Why does this automatic enforcement of law only ever cut one way?
If we're mandating that technology should enforce laws automatically, how about anti-monopoly-power technology? All mergers and acquisitions of companies above some size are automatically blocked, and they have to make a compelling case in a court of law to have the block lifted. It has to be renewed every three years, or the company is automatically broken up again.
Oh, and a simple similarity search versus the entire web, to mark patents as invalid due to prior art or obviousness.
DRM could be presumed to infringe upon fair use and other legal rights of ownership, and be automatically declared illegal (no, I don't mean that breaking it would become legal, though it would. I mean the DRM itself would be illegal, and the manufacturer would be by law forced to remove it), unless the manufacturer convincingly argues it is necessary (and re-argues it every three years).
And naturally, use of copyrighted material would be presumed fair-use, and just like wrongful takedowns don't get punished currently, if some material were proven to be infringing in a very non-automatic legal proceeding, the only consequence would be taking the material down - no other fines or punishment of any kind.
> Why does this automatic enforcement of law only ever cut one way?
Because the people paying for it only want it to go one way.
> how about anti-monopoly-power technology?
That defeats the purpose of the legislation in the first place.
The goal is to establish monopolies. Why would they introduce a provision to undermine everything they are trying to accomplish with the law in the first place?
actually, id argue its much more grandiose than just monopolistic activity. If you want to continue doing capitalism, youll need to switch from physical property to imaginary property as the laws of thermodynamics simply do not permit for endless consumption of scarce physical resources.
maximum consumption with minimum production expense has already eclipsed its zenith in the seventies. evermore impoverished consumers seeing longer hours and lower wages were made to establish credit as an extension of their purchasing power. this credit was made mandatory at all levels of capitalist society, including government.
to permit even the idea of piracy would be to undercut capitalisms current waxing pivot to continued survival. its less a drive from the MPAA, and more a common understanding amongst leaders.
I agree with you that it's an attempt to side-step the tendency of the rate of profit to fall but I'm not sure it's particularly well-understood by anyone involved. and even a cursory examination of the material basis for so-called imaginary property can't help but identify that such property only exists insofar as computers continue to make them accessible. this transition cannot prevent the death of this society to climate change.
> as the laws of thermodynamics simply do not permit for endless consumption of scarce physical resources
1) Ever-increasing consumption is not a prerequisite for capitalism, but rather a beneficial consequence of the increasingly efficient use of available resources which capitalism enables.
2) Economic growth is about increasing value, not physical materials. Value is a human concept, not a physical one, and can increase indefinitely unhampered by the laws of thermodynamics.
3) Copyright is anti-capitalist. It's a subsidy granted to one group at the expense of another in the form of a monopoly (or rather, many small monopolies) enforced through threat of violence. As a means of directing production toward "social" goals (encouraging the creation of "creative" works) instead of those chosen by the market it has its roots in socialism. Far from enabling further growth, it causes less efficient allocation of resources and in doing so impoverishes society.
> Oh, and a simple similarity search versus the entire web, to mark patents as invalid due to prior art or obviousness.
Former USPTO patent examiner here. Patent similarity search doesn't work that well at present. Even when there is a perfect 102 reference (the best sort of prior art reference; the reference shows exactly what is claimed) in the patent literature [0], frequently none of the 3 similarity-based search engines I'd try [1] would return that reference. There are many reasons for this. In my previous area (water heaters and ventilation, mostly), a lot of the issue was because the software would only look at the text (and citations) and the drawings really did provide a lot of critical details that aren't easy to express in text. (I already would check the provided citations so the AI checking the citations is not a value-add in my opinion.)
Patent searching is not anywhere near as easy as many people here seem to think! That's particularly true when the examiner has a very limited amount of time to search, which is every time.
[0] Yes, searching the entire web in addition to patents would be better. But it's already clear that the software often doesn't return the best references from the patent databases it does search, so I'm skeptical that moving to the entire web would make that much of a difference.
[1] IP.com (can work on unpublished applications), Dialog Foreign Patent Finder (can work on unpublished applications), Google Patents (if the application was already published). Each of these seem to be roughly as good as each other. For a while I'd also try the USPTO's home-grown PLUS system from the early 00s, which returned mostly irrelevant documents.
> Patent similarity search doesn't work that well at present.
Neither does automatic detection of fair use - that's the point. Just crank up the false-positive rate so anything vaguely related counts as prior art. If the submitter is not happy about it, they can argue their case in a proper court.
The status quo is close to what you describe. Very few patent applications are not rejected in the first action. I did a quick Google search that indicates that over the entire USPTO, 88% of patent applications are rejected by an examiner in the first action [0]. I myself never allowed an entire application on the first action!
However, it's rare that an attorney will argue that their patent should be issued in court. Almost always they argue with an examiner.
