dissident

I wouldn't use "there isn't enough due process" to describe why SOPA is a terrible bill, or any similar legal argument. Besides, many of those problems have been fixed in the Manager's amendment.

DNS blacklisting as a concept is simply unacceptable. The way it is applied in SOPA requires that a certain classification of DNS caching servers must pretend like a website does not exist, which reduces trust in domestic caching servers and stifles DNSSEC.

If people move to foreign DNS (or local caching servers), which is incredibly easy, the entire thing is circumvented. But a tricky side-effect takes place: the system is now balkanized. Servers in the U.S. believe the naming system to resolve to one IP, and servers everywhere else resolve to something completely different.

This balkanizing effect can break the effectiveness of CDNs, can congest Internet traffic, and overall reduces the credibility of the naming system. Passing SOPA would mean other countries would follow in the same footsteps. Once every country believes the delegation chain can resolve to whatever they want to, what is the point in an international naming system?

These are only some of the problems with DNS blacklisting -- nevermind the security problems -- which are not worth it especially considering it is so easily circumvented.

Additional problems with the bill, such as the vague wording which may consider Tor a tool for "circumventing" DNS blacklists and, therefore, illegal, demonstrate a huge lack of forward thinking and an unsustainable approach to copyright enforcement.

The doomsday scenario is that government sticks its foot in Internet policy and communication and pretends it actually has the reasonable capability to prevent piracy. It will never have that capability without large-scale violations of privacy.

There are also a good amount of talks regarding the precedent SOPA may have for general purpose computing and a whole host of other sensitive topics. I don't think it's responsible to just point at provisions in the bill and say "well it seems to add enough oversight".

Besides, the bill encourages preemptive takedowns by providing immunity. The tech industry behaviors that will result would be devastating.

Also relevant is the increased availability of professional software for film/music production, and advanced technologies for producing creative content which are emerging.

How much is a Hollywood movie really going to cost to produce in five years? (Ignoring inflated writing/acting expenses.)

I also don't use Chrome because of the combined elements. I think they serve different purposes and combining them is confusing (at least to somebody used to having them as separate features). I also use the search bar as a kind of clipboard, as I'm sure many other people do as well.

Imagine somebody built a matter duplicator. I decide to use it to duplicate a can of soda instead of buying it from the company. The original creator hasn't been paid for their efforts, but they definitely haven't expended any costs due to my duplication. Am I now a pirate of their property? No, they haven't lost any actual property. I haven't taken anything from them physically.

Now imagine somebody built so many of these matter duplicators that we could literally carry them in our pockets and duplicate whatever we want. Should we start putting cameras in everybody's home to make sure they're not duplicating stuff they should be paying for?

This is exactly what we're talking about. We have digital consumer technology that can replicate and distribute almost any media, and the reason these problems have only just started propping up in the last couple decades is because before that, all media was physical. It was on newspaper, or film roll, or vinyl record, or cassette, or in books.

Why should we be paying a company when we aren't losing them anything? Why do they call us thieves when we have not harmed them in any way? Are we supposed to ignore these new technologies because they don't support their business model? Fuck them, I'll use my matter duplicator however I want.

The only way I'll consider giving my money to Coca-Cola when I can just use a matter duplicator, is if they're producing new and tasty beverages that they could not develop without my money. This is exactly my reasoning for being a pirate.

The service of creative content production, or intellectual property in general, is an artificial one, not a natural one. We've endowed ourselves with this institution, presumably to promote cultural progress. So established, we can argue against the idea that it is "theft" because we have artificially stimulated that definition in the first place; it is not "theft" naturally, it is theft due to centuries of a model that used to work, but cannot work anymore.

To refuse to reconsider whether it is theft or not is therefore asinine.

That said, I'd like to ask what more than a cynical and baseless speculation you use to support the argument against a patronage model for creative content? You're looking at charity in the wrong way -- a number of individuals who enjoy the benefits of some action are free to provide as much of their own incentive to support those institutions.

Your argument against a patronage (donation based, or public subsidy) model is akin to complaining that a homeless shelter should expect all of the homeless they take care of to pay their share in the service they provide. That is not the point and is clearly not the effective strategy. Enough people who have the cultural motivation and desire can donate to those shelters, or a number of other non-profit institutions who provide different solutions.

