dissident

I've been on the other side of the hivemind many times here and on reddit, and I can assure you, I encourage opinions that I may even disagree with or doubt. The last people I would sympathize with are the stubborn, dogmatic kind that refuse to listen to other perspectives.

RT is not an opinion or a perspective, they are a source that lacks credibility. It is not that their opinions are "wrong" to me, or that I disagree with them, it is that they fabricate, sensationalize and mislead people. As is the case with this article and many more.

Those are not characteristics of a debate in which all participants and opinions are given a fair shot -- you know, the ones dissidents fight for.

By the way, this is a private website, not a public space, and I have no problem with Hacker News outright banning whatever they want. Especially if it means I have to read less made-up crap. And if they end up banning legitimate sources, I can go elsewhere. Or if they're like reddit and refuse to police themselves -- letting the community's cynical attitude pervade the entire website's content, skewing the news and making it an unreliable representation of current events -- I can go somewhere else too.

You might have a hard-on for calling me a hypocrite, but really you're just making yourself look like an ass.

I'm really surprised Russia Today links are even allowed here.

The best evidence of the usefulness of PG's post are replies like yours which (hilariously) cannot refute his points. Too many people are blindly devoted to the idea of copyright. He's not exactly preaching to the choir.

Please, refer me to an RIAA lawyer who can justify copyright in 2012.

Yes, the restrictions of the GPL would be moot if there were no copyright.

Treating source code as intellectual property is exactly what spawned GPL in the first place, as it is a "hack" that exploits the nature of software licensing.

Can you reiterate your point?

I'm only aware of laws that dictate the effort put into obtaining private information, not the knowledge or dissemination of it. I can't steal your phone and grab the picture, but if you give it to me under no certain terms, I can do what I want. Where is this mystical protection you speak of?

> You could always give performances and charge for those!

So, software as a service? It appears we've been heading that way for a while.

> Joking aside, I think that IP is and should remain a messy compromise. There are no easy answers. Were it to cease to exist completely, it would reduce the incentives for producers, and thus consumers would be worse off too because they would have less software, books, movies and music to enjoy.

I'm not sure we'd see less content, but less financially motivated content. Keep in mind, copyright is not the only way to subsidize content creation.

New music genres and artists are giving away their music online today -- and not just some of them. I'd say most new electronic music winds up on Soundcloud from the artists themselves. RIAA has a choke-hold on Pop music and that's it, but given the nature of Pop music, that's unsurprising.

It would be impractical to expect artists to give away their content with nothing in return... so create a business model that relies on payment before you produce the content rather than after you share it.

Copyright will die a slow and painful death, whether or not it is a compromise by today's standards. What are you going to do when I can put every HD movie ever created on my hard-disk? Enforcement isn't a gradient, it either largely works or largely doesn't.

It would appear there's more to the story than I was aware.

Certainly administrative subpoenas that are not based on a grand jury hearing would be susceptible to appeal?

> It requires a provider to turn over to the government without a warrant:

It does not require that a provider turn that over to the government without a warrant. It mandates that only the government can have access to it.

Providers still have the liberty of not complying with government requests for assistance, in which case a warrant would be necessary to obtain the information.

We can argue over whether providers will cooperate or not in practice, but it does not require providers to do anything but keep the information.

Where's the reasoning for this? Frequently starting over is a problem, but code refactoring can have immense benefits. Discovering a different framework or language may suit your work better, for instance.

Monkeypiling on top of old work is really advice out of the 90's.

These articles with a bunch of three word sentences and zero justification are becoming annoying.

> I've also heard that this law requires ISPs to turn this information over without a warrant. Is this not correct?

That isn't correct, you could go and read the bill if you want: http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1981/text

Calling it the "Spy on Everyone Always Act" is sensationalized no matter what your opinion is on the bill. Most ISPs wouldn't even have to change their current behaviors to comply with it. (To be fair, that's not saying much anyway...)

