There is a lot of copyright management companies out there that do the work for the *AA. There is no provided way to validate a specific takedown. Say you run a site like MegaUpload and you receive a takedown notice from a gmail account. Could you really beleive in the email as being done in good faith? What about all those companies that don't even take the time to publish SPF records.

As reported by MegaUpload, 70% of fortune 500 companies had accounts linked to them. How would you sort out what is infringing from what isn't? It could happen that works in progress and final works get distributed internally that way.

What about remixes?

As for just having a bunch of regexes, Hotfile lawsuits against Warner show how it can fail (see: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/hotfile-turns-tables-accusing-warner-brothers-of-dmca-abuse.ars )

There is also the the matter of volume. In the indictment, it says that Carpathia (a hosting provided) provided 25PB to megaupload. This would be a lot of files to verify. And even then you could make a lot of false positive and a lot of false negative. It is not specified how much data capacity was at Leaseweb, however the amount of servers was similar.

As for deleting the files, the DMCA doesn't require that. It says:

"(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;"

Removing the link in question would disable access to the material, which is what MegaUpload did.

I usually open up the cover, power it the drive up so it spins (so a platter is exposed), use a dremel with a grinder attachment to damage the first layer. This will already make it unrecoverable.

After that I take the bunch of platters and bring it to a scrap metal dealer so it can be recycled / smelted.

Instead of spending so much money on the hopeless white elephant of online voting, they should just give out 50 to 100$ cash at the polling station to everyone who actually votes.

Even an online voting system where the whole software stack is open source, hardware is standard commodity hardware, with feeds of the votes cast provided live to all political parties, and with the software stack and hardware specs provided to the parties and independent observers, it would still be impossible to protect against the gazillions of issues on the voter's computers that could still affect the results.

Even though it looks like one issue, these issues reach deep into the other more mainstream issues.
Just in Quebec, faster generics can save at least 3 billion$ (that's a pessimistic estimate) on the cost of providing the publicly funded drug plan. That's all money that can be reused elsewhere.

It will be our own SSL CA, initially the launch will only support OpenVPN, but other technologies might be added later if we're confident that they are secure.

I've started the canvassing to be the candidate in Laval - Les Îles
I figured that I can't just wait for someone else to do it for me.

I've just opened a twitter account if anyone cares to follow me.
http://twitter.com/stephanebakhos

It's even worse then you think. The CRTC, as part of the way it is organized, is actually headed by ex-directors of the telecommunications companies.

When a company wants to add more charges to fleece customers it usually follow this flow:
1. Apply to CRTC
2. CRTC posts public comments
3. CRTC ignores 99% of the against comments and grants between 30 and 50% of the request
4. Provider appeals
5. CRTC restarts the process, media by then has started ignoring the issue at point 1
6. CRTC grants the appeal, keeping some elements "for further review"
7. CRTC accepts the last elements after the "further review", thus the telcos get their pie and CRTC saves face.

As for choice, I'm living in suburbia of Montreal. 2nd biggest city of Canada.
We have 2 providers for the infrastructure: Bell and Videotron.
Videotron started usage based billing years ago, they also monitor connections and send you bitchy emails if you dare use P2P or BitTorrent. They are also owned by Quebecor, a major media conglomerate.

The only 2 "competitors" I know of are SkyNetCanada (800$ setup fee + 100$/month for 3mbps) and FibreNoire, which would be happy to get service to my house if I pay the build fee (10000$+).

The market is producing an absolute pants load of entertainment every week.

This is what is coming for the rest of this month (20 days)
24 movies (only cinema, not DVD releases)
33 CD
8 X360 games

How are we supposed to sort through all of this with the very limited demos available?
Should we just remain apathetic to it all?

Many of us also took a lot of guesses at various products and got burnt big time.

If you want to get politically active, a political party is needed.

Pirate Party of Canada
www.pirateparty.ca

In Quebec while the contract is with the retailer, you can sue the both the retailer and the manufacturer for problems and liabilities.

In fact, stopping games from working with an older version of the firmware could also be used in court, as these are all conditions that are added after the initial contract (the sale). Furthermore, the consumer rights law in Quebec are very clear on the point that no contract can revoke any rights granted by the law.

The name "Pirate" is a great attention grabber, and by utilising it, we hope
to change the connotations of the name, and help show that people considered
"pirates", roughly 85% of the Canadian population, are not criminals, and
are as legitimate as we are.