Privacy.security

This Salon.com treatise on Chinese piracy points out how serious and pervasive the problem is. And it isn't just intellectual property, it's clothing, hard goods -- everything from MacDonalds to Starbucks -- that gets cloned within the Chinese borders.

I used to do some work in Shanghai. Long before DVD burners were widely available here in the states, kids in Shanghai development houses were burning digital copies of new DVDs that came in from the outside. They had the hardware, the software -- an entire infrastructure -- available to them for the sole purpose of copying stuff. And they had the technological wherewithal to supercede any silly copy-protection or encryption scheme the MPAA, RIAA, or DEA can come up with.

This is where the real focus on piracy needs to be. Microsoft knows it. Everyone in the software industry knows it. There are probably people in the RIAA who know it, but it's far easier to treat average Americans like criminals and to dupe (or pay) ignorant Congressmen (see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt" and "Legislation from the Hot-tub Party") into passing ill-conceived, over-arching legislation that criminalizes all sorts of normal, rational activity.

This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. China has been working on it for years, as the article points out. But it is where the real focus on piracy needs to go. Not toward the average customer for music, films, and other media.

posted by Bag Man » July 8 2:16 PM | 10 comments. "Piracy sure beats manual labor" Can China's Piracy industry be stopped? Should it be stopped? Will this be the fate of all copyrighted material? Lisa Movius offers few answers, but gives a pretty good overview of the situation.

[MetaFilter]

Social Security Numbers Spilled by Small Telco

8:50:42 AM

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One more reason to keep your Social Security number out of the hands of third-party providers. Or better yet, add a PIN number to the SS for some small level of security.

CNET NEWS.COM - Telecom firm leaks student data to Web.
A company that provides intra-campus telephone services to small colleges inadvertently posted online the names, addresses and social security numbers of thousands of its student customers, the firm acknowledged on Monday.
In the latest of what has become a common Internet problem, the information about more than 2,000 students whose schools use telecommunications management firm Resicom may have leaked out from the company's Web site. Database files containing students' personal information had the wrong permission settings and could have been accessed using any Web browser as late as Monday afternoon.
David Horn, the network and billing manager for the Doylestown, Penn., company was working to turn off access to the files Monday afternoon.