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Comment Re:Not likely in modern communications (Score 1) 109

Due to the amount of signal processing that goes on with modern television, its highly unlikely. MPEG compression probably stops it at the source since its instantly fuddled with and massive amounts of the data they use is lost right then and there.

It might, but you can't really be too sure that there isn't enough data surviving; MPEG compression was never designed as a feature for ensuring privacy, and there will still be human-imperceptible recorded noise.... or, maybe intentional "canary" noise signals / watermarks transmitted by the feds to help aid them in this endeavor. A video camera with a GPS and a secret way of "watermarking" the output files with analog patterns incorporating the location and/or IP address data would also be a great aide, and many modern cameras already have the GPS capability too.

Imperceptible but recorded visual noise from the background lighting in the room and orientation of cosmic background radiation noise alone may be revealing.

Comment Re:John Smith? (Score 1) 148

You must claim _under penalty of perjury_ that some work is infringed and you are or represent the copyright holder.

False. Only the second part is required to be under penalty of perjury: the part where you claim that you are or represent the copyright holder of the work alleged to be infringed; the allegation of infringement is not under a penalty of perjury, even if it's obviously bogus.

If you do commit this perjury; it is not going to be provable by a third party, unless the copyright work you are alleging to be infringed is someone else's work, and the third party can prove you don't represent the copyright holder.

If the DMCA letter writer slaps on an allegation of infringement of their unpublished title Xyz; nobody can prove it's perjury, at least, without the admission of the person who sent the letter.

See the text from the act:

A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Comment ItsATrap (Score 3, Insightful) 115

With 90% confidence; I estimate this is a trap. Police can defeat encryption, no problem, usually by coercing the defendant. The reports by the police themselves are geared at getting tougher anti-privacy/anti-encryption legislation and giving bad guys a false sense of security. The feds could likely have broken the encryption, no problem, the issue at hand just wasn't important enough to reveal the capability. Pretending not to have the capability gives politicians better ammunition when improving state powers for legal surveillance, and for forcing the hands of software providers to secretly include specified backdoor tech.

when police said that they’d been stymied by crypto in four cases—and that was the first year they’d ever reported encryption preventing them from successfully surveilling a criminal suspect. Before then, the number stood at zero.

Comment Re:John Smith? (Score 1) 148

It does seem to make much more sense for OSPs to charge a reasonable civil compliance fee per DMCA action, in order to receive and process each letter through their legal staff, commesurable with the costs of opening, reading, interpreting, and acting upon the DMCA letter. The safe harbor IS suposed to provide additional protections for the OSP from liability for what their users do without their knowledge; policing distribution of their work is the copyright holder's cost.

It wouldn't be fair for them to be able to totally outsource all their copyright enforcement costs to society; the rights holder needs to pay something from their compensation for producing the work, in order to effectively enforce their rights.

Unless you caught evidence of them discussing how they're going to cause people pain by generating fraudulent letters; you probably don't have good enough evidence.

They will probably always claim the letter was a mistake or error and based on a good faith belief.

Also, almost everyone has copyright in some work. Under the Berne convention and US law, everything you write is automatically copyrighted at the moment of its registration, and you don't have to formally register your copyright, in order to successfully take actions against a severe enough infringement.

There is no requirement to register your copyright, in order to send a DMCA letter, either

Perjury will essentially be impossible to prove, so, they almost might as well have not included the penalty.

Comment Re:Over-reacting is required (Score 2) 148

They will respond to DMCA's by sending it to you, but you must respond or they will disconnect your machine. This isn't any different if your IP address is found to be serving malware or sending out spam.

It is neither required, nor good for an ISP to take any actions based on a letter purporting to be a DMCA takedown request. The end user should always be the recipient of the letter. If the ISP handles it in any way: this should be solely to forward the letter to the proper recipient.

With regards to copyrights, a court order is and should be required to require disconnection of any telecommunication or IP networking services, etc.

As long as the ISP is a conduit and not hosting the content, then the Section 512(a) safe harbor applies.

The DMCA’s exemption of providers of routing and transmission services (a.k.a. “mere conduits”) from the notice-and-takedown requirements in 512(c) is entirely consistent with the fact that such providers do not store or control user content.47 Nevertheless, the exemption has

operated in the context of P2P file-sharing to negate the scalable enforcement mechanism that notice and takedown provides. Inasmuch as P2P file-sharing shifts the locus of infringing activity from the storage function to the transmission function, it places such activity beyond the knowledge and control of the OSP and thus beyond the reach of the enforcement scheme created by 512(c).48

As a consequence of the exemption of conduit providers from the notice and takedown requirements of 512(c), the expedited subpoena provision in the DMCA— 512(h)—has also been held inapplicable to these providers.49 This is because the application for a subpoena under 512(h) must include a copy of the notice described in 512(c)(3)(A).

Comment Re:Over-reacting is required (Score 1) 148

Pick a nation on the USTR's shitlist and host your stuff there.

There is another option... host yourself. This takes care of DMCA requests against the hosting provider.

As for DNS...... DNS registrars and ISPs do not host the content, and there is no DMCA letters they are required to honor in the first place, a court order should be required, so shop around for providers until you find one that tells you they won't turn off your domain or interfere with the internet connectivity to your IP addresses based on a DMCA letter ("legitimate" or not).

Comment Re: How about a sign (Score 1) 579

If you do that in any city I live in I will take a baseball bat to it.

You'll have missed the fine print that says "Do not take a baseball bat to city equipment", together with the baseball bat detection cam which will scan the barcode on the bat and facial recognition software to identify the bat swinger from the National ID picture database and, immediately deduct $50,000 from the checking account of each whoever bought the bat and whoever possesses the bat, and freeze all other assets pending confirmation of adequate payment, to help defray the cost of a new camera system.

