Zoe Lofgren Wants To Slow Down Domain Seizures By ICE & DOJ 46
GovTechGuy writes "Rep. Zoe Lofgren sat down with Roll Call to discuss her proposal to slow down the seizure of domain names accused of piracy by the federal government. Lofgren turned to Reddit for help formulating the bill, and also discussed whether her colleagues in Congress know enough about technology to make informed decisions on tech policy."
It's "Zoe", not "Zof" (Score:5, Funny)
She "also discussed whether her colleagues in Congress know enough about technology to make informed decisions on tech policy".
This is one of those trick questions, right? I mean, "No, next question." is too easy, right?
Re:It's "Zoe", not "Zof" (Score:5, Funny)
That is so not true, these people are our best and brightest! Hello.... you think congressmen don't have indoor plumbing? They know how tubes work, they know what happens when you put them in a series. They arn't stupid.
Re:It's "Zoe", not "Zof" (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely. The US Congress contains the best and the brightest graduates of law school that we currently...
WE ARE SO HOSED.
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Why are you bringing up the TSA?
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Absolutely. The US Congress contains the best and the brightest graduates of law school that we currently...
Bought dogs have leashes.
Leashes have handlers.
Handlers have people to answer to. Once you find "these" people, the inquisition should begin
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Yes, Congress includes a person who thinks the Apollo astronauts landed on Mars. Not our brightest.
Re:It's "Zoe", not "Zof" (Score:5, Funny)
Also a Congressman who worried that stationing more US forces on Guam would flip the island over [wikipedia.org].
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Johnson was obviously joking about stationing too many people on the island. Jackson-Lee honestly asked a NASA official if the Mars Pathfinder had photographed the flag planted by Neil Armstrong. Her office accused those who pointed out her stupidity of racism.
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You might say that, until you see the part where he says [youtube.com] "....tip over....[insert flipping motion with hand]... and capsize".
Honestly, the hand motions are what kill me-- that, and the admiral trying to keep a straight face.
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That's what makes it funny, and obviously a joke.
Some things like this are jokes. Some things are the speaking version of typos like Obama's 57 states. A rational person can't really believe that he thinks therea are 58 states. But others simply show ignorance. Jackson-Lee on the Mars Pathfinder was classic. Most Democrats and some Republicans when referring to guns are just displaying ignorance. Take Obama during that debate saying automatic rifles should be illegal, that's just ignorance. And then Romney
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Sometimes the humor is too dry to many to catch. Also, some people aren't very good comedians and shouldn't be making jokes. Take Romney talking about opening the window in a jet. He has spent more time in private jets than most of us and obviously knows what's up, but his delivery was too deadpan. Many in the audience caught the joke (you do hear laughter), but he left himself open to claims of stupidity.
But Jackson-Lee, that one was real. She was asking an honest question.
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His was a joke.
Her's wasn't:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Jackson_Lee#Historical_errors [wikipedia.org]
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a congressman who flatly and publicly calls all her colleagues idiots will soon find herself on no committees and with no support at anything she tries to do. Effectively rendering herself powerless and unable to do anything.
That's why the diplomatic phrasing.
One of those word games politicians play.
A representative of the people doing her job? (Score:5, Funny)
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Let's see, have we seen MAFIAA's tentacles in action [slashdot.org] recently?
Chris Dodd complained that Congress isn't bought (Score:2)
ICE ? (Score:1)
I thought the ICE was melting due to global warming.
Fortunately there has been a bit of snow here which has made most of the slick ice that happened with the freezing rain over the weekend have a bit more traction so you can walk on it.
And theres no highs above freezing in the next 7 days forecast
Pirates and global warming (Score:2)
I thought the ICE was melting due to global warming.
If the pirates are winning, how is there still a warming trend? This must disprove Pastafarianism.
Is she still on tour (Score:1)
We can fix this problem (Score:5, Insightful)
These agencies of the US government are abusing the DNS system, our DNS system. We should replace or at least supplement DNS with something they can't abuse, something peer2peer. Nothing short of that will fix the DNS abuse we keep seeing.
Namecoin was a good idea but it's not going to work as currently implemented. Maybe something similar could.
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Jesus, you don't even read the comments anymore? Why do you people browse this site?
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I made a mistake. What's the biggest flaw of Namecoin?