The more bills we shoot down because of misinformation, the less likely we can defeat bills with more serious problems.

> The economic benefit they provide to content creators is the financing to be able to create the content in the first place

Music, video games, application/software development are all areas where this is completely false -- very minimal financing is required for any of this and we already see a growing, open media landscape as a result of it. You seem to forget the capitalistic tendency for market potential to dictate the cost of services as well.

That is to say, Hollywood movie budgets are extremely over-inflated because of the monopolistic business models that guarantee them capital they do not require to finance the creation of content in the first place. Actors, directors and writers do not require millions of dollars to write or produce this content anymore. A market for its production -- or at the very least a social imperative -- would exist regardless of this artificial establishment.

Walk through this with me:

* it costs nothing to distribute the content anymore (in stark contrast with even a decade ago)

* it costs very little to create most content, and where it does costs a lot, it's mostly because of copyright's existence

* it costs nothing to market the content anymore. Social media is in a dominating role.

Copyright depended on all of these factors being completely opposite. It depended on some cost for creation, or more broadly, some quantifiable scarcity. It depended on a publisher -- an intermediary -- to connect the consumer with the creator. It eventually depended on advertising and extremely competitive marketing as well.

The realities of 21st century communication and technology simply are not compatible. Financing the production of works by selling the right to copy it is absurd in this economic climate. It made sense when publishing was a capital-intensive and narrow industry, but it now forms the basis by which many people communicate today.

Instead, works should be financed by the public interest in its creation. Nobody has to pay more than they want for their "copy" of the "intellectual property", the artist is subsidized as much as they transparently request, and perhaps an arbiter is compensated under contract.

Regardless, it is unenforceable and ultimately counter-productive to support copyright, just about anything could be better.

Long read but good work.

I think this is more of an open letter to content publishers; content creators haven't had any trouble solving the problems that you explained.

Content has been moving copyleft (or at the very least, to more liberal licensing) every day because of the competitive advantages in emerging markets, but where copyright still holds a strong presence, the debate will not center around the consumer's point of view (unfortunately).

It is better to frame this debate around "content creators" and whether they are truly benefiting from the artificial scarcity which supports Hollywood's business model. And thus it is important to mention that this is not the content creators doing, but the backwards thinking of very powerful copyright holders, who pass very little of their economic benefits to artists compared to other mediums.

I highly doubt he was being serious when he was "fear mongering". In context it was likely him using the TSA's logic against the scanners.

Remember, this guy has been fighting long before this vulnerability was publicly known.

It sounds like Linode's user system is different from their server management system. They probably have some administration tools for resetting VPS passwords, but don't have access to sensitive user details.

> if linode was compromised either the whole infrastructure was compromised (unlikely)

That's funny. I know from experience in the script kiddie part of the Internet that it was sometimes exceptionally easier to hack entire datacenters (even ones worth millions of dollars) just to get into a few of their customers, especially if those customers secured themselves.

Hosting companies have very sophisticated websites sometimes, meaning that they're almost always vulnerable to something.

I know of an SQL injection in an very large U.S. datacenter's administration panel which has been there for at least six years. Six years and it has not been fixed, and maybe a dozen people have independently discovered it. The deeper you delve, the more you realize that at least a handful of people also have access to important upstreams/backbones.

It's a lot bigger of a mess than anybody realizes. A bit of advice: if you say you're secure, you're either lying or colocating.

It's important to note that, at least in the U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU that blanket censorship of online content simply because they can be illegal is unconstitutional.

It is further reaffirmed in MGM v. Grokster that a filesharing service is only accountable for its actions if it advertises or supports the service's use of violating the law.

Kademlia did get traction; it is the protocol for BitTorrent's use of magnet links, trackerless torrents and other features.

It was not designed to act as a gossip-like overlay network for indexing content (similar to eDonkey/eMule), it was designed to act as an overlay network for identifying metadata of known keys stored in DHT.

