ygreek

In China you already have to apply for a website license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license). And most people do not care about it very much. I once made a site with a friend from China, and he applied for the ICP license, even though the server was in the US and there was not a single word in Chinese on the site. In my friend's opinion it was a natural thing to do for a law abiding citizen.

I wish there were good open source alternatives to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter etc. that you could just install on your own server. But as it is now leaving cloud entirely would require significant effort, time and knowledge to setup and when you do, you would still lose a great part of functionality provided by the cloud now.

This idea is actually not as crazy as it may seem. Copyright lobby is usually just one step behind the Chinese policies of restricting access to the illegal content, with the only difference in definition of illegal. Chinese have developed such tool, [1], and were planning to install it on every new computer sold in China. But later scaled down it's use.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort

Admirable, but regrettably, people boycotting Kindle or any other product because of the DRM are in the minority that is easy to ignore.

In other news: RIAA Wants To Start Peeking Into Files You Store In The Cloud http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2570538

Considering those trends I would not want to store any unencrypted data in the cloud.

I am not a layer, so I do not really understand what does the phrase "conducting business in the US" means. Does creating a website amounts to the "business in the US", since by the nature of the internet, websites in any country would normally be accessible in the US? Or does one need to have customers in the US? Or is it something else?

So I am wondering, how could they stop conducting business in the US? Should they just block the access from the US based IP? If they would do so, would that really be better then censorship?

I do not understand on what grounds the Chinese company that serves Chinese users is being sued in New York. The search results are censored because Chinese law requires doing so. What does it have to do with the US?

It looks like they do not offer any good way to deal with forgery. The card and the hologram are not terribly hard to produce. Also unlike the usual bills they would not have the strong legal protection from counterfeiting.

Author's uncritical fascination with those scammers makes the article quite annoying to read. Leaving ethical issues aside, spamming does not seem to be technically challenging. Especially if you live in a country where the law enforcement is too weak to prosecute cybercrimes.

It feels ridiculous that I can easily send any pdf or jpeg files to Canada or nearly any place connected to the Internet, and no one would interfere. But somehow the exact same pictures printed or drawn on paper are subject to the border inspections and potential seizure.