MPAA boss: 'SOPA isn’t dead yet' Former senator and current head of the Motion Picture Ass. of America Chris Dodd hopes to resurrect the reviled SOPA anti-piracy legislation in another form, but it appears the US House of Representatives is beating him to it a new bill that makes SOPA look sensible. Dodd, speaking in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, …
If I was the media industry I would put a giant muzzle on Chris Dodd speaking to the public. That idiot has done as much to ruin the worldwide economy as all but a few other men. He is proof positive corporate prostitution is truly bipartisan. I understand hiring him was all about him getting his country club legislative former buddies on board the rape of the public but him talking to the public is a receipt for disaster.
The best part of the US system is the total elimination of corruption. It can't be corruption if it is legal to give unlimited money to a legislator to get him to do what you want and best of all their are many ways to not even have to report it.
Still waiting for that comprehensive VPN service review. Focus on
- Servers in non US/ UK/ EU countries (and other satellites like Australia) (and yes UK is/ isn't in EU thanks...)
- PPTP/ OpenVPN support
- Whether logs maintained
Categories
- Best priced
- Best for media streaming
- Best for VOIP
- Best for torrent/ usenet use
TA....
> Anyone who proposes a law with the word Cyber in it should be removed from office
> imemdiately on the grounds of being too stupid to hold office...
Mike Rogers is many things, but stupid isn't one of them.
"Cyber" (used for anything other than actual cybernetics) is a vile construction (for which Gibson is largely to blame), but it's being used here for rhetorical effect. Rogers knows "cyber" suggests to many of his constituents, and those of his peers in Congress, the baffling and frightening world of computer and communication technologies which pose vague threats they have no idea how to combat. Also it has something to do with those damn kids who won't stay off their lawn.
Rogers is quite good at what he does, and what he does is keep getting re-elected so he can promote the burgeoning police state. He's former FBI, after all, and has never lost his desire for broader investigative powers.
CISPA may die a well-deserved death, but you can be sure Rogers will keep writing and sponsoring bills like this. That's what he's done for the past decade (and did for five years previously at the state level). And there's very little chance that Michigan's 8th will vote him out of office - didn't even come close in '08, and that was probably the best opportunity we'll see for a long time.
(Ruppersberger I don't know much about, but while he's a Democrat, he's also a former prosecutor in the organized crime division. And those folks are pretty much always big fans of surveillance; it's their main tool.)
I prefer this reworking.
"Bigoted, resentful behind the time ex-politician pushes for laws on a subject he doesn't understand and liases with people who know even less about how the actual world functions, they do this under the guise of protecting an industry that is only in decline because they will not adapt to a new environment"
Or, to put it more succinctly
"Wanker wants law approved by other wankers for wankerish reasons, also wankers"
would rework one thing on your reworking the part that reads "protecting an industry that is only in decline because they will not adapt to a new environment""
I'd rework it to :
protecting an industry that is in decline because they keep pumping out complete shit no one wants to see, let alone pay them to see because they will not bother making anything worthwhile.
"I'd rework it to :
protecting an industry that is in decline because they keep pumping out complete shit no one wants to see, let alone pay them to see because they will not bother making anything worthwhile."... so the content gets stolen so people can determine that they would not have bought it in the first place.
He does understand it actually. So does the industry.
The problem is that not in their understanding, the problem is in the economical fundamentals based on which the industry operates. It does not try to satisfy demand and match demand to a price. It tries to inflate demand through artificial scarcity. Delay DVD release, delay special release, delay release based on regions, limit how the content is available and so on.
Let's compare that with the music industry - did you notice that RIAA has not been in the news for years and it is just the MPAA now? Of course it would not be - all prices for CDs, downloads, etc are now demand based and made to match actual demand using feedback from sales forecast to sales correlation. The entire idiotic cycle of limited release of singles, then limited release of album, then... is in the gutter with a 5 inch stake in its heart.
What needs to happen to the movie industry is a legilsatively applied Stelios (the real one tried to break their monopoly, but failed, guess airlines are easier). The moment the movie industry stops using economics of artificially induced scarcity and becomes a modern demand based economics system based on demand driven pricing the ever repeating cycle of "one idiotic law proposal after another" will go away.
As long as this is not happening there will be a SOPA every year, rinse repeat, try again. That is what the industry needs and its main lobbist understands it pretty well so do not underestimate him.
> The moment the movie industry stops using economics of artificially induced scarcity and
> becomes a modern demand based economics system based on demand driven pricing the
> ever repeating cycle of "one idiotic law proposal after another" will go away.
No, it won't, because the movie industry is not the only party with an interest in these laws. Mike Rogers doesn't give a damn about the movie industry; he's not Sony Bono or Fritz Hollings.
CISPA is for the police - the real police, particularly Federal investigative agencies. Dodd likes it because he figures the content police can use it too (and indeed they could), and that's fine with Rogers and Ruppersberger because it's more money and influence pushing their bill. It's not the primary motivator, though.
Getting in touch with the crying-all-the-way-to-the-bank content-provider reality, more like. This "reality" being pushed by crying , know-it-all, I-was-there-but-you-weren't El Reg contributors btw.
Now allied with the securo-nazi-congressional-industrial complex. With "bipartisan" support.