A lot of people here seem to believe that the USPTO issues patents like handing out candy to children, but the reality is that a large fraction of patent applications are never granted. Mistakes happen, yes, but that has more to do with how little time the USPTO gives examiners than anything else. It's really easy to miss something. If you want to improve patent quality, tell your congressmen to increase funding at the USPTO so examiners can get more time. Nothing else will work in my view. Right now the USPTO is funded solely by fees paid by patent applicants, which isn't enough and probably distorts the incentives.
ican confirm it can be more like pulling teeth than freely receiving candy. I’ve pulled a few teeth and by the time I got it, I wasn’t sure it was worth it.
The uspto seems to me like the fda in that they typically have a fraction of the resources and a sub-fraction of the compensation of those on the other side of the table, yet seem to get blamed for the downfall of society based on their decisions.
> All mergers and acquisitions of companies above some size are automatically blocked, and they have to make a compelling case in a court of law to have the block lifted
Something like this is already a thing, though the review is performed by the DoJ and FTC.
> This Act, amending the Clayton Act, requires companies to file premerger notifications with the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department for certain acquisitions. The Act establishes waiting periods that must elapse before such acquisitions may be consummated and authorizes the enforcement agencies to stay those periods until the companies provide certain additional information about the likelihood that the proposed transaction would substantially lessen competition in violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.
Well imagine if you have a few friends who are into cars and they're all about, say, reducing certain regulations on tailpipes.
You yourself don't know much about cars and frankly don't care, but because the people you are around predominantly keep giving you these convincing arguments, you start to support their side without even thinking about it. When someone random person starts arguing a counterpoint, you might even start repeating what your friends told you.
Most congressman aren't creating or remixing content. They probably don't care that much, but the people lobbying are definitely more one-sided.
There are also more important things than this DRM rage boner. Surely, providing the entire country with fast internet has priority over DRM?
I just see this as an attempt to increase the amount of bureaucracy for no real reason other than to let people specialize in navigating the bureaucracy and using that as a weapon against other people.
I could see them saying faster Internet makes more piracy. I doubt they actually give a shit about faster Internet for the masses. Nobody is lining their pockets on that one.
> All mergers and acquisitions of companies above some size are automatically blocked,
While I agree to the spirit of your comment, isn't this already true, I have heard of multiple times of deals waiting for approval across multiple countries for them to be a closed.
It probably only cuts one way because it's difficult or impossible to implement "anti-monopoly-power technology", as you put it. Indeed, in your own comment you posited the existence of such a technology but then failed to suggest one, or even how it might theoretically work. You proposed a cumbersome, entirely legal-system-based solution instead.
> Why does this automatic enforcement of law only ever cut one way? If we're mandating that technology should enforce laws automatically, how about anti-monopoly-power technology?
The people writing those laws understand that monopolies and the regulations surrounding them are complicated. They don't understand that technology is, also.
In a way, this has already happened. Microsoft has chosen to classify qBittorrent, Transmission, and Deluge as PUA (potentially unsafe application). As a consequence, Defender will block their installation and remove existing copies.
As someone who uses Linux daily, when will this stop being parroted. Your average person, your average BitTorrent user even, does not have the skill set required for the running of Linux to be anything near trivial...
Probably when my <50yo dad stops asking me to change the font size on his phone everytime he changes it. The thing is, technology is just a tool for most people and except software engineers almost no one wants to spend any time dealing with anything that they would have to configure. Until the day linux based OSes come pre-installed with sane defaults that work out of box on laptops, the average person won't use it.
If all distros were Gentoo or Arch, you'd be correct, but Linux Mint exists, and my very non-technical grandmother has no issues using Mint for her day-to-day. Linux is no longer gatekept by the command line.
I would still recommend Debian, possibly with some added repos for things that need to be newer or which aren't normally included.
If only that recently discussed change to include just the closed source firmware blobs in the standard dist gets approved, things would be even better than they currently are.
Maybe? My grandmother typesets organ music on her linux mint laptop and runs into no issues. Some people who need to use specific software still run into issues, but it's not guaranteed anymore.
Thank you!! When I first set up Linux as my daily driver I questioned if perhaps I just chose a bad distro or got unlucky in my setup. After trying 2-3 distros I saw that even as a fledgling software engineer at the time I lacked the ability to set up Linux in accordance with my desires without hours of googling and frustration.
Considering some of the issues I help my friends and family with on their personal computers, I couldn't imagine any of them installing and configuring Linux on their own.
It frankly does more harm than good when people try to perpetuate the myth that a Linux installation is just as trivial as a modern Mac or Windows install as it causes people to approach Linux with unrealistic expectations.
This is the wrong way. Try hardware designed for Linux instead of a Windows-certified one. Ideally, with preinstalled Linux. Look, the Linux community can't develop drivers for all hardware in the world for free, especially when it has no documentation whatsoever.
> I lacked the ability to set up Linux in accordance with my desires without hours of googling and frustration
This is so fuzzy, I can easily say the same for Windows or MacOS. Depending on you needs, hours of googling might even be very reasonable.
I had never used an Apple product before buying my mac mini but upon opening the box I had all needed software installed and was able to be productive in under an hour.
This parody brought to you by the people for common sense.
