Mega has launched
mega.co.nz
mega.co.nz
8. Our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload or give someone else access to where it determines that that data is an exact duplicate of original data already on our service. In that case, you will access that original data.
Duplicate check, I get that. But, how do they do it? They say the files are encrypted on the browser, so if I upload file X and other user uploads X too, they can't know they're the same because both uploads are encrypted. So, they can check only for duplicates of the encrypted outcome of each file. But, wouldn't that be inefficient? Probability of collision in encrypted files is (AFAIK) really low, something like 2^(-N), N being the size of the file on bits... If I did it well, it'd be a collision probability of 7.458E-155 for a file of 1MB.
EDIT: Added example.
EDIT: They never get to see your key or what is in the file.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known-plaintext_attack#Present_...
Of course this will only give you the key to that one particular file, not any other files that you do not have yourself.
Assuming that it works this way, it would allow Mega to figure out if you own a known "bad" file. Just take something like "New_Jay-Z_Album.zip," hash it, and try the hash against your encrypted files. It seems like Kim is trying to avoid this problem.
It seems really interesting, so they can check for duplicates while keeping files secure. Thanks!
"However, one more attack: an attacker can guess plaintexts and test if you have that file."
If that's the case, pirates beware.
Edit: GNUet quote:"The gnunet encryption scheme is remarkable in that it allows identical files encrypted under different keys to yield the same ciphertext, modulo a small block of metadata. These files can then be split into small blocks and distributed (and replicated if need be) across hosts in a gnunet system to balance load."
http://grothoff.org/christian/esed.pdf Efficient Sharing of Encrypted Data - Krista Bennett, Christian Grothoff, Tzvetan Horozov, Ioana Patrascu
One solution to that would be to have two hashes of the file, and to use one as the key and one as the index.
This is only reasonable method when ever you can assume that every plaintext is unique, which also makes point of deduplicationg data absolutely pointess.
This is just the reason, why sensitive data needs to be encrypted before deduplication.
OFF System is also one interesting approach to this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem
These are more or less "funny" work-a-rounds to the actual problem.
They wouldn't really want that, would they? So as clever as it is, I doubt they do it this way.
The thing with copyrighted content, though, is that even if the file you're checking might be infringing on copyrights in certain cases, in other cases it might as well be completely legit. I wrote about this on some earlier MU submission[1], so I won't repeat all that here, but all in all, even if you knew that file X existed on Mega's servers, it would be pretty damn haphazard to just outright delete it, because you might be hurting many legitimate users by doing so.
Anyway, I think Mega could secure user's files simply by encrypting the locator keys they have with the user's own key, and this data only gets decrypted and parsed client-side when the user uses Mega with the user's own key. This way you could only prove that a file exists on Mega's servers, but had no way to check which user(s) it belongs to without cracking the individual user data one by one. And of course, if you don't have any exact files to check against Mega, then you wouldn't be able to even figure out whether "content X" is hosted there somewhere, and neither could Mega (since they'd naturally only store locator hashes and encrypted data itself).
True, and it seems that Mega's copyright infringement reporting page[1] has an option for that:
Takedown Type: Remove all underlying file(s) of the supplied URL(s) - there is no user who is permitted to store this under any circumstance worldwide
Example: Alice and Bob both upload the same file to Mega. Alice is raided by the MAFIAA. They get a court order telling Mega to list all users having a copy of that file. Can Mega comply? Or does not even Mega know that Bob has the same file too?
Related question: Is there any way for Bob to share his uploaded file with friends?
Encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data, so it is incompressible. The chances of finding anything significant to deduplicate are so low that it's not worth trying.
https://mega.co.nz/#developers
Apparently, they use unsalted symmetric key encryption which allows them to discover [hash(file), password] duplicates. By comparison, the old Megaupload would apparently deduplicate based on [hash(file)] matches.
Suppose Alice and Bob have files [D, E, F] and [F, G, H], respectively. If MEGA discovers that Alice and Bob share a duplicate file F and Alice to reveals her password (through password frequency analysis or to the Government), then all of Bob's files are compromised.
