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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing

[noae]

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Even if we win the right to own and control our computers, a dilemma remains: what rights do owners owe users?   

Cory Doctorow: "The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing", Talks at Google

This talk was delivered at Google in August, and for The Long Now Foundation in July 2012. A transcript of the notes follows. I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this: • Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them. • We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body. [[VCR, washing machine] [[747]] [[Hearing aid]] • This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too—and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this: "Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race" "Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds" Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out." [[Turing - 1]] But there's a problem. We don't know how to make a computer that can run all the programs we can compile except for whichever one pisses off a regulator, or disrupts a business model, or abets a criminal. The closest approximation we have for such a device is a computer with spyware on it— a computer that, if you do the wrong thing, can intercede and say, "I can't let you do that, Dave." [[Hal]] Such a a computer runs programs designed to be hidden from the owner of the device, and which the owner can't override or kill. In other words: DRM. Digital Rights Managment. [Defective by design] These computers are a bad idea for two significant reasons. First, they won't solve problems. Breaking DRM isn't hard for bad guys. The copyright wars' lesson is that DRM is always broken with near-immediacy. DRM only works if the "I can't let you do that, Dave" program stays a secret. Once the most sophisticated attackers in the world liberate that secret, it will be available to everyone else, too. [[AACS key]] Second, DRM has inherently weak security, which thereby makes overall security weaker. Certainty about what software is on your computer is fundamental to good computer security, and you can't know if your computer's software is secure unless you know what software it is running. Designing "I can't let you do that, Dave" into computers creates an enormous security vulnerability: anyone who hijacks that facility can do things to your computer that you can't find out about. Moreover, once a government thinks it has "solved" a problem with DRM—with all its inherent weaknesses—that creates a perverse incentive to make it illegal to tell people things that might undermine the DRM. [[cf felten, huang, geohot] You know, things like how the DRM works. Or "here's a flaw in the DRM which lets an attacker secretly watch through your webcam or listen through your mic." I've had a lot of feedback from various distinguished computer scientists, technologists, civil libertarians and security researchers after 28C3. Within those fields, there is a widespread consensus that, all other things being equal, computers are more secure and society is better served when owners of computers can control what software runs on them. Let's examine for a moment what that would mean. Most computers today are fitted with Trusted Platform Module. This is a secure co-processor mounted on the motherboard. The specification of TPMs are published, and an industry body certifies compliance with those specifications. To the extent that the spec is good (and the industry body is diligent), it's possible to be reasonably certain that you've got a real, functional, TPM in your computer that faithfully implements the spec. How is the TPM secure? It contains secrets: cryptographic keys. But it's also secure in that it's designed to be tamper-evident. If you try to extract the keys from a TPM, or remove the TPM from a computer and replace it with a gimmicked one, it will be very obvious to the computer's owner. One threat to TPM is that a crook (or a government, police force or other adversary) might try to compromise your computer — tamper-evidence is what lets you know when your TPM has been fiddled with. Another TPM threat-model is that a piece of malicious software will infect your computer Now, once your computer is compromised this way, you could be in great trouble. All of the sensors attached to the computer—mic, camera, accelerometer, fingerprint reader, GPS—might be switched on without your knowledge. Off goes the data to the bad guys. All the data on your computer (sensitive files, stored passwords and web history)? Off it goes to the bad guys—or erased. All the keystrokes into your computer—your passwords!—might be logged. All the peripherals attached to your computer—printers, scanners, SCADA controllers, MRI machines, 3D printers— might be covertly operated or subtly altered. Imagine if those "other peripherals" included cars or avionics. Or your optic nerve, your cochlea, the stumps of your legs. When your computer boots up, the TPM can ask the bootloader for a signed hash of itself and verify that the signature on the hash comes from a trusted party. Once you trust the bootloader to faithfully perform its duties, you can ask it to check the signatures on the operating system, which, once verified, can check the signatures on the programs that run on it. Ths ensures that you know which programs are running on your computer—and that any programs running in secret have managed the trick by leveraging a defect in the bootloader, operating system or other components, and not because a new defect has been inserted into your system to create a facility for hiding things from you. This always reminds me of Descartes: he starts off by saying that he can't tell what's true and what's not true, because he's not sure if he really exists. [descartes] He finds a way of proving that he exists, and that he can trust his senses and his faculty for reason. Having found a tiny nub of stable certainty on which to stand, he builds a scaffold of logic that he affixes to it, until he builds up an entire edifice. Likewise, a TPM is a nub of stable certainty: if it's there, it can reliably inform you about the code on your computer. [crazy] Now, you may find it weird to hear someone like me talking warmly about TPMs. After all, these are the technologies that make it possible to lock down phones, tablets, consoles and even some PCs so that they can't run software of the owner's choosing. Jailbreaking" usually means finding some way to defeat a TPM or TPM-like technology. So why on earth would I want a TPM in my computer? As with everything important, the devil is in the details. Imagine for a moment two different ways of implementing a TPM: 1. Lockdown [LOCKDOWN] Your TPM comes with a set of signing keys it trusts, and unless your bootloader is signed by a TPM-trusted party, you can't run it. Moreover, since the bootloader determines which OS launches, you don't get to control the software in your machine. 2. Certainty [CERTAINTY] You tell your TPM which signing keys you trust—say, Ubuntu, EFF, ACLU and Wikileaks—and it tells you whether the bootloaders it can find on your disk have been signed by any of those parties. It can faithfully report the signature on any other bootloaders it finds, and it lets you make up your own damn mind about whether you want to trust any or all of the above. Approximately speaking, these two scenarios correspond to the way that iOS and Android work: iOS only lets you run Apple-approved code; Android lets you tick a box to run any code you want. Critically, however, Android lacks the facility to do some crypto work on the software before boot-time and tell you whether the code you think you're about to run is actually what you're about to run. It's freedom, but not certainty. In a world where the computers we're discussing can see and hear you, where we insert our bodies into them, where they are surgically implanted into us, and where they fly our planes and drive our cars, certainty is a big deal. This is why I like the idea of a TPM, assuming it is implemented in the "certainty" mode and not the "lockdown" mode. If that's not clear, think of it this way: a "war on general-purpose computing" is what happens when the control freaks in government and industry demand the ability to remotely control your computers [1984] The defenders against that attack are also control freaks—like me—but they happen to believe that device-owners should have control over their computers [De Niro in Brazil] Both sides want control, but differ on which side should have control. Control requires knowledge. If you want to be sure that songs can only moved onto an iPod, but not off of an iPod, the iPod needs to know that the instructions being given to it by the PC (to which it is tethered) are emanating from an Apple-approved iTunes. It needs to know they're not from something that impersonates iTunes in order to get the iPod to give it access to those files. [Roach Motel] If you want to be sure that my PVR won't record the watch-once video-on-demand movie that I've just paid for, you need to be able to ensure that the tuner receiving the video will only talk to approved devices whose manufacturers have promised to honor "do-not-record" flags in the programmes. [TiVo error] If I want to be sure that you aren't watching me through my webcam, I need to know what the drivers are and whether they honor the convention that the little green activity light is always switched on when my camera is running. [Green light] If I want to be sure that you aren't capturing my passwords through my keyboard, I need to know that the OS isn't lying when it says there aren't any keyloggers on my system. Whether you want to be free—or want to enslave—you need control. And for that, you need this knowledge. That's the coming war on general purpose computing. But now I want to investigate what happens if we win it. We could face a interesting prospect. This I call the coming civil war over general purpose computing. Let's stipulate that a victory for the "freedom side" in the war on general purpose computing would result in computers that let their owners know what was running on them. Computers would faithfully report the hash and associated signatures for any bootloaders they found, control what was running on computers, and allow their owners to specify who was allowed to sign their bootloaders, operating systems, and so on. [Revolutionary war victory image] There are two arguments that we can make for this: 1. Human rights If your world is made of computers, then designing computers to override their owners' decisions has significant human rights implications. Today we worry that the Iranian government might demand import controls on computers, so that only those capable of undetectable surveillance are operable within its borders. Tomorrow we might worry about whether the British government would demand that NHS-funded cochlear implants be designed to block reception of "extremist" language, to log and report it, or both. 2. Property rights The doctrine of first sale is an important piece of consumer law. It says that once you buy something, it belongs to you, and you should have the freedom to do anything you want with it, even if that hurts the vendor's income. Opponents of DRM like the slogan, "You bought it, you own it." Property rights are an incredibly powerful argument. This goes double in America, where strong property rights enforcement is seen as the foundation of all social remedies. [private property] This goes triple for Silicon Valley, where you can't swing a cat without hitting a libertarian who believes that the major — or only — legitimate function of a state is to enforce property rights and contracts around them. Which is to say that if you want to win a nerd fight, property rights are a powerful weapon to have in your arsenal. And not just nerd fights! That's why copyfighters are so touchy about the term "Intellectual Property". This synthetic, ideologically-loaded term was popularized in the 1970s as a replacement for "regulatory monopolies" or "creators' monopolies" — because it's a lot easier to get Congress to help you police your property than it is to get them to help enforce your monopoly. [Human rights fist] Here is where the civil war part comes in. Human rights and property rights both demand that computers not be designed for remote control by governments, corporations, or other outside institutions. Both ensure that owners be allowed to specify what software they're going to run. To freely choose the nub of certainty from which they will suspend the scaffold of their computer's security. Remember that security is relative: you are secured from attacks on your ability to freely use your music if you can control your computing environment. This, however, erodes the music industry's own security to charge you some kind of rent, on a use-by-use basis, for your purchased music. If you get to choose the nub from which the scaffold will dangle, you get control and the power to secure yourself against attackers. If the the government, the RIAA or Monsanto chooses the nub, they get control and the power to secure themselves against you. In this dilemma, we know what side we fall on. We agree that at the very least, owners should be allowed to know and control their computers. But what about users? Users of computers don't always have the same interests as the owners of computers— and, increasingly, we will be users of computers that we don't own. Where you come down on conflicts between owners and users is going to be one of the most meaningful