Seriously.... I'm joking.

Comment Re:Blaming Google (Score 1) 239

He does question why there's no apparent right to appeal. It would certainly seem reasonable to allow the person responsible for an article to highlight why it is still relevant or not outdated since often they will have better knowledge of the subject area than a paralegal.

This is for the courts to decide. And I suspect Google will take the position that it's suppressed by default, since that's the only safe action for their part (They were ordered by a judge to do so).

Comment Re:How about a sign (Score 1) 579

Obviously... i'm trying to mock the dump red light camera stuff, where if your car happens to be sitting 2" over the line at the moment that the light turns red, or your car hydroplanes and skids 3" past in the pouring rain, due to an unexpected puddle in front of the intersection, you get a $200 ticket in the mail.

Yes comrade. Where do I show you my papers?

The shredder's 5 feet down the hall, and on your left, toss them in there.

Then on your right side, pick up a random stack (I don't care which).

Comment This comes to less than 7 Megabits (Score 0) 349

7 Megabits is not much on a 50 Megabit connection; it's less than 15%. I say... perhaps the more bugs like this in popular consumer devices, the better. Better still if the 'bug' can't be blocked by the SPs without breaking the device.

It will help accelerate the rate at which residential ISPs have to start getting rid of stupid data caps ---- and start delivering more of the promised capacity.

Tech writer Tyler Hayes had never come close to hitting the 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap imposed by Cox Cable — until suddenly he was blowing right through it, eating up almost 80 GB a day.

Comment Re:Political/Moral (Score 1) 305

No, it's basic human nature to kick the can down the road, nothing exclusive to politicians.

You're wrong. When did I write that it was exclusive to politicians?

You're writing about a different phenomena, however. You are referring to delaying investments in transitions that will be required AND procrastination. That is fundamentally different than committing resources into deception and delay.

Humans due also have a tendency to procrastinate, as you mentioned. This is separate from kicking the can down the road though.

Same for fossil fuels, "conventional sources" have already peaked and the cost of energy is just going to go up

Fossil fuels are still in ample supply and Nuclear technology is reliable, available, and an excellent replacement --- there is essentially no possibility of an alternative capable of being viable. Price increases with fossils are mainly due to inflation: US dollars are losing value, therefore it takes more of them to buy energy and other valuable commodities, we are not at a limitation of supply of fossils in the ground ---- limited supply during and after extraction due to artificial restriction: regulations pertaining to extraction and construction of new infrastructure, and limited transportation and processing infrastructure in the first place. Essentially... often overly-aggressive environmental regulations and excessive unnecessary government interference are to blame for the other part of the price issues with fossil fuels.

We are not running out of this stuff. Our government thinks it "knows best" and blockades the construction of new infrastructure needed to adequately deliver the supply, which is why prices are going up.

Nuclear technology can be improved further with more research --- which is not procrastination, research takes time, AND the sustained concerted efforts of limited size groups of people.

If IPv6 adoption was like the government's treatment of the economy: (1) IPv4 would already have run out several years ago.
(2) Published statistics from the official IP address registries would still show that 50% of the IP address space has not been allocated yet.
(3) The registries, nervous about market sentiment would have masked the fact that IP addresses ran out. However, all allocation requests would either take many months to process, or get kicked back, or rejected based on some technicality, SO the frontline story would be --- we have IP addresses (in theory), you just don't qualify for them. And at worse start issuing IP address allocations that don't exist such as 258.0.0.1/16, or start issuing the same groups of addresses to multiple entities; by searching for IPs that didn't seem to be actively in use at the moment.
(4) The entire Cable/DSL industry would have already moved to Carrier grade NAT and LISP
(5) The IP address registries would have announced a new program, under which they will solve the IP shortage and promote internet growth, by finding random registrants and forcibly revoking/taking back 20% of their IP space a year, especially /8 holders, and randomly handing it out to newcomers.
(6) They would have provided increased fees and costs for holding IP addresses per IP, and offered substantial $$$ incentives for returning IP addresses

Comment Re:Legal Precedent? (Score 1) 495

If Microsoft abuses this, judges won't be so inclined to grant such requests in the future.

What I'm looking for is a procedure where the public can alert the judge, that Microsoft has indeed abused this by causing serious damage to the public: in terms of disruption of internet infrastructure used by millions of Dynamic DNS users.

Comment Re:Political/Moral (Score 3, Interesting) 305

And it will always be better politically for the government to be just as surprised as everyone else when things go belly up

No.... politically speaking: it's in the government's best interest to take any action possible to delay the next downcycle in the economy, kick the can down the road JUST A LITTLE BIT ---- just a few more years, so the collapse happens when the next guy is elected (preferably a candidate from the opposite party: so they will get blamed), even if doing so INCREASES the ultimate amount of damage, strife, and pain, the people will feel during the next down cycle. Politics actually favors increasing the total amount of pain, as long as the politicians are able to cowardly delay it, so it doesn't happen during their term, therefore, they escape the voter outrage over the issue.

This is why there will always be enough votes to raise the debt ceiling and keep the US government spending.

Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?

If mere knowledge of economic facts would be at risk of causing a disaster, then the disaster is practically already a certainty, because that truth is inevitably going to eventually be discovered.

The sooner a bubble or distortion is discovered, the sooner the correction begins, the smaller correction begins, and the quicker the recovery: assuming there is no government interference, which almost always tends to create new distortions and slow down the recovery.

It is natural that the economy operates in periodic cycles of prosperity and recision. Government-distortion tends to attempt to distort the cycles by delaying recessions, and ultimately --- increasing their magnitude.

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