Nominations Open For "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government"

The corporate overlords at SourceForge asked me to name a Slashdot category for their upcoming Community Choice Awards and to let you guys select the winner. I have named my category "Most Likely to be Shut Down by a Government Agency." We're going to run this like we do an Ask Slashdot call for questions — post your nominations into the comments here. Use moderation to send up good ideas. In the upcoming days we'll post another story where you can vote on the actual winner. Nominations need to include the project name, a link to some sort of official website, and a paragraph of why you think they deserve to win. The project that wins will gain fame, notoriety, and maybe a cease and desist order that they could print out and frame if they had that kind of time.

Re:Truecrypt

[Quila]

They started trying in the 90s under Clinton's reign, with Al Gore as the point man. Luckily resistance from people and businesses was enough to kill the Clipper Chip and Key Escrow. over 10 years later, I guess it's time for another round of facists to try it again.

Re:Liberty Dollar

[poetmatt]

Looks like it's already been taken down, according to the site:

"Please note that on November 14, 2007 the US government raided the warehouse for the Liberty Dollar certificates and digital currency and they are currently unavailable or redeemable except as numismatic items on eBay.

Re:Software radio...

[Andy Dodd]

Plenty of ways to do that already, nothing new...

Re:Patent Busting

[glarvat]

Yeah we need to end Patent Busing. Why should a patent have to go all the way across town to the same type of schools I moved to get away from?

I doubt the parent was trolling. It was an obviously misunderstood attempt at humo(u)r referencing School Desegregation [wikipedia.org] because of the typo in the GP (busing instead of busting).

For what it's worth, I thought it was funny.

Re:Problem with Poll/Question

[ScuttleMonkey]

If you feel strongly about a project feel free to comment in support of said project.

We will do our best to try selecting the most popular/controversial projects for the eventual poll that will allow you to actually vote.

Re:ThePirateBay

[Anonymous Coward]

They were shut down already 2years ago just to come online 3days later.

If they were taken down again it wouldn't take that log because of their new infrastructure.

Re:Software radio...

[Anonymous Coward]

not exactly - the Ettus USRP device primarily (though many many other devices are or could be supported easily) outputs test-bench level signals in the milliwatt range. You need amplifiers.

More likely: The 2008 Elections

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad, but true.

Re:Trapster

[ScuttleMonkey]

I don't have the link on hand, but the funny thing was that many cops went on record in support of the speed trap websites because it accomplished what they were trying for anyway (just to get people to slow down).

Re:Software radio...

[A nonymous Coward]

Not sure how much you are trolling and how much being sarcastic, but for the enlightenment of people who know little about the subject ...

The government (and court-approved) excuse for regulating the broadcast airwaves is that the radio spectrum is a limited resource, therefore public, therefore not private property.

Out of the presumption that the nanny state is required to regulate the airwaves for the public good comes the corollary that regulation has to include preventing unauthorized transmitters and receivers, and that is why Software Radio is a prime candidate for outlawing.

Software Radio relies on the fact that computers nowadays are fast enough to dissect received signals and format transmitted signals completely in software in real time. You no longer need hardware frequency selectors. The hardware only has to receive or broadcast the general signal, and software formats the specific frequency desired.

Of course this scares the bejaysus out of the government. It would mean any computer and minimal hardware could bypass all government regulation. Consider all the recent spectrum auctions where telecom giants paid billions of dollars for exclusive access to specific frequencies -- along comes software which would let anybody broadcast on or receive from any signal desired without having to pay for specific hardware dedicated to specific frequencies. One small hardware investment, free software, and you have eliminated the need for all those many telecom-specific pieces of hardware for each purpose.

Certainly there is need for some standardization of frequencies and protocols, but studies have shown the current system is no longer necessary. Ultrawideband and frequency hopping may even make interference a thing of the past and reduce the need for regulation to general protocol specs, such as apply to phone lines and allow faxes, modems, answering machines, and so many other ubiquitous devices to connect to land lines without heavy handed regulation.

Re:Trapster

[Grey_14]

I thought the reason they were there, was to discourage people from speeding anywhere because they wouldn't know where the speed traps were.

Re:Truecrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

The US policy on crypto has actually been steadily improving over the past 10 years or so since Clipper died. Crypto products shouldn't get nominated. I don't see anybody trying that kind of thing again any time soon, at least not in the US.

Re:Don't need government - doing it themselves.

[osu-neko]

It is interesting to note that we've had a relatively stable liberal party (save for a rough spot in the 1820's) since the late 1700's, whereas we've had a succession of conservative parties that rise, go for while, often do quite well, but then implode (Federalist -> National Republican -> Whig -> Republican without even considering the side-branches and parallel ones like the American "Know-Nothing" Party and such). One has to wonder if we're heading into another episode where the conservatives revitalize themselves by breaking apart and reforming under a new banner yet again...

You may be right about the Democrats needing to prop it up, too. That rough spot in the 1820's was caused when the Federalists imploded and the Democratic-Republican party started to disintegrate simply because it had no significant opposition.

It's not about transmission

[whitneyw]

It's about reception. Any sort of broadcast flag could be easily stripped from transmissions, making the content recordable. There are already laws against building receivers that can pick up cellular phone signals. How awesome is that? In fact, software radio, with a more powerful (read faster) analog-to-digital converter would violate this law.

see 47 C.F.R. 15.121(a)

(a) Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, scanning receivers and frequency converters designed or marketed for use with scanning receivers, shall:

(1) Be incapable of operating (tuning), or readily being altered by the user to operate, within the frequency bands allocated to the Cellular Radiotelephone Service in part 22 of this chapter (cellular telephone bands). Scanning receivers capable of âoereadily being altered by the userâ include, but are not limited to, those for which the ability to receive transmissions in the cellular telephone bands can be added by clipping the leads of, or installing, a simple component such as a diode, resistor or jumper wire; replacing a plug-in semiconductor chip; or programming a semiconductor chip using special access codes or an external device, such as a personal computer. Scanning receivers, and frequency converters designed for use with scanning receivers, also shall be incapable of converting digital cellular communication transmissions to analog voice audio.

(2) Be designed so that the tuning, control and filtering circuitry is inaccessible. The design must be such that any attempts to modify the equipment to receive transmissions from the Cellular Radiotelephone Service likely will render the receiver inoperable.

Re:Truecrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

Properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise, so they would have an issue determining that your encrypted partition is in fact encrypted and not just empty space. I.e, for such a law to work they would have to effectively make it criminal to not zero erased data.

Furthermore, with some clever tricks you could insert your encrypted data into the noise of an audio sequence. Assuming you could make it look sufficiently similar to the type of noise you normally get when you record audio, it would then be virtually impossible to distinguish a noisy recording from a good recording with encrypted data injected into it.

So no, unless they want to ban you from storing and transmitting data that contains even a random component ( and every sound recording, every photograph, every video feed contains some noise ) they can't ban encryption. They might be able to make it sufficiently hard to do it to deter most people from using it, but completely preventing it won't be possible.

Now what they COULD do , and what is far scarier, is they could ban general purpose computers, requiring all computer manufacturers to only make devices that run signed code only, and they could then include large quantities of spy ware into them, which phone home every 10 seconds , prohibiting you from even shutting them off.

Apparently some guy named George thought of this scenario some time ago and blew the whistle. Most voters don't seem to worry about it however.

Re:Tor, Freenet, and I2P

[ToxikFetus]

It would ironic if Tor was shut down by The Man, as the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory was responsible for its development.

Re:Truecrypt

[Cillian]

Nope - since the key changes for each character, it's not the same character difference. Really, any OTP encryption done properly is by definition unbreakable, since you can generate any plaintext of the correct length for the given ciphertext by using the right keys

That doesn't work

[roystgnr]

If you use data from the same one-time-pad twice, it quickly turns from "a theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem" into "one of the weakest cryptosystems ever".

If you don't use data from the same one-time pad twice, then it's pointless to use one one-time pad to send another one-time pad, because every N bytes that you receive for the next key is just replacing N bytes of your last key that now can't be reused to send any other data.

Re:ThePirateBay

[Em Adespoton]

From the website:

The big news about our awards program this year is that we've decided to allow nominations for any open source project, not just those on SourceForge.net. We know that the success of open source is bigger than one repository can contain, so nominate your favorite Codeplex projects, Google Code projects, ASF projects, and everything else right now!

I don't think websites (especially non-wiki websites) would qualify. CmdrTaco should have made it more explicit in the summary.

Re:Truecrypt

[rts008]

I would start here:System encryption [truecrypt.org] , and System encryption [truecrypt.org]

You've Been Asked a Question by: SMS.ac/FanBox.com

[You Deserve Better]

You are one within a very small percentage of the connected world if you have not received a "Question It!" email in the last year. SMS.ac made a name for themselves, and over $100 million dollars in revenue, in the premium text messages. After incurring an undisclosed number of fines for their activities (SMS.ac fined 175,000 pounds by UK regulator [smstextnews.com]), they renamed and rebranded themselves as FanBox. FanBox is attempting to generate revenue through premium applications using their SMS billing engine and ad revenue. Their single-minded approach to gaining users is through misleading emails that appear to be from people you know. Such "products" named "Question It!" and "Predict It!" are very familiar to your Junk folder if not your Inbox. Their continued business practices could raise accusations of violation of Federal Trade Commission ("CAN-SPAM Act of 2003"), Federal Communication Commission, and other Federal and State laws, as well as European Community and other international laws. Also, SMS.ac/FanBox.com treatment of their employees could find them in violation of long list of California-state employment laws. Additionally, they have an almost serial behavior of leasing and defaulting on equipment purchases. They are currently embroiled in a number of lawsuits brought against them by their former employees, creditors, and customers. The Question is: why hasn't the hammer come down on this company?

Re:GOA

[Anonymous Coward]

For the uninformed, here is a description of the GAO from their website:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is known as "the investigative arm of Congress" and "the congressional watchdog." GAO supports the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and helps improve the performance and accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people.

Re:Don't need government - doing it themselves.

[Eric Smith]

Actually, we haven't had a stable liberal party since the late 1700s. At some point (early-to-mid 20th century?) the definition of "liberal" changed dramatically. A classical liberal wanted the government to leave the people alone, while today the so-called liberals want the government to protect us from ourselves. The closest current thing to the original definition of liberal would be "libertarian".

Re:Truecrypt

[Joe U]

Could it be argued that encryption falls under free speech?

A while ago, when strong encryption exports were not allowed, people got around them by printing the source code and selling a book with the code as one of the chapters.

Entertaining.

shooop shooop shooop Whooosh! shooop shoop shoop

[Anonymous Coward]

Did thou hearest that whistle of an ether-fly? Get thee down from thy mount and hideth thy face in the Bushes! Worsted than an axe flying inches past thy headeth... It's raining vaginas and thee begot hit by a penis! Did thouest fvck!ng miss his joke? And no, the parent was a male, hence my implied use of "his post" in the previous sentence; because I know for certain that all tempted females on Slashdot are 13-year-old lipstick lesbians interning at the CIA and the FBI. Thou has wrot silliness in thy house. Washeth thy hands of thee and thou postest not again.