[Citation Needed]

Further, please read a post before you reply to it. "Having your property associated with a crime does not prove criminal activity itself. It at best proves you were an accessory." Nothing you said in any way relates to what I said.

Most of Europe doesn't have an equivalent to the 5th Amendment. They, for whatever reason, do not see this as a problem. We are quickly ceasing to have it even here in the US.

Which is why the owner of a car is liable if it is stolen and used in a robbery?

Except not. Having your property associated with a crime does not prove criminal activity itself. It at best proves you were an accessory.

Your post is just scare tactics regurgitated from ISP PR departments, to sell more connections by scaring people into closing their public nodes.

According to TFA, they have to already have been ruled to have infringed copyright, meaning they presumably already had the information the ISP would be giving, in addition to some proof of the supposed infringement. Basically, this isn't supposed to do anything, which makes me wonder why they want it at all. Hedging their bets on the judges they bought, perhaps?

Just ignore the trolls. I know there are a lot of them lately. Slashdot's moderation system seems to have been co-opted by sockpuppets, but that's no excuse to feed ones at -1.

How else will it know it exists!?

Yes. I do. The context of numerous people giving you factual information, and you acting like an asshole rather than actually refuting them. I hope they do, I really do. Your posts are far over-rated in this discussion at anything above -1. I would encourage everyone to keep watching your posts in general, in fact.

The process is quite simple.

You link an image from Facebook, such as a "like" button. Every time someone views your page, that button is accessed, and your domain is the referrer. Facebook then sees the IP of the person viewing that image, and that referrer, and can potentially correlate that easily with the known IPs of Facebook users. Volla, Facebook knows every site you have been to.

This is not some kind of mythical concept. This was actually used to cause a brief hack scare on a site I used to administer.

That is not even getting into CSS hacks, which are still, effectively, open, and allow any site to access your browser history.

It's also pretty classic you're accusing me of being a tinfoil hat, considering you spent several hours going on about the evils of cookies and how this law is needed to protect your privacy, but that's ok, it's obvious you're a troll. I post this for the benefit of others, as I realize my original post was not totally clear.

So your answer to having it pointed out this helps nothing and hurts technology in general is... to call me a douchebag and continue to say nothing of substance (really, I can tolerate being called names if the person actually puts in an effort).

Well, I can see the supporters of this measure are as mature as they come.

"there you go with your cookie fetish again... it won't "break technology", it will merely neccessitate some recoding (keeping programmers employed)"

It will break it as it stands. That qualifies as "breaking" it in my book. The fact it can be fixed is irrelevant to the act of breaking it.

Also, broken window fallacy. Creating jobs is not an excuse to break things that work fine now.

"you're not too bright are ya... there are also laws that prohibit murder, but it doesn't prevent people from being murdered... maybe such pointless laws should be dropped too?"

If there was a law that stated you could not kill someone with a bladed weapon, and no law saying you could bludgeon them to death, then yes. It is stupid and ineffectual to have one but not the other, ESPECIALLY if part of the law calls for outlawing cooking knives.

"the law is about establishing a level of risk in doing what is against the law, so that if you engage in breaking the law there is a risk that you'll be caught and punished."

Or... people can simply do the same nasty things via still legal and not much more complicated means, effectively only harming the legitimate applications of the effectively banned technology.

"introducing a law that prohibits using such cookies without user consent means that there is now risk in engaging in some (not all) online privacy invasion "

Except:

1. Real privacy threats are outside EU jurisdiction, and will continue on their merry way.
2. It is trivial to shift tracking to other means.
3. It is NOT so trivial to shift legitimate uses, many of which lack good alternatives, as I and others have explained.

Costs: massive.
Benefits: near nil.

This isn't a well-reasoned policy. That leads me to think it is a feel-good policy.

Or just hold no physical presence in those countries, and still sell to them. More or less the same thing done with sales tax in the US. All this sort of thing does is make EU countries less likely to compete in the internet market. I guess I should be happy about it: it means the US will be able to pick up a lot of the space left by them.

It's just another group of governments trying to flex their muscle to prove how bravado they are over the internet. It'll fail, they'll destroy their own IT industry in the process while the companies move to some less problematic country (in this case, the US), and no one will ever call the governments on it. It happens often.

Europeans especially seem to be unusually prone to this. At least us Americans tend to bitch about everything before, during, and after; that's arguably why we're still freer in a lot of important ways, despite having a much larger number of right-wing loons. It's also why nothing passes on a federal level other than "we dislike Hitler" bills. I'd still rather that than the alternative, though.

"Because the burden is on the one infringing on my right to privacy to prove necessity, not on me."

Or, you could, you know, block their cookies. Or disable cookies entirely. Or get the fuck off the internet if you are THAT worried about privacy, because, let me tell you, cookies are the absolute least of most people's privacy woes here.

Check the link in my signature. It's relevant.

"and how do you mandate that to a company that isn't in the UK?"

How do you mandate what sites do if they aren't in the UK?

The answer in both cases is: you do not, and that is by design.

It was also arguably made to be transferred over telephone lines and used by 16 bit computers.