Posts by Mei Lewis 46 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2008
"China, North Korea, Syria, THE UK ... are you listening?"
Ever heard of cleanfeed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_%28content_blocking_system%29
Oh wait, that's not the bad kind of censorship, it's the good kind! The kind that protects you!
So insidious even the tech literate register crowd are barely aware of it.
If they stood in a constituency I could vote in. The system needs a shakeup.
Also stop calling them freetards theregister. It's a social position some people choose to take, calling them retards for it every time you mention them is the very antisthesis of cool-headed, unbiased journalism. It would be okay if it was funny, but it's not - think up a new joke.
"However, the defendant was not authorized to distribute the material to anyone, even those authorized to download it, hence she did commit a crime."
It's that kind of twisted, unreasonable logic that leads the vast majority of people think the law is an ass and the RIAA are arseholes.
Suppose you're at a family gathering and you see a mum tell her son that it's okay for him to eat chocolate today because he's been good.
You happen to have some chocolate so you give the kid a piece. Then BANG! the mother tears into you calling you every name under the sun and screams, "I said he could have chocolate but I didn't say you were allowed to give it to him."
You'd think she was a psychotic bitch wouldn't you?
Why are people so rabbid when discussing something that happened before most (all?) of us were born?
I mean people on both sides, although I guess the 'deniers' started the discussion and those who speak against them are just acting defensively.
I'm not trying to make a point here, I seriously want to know. Why are you all so interestd in Jewish history during WW2?
The article is great, and I've read similar pro-photography stories in other places, mainly photography sites. They tend to the line that photography is not illegal, there's nothing wrong with and it's a right we don't want to lose, all of which is true, but relates mainly to photographers' interests.
But the issue is far larger than that. I think someone needs to make the point that the public and media being allowed to record the events of the country and world is a vital check on the power of the police, government and authorities generally.
We (the general public) need to know when they do something we might disagree with or which is outright wrong or illegal. The Rodney King beating in America are an obvious example, and the West putting observers in certain countries to monitor arms or elections is the same sort of thing.
And we need more than just 'professional journalists' as is hinted at towards the end of the article. If the barriers to entry are too high, or if it's the authorities who decide who gets to report on the authorities it won't work.
That's all very tragic / interesting, but the best bit is when you try to download the manual yourself, which of course you now want to do.
Google 'al-Qaeda Training Manual' and the first result that comes up is www.usdoj.gov/ag/manualpart1_1.pdf
Yes, that's a file on the website of the US Department of Justice. They're thoughtfully got hold of a copy, scanned it in, used OCR on it an put it on the website for the world to share. Thanks Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey!
What if I buy Volume 1 of some edgy manga where a fifteen year old girl gets molested at her high school by some tentacled ogre, the police find out and lock me up, then Volume 2 comes out and it turns out that the 15 year old girl was actually a 30 year old psi-investigator sent in disguise to the school to investigate the tentacled beasties?
Or the other way around, what if a sequel comes out to some adult book and reveals that the characters thought to be adults were children all along?
Are we now being judged for actions we _might_ take as the result of looking at fictional worlds where there is _no_ definitive reality?
Why does Google always get away with links to torrents? They have to be the largest and best torrent tracker there is.
Just Google "xxx torrent" where 'xxx' is the thing you want to download and they'll give you either indirect links via other trackers or a direct link from their own cache, just in case the original tracker has been closed down.
They have plenty of money to go after, maybe too much?
And it will.
Apple have already nearly gone bust 3 or 4 times in the last twenty years.
Even if they stay active it's likely that within 5 years they'll be forced to sell DRM free music so their DRM servers will be a legacy support hassle for them they'll switch off as soon as they feel they can.
Then all the people who've bought music from iTMS will have a hissy fit and the general public will realise what a stupid idea DRM is.
If downloading music illegaly is only a problem because it's illegal maybe we should make it legal?
There are probably more downloaders than there are music creators and therefore, in a democracy, where the majority supposedly gets what it wants, it should be made legal.
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