Now one could very well argue that DeCSS has rendered the technology ineffective. Would be interesting to know what the court thinks of such an argument.

If so, people would never play blackjack or roulette as both games are designed to give the house a slight advantage of about 2%. This means that given enough hands, you always lose about 2% of your bet, leaving you with about 98% of the amount you started with.

However many players do not play that many hands. They play 5, 10, maybe 100 hands. In that situation the spread is much greater - and that's what punters hope for. To get one of those hands that gives them a big win, before they get all the hands that give them losses. That is also the exact reason why people do sometimes win big in a casino, and the casino still makes money.

Then there is the question, what is considered "hacking of a digital lock"?

After installing DeCSS on my Linux PC well over a decade ago when I still had a working DVD player, I didn't notice the lock. Was it really still there? Is it really a lock? To view a .jpg image I also need some special software to decode it for me and display it on my screen.

Even after decoding CSS, you still have to decode the MPEG to be able to send it to a screen for display. Most players do both steps in one go, without a single bit of user interaction. It is as if there is no locking going on. Some players will even conveniently ignore "unskippable" locks on promos and so that are sometimes put at the start of a DVD.

Now imagine you got some DVD or BluRay, and want to make a copy of it. You go online, and surely in moments you find a piece of software that can do just that for you, fully transparent. Are you still, legally speaking, in the process of "hacking a digital lock"? Many users may not even know it's encrypted - they pop it in their BluRay player, and it just plays. They put it in their computer, and their ripping tool just rips it as someone else already figured out how to read the content. To the user it is exactly the same as if this encryption never was there in the first place.

Close, but not correct: "it's not 'theft' if he owned the copyright on those articles, or has a license to distribute them".

Having written something yourself doesn't mean you own the copyright on it: e.g. if a journalist writes an article for the newspaper he works for, the copyright usually goes to the newspaper. Another situation where you may not distribute your own stuff, is if you write something, and then license it on exclusive basis to someone. Though in this case it may actually be breach of contract rather than breach of copyright.

In both cases, however, the author should be very well aware of what he may or may not do with his own work.

The part they infringed upon is easy to understand (downloading and redistribution of stuff they find online, exactly what many lawsuits are fought over, and specifically what they always tell the public is not OK to do), so misunderstanding the matter is indeed not likely. So it's likely the first: they don't give a damn.

So those sanctions against Russia target the wrong products!

The purpose of sanctions is to hurt the government rather than the common people. I don't think there are many people that depend on typewriters nowadays, so banning the export of typewriters and their supplies to Russia would paralyse the government while leaving the common people alone. As an added bonus, it'd have a much smaller effect on European farmers than the current boycotts have.

This is not going against free trade, at all. This is free trade: part of free trade is that the seller is allowed to choose who to sell to. Free trade agreements are agreements between governments, to not put any restrictions on the trade by businesses.

When buying on a streaming service, the copyright holder has a say on who/where this service may sell a license to. After all, if you play a show on Netflix, they effectively sell you a license to watch it, and the rights holder has the right to put restrictions on its sale to Netflix - and if Netflix breaks that contract, to stop selling to Netflix altogether.

The Australian or US governments do not put any additional restrictions on the sale. Neither government levies import/export taxes on the trade. Netflix is fully allowed to sell in Australia under Australian law - it's just that their content suppliers don't let them.

If Netflix is not doing it, they risk losing all their content - and with it their whole business. It's not foolish from their pov, it's just what they have to do to keep their business alive.

That is per rights holder. If you've downloaded 10 works from one rights holder, they can get no more than $5k. However if you've downloaded 10 works from 10 different rights holders, you may end up on the receiving end of ten law suits, with total potential fine of $50k. Both amounts not counting legal costs.

You will only get warning letters if you're downloading copyrighted stuff that:

1. the rights holder is monitoring,
2. from a service the rights holder is monitoring,
3. if they can identify you somehow.

Using encryption and built-in blacklists (of known monitoring sites) will help a lot.

So the race is on for torrent client developers to make it even harder to track who's downloading what.

Easy enough to make this mistake, and not realising it.

Develop something that needs Amazon S3 access, and put it on GitHub. It's easy enough to forget about removing your keys before doing a git commit, putting them on GitHub.

Next time maybe you do remember to do so; possibly not realising your first mistake. The keys remain available in previous versions of your software, and you'll never see this old version until you happen to do a rollback to exactly that revision. Rollbacks don't happen too often; to that specific version even less; and then you still have to look at the bit of code that has the keys and realise it's coming from the rollback.

Others that may download your updated (keyless) version also won't notice your keys are on GitHub, after all they're hidden in an older version, which you never see unless specifically requesting it.

What makes matters worse: with this bot it may take just minutes for your keys to be copied and put in use. TFS mentions just five minutes for that to have happened. Maybe it's specifically looking for new commits?

Anyway, easy enough to make such a mistake and not realising it. As such there are many AWS secret keys out there, that are still valid (owner doesn't realise they're out there so won't revoke them), and that are just waiting to be found and put into use.

Agreed. It's Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his WMDs all over again.

Not a shred of verifiable evidence given - we just have to believe what those in power say - and accept more death and destruction.

That hackers defeated the security, doesn't necessarily mean it was easy to do so.

As I understand it, it was related to social engineering - they managed to get their hands on actual user accounts and passwords, so could log in tot the network the intended way. There is nothing that stops a hacker the moment they have valid credentials, credentials that are meant to give access.

Any network is by nature vulnerable as it is designed to allow people to get in. Without that option, the network would be useless for any practical use. The trick is to make sure only give access to people you want to be able to access it, and find a way to make it impossible for others to impersonate those people. And that's hard - really hard.

They'd kill themselves - the current slow but steady rise in the RMB is hard enough on their central bank already (as it means a steady decline in the value of their main asset: their massive USD holdings).

Registration is not necessary, but it does make things a lot easier if you indeed have to defend a copyright.