I have a system76 machine that I've used for years without any difficulty until my kids school said she needed access to this weird OS called Microsoft Windows that I don't know much about so I got a second drive and resolved to try this Windows thing on a secondary drive.
Installing the physical drive was the easy part. Everything after that went south. First instead of just going to windows.com or something I got shunted to stores where they were selling entire computers. I didn't NEED a new computer just an OS. Then I found people selling things called cd keys. What are those? Who even buys an OS anymore?
Eventually I figured out you can download something called an ISO file (what is that?) from microsoft and pay for it later? It looks like I'll be paying hundreds of dollars for what comes standard with Linux isn't that crazy? Then I tried to "burn" the iso to a usb drive and THAT didn't work so I borrowed a portable usb optical disk and bought some writable disks at Walmart like it was 1999 and finally got it installed whereupon it took a giant shit on my computers ability to boot anything except Windows. At first I thought it destroyed all my data on Linux and I about had a heart attack but after hours of troubleshooting I realized I just had to restore the ability to choose my OS at boot time and all my data was still there and I calmed down a bit.
Then I booted up this "Windows". At first nothing worked including the internet so I had to do research on my phone. I discovered that unlike Linux windows doesn't actually come with the drivers needed for your machine you have to go to each manufacturers website and navigate their confusing site (and avoid malware sites offering drivers) and find each individual driver. If you ever need an update you will have to do this all over again unless the driver includes an auto update feature. For the stuff that does auto update if it ever causes a problem with your hardware it will probably be impossible to fix and you will just end up reinstalling windows all over again and hopefully realizing what tanked your install in the first place and people actually do this over and over again!
It had a mediocre but acceptable set of default applications. Not nearly as good as my computer came with but its ok. Then I went to install some software I'm used to and I discovered the windows app store unlike Linux has almost nothing of value and one is expected to do the same dance as above for applications just like drivers. While downloading from a seemingly legit site I acquired several weird pieces of adware and an actual computer virus. Something I had previously just read about on the internet. Good thing this insecure OS didn't have any of my actual data!
It's not surprising that few people use this "windows" thing. It's a total mess and not nearly ready for prime time. Maybe 2030 will be the year of the Windows Desktop.
I have not had to install a driver manually on Windows in a long time, probably approaching a decade. I will concede that Window's boot partition defaults are comically malicious to other boot managers on a system and personally temporarily unplug all drive besides the installation target.
All that being said this feels like a bit of a straw man seeing as your average user (which this entire sub-thread is discussing) does not even know their hardware can support multiple OSs at all, let alone simultaneously. They buy a computer and assume the OS it has at that time is all they can use, and if it somehow ends up in an un-bootable state that they need to bring it to GeekSquad...
Also to imply that the Linux app stores are at all better than the Windows one is a bit disingenuous. About 50% of the time that I have attempted to use them, I ended up with a broken and completely unusable installation of the program. There is some hilariously ambiguous error prompt that shows up and the real error is written out to some log file mentioning that the installation failed to do the system not using init.d or something about systemd. Oh and the log file is intended to be interacted with through terminal commands and is a pain to even find on disk.
> Also to imply that the Linux app stores are at all better than the Windows one is a bit disingenuous. About 50% of the time that I have attempted to use them, I ended up with a broken and completely unusable installation of the program.
The Windows store doesn't contain most of the software you want because they limited what license you could use, what technology you could use to build with, and want a huge cut leading to developers opting out.
Meanwhile major distros repos contain almost all the software you are liable to want with the rest easily added by configuring additional sources so you can use the same highly functional interface to manage all your software gui or cli. The experience you describe where half of installations resulted in broken software is highly suspect. Such tech has worked extremely well for decades. Problems outside of self inflicted wounds like manually screwing with the same set of files managed by your package managers or trying to install packages not built for your distro are rare. Your problems are virtually certainly the result of highly interesting choices which is like saying cars don't work because the last time you drove backwards on the interstate you kept crashing.
Logs are in /var/log like /var/log/apt not in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavoratory with a sign "beware the leopard" not sure why you would NEED a terminal for this task although its certainly handy. Instead you could read all the messages in your gui client and stop doing whatever its is you are trying to break your system.
Lastly init.d? Did you time travel from 2003? If so watch out for that Putin fellow he's a bad egg.
Have you considered running Windows 3.1 in dosbox? It's the complete windows experience, and the terminal integrates in seamlessly with your desktop linux account. Office, etc run well, but you can use the Linux side for things like Steam, browsing the internet, development, media creation, etc.
Sadly, due to the hardware compatiblity issues you described, and the fragmentation of the UI in modern windows distributions, this really is the best out-of-the-box microsoft experience these days.
I really hate indirectly supporting commie zealots by paying hardware developers, knowing that some of the purchase price goes to making sure their hardware works well with open source software.
Once, I tried to organize a sit in at the FSF to get them to refund us, but it didn't work out. The lamestream media wouldn't cover it.
Sadly, as you have found, there just aren't any principled capitalists producing products with an acceptable out of the box experience.
So, I have to recommend things like the raspberry pi to my less tech-savvy friends, as much as a I find it to be a moral and ethical compromise.