The BitTorrent checklist is as follows:

1. [X] peer to peer file transfer

2. [X] Kademlia/magnet links for decentralized metadata

3. [X] Kademlia/peer exchange for decentralized tracking

4. [X] Gossip protocol for indexing magnet links

5. [X] integrated data proxying for anonymity/plausible deniability

Tribler solved step 4, OneSwarm and some others are trying to solve step 5.

We're indeed on the cusp of an impenetrable file sharing network.

> I think that companies can release source to licensees only and I would like to see that practice enter general use.

Companies already license out their source code to whoever they wish, and many already do what you suggest ("enterprise licensing"). Many prefer to open-source non-critical software, because the community can help maintain it.

I'm trying to wrap my head around this comment. You're saying that GPL isn't restrictive enough to provide the security for businesses to open-source their work? GPL is very restrictive, more so than most other open-source licenses, which is why businesses usually release under Apache/MIT/BSD.

If a business is worried that their open-source software is going to backfire and feed the competition, they have no interest in open-sourcing their software in the first place, and no license restrictions will help them.

GPL's other effects (forcing businesses to open-source software they make modifications to, which are covered under the GPL) are good enough.

> I believe that every software owner deserves a copy of the source, but I don't believe that every software owner has the right to redistribute that program practically without limitation as the GPL allows.

I'm not sure you realize how unrealistic that artificial approach is becoming.

XHR is awful for large file uploads. It doesn't support sending the file object (which presumably would be processed according to RFC1867) on Firefox, but it does support that on Chrome.

As a result, for cross-browser compatibility you have to upload via raw POST data and send your own file metadata headers. Not entirely a bad thing, but it's annoying because most HTTP servers don't support this. And because you cannot send the file object, you have to load the file into browser memory. No streaming options.

Thus, you have to make multiple request uploads that upload a chunk at a time to the server per request (spliced uploading), which is annoying and unnecessary.

To make matters worse, Chrome doesn't support XMLHttpRequest.sendAsBinary (WHY? you can easily implement this in javascript anyway), and a bunch of other random inconsistencies.

And no, PUT doesn't help.

I actually don't care that they copied the design, but that YC actually funded people who thought that was a professional thing to do.

I love this post and agree with most of it, but I'd like to point something out.

> But once they do anything with enough financial scale to merit incorporation, they need to submit those organizations to the traditional rules governing duplication, distribution, and derivation.

How do we know that we can govern/enforce that law? What if a digital currency (say, bitcoin) becomes a useful model for online payments, in a way that cannot be tracked or enforced? The same issues pop up. People can then profit from others' works.

This may require an additional concession: people should be able to profit from the service of distributing content, even if they did not create it. But is that something we're prepared to allow? And if so, how will that affect the dynamics of distribution and content creation in the future?

In my own perspective, services will have enough of an incentive to publish and distribute unique content, that it will indirectly subsidize the creation of it.

I'm a completely anti-copyright, pro-piracy, pro-megaupload person, but there was due process and complete legitimacy with them taking down megaupload.

Perhaps megaupload are not guilty of anything, but this entire episode was completely legal and proper. The owners were indicted and they served injunctions against the servers, and seized their domains. They have treaties with all of the countries involved to extradite the operators.

Regardless, this does not make it okay to DDoS government websites offline. It's really easy to download LOIC and DDoS whatever websites are mentioned in #anonops, but you relinquish all moral high ground in the process.

In fact, this rarely does anything. The websites usually just mitigate the attack within a couple hours, and in hindsight it just looks like a hissyfit that got nowhere.

I think it would be best to compose a short video that outlines all of the problems, as that's even more accessible to people. I've seen a few videos that are long, and a few videos that are inaccurate/vague, but no definitive explanation of the issue.

Here's the best video I've found so far: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/protect-ip/

It sure seems like in the last few days the floodgates opened against this bill from a lot of reputable organizations. What were they waiting for a month ago? Was there some report/statement published recently that convinced them?

