The source article didn't link to a login screen when I wrote this. Here's the right URL:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html

You make good points about the technical faults with the proposed measures. Another thing to keep in mind is that it won't be possible for the US gov't to meaningfully enforce this. They may be able to get the big providers- such as Skype and Microsoft's BitLocker (assuming there aren't already backdoors in that)- to comply, but there is plenty of FOSS encryption software which will easily be able to get around any attempt at regulation of this magnitude. The feds try to get the developer to rewrite the app? Cool. He leaves the country, or transfers control of the project to someone overseas. And how do they deal with the fact that the source code for the unbackdoored version is publicly available? Try to erase it from the Internet? Yeah, that's not going to work.

On the other hand... perhaps it's like the War on Piracy. You can never fully stop people from sharing files online, but you can make it too difficult and tedious for the average person to bother with, and thusly prevent it from becoming mainstream. Maybe they only want to target the big providers that service the majority of users, users who are computer-illiterate and neither know nor care about encryption. Us basement-dwelling geeks will still have our namby-pamby free software letting us have private conversations about how the government totally sucks, while nearly everyone in the country is digitally spied on...

If that's the case, then it's all the more reason to educate people about the dangers of the Internet and the value of cryptography.

Here's my own submission of this story, which for some reason isn't showing up in the Firehose or even in my submissions history:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=16610344

Check out my summary for more quick information on the issue.

Yeah, my bad.

What's that Internet law that states you can't create a parody of a fundie that someone won't mistake for the real thing? I guess that applies to parodies of copyright maximalists too.

> Who would fund the creation of new recipes if everyone shared them freely?
I honestly can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, because that's a really stupid question. It implies that sharing knowledge is bad for culture.

> By suboptimal you mean it shows a sales increase when steps are taken to reduce piracy which make it inconvenient for those who say that piracy harms no one.
No, it doesn't. It has one poster /claiming/ that sales dropped with the introduction of keygens and rose when she implemented antipiracy measures. It does not in any way represent evidence that piracy causes substantial harm overall. I already told you this, so please stop repeating falsehoods.

Keep in mind that the only damage done by piracy is from those who would have bought it otherwise. In the case of a $5 indie game, you may say that more would be inclined to buy it because of its much more appealing price (leaving aside the issue of game quality), but the indie game wouldn't have anywhere near the market exposure that the $60 professional title would have. Piracy helps these small indie games by spreading mindshare of the game, and if the game in question is good, more people will know about it and buy it. If the game developer encourages, accepts or tolerates sharing of the game, that will get them some goodwill from the fans as well.

> Why do you expect people to provide their work to you for free?

This is a bad question.

First of all, you can't make assumptions about my motives. Nowhere in any of my posts have I said that I pirate software. Don't make personal attacks in order to legitimize your own position.

Two, the wording of your question is biased towards copyright holders. I see questions like yours quite a bit, and I just now realized how slanted they are. Your question assumes that a copyright holder has to somehow go out of their way to provide their work for free, as you said, but in most cases of piracy the copyright holder has to do nothing at all except release the original work, which is what happens anyway. The phrasing of your question adds undeserved emotional weight to your position by implying that those evil pirates are forcing the poor artist to proactively do something which benefits only them and screws the artist. It's dishonest.

A better question would have been "Why do you expect to have access to the work of others for free?" but my first point about personal attacks would still apply.

> Of course, we watched gamecopyworld and friends for the first cracks to show up and literally the day the game got cracked, sales dropped like a rock.

You know, I've been following the piracy debate for a while, and I have seen this claim and others like it on the Internet many times. There are just two problems with them. One is that they're never backed up with any sort of data that inconclusively demonstrates that piracy killed sales; readers are forced to take the poster at his word. Two, they always start and stop with individual posts on various forums. If piracy were really a big enough problem that it could massacre sales of a game, information about it would be all over the Internet. As it is, I have -never- seen actual evidence that piracy is anything but an Internet boogeyman, or that it does any substantial harm, or that harsh copyright enforcement measures are justified. I think that the need for actual evidence on the antipirates' side is so great that anything solid at all would quickly become popular and well-known. Since there is nothing solid, I have to assume that claims such as "piracy kills sales" are misleading or just false.

> Read this please
Okay. I don't really have the inclination to read every single post and comment in that large thread, but I read the question and some of the highest-ranked answers. The top-rated answer, by Dana Holt, presents a good argument but there are problems with her post. On a pedantic level she compares copyright infringement to physical theft, which is sure to aggravate anyone in the piracy debate and should be avoided. If she has been debating it for years as she claims, she ought to know that speaking in such a way is just an inflammatory thing to do. Additionally, she says that she was able to produce raw data that connected a keygen with low sales, but I do not see any citations for her claims, or any of the actual data. Plus, how does she know that none of the keys she revoked were legitimate, or used by legitimate customers?

I'm just not sure what you wanted me to come away with from linking me to that. It just demonstrates that there is a wide variety of opinions in the piracy debate, and that none of them can be convincingly substantiated with evidence because of the nature of the problem.

Taking a guess, you must be a game developer. While I'm sure it's nice in a business sense that Sony can tell developers and publishers that their console is invincible to hacking, nothing like that can last forever. Ultimately, everything is cracked; it's just a matter of how much time it takes. Personally I am pleased at the level of enthusiasm the techie community is displaying towards cracking the PS3 because it will, for better or worse, eventually lead to a more open system.

And for the record, if you are a game developer, you shouldn't believe the hyperbole and propaganda that Sony and the major game publishers no doubt tell you about the dangers of piracy. It is a popular scapegoat for big companies that don't sell their media as well as they'd like, or that just want greater control over their products post-sale, but there's never been any solid evidence to connect high piracy rates with low or no sales. Just because the PS3 has been broken doesn't mean that sales of PS3 games are going to drop flat.

> Updates are not forced. If you wish to use every service available on the PS3 that worked before the last update, you can. It is only if you want the new features, the new games, and the new services on PSN that you have to upgrade.

I call BS. My understanding of the matter is that if you want to use the PSN at all, you have to have current firmware. This includes online multiplayer for games you already have. If you refuse to update, you are locked out of playing online.

> The Other OS was only taken down AFTER someone started bragging about the ability to copy $60 PS3 games and play them... Only 5-6 assholes who are too cheap to afford new games but feel deserving of free stuff ruined it for the rest of us.

Another Sony apologist who says the hacking attempt was motivated purely by piracy. Nonsense. If the only people who wanted to crack the PS3 were pirates, then we would have seen a crack much earlier in the console's life, given that it apparently wasn't all that hard. Instead the cracking started after Sony removed OtherOS. Isn't that interesting?

> So yeah, I bought a PS3 to play PS3 games. The fact that it had all these other benefits were just frosting on the cake.

To you. There are also people who bought it largely because of these other benefits. Just because you don't personally care about them doesn't mean Sony is justified in removing an advertised feature after the sale.

Actually, he's got a point. A person who has sex daily will probably value it less than someone who only gets it once a month or so.