I would personally feel unsafe storing private documents on Mega due to the lack of public/private key encryption, but that's me.
The document does say it uses public/private keys for data transfer. You would not usually use public/private for data storage because of the huge keysizes required.
If they use asymmetric encryption for data transfer, then how does that work as part of a convergent encryption scheme? Wouldn't all of the file hashes be different at that point?
It is probably worth pointing out that all of this encryption stuff is only for them. Nomatter how they brand it, the purpose is to give them plausible deniability, which they lacked with the previous Mega.
If you want encryption meant for you, then you should probably just encrypt your files yourself before you let Mega touch them.
Morally ok? That is subject to opinion. I don't have a problem with them now, and I never did.
Legally immune? They very well could be. Certainly any action against them is going to be much harder this time, if only because a bunch of people in New Zealand are still pissed about what happened last time without the revisions that were made. If their system works as they claim, and renders them unable to govern content, then how could they be considered culpable for content? If I start posting nasty stuff encrypted with PGP to HN, would HN be to blame for failing to recognize the nasty stuff and remove it?
And if mega is de-duping content then that could technically eliminate "whack a mole" for the copyright holders (except for people re-encoding the file and re-uploading). I had heard in the past that mega would only take down one link.
And presumably, unless they think they can legally get away with ignoring it, they will.
What they won't be able to do is respond to a request that says "Delete all copies of [Big movie of the year], and continue to delete all of our movies as they pop back up."
I feel like a goddamn broken record.
It would kind of function like hard links on linux file systems.
This is the important bit. Files can be shared between private groups, using Mega as an intermediary, without them ever becoming indexed on the public web. Previously, files shared in this manner could still be a target of a takedown, because Megaupload would know they had them, even if nobody else did. Now Mega can make a stronger guarantee about keeping this kind of sharing "safe", because they have no idea whether they're hosting this kind of file or not.
As soon as the sharing group got big enough to notice, then there could be agents in the group reporting infringement.
Is the line about intent rather than technicality? For example how driving a bus that a drug dealer is on is not illegal, but driving the getaway car from a robbery is? If it is, then how does one prove that Dotcom wants to support copyright violation, rather than his official stance of just believing that there is a level past which he can not be expected to police his customers?
Enforcement of the standard you're promoting would require pervasive surveillance of every data storage and transfer method in the world, and backdoor access for all forms of encryption.
Freedom of information and communication is orders of magnitude more important for a healthy and free society than copyright of digital goods, and you can't have both--they are fundamentally incompatible.
To address your latest spurious post, dropbox, gmail, etc. Facilitate file sharing on a small scale. Public links to megaupload listed on public aggregating websites that list the latest 'releases' are an entirely different matter. You obviously know that but are willfully blind to it to make stupid arguments.
Let's say you are right. Explain to me how you would justify the pricing scheme we have for digital media to the average person on this planet, who most likely is Indian/Chinese/Nigerian and makes less that $5 a day.
How much should we charge this individual? Do you think they have the same right as westerners to challenging themselves and experiencing other cultures?
No, you assume that piracy is only white people that don't have a large allowance, which is a childish view perpetuated by the media. Most people don't have a computer, and if they are lucky enough to get one they should be able to have access to a large variety of the same digital goods.
tl;dr show some goddamn empathy.
Don't you have it in your head that danenania's position is incorrect and it's therefore a waste of time to argue the subject with you? It certainly seems so, specially since danenania isn't actually arguing for piracy, just that (s)he considers the steps of eliminating piracy to go against more important values.
As an analogy, the fact that I defend almost absolute free speech doesn't mean I'm in favor of all speech, it just means that eliminating said speech is worse than allowing it to exist freely.
Hm. This makes it sound like your point stands regardless of personal ethics; as though
> profitting off of the distribution of other peoples work, without their permission, is not something that should be encouraged or tolerated
is a provable, obvious, non-debatable stance. I don't think it is.