ideological questions in technology's history. There's no easy answer that I know about for guiding these decisions. [Blackstone on property] Let's start with a total pro-owner position: "property maximalism". • If it's my computer, I should have the absolute right to dictate the terms of use to anyone who wants to use it. If you don't like it, find someone else's computer to use. How would that work in practice? Through some combination of an initialization routine, tamper evidence, law, and physical control. For example, when you turn on your computer for the first time, you initialize a good secret password, possibly signed by your private key. [Random number] Without that key, no-one is allowed to change the list of trusted parties from which your computer's TPM will accept bootloaders. We could make it illegal to subvert this system for the purpose of booting an operating system that the device's owner has not approved. Such as law would make spyware really illegal, even moreso than now, and would also ban the secret installation of DRM. We could design the TPM so that if you remove it, or tamper with it, it's really obvious — give it a fragile housing, for example, which is hard to replace after the time of manufacture, so it's really obvious to a computer's owner that someone has modified the device, possibly putting it in an unknown and untrustworthy state. We could even put a lock on the case. [computer that has had its lid ripped off]  I can see a lot of benefits to this, but there downsides, too. [Self-driving car] Consider self-driving cars. There's a lot of these around already, of course, designed by Google and others. It's easy to understand, how, on the one hand, self-driving cars are an incredibly great development. We are terrible drivers, and cars kill the shit out of us. It's the number 1 cause of death in America for people aged 5-34. [Mortality chart] I've been hit by a car. I've cracked up a car. I'm willing to stipulate that humans have no business driving at all. It's also easy to understand how we might be nervous about people being able to homebrew their own car firmware. On one hand, we'd want the source to cars to be open because we'd want to subject it to wide scrutiny. On the other hand, it will be plausible to say, "Cars are safer if they use a locked bootloader that only trusts government-certified firmware". And now we're back to whether you get to decide what your computer is doing. But there are two problems with this solution: First, it won't work. As the copyright wars have shown up, firmware locks aren't very effective against dedicated attackers. People who want to spread mayhem with custom firmware will be able to just that. What's more, it's not a good security approach: if vehicular security models depend on all the other vehicles being well-behaved and the unexpected never arising, we are dead meat. Self-driving cars must be conservative in their approach to their own conduct, and liberal in their expectations of others' conduct. [Defensive driving driver's ed sign/scan] This is the same advice you get in your first day of driver's ed, and it remains good advice even if the car is driving itself. Second, it invites some pretty sticky parallels. Remember the "information superhighway"? Say we try to secure our physical roads by demanding that the state (or a state-like entity) gets to certify the firmware of the devices that cruise its lanes. How would we articulate a policy addressing the devices on our (equally vital) metaphorical roads—with comparable firmware locks for PCs, phones, tablets, and other devices? After all, the general-purpose network means that MRIs, space-ships, and air-traffic control systems share the "information superhighway" with game consoles, Arduino-linked fart machines, and dodgy voyeur cams sold by spammers from the Pearl River Delta. And consider avionics and power-station automation. [Nuclear towers] This is a much trickier one. If the FAA mandates a certain firmware for 747s, it's probably going to want those 747s designed so that it and it alone controls the signing keys for their bootloaders. Likewise, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will want the final say on the firmware for the reactor piles. This may be a problem for the same reason that a ban on modifying car firmware is: it establishes the idea that a good way to solve problems is to let "the authorities" control your software. But it may be that airplanes and nukes are already so regulated that an additional layer of regulation wouldn't leak out into other areas of daily life — nukes and planes are subject to an extraordinary amount of no-notice inspection and reporting requirements that are unique to their industries. Second, there's a bigger problem with "owner controls": what about people who use computers, but don't own them? This is not a group of people that the IT industry has a lot of sympathy for, on the whole. [Encrufted desktop] An enormous amount of energy has been devoted to stopping non-owning users from inadvertently breaking the computers they are using, downloading menu-bars, typing random crap they find on the Internet into the terminal, inserting malware-infected USB sticks, installing plugins or untrustworthy certificates, or punching holes in the network perimeter. Energy is also spent stopping users from doing deliberately bad things, too. They install keyloggers and spyware to ensnare future users, misappropriate secrets, snoop on network traffic, break their machines and disable the firewalls. There's a symmetry here. DRM and its cousins are deployed by people who believe you can't and shouldn't be trusted to set policy on the computer you own. Likewise, IT systems are deployed by computer owners who believe that computer users can't be trusted to set policy on the computers they use. As a former sysadmin and CIO, I'm not going to pretend that users aren't a challenge. But there are good reasons to treat users as having rights to set policy on computers they don't own. Let's start with the business case. When we demand freedom for owners, we do so for lots of reasons, but an important one is that computer programmers can't anticipate all the contingencies that their code might run up against — that when the computer says yes, you might need to still say no. This is the idea that owners possess local situational awareness that can't be perfectly captured by a series of nested if/then statements. It's also where communist and libertarianis principles converge: [Hayek] • Friedrich Hayek thought that expertise was a diffuse thing, and that you were more likely to find the situational awareness necessary for good decisionmaking very close to the decision itself — devolution gives better results that centralization. • Karl Marx believed in the legitimacy of workers' claims over their working environment, saying that the contribution of labor was just as important as the contibution of capital, and demanded that workers be treated as the rightful "owners" of their workplace, with the power to set policy. [Coalface] For totally opposite reasons, they both believed that the people at the coalface should be given as much power as possible. The death of mainframes was attended by an awful lot of concern over users and what they might do to the enterprise. In those days, users were even more constrained than they are today. They could only see the screens the mainframe let them see, and only undertake the operations the mainframe let them undertake. When the PC and Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 appeared, employees risked termination by bringing those machines into the office— or by taking home office data to use with those machines. Workers developed computing needs that couldn't be met within the constraints set by the firm and its IT department, and didn't think that the legitimacy of their needs would be recognized. The standard responses would involve some combination of the following: • Our regulatory compliance prohibits the thing that will help you do your job better. • If you do your job that way, we won't know if your results are correct. • You only think you want to do that. • It is impossible to make a computer do what you want it to do. • Corporate policy prohibits this. These may be true. But often they aren't, and even when they are, they're the kind of "truths" that we give bright young geeks millions of dollars in venture capital to falsify—even as middle-aged admin assistants get written up by HR for trying to do the same thing. The personal computer arrived in the enterprise by the back door, over the objections of IT, without the knowledge of management, at the risk of censure and termination. Then it made the companies that fought it billions. Trillions. Giving workers powerful, flexible tools was good for firms because people are generally smart and want to do their jobs well. They know stuff their bosses don't know. So, as an owner, you don't want the devices you buy to be locked, because you might want to do something the designer didn't anticipate. And employees don't want the devices they use all day locked, because they might want to do something useful that the IT dept didn't anticipate. This is the soul of Hayekism — we're smarter at the edge than we are in the middle. The business world pays a lot of lip service to Hayek's 1940s ideas about free markets. But when it comes to freedom within the companies they run, they're stuck a good 50 years earlier, mired in the ideology of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his "scientific management". In this way of seeing things, workers are just an unreliable type of machine whose movements and actions should be scripted by an all-knowing management consultant, who would work with the equally-wise company bosses to determine the one true way to do your job. It's about as "scientific" as trepanation or Myers-Briggs personality tests; it's the ideology that let Toyota cream Detroit's big three. [GM v Toyota earnings] So, letting enterprise users do the stuff they think will allow them to make more money for their companies will sometimes make their companies more money. That's the business case for user rights. It's a good one, but really I just wanted to get it out of the way so that I could get down to the real meat: Human rights. [Another Human Rights Now fist]  This may seem a little weird on its face, but bear with me. Earlier this year, I saw a talk by Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics group at The MIT Media Lab. Herr's talks are electrifying. He starts out with a bunch of slides of cool prostheses: Legs and feet, hands and arms, and even a device that uses focused magnetism to suppress activity in the brains of people with severe, untreatable depression, to amazing effect. Then he shows this slide of him climbing a mountain. He's buff, he's clinging to the rock like a gecko. And he doesn't have any legs: just these cool mountain climbing prostheses. Herr looks at the audience from where he's standing, and he says, "Oh yeah, didn't I mention it? I don't have any legs, I lost them to frostbite." He rolls up his trouser legs to show off these amazing robotic gams, and proceeds to run up and down the stage like a mountain goat. The first question anyone asked was, "How much did they cost?" He named a sum that would buy you a nice brownstone in central Manhattan or a terraced Victorian in zone one in London. The second question asked was, "Well, who will be able to afford these? To which Herr answered "Everyone. If you have to choose between a 40-year mortgage on a house and a 40-year mortgage on legs, you're going to choose legs" So it's easy to consider the possibility that there are going to be people — potentially a lot of people — who are "users" of computers that they don't own, and where those computers are part of their bodies. [Cochlear implant] Mmost of the tech world understands why you, as the owner of your cochlear implants, should be legally allowed to choose the firmware for them. After all, when you own a device that is surgically implanted in your skull, it makes a lot of sense that you have the freedom to change software vendors. Maybe the company that made your implant has the very best signal processing algorithm right now, but if a competitor patents a superior algorithm next year, should you be doomed to inferior hearing for the rest of your life? And what if the company that made your ears went bankrupt? What if sloppy or sneaky code let bad guys do bad things to your hearing? These problems can only be overcome by the unambiguous right to change the software, even if the company that made your implants is still a going concern. That will help owners. But what about users? Consider some of the following scenarios: • You are a minor child and your deeply religious parents pay for your cochlear implants, and ask for the software that makes it impossible for you to hear blasphemy. • You are broke, and a commercial company wants to sell you ad-supported implants that listen in on your conversations and insert "discussions about the brands you love". • Your government is willing to install cochlear implants, but they will archive everything you hear and review it without your knowledge or consent. Far-fetched? The Canadian border agency was just forced to abandon a plan to fill the nation's airports with hidden high-sensitivity mics that were intended to record everyone's conversations. Will the Iranian government, or Chinese government, take advantage of this if they get the chance? Speaking of Iran and China, there are plenty of human rights activists who believe that boot-locking is the start of a human rights disaster. It's no