One thing that has changed is the fact that most of the third party drivers is installed automatically when you install Windows and can also be updated as "optional updates" using Windows update itself... also with WSL, you can run a Linux instance which seamlessly integrates with Windows.
So, I think the time of the Windows desktop is already here.
A huge portion of the job for non technical people is ensuring hardware and software compatibility, installing, configuring the OS. With Windows people outsource this job to their OEM in general because that is what non technical people do with any OS they buy it as a package with their hardware and use it.
Using Linux isn't particularly harder than using Windows.
>Your average person, your average BitTorrent user even, does not have the skill set required for the running of Linux to be anything near trivial
This says more about Windows users than it does about Linux.
Numerous distro maintainers have already made things as easy as possible. Will you be satisfied when the installer has only one comically large button? How braindead does the setup process have to be? Have you actually used Linux in the last 15 years?
Which, may I ask? I have a Librem laptop, but I wouldn't give it to a previous Windows user because of the pre-installed desktop (some GNOME variant I think).
On the other hand I installed Linux Mint on all family hardware with no issues (complaints from family members).
As someone who has used both Linux and Windows extensively (and dealt with hardware and software problems in both), as well as guided at least a dozen different Windows users through some setup and use of Linux - this is completely, categorically false.
The closest truth is "some users find it easy to install and/or use Linux some of the time" but saying that it is "trivial" to run Linux in general is incorrect.
Point of clarification, "PUA" actually stands for "Potentially Unwanted Application" (not "unsafe"), which makes this an even more transparently bad faith classification.
Well, no, not really. The GitHub thread is based on a mis-understanding of what Windows is doing and how Windows AV works. Windows uses a system very similar to those used for spam filters, except for binaries. That system is "reputation". It tries to learn over time to classify software into wanted and malware.
Just like with email, to build binary reputation you need to cooperate by using cryptography. With email you sign your mail using DKIM and publish your DKIM keys in DNS. This lets spam filters associate the mails you send together and learn that a stream of mails, even though they may all be very different, are in fact all "good". With Windows programs you have to sign your software. This lets Windows know that different versions of your program are actually all "good".
Authenticode certificates cost money. QBitTorrent is open source. Unsurprisingly they'd rather not pay for a code signing certificate, so their installers are unsigned. From Windows' perspective every new version resets the clock and is "unknown" because the binaries have different hashes. It then has to start learning reputation all over again. New binaries are described as "potentially unwanted" rather than explicitly as malware because malware is polymorphic, exactly to evade blacklisting, so binaries that haven't accumulated any reputation yet might or might not be malicious. Windows just doesn't know yet. That's why some users report it happens and others don't.
This isn't QBitTorrent's fault exactly but they're experiencing the same problem you'd get if you tried to run a popular mailing list off a site that didn't use SPF or DKIM. You aren't signing, so, you get lumped in with all the other people who don't sign and many of them are malicious.
tl;dr It's got nothing to do with being a BitTorrent client.
> to build binary reputation you need to cooperate by using cryptography.
You need to get your software signed by Microsoft because it wants to be the arbiter of allowed software.
This is blatantly misrepresenting the issue and is technically wrong. And it disregards that this is mainly a mechanism to protect and conquer hegemony in software. This is not at all comparable to DKIM or SPF.
> tl;dr It's got nothing to do with being a BitTorrent client.
That's simply not true. It's got everything to do with it being a BitTorrent client.
> Microsoft uses specific categories and the category definitions to classify software as a PUA.
> Torrent software (Enterprise only): Software that is used to create or download torrents or other files specifically used with peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies.
Microsoft explicitly include "Torrent software" in their article for what's considered by them to be PUA.
> In a background article on what’s considered unwanted software, torrent clients are specifically mentioned, along with advertising software and cryptominers. The article suggests that it applies to “enterprise” only, but the complaints we have seen apply to other Windows versions as well.
As pointed out by TorrentFreak, the Microsoft article suggests that it only applies to the "enterprise" version of Windows however as we've seen this doesn't appear to be true. It at least explains why some experience this user hostile behaviour while others don't.
If your Windows isn't joined to an AD domain then the enterprise stuff doesn't apply. Maybe some of the users complaining about QBitTorrent are trying to install it at work, but it's much more likely to be simply because they don't sign their software. It's more or less guaranteed that not doing that will cause spurious and inconsistent security warnings.
If you check the github thread then the very first post says it was flagged as PUA but the actual error they show is clearly a malware classification. The fact that they have one naming scheme and QBitTorrent got dumped in the PUA section (because it's not malware) doesn't mean it automatically gets opted out of the reputation system. And they observe themselves that people are re-bundling qbittorrent binaries into third party re-packagings that are probably adware or malware, which in the absence of signing will confuse Windows because it can't tell the re-packaged versions apart from the upstream versions.
> If you check the github thread then the very first post says it was flagged as PUA but the actual error they show is clearly a malware classification.
Are you sure that's what you're seeing? The image in the first post of that GitHub thread shows that Defender did indeed flag the qBittorrent installer as PUA.