I don't think profiting off it changes the basic ethics; if something is morally okay to do as a hobby, it should generally be morally okay to do as a business until proven otherwise.
I wouldn't agree you always need the permission of someone upstream to share ideas or content. That's something we can discuss. Don't make it sound like you have the answer sheet in front of you.
Because clearly they profit off the distribution of other peoples work without their permission every day.
What do you have to say to those of us who disagree completely and fully with the entire concept of intelectual property?
With the way I feel about copyright, I believe distribution of other peoples work, with permission or otherwise is something that should be actively encouraged and praised.
Whether they profit off of it or not is completely irrelevant.
"File integrity is verified using chunked CBC-MAC. Chunk sizes start at 128 KB and increase to 1 MB, which is a reasonable balance between space required to store the chunk MACs and the average overhead for integrity-checking partial reads."
Not sure I understand this, how can you deduplicate if every file is encrypted via a random key?
Then, on the user side, they store an per-user encrypted index (random, counter, MAC) to those individual chunks to represent the file.
That way, they can only see giant encrypted blocks of data, and per-user encrypted indexes to data. But it is all encrypted.
They would need to hack into accounts by keylogging passwords to decrypt the indexes and see what files users can actually access.
Public links could be shared by giving out a key in the URL that is a file containing indexes to other blocks. So whoever knows the URL, knows the index, and can get the data.
That is the way I'd design it, at least... :)
edit:typo
Also, if you believe Microsoft Outlook, there's something called "compressible encryption", which implies there are encryption schemes that aren't exactly random, meaning in turn that not all N-bit blocks are equally likely.
not to mention metadata associated with such a small block would be probably more than the size of the block itself.
The idea is simple: if you have data, then you can generate the key from data itself to encrypt and decrypt than data. Then you use hash of encrypted data to look up if server (or just other side) has the same data. If hash exists, no need to send to server - just tell server to bump references. If hash does not exists, just upload data. The key derived from data needs to be stored locally - if you lose it, you will lose data too.
key = f(data);
upload(encrypt(data, key));
store_key(filename, key);
Which is to say that every file has a globally 1-to-1 mapping to its encrypted version. I'm not sure how they are storing the (User, [(Filename,Key)]) data, but this is ideally encrypted on a per user basis, making any sort of per-user lookup attacks moot.
However given a file Mega would be able to tell whether they stored that file, eliminating the plausible deniability they're aiming for.
For that reason, when ever I'm sharing anything I usually encrypt files with my recipients public keys before sending those out. Just to make sure that data is really private and keys are known only to my selected peers. In some cases when I want to make stuff even more private, I encrypt data separately with each recipients public key, so you can't even see list of public key ID's which are required to decrypt the data.
I also have 'secure work station' which is hardened and not connected to internet. That's the workstation I use to decrypt, handle and encrypt data. Only encrypted and signed data is allowed to come and go to that workstation.
They needed a way to deny any knolage of file sharing and have found a two pronged attack. The encryption means they can deny any knowledge of what they are serving, and marketing it as a drop box type tool means that they aren't marketing it as a blatant tool for illegal file sharing.
Doesn't the encryption make video streaming impossible in the way it was being done before (i.e. to a large psudononymous userbase)?
The service seems to have ground to a halt, and I am not able to upload anything, so perhaps this all becomes clear once one starts using the service, but I'm curious about how the encryption is used in practice.
Edit: Found a bit more detail in the developer documentation: https://mega.co.nz/#developers According to this, they use the symmetrical AES-128 to encrypt files, so why do I need an (asymmetrical) RSA key pair? It also says there that the private part of the RSA key is stored encrypted with the symmetrical AES key, but MEGA has that key, so what good does that do in case of an FBI raid?
One of the things that I was most curious about regarding MEGA was to see how they would manage to make encrypted file storage safe but user friendly. It seems like this is user friendly, but not safe at all, or am I wrong?
