FTC To Take a Second Look at P2P 132
BlueMerle writes to mention that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has asked the FTC to take another look into the world of peer-to-peer file sharing. This time around however the inquiry has nothing to do with copyright. "But a USPTO report earlier this year stirred up the issue again by claiming that P2P installs could adversely affect national security when they made confidential government information available. This has already happened several times, as the Oversight Committee learned in July when it held hearings on the USPTO report and its findings. At that hearing, representatives were also shown real-time P2P search data. While most of the searches were for porn, movies, and music, the committee noted a surprisingly number of searches for private financial information."
Re:I may not be a bureaucrat ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be too fucking obvious, here.
Re:Why is P2P always to blame? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just wonderful. (Score:5, Interesting)
Your search for muscle building is probably not going to raise any eyebrows. The fact you are sharing your entire My Documents folder with your Turbo Tax records is of a bigger concern. Go to any P-P site and do a search for common applications extensions.
Many people just don't get the fact they shouldn't use their home directory as a place to download their goodies. It is what they share without even knowing is what is dangerous.
Here is a WSJ article detailing the problem..
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118134946950829716-QWDmBwH_qAgisaepbCCMoT_4cPA_20070710.html?mod=fpa_editors_picks [wsj.com]
Compuerworld article;
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012961 [computerworld.com]
and an article regarding an ID theft and arrest
http://www.smh.com.au/news/security/man-used-filesharing-program-to-steal-data-money/2007/09/07/1188783469524.html [smh.com.au]
They are not interested in your searches for marginal photos. They are interested in the security leaks.
So just where are you pointing your downloads? Just what are you making available?
p2p is too democratic, a danger to the US (Score:5, Interesting)
Last year Javed Iqbal, a satellite installer, was thrown in jail. His crime? He allowed people in the US to watch Al-Manar, the television station of Hezbollah. Of course Hezbollah is legally considered to be a terrorist group - if you're a country that is or formerly was a British colony. Or, for some reason, Holland. Outside of Holland and current/former British Dominions, the rest of the world considers Hezbollah to be what it is, a representative of Palestinians pushed into southern Lebanon by the Israelis from 1948 on. But anyhow, the US and UK are at odds with the rest of the world on this as so often they are, Iqbal was thrown in the slammer, and nary a word is heard about it or the supposed First Amendment. Meanwhile, narcissistic attention-seekers like Salman Rushdie are feted and praised year after year. In fact, this is done by the same corporate media propaganda machine which is working to dismantle things like peer-to-peer, all the while of course never reporting on what they are in fact doing, or about many things that are going on in the country of interest but that we'll never know about.
Re:Just wonderful. (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO the P2P developer groups are going to have to get off their butts right fast and do some kind of patch to fix this hole, Such as an auto folder creation, or major pop warnings or something, or they are going to find themselves legislated out of existence.
And I do mean really really fast. There is a major attitude about foreign military and industrial espionage. This is the kind of legislation that has legs. It's got both fear and money on it.
Why is P2P always to blame? Answer: (Score:3, Interesting)
How could a legislative committee discover, discuss and decide to take action on a problem like this before the leading edge of the community, which is to say here, has even heard about it? Remember these guys don't even type themselves, they have people to do that. That intertube guy genuinely thought he was being insightful at the time.
There may be other evidence. Where an when did these guys hear about the problem? That one could say a whole lot
Groups like the senate oversight commitee are cherry appointments. They go to senators that have been in office more or less forever. That means these guys are OLD.
OLD legislators don't go online that often but the do generally make a point to read their district's local paper. Is there a suspicious cluster of spontaneous articles that have appeared there more than other equivalent publications that are not home town news for pertinent legislators?
There may also be a few various motivating factors for making an argument over this.
Is there unequal use of P2P for political purposes? I have not been following the Obama campaign but I understand he is leveraging the internet pretty heavily. If P2P is being heavily used by on party more than another, it behooves the other party to kill the medium.
The solution for this one is for supporters of both P2P and the legislator in question need to start making use of it to prove the personal need.
Espionage has recently become a hot issue. The beauty of this particular subject is it's at least superficially non-partisan, it appears, truthfully or not, to address a major news subject making them look like heroes, and of course there's the money from the RIAA to make it all tastier.
I'd go further than that... (Score:3, Interesting)
One consequence of this is that you will lose anonymity, because everything you send will be traceable to your licence. It will also enable censorship and the destruction of information, because when licences are revoked, information sent using them will simply disappear. That's perfect for any organisation that wishes to control the movement of information, from Fascist governments to record companies.
The expense of this will be justified in the usual ways ("think of the children"/"the poor starving musicians"/"the dying film industry"/"OMG TERRORISTS!1!!!!1!"), and the technology that will be used to implement it already exists. It's funny to think that possession of an unlicensed computer might be a crime in the future, since an unlicensed computer might enable someone to copy information without restriction, and obviously only a criminal would want to do that. Will possession of Linux land you in jail?
Truly the present day is the best time to be alive, because we have all this advanced technology and it is not restricted yet.
Re:Just wonderful. (Score:3, Interesting)
Off hand I would ignorantly guess that it at least needs to be made clear that anyone who manages to get their stuff shared unintentionally is a giant idiot. Traditional liability requires a gate lock equivelant, which in this case would be a default setting that did not allow main directory sharing, with a warning labeled confirm window to change it.
This will possibly damage a lot of the sharing depth of lime/frost wire and eDonkey, but I'm not sure there's any help for it. I'm not a lawyer, a programmer, or a political analyst however. Your milage may vary.
Tech Support for a day (Score:1, Interesting)