Monthly Archives: February 2013

I came across this article about two weeks ago (it surfaced when President Obama signed his secret executive order effectively enacting CISPA), but haven’t had time to post about it. It is certainly relevant to our current discussion topic of privacy – especially digital privacy. Essentially, this order “will allow for the voluntary sharing of Internet traffic between private companies and the government.” It allows the CAS, which Glenn just posted about. Accompanying this newly obtained governmental power is an algorithm designed by Raytheon, a defense contractor, that essentially can find out everything about a person – and it’s available to the public. I highly encourage everyone to view the video.

The software allows a user to track every checkin, photgraph, or whatever on a list of social media sites. It will compile a schedule of when/how often the person you’re searching for is at a certain place, allowing you to track their wherabouts pretty effectively. The demonstration in the video starts with just a name, getting all of the person’s – Nick’s – media sites, then finds all the locations that he’s been while connected to social media, and then finds photos of him. Very quickly, the demonstrator finds where Nick’s been and what he looks like. Then he begins to predict where Nick will be. The demonstrator finds that the best time to find Nick is a 6AM on Monday in the gym. Finally, he finds all of Nick’s associations. All the people he has communicated with on his social media sites as well as phone numbers of many of those people!

There are obvious privacy issues – not to mention constitutional legality issues – associated with this technology. I believe that the 4th Amendment entitles you to privacy from not only the government, but the general public. Being able to warrantlessly access the information RIOT does without any legal backing is extremely disturbing to me. Most of the privacy topics we have been discussing in class are dear to people – seemingly – because he or she is afraid of who is judging him or her. My biggest issue is that I don’t like people that I can’t see being able to obtain information about me when I don’t know who or even that they are in fact accessing my information! This tool just stiffens my paranoia that stuff like that actually happens for reasons beyond advertising…

Finally getting around to posting this on here after a few of us talked about it after class last week:

YouTube tends to be kind of strict when it comes to copyrights on music used in the background of videos. I used to make a lot of videos with Call of Duty and different games, and YouTube started disabling the audio from my videos completely because it contained “copy-written  material”.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I ended up finding this paragraph about fair use:

~FAIR USE~ Copyright Disclaimer
Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

If you post that in the dispute form for audio being disabled, most of the time they’ll put it back up for you. I’m not really sure which specific part of it would be the part applicable. Maybe the non-profit or personal use part?

Owen wanted me to post a link to one of the videos I used Fair Use to dispute, so here’s a link to one. Any Battlefield 3 fans? 😛

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCImPBVPfQ

Anyways, I always thought it was pretty cool. Normally when I think of copyright laws I don’t think of anything that would really be too applicable to stuff I used to do in my spare time.

-Grant

Recently released an article about The Pirate Bay’s database file. For those of you who don’t know, The Pirate Bay (TPB) used to be a search engine to search torrents that were hosted on TPB’s servers, usually that contained copyrighted content. Nowadays, TBP has removed all torrents from their search engine and only link to magnet links. The difference is that a magnet link is just a link to a file, rather than the actual file. TPB did this so that they could claim less liability in any court cases. In addition to this, there was another positive effect for the site’s users. The so-called “pirates” could now download the entire contents of TBP at once, and it only took up a tiny 50 megabytes. 50 megabytes to link to millions of files. Their newest release of their database is 75 megabytes and links to over 2 million magnet links. Even if/when TPB is shut down, there will be no way for the government to prevent people from accessing and downloading the magnet links. As soon as one website is shut down, another opens its doors. The pirate community is amazingly resilient. Even when the Swedish government was pressured by the US to raid TPB, all their servers were taken and they were only offline for 2 days. Presumably access to the database of TPB’s magnet links will allow piracy to occur even if TPB goes offline for good. What sort of unintended effects do you think this will have on piracy? Do you think the government is aware of this problem and thinking of ways to stop it?

I know there have to be some gamers amongst us. Here is a topic that tackles an interesting legal battle. I will link a few passages at the end of this explanation which sheds greater detail on the nature of the legal debate.