secret that high-tech companies have been happy to build "lawful intercept" back-doors into their equipment to allow for warrantless, secret access to communications. As these backdoors are now standard, the capability is still there even if your country doesn't want it. In Greece, there is no legal requirement for lawful intercept on telcoms equipment. During the 2004/5 Olympic bidding process, an unknown person or agency switched on the dormant capability, harvested an unknown quantity of private communications from the highest level, and switched it off again Surveillance in the middle of the network is nowhere near as interesting as surveillance at the edge. As the ghosts of Messrs Hayek and Marx will tell you, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening at the coal-face that never makes it back to the central office. Even "democratic" governments know this. That's why the Bavarian government was illegally installing the "bundestrojan" — literally, state-trojan — on peoples' computers, gaining access to their files and keystrokes and much else besides. So it's a safe bet that the totalitarian governments will happily take advantage of boot-locking and move the surveillance right into the box. You may not import a computer into Iran unless you limit its trust-model so that it only boots up operating systems with lawful intercept backdoors built into it. Now, with an owner-controls model, the first person to use a machine gets to initialize the list of trusted keys and then lock it with a secret or other authorization token. What this means is that the state customs authority must initialize each machine before it passes into the country. Maybe you'll be able to do something to override the trust model. But by design, such a system will be heavily tamper-evident, meaning that a secret policeman or informant can tell at a glance whether you've locked the state out of your computer. And it's not just repressive states, of course, who will be interested in this. Remember that there are four major customers for the existing censorware/spyware/lockware industry: repressive governments, large corporations, schools, and paranoid parents. [Kid-tracking software] The technical needs of helicopter mums, school systems and enterprises are convergent with those of the governments of Syria and China. They may not share ideological ends, but they have awfully similar technical means to those ends. We are very forgiving of these institutions as they pursue their ends; you can do almost anything if you're protecting shareholders or children. For example, remember the widespread indignation, from all sides, when it was revealed that some companies were requiring prospective employees to hand over their Facebook login credentials as a condition of employment? These employers argued that they needed to review your lists of friends, and what you said to them in private, before determining whether you were suitable for employment. [Urine-tests] Facebook checks are the workplace urine test of the 21st century. They're a means of ensuring that your private life doesn't have any unsavoury secrets lurking in it, secrets that might compromise your work. The nation didn't buy this. From senate hearings to newspaper editorials, the country rose up against the practice. But no one seems to mind that many employers routinely insert their own intermediate keys into their employees' devices — phones, tablets and computers. This allows them to spy on your Internet traffic, even when it is "secure", with a lock showing in the browser. It gives your employer access to any sensitive site you access on the job, from your union's message board to your bank to Gmail to your HMO or doctor's private patient repository. And, of course, to everything on your Facebook page. There's wide consensus that this is OK, because the laptop, phone and tablet your employer issues to you are not your property. They are company property. And yet, the reason employers give us these mobile devices is because there is no longer any meaningful distinction between work and home. Corporate sociologists who study the way that we use our devices find time and again that employees are not capable of maintaining strict divisions between "work" and "personal" accounts and devices. [Desktop covered in mobile devices] America is the land of the 55-hour work-week, a country where few professionals take any meaningful vacation time, and when they do get away for a day or two, take their work-issued devices with them. Even in traditional workplaces, we recognized human rights. We don't put cameras in the toilets to curtail employee theft. If your spouse came by the office on your lunch break and the two of you went into the parking lot so that she or he could tell you that the doctor says the cancer is terminal, you'd be aghast and furious to discover that your employer had been spying on you with a hidden mic. But if you used your company laptop to access Facebook on your lunchbreak, wherein your spouse conveys to you that the cancer is terminal, you're supposed to be OK with the fact that your employer has been running a man-in-the-middle attack on your machine and now knows the most intimate details of your life. There are plenty of instances in which rich and powerful people — not just workers and children and prisoners — will be users instead of owners. Every car-rental agency would love to be able to lo-jack the cars they rent to you; remember, an automobile is just a computer you put your body into. They'd love to log all the places you drive to for "marketing" purposes and analytics. There's money to be made in finagling the firmware on the rental-car's GPS to ensure that your routes always take you past certain billboards or fast-food restaurants. [burger] But in general, the poorer and younger you are, the more likely you are to be a tenant farmer in some feudal lord's computational lands. The poorer and younger you are, the more likely it'll be that your legs will cease to walk if you get behind on payments. What this means is that any thug who buys your debts from a payday lender could literally — and legally — threaten to take your legs (or eyes, or ears, or arms, or insulin, or pacemaker) away if you failed to come up with the next installment. [Slimy collection notice] Earlier, I discussed how an owner override would work. It would involve some combination of physical access-control and tamper-evidence, designed to give owners of computers the power to know and control what bootloader and OS was running on their machine. How would a user-override work? An effective user-override would have to leave the underlying computer intact, so that when the owner took it back, she could be sure that it was in the state she believed it to be in. In other words, we need to protect users from owners and owners from users. Here's one model for that: Imagine that there is a bootloader that can reliably and accurately report on the kernels and OSes it finds on the drive. This is the prerequisite for state/corporate-controlled systems, owner-controlled systems, and user-controlled systems. Now, give the bootloader the power to suspend any running OS to disk, encrypting all its threads and parking them, and the power to select another OS from the network or an external drive. [Internet cafe] Say I walk into an Internet cafe, and there's an OS running that I can verify. It has a lawful interception back-door for the police, storing all my keystrokes, files and screens in an encrypted blob which the state can decrypt. I'm an attorney, doctor, corporate executive, or merely a human who doesn't like the idea of his private stuff being available to anyone who is friends with a dirty cop. So, at this point, I give the three-finger salute with the F-keys. This drops the computer into a minimal bootloader shell, one that invites me to give the net-address of an alternative OS, or to insert my own thumb-drive and boot into an operating system there instead. [Three finger salute] The cafe owner's OS is parked and I can't see inside it. But the bootloader can assure me that it is dormant and not spying on me as my OS fires up. When it's done, all my working files are trashed, and the minimal bootloader confirms it. This keeps the computer's owner from spying on me, and keeps me from leaving malware on the computer to attack its owner. There will be technological means of subverting this, but there is a world of difference between starting from a design spec that aims to protect users from owners (and vice-versa) than one that says that users must always be vulnerable to owners' dictates. Fundamentally, this is the difference between freedom and openness — between free software and open source. Now, human rights and property rights often come into conflict with one another. For example, landlords aren't allowed to enter your home without adequate notice. In many places, hotels can't throw you out if you overstay your reservation, provided that you pay the rack-rate for the rooms — that's why you often see these posted on the back of the room-door Reposession of leased goods — cars, for example — are limited by procedures that require notice and the opportunity to rebut claims of delinquent payments. When these laws are "streamlined" to make them easier for property holders, we often see human rights abuses. Consider robo-signing eviction mills, which used fraudulent declarations to evict homeowners who were up to date on their mortgages—and even some who didn't have mortgages. The potential for abuse in a world made of computers is much greater: your car drives itself to the repo yard. Your high-rise apartment building switches off its elevators and climate systems, stranding thousands of people until a disputed license payment is settled. Sounds fanciful? This has already happened with multi-level parking garages. Back in 2006, a 314-car Robotic Parking model RPS1000 garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, took all the cars in its guts hostage, locking down the software until the garage's owners paid a licensing bill that they disputed. They had to pay it, even as they maintained that they didn't owe anything. What the hell else were they going to do? And what will you do when your dispute with a vendor means that you go blind, or deaf, or lose the ability to walk, or become suicidally depressed? [Phrenology bust] The negotiating leverage that accrues to owners over users is total and terrifying. Users will be strongly incentivized to settle quickly, rather than face the dreadful penalties that could be visited on them in the event of dispute. And when the owner of the device is the state or a state-sized corporate actor, the potential for human rights abuses skyrockets. This is not to say that owner override is an unmitigated evil. Think of smart meters that can override your thermostat at peak loads. [Smart meter] Such meters allow us to switch off coal and other dirty power sources that can be varied up at peak times. [Dirty coal] But they work best if users — homeowners who have allowed the power-company to install a smart-meter — can't override the meters. What happens when griefers, crooks, or governments trying to quell popular rebellion use this to turn heat off during a hundred year storm? Or to crank heat to maximum during a heat-wave? The HVAC in your house can hold the power of life and death over you — do we really want it designed to allow remote parties to do stuff with it even if you disagree? The question is simple. Once we create a design norm of devices that users can't override, how far will that creep? Especially risky would be the use of owner override to offer payday loan-style services to vulnerable people: Can't afford artificial eyes for your kids? We'll subsidize them if you let us redirect their focus to sponsored toys and sugar-snacks at the store. Foreclosing on owner override, however, has its own downside. It probably means that there will be poor people who will not be offered some technology at all. If I can lo-jack your legs, I can lease them to you with the confidence of my power to repo them if you default on payments. If I can't, I may not lease you legs unless you've got a lot of money to begin with. But if your legs can decide to walk to the repo-depot without your consent, you will be totally screwed the day that muggers, rapists, griefers or the secret police figure out how to hijack that facility. [TV remote, labelled "legs" "arms" etc] It gets even more complicated, too, because you are the "user" of many systems in the most transitory ways: subway turnstiles, elevators, the blood-pressure cuff at the doctor's office, public buses or airplanes. It's going to be hard to figure out how to create "user overrides" that aren't nonsensical. We can start, though, by saying a "user" is someone who is the sole user of a device for a certain amount of time. This isn't a problem I know how to solve. Unlike the War on General Purpose Computers, the Civil War over them presents a series of conundra without (to me) any obvious solutions. These problems are a way off, and they only arise if we win the war over general purpose computing first But come victory day, when we start planning the constitutional congress for a world where regulating computers is acknowledged as the wrong way to solve problems, let's not paper over the division between property rights and human rights. This is the sort of division that, while it festers, puts the most vulnerable people in our society in harm's way. Agreeing to disagree on this one isn't good enough. We need to start thinking now about the principles we'll apply when the day comes. If we don't start now, it'll be too late.