I think it looks like that because each program gets a single name to identify it in the Defender namespace, and that namespace seems to include a sort of general categorization. But then a program can be classified in multiple ways and blocked for multiple reasons. The people on that thread don't seem to be on corporate networks, so it seems like Defender is marking it as a "threat" for other reasons.
The whole thing is annoyingly confusing and opaque, but, I don't think the issue here is some sort of conspiracy against BitTorrent. Unsigned software is gonna trigger AV false positives, it's been that way for decades. Now they're getting AV false positives. If they started signing their code then eventually Windows would learn it's not malware. Corp networks might still opt to block it because they don't want their employees torrenting, but that's a separate issue.
Make it a Windows kernel driver for scanning process memory and I'm sure you'll have enterprise customers lining up to buy it. With or without this new legislation. A new tool for spying on their users (students, employees, etc) wont go ignored.
As an employee, you trade time and some basic human decency in exchange for money.
How much decency you trade is debatable, but I assure you, there are millions of people working in industries where losing far more decency is considered normal. Call centers, retail, food all immediately spring to mind.
Doesn't Microsoft use torrents to update their software? I thought they enabled P2P downloading to reduce their server overhead in windows 10. That's a bit hypocritical if you ask me.
Actually BITS is the old thing by now (it's been present in Windows since Windows XP), which only tries to download things in the background by using spare network bandwidth. I've never actively tested how well this "spare bandwidth detection" actually works, but on the other hand I've also never negatively noticed it, so I guess it might actually be doing its job quite well.
On the other hand there is in fact a newer (relatively speaking, given that it's a few years old by now, too) thingy specifically for Windows Update which also tries to use P2P distribution – that one is called DOS. Officially that stands for "Delivery Optimization Service", though personally I rather prefer "Denial of Service service", because when I first encountered I immediately noticed it in a negative way:
Even without any P2P features enabled, it spammed literally dozens of TCP connections to download stuff, and would thereby effectively monopolise the whole bandwidth of my internet connection. Until I figured out what was happening and disabled it (you can disable it and switch back to using BITS for downloading updates), every time my new (at the time) laptop was downloading updates, it would dramatically slow down Internet speeds for everything else in my whole home. Maybe by now that kind of issues have been fixed, but I've never tried it myself because BITS is, as I said, working perfectly fine and unobtrusively.
I have a few Windows machines at home and BITS is so good that I’ve never really noticed it in action.
By comparison, macOS App Store downloads and updates can hog bandwidth horribly. It was just my wife and I on our at the time 25mb/s line, and Netflix dropped to like 240p and was still struggling while I was doing an XCode update.
I'm sorry, not a network guy. But I was thinking of this[0], which says you can update your network through peers. And maybe it isn't bittorrent, but it looks P2P and I'm not sure that's meaningfully different.
The key difference for Windows' Delivery Optimization and traditional P2P is that it's only enabled by default on the Enterprise, Pro and Education SKUs, and then only enabled for connections on the same local network.
And adding to the fun, the one thing I wish it would cache, namely Xbox Game Pass downloads, you can't force it to cache or share on the LAN.
> Every three years, the public could submit petitions proposing new mandates for anti-piracy technology.
Why stop at websites, when OSes and browsers could do the filtering for you? And why stop at piracy, when there are all sorts of other illegal files (and "legal but harmful" content) out there?
(For the avoidance of doubt, I think that these are all terrible ideas, and I fear that once the government starts mandating blackboxes for one purpose, it will become harder to prevent laws mandating blackboxes for other purposes).
What is misinformation? Does just being wrong count, or do you have to prove malicious intent? How do you prove intent? What about things that were correct at one point in time but aren't anymore? What about things discussing or analyzing the misinformation, that by definition requires showing/spreading it?
How about you just let people be free? Some people are stupid. You're never going to stop that. But the paternalistic "just filter it out" nonsense isn't the panacea those in favor of it think it is.
Rather than acting like everyone else is an idiot, perhaps explain your points rationally. You might even convince some fence-sitters or make folks who disagree with you less sure of their positions.
But the tone of your comment is very much "it's obvious, you dumbasses" which only entrenches those whose minds you'd presumably like to change.
Disclosure: I worked in the "anti-piracy" industry for 6 years at one point. It should be renamed the Big Content Fluffing Contingent, but that position is itself revealing on my part.
It's all just anti-competitive and bullying trash-baggery from an industry stuck in the 1940s for business practices (read: Mafia accountancy) with a 1980s business mandate (read: "greed is good" when its us, but for anyone else is bad).
They dedicate huge sums to lobby whomever will do their bidding (e.g. over history, folks like Sonny Bono, Claire McCaskill, etc) and demand total, stupid fealty, because the execs in Big Content really are like d-list extras from an episode of Entourage (or the Tom Cruise character from Tropic Thunder).
They have no understanding of tech, and don't care, because they feel all of reality can be warped to their vision via contractual enforcement and litigation threats.