[1] https://mega.co.nz/#help_security
EDIT: The senario in the posts above sound more likely. The exact text of the help is "No usable encryption keys ever leave the client computers (with the exception of RSA public keys)." So they probably store an encrypted version of the keys server side.
How do other people access my stuff?
Doesn't work...
I agree with the sentiment, though, that this is security theater. It's subject to the same problem as Hushmail, where they could be forced to snoop on their customers by modifying client code.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/mega-arrives-ars-goe...
They can store the encrypted key on their server and send the encrypted key to the client whenever the client requests it. The client decrypts the key locally and use the decrypted key to decrypt the data.
With this scheme, the user can use a client on any machine to download his encrypted key and use it locally.
| Each user account uses a symmetric master key to ECB-
| encrypt all keys of the nodes it keeps in its own trees.
| This master key is stored on MEGA's servers, encrypted
| with a hash derived from the user's login password.
Unlocking a key requires a real password but the server knows only the hashed version. This way they can't capture the real password to unlock. The trick would be to make sure server always gets only the hashed password. Even at website login, the password must be hashed before sending!
We used similar crypto for http://timegt.com product where everything is end-to-end encrypted with a keypair generated by the user yet stored at the server. But it's stored at the server in a locked form that can be opened with a password that user entered. But this password is never sent to the server, only the password hash is and is used only to make sure that it's ok to send this locked key to the user. Hopefully this didn't sound too confusing now...
Improving this situation could involve keeping a browser extension that takes care of the hashing algorithm and makes sure the real hash is sent. As long as the extension is not updated, the hashing would be safer.
It would probably be easy to write your own login page or a browser toolbar that would either do the hashing on a page you control or check that the javascript was what it should be.
At that level of distrust however you might as well encrypt the stuff yourself (and send the decryption keys to the people you want to share with in some other, more annoying but secure, way)
for those who don't know, hushmail is probably the best known example of this.
What if I don't trust you? Is it still safe for me to use MEGA?
If you don't trust us, you cannot run any code provided by us, so opening our site
in your browser and entering your password is off limits. If you still want to use
MEGA, you have to do so through a client app that was written by someone you trust.If the goal was actually to create something very secure, I would say that the keys would need to stay entirely on the client side, but this of course has its own usability problems. As it is, I'm curious as to how password resets can be carried out.
That being said, it's probably relatively secure as long as the cloud provider isn't raided or coerced to act badly. They can reasonably say that the data is encrypted and that they don't have access to the key.
I would be interested to see what the crypto looks like when the site is used for file sharing (e.g. I upload once, then post a link for many to download). Or am I just assuming that there's an option for this use case?
So what if the service falls flat? I don't really plan to use it until the kinks are hammered out anyway. The fact that he got it out there though is a statement on to itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigat...
It's just hard for me to respect the man, because he's not fighting for information freedom, he's fighting for as much cash, status, and power as he can get his hands on.
Also, during the time megauplaod existed, there always were upload providers. Megaupload came quite late into the game.
Google and Co is also selling... your content whenever is legal or not
No, no you can't.
There is a wildly obvious difference here and unless you're being deliberately dishonest, you'd have to be a complete idiot not to see it.
Torrent sharing is one thing. Selling access to downloadable material that doesn't belong to you quite another.
I completely agree that there is a distinction, and one I also feel strongly about. But really the only distinction between the pirate bay and megaupload from that point of view is maturity and technical/political savvy. I feel I have to draw the line at a place where selling access to a file locker that you know is mostly used for infringement is ok or I'm a hypocrite. Especially when you look at from a "what should be legal" point of view where you have to consider enforceability rather than a hypothetical ethical question.
Edit: They're not gzipping any of the 2.5MB in static resources either. I realise that probably doesn't impact their API calls that are failing, but it's still a big oversight.
Not using Gzip is obviously a big mistake.
I think this is the only time I would use the words "FTFY" on HN, but I do think it's obvious, that with kim's bragging about bandwidth usage, gzip has been disabled intentionally.
He could just as easily make up a fake bandwidth usage number for marketing purposes rather than actually put unnecessary load on his servers by not using Gzip.
