Where the \u3ci\u3eNetcom\u3c/i\u3e Yardstick Comes up Short: Courts Should Not Apply the Facts of \u3ci\u3eNetcom\u3c/i\u3e as an Example of Intermediate and Transient Storage under § 512(a) of the DMCA

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) risk substantial liability for passively contributing to subscriber-initiated acts of online copyright infringement. Cognizant of this problem, courts and Congress have taken differing approaches to limiting ISP liability. The Netcom court established that ISPs could store infringing material for eleven days without incurring liability for direct infringement, but did not similarly rule out liability for other forms of infringement. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subsequently advanced the law of copyright by strengthening the protections