It's a relatively new agency in name (2003), but it's not really all that new. It was formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and U.S. Customs.
> Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.
I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.
What's the difference in outcome between passive stalking by having sufficient cameras to capture everyone's actions at all times and active stalking with a film crew?
It is intimidating and threatening to most normal people for their wearabouts to be tracked at all times, regardless of the mode.
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
They're not being tracked at all times in real life. They're potentially being tracked in public.
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it. But note that it's not cost-free, and there will be tradeoffs.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
> seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
They often do. What am I gonna do, run up to anyone who's taking cell phone videos that might have me in it and try to force them to stop recording? That would make me look unhinged.
It’s a false equivalence. Passive surveillance cameras aren’t the same as having a bunch of annoying people trailing me, which gives rise to the concern for the personal safety of me and my family. So I reject the comparison.
What about if/when those cameras are no longer really passive, and everything they see gets autonomously compiled into a dossier on your activities and movements?
That’s a separate issue. Real time observation is one thing. What happens with the data afterwards is another.
Now, the obvious response to that is “if you’re not watching, it can’t be recorded in the first place.” But we have legitimate reasons for wanting to observe public activities. The question is, how do we strike the right balance between legitimate use and abuse?
Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
Having this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
You're bootstrapping your argument with an assumption that there's something to account for. Public activities are public. You're shifting the accountability from the actor to the observer.
What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.
And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.
If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.
> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.
The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.
You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme.
I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.
Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.
Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.
Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.
Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy.
> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked
You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.
You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.
You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build.
My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).
To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?
Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.
> we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone...illegally have access to the software we build.
Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.
> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).
Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.
> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?
You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.
> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.
We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.
I guess there's some confusion in that I don't think anybody's saying everyone should pirate everything all the time. That would, indeed, be problematic.
But if companies keep pushing people to piracy... well, I'm not going to blame the people first, that's for sure. Especially when things like TFA happen.
No, I don't really see the slippery slope. If there were such a slope, I would imagine that decades into this piracy thing, we'd be sliding down it. Yet most people don't pirate. Strange?
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
But cloudflare has no issue blocking the content if they receive a court order. The issue here is that La Liga wants to be able to get content blocked because they say so, and it has to be done right now.
I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.
DMCA notices (and whatever the EU equivalents are) are designed to avoid the need for court orders. Every service provider that sends content is obligated by law to cease sending the content upon receipt of that notification. CF ignores them because they believe (mistakenly in my view) that the law doesn’t apply to them.
And every time they are sued for facilitating piracy, instead of letting the case to proceed to trial, they settle out of court.
Cloudflare famously ignores DMCA themselves for content they don't host, with their point of view that since they're a proxy and not a host they are not forced to comply, only pass the DMCA claim to the upstream.
Other than that, the legal situation on Spain is pretty dire for LaLiga. The Supreme Court already ruled in Spain that, as per the current writing of the law, football transmissions are _not_ works subject to copyright as they're not works of "art, literature and science":
https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/ca/Poder-Judicial/Tribunal...
So it's likely that, if LaLiga sued Cloudflare or they made them party on any actual litigation, Cloudflare would defend themselves and possibly win. Therefore... they just don't sue them, only sue ISPs that have an incentive to just comply to any LaLiga request (as.. legal compliance and collaboration is one of the requirements for being able to buy rights to LaLiga matches in Spain. Yeah, no kidding, you can look it up in their public documentation).
Well, I lie. In a legal twist, they ended up suing Cloudflare for "participation in criminal activities", but not through the same avenue they sued the ISPs on (penal vs commerce court), with some interesting twists as accusations of "facilitating services to avoid the execution of a court order" - which doesn't make a lot of sense, as they're not even direct parties to that court order and they were denied taking part on it.
https://okdiario.com/economia/empresas/justicia-imputa-ceo-c...
I’m aware of how they rationalize it, and it’s bullshit. They compare themselves to a router that passes through packets unmolested. But that argument is trivially refuted by the fact that their IPs are what their customers' DNS queries resolve to, and the fact that without being explicitly configured to do so, their proxies will not serve content on behalf of an origin. L3 routers simply copy packets between interfaces. A CDN is significantly more complicated than that.
Not every customer, even a paying customer, demands reliability at a particular level. Market segmentation tends to address those situations: pay more, get more.
Users on $200 plan complaining, already at max level of subscription, I don't think a $200 subscription should make you feel like you are getting unfair advantage. Like restricting claude -p to API ... after I paid so much? Moderate use should not do that. I am not running it batch mode on a million inputs.
They can be held to account when they fail to deliver what they promise! But what is promised for delivery is what's in the Terms of Service (i.e. the agreement). Nothing more. If it's not in there, you can't hold them to account for it.
> It's too easy for companies to fail to provide their service as long as they never promise to provide their service.
I don't even know what this means. You can't make anyone work for free, nor dictate the terms of what kind of work someone will do without their consent. I assume you are not pro-slavery.
You didn't merely call out their failure. You said it was "too easy," implying something more, like they owe you something. It's a pretty entitled point of view.
"[W]ant[ing] companies to put some effort into avoiding ... failures" is not the same as "hold[ing] them to account". The former is "this sucks and I don't like it." The latter is "punish them or force them to do what I want!"--i.e., some sort of legal remedy.
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