond and react quickly to the threats. Even as the attacker knows or can look up every line of code in the operating systems on the server they're attacking.
All complexity does, and more layers is more complexity, is increase the number of attack vectors and a larger possibility of more weaknesses an attacker can walk through.
On the post: Cybersecurity Bill Backers Insist This Isn't SOPA... But Is It Needed?
Re:
Including plans and details of ruggerdizing and other steps being taken in that area. Probably not most "terrorist" organiations as none of them are that well organized anymore.
In what passes for the normal world of espionage, yes, there's a threat. Is it all that big? Who knows. Judging from statements by those in charge of "cyber-defense" it is being overblown by several orders of magnitude which is, sadly, normal in these cases as they're in there looking for budget space and allocation.
I'd be more concerned with a concentration of contracts between a few large companies to be bidding on and working on security system wide. I agree with Mike that the people who are actually running the networks have more at stake than a third party and are far more likely to pick up something unusual on their network than a brilliantly written bit of software acting as a detection thing-a-ma-jig by people who know little or thing about the network they're supposedly protecting which is far more likely to yield false alarms than anything usable.
On the post: Cybersecurity Bill Backers Insist This Isn't SOPA... But Is It Needed?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Packet Sniffing by Cable Companies Allowed?
On the post: Two Contradictory Paths In The UK When It Comes To Copyright Issues
Re: A World Without IP
If most of the stories surrounding the passage of the Statue of Anne which brought the concept of copyright to the English speaking world the primary reason for it coming into being was to protect publishers from themselves in that they'd publish the same title at the same time putting themselves in danger of going under. Particularly if the author was popular. The states reason in the preamble to the statue was to encourage education not make publishers wealthy.
Patent law largely came around so that advancements in engineering and design would become public instead of trade secrets where the trade off was a monopoly for a limited (LIMITED) period of time.
Both worked reasonably well until the Internet came along and disturbed(!) the assumptions both copyright and patent law were based on. That is that it's expensive to create a copy of something in time, effort and money and then to share/sell them. In the case of a lot of so-called intellectual property that isn't the case anymore. In fact the effort needed to copy something like a song, book, video or movie is relatively trivial.
In the case of "real world" developments, if one ignores the lunacy of patents on business processes and software, as the 3D printer moves ever closer to reality and ever closer to a consumer product a large part of the reason for a monopoly in things covered by patents begins to vanish. As would the effort required to develop and test and prove such items. (Big Pharma excluded if only because of the complexity of the products and the potential danger of them.)
None of this means that the creators themselves shouldn't have some reward for their work. But, frankly, most of them don't under current laws given the incredibly creative accounting of the people they sign their rights over to or are compelled to by employment contracts. We may have to come up with some other framework than the what we have now. One that allows creators to keep control of their work as the cost of production of their work has fallen off dramatically.
Face it, if I come up with a better widget, patent it and all that there is nothing at all to stop the guy down the street from reverse engineering it putting the data into a 3D printer and come up with better widgets indistinguishable from mine,covered by my patent.
Another observation here is that people and companies seem only to become IP maximalists AFTER they assemble a couple of warehouses full of the stuff whereas before they were likely doing end runs around existing copyright and patent law to develop their own products.
The reverse side of that is that countries only start to care when they have a few battleships full of the stuff whereas before, like the United States as it was developing and up to something like 55 or 60 years ago didn't give a damn about patents and copyrights held in other countries.
We've already had a world without IP and it worked just fine. Right now the world with IP seems to be charging down a path to take civil and moral rights away from citizens for the enrichment and preservation of a few corporate entities. Note the I deliberately left out creators. They're still stuck in creative accounting hell no matter what system's in use.
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