Dude.

Totally true.

Really.

Yeah... I don't think he knows that censorship doesn't mean what he thinks it means.

No, I'm Canadian, hence the "here's my two cents worth, Canadian" signature.

And you're a fucking moron.

Wups.... that might not have been nice enough to convey the proper level of Canadian politeness.

My bad.

This isn't censorship, it's a corporate policy decision. Big difference.

This is them determining what items they want in their catalogue.

They have no requirement to put everything that exists in there.

You might want to buy better textbooks.

This has nothing to do with terrorists winning, and everything to do with people who are friends and associates of those that are in power, taking advantage of a fictitious threat scenario, and cashing in on it. It's greed, plain and simple.

Idiots are getting more and more power granted to them, and making more and more cash in the process, all for dealing with this "threat" that they've manufactured. They will do anything and everything they can to perpetuate it, as long as they retain and grow that power base and make more and more money.

Security Theatre relies on keeping the public ignorant of what the real threats are, and of the proper ways to deal with them.

And the morons in charge are making laws to protect themselves and keep it all going.

The real terrorists are running the show.

Again... .cooperate with WHAT exactly?

These guys aren't doing anything wrong... they're just editing some pages. The Wiki admins SAY they're libelling people, etc., but since when is it Wikipedia's responsibility to handle that for those that have been wronged?

If they're claiming illegal activity, then follow legal means to take care of it. They can't just say "they're doing illegal shit so we should take some vigilante action to shut them down".

Again, I'm not agreeing with what these vandals are doing, but I'd never condone Wikipedia using their popularity to influence an ISP. That's just a bully trying to get their way. At that point they stop getting any and all support from me.

Wikipedia apparently has a system or process with a few holes in it, in that they are relying on people being good and doing the right thing. That is flawed. It's not up to Verizon to deal with it, it's up to them to adapt their process to handle it. Either that or wait until the vandals get bored and go away.

Mind you, a story on /. will probably not help it go away any time soon. If anything, you can expect to see a bunch of new "vandals" start fucking with them any time now.

As opposed to going to the local Starbucks and using their Internet. Or scarfing any other source of non-Verizon internet access.

I highly doubt that someone going to this much trouble to cause them problems is going to stop the first time he runs into a simple block like this.

I guess I should have reworded my response to "adapt their process to something that will effectively take care of the problem".

This seems silly to me... why would Verizon care?

If the vandals are doing something illegal, then go ahead and follow the legal procedures to get it stopped, which would probably include subpoenaing Verizon for the identity of the vandals and going after them directly.

If it's not something that can be handled in the courts, (being a dick hasn't been made illegal, last time I checked) then Verizon may well open themselves up to a lawsuit for helping Wikipedia with this "wrongdoing".

If it's not illegal, then they'll probably have to adapt their process to take care of the problem.

And I'd be very interested to see how many good edits or entries were being made from that block of IP addresses. They may well be cutting off their leg to cure an ingrown toenail.

As a Canadian Citizen, I'd just like to say to the EU...

"Go fuck yourself."

That is all.

Oh please...

You have NO way of knowing that it was his decision. And it's a government... odds are that he was NOT allowed to make that decision.

I know that in my shop, the network admins do not have that kind of autonomy. They can make all the recommendations they want, but it's not their decision.

For all we know, he may have asked his superiors for permission and they failed to give it, and he went ahead and did it anyways.

Not at all.

I've been doing app development for years, and work in a few OS projects myself.

I'm quite familiar with the various licenses, etc., required.

I've helped vet those licenses for Government implementations, as well as pay lawyers to draft contracts for custom licenses I need for my own software product.

The last thing I wanted to do was go about and mass download and extract any/all Java/Apache/JBoss libraries and licenses.

It was nothing but a colossal waste of time for everyone involved. It's just the client ended up paying for it.

No. We were about to start he business analysis phase of the project... literally step one.

We were totally in the dark about what they needed, technical/business requirements, etc.

All we knew is that it was going to be an Oracle-backed Java distributed app running on Sun.

And I'm not even kidding. That was ALL we knew.

A good lawyer has common sense and a sense of situational awareness.

This one had neither.

He refused to believe he was wrong, and we did exactly what he asked of us.

In the end, we gave him just enough rope to hang himself with.

He just had to take responsibility for his actions.

Actually, I had assigned resources to the project at the client's request, so instead of having them pay for those resources as they sat idly by doing nothing, or ME having to pay for them to do nothing, I put them to work doing the only work we were allowed to do on the project.

AS REQUESTED BY THE CLIENT.

So yeah, it might have been a dickish thing to do, but I did my best to NOT do it.