While you can't arrest everyone on the block if somebody smokes weed, if your apartment building is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, don't be surprised if you lose your landlord permit. And yes, perfectly innocent tenants get thrown out when that happens.

I am arguing nothing of the sort. Instead, I'm arguing that if you want to have multiple users share the same IP address, you need to be prepared to find, and shut, individual users if informed of wrongdoing. If you ignore such requests, you shouldn't be surprised if you get spanked for it.

That "false positive" event was BS, and the EFF should know better. Slashdot covered the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/1849207/australian-networks-block-community-university-website

Basically, a community college cheaped-out on it's webhost, and it was sharing a single IP with 1,200 other sites. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibilities that one of those 1,200 was doing something naughty (malware, DDOS, spam, kiddie porn, who knows?), and CheapBastardWebhosting was apathetic when informed about it. Just like any harmful of blatantly illegal site, the next step is a block of the IP.

The block was lifted after the outcry, but I suspect that was more because the block got the webhosts attention and they then properly booted the naughty customer.

EFF, please don't Greenpeace or PETA yourselves with silly crap like this. (This wouldn't be the first time their press releases have stretched or misinterpreted facts more than a bit.)

Yes, Mt. Gox had some anti-money-laundering measures in place. But the legal requirements go far beyond merely verifying the legal identities of your customers, which is all that page covers. (If that was all KYC involved, banks would not need entire large departments dedicated to that function.)

For a small customer like yourself, nothing more than ID is required, which you've supplied. Once you start moving decent amounts of cash, the institution receiving the money is required to know something about the activities the cash came from. It doesn't matter that the currency was BitCoins; the same rules still apply. There are reports to file, records to keep, etc. For instance, a bank is expected to report activities like a hot dog cart suddenly depositing stacks of $20's well out of proportion to a plausible amount of sales.

Not complying with these rules (which is "Financial Institution Regulatory Framework 101") is not going to end well.

Mt. Gox was a shoestring operation that got in WAY over its head. (As in, actual banks have entire departments of employees dedicated to pretending to comply with these kinds of rules, warehouses (or tape libraries) full of documents stored away, etc.)

The likelihood that Mt Gox was complying with the "Know Your Customer" anti-money-laundering rules that apply to all financial institutions that handle currency was approx. zero. I'm not surprised in the least. If a bank was doing what Mt. Gox was, (as in, not even pretending to comply with the law), the same thing would happen.

(That's not to say that disobedience of money laundering never occurs, just that experienced banks are substantially better at hiding it.)

Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only make more time-consuming work, it'd be silly for some Machiavellian Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.

Correct... banks do not like to deal in large cash volumes (it's expensive, for starters.) However, those businesses for which it makes sense to have a large cash intake still do have access to the banking industry, although a closer eye is kept on them than customers that don't move large cash volumes.

A bank providing services to a BitCoin exchange? Neither the bank nor the exchange has any flipping clue where the BitCoins came from, and unless the exchange sets up a mechanism to find out, then yes, the bank is going to drop the exchange for fear of running afoul of Know Your Customer rules. A few large cash transactions running through the exchange and a whole lot of "I dunno" answers leads to all sorts of uncomfortable meetings with regulators.

Banks don't hate BitCoins (or gold) because it's non-fiduciary... it's because it's a Pain In The Ass to deal with. Banks are more than happy to let an independent entity (as in, not them) deal with BitCoin transfers and storage if they so choose. Agreeing to accept deposits in BitCoins (which due to their volatility are currently utterly incompatible with fractional reserve banking) is a task that would earn them only tiny transaction fees... it's simply not worth the bother.

I suspect it was Transaction Reporting requirements, along with Know Your Customer regulations that did them in. The government doesn't care if you are shoveling Benjamins, BitCoins, Euros, Pesos, or British Pounds, across the counter or over the wire... if you want to trade in heavy quantities of Cash or Cash Equivalents, you have to comply with money laundering laws. If their bank felt they could not keep the account open and still comply with those laws... ker-chop!

Did the fact that BitCoins were being traded have something to do with it? You bet. But they would have been equally eager to shut down an operation dealing with physical currency and numbered accounts... they don't like anonymiity combined with large volumes of untracable cash.

The money supply does not have a direct relationship to GDP. A high-velocity currency (one that trades hands frequently instead of being stored) will have a low value in relation to GDP. A low-velocity currency would behave the opposite.

When reporting the size of the money supply, you will see references to M0, M1, MB, and M2. They are different ways of measuring the supply and are used for different purposes.

Spraying a highly toxic gas (which cannot be smelled after it passes a certain threshold) over large areas of land? What could possibly go wrong? I know I'll sleep better at night knowing gas regulators never fail, nor do meters ever give inaccurate readings.

I don't see DRM as being incompatible with openness. The ability to save off content has nothing to do with how open (or not) a standard is. Why wouldn't Firefox implement it?

I think the summary writer is confusing "non-openness" with "things I don't like".

Hmmm... which is more likely? An utterly inoffensive group providing free education materials on the internet is the victim of a shadowy government conspiracy, or that one of the 1,200 other sites on the same IP did something sufficiently stupid as to attract govt. attention.

I know that the summary and the article both mention that the latter is a possibility, but the headline, summary, and article, are all written as if the most likely possibility was that MFU was targeted directly.

I suspect that the ISP got a request from somebody about one of the hosted sites doing something very naughty, and the person who's job it was to pay attention to such requests didn't get them or ignored them, so an IP block was the next step.

If they demand payment via Western Union, it cannot be traced, and I'm pretty sure $5k is under their max transaction amount.