There simply is no evidence for you to base the allegation that it is "in no way a solution" because we already see patronage as an effective model for a number of systems that capitalism has failed to address. Once we stop pretending creative content can be owned, we can actually begin progressing as a culture.

The days for copyright are numbered, and the selfish and entitled are not the pirates but the artists who demand that their content be worth something to everybody.

That is circular logic and represents all that was wrong in the original article. Copyright, as an institution, implies that ownership of data is possible and real, therefore implying that the data can be "stolen".

People who disagree with copyright as an institution would do so conclusively because they do not believe in the ownership of intellectual thought. They believe that there are better, more progressive institutions for cultural progress. They do not agree that somebody owns the content they produce.

The article stubbornly ignores that assessment and then tells people to fuck themselves if they can't subscribe to failed logic.

Copyright is not the only way to financially motivate progress in culture. Public subsidy toward individuals who have enhanced culture is already a working model, and we've also had institutions like this in the past (even in the U.S. government, see Federal Project Number One).

If people create useful original content, others can reward them so as to promote future development. Donating to your favorite artist or an emerging talent should be the nature of our cultural progress, rather than the selfish strive for exuberant compensation. If money is actually necessary to produce better than what you'd call "mediocre" content, we can establish public systems to direct money for those purposes.

I highly doubt money is so necessary anyway, considering audio and video equipment and editing software are easier and easier to attain. There are kids creating music and uploading it to Soundcloud every single day, giving it away, and forming networks to distribute this content with their friends. Some of them can produce some really amazing music with _very_ cheap equipment. I could produce objectively more sophisticated music in thirty minutes with a kaossilator I've had sitting in my garage for five years, than probably any song in the top-100 charts right now -- sans auto tuned vocals.

I know that's "mainstream" hit piece, but it's true. You can't honestly tell me when you think "progress in culture" you imagine that most of our cultural funding should go toward "artists" who do not actually produce their own content, but rather sell their public image. Somebody with barely any experience in music production can produce a pop song similar to most of the popular content out there. It's all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, who is then conditioned to expect even dumber content in the future.

How easy is it for actually creative music to be accepted by a wider audience? Not easy, when the distribution channels are owned by the people representing the distributors and producers of the content. Then the Cable companies also are owned by those organizations too, and it becomes a sick and twisted mess.

Further proof is shown in television. BBC and NOVA and NPR and other organizations have far more accurate and superior scientific and culturally educational programming and journalism, but they're publicly funded. Whereas the History channel probably hasn't played a single history program for years, and runs "Modern Marvels" reruns every hour on the weekend until the next primetime spot for "Ice Road Truckers" opens up. The Science and discovery channels almost never produce unique or interesting content.

These organizations and their strangleholds on our legislative process keep the status quo of copyright intact, even despite grave consequences to our personal liberties, knowing full well that their financial benefit has a more immediate and self-perpetuating impact on society. It's disgraceful.

Why can't a more universal public funding system be embraced, considering we have the technology to do it? If we care about personal liberties and advances in communication, we should take innovative steps in that direction.

Public info also makes it easier to steal a domain.

Long ago, I (being childish) stole a domain from some random person who pissed me off in a video game. I spent three days calling the registrar's offices (along with a friend) over fifty times, writing the name of each service representative down so that we didn't dupe up on anyone and raise any red flags. (It was a huge registrar, though not GoDaddy.)

We were able to use the public info available on their whois records to weasel our way into getting additional account information from the employees. We'd simply call and ask for a small piece of the account information in a nonchalant manner, they'd ask for info we've already obtained from previous calls, and usually they'd either give us the info or say "we don't have access to that information".

The hardest part was getting the last four digits of the credit card on the account. Since we had all the rest of the user's information, we called maybe twenty times trying to get those numbers. Some employees would say they can't see them, but they could. All it took was one really stupid representative:

"Yes, I'd like to confirm the credit card on my account before I file a form to retrieve my account back. I have two cards that end with the same last two digits, what are the first two digits of the last four digits"

[she doesn't understand so we confuse the hell out of her for minutes on end]

"uh... 2... 6."

"And the last two?"

"82"

"Thank you, I have the right card. Good day."

Had a good laugh, filed a form, emailed it in, stole their domain before they noticed, and never gave it back. I talked to the owner and eventually redirected his website back, and he forgave me.

Keep your whois info private if you're on a crappy registrar. Likely, the OP uses the same password everywhere and some random kid stumbled on his godaddy account and took the domain from under his nose.