[/noae]

A i ovo je zanimljivo:

Quote
Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.
Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy
     

QuoteTODD RUTHERFORD was 7 years old when he first understood the nature of supply and demand. He was with a bunch of other boys, one of whom showed off a copy of Playboy to giggles and intense interest. Todd bought the magazine for $5, tore out the racy pictures and resold them to his chums for a buck apiece. He made $20 before his father shut him down a few hours later.
A few years ago, Mr. Rutherford, then in his mid-30s, had another flash of illumination about how scarcity opens the door to opportunity.
He was part of the marketing department of a company that provided services to self-published writers — services that included persuading traditional media and blogs to review the books. It was uphill work. He could churn out press releases all day long, trying to be noticed, but there is only so much space for the umpteenth vampire novel or yet another self-improvement manifesto or one more homespun recollection of times gone by. There were not enough reviewers to go around.
Suddenly it hit him. Instead of trying to cajole others to review a client's work, why not cut out the middleman and write the review himself? Then it would say exactly what the client wanted — that it was a terrific book. A shattering novel. A classic memoir. Will change your life. Lyrical and gripping, Stunning and compelling. Or words to that effect.
In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50.
There were immediate complaints in online forums that the service was violating the sacred arm's-length relationship between reviewer and author. But there were also orders, a lot of them. Before he knew it, he was taking in $28,000 a month.
A polite fellow with a rakish goatee and an entrepreneurial bent, Mr. Rutherford has been on the edges of publishing for most of his career. Before working for the self-publishing house, he owned a distributor of inspirational books. Before that, he was sales manager for a religious publishing house. Nothing ever quite worked out as well as he hoped. With the reviews business, though, "it was like I hit the mother lode."
Reviews by ordinary people have become an essential mechanism for selling almost anything online; they are used for resorts, dermatologists, neighborhood restaurants, high-fashion boutiques, churches, parks, astrologers and healers — not to mention products like garbage pails, tweezers, spa slippers and cases for tablet computers. In many situations, these reviews are supplanting the marketing department, the press agent, advertisements, word of mouth and the professional critique.
But not just any kind of review will do. They have to be somewhere between enthusiastic and ecstatic.
"The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews," said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. "But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created."
Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.
Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines stating that all online endorsements need to make clear when there is a financial relationship, but enforcement has been minimal and there has been a lot of confusion in the blogosphere over how this affects traditional book reviews.
The tale of GettingBookReviews.com, which commissioned 4,531 reviews in its brief existence, is a story of a vast but hidden corner of the Internet, where Potemkin villages bursting with ardor arise overnight. At the same time, it shows how the book world is being transformed by the surging popularity of electronic self-publishing.
For decades a largely stagnant industry controlled from New York, book publishing is fragmenting and changing at high speed. Twenty percent of Amazon's top-selling e-books are self-published. They do not get to the top without adulation, lots and lots of it.
Mr. Rutherford's insight was that reviews had lost their traditional function. They were no longer there to evaluate the book or even to describe it but simply to vouch for its credibility, the way doctors put their diplomas on examination room walls. A reader hears about a book because an author is promoting it, and then checks it out on Amazon. The reader sees favorable reviews and is reassured that he is not wasting his time.
"I was creating reviews that pointed out the positive things, not the negative things," Mr. Rutherford said. "These were marketing reviews, not editorial reviews."
In essence, they were blurbs, the little puffs on the backs of books in the old days, when all books were physical objects and sold in stores. No one took blurbs very seriously, but books looked naked without them.
One of Mr. Rutherford's clients, who confidently commissioned hundreds of reviews and didn't even require them to be favorable, subsequently became a best seller. This is proof, Mr. Rutherford said, that his notion was correct. Attention, despite being contrived, draws more attention.
The system is enough to make you a little skeptical, which is where Mr. Rutherford finds himself. He is now suspicious of all online reviews — of books or anything else. "When there are 20 positive and one negative, I'm going to go with the negative," he said. "I'm jaded."
Trainloads of Books
"If there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was books," the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell wrote in 1964. He reflected on "the cataracts of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that moment," regretting that so few would be "worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading."
Since then, the pace of production has picked up quite a bit, although it is debatable whether Mr. Mitchell, who died in 1996, would be any more impressed by the quality. There has been a boom in what used to be called vanity publishers, which can efficiently produce physical copies that look just as good as anything from the traditional New York houses. But an even bigger factor is the explosion in electronic publishing. It used to take the same time to produce a book that it does to produce a baby. Now it takes about as long as boiling an egg.
In 2006, before Amazon supercharged electronic publishing with the Kindle, 51,237 self-published titles appeared as physical books, according to the data company Bowker. Last year, Bowker estimates that more than 300,000 self-published titles were issued in either print or digital form.
"I don't know how many people have a book in them trying to get out, but if they do, all the barriers are being removed," said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. "This is a golden age of being able to make yourself more widely known."
In theory, at least, good reviews are proof that a writer is finding his or her way, establishing an audience and has something worthwhile to say. So as soon as new authors confront that imperative line on their Amazon pages — "Be the first to review this item" — the temptation is great for them to start soliciting notices, at first among those closest at hand: family, friends and acquaintances. They want to be told how great they are.
"Nearly all human beings have unrealistically positive self-regard," said Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford professor and the author of several traditionally published books on business psychology. "When people tell us we're not as great as we thought we were, we don't like it. Anything less than a five-star review is an attack."
Mr. Sutton's best-known book, about bullies in the workplace, had 110 five-star reviews on Amazon late last week, none of which he paid for but a few of which he says he solicited. He once asked his wife to review one of his books. To his disappointment, she refused.
Mr. Rutherford's customers faced no such setbacks. Mark Husson, author of "LoveScopes: What Astrology Knows About You and the Ones You Love," wrote in an online testimonial about GettingBookReviews.com that "my review was more thorough than I expected. I wanted to go back out and buy my own book." On Amazon, "LoveScopes" had 70 reviews, 65 of which were five-star.
Peter Biadasz, a writer here in Tulsa, hired GettingBookReviews when he published "Write Your First Book." As a writing coach, he knows all about how writers obsess over bad reviews. "Nobody likes to hear their baby's ugly," he said. Still, he added: "I know the flaws in my book. I know my baby's not perfect."
But it is perfect, according to all 18 reviewers on Amazon, every one of whom gave it five stars.
"For me, it came out very favorably," Mr. Biadasz acknowledged. Most books, he cautioned, will not get such uniformly glowing notices.
This is true. For example, here's a derisive notice, recently posted on Amazon: "I was utterly bored." A second reader offered this: "Mediocre." A third: "This isn't good prose."
All three were offering their opinions of "The Great Gatsby." Quite a few reviews of the book, the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic that's among the greatest American novels of the last century, deem it somewhere between so-so and poor.
Roland Hughes, another self-published writer, has a theory about this: "Reviews for the established classics tend to come from actual readers."
A computer programmer and novelist based in Illinois, Mr. Hughes, 48, says he has spent about $20,000 on review services. "I'd like to say I view it as an education," he wrote in an e-mail. His goal, not yet accomplished, is to make that difficult leap from "being an author" to "being a recognized author."
His thriller "Infinite Exposure" had an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5 late last week on Barnes & Noble, while another of his books, "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer," got 5 out of 5.
"Some of these review services will actually ensure your title is read by someone who likes your genre of books," he added. "The last thing you want is someone who loves Christian and romance novels reviewing a science-fiction book which has no romance and calls into account the existence of God."
Finding the Reviewers
Traditional journalism jobs may be dwindling, but the Internet offers many new possibilities for writers. As soon as the orders started pouring in, Mr. Rutherford realized that he could not produce all the reviews himself.
How little, he wondered, could he pay freelance reviewers and still satisfy the authors? He figured on $15. He advertised on Craigslist and received 75 responses within 24 hours.
Potential reviewers were told that if they felt they could not give a book a five-star review, they should say so and would still be paid half their fee, Mr. Rutherford said. As you might guess, this hardly ever happened.
Amazon and other e-commerce sites have policies against paying for reviews. But Mr. Rutherford did not spend much time worrying about that. "I was just a pure capitalist," he said. Amazon declined to comment.
Mr. Rutherford's busiest reviewer was Brittany Walters-Bearden, now 24, a freelancer who had just returned to the United States from a stint in South Africa. She had recently married a former professional wrestler, and the newlyweds had run out of money and were living in a hotel in Las Vegas when she saw the job posting.
Ms. Walters-Bearden had the energy of youth and an upbeat attitude. "A lot of the books were trying to prove creationism," she said. "I was like, I don't know where I stand, but they make a solid case."
For a 50-word review, she said she could find "enough information on the Internet so that I didn't need to read anything, really." For a 300-word review, she said, "I spent about 15 minutes reading the book." She wrote three of each every week as well as press releases. In a few months, she earned $12,500.
"There were books I wished I could have gone back and actually read," she said. "But I had to produce 70 pieces of content a week to pay my bills."
An E-Book Best Seller
John Locke started as a door-to-door insurance salesman, was successful enough to buy his own insurance company, and then became a real estate investor. In 2009, he turned to writing fiction. By the middle of 2011, his nine novels, most of them suspense tales starring a former C.I.A. agent, Donovan Creed, had sold more than a million e-books through Amazon, making him the first self-published author to achieve that distinction.
Mr. Locke, now 61, has also published a nonfiction book, "How I Sold One Million E-Books in Five Months." One reason for his success was that he priced his novels at 99 cents, which encouraged readers to take a chance on someone they didn't know. Another was his willingness to try to capture readers one at a time through blogging, Twitter posts and personalized e-mail, an approach that was effective but labor-intensive.
"My first marketing goal was to get five five-star reviews," he writes. "That's it. But you know what? It took me almost two months!" In the first nine months of his publishing career, he sold only a few thousand e-books. Then, in December 2010, he suddenly caught on and sold 15,000 e-books.
One thing that made a difference is not mentioned in "How I Sold One Million E-Books." That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service's best customers. "I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more," he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford.  "I'm ready to roll."
Mr. Locke was secure enough in his talents to say that he did not care what the reviews said. "If someone doesn't like my book," he instructed, "they should feel free to say so." He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an "Amazon verified purchase" and increase the review's credibility.
In a phone interview from his office in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Locke confirmed the transaction. "I wouldn't hesitate to buy reviews from people that were honest," he said. Even before using GettingBookReviews.com, he experimented with buying attention through reviews. "I reached out every way I knew to people to try to get them to read my books."
Many of the 300 reviews he bought through GettingBookReviews were highly favorable, although it's impossible to say whether this was because the reviewers genuinely liked the books, or because of their well-developed tendency toward approval, or some combination of the two.
Mr. Locke is unwilling to say that paying for reviews made a big difference. "Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful," he said. "But it's a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience."
Mr. Rutherford, who says he is a little miffed that the novelist never gave him proper credit, is more definitive. "It played a role, for sure," he said. "All those reviews said to potential readers, 'You'll like it, too.' "
End of a Venture
By early 2011, things were going swimmingly. Mr. Rutherford rented a small office in Tulsa and hired two assistants, including an editor who polished his reviews for $2 each. He had plans for a multimillion-dollar review business that went far beyond just books. But the end was near.
The collapse was hastened by a young Oregon woman, Ashly Lorenzana, who gave Mr. Rutherford and GettingBookReviews.com perhaps their only bad review. Ms. Lorenzana, 24, self-published some of her journal entries as an exceedingly bleak book, "Sex, Drugs & Being an Escort" ("I hated today," reads one representative passage. "Today was full of hate. I hate, hate, hate.") In seeking some attention for it, she checked out Kirkus, a reviewing service founded in 1933 that has branched out into self-published books. Kirkus would review "Sex" for $425, a price that made her balk.
Another issue with Kirkus was that it did not guarantee its review would be positive. Ms. Lorenzana felt she would then be in the position of having spent a bundle just so someone she did not know could insult, belittle or devalue her work. On the Internet, you can usually get someone to do that free.
"You're taking a chance by putting your writing out there — a huge chance," she said. "You want validation that it's not a joke."
When Ms. Lorenzana found GettingBookReviews.com, $99 seemed reasonable. But the review did not show up as quickly as she expected. She posted a long, angry accusation against Mr. Rutherford and his service on several consumer sites, saying she had received better treatment from a reviewer whom she had hired for $5. ("You could tell that the person had really spent a few minutes checking out the information about my book and getting a feel for it before just diving into writing a meaningless review.")
Mr. Rutherford refunded her fee, but his problems were just beginning. Google suspended his advertising account, saying it did not approve of ads for favorable reviews. At about the same time, Amazon took down some, though not all, of his reviews. Mr. Rutherford dropped his first name in favor of his middle name, Jason, so that people who searched for him through Google would not automatically see Ms. Lorenzana's complaints.
These days, Mr. Rutherford is selling R.V.'s in Oklahoma City and planning a comeback in that narrow zone straddling what writers want and what the marketplace considers legitimate. Bowker, the data firm, says that as many as 600,000 self-published titles could appear in 2015, and they all will be needing their share of attention.
Mr. Rutherford tried to start another service, Authors Reviewing Authors — a scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours approach. Authors preferred receiving over giving, however, and that venture failed. Now he is developing a service where, for $99, he blogs and tweets about a book — he has 33,000 Twitter followers — and solicits reviews from bloggers and regular Amazon reviewers. No money is paid to the reviewers, so Google has approved ads for the service.
He says he regrets his venture into what he called "artificially embellished reviews" but argues that the market will take care of the problem of insincere overenthusiasm. "Objective consumers who purchase a book based on positive reviews will end up posting negative reviews if the work is not good," he said.
In other words, the (real) bad reviews will then drive out the (fake) good reviews. This seems to underestimate, however, the powerful motivations that writers have to rack up good reviews — and the ways they have to manipulate them until a better system comes along.
"It's a quagmire," Mr. Rutherford conceded.
A few months ago, he self-published a guide for aspiring authors called "The Publishing Guru on Writing." Late last week, it had one lone review on Amazon, two sentences from someone named Kelly. "Great advice," it read, giving the book five stars and, even more important, that all-important shot of credibility. Mr. Rutherford said he had no idea who Kelly was, but added, "I'm glad she liked it."