It's most likely down to him hiring sloppy developers. And judging by the source code on the site this is exactly the reason.
In any case i don't think climbing those lists would be reason to disable gzip. In that case an easier method would be to just add lots of not rendered junk at the end of your html to beef up the data usage.
The tie in with web hosting companies adds an ounce of legitimacy to the affiliate program that originally led sites like the defunct tv-links.co.uk etc to throw traffic at their paywall last time but it won't be even close to enough if tomorrow there's millions of mega links on all the streaming and download indexing sites.
This will be very interesting to watch unfold.
They say that this is their first Javascript coding; they should really get some talent on board to clean this up.
is this a joke? I'm on FF19
File upload didn't work though....
btw thanks for the downvote, whoever that was.
Further, the site looks very much polished in Chrome and its hard to find anything to blame for. If they did benchmark testing and realized Chrome works the best for decryption/encrypting/etc, I don't blame them for giving up on other browsers.
Chrome starts a lot slower for me. It seems to really hit the disk a lot more than Firefox.
Basically, only Chrome seems to be supported because it is "the most advanced browser currently in existence"
Chrome supports this, Firefox does not. See my comments in the Mozilla bugzilla bug about this:
Definitely a rip-off, and not a particularly well executed one.
And the file is just 4KB.
For me, mega.co.nz is at 154.53.224.166, which is Africa allocated, administered by afrinic.net who seem to be on a small island off the coast of Madagascar.
cursor:pointer;
Is it down, or is my ISP blocking the SSL certificates so I cannot use it?
I am using Google Chrome.
I assume the site was DDOS'ed or failed under heavy bandwidth.
Other links just failed for me. They definitely messed something up. Or I am missing something central here.
> 8. Our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload or give someone else access to where it determines that that data is an exact duplicate of original data already on our service. In that case, you will access that original data.
EDIT: Spoke too soon
Edit: I'm trying to access it from EU if that makes any difference. Seems like http 500 error is returned for assets hosted on eu.static.mega.co.nz.
You can't share a link with the public anymore, only with an emailadres.
http://gizmodo.com/5977265/how-megas-encryption-will-protect...
which makes it no different to before, except this time they're hoping deniability is better than openly facilating piracy in their internal communications.
Seems like they can't handle the load.
MEGA reports: 500 B/s upload speed
:/
However, that's not how Mega works. They're still storing a symmetric key on their server. They're just encrypting before storing for deniability reasons. https://mega.co.nz/#developers
EDIT:
It's because AJAX return "500 server too busy" error.
Fucker.
"Bigger. Better. Faster. Stronger. Safer. Thanks Daft Punk for all the music!"
Daft Punk sold out by their second album anyway, they're hardly underground geniuses in want of credit now.
Nonetheless, I think it's just more grandiosity and find it irritating that he riffed on the chorus at all.
In general, audiences have NO idea how much time, effort, etc. it takes to produce decent work. Partly, that's by design, since good work should look effortless. But when you count the time getting good, a decent album may represent a decade of someone's life (10,000 hours, etc.) And the thousands of names in the credits of major films represent actual work, by real people. There's no reason these people should be expected to "find a business model" that doesn't rely on some form of legal protection when protection is the backstop of every viable business model in existence (not always legal, in the case of drug cartels; and where there's no protection at all, what you're really talking about is good luck and charity).
That said, I think enforcing copyright at the individual level is a fool's errand. No one writing the law - which evolved over centuries - ever imagined that it would be applicable on such a global scale, in such a granular way. Barring radical change in the law, I think individuals should be exempt from prosecution under something that is so spectacularly unsuited to free individuals and the democracy that depends on their liberty.