That's horrifying. What are we supposed to do? Can they be defeated? Do technology companies have enough lobbying power to put a stop to these never ending "anti-piracy measures"? Do they want to?
Honestly, both. In most industries, you have a lot of decent, normal folks and a handful of lunatic ball-dents flailing about. Big Content is the opposite, almost all leadership is nuttier than a freight train full of trail mix, and conduct themselves like goddamn sociopaths from an episode of CSI.
Things I recall being asked for in meetings with these firms:
1. was it possible to DDos Google (because they were the course of all piracy)? They didn't ask in so many words, but it was effectively what they asked for. Whether the realized the legality of it at the beginning of the meeting, they were disabused of that as an option, promptly.
2. How could we take down the company hat "hosted all the bittorrent"?
etc
3. Screaming fits on the phone I wouldn't expect from a teething infant let a lone a grown-ass adult.
4. Execs claiming they hired someone on staff for their cup size (into roles they had no qualification for)
5. Regular meltdowns over actual fair use content (reviews, critiques, etc), when after being told it would likely be overturned after we sent a DMCA, demanded it anyway, then screamed when it was in fact overturned on appeal, and blamed us for not somehow making subverting IP law a feature of our business.
> The metaphor has been widely ridiculed, particularly because Stevens displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, even though he was in charge of the Senate committee with the responsibility for regulating it.
Ted Stevens had a more accurate view of how the internet works than 95% of the people I talk to. What's the correction? It's not a "series of tubes" it's acshully a "series of pipes"? It's a bunch of mailboxes and parcels being delivered to them?
The attacks on Stephens for this were entirely political and unfair. He certainly was awful, but the ante-twitter mob that converged on him led by late night comedians were computer illiterates parroting what they heard.
The reason he said it that way is because he was an old corrupt coot who had net neutrality explained to him in very simple terms by lobbyists and PR flacks trying (successfully) to stop it. The reason he was taunted over it was because of a strategy come up with by the opposing PR flacks, probably gathered around the same brand of whiteboard.
> The attacks on Stephens for this were entirely political and unfair. ... [He] had net neutrality explained to him in very simple terms by lobbyists
Were the "attacks" really unfair? He wasn't doing his job properly if he was just accepting the position of one group of lobbyists without understanding the technology he was regulating or the consequences of that legislation.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "entirely political", since surely criticism of politicians should be political (as opposed to personal), but assuming you mean "entirely partisan" (i.e. based solely on his party, rather than the policy itself) I disagree. Perhaps you can find some example of a Democrat using an embarrassingly bad analogy to explain something technical, but I suspect it would be met with ridicule too, especially if the analogy were being put forward to justify a bad policy.
It wasn't just the "series of tubes" phrase itself; it was the whole nonsensical story that followed that. Wikipedia has the full quote and a recording, but to summarize: Stevens opposed network neutrality on the grounds that it could lead to network congestion, which he illustrated with an example of an email (in his words, "an Internet") sent to him which took some time to arrive. As an argument, it was barely coherent, and demonstrated a lack of understanding of the technology he was trying to make an argument about.
Because "series of tubes" and "series of pipes" are both a dumbed-down inaccuracy.
The Internet is a mesh of millions of computers that happen to be connected by wire or fiber optics or some other transmission medium. Fiber optic cables are the closest to "tubes" one could analogize, since it has a thing (light) being pushed through a cylindrical device, but it does a complete disservice to the technological advancements to dumb the whole of the Internet down to "series of tubes".
The attacks on Stephens were very justified in that as a leader of the committee, he should have been much more well-versed in the actual technologies used. He should have wanted to be more well-versed. And if lobbyists had that much pull and sway over him and what he "knows" and how he presents it, then the ridicule was even more justified.
You can try to sugar coat his ineptitude all you like with a plethora of excuses, but, in my opinion, he got what he deserved with the ridicule.
OK, I'll bite: tubes/pipes/flow is a bad analogy for packet-based network transmission.
Overall though, it doesn't make sense to argue the required corrections of this statement unless you also think a good analogy for a simple circuit is "wires are straws through which electricity pours".
There isn't really a good replacement metaphor. As far as I can think of, there's just bad metaphors.
But an important part of demonstrating you're worthy of legislating the internet is talking the talk - demonstrating you know how what the industry is and how the industry operates. A suitable replacement statement which demonstrates a command of the basic ideas would be:
"If we exceed the capacity of our internet backbones, critical services -- as well as consumer services -- will be impacted."
For me, "tubes" was less of a gaffe than referring to an email as an "Internet". The former was a bad metaphor, the latter was a failure of basic layman terminology. It means either you don't know what you're talking about, or you're a bad communicator, and either of those should be disqualifying of your post as the head of a senate committee on internet legislation.
It works pretty well in practice, so well, that citizens assemblies are often better informed than the politicians in government. Yet politicians routinely ignore their non-binding decisions/conclusions, as if there is a group of people that deserves more attention.
