[suggests] relocate[ing] GitHub (servers, company and all) outside the US to avoid those DMCA take downs? ... Next question: what country would be most friendly to Open Source yet resisting the insatiable hunger of the copyright trolls?

How about Antigua?

Antigua recently won a suit against the US over its ban on online gambling (a major source of foreign exchange income for the country). As a penalty, the WTO awarded Antigua the right to freely distribute "American [copyrighted] DVDs, CDs and games and software", up to $21 Million per year.

GitHub doesn't charge for the software it distributes (getting revenue mainly from things lik companies storing their OWN, PRIVATE repositories on their servers). So I'd think a company like GitHub, incorporated, owned, and hosted there, would consume $0 of the $21MM/year allocation, and could freely and legally distribute copyrighted material with US copyright holders - at least until the year after the US congress finally repeals the anti-online-gambing laws.

Oh that DMCA was issued by Cyveillance ...

According to an Ausdroid "excllusive", a "Qualcomm representative" has already:
  - repudiated and retracted the takedown notices,
  - promised they will pursure any issues directly with the project maintainers.
  - appologized to the project maintainers.

Unfortunately, this was in a communication with Ausdroid and apparently not in a form that would let GitHub over-the-holiday staff put the repositories back up immediately.

That's a pity. Many of the contributors to open source projects are volunterers with day jobs. This makes three-day weekend holidays "prime time" for a hackfest. Taking down the repositories over such a period is a serious hit to productivity. If they'd done it early in the week, rather than just before a three-day holiday, their error could have been corrected in hours rather than (exceptionally important) days.

(Fortunately, since the revision control system is git, where each checkout is a full copy of the repository, the hit is mainly impeeding inter-member cooperation, rather than bringing all work on the projects to a screeching halt.)

I hope both Qualcom and some of the affected projects bring actions against Cyveillance, if only to make them leery of issuing anti-FOSS takedowns at such sensitive times.

The DMCA does not allow you to refuse to process notices due to unpaid processing fees.

Does it allow somethig like this?

1) OSP charges the takedown filer a $1,000 (or $10,000, or whatever) fee to process a notice.

2) The fee is waived if the alleged infringer fails to file a counter-notice.

3) If a counter-noitce, is filed, the takedown filer is notified, perhaps with a check-box list of the alleged imfringer's claim(s), but DOES NOT RECIEVE THE CONTACT INFORMATION until the fee is paid (or satisfactory payment arrangements made).

4) The fee (or the bulk of it, or a pro-rata share) is waived if the takedown filer notifies the OSP, in a timely fashion, that it does not wish to pursue the takedown at this time and the OSP may put-back the material immediately, rather than waiting for the statutory time.

Assuming the OSP may legally withhold the counter-filing contact information pending payment without jepoardizing the safe harbor, this could be implemented entirely by an OSP. A troll operation would have to pay up to get the information needed to pursue its extortion. The OSP would not be stiffed for its fees if the trolls want to move on to the next step (and could still pursure collection even if the trolls DON'T pay up after the counter-notice is filed).

It would have the advantage (over "losing filers get a big financial hit" approaches) that it does not create a financial incentive for copyright claimants to pursure an iffy or bogus suit in order to avoid a large fine or damages payment.

How hard would it be to send signals from the power plant or substations across different parts of the grid creating a signature that could be detected in recorded hums?

It wouldn't have to come from the substations. It could be injected at any power feed (though the higher-capacity feed the better). B-b

It might also drive the power company nuts - especially if it was close to the line frequency, because that would look like a large and rapidly varying power factor.

I've been trying to think of how there could possibly be enough variation to fingerprint someone based on the hum caused by that 60Hz frequency noise. I've been in transmission control centers where they monitor, regulate and occasionally wet themselves over frequency shifts, and I've seen that the amount of variation needed to cause sheer panic is shockingly low..and it rarely ever happens for even a second. And those tolerances have been the same everywhere I've gone.

The frequency is synchronized across the whole grid.

The phase shifts, due to several factors (which way the power is going on the lines (treated as signal transmission lines), power factors of loads switching on and off, etc.) Much of this shiftig is local (motors on your transformer starting and stopping, etc.). Some of it is regional (for starters: the average across a distribution block of all those motor loads switching).

The combining of the varioius contributibutions to the phase offset is essentially linear. So if you have a recording system that is including power line hum and sufficiently stable on a tens-of-seconds time scale, the phase can be extracted and correlated with a recording from a nearby part of the grid. The closer they are (in electrical term), the stronger the correlation.

I could imagine the NSA recording this phase signal from one or several places in each city or rural region and archiving it, then using a cross-correlation against such a signal extracted from a recording. The amount of data to be stored and processed would be pretty small and a hit would stand out like a beacon.

