Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files 626
mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."
Of Course (Score:4, Interesting)
Likely proposed by the ISPs (Score:4, Interesting)
Comcast tried the first option, which is to drop the connections. The outrage on tech sites was massive, and eventually led to them being investigated by the FCC.
Barring that option, why not put the burden on the government to handle the filtering. Heck, that is even better because now you don't have to pay for it anymore, your customers pay for it through their taxes.
Just follow the money... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And people ask why I support Jesse Ventura? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't it possible just to claim your wireless access point was left open and that someone else was using your wireless without your consent or knowledge? They can only prove it was your modem that transmitted the information, not the actual PC without doing a forensic hard disk analysis, right?
My router spoofs all my MACs and I've only got one IPA, so anyone using my router looks the same to the entire web.
Is this a plausible defense?
Re:Remember, Kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Two Parties = No Voice (Score:4, Interesting)
When voting, I ALWAYS end up selecting the lesser of two evils.
I would like to see more of a parliamentarian form of government in the U.S.
Most of all, I would like to see the abolishment of "winner take all" rules for electoral votes that some states have.
I could rant for days about different ideas and suggested changes, but this is the gist of it.
Re:We need to demolish the two-party system (Score:3, Interesting)
What we need is for the federal government to back off and give back some of the power that they've taken from the states. That way, we can move to the state which fits us best politically, and everyone's happy.
Re:Biden's not Senator RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
I still want a law that puts casino patrons on a public assistance black list.
Biden and P2P, hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't he the very same Senator Biden censured back in 1988 for plagiarizing a paper during his law school years?
Re:And I'm sure . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I could share your optimism, but I doubt it. Freenet has been around for a long, long time (over 10 years now, I believe). It's barely usable because it depends on there being lots and lots of nodes - and why aren't there lots and lots of nodes? Because everybody's afraid of installing it since it might be used for illegal purposes! Nobody's willing to support truly workable anti-censorship measures because deep down, they support some censorship... which is unfortunate because you either allow no censorship at all or you allow arbitrary censorship.
Re:We need to demolish the two-party system (Score:5, Interesting)
Visualize a small town, with one main street. A McDonalds comes into town, and locates at one end of the town, let's call it the east end.
Now let's say Burger King wants to come into the same town. Where is the most logical place for the BK to locate? Answer: right next to the McDonalds, on the side that is closer to the most people.
In politics we see this in the clustering of positions. It makes sens for the Democrats to be just slightly more liberal than the Republicans, so that they can capture the votes of people that are somewhat liberal republicans. If they adopt a very liberal stance, then there is no way of knowing how people in the middle will vote.
We see this in Hillary Clinton, who in other times might have been described as a moderate republican, by here views. This stance makes sense, so that she can capture the middle of the spectrum. We saw this in the last 7 years, as democrats scrambled to be almost as conservative as the republicans, because that is what made political sense.
If you have a third player in the mix, let alone many players, that destablizes this balance. Then you'll start seeing a spectrum of views, rather than polarized (abortion) or highly similar (war on terrorism) positions. It's just game theory, which seems to be the meme of the day.
Re:And people ask why I support Jesse Ventura? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, they're pushing copyright infringement more and more into criminal court. It really got its start with DCMA....bypassing copyright measure....FELONY.
I agree with you on the other parts.....the use or lose thing causes SO much waste. Trust me...I've seen it first hand.
Re:And people ask why I support Jesse Ventura? (Score:1, Interesting)
I really despair when I read stuff like this, and it gets modded "insightful."
Answer me this: What is the probability that your vote will be the deciding vote in an election? Here's a hint: Buying lightning insurance and playing golf would give you a better rate of return. With your view, the only votes that count in an election are those suffiecient to give a bare plurality -- any excess for the winner, and *anyone* voting for any losing candidate wasted their vote. Votes for Kerry in 2004? Wasted. Votes for Gore? Wasted -- and not just that, but every individual vote EVEN IN FLORIDA was less than the noise in the election. No one can give a precise number of votes even after multiple recounts, or say what the margin of victory was.
So unless you are prepared to get together five hundred (or whatever the margin of error is) of your closest friends to vote as a bloc and wait a couple of hundred years to perhaps have a 1 in 50 chance of being in a state where you can influence a national election, the best strategy for an individual voter is to vote for the candidate they like the most.
The reason is simple. Voting is a recurring event, and Presidential elections happen every four years. If you are in a group that is greater than the margin of victory between the top two candidates, you have a louder voice in future elections than a voter that pads the margin of the winner or who votes for the loser. If an election is 51-49, the winner is perfectly happy with the margin in future elections, and the loser has to try to figure out some way of peeling off enough voters to actually win. If an election is 48-46-6, you can bet that at least one of the two major candidates will look for ways to appeal to that 6% -- or deny their opponent that 6% -- in future elections.
Re:Remember, Kids (Score:2, Interesting)
The weird thing is that the Republicans usually come out of the woodwork and try to censor violence (particularly in games today, but before that it was music, movies and TV) whenever there's a school shooting. The Democrats are right there too, but it's funny how you suggested that the Republicans don't to censor violence as much when they really do.