I encourage folks from the HN community to run! We have no (?) technologists in the senate and probably not the house either? Yet plenty from medicine and other professions…
Largely because we’ve lost social cohesion and pride, so that few are motivated towards civic good. The solution is purely cultural and doesn’t cost any money. But it requires shifting belief structures, which requires leadership and shared experiences… and that’s hard and rare to achieve.
Not really, its because you will be outspent and stomped in an election by the establishment that profits from the status quo. Being good at winning elections and being a good politician do not always go hand in hand.
Not to blow the "our government is broken" trumpet too hard, but this is exactly the way the FCC works as well. They instead bring on consultants; the FTEs are lawyers and policy makers.
> you can let Congress know that you oppose mandatory censorship filters. Fight for the Future is leading a petition opposing the harmful impacts of the legislation that will be delivered to Congress on 25th April, 2022. You can sign the petition at https://nocensorshipfilter.com and make sure Congress knows just how many people are concerned about the impacts this bill will have on free speech.
The "SMART Copyright Act" would:
- Create universal automated censorship chokepoints across the internet by requiring expensive content filters that we already know don’t work and regularly silence lawful speech
- Encourage surveillance backdoors in everything from Canva to Google Drive to internet service provider traffic, since it is written to apply at all layers of the internet
- Mandate filtering of all content online at all levels, from Big Tech platforms like Twitch and Instagram to ISPs like Verizon and Comcast—and for any other platform that lets people speak or share online
- Force these companies to compromise the safety and security of the internet with mandated use of software even if it has massive flaws, or risk being sued
> the labels, publishers and other rightsholder groups backing “stay down” filters will all tell you that Content ID routinely allows infringing materials through. That’s because it is such a blunt instrument: The matching heuristics it uses are easy to study and evade…if you are an actual pirate.
So pirates study the system, figure out how to evade it, and post with impunity. By definition, then, filters only catch the people who don’t think they’re doing something infringing — while deliberate infringers slip through.
Sadly, the first 3 of those 4 bullet points seem like something that Congress would be happy to have. The 4th doesn't seem like something that they are concerned about.
Yes, it was terrible when access to information was facilitated by professionals who had a professional belief in providing access to everything for free, and in protecting the identities of people who used them. Better now when what you read can be tracked in realtime. Or changed while you read it. Or deleted, along with all references to it.
edit: the biggest inroads against the academic publishing cartel have been when institutions and their libraries refused to pay.
As I type this my other monitor is displaying pirated content in glorious 4K resolution downloaded via sites that have been in blatant contravention of the existing laws for 19 years. Simultaneously I pay for a subscription entitles me to watch the same content in the same resolution on a TV I don't own and don't have room to install if I wanted one.
My other choices include watching it in glorious 720p that somehow manages to look worse than SD from 1995 or paying $150 to buy optical disks of a series I'd like to watch once to see it in 1080p and buy an optical disk drive for the privilege.
While not everyone's quality is quite as bad as Amazon they all work worse on computers than TVs and in addition to dealing with mediocre hardware and limiting platforms one is now expected to deal subscribe to 7 platforms to have access to most content.
Meanwhile jellyfin is basically netflix for content on your own hard drive or network which is trivial to acquire from sites that have been distributing torrent and magnet links for 19 years. If its worthwhile to pirate even while actually paying for the same content and such pirated content is readily available from lawbreakers you can't shut down despite obviously breaking existing laws maybe making random websites implement expensive screening isn't a useful thing.
Now bob's forum has to buy tens of thousands of dollars of tech to keep people from theoretically sharing links to <insert series> while every Tom Dick and Harry are torrenting from the usual suspects.
To end most piracy make it like radio where services pay for a standard license for content and every streaming service has every piece of content while competing on interface. Then I can subscribe to a service that works well on Firefox on Linux and you can use a service that only works on your shitty ad laden tv if you please.
> For example, in December 2020, Tillis introduced legislation to make it a felony to run a pirate streaming site. Just two weeks later, the proposal was attached to the massive 5,600-page, $900 billion COVID spending bill. As a result, Tillis' bill became law before most lawmakers—to say nothing of the general public—had time to read it.
This kind of doing it, as an intentionally deceptive practice, should itself be declared felony (or whatever a felony against the whole country and the whole legislative system as a victim is called).
Once again, politicians are trying to fix something that isn't broken and are going to make a bigger mess than whatever it is they're trying to change.
This whole thing reminds me of Alice in Wonderland.
> "For example, in December 2020, Tillis introduced legislation to make it a felony to run a pirate streaming site. Just two weeks later, the proposal was attached to the massive 5,600-page, $900 billion COVID spending bill. As a result, Tillis' bill became law before most lawmakers—to say nothing of the general public—had time to read it."
Is it just me, or democracies have been flirting quite often with authoritarianism? Canada, for example, has been taking some worrisome measures recently. Now US is following suit, although in a much smaller scale.
Democracy- straight democracy- is a terrible way to avoid authoritarianism. So long as a majority agrees, anything goes.
Un-democratic checks are required in any such system to prevent a tyranny of the majority. Unelected judges, co-equal to but with different powers than a legislative or executive body, are one such example.