Blizzard Entertainment has always been very interactive with its community. With the release of Starcraft, they also included a extremely intuitive map editor which all members of the community could use. There was mixed success in the endeavors that programmers and enthusiasts took in creating these map mods. It was not until the release of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and the expansion The Frozen throne that these map modifications took on a whole new life of their own. With the help of others, a programmer dubbed Icefrog created one of the first MOBA games (trolls will say that the SC1 map AoS, or Aeon of Strife was the original genre), Defense of the Ancients (Or DotA). This map became a huge success and even spawned worldwide invitationals. Another gaming powerhouse, Valve, later hired Icefrog to oversee a ‘sequel’ to DotA, aptly named Dota 2. In the creation of this game, Valve took legal action to trademark ‘DotA’, ‘Defense of the Ancients,’ etc. The end-user agreement for Warcraft III stated that no one could profit from any map editor creations. They, however, did not follow their own guidelines as a company, by holding profitable tournaments surrounding a mod they did not own. Does Blizzard have more of a claim than Valve to this trademark though? Here is the more important question:

Should a mod that a user creates be owned by the original game developer?

Blizzard vs. Valve

DOTA: Wikipedia

A Deal is Reached

In our book, it mentions a single, Minnesota mother of four who was found guilty of a massive file-sharing verdict. Her name is Jammie Thomas-Rasset and she was accused and found guilty of violating copyright laws for 24 songs she downloaded from Kazaa. Recently, the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court NOT to review her case, which would allow the penalty of $222,000 to stand. This Wikipedia article can bring you up to speed on the past statuses of the case, as the amount of damages has rangedfrom $54,000 to the absurd amount of $1,920,000. Currently the damages are at $222,000 dollars, or $9,250 per song. The Obama administration has tried to set this case as a precedence to give the music industry more power to prosecute and strike fear into would-be copyright violators. A quote from the Arstechnica article, found here, is “The feds don’t buy the woman’s argument that the massive size of the award makes it unconstitutional.”
Using this rationale, isn’t the 8th Amendment to the Constitution null? The whole point of the 8th Amendment is to make sure the punishment matches the crime. The government is essentially saying that they understand the song costs $1.00 or $1.29, but they are going to charge you for thousands of dollars per song. Since the music industry likes to draw parallels between physical objects and the intellectual property that is a song, let’s do the same. Say you steal a pair of sunglasses from Walmart that cost $5.00. The Wal-mart doesn’t look at the cost that went into creating the sunglasses, they just go after you for the value of the sunglasses. By the music industry’s logic, you should have to pay for all the worker’s salaries that made the sunglasses, and the machinery that created the sunglasses! Now doesn’t that just sound ridiculous.

What do you guys think about this? Is it complete garbage? I think so.

When I saw this article, I instantly thought of moral luck.  In addition to moral luck, the article brings up a few moral issues.

Succinctly, this article describes how a ski resort started to use sewage to create their fake snow.  However, when the snow was made, it came out yellow.  The resort’s manager claimed that the discoloration was cause by rust residue in the pipes used, but everyone has their doubts.  Additionally, the snow contains hormones, chemicals, and etc.

As a result, the moral issue is whether or not it was morally right or wrong for the resort to make snow that contains possible dangerous chemicals?Personally, I believe this action is morally wrong because it puts people’s health at risk. So by the moral rights theory, this action is morally wrong because it infringes on people’s right to life/health.

While perusing hacker news I came upon this blog post BBC Attacks the Open Web. In a quick summary, the web was created with open ideals, HTML is the leading example.  Companies, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and the BBC,  who have publicly stated similar goals along the lines of promoting of creativity and the sharing of information are attacking their own ideals in search of profits. The BBC in 2010 tried to support DRM for their online HD broadcasts because the license-holders of the content threatened to disallow BBC from using their content. So they are not entirely to blame. Their full submission can be seen here.