> Do you believe that if SOPA passes, it would really have drastic effects to the internet functionally?

Yes. Things would have to shift around the compensate, but the real problem begins when SOPA justifies similar legislation in other countries, especially ones being bound by trade agreements which call for this type of stuff.

In the U.S. they claim "oh, but we're just going to target people who violate the law. You know, copyright infringement." Even if that were true, other countries have a long history of applying their laws, which usually suck and go much further to stifle speech.

SOPA legitimizes this method of blacklisting, thus leading to a balkanization of the naming system. People begin to move away from the cache servers, causing slowdowns in resolution and CDNs. Once this proves ineffective, the U.S. will want to censor any DNS server that resolves an IP to something they don't want. Then we have deep packet inspection.

It really will not end unless we force it to end. SOPA takes a drastic step that even the DMCA didn't do. DMCA targeted activities under U.S. jurisdiction. The next chapter in the global censorship game is the attack on websites outside jurisdiction, which is not feasible without immense privacy encroachments.

I don't want to see us going down that path. We need to go the complete opposite direction when it comes to copyright. SOPA also places way too much of a legal and logistical burden on companies within the U.S., which is going to lead a lot of people toward countries with progressive outlooks on copyright, like in some places in Europe.

You're justifying it as not having too much of a "splash" because it targets foreign websites which you claim are primarily for copyright infringement. That's just not true at all. Most foreign websites are perfectly legitimate.

> I realize DNSBL is voluntary and SOPA would mandate/force, but I don't see how the effects are different. For a DNS server

Bam, stop right there. DNS servers do not use DNSBL. There's your answer.

DNSBL is used in circumstances like this: You're connecting to an IRC server. It does some tests to make sure you're not spoofing your host, like using reverse DNS (PTR records). IRC servers will also try to prevent spammers and flooders by denying access to hosts that are in a DNSBL -- likely open proxies.

Here's some IRC software which does specifically that: http://www.blitzed.org/proxy/

I am running some mail servers which are having trouble delivering mail to gmail right now. gmail is returning back this error:

    The IP you're using to send mail is not authorized to
    send email directly to our servers. Please use the SMTP relay your
    service provider instead.

Turns out, it's because the IPs I've been allocated are in Spamhaus, which is an implementation of DNSBL that specifically targets spammers.

Again, this is an action by the server software itself. It is not a mandate, and is not actually a restriction on DNS. It is nothing like blacklisting cache servers. The name has confused you.

> Regarding CDNs, for a user initiating request for a non-blacklisted site, why would the CDN be now less efficient in its response?

If you're trying to access Google, their nameservers may give your ISP's caching servers a different resolution if you're in California rather than in the UK, usually to resolve to closer servers. This is only effective because nameservers can target cache servers which are specific to geographic areas, and is a great side-effect of the current structure of the naming system and of the Internet.

By forcing people away from domestic nameservers, this targeted effect fails. A foreign cache server will return inefficient resolutions to queries compared to a domestic one operated by an ISP.

Aside from being terrible for the end user, it also begins to put stress and congest different areas of the global Internet unexpectedly. Though arrangements can be made to compensate, it's pretty annoying and will never be as efficient as before.

> My point is that if DNS and CDNs become drastically inefficient by having to ignore certain names, then it sounds like it could have been designed better to handle such cases.

The only real "design flaw" in DNS is the inflated trust in cache servers. DNSSEC tries to resolve this by attaching a chain of authentication alongside the delegation chain which can be verified. SOPA breaks DNSSEC entirely because it cannot return these authenticated messages (it is resolving incorrectly or lying about the delegation chain).

DNS was not designed to be censored in the way proposed by SOPA; it is not a design flaw in SOPA, it's a flaw in the legislation.

> if everyone knew that only foreign sites (whose primary purpose is infringement)

I'm sorry, but this reeks of complete ignorance. I don't think you're qualified to argue for SOPA.