But corporations are another story. They're tools, not people, and tools have no rights. Shareholders have rights, employees have rights, citizens whose governments issue corporate charters have rights. But corporations themselves? No rights whatsoever. There's no threat to democracy in making them secure permission - by paying for it on fairly negotiated terms - or getting sued into oblivion. Indeed, that's the exact expectation around which the law and industries that pay for copyrights both developed. The Internet's appearance doesn't change the premise that anyone building a business around material they didn't produce, should include the properly negotiated price of their inputs in the prices they charge to others. Obviously, that's my own standard. It's not reflected in law. But I think it's a fair break. If it were reflected in law, I think we could put the copyright wars behind us for the foreseeable future.
As far as Kim Dotcom goes, it's clear he made his money on the wrong side of this line. That's why I'd like to see him jailed under law which should make jailing him a no brainer. I have no idea how he's going to pay for his current venture, but I'm pretty sure he says "safer" not "safe" for good reason. You'd have to be an idiot to give Mega the same level of trust that Dropbox enjoys.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5084439
I can see how the Daft Punk thing would get on your nerves. It seems like all this man does is use people.
Mega is just being a midleman here. What's so wrong about it, really? If an industry goes down because it can't compete with "free", then maybe it should go down because technology makes the business model unprofitable? Big players go down and small ones come to rule the game, it's not like people stop caring about entertainment. But of course this all whining about piracy is exactly about securing people's own position and ability to survive in the competitive market. After all, an industry-wide collapse could very well mean loss of a job(not for a single person, but also for co-workers etc) or at least huge cut in income.
In the end it's just everyone playing for themselves. Hopefully in a few decades we have machines creating superior content for us(at least to some degree), so we can finally start getting rid of the publishing/content providing industries which hinder technological progress and start to focus on consuming whatever we find most suitable for us, without legal or ethical barriers. Everyone wins if we don't let bullshit legislation hinder the progress.
A liberal education may not get you a job, but it'll save you from embarrassing yourself with stuff like this.
You're arguing against something I never even claimed. However, what you said still doesn't change the fact that pigs are being used. Problem?
> And I'm sorry that think that getting the artists out of art and just handing the satisfaction of the human intellect to machines is a situation where "everyone wins." I mean, that's just embarrassing.
What's the problem with this? People who are creative can stil create things as much as they like, while people who prefer consuming things can get the said things for cheaper and for less effort. Of course this sounds like a dystopian future for an artsy person who would love to get paid for their hobby. But just as radio amateurs with their love for analog electronics have gone underground, so will happen for those who can't adapt to the ever-accelerating technological progress we're going through. And the fact that we can now share information so effortlessly is a great sign of that.
Of course it would be ideal that I could create X, set it a price Y and then people would pay for it if they consider my product worth it's price. However, because of the way the world changes, it isn't possible in a strict sense. It will never be possible during this digital era, at least not without sacrificing liberties and creating some godlike authority over information sharing. Now how would that not be a dystopian future!?
- "People who are creative can stil create things as much as they like": no, they are constrained by their budget and time. Piracy destroys the potential for remuneration on the back of e.g. recorded music, thus restricting the ability of the artist to create. Stop pretending like all worthwhile (by which I mean to say in-demand, whether legally or not) art can be made on a Sunday afternoon by a single person.
- "Artsy person...": I resent your suggestion that art is axiomatically a hobby, and those that create it -- "artsy persons", really? -- are all mere hobbyists. You seem to value music/film/etc. enough to unilaterally grant yourself unlimited rights to it, yet you use belittling terms, the better to convey your perceived superiority (presumably because you think programming requires more intelligence?) when discussing it. Not cool.
- "who can't adapt to the ever-accelerating technological progress we're going through": Yes, we musicians are all such idiots, we simply don't get revolutionary rockstar technologies like node.js and mongodb.
- "we can now share information": Please stop invoking lofty principles like liberty and the right to information to justify your consumption of the latest hollywood-made blockbuster movie or pop single without compensation the artists who created it.
- "Of course it would be ideal that I could create X, set it a price Y and then people would pay for it if they consider my product worth it's price. However, because of the way the world changes, it isn't possible in a strict sense."