Doktorov priča sto na sat, na kraju mi ništa nije jasan. Je li to dajdžest što si postavio?

Ne, to je transkript celog govora, klikni na link, imaš ga u čitljivijem formatu.

ja sam ukapirao da je to govor iz Berlina, koji je dosta kraći

uostalom, sad sam našao dvije njegove knjige kolumni...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119338-Kim-Dotcom-Will-Create-a-New-Megaupload

Koji je on mazgov    Baj baj Ešelon, helou fridom 

Profesor Paul Ohm veli:

Don't Build a Database of Ruin 

Quote
Many businesses today find themselves locked in an arms race with competitors to see who can convert customer secrets into the most pennies. To try to win, they are building perfect digital dossiers, to use a phrase coined by Daniel Solove, massive data stores containing hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands, of facts about every member of our society. In my work, I've argued that these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret. This might be a secret about a medical condition, family history, or personal preference. It is a secret that, if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm. And these companies are combining their data stores, which will give rise to a single, massive database. I call this the Database of Ruin. Once we have created this database, it is unlikely we will ever be able to tear it apart.
I have become convinced that my earlier, bleak predictions about the Database of Ruin were in fact understated, arriving before it was clear how Big Data would accelerate the problem. Consider the most famous recent example of big data's utility in invading personal privacy: Target's analytics team can determine which shoppers are pregnant, and even predict their delivery dates, by detecting subtle shifts in purchasing habits. This is only one of countless similarly invasive Big Data efforts being pursued. In the absence of intervention, soon companies will know things about us that we do not even know about ourselves. This is the exciting possibility of Big Data, but for privacy, it is a recipe for disaster.
If we stick to our current path, the Database of Ruin will become an inevitable fixture of our future landscape, one that will be littered with lives ruined by the exploitation of data assembled for profit. But we can chart a different course, in various ways. I think our brightest engineers can develop innovative privacy-enhancing technologies which will enable new techniques for data analytics that minimize costs to privacy. I hope that public institutions and industry, through self-regulation, will devise ways to better balance the burdens on privacy and the benefits of Big Data. If nothing else, I anticipate that society will slowly develop new norms for engaging with the massive amount of information collected about us, creating informal rules governing when and how it is appropriate to release, collect, and use data, the way minors have learned to speak and listen carefully on social networks.
But every one of these correctives requires the same thing: time. We need to slow things down, to give our institutions, individuals, and processes the time they need to find new and better solutions. The only way we will buy this time is if companies learn to say, "no" to some of the privacy-invading innovations they're pursuing. Executives should require those who work for them to justify new invasions of privacy against a heavy burden, weighing them against not only the financial upside, but also against the potential costs to individuals, society, and the firm's reputation. Companies should do this not only as matter of good corporate social responsibility, but also because it will likely square with the government's recommendations for protecting privacy, which seem to advise caution and deliberation, under the banner of "context."
Earlier this year, Federal government officials released two privacy reports — the White House's White Paper and the FTC's Final Privacy Report — that together describe a national privacy policy for the foreseeable future. Although the two reports vary on some particulars, they both point to context as a central, important, and fundamental measuring stick we should use to assess decisions that bear on personal privacy.
The FTC report offers three broad recommendations: Privacy by Design, Simplified Choice for Businesses and Consumers, and Greater Transparency. In discussing the second recommendation — a call for simplified and more transparent choice — the FTC suggests a carve out. "Companies do not need to provide choice before collecting and using consumer data for practices that are consistent with the context of the transaction or the company's relationship with the consumer, or are required or specifically authorized by law." Under this standard, it might be "consistent with the context," for a company in a direct business relationship with a customer to use that customer's information to deliver ads for its other services, but it might be inconsistent with the context — thus requiring notice and choice — to sell that information to third-party advertisers, the FTC explains.
Similarly, the White House white paper defines a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," which would protect, among other things, "Respect for Context." "Consumers have a right to expect that companies will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data," the paper explains.
These parallel pronouncements mean that companies that deal with personal information (meaning all companies, really) need to focus much more often than they have on the history of privacy practices in their industries. Although neither report defines in depth what it means by the word "context," to me the message seems to be: do not push the privacy envelope. Companies that use personal information in ways that go well beyond the practices of their competitors risk crossing the line from responsible steward to reckless abuser of consumer privacy.
The lesson is plain: compete vigorously and beat your competitors in every legitimate way, except when it comes to privacy invasion. Too many companies have learned this lesson the hard way, launching invasive new services that have triggered class action lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and media firestorms. These companies knew that they were treading where others had feared to go. This may have felt like an exciting opportunity. It should have felt instead like perilous risk-taking, because it meant hurtling beyond the contextual borderlands defined by past practice.

pornićari sjebali FileSonic?

http://www.b92.net/tehnopolis/internet.php?yyyy=2012&mm=08&nav_id=639236

Aj, dobro, ima li sad kakvih izveštaja o porastu prihoda tih filmskih i muzičkih producentskih kuća?

Osnivač TPB uhapšen u Kambodži

QuoteNjega očekuje zatvorska kazna u trajanju od godinu dana zbog kršenja autorskih prava, prenosi agencija AP.

Godfrid Svartholm Varg uhapšen je prošle nedelje, rekao je portparol policije Kambodže. On je, zajedno sa ostalim osnivačima pomenutog sajta osuđen od strane švedskog suda na godinu dana zatvora, a naređeno im je i da plate kaznu od 30 miliona kruna (3,6 miliona dolara).

Varg se nije pojavio na poslednjem saslušanju 2010. godine, a njegov advokat tada je rekao da se Varg razboleo u Kambodži i da se neće pojaviti na suđenju.

Osnivač The Pirate Baya trenutno se nalazi u zatvoru u Kambodži i čeka na ekstradiciju Švedskoj.

http://www.b92.net/tehnopolis/vesti.php?yyyy=2012&mm=09&nav_id=639752

Da, baš sam kreno to da okačim. Evo sajta koji prati situaciju:

http://freeanakata.se/index

PROKLETNICI! NE NJEGA!
PAJRAT BEJ JE MAJKA!

Ako mu posle zatvora u Kambodži uopšte bude do života...

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 27-08-2012, 11:22:02
Šta se događa sa vašom elektronskom bibliotekom knjiga ili kolekcijom digitalne muzike ili igara, kad umrete? Za sada, svi mi koji ove stvari kupujemo legalno, to radimo pod uslovima da su prava koja imamo spram materijala (licenca za njihovo korišćenje, ne i vlasništvo nad materijalom u bilo kom obliku) netransferabilna.

Who inherits your iTunes library? Why your digital books and music may go to the grave 

Quote

Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.
Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.
And one's heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. "I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs," says Evan Carroll, co-author of "Your Digital Afterlife." "Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult."
Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn't have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don't actually own them.
Apple /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL +0.09%   and Amazon.com /quotes/zigman/63011/quotes/nls/amzn AMZN +1.88%   grant "nontransferable" rights to use content, so if you buy the complete works of the Beatles on iTunes, you cannot give the White Album to your son and Abbey Road to your daughter.
According to Amazon's terms of use, "You do not acquire any ownership rights in the software or music content." Apple limits the use of digital files to Apple devices used by the account holder.
"That account is an asset and something of value," says Deirdre R. Wheatley-Liss, an estate planning attorney at Fein, Such, Kahn & Shepard in Parsippany, N.J.
But can it be passed on to one's heirs?
Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. "The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century," says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who've died, but the regulations don't cover digital files purchased.
Apple and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
There are still few legal and practical ways to inherit e-books and digital music, experts say. And at least one lawyer has a plan to capitalize on what may become be a burgeoning market. David Goldman, a lawyer in Jacksonville, says he will next month launch software, DapTrust, to help estate planners create a legal trust for their clients' online accounts that hold music, e-books and movies. "With traditional estate planning and wills, there's no way to give the right to someone to access this kind of information after you're gone," he says.
Here's how it works: Goldman will sell his software for $150 directly to estate planners to store and manage digital accounts and passwords. And, while there are other online safe-deposit boxes like AssetLock and ExecutorSource that already do that, Goldman says his software contains instructions to create a legal trust for accounts. "Having access to digital content and having the legal right to use it are two totally different things," he says.
The simpler alternative is to just use your loved one's devices and accounts after they're gone—as long as you have the right passwords.
Chester Jankowski, a New York-based technology consultant, says he'd look for a way to get around the licensing code written into his 15,000 digital files. "Anyone who was tech-savvy could probably find a way to transfer those files onto their computer—without ending up in Guantanamo," he says. But experts say there should be an easier solution, and a way such content can be transferred to another's account or divided between several people."We need to reform and update intellectual-property law," says Dazza Greenwood, lecturer and researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.
Technology pros say the need for such reform is only going to become more pressing. "A significant portion of our assets is now digital," Carroll says. U.S. consumers spend nearly $30 on e-books and MP3 files every month, or $360 a year, according to e-commerce company Bango. Apple alone has sold 300 million iPods and 84 million iPads since their launches. Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle Fire, but analysts estimate it has nearly a quarter of the U.S. tablet market.

Brus Vilis je (navodno) rešio da ovde uleti u ring.

Bruce Willis 'considering iTunes legal action' against Apple

QuoteBruce Willis, the Hollywood actor, is said to be considering legal action against Apple so he can leave his iTunes music collection to his three daughters.

The 57-year-old action star has reportedly spent thousands of dollars on digital music, which he wants to leave to daughters Rumer, 24, Scout, 20, and Tallaluh, 18.

Existing iTunes rules mean he cannot do so however, as purchased music is only "borrowed" under a license.

If Willis is able to successfully challenge the small print, it could benefit millions of frustrated iTunes users who haven't had the resources to fight the technology giant.

He is said to be considering two approaches to the digital battle. His first option would be asking his lawyers to establish a family trust to hold the downloads.

A second approach would be supporting ongoing legal tussles in other US states, where complainants are already seeking to gain more rights to their music.

With more and more people buying digital media products, the issue of ownership is becoming an increasing problem with many not realising they do not hold the rights to their books, music, films or games.

Solicitor Chris Walton told The Daily Mail: "Lots of people will be surprised on learning all those tracks and books they have bought over the years don't actually belong to them. It's only natural you would want to pass them on to a loved one.

"The law will catch up, but ideally Apple and the like will update their policies and work out the best solution for their customers."