> the amount of people that pirate because of DRM is tiny

This depends on the DRM and the software. Software which has high international demand but is region-locked to specific countries will be pirated because of the DRM at rates that sometimes dwarf "freeloading" pirates.

I agree that Gabe is pretty much just pandering, but in the end, DRM doesn't really help piracy rates. Maybe for an immediate period after release, which is desirable in some circumstances as a matter of convenience, but that's it.

The real question is whether the piracy rate is indicative of the loss of sales due to piracy, which is clearly contested in some situations. Would Mojang profit more if Minecraft piracy was -- hypothetically speaking -- impossible? Probably a little bit, but a lot of users will look for something else to pirate, not roll their eyes and say "ugh well I guess I have to buy it now".

As an administrator of an online message board, I concur. Web content is being so efficiently aggregated that some forums turn into the awkward conversation between two redditors: "Check this out!" "Heh, yeah. I saw that."

Communities before were usually separated by platforms, because the platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more. Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles, and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has slowly become part of the same identity.

I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart, but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et al have the potential to monopolize social networking.

While it would be much more convenient for everybody if they implemented some extension of the current protocol/formatting, there are some issues with accomplishing that.

Names registered with namecoin have to depend on some blobs which can be updated by the name owner. The blobs need a format of some kind, and since they're already using a different protocol than DNS to achieve this P2P system, they might as well use JSON.

Also, as I stated in my comment, the structure of JSON fits better for this type of system than DNS's formatting. DNS requires redundancy to describe round-robin, and it's not easy (or elegant) to express complex structures in DNS, compared to JSON.

One example of this in practice is the I2P field I mentioned before.

Namecoin is based on Bitcoin, but it uses a different block chain. Essentially, they are two different "commodities". You have to obtain namecoins in order to purchase .bit names.

However, you can purchase namecoins with bitcoins using bitcoin-namecoin exchanges like this one: https://exchange.bitparking.com/main

Also, to answer your question, mining is really ineffective for home users. I mean, if you have energy to waste on it, that's fine, but you'll find it's more economical to simply buy the bitcoins through bitcoin exchanges (Tradehill, MtGox) than it is to mine them.

Namecoin is already established, and although there could be better P2P naming systems, I'm happy they're trying to snag .bit. I had a similar thought just earlier this week; Namecoin could work seamlessly alongside our current naming system as long as .bit is endorced for that use.

This isn't a replacement of existing DNS with some arbitrary JSON protocol, this is a P2P DNS called Namecoin which happens to use JSON. Arguably, the flexibility offered by JSON can allow for sophisticated technologies to emerge which can take advantage of this naming system.

It's clear from the very article of this submission that this is the case. For instance, the I2P fields are combined in a structure that best represents the resource on the I2P network. A different structure is necessary to represent a Tor or freenet resource identifier.

If Internet naming is going to be fragmented, I'd rather it not be wasted on Alternative DNS roots, which fall privy to the same fundamental problems as our current domain name system. A Namecoin system cannot be so easily censored.

That's absurd. Just because the motive of the advertisement is to sell you an idea, doesn't mean it isn't done creatively and artistically. In fact, advertisements tend to be most effective when they are extremely artistic and unique.

Art is supposed to be emotionally engaging. What does a comic book do better?

That's actually not specifically the problem with crytocurrencies. The CPU cost is dynamic in bitcoin, and has changed in the past to reflect more or less people mining new bitcoins.

The real problem with crytocurrencies is scaling transactions. In a model where every participant has to be aware of every transaction, it is extremely difficult to imagine it (quickly) handling millions of transactions a day.

The homepage links to this: http://www.dartlang.org/support/index.html.

He might be saying something false, but he's saying something he believes is true. They're not asking him for an account on some event that took place, they're asking for an opinion.

Lying under oath has to be a clear and deliberate misrepresentation of the truth. That can't be proven in this case. It's a perfectly valid opinion to believe that Google is successful because it was first, whether you agree with that opinion or not.

If you dig through their website, it looks like the common theme is "get money out of government", which is a rather vague goal and doesn't explain much.

Assuming they mean political finance regulations, who objectively determines when the goals are met? What kind of specific regulations do they want? You can't find this information anywhere.

This is more of a symbolic protest than a redress of grievances. People who have no idea how to solve problems and want one person to solve them all because they're holding up traffic in New York.