I think this relates directly with our classroom discussions. This API, Encrypted Media Extensions, would allow web content to be distributed in a controlled manner. As we have discussed, creators need to be rewarded for their creations, but in order to continue improving, access to this material needs to be relatively unrestricted. As we also discussed, DRM does not expire. Even the ludicrous American copyright law, expiration 75 years after death, does mean there’s an eventual end to the restrictions.

What would this mean for the future of the web? If content could be easily encrypted and people had to start paying for the majority of internet content, I think it could get really ugly. I know I would be out of a job if I couldn’t find free quality content with a quick Google search. If I had to pay for most everything on the web I would never make any money.

This is just a small post about something awesome i found. the first BIONIC EYEBALL. How awesome is that? Apparently it has a small camera on a set of glasses that records video, then sends those images to a small chip implanted in the blind eye that sends electronic signals into your brain. Since I’m blind in my right eye, this seems as cool as it gets when it comes to the medical field and computers. Is anyone else excited for bionic people? I personally want giant metal arms like Jax from mortal combat Annihilation.

We all know the internet is full of bad things and bad people that were created in some awful dark corner of the planet. This being a school blog, I wont bring those up here. But its odd that this class has introduced me to a completely new kind of low and pathetic. By low and pathetic I of course mean patent trolls. From what I have learned so far, patent trolls are a premium example of how to get rich by doing nothing. I hate the idea of a patent troll, someone who buys the right to others work and gets money from what they did while doing nothing themselves. It seems to go against how I was raised. Being from a small farm town I have a more blue color view of the world than some I guess. But that is why i was very happy to find this article which could be an answer to the trolls.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation or EFF has proposed a way to stop or at least slow down the trolls. By forcing them to submit code with there patents and if the patent is granted then it should just be limited to the invention claimed. At the very least making patents have code attached would force trolls to do a little more work. But at its best, this idea could stop trolls from just suing everyone. As described in the article directly from EFF, if you make them attach a solution to the patent, they cant sue anyone under the sun for coming up with a similar solution that is created in a different way. EFF does a better job than describing this than I do so I hope you read there article also.

Does anyone see a positive of a patent troll? Or how they are useful to society? Or do you see flaws in the EFF’s proposal?

Recently an article that appeared in CNN caught my attention about drones. They are unmanned killing machines armed with missiles, controlled from thousands of miles away, as they stalk and then destroy supposed terrorist targets in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Last Thursday the Senate Intelligence Committee received a classified document, which gives legal justifications for the administration’s use of drones. According to CBS news, controversial drones are the weapons of choice in a semi-secret war that was dragged into the spotlight this past week, during confirmation hearings for John Brennan as CIA Director. He says: “The people that were standing up here today, I think they really have a misunderstanding of what we do as a government,” said Brennan of protesters. “We only take such actions as a last resort to save lives when there is no alternative taking an action that will mitigate such a threat.”
The question is, is this legal? The government claims that the drones are only used to save lives or stop terrorist actions even though statistics show that 98 percent of those killed by drones have not been high-level targets.
Most of the drones that so far the military has been using for reconnaissance are small planes that are equipped with small special-purpose cameras.
The police of North Dakota are using the drones in demonstrations in hostile situations. It now seems that the drones are already spreading throughout our own country. Now you can order online a drone kit for a couple of hundred dollars. At least eleven states have pending legislation or restrictions that would allow the drones.

I think there is clearly a privacy issue. Everyone has the right to privacy in their home and that includes the backyard. The fence that divides the yard of your home from the rest of the world is an imaginary vertical fence that cannot be violated by any drone. With the use of drones carrying cameras, anyone can film you being in your backyard and immediately put it on the Internet. It would not surprise me that some paparazzi are already using this technology to get their news.
I am not against the police and the task of maintaining order, but I have always been a person who likes to be in accordance with the law. However, in this case, I think they are taking the issue of security so far away that it violates our basic right to privacy. Everyone has the right to have a private space, and this should not be violated.