Avaj, Vilisova žena Ema veli da je sve izmišljotina   Jebeni Telegraf

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/

Gaff je ovo već postovao na odgovarajućoj temi u gornjem delu foruma, ali treba da bude i na ovoj:

How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards [UPDATED] 

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction's most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you're not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service Ustream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, "The Doctor's Wife." Where Gaiman's face had been were the words, "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement." What the hell?
Jumping onto Twitter, people who had been watching the livestream began asking what was going on. How could an award ceremony have anything to do with copyright infringement?
Bestselling science fiction author Tobias Buckell tweeted:
   

tobiasbuckell @tobiasbuckell   Oh, FFS. Ustream just shut down live worldcon feed for copyright infringement. 3 Sep 12   

   
• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

 
And then it began to dawn on people what happened. Gaiman had just gotten an award for his Doctor Who script. Before he took the stage, the Hugo Awards showed clips from his winning episode, along with clips from some other Doctor Who episodes that had been nominated, as well as a Community episode.
Wrote Macworld editorial director Jason Snell:
   

Jason Snell @jsnell   Ustream just shut down the #Hugos live stream because they showed clips of the TV nominees. Automated copyright patrols ruin more things. 3 Sep 12   

   
• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

 
This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn't, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.
And then, it got worse. Amid more cries of dismay on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere, the official Worldcon Twitter announced:
    > Chicon 7 @chicon_7   We are sorry to report that #Ustream will not resume the video feed. #chicon7 #hugos #worldcon 3 Sep 12   

   
• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

 
And with that, the broadcast was officially cut off. Dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards. Sure, we could read what was happening on Twitter, or get the official winner announcement on the Hugo website, but that is hardly the same. We wanted to see our heroes and friends on that stage, and share the event with them. In the world of science fiction writing, the Hugo Awards are kind of like the Academy Awards. Careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi. You want to see and hear it if you can.
But Ustream's incorrectly programmed copyright enforcement squad had destroyed our only access. It was like a Cory Doctorow story crossed with RoboCop 2, with DRM robots going crazy and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of perfectly innocent broadcasts.
And who did we have recourse to? We couldn't file a legal complaint in time to see io9's Charlie Jane Anders accept the Hugo for best novelette. And Ustream was completely unresponsive. As of today, September 3, people who posted queries on UStream's site have yet to be answered.
The point is, our ability to broadcast was entirely dependent on poorly-programmed bots. And once those bots had made their incorrect decision, there was absolutely nothing we could do to restart the signal, as it were. In case anyone still believes that copyright rules can't stop free speech or snuff out a community, the automated censorship of the Hugo Awards is a case in point.
Robots killed our legitimate broadcast. Welcome to the present.
UPDATE: Ustream's CEO Brad Hunstable has finally made a public apology about the incident, but his explanation is quite odd. The good news is that Ustream will no longer be using Vobile, a third-party service that does automated infringement takedowns. The odd part is that apparently Ustream couldn't restart its own live feed once Vobile had shut it down. At least, that's what Hunstable claims.
Hunstable writes on the Ustream blog:
 

Very unfortunately at 7:43 p.m. Pacific time, the channel was automatically banned in the middle of an acceptance speech by author Neil Gaiman due to "copyright infringement." This occurred because our 3rd party automated infringement system, Vobile, detected content in the stream that it deemed to be copyrighted. Vobile is a system that rights holders upload their content for review on many video sites around the web. The video clips shown prior to Neil's speech automatically triggered the 3rd party system at the behest of the copyright holder.
Our editorial team and content monitors almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages about the ban and attempted to restore the broadcast. Unfortunately, we were not able to lift the ban before the broadcast ended. We had many unhappy viewers as a result, and for that I am truly sorry.
As background, our system works like this in order to support a large volume of broadcasters using our free platform. Users of our paid, ad-free Pro Broadcasting service are automatically white listed to avoid situations like this and receive hands-on client support.
I have suspended use of this third-party system until we are able to recalibrate the settings so that we can better balance the needs of broadcasters, viewers, and copyright holders. While we are committed to protecting copyright, we absolutely must ensure our amazing and democratizing platform allows legal broadcasters to Ustream their events and shows. This is our first and foremost obligation to our users and community.

I applaud Ustream for discarding Vobile, but remain puzzled about why the company couldn't control its own technology and restart the feed as soon as they realized the mistake.
         







Sve one naučnofantastične priče koje su objašnjavale kako će roboti uništiti civilizaciju deluju ubedljivije. Nakon onog gafa sa kjuriositijem pa sad ovoga pokazuje se da je automatizovana pretraga za prekršiocima kopirajta... apsurd.

A posle Huga, slično je prošla i konvencija demokrata:


YouTube Flags Democrats' Convention Video on Copyright Grounds

(via Wired)


http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/youtube-flags-democrats-convention-video-on-copyright-grounds/

Ne pratim mnogo youtube kanala, ali evo, ovaj lik na interesantan način zbori i repuje o raznim temama....u ovom slučaju o netu, big brother sindromu itd:

RAP NEWS 15: Big Brother is WWWatching You

Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia

QuoteEver since the arrest last week of Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, there has been the usual speculation of who in the United States or Sweden 'paid off' Cambodia to make the move. Of course, with no supporting evidence claims that such a deal exists can be brushed off as pure fantasy. But today, in another one of those unusual political coincidences, Cambodian officials announced the "strengthening of bilateral ties" with Sweden – along with a $59 million aid package sweetener.

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-arrest-followed-by-59m-swedish-aid-package-for-cambodia-120905/

Ako koristite torente da dobavite neke od najpopularnijih fajlova verovatno ste pod prismotrom neke od desetak firmi koje se prismotrom bave:

Honeytrap reveals mass monitoring of downloaders 

Quote
Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within 3 hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online - and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.
The news comes from this week's SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered "massive monitoring" of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been taking place for at least three years.
BitTorrent is a data distribution protocol that splits an uploaded digital media file into many parts and shares it around a swarm of co-operating servers. Birmingham's fake server acted like a part of a file-sharing swarm and the connections made to it quickly revealed the presence of file-sharing monitors run by "copyright enforcement organisations, security companies and even government research labs".

  "We only detected monitors in Top 100 torrents; this implies that copyright enforcement agencies are monitoring only the most popular content music and movie on public trackers," the team says in its presentation paper. "Almost everyone that shares popular films and music illegally will be connected to by a monitor and will have their IP address logged," says Chothia.
Given the vast numbers of people whose IP addresses will have now been logged, the finding raises the question over what enforcement outfits now plan to do with their harvested data. Have they gathered a war chest of targets for future copyright infringement lawsuits? Or are they simply assessing the scale of the problem to make governments act?
If it is for lawsuits, the standard of evidence may not be enough, says Chothia. "All the monitors connected to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content. However, they did not actually collect any of the files being shared. So it is questionable whether the observed evidence of file-sharing would stand up in court."

Što se jednostavno sšreči programom PeerBlock: http://www.peerblock.com/

http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/possession-wins-weekend-box-office-goes-hell-55531

Evo im ga sad na! 

In the worst box office weekend of the year, Lionsgate's exorcism thriller "Possession" repeated as the No 1 movie taking in just $9.5 million.

The No. 2 film, 'Lawless," in its second week, finished well behind with $6 million, and newcomer "The Words" was third at $5 million. The week's only other wide opener, Summit Entertainment's "The Cold Light of Day," managed just $1.8 million.

Here's how bad it was. If the numbers stand, it will be the first weekend since 2008 in which no film cracked the $10 million mark. Blame it on football season and back-to-school preparations or unappealing fare, but whatever the reason the box office clearly suffered.

Even the film industry's attention was focused elsewhere, with many of the town's execs at the Toronto International Film Festival or the Venice Film Festival. The festival crowds didn't miss much at home.

How one game developer is making The Pirate Bay work for him 

Quote
Figuring out the best way to handle game piracy continues to be a major concern for developers both big and small. Some major publishers are increasingly looking to an unpiratable free-to-play model to blunt piracy's effects, while some smaller developers have offered amnesty sales to try and coax some money out of pirates, or tried to engage pirates in conversation about why they download games illegally rather than buying them.
McPixel developer Sos Sosowski has taken a different tack, one that gives new meaning to the phrase "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Starting this morning, and through the entire weekend, Sosowski is actively directing people to pirate his game using the Torrent link posted on The Pirate Bay, and asking them to donate whatever they want in return. What's more, the pay-what-you-want sale is being actively promoted on the front page of The Pirate Bay, where tens of millions of visitors will see a short, conciliatory message from Sosowski (seen above).
"I know that not everyone can afford entertainment. But everyone needs it," the message reads in part. "And even though I make games for a living. I am most happy just to see people enjoy them. So today, you can download a torrent of my game. And if you like it, throw some coins in my general direction."
This isn't the first time The Pirate Bay has donated its heavily trafficked front page space to promoting a specific project. Since January, dozens of artists have been featured as part of The Promo Bay, which is what the site calls its rotating "promotional apparatus" for unnnoticed artists of all stripes. But while The Promo Bay effort attracted over 5,000 applications in its first three months of existence, almost 90 percent of those seeking promotion were musicians, with the remainder reportedly mainly made up primarily of authors and moviemakers. This is the first time the front page banner has been used to promote an indie video game (though the front page featured print-and-play collectible strategy card game Empires & Generals back in May, and the banner has linked to internal searches for Grand Theft Auto in the past).
Sosowski's path to The Promo Bay didn't go through the normal application process, though. It all started last month, when Sosowski tells Ars he was actually excited to find that McPixel, which launched in late June, had become popular enough to warrant a torrent on The Pirate Bay. Sosowski went into the comments for that Pirate Bay torrent post, politely asking for donations and offering a few free, legitimate gift codes for those who felt they really couldn't pay anything.
That kindhearted response attracted the notice of a Redditor who said "these kind of developers truly deserve recognition." The Reddit community apparently agreed, as the screenshot of The Pirate Bay comment attracted enough attention to hit the top position on Reddit's front page, leading to a barrage of traffic that shut down the official McPixel web site (The Pirate Bay torrent continued to work just fine, we assume). It wasn't until after the site was retored and Sosowski hosted a popular Ask Me Anything post about the deal that The Pirate Bay came calling, offering him the promotional spot "upon noticing how cool I am about all that," as he put it to Ars Technica.

