Tag: You’re Doing it Right

An IP Address Isn’t a Person

A common method used by copyright holders to sue file sharers is to file John Doe lawsuits against IP addresses. This type of lawsuit has always been on shaky ground in my opinion and it appears as through a District Judge has decided that shaky ground was falling apart:

A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the “pay-up-or-else-schemes” that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.

This is a great ruling because of the simple fact that having somebody’s IP address is in no way proof that said person was actually committing a violation against copyright holders. For example if you have an unencrypted or weakly encrypted wireless network it would be trivial for somebody to connect to it and start downloading movies illegally. When the copyright holders get a list of IP addresses that downloaded said movie illegally yours would be one on the list. Thus the lawsuit would be failed against the IP address holder, yourself. As you can see though just because the IP address traces back to you doesn’t imply any proof that you committed the crime. In fact this exact scenario has played out before:

In the case VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017, the judge denied the Canadian adult film company access to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses do not equal persons, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.

Among other things Judge Baker cited a recent child porn case where the U.S. authorities raided the wrong people, because the real offenders were piggybacking on their Wi-Fi connections. Using this example, the judge claims that several of the defendants in VPR’s case may have nothing to do with the alleged offense either.

This ruling is just but I bet money that a long process of appeals will be going down until VPR Internationale is able to buy find a judge more sympathetic to their crusade cause. For now though it’s good to see there is at least one judge out there with some common sense on this issue.

H.F. 1467 Passes House Judiciary and Public Safety Committee

I’ve been told that H.F. 1467 passed the House Judiciary and Public Safety Committee yesterday and is ready to head out for a vote by the entire House.

So far, so good. Now we just have to get it through the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, get it on the Senate floor, get both the House and Senate to vote in favor of it, and finally get Dayton to sign it.

Defense of Dwelling and Person Act Will Be Heard Friday

Talk about fast results. “Representative” Limmer claimed that the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee didn’t have enough time to heard the S.F. 1357, the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act, but miraculously was able to conjure up some time after Minnesota gun rights activists flooded his office with call. Good work everybody.

The hearing will be on Friday May 5th starting at noon. If you can make it to the hearing do so. We want a strong showing in order to prevent any rumors being spread that there isn’t enough support for this bill. If we get the Committee’s approval on this it goes for an actual vote.

My Take on TenFourFox

Not too long ago I mentioned TenFourFox, a port of FireFox 4 to the PowerPC. Last night I actually had time to load and try it out on my old PowerBook G4 and I must say I’m rather impressed.

Understand that the PowerPC G4 processor is pretty damned slow by today’s standard. Playing a Flash video while downloading e-mail generally turns the video into a slide show and makes any interaction with other processes a slow ordeal. Firefox 3 always ran a bit shitty on that system thus I wasn’t impressed. TenFourFox on the other hand ran pretty well for a modern piece of software ported to an ancient system. All my Firefox add-ons (NoScript, Certificate Patrol, LastPass, and Xmarks) work just find in TenFourFox and every webpage I visited appeared to render correctly. The browser’s performance wasn’t noticeably different than Safari’s which was a big plus. Overall I’m very impressed with what the team working on TenFourFox has managed to accomplish.

I Think This is Called Winning

According to Say Uncle the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting had 71,139 people in attendance. Just remember that according to the anti-gunners the issue of gun rights is declining in the United States and it’s only a matter of time until nobody cares about gun rights in this country.

Isn’t it funny how everything the anti-gunners claim is always going to be just a matter of time? They claim that it’s only a matter of time until blood runs in the streets after any pro-gun bill is passed which has yet to happen. It reminds me of Keynesian economists who claim it’s only a matter of time until an economy recovers when the government starts spending tons of money which also never ends up happening.

Walmart Bringing Guns Back

Unlike a large number of people I know I personally have nothing against Walmart. Walmart got to where they are today without exploitation of government regulations to push out their competition which means as far as I’m concerned they got to where they are through legitimate methods. It seems the people running Walmart have decided to bring guns back to many of their locations. I chose this specific news article because the author gets one point right:

Why does the same store that sells baby clothes and books like Organic Gardening for the 21st Century think its customers will want rifles, shotguns, and ammunition? Because Americans love guns. And Walmart thinks they can sell them to us.

Whether you like Walmart or hate them they got to where they are today by doing one thing; they offer products that people want for prices people are willing to pay. Yes they use their clout to strong arm suppliers into providing goods at a price Walmart wants to pay but that’s how business works. This part is kind of funny:

The retailer is already the biggest firearm and ammunition vendor in the country. Having more gun-stocked Walmarts probably won’t influence local violence, though it may put some mom and pop gun stores out of business (that liberal complaint is still valid!).

Walmart is unlikely to push any gun store out of business because of the poor selection of firearms. When Walmart used to sell firearms the only things they had on hand (at any Walmart I went into at least) were shotguns and hunting rifles. There were no handguns nor military pattern rifles. Both categories of firearms are very popular and unless Walmart changes their previous stance local gun shops have nothing to worry about.

I also like the fact that Walmart is going to sell guns against because it gives me something else to shove in the faces of those anti-gunners.

Minnesota H.F. 1467 Passes Public Safety Committee

H.F. 1467, the omnibus gun rights bill passed the House Public Safety and Crime Prevention Policy and Finance Committee with a 10 to 7 vote. Now the bill will move to the House Judiciary Committee for yet another round of fun and games. We’re making progress, now let’s just hope we can get this bill through and finally have castle doctrine and stand your ground laws in Minnesota.

If you want to watch a video of the debate an archive is available here.

Firefox 4 for PowerPC Macs

Although I have many complaints about Firefox 4 it is still my main browser because I can’t remain sane, online, and not have NoScript. Two weeks ago I tried running Chrome as my main browser again thinking I would give it a fair shake only to rediscover all the full page advertisements, popups, flash advertisements, and other annoying things that I forgot existed thanks to the wonderful little plugin that prevents all but authorized domains from running scripts.

I also have an old PowerBook that I still use once in a while and Firefox 4 doesn’t support it. It’s not the end of the world yet as Firefox 3.x is still being supported on the platform and with security updates but that will end some day. Thankfully somebody has seen my blight and has started a project to bring Firefox 4 to PowerPC Macintosh computers via the TenFourFox project. This is one huge advantage to open source software, when a vendor drops support for a platform others can swoop in and do the support themselves.

The group behind TenFourFox is also claiming that they’re making CPU specific optimizations which is pretty awesome. I’ll have to test this on my old PowerBook G4 and let you know how it runs.

NRA Convention Expecting 65,000 People

Wow the National Rifle Association (NRA) Convention this year is expected to have 65,000 people in attendance. The area tourism industry expects $23.7 million to be spent by these 65,000 people. How’s that for a stimulus plan?

How many people attended the last Brady Campaign event? Did it even break the double-digits? Who knows, they certainly aren’t bragging about their numbers. Yet another reason why we win, we far outnumber them. We’re also good for local economies to boot.

New Hampshire Hearing on Permitless Carry Today

The New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee is having a hearing on a bill that would turn the state into another territory where people can exercise their right to self defense unhindered. The bill in question is HB 330. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is also pushing people to ask members of the Committee to consider an amendment:

However, an important amendment is still needed. The NRA, along with its state affiliate – Gun Owners of New Hampshire (GO-NH) – is supporting the Luther Amendment, an omnibus amendment to clarify certain provisions in HB 330. In addition, this amendment would keep the existing law in place for individuals 18 years of age or younger to possess a firearm for hunting under certain conditions.

Hopefully the bill makes it out of committee and gets passed into law. It would be nice if the free state was a little more free.