Domain squatting due to the low cost of registering domains. Also there is nothing to stop me or you registering 'microsoft'.
See my comment above.
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We should replace or at least supplement DNS with something they can't abuse, something peer2peer.
Namecoin perhaps? It's a parallel DNS authority forked from Bitcoin.
Yeah I meantioned that. Seems you didn't get to the end of my comment. Anyway - namecoin as currently implemented is prone to exactly the same domain squating problem that conventional DNS suffers from. It needs a solution to that, and that's not so easy to design.
Maybe something like a small cost to register a name you already have a .com for ( provable by adding a text record to the .com ), and a very high cost if you don't. Maybe also a landgrab like phase where users can only register the domains they o
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There is no "fix" for DNS. DNS is the fix. The DNS hierarchy basically handles a variety of cases. Any peer to peer system would either converge into DNS or devolve into a world with no Internet security. In a P2P system a compromised peer can spread misinformation far and wide and be pragmatically untraceble. Even a quorum system would allow a botnet to easily corrupt it.
If you want to replace DNS, you will need to replace SSL/TLS, PKI, SMTP, and several load balancing or content delivery solutions. You wo
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- Consider peer lifespan: How long has this peer been known-good?
- Consider change pattern: did google.com just change in the 2 places you trust, but not 15 others?
- Sign the data: Pull a whole block of name resolutions signed by "Google, MS, Apple, US, EU, & China" trusted keys, & only consider updates signed by a similarly-large group that mutually doesn't
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"Web of Trust" systems would be a required basis to prevent compromise problems.
I'm not sure. Anything that has trusted systems is open to legal attacks from the bad guys.
Only peer2peer has proven to be safe from the two great evils of our age - governments and botnets.
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Peer2peer doesn't have to mean the quorum wins, or that a single compromised node gets to screw everything up, or that a botnet can p0wn the whole network. What you are describing are problems with badly designed peer2peer.
If you want to see a well designed peer2peer application look up the bitcoin paper. On a technical level the bitcoin network and blockchain is very well designed regardless of its use as a currency.
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Informed Decisions? (Score:3)
I, for one, believe there should be some sort of test you need to pass to prove you have basic understandings of certain things before you can represent others. Or, better yet, choose people in the field to make policy; go to MIT, Stanford, IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc and make a tech representation senate. We don't NEED everyone in the government making decisions on everything; spread out the responsibility to those who are experts.
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I, for one, believe there should be some sort of test you need to pass to prove you have basic understandings of certain things before you can represent others.
How about this test:
Do you have a law degree?
Yes: Oh, I'm sorry you're not qualified to be a representative....
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Or at least to be on committees for certain subjects. Jackson-Lee was on the science committee at the time she asked her famous question about when the Apollo astronauts landed on Mars. Most Democrat reps are completely ignorant on guns, so should be kept away from any committee related to them. Consider Todd Akin who thinks a woman's body can automa
Physical goods need quick-return as well (Score:2)
Quoting from the linked article:
âoePhysical goods can be held in escrow or in a warehouse and they wonâ(TM)t necessarily decay or degrade,â
Many goods are perishable. Many that are not are also "part of a process" as well.
Imagine if a small-business brick-and-mortar movie store was credibly accused of piracy and the cops came in and seized ALL of the DVDs and waited weeks or months to return those that weren't reasonably suspected of being pirated. They value of that inventory would likely go down over time, especially for recently released titles.
Imagine if the cops went one step further and padlocked the buil
The quote that got botched (Score:1)
Quoting from the linked article, 2nd try:
"Physical goods can be held in escrow or in a warehouse and they won't necessarily decay or degrade,"
Lofgren Q&A on Tech Policy (Score:3)
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Meant to include this link: http://www.rollcall.com/news/seeing_the_internet_as_a_place_for_freedom_to_flourish-220070-1.html [rollcall.com] From the post: "I don’t want to critique my colleagues. My degree was in political science, not computer science. So, you have to teach yourself. I spend as much time as possible trying to become a knowledgeable person. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve read a lot of books and I’ve taken some courses on how to do some simple programming. And I actually did some simple programming a long time ago in college. So I’m not an expert, but you need to have at least some concept of how the technology works to avoid making mistakes." --Lofgren
What a novel concept: actually understand technology before legislating it.
Quick name confusion... (Score:2)
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dolph Lundgren... might have really changed the fight...