The front page of McPixel.net currently features a large link to The Pirate Bay torrent download, which features a full version of the game for Mac, PC, and Linux (versions for iOS, Android and Blackberry are also available for sale). You have to scroll down well below that to find a PayPal donation link for the game.
As of this writing late Friday afternoon (less than a day after the promotion started), Sosowski says he's has sold over 300 copies of the game at an average of $1.43 each. That might seem like a slow start for the donation effort, especially considering that the BitTorrent download recently hit over 3,000 simultaneous seeders. It also seems a bit small compared to other pay-what-you-want download efforts like The Humble Indie Bundle, which quickly made millions taking donations of as little as a penny for a package of five well known indie games (though even that effort ran in to its own piracy problems).
Still, it's a significant increase from the 100 or so copies of McPixel Sosowski sold for $10 on the game's first day of availability (before attention from Reddit and "Let's Play" videos on YouTube).
For his part, Sosowski isn't worried that promoting a game on a site known for piracy might be more effective at attracting more pirates than actual paying customers. "The game was already available on TPB beforehand, and I believe if someone didn't want to pay, he just didn't," Sosowski told Ars. "It is up to people to decide how much they would like to pay for the game, and I have no worries. I am happy that more people can enjoy my game. ... TPB is one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and simply having a game there is a form of advertisement and promotion.
And since he doesn't see any direct profit from those using a Pirate Bay torrent anyway, Sosowski said that his best recourse was to tell his story to that audience and hope that some of them choose to pay up. "I think that if people who torrent the game are aware that there is a live person behind the game, and makes the game for a living, they are more willing to provide support than to a giant lifeless studio," he said.
"That's what I would probably do, at least."
   

koristi li iko još emulu

emula majka kakvi toretni

torenti su za živčane

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

privremeno bar ne radi.

Koje su ono beše alternative, znam da ima još par sajtova sa skoro istom bazom pdf poslastica?

http://en.bookfi.org/

(i ovo povremeno puca, a library genesis nije radila nijednom kad sam pokušala u prošlih par meseci)

www.libgen.info
vidi ovo

Quote from: chovekoid on 11-09-2012, 18:26:36
www.libgen.info
vidi ovo

ili http://libgen.org/

Oh, ima ludaka!!!!!

Author Threatens to Sue Book Reviewers over Trademark Infringement 

Quote
For those who have not read The Onion today, I have your daily dose of crazy all ready for you.
Jazan Wild, a comics creator who is most well known for suing NBC in 2010 for $60 million over copyright infringement, is now pursuing a different lawsuit against HarperCollins. Wild is claiming that one recent HC title, Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr, infringes upon his trademark.
Not copyright – trademark.
Wild is claiming that HarperCollins is using the trademarked phrase as the title of a book to intentionally confuse readers into thinking that a fantasy novel which was published last week was related to a comics series which Wild had published in 2006.
Crazy, right?  Any sane person would have put a few minutes thought into the matter and realized that such an obvious phrase as Carnival of Souls would likely have been used as a title many times before. In fact, Bookfinder turned up at least a couple dozen different books, movies, TV episodes, and more – some of which dates back to 1962. And if you look inside books, Google says that it found the phrase no less than 5600 times (with some duplication, obviously).
But that's not the end of the craziness. No, it's with the book reviewers that the crazy truly begins.
Wild is now sending cease and desist letters to any book reviewer who has mentioned or posted an excerpt from the new novel. He's accusing them of trademark infringement.
The Bookalicious blog posted a copy of an email they got from Wild today. This blog posted a review of the new novel, not an excerpt, and Wild is freaking out over the fact that they mention the title of the book:

To whom it may concern,
This is a cease and desist. "Carnival Of Souls" is a trademark owned by Jazan Wild and Wild alone has the exclusive right on the United States of America to use the mark in classes 16 and 41 of which a novel is included. Posting a chapter from a novel using this mark is a willful and malicious infringement of Wild's mark. Please remove.
The Trademark Infringement:

>http://bookalicious.org/2012/09/review-carnival-of-souls-by-melissa-marr/

The guy also shows up in the comments thread following that notice to continue the craziness. For a raving lunatic he is quite a nice person.
I probably don't have to say this but:
Authors, don't be this guy. First, don't file frivolous nonsensical lawsuits but most importantly don't threaten book bloggers. One threat sent to one blog and everyone is going to know about it. The book community is large but juicy stories like this will spread fast.
In the past I've pointed to the Lendink lynch mob as an example of how not to react to piracy, and one of my recommendations was to figure out who to ask for advice.  I've already pointed out a couple law blogs, so let me add a third source.  Dear Author is a book review blog run by a lawyer, Jane Litte. In addition to the book reviews each week she posts on a legal topic relevant to authors. I'm going to pass this along to her and see if she thinks it's worth explaining just how crazy this guy is.

New Zealand PM apologises to Kim Dotcom over spying 'error'

Quote

New Zealand's spy agency illegally carried out surveillance on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, an official report shows, prompting an apology from the prime minister and dealing a possible blow to US efforts to extradite him.
Washington wants the 38-year-old German national, also known as Kim Schmitz, to be sent to the US to face charges of internet piracy and breaking copyright laws.
The report, published on Thursday by the Inspector-General of Intelligence, the watchdog for New Zealand spy agencies, found the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) had spied on Dotcom, despite a law prohibiting it from snooping on New Zealand citizens and residents. The flamboyant Dotcom attained New Zealand permanent resident status in 2010.
The prime minister, John Key, said: "It is the GCSB's responsibility to act within the law, and it is hugely disappointing that in this case its actions fell outside the law", adding the incident was caused by "basic errors".
He apologised to Dotcom and all New Zealanders, saying they were entitled to be protected by the law but it had failed them.
New Zealand police asked the GCSB to keep track of Dotcom and his colleagues before a raid in late January on his rented country estate near Auckland, in which computers and hard drives, artwork, and cars were confiscated.
The illegal surveillance may deal another blow to the US extradition case after a New Zealand court ruled in June that search warrants used in the raid on Dotcom's home were illegal.
The raid followed a request by the FBI for the arrest of Dotcom for leading a group that netted $175m (£108m) since 2005 by allegedly copying and distributing music, films and other copyrighted content without authorisation.
Dotcom maintains that the Megaupload site was merely an online storage facility, and has accused Hollywood of lobbying the US government to prosecute him.
American authorities are appealing against a New Zealand court decision that Dotcom should be allowed to see the evidence on which the extradition hearing will be based.
The extradition hearing has been delayed until March.

Vrijeme za fejspalmovanje.

Former Copyright Boss: New Technology Should Be Presumed Illegal Until Congress Says Otherwise

Quote
from the wtf dept One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we've (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society -- one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. This is a hugely valuable thing, and it's why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don't upset the apple cart of copyright, before they're allowed to exist. I'm not joking. Mr. Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case (pdf).

As you hopefully recall, Aereo is the online TV service, backed by Barry Diller, that sets you up with your very own physical TV antenna on a rooftop in Brooklyn, connected to a device that will then stream to you online what that antenna picks up. This ridiculously convoluted setup is an attempt to route around the ridiculous setup of today's copyright law -- something that Oman was intimately involved in creating with the 1976 Copyright Act. The TV networks sued Aereo, but were unable to get an injunction blocking the service. Oman's amicus brief seeks to have that ruling overturned, and argues that an injunction is proper.

But he goes much further than that in his argument, even to the point of claiming that with the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress specifically intended new technologies to first apply to Congress for permission, before releasing new products on the market that might upset existing business models: >Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.

This is, to put it mildly, crazy talk. He is arguing that anything even remotely disruptive and innovative, must first go through the ridiculous process of convincing Congress that it should be allowed, rather than relying on what the law says and letting the courts sort out any issues. In other words, in cases of disruptive innovation, assume that new technologies are illegal until proven otherwise. That's a recipe for killing innovation.

Under those rules, it's unlikely that we would have radio, cable TV, VCRs, DVRs, mp3 players, YouTube and much, much more. That's not how innovation or the law works. You don't assume everything innovative is illegal just because it upsets some obsolete business models. But that appears to be how Oman thinks the world should act. Stunningly, he even seems to admit that he'd be fine with none of the above being able to come to market without Congressional approval, because he approvingly cites the dissent in the Betamax case (which made clear that the VCR was legal), which argues that the VCR should only be deemed legal with an act of Congress to modify the Copyright Act. You would think that the success of the VCR in revitalizing the movie industry would show just how ridiculous that is... but in Oman's copyright-centric world, the rules are "first, do not allow any innovation that upsets my friends."

Elsewhere, he argues -- quite correctly -- that Aereo's design was clearly done with the help of lawyers to stay on the legal side of the line, but he gets the exact wrong lesson out of that:
>The Aereo system was not designed for the purpose of speed, convenience and efficiency. With its thousands of dime-sized antennae and its electronic loop-the-loops, it appears to have been designed by a copyright lawyer peering over the shoulder of an engineer to exploit what appeared to Aereo to be a loophole in the law and shoehorn the Aereo business model into the Cablevision decision. In other words, he's admitting that the system was designed carefully to remain on the right side of the law... but he's somehow upset that this is possible. In his incredible worldview, you should not be able to design around the contours and exceptions to copyright law -- because anything that upsets Hollywood is, by default, illegal.

Perhaps we've learned who put the clause in the '76 Act that explicitly says that the law should be used to stop disruptive innovation if it gets in the way of the status quo.

Either way, he goes on at length, claiming that his efforts in helping to put together the '76 Act and his other work on copyright were continually focused on benefiting the copyright holder. He never mentions that this is not the purpose of copyright law. It is the means. But the intent is to benefit the public. Oman does not ever seem to take that into consideration.
>Indisputably, Congress drafted the Copyright Act to prevent the creative efforts of authors from being usurped by new technologies. That core principle is at the heart of the Copyright Act. Congressional intent would be undercut by any decision that would sanction the use of technologies which could be used indirectly to undermine its goals. Congress enacted a forward-looking statute that would protect those who create precisely so they have incentives to create. Actually, that's quite disputable. The Copyright Act can only be designed to benefit the public. The means of doing so is by creating the ability of copyright holders to exclude, but that is hardly the only incentive to create. Allowing new technologies that disrupt old business models does not necessarily remove the incentive to create. Instead, as we've shown over and over again, the incentive to create appears to have increased greatly, even as respect for copyright has weakened tremendously over the past decade. So I fail to see how Congress' "intent" could possibly be undermined by new disruptive technologies coming along -- without permission -- and creating new and expansive markets that both help the public and provide new opportunities for content creators.

šta se dešava sa pirackim zalivom, već drugi dan mi je nedostupan?

Quote from: Alexdelarge on 03-10-2012, 09:56:22
šta se dešava sa pirackim zalivom, već drugi dan mi je nedostupan?

http://torrentfreak.com/prq-police-raid-takes-down-dozens-of-file-sharing-sites-121001/

Vraćaju se:
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-returns-after-2-days-downtime-121003/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29

ja sam već uplovio u zaliv. moja crna zastava sa lobanjom i kostima se vijori.

Naravno, sad tek ne treba da se opustimo i verujemo im:

MPAA chief admits: SOPA and PIPA "are dead, they're not coming back." 

