I agree with you generally. It's not impossible, but probably unlikely for an individual to be sued for contents of cookie data or similar small fragments like that. I do believe it's orders of more magnitude more likely for the 'average' residential consumer to attract a suit from the MPAA/RIAA/etc because there is a torrent stream emanating from their connection, and I have little faith that any provider would go out of their way to jump in front and say 'no no, that's our tech'. On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 5:15 PM Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 2:01 PM Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:
I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers
to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside, it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to.
I'm familiar with some work and ideas that have gone into such a thing, and I'm personally very much against it for non-technical reasons.
Given how far the law lags behind technology, the last thing anyone should be ok with is a 3rd party storing bits on ANYTHING in their house, or transmitting those bits from a network connection that is registered to them.
*chortle*
So, I take it you steadfastly block *all* cookies from being stored or transmitted from your browser at home?
Oh, wait. You meant it's OK to let some third parties store and transmit bits from your devices, but only the ones you like and support, and as long as they're small bits, and you're sure there's nothing harmful or illegal in them.
So, that means you check each cookie to make sure there's nothing in them that could be illegal?
You sure someone hasn't tucked something like the DeCSS algorithm, or the RSA algorithm into a cookie in your browser, like this?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(front).jpg
The fact of the matter is, every one of us allows third parties to store data on all our devices, all the time, and send it back out on the network, completely unsupervised by us, even though it could contain data which is illegal to cross certain arbitrary political boundaries.
I understand where you're coming from, I really do.
But I don't think people stop and think about just how completely that ship has sailed, from a legal standpoint. You could have been asked by a random website to store code which is illegal to export in a cookie which is then offered back up to any other website in whatever jurisdiction around the globe that asks for it, and you'll be completely unaware of it, because we've all gotten past the point of "ask me about every cookie" being a workable setting on any of our devices.
Go ahead. Turn off all cookie support on all your devices for 24 hours. Don't let any of that third party data in or out of your home during that time.
Let me know how well that turns out.
Bonus points if you enforce it on your family/spouse/SO/partner at the same time, and they're still talking to you at the end of the 24 hours. ;-P
Matt