First run against a national average (or several regional signals) to get enough of a hit to identiy the time of the recording. Then run against that time segment of the whole database of local samples to get a rough location. (With enough samples this should get you down to a "which cell tower" level.) Then see what suitable recording studios are in the identified region and look for other clues.

Possible countermeasures:
  - Notch-filter out the power line frequency and its first few harmonics.
  - Bandpass filter out the low part of the audio.
  - Add in a small amount of hum of your own, with a pseudo-random phase jitter (and still more phase jitter on the harmonics). Be sure to use a set of pseudo-random generator that they won't be able to identify and cancel out - like by using several of them to continuously adjust the amount of phase noise added and such.
  - Jitter the sampling rate.
  - Re-record it with deliberate injection of a larger amount of real power line hum at a different time and location, before releasing the recording. B-)

Identifying edits in a recording consists of lookinf for a gross jump in the phase of the hum. Identifying the recording location from the pattern of small phase shifts (and other artifacts) in the power line signal is a much signal to find in a much larger amount of noise. I'm not convinced yet how doable it is. But with the above description of what I think they're doing, I expect a bunch of slashdotters will soon be playing with their audio cards, hacking up code to analyze recordings. B-)

*Regulator hand Comcast a grimy, well used jar of Vaseline®* Them Tax Payers tend to clench up when you shove it in, so dab some of that on your rod and it's like riding a slip n' slide

But so far, the only criminals using encryption are the smart ones who take precautions not to even become suspects in the first place. And just because the authorities were stymied by encryption, or that the suspects used encryption does not mean that the suspects were actually guilty of any crime. Personally, I'd much rather a few crimes go unsolved than live in an authoritarian Police State.

Seems they could have simply created some "molds" with a some 2x4s and a couple plywood sheets and just dumped the cement formula in to make the individual walls instead of this elaborate process. How has the process of making a cement slab been improved by using an expensive industrial grade 3D printer? Smells like "we did it because we could" rather than "doing it because you should".

Actually, they were Jews and considering they wrote about their GENOCIDE OF THE CANAANITES in their little book and are gleefully enacting Genocide of Canaan 2.0, plenty have died. Now be sure to show your sorrow for the suffering of the Jews at the Holocaust museum near you.

Ever consider the fact that Bigfoot, werewolves and ghosts have the right NOT to be surveiled? I for one have encountered ghosts and aliens on a pretty regular basis, but unlike some people around here *cough*glassholes*cough* I respect their right to privacy and to not be recorded by my camera phone and posted to youtube.

It's getting to the point where the US Citizenry will need to decide to accept to be held captive to the interests of a Corporate Oligarchy or go into active revolt against a Government that no longer sees them as actual citizens, but as the chattel of the "true citizens", the Corporate Personhoods of the Fortune 500. ObamaCare was the first step in forcing every American to buy goods and services from Corporate Cartels. Having Corporate Lobbyists oversee and regulate the industries meant to protect the American public from the Corporations is only a logical step on the way to a truly Captive Audience envisioned for the Future American Free Market Surveillance State.

Point out anything counter to the politically-correct paradigm on global warming. B-)

Religious zealots are more than happy to abuse the moderation system to suppress discussion threads when they begin to question any aspect of their religion.

Turning it on its side and putting it into the Google Cardboard (or similar) stereoptic holder gives you about a 1440x1250 display per eye. Looks right to me.

Now if (as I suggested in the Cardboard item) they installed two cameras on the phone back, separated by about eye distance, you'd have a camera that could take and display stereoptic pictures and/or do augmented reality without losing the scene's depth.

This is a great use for the (otherwise excessively) high-resolution cellphone displays such as Apple's "retina".

Also: This is a strong argument for putting TWO cameras on a cellphone's backside - separated by about the typical distance between a person's eyes and equally speced relative to the centerline of the phone. That would enable the formation of a stereoscopic augmented reality display showing the correct image of the background. (It would also enable taking stereoptic pictures.)

Even some of the more extreme estimates of the amount of temperature change expected just mean, to a farmer, that his great grandsons might do better if they switch to crops that are currently grown a couple hundred miles closer to the equator or a couple hundred feet lower on the hillside. (Something like they did during the Medieval Warm Period, when Iceland had lots more cropland and grapes were grown on a large scale in Britain.)

So even if you convince them that global warming is real, don't expect anything but a cheer from the farmers of Sweden.

There are a lot of steps between "It looks like the average temperature might go up four or five degrees C in the next couple centuries." to "We must take drastic action RIGHT NOW to AVERT DISASTER!". Like figuring out whether such a temperature rise is really a threat - or might even be a boon. We're still working on "Is it real?"

Except, of course, for politicians, who can use that last claim to increase their power, or (like Al Gore) make billions off a "carbon credit exchange" built on anti-global-warming legislation.