Quote
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—MPAA CEO Chris Dodd didn't seem eager to talk about the aftermath of SOPA when he spoke at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on Tuesday night. The former Connecticut senator would have preferred to wax poetic about innovation, California, and the collaboration between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. "Every studio I deal with has a distribution agreement with Google," said Dodd. "We've divided up this discussion in a way that doesn't really get us moving along as a people."
He couldn't ignore it for long. Gavin Newsom brought it up only briefly, but reporters approached Dodd after the event to get more details on how he viewed the SOPA aftermath, as well as the MPAA's Internet lobbying more generally. SOPA and its sister bill PIPA were both definitively killed off earlier this year after an overwhelming campaign of online action by citizens and tech companies.
Dodd sounded chastened, with a tone that was a far cry from the rhetoric the MPAA was putting out in January. "When SOPA-PIPA blew up, it was a transformative event," said Dodd. "There were eight million e-mails [to elected representatives] in two days." That caused senators to run away from the legislation. "People were dropping their names as co-sponsors within minutes, not hours," he said.
"These bills are dead, they're not coming back," said Dodd. "And they shouldn't." He said the MPAA isn't focused on getting similar legislation passed in the future, at the moment. "I think we're better served by sitting down [with the tech sector and SOPA opponents] and seeing what we agree on."
Still, Dodd did say that some of the reaction to SOPA and PIPA was "over the top"—specifically, the allegations of censorship, implied by the black bar over Google search logo or the complete shutdown of Wikipedia. "DNS filtering goes on every day on the Internet," said Dodd. "Obviously it needs to be done very carefully. But five million pages were taken off Google last year [for IP violations]. To Google's great credit, it recently changed its algorithm to a point where, when there are enough complaints about a site, it moves that site down on their page—which I applaud."
Dodd also continued to laud the "six strikes" plan that US Internet providers have agreed to enforce on behalf of the entertainment industry, insisting that it's an "educational" program aimed at illegal downloads. "If people are aware they're downloading illegal content, they'll go to a legal service," he said. "It's an experiment to see if we can get cooperation. It's not a law—you don't go to jail."
The MPAA won't have any kind of back-door to subscriber records at Verizon or other ISPs, Dodd said.
After the event, an EFF attorney in the audience asked, "Why wasn't that spirit of cooperation in the room when SOPA was drafted?"
"I don't know," answered Dodd. "There was no widespread conversation." Dodd seemed to think SOPA just wasn't seen as particularly controversial when it was first introduced, with nearly half the Senate listed as co-sponsors. "Going after foreign, rogue sites was not seen as an illegitimate idea," he noted. The bill may have been seen as an easy vote, until stiff resistance was seen in January.
   

Ma to će oni sve preko Swinjdowsa da reše. Samo ti isključe komp na daljinu čim odeš na sumnjivi link.

Koji oni? Vlada? Apple? Warner? Microsoft? FBI?

Korporacije. Sony itd.

Ako te dobro razumem, ti tvrdiš da će Sony, kad posumnja da si neautorizovano delio neki materijal na koji oni polažu prava na umnožavanje, okrenuti telefonom svog ljutog poslovnog rivala, Microsoft i zamoliti ga da tebi pošalju instrukciju da ti se windows isključi.

Možda se to i desi!!!! A možda i ne. No, srećom, uvek imamo alternativu - Linux!!!!

Quote from: Lord Kufer on 05-10-2012, 12:37:36
Ma to će oni sve preko Swinjdowsa da reše. Samo ti isključe komp na daljinu čim odeš na sumnjivi link.

Зар им није лакше само да "убију" сумњиви линк?

Meni je od Sonija stiglo preko naše policije (pa preko provajdera) da odmah obrišem ono njihovo sranje Terminator 4 sa svog HDja ili tako nešto inače će moj provajder da me odagna...

Quote from: Джон Рейнольдс on 05-10-2012, 12:53:25

Quote from: Lord Kufer on 05-10-2012, 12:37:36
Ma to će oni sve preko Swinjdowsa da reše. Samo ti isključe komp na daljinu čim odeš na sumnjivi link.

Зар им није лакше само да "убију" сумњиви линк?

Pa, nije to tako lako u ovom trenutku, ako je sumnjivi link u zemlji kojoj se živo fućka za DMCA. Zato je i pokušano da se proture SOPA i PIPA - da možeš da - bez mlaćenja sa sudovima itd. nateraš sajtove koji hostuju piratski (ili označen kao piratski) materijal u ekonomski tesnac time što im firme koje se reklamiraju kod njih ukinu reklame a firme koje im procesuiraju plaćanja zavrnu slavinu.

Quote from: Lord Kufer on 05-10-2012, 12:55:03
Meni je od Sonija stiglo preko naše policije (pa preko provajdera) da odmah obrišem ono njihovo sranje Terminator 4 sa svog HDja ili tako nešto inače će moj provajder da me odagna...

Jasno, znam za dosta takvih slučajeva ali kakve veze to ima sa Windowsom??

Za W8 kažu da može MS da te isključi po želji.
Tu će sigurno da bidne neki dil između braće, ne treba im Kongres da donese zakon.

Pazi, ono što se generalno zna za W8 je da će imati killswitch sličan onome što već godinama postoji na tabletima i telefonima. Ali to je moguće jer će W8 imati integrisan appstore za koji se svaki komad softvera sertifikuje, pa će moći da ti isključuju te aplikacije, kupljene i instalirane kroz appstore, kada se desi bezbednosni rizik itd. Naravno da je ovo dvosjekli mač i ima i ozbiljne implikacije na privatnost korišćenja, ali za sada nema signala da ovo Majkrosoftu omogućava da isključi aplikacije instalirane izvan Appstore okruženja (nije Windows 8 totalni walled garden kao na primer iOS okruženje kod Applea), a pogotovo ne da ti potpuno isključi operativni sistem. Mislim, ne postoji istorijski presedan za koji ja znam da je ijedna firma ikada uradila remotekill za svoj hardver/ softver kombo (iako se paničilo da će Nintendo to raditi sa 3DSom) jer bi to bio popriličan košmar na trgovinskom sudu (moje dete je čačkalo moj telefon i sada mi je firma ubila telefon - mora da mi ga zamene!!!). Više detalja ovde:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-17/the-kill-switch-comes-to-the-pc

S druge strane, znam programere koji već više od deset godina tvrde da Microsoft ima ugrađene backdoorove u sve kopije windowsa i da mogu da ih kontrolišu na daljinu bla bla bla, ali većina njih deluju kao paranoici i nisu pružli za to ni jedan plauzibilan dokaz 

Kad sam jednom pokušao da radim s Vistom, video sam odmah kuda to vodi.
Oni sve kao "jesi li siguran da baš to hoćeš da uradiš", ustvari to je slave conditioning. Sigurno postižu dobre rezultate s prosečnim idiotom.
Možda im je to i dovoljno.

Ma, dobro, taj idiot-proofing je prisutan u Windowsu mnogo duže nego što Vista postoji. I može da se isključi po želji.

Sa Windows 8 će veći problem biti što idioti sad imaju potpuno nerazumljiv default UI na desktop mašinama - koliko god da je ono ispod dobro ili nije dobro, prva prepreka, tile-based interfejs će da ostavi mnogo loš utisak na prosečno idiotskog korisnika čak i ako tako nešto već ima na telefonu. Bar se tako misli širom IT zajednice, ali to su sve profesionalni skeptici i kritizeri.

Neobična situacija koja traje već izvesno vreme otkada je Majkrosoft najavio da će u Internet Exploreru 10 po defaultu biti uključena Do Not Track preferencija. Sad su onlajn advertajzeri skočili da im iskopaju oči, što je razumljivo, a Apache ih napadaju govoreći da je ovo "zloupotreba open source filozofije" i objavljuju da će njihovi serveri biti konfigurisani da ignorišu do not track header. WTF? Mislim, nisam očekivao da će doći dan da branim Majkrosoft kao zaštitnika korisnika a napadam Apache (čiji open office koristim umesto Majrkosoftovog) zato što se svrstavaju na stranu bezdušnih kapitalista.

Neki komentari iz open source zajednice pokušavaju da argumentuju da je ovo loše po korisnike jer ako je Do Not Track default opcija onda to, navodno ne predstavlja svestan izbor korisnika pa će to samo biti izgovor da sajtovi ignorišu preferenciju i svejedno nastave da prate korisnike, ali to mi je bizaran argument. Deluje kao intuitivno i najprirodnije moguće da DNT bude default seting a da praćenje bude nešto sa čime moraš eksplicitno da se složiš (dakle, opt in, ne opt out).

Da bude savršeno jasno: Do Not Track ne znači da korisnik ne vidi reklame na Internetu već da sajtovi ne mogu da prate njegovo ponašanje i kretanje kako bi mu servirali reklame podešene po njegovim interesovanjima. Dakle, sajtovi koji bi nas eksplicitno pitali da li želimo da imamo sadržaj bolje podešen prema onome što nas statistički gledano više zanima - kao što neki rade - bi mogli da dobiju našu dobru volju i navedu nas da u njihovim slučajevima prihvatimo praćenje. Ali, poenta je - nije li prirodno da po definiciji ne želimo da neki tamo trgovci koje ne poznajemo i ne znamo smemo li im verovati imaju pristup podacima o našim navikama i ponašanju?

Microsoft holds its ground as big advertisers blast IE10′s default privacy settings

Quote
Microsoft's decision to prevent Internet Explorer 10 users from being tracked online, by default, is getting an extraordinary response from some of the world's largest advertisers, in the form of a letter to the Redmond company this week from the Association of National Advertisers, objecting to to the plan.
The letter was signed by representatives of companies including Intel, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, General Mills and many others. At issue is the "Do Not Track" setting in IE10 and its impact on way advertisers to use information gathered about users, through their online activities, to better target advertising.
Other browser makers also offer the feature but it isn't turned on by default. Microsoft sees the default setting in part as a competitive advantage in its appeal to get users to try Internet Explorer again. The new browser will be released in conjunction with the upcoming debut of Windows 8.
The ANA board contends in its letter that Microsoft's plan to make Do Not Track the default will have drastic implications: "Microsoft's decision to block collection and use of information by default will significantly reduce the diversity of Internet offerings and potentially cheat society of the robust offerings that are currently available."
Ed Bott of ZDNet picks apart the ANA's arguments, pointing out that an end to tracking doesn't mean an end to the advertising industry. "Ad-supported television networks are able to survive without having any form of data collection to target ads to individual sets," he writes. "Why is Internet advertising different?"
A Microsoft representative reiterated the company's previous statement: "Our approach to DNT in Internet Explorer 10 is part of our commitment to privacy by design and putting people first. We believe consumers should have a consistent experience and more control over how data about their online behavior is tracked, shared and used. We also believe that targeted advertising can be beneficial to both consumers and businesses. As such, we will continue to work towards an industry-wide definition of tracking protection."
Also see this June post by Brendon Lynch, Microsoft's chief privacy officer.
The widely used Apache web server software will be set to override the privacy setting in IE10, calling Microsoft's actions a "deliberate abuse of open standards."
The dispute is remarkable in part because Microsoft is nominally a member of the Association of National Advertisers. It's also amazing to see IE — one of the programs that was at the center of Microsoft's U.S. antitrust case — now being used by the company to advocate consumer rights.

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http://www.ghostery.com/

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