One would think these people have checked out the antics of a certain Middle Eastern country where "shoot and cry, shoot and cry" is the order of the day.
Yeah, yeah - you're all big damned heroes. That'd be why you all post under nicknames, want review of things like VPNs and so on (too lazy to look them up yourself?) blah blah blah. It's really funny to see all you guys actually thinking you're Robin Hood ... :)
Maybe the voters will realize the power that they have over these bought-off politicians. Voting the racscals out sounds like the order for today. Politicians feel that removal from political life is more of a threat than losing campaign contributions from the media industry
Thing is, securing one's political footing is the first order of business of just about any politician. Does it come as any surprise that a large number of political elections actually aren't elections at all...because there is no viable opponent to the incumbent? And if there is, odds are pretty good he's just as bad.
In other words, elections are becoming more of a choice between two evils. So tell me, would you rather be dragged through cacti or locked in with rabid racoons?
I agree it's likely this or some other version will eventually pass in the US. The US is a financial oligarchy, so why bother coming up with a business model when you can pay corrupt politicians to create an artificial one for you by restricting public freedom?
I think the simple truth is that privacy on the internet is now effectively over. So many people find your information valuable & want to get hold of it. Google can build up a detailed profile of you through your web searches & by signing on to their services. The NSA sweep up the world's communication data & use supercomputers to try to pick the needles out of the haystacks. There's targetted advertising, illegal hacking by the media, cyber-criminals & the pirate hunters. Heck we even snoop on each other's Facebook profiles. Imagine how many different surveillance systems there are scanning the internet. Doesn't it make more sense to have just one which everyone can use?
Internet privacy isn't all or nothing. You choose how much of your personal information you give up whenever you use a service. El Reg know my IP address whenever I visit, and since I'm currently logged in, they can associate more detailed information.
Google? You can use search without logging on. If you want to use more of its services you pay with your information. Fair enough.
Facebook? et al - don't put anythng on there that you wouldn't want to be public. I don't. And lock all the apps and tagging down to zero.
Government agencies? This is where you need to be writing to your MP/MEP to ensure that information can only be gathered with a court order or warrant.
Internet privacy is only dead if you want it to be.
It's pretty much dead, and there's no one anyone can do to stop it.
Encryption? Install a zero-day malware on the machine and intercept the data before it's encrypted or after it's decrypted (after all, it's useless unless you're able to use it at some point--just intercept it THEN). Virtual machine? Detect it and use a hypervisor exploit to break out. Alternative OS? They already know about those. Airgap? Data has to be transported somehow; jump the airgap that way.
And then there's that business about government interests in exascale computing and long-term archival storage in capacities they've yet to name. IOW, if they don't get you now, they'll just hold it and let Moore's Law catch up so they can get you later.
And if not the governments, then who knows who else wants to pry in...? The big problem about being able to access anyone is being ACCESSIBLE to anyone.
Google et al don't depend on you signing in for their services to gather data about you. They have lots of ways to get it, and they are some of the best at it. They get some data if you run a search from their engine. If you have an account, they get lots of data. When you visit a web page, they likely get data because there's a 90% chance the website is running Google Analytics to generate web stats. All without signing in, and all because the data is assumed to not be not only non-PII, but so non-specific that it couldn't be associated with you. But when you get enough of that non-specific data you can start to analyze, draw trends, and possibly even identify individual users from the data.
Internet privacy is dead, at least in the sense of, if it is worth finding you, someone can do it. The question for most people is: Is it worth finding me? For most of them the answer is 'no' so they are relatively safe.
The trouble with the last paragraph is that, for private companies, EVERY person is worth pursuing because EACH one is a potential sale. That's why spam persists even today, since the return for just snagging one or two people is more than the cost of all that spamming. Google is well-known for its harvesting (and now with Android it's pretty hard to avoid them--block the web, they'll get you with the phone). Facebook's even more notorious as those infamous "Like" buttons can track you down even if you never visit Facebook, even if you never click that button. And more firms are working to get around adblockers by insisting on local hosting (to get around address blocking--blocking the host site is usually a ticket to an unreadable page) or hiding things behind script-block detectors. And with plenty of personal information open to the public (either by government mandate or as a result of using a publicly-available service like the telephone), just ONE detail can put two and two together very darn quickly.
Not just for activists of one sort or another but for everyone. It has been noticable recently that the general population in the UK (those that commentards usually refer to as 'sheeple') have been much more aware of the consequences of proposed legislation (eg the monitoring proposals) and have been objecting.
This puzzled me until someone pointed out that the previous SOPA attempt had made everyone aware of such moves in general.
More SOPA => more awareness. Not a bad thing, really.
it is vitally important to make it clear to your politicians that privacy needs to be protected. those voting for the bill are doing it for money from the lobbyists who are the corporations who want to control the net, and the future. if you can be held indefinatly without trial, and all your communications can be monitored without a propper warrent, then you do not live in the land of the free.
I think we're all just going to have to accept that over the coming decade all western governments, law enforcement and lobby groups will have access to all of your unshielded communications data. They'll probably all have far greater control over data and media as well.
There's nout anyone can do about it.
Well except maybe all those people with massive gun stashes in America.
The only other way to escape the all pervasive eye of government and law enforcement maddness is to live somewhere to poor or disorganised to put such systems in place.
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