"Of course it would be ideal for me not to whack you on the head with a club and take your possessions, but it's just not realistic in a strict sense; at least not without sacrificing vital liberties and the creation of a police force with godlike authority."
I never said anything about piracy in my reply nor I implied it. I guess I can assume machine learning and AI advancements pose a similar threat? So it would be wrong if there was something which would make creating art less profitable, such as for example computer aided creation of things? I mean of course that would put a few useless people out of their jobs when machines can increase the productivity enough. Horrible? Not really, cheaper art for people and increased amount of "indie" art in circulation. I'm all for it.
> "- "Artsy person...": I resent your suggestion that art is axiomatically a hobby, and those that create it -- "artsy persons", really? -- are all mere hobbyists. You seem to value music/film/etc. enough to unilaterally grant yourself unlimited rights to it, yet you use belittling terms, the better to convey your perceived superiority (presumably because you think programming requires more intelligence?) when discussing it. Not cool."
I guess the word artsy carries a negative tone, it wasn't my intention to imply that. Bear with me for not being a native English speaker. However, my whole point has been that the whole discussion about piracy revolves around people who are not doing art as a hobby but who are reliant on being paid for what they are doing.
> "- "who can't adapt to the ever-accelerating technological progress we're going through": Yes, we musicians are all such idiots, we simply don't get revolutionary rockstar technologies like node.js and mongodb."
Interesting, "we musicians". Spot on. However, again it seems that you are purposefully(?) missing the point. If we can recreate art with ease and as such we need less producers and distributors, what's the big deal? They go out of job because technology makes their work obsolete? It's a shame, but if there's something we can learn from the past, it's that you can't stop technology from advancing. My friend as a cab driver will lose his job once self-diriving cars become mainstream. My friend as a cashier already lost her job because of automation. Millions are going out of work at Foxconn during the next few years because of advanced robots. It's everywhere, technology reigns supreme and people go out of jobs at exponential rate from now on. Things change.
> "- "we can now share information": Please stop invoking lofty principles like liberty and the right to information to justify your consumption of the latest hollywood-made blockbuster movie or pop single without compensation the artists who created it."
Justify my what? Your assumption is completely false. Even if it were true and I actually did consume mainstream entertainment and especially without compensating the artists the fact that we can now share information easier than ever before holds true, and will (hopefully) hold true in the future too. After all services like youtube, dropbox, Mega etc. are here to stay and for obvious reasons. Oh and there's an increasing number of truly anonymous content sharing sites in Tor network. It's pretty fascinating where we're going IMO.
> "Of course it would be ideal for me not to whack you on the head with a club and take your possessions, but it's just not realistic in a strict sense; at least not without sacrificing vital liberties and the creation of a police force with godlike authority."
Your comparison is completely flawed and you know it. Do you understand the implications of total surveillance of the Internet in regards of freedom of speech for example? Or do you not care, as long as you get paid for your job?
Anyway, in case you haven't noticed it yet, we're moving towards a world where the copyright laws have less and less implications in our actions. Not only will the laws be reformed to make more sense, content sharing and distribution will increase just as it has to this day. Some people will lose their jobs, some artists will get less compensation for their work(for other reasons than piracy though) and so on. It's only natural. If this scares you, then just maybe it would be better for you to work in a different field? Because as I've said, you can't stop technology from advancing, and it advances at an accelerating rate. Exponential growth is a bitch.
> "Comments such as these never cease to astonish me"
Oh the irony. :)
It's clear that you have great admiration for artists, but really, they're only slightly more magnanimous than the rest of us. Not making any money incentivizes no one. If you think Western culture would be as rich and diverse as it is without copyright and capitalism, check again.
What certainly should be avoided is admiring a convicted repeat-criminal who's business it is to exploit people at every opportunity. People who support Kim are like people who vote for Berlusconi. They are literally the problem in this world. Have some fucking values.
Hatred for the "content mafia" is not a value.
I don't believe that machines will replace artists either, because I believe art is the expression of personal human experience.
>The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius." These three Latin words mean "Swifter, Higher, Stronger."