There's not a perfect system yet, because at the end of the day, it's always just a bunch of imperfect people in a shared imaginary game. I'm not holding my breath for technology to save us either, because I don't imagine any AI will do a better job- it'll have to be trained on human interpretations of that imaginary playground, after all.
This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard, from a competition standpoint, from a censorship standpoint, from an innovation standpoint, just... oof.
Senators are also debating whether the US should have a digital currency. I don't have faith that they have the technical literacy to understand the nuances of that conversation much less the effects this would have.
I’ve seen many of the young people stepping in… they can easily be worse. They’re typically coming up in a WAY more polarized world where identity politics are the only path forward… and they are often just as clueless about the world. New doesn’t mean better.
>I’ve seen many of the young people stepping in… they can easily be worse.
Madison Cawthorn is probably the best example of this. Elected to Congress at 25 years old. Education: One semester at a Bible College where he received "mostly D's" and then dropped out. Work experience: One and a half years as a part time staff assistant to Mark Meadows. He's now in a position of authoring laws that bind all of us while receiving a $174K annual salary plus incredible benefits at taxpayer expense.
That's easy to fix - young but also with experience. I don't know why we don't have some sane speed bumps for people that have political aspiration. Don't let judges be appointed if the bar deems them "unfit." Don't let politicians run for senator if they've never worked for government a day in their life, or have criminal records.
This sends shivers down my spine. Will it always be like this? Which will be the generation that will be computer literate? In ten years? A hundred? A millenia? Sigh.
> Pardon the ignorance, but why is Ars Technica using a Moldova-based proxy for page 2. Is anyone else seeing "netblogpro.com" in the URL for page 2.
Hi. Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean by “Page 2”? The article is a single, continuous page in my browser (Firefox mobile for iOS).
I would guess you are accessing the "desktop" version of the website. If you try omitting a User-Agent string (script provided above) you should be able get the two page version, which I assume is the "mobile" version.
The problem is that piracy isn't a technology problem, it's a people problem.
"Pirate" technology doesn't exist. Somewhere, somehow, you need to show information. At that point, anything you've used to convey that information can also make a copy of that information or allow access to someone who shouldn't have it.
Piracy is people using legitimate means to perform actions in a manner deemed unacceptable.
> anything you've used to convey that information can also make a copy of that information
That's true of a general purpose computing device, but sadly those are becoming rarer and rarer, at least as a percentage of all devices.
(I suppose in some technical sense the device conveying the information is necessarily making a copy of the information at least temporarily, but there is no need for that copy to be persistent or retrievable at the request of the user.)
As corporations are considered people, there is not, in fact, literally zero citizens asking for this. Very rich citizens capable of padding pockets of congresspeople are asking for this. These same very rich citizens would prefer not to address housing.
So yeah, I absolutely understand why congress is tackling this. It's more profitable to do so.
Allowing corporations to continue to be viewed as people is the worst thing for the USA. That needs to be challenged again and again until it is brought down.
What they work on is reflective of their real priorities in office. It's never you and me, its them and their friends. All we are there to do is vote the party line and allow the profitable status quo to continue unquestioned.
there is a meta-problem that leads to this situation:
" It's not clear when—or even if—this legislation will come up for a vote. Traditionally, a bill like this would be considered by a Senate committee before making its way to the Senate floor. But as Congress has become more dysfunctional"
"it has become increasingly common for bills like this to get attached at the last minute to gargantuan "must-pass" spending bills."
This has to come to an end, no more dealing from the bottom of the deck.
How about we block senators from making inside trades first, and also subject them to the same healthcare plans we have access to, and they have to pay the maximal tax rate they put on anyone? Seems like a bit higher impact.
The Senate was broken with the 17th amendment. As described originally, senators were meant to represent their state government and take a longer view than the House. The House was meant to represent the people and their whims.
It's disgusting. It should either be neutered like the House of Lords, or keep its position but have its members directly elected. Top 100 candidates get in.
The citizens of overly influential states with tiny populations would easily be placated by the possibility of electing at least one or two actual neo-nazis to the Senate; you could definitely pass it. We would have to accept that both Kim and Kanye would probably be Senators.
If we're mandating that technology should enforce laws automatically, how about anti-monopoly-power technology? All mergers and acquisitions of companies above some size are automatically blocked, and they have to make a compelling case in a court of law to have the block lifted. It has to be renewed every three years, or the company is automatically broken up again.
Oh, and a simple similarity search versus the entire web, to mark patents as invalid due to prior art or obviousness.
DRM could be presumed to infringe upon fair use and other legal rights of ownership, and be automatically declared illegal (no, I don't mean that breaking it would become legal, though it would. I mean the DRM itself would be illegal, and the manufacturer would be by law forced to remove it), unless the manufacturer convincingly argues it is necessary (and re-argues it every three years).
And naturally, use of copyrighted material would be presumed fair-use, and just like wrongful takedowns don't get punished currently, if some material were proven to be infringing in a very non-automatic legal proceeding, the only consequence would be taking the material down - no other fines or punishment of any kind.