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Topic: Huge improvement in US Senate Website (Read 754 times) |
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Hermit
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Huge improvement in US Senate Website
« on: 2003-06-19 23:17:18 » |
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The following is a screen capture of Senator Orrin G Hatch's Website (http://www.senate.gov/~hatch/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Students.Utah) and a link from it (http://www.myutahsearch.com/) made on 2003-06-19. It was brought to our attention by A-KO.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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JerryLee
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Do as I say, not as I do...
« Reply #1 on: 2003-06-20 12:46:09 » |
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Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate? 
Source: Wired
Author: Leander Kahney
Dated: 2003-06-20
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.
But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.
The senator's site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's website.
"It's an unlicensed copy," said Andy Woolley, who runs Milonic. "It's very unfortunate for him because of those comments he made."
Hatch on Tuesday surprised a Senate hearing on copyright issues with the suggestion that technology should be developed to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Net.
Hatch said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights," the Associated Press reported. He then suggested the technology would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
Any such technology would be in violation of federal antihacking laws. The senator, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested Congress would have to make copyright holders exempt from current laws for them to legally destroy people's computers.
On Wednesday, Hatch clarified his comments, but stuck by the original idea. "I do not favor extreme remedies -- unless no moderate remedies can be found," he said in a statement. "I asked the interested industries to help us find those moderate remedies."
Just as well. Because if Hatch's terminator system embraced software as well as music, his servers would be targeted for destruction.
Milonic Solutions' JavaScript code used on Hatch's website costs $900 for a site-wide license. It is free for personal or nonprofit use, which the senator likely qualifies for.
However, the software's license stipulates that the user must register the software to receive a licensing code, and provide a link in the source code to Milonic's website.
On Wednesday, the senator's site met none of Milonic's licensing terms. The site's source code (which can be seen by selecting Source under the View menu in Internet Explorer) had neither a link to Milonic's site nor a registration code.
However, by Thursday afternoon Hatch's site had been updated to contain some of the requisite copyright information. An old version of the page can be seen by viewing Google's cache of the site.
"They're using our code," Woolley said Wednesday. "We've had no contact with them. They are in breach of our licensing terms."
When contacted Thursday, Woolley said the company that maintains the senator's site had e-mailed Milonic to begin the registration process. Woolley said the code added to Hatch's site after the issue came to light met some -- but not all -- of Milonic's licensing requirements.
Before the site was updated, the source code on Hatch's site contained the line: "* i am the license for the menu (duh) *"
Woolley said he had no idea where the line came from -- it has nothing to do with him, and he hadn't seen it on other websites that use his menu system.
"It looks like it's trying to cover something up, as though they got a license," he said.
A spokesman in Hatch's office on Wednesday responded, "That's ironic" before declining to put Wired News in contact with the site's webmaster. He deferred comment on the senator's statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which did not return calls.
The apparent violation was discovered by Laurence Simon, an unemployed system administrator from Houston, who was poking around Hatch's site after becoming outraged by his comments.
Milonic's Woolley said the senator's unlicensed use of his software was just "the tip of the iceberg." He said he knows of at least two other senators using unlicensed copies of his software, and many big companies.
Continental Airlines, for example, one of the largest airlines in the United States, uses Woolley's system throughout its Continental.com website. Woolley said the airline has not paid for the software. Worse, the copyright notices in the source code have been removed.
"That really pisses me off," he said.
A spokesman for Continental said the airline would look into the matter.
Woolley makes his living from his software. Like a lot of independent programmers, he struggles to get people to conform to his licensing terms, let alone pay for his software.
"We don't want blood," he said. "We just want payment for the hard work we do. We work very, very hard. If they're not prepared to pay, they're software pirates." 
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JerryLee
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Hatch the l33t hax0r?
« Reply #2 on: 2003-06-20 13:06:09 » |
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Hatch Wants to Fry Traders' PCs 
Source: Wired
Dateed: 2003-06-18
Authors: Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Illegally download copyright music from the Internet once, or even twice, and you get a warning. Do it a third time, and your computer gets destroyed.
That's the suggestion made by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a Tuesday hearing on copyright abuse, reflecting a growing frustration in Congress over failure of the technology and entertainment industries to protect copyrights in a digital age.
The surprise statement by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that he favors developing technology to remotely destroy computers used for illegal downloads represents a dramatic escalation in the increasingly contentious rhetoric over pirated music.
During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal antihacking laws.
"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender, a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can't.
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in songwriting royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions.
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.
Some legal experts suggested Hatch's provocative remarks were more likely intended to compel technology and music executives to work faster toward ways to protect copyrights online than to signal forthcoming legislation.
"It's just the frustration of those who are looking at enforcing laws that are proving very hard to enforce," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department cybercrimes prosecutor.
"The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some Draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve," Leahy said in a statement. "We need to work together to find the right answers, and this is not one of them."
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) urged Hatch to reconsider. Because Hatch is Judiciary chairman, "we all take those views very seriously," he said. But Kerr said Congress was unlikely to approve any bill to enable such remote computer destruction by copyright owners "because innocent users might be wrongly targeted."
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, Jonathan Lamy, said Hatch was "apparently making a metaphorical point that if peer-to-peer networks don't take reasonable steps to prevent massive copyright infringement on the systems they create, Congress may be forced to consider stronger measures." The RIAA represents the major music labels.
The entertainment industry has gradually escalated its fight against Internet file traders, targeting the most egregious pirates with civil lawsuits. The RIAA recently won a federal court decision making it significantly easier to identify and track consumers -- even those hiding behind aliases -- using popular Internet file-sharing software.
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Hermit
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Re:Huge improvement in US Senate Website
« Reply #3 on: 2003-06-20 13:56:37 » |
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Judging by the insanity coming out of Washington these days, I'm sure that his masters would prefer to make piracy a death-penalty offense. When you are are as completely dependendent on the media-moguls as Orrin Hatch, then this kind of loonacy is no doubt the "logical" outcome. Yet, if you asked Orrin Hatch off the record, as we see above, if he would prefer to pay for software and music, or receive it free, if he remembered how to be truthful (or knew what it meant) his answer would be that he would rip it off without a question (but only if he thought that he wouldn't get caught). That being his nature, he evidently thinks that others should be prevented from doing so (as long as he doesn't get caught).
Meanwhile some questions remain. The people screaming for this level of protection appear to be attempting to tilt the world down a slippery slope of their own making. It was Jack Valenti of the MPAA who said, "The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." Yet colorful simile or not, the "American film producer" seems to have done rather well since then. More to the point, has the protection of copyright holders (as opposed to artists) actually contributed one whit to the constitutional justification for copyright? [The Congress shall have power] "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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