Build Date: Wed Dec 11 23:30:14 2024 UTC
Football is like fishing. Drinking by another name.
-- P a u l
Russian Programmer Imprisoned for DMCA Violations
2001-07-18 11:03:21
Yesterday the U.S. busted a Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov for breaking the infamous DMCA act. It is not really clear to me if Dmitry was jailed (and he is currently sitting in a Las Vegas jail) for writing a piece of code that defeats Adobe's PDF file encryption schema or for talking about it at the notorious hacker convention, Defcon, held this year in Las Vegas.
Both acts violate the DMCA.
And in both cases, I'm appalled.
That, one, the U.S. has jailed someone for creating content it disagrees with while they were outside the United States. This is horrible and sets a precedent that is truly frightening. How would you like to be responsible for anything and everything that you've ever created in every jurisdiction in the world? That scares the hell out of me, as after some of the crap I've written, I probably qualify for the death sentence in several dozen Middle Eastern countries.
Or, two, the absolute irony that a former Soviet citizen was arrested for speaking his mind while in the United States. Whatever happened to free speech? I thought WE won the Cold War.
While I do love the theory that America was founded on, I have to say that I'm becoming less and less enamored with the way in which the ideals of our founding fathers are being implemented and put into practice. That people in our government even remotely think that the DMCA doesn't violate the First Amendment is truly an indictment of the absolute corruption that corporate soft money has wrought on this once fine system.
It should be pointed out that because Adobe's encryption scheme doesn't permit the user to make at least one copy, it is currently breaking Russian copyright law. Horrors. A U.S. company breaking the law? We can't have that.
So I urge the Russian government to immediately begin legal proceedings to extradite the entire management team at Abode and then send them all to Siberia to count trees. Not because I feel that people should be imprisoned for breaking copyright law, but because I believe in poetic justice.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)
We here in SMRL's Beverage Research Lab realize that there is more to life than just drinking spocktails. It's important to have other activities. One such activity that we wholeheartedly support is dancing six or more hours to Trance music. So we have designed a drink to accommodate this. (More...)
Eavesdropping on Geeks: 'Star Trek: Discovery' vs 'The Orville'
If you broke into Pigdog's top sekrit headquarters, spying on their mysterious mix of weird science and old-skool geekiness, you'd overhear this conversation: (More...)
What the hell is going on with Sony?
Is anyone else as confused as I am with what's happening with the Sony Playstation network hack? (More...)
Ah, it's that special time of year again. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, crowded, dangerous streets filled with maniac shoppers rushing to the mall to buy Pokemon action figures, and getting hammered at the Xmas party and insulting the boss's hair weave. That's right: it's time to drink heavily and wait out life's little nagging miseries, holiday variety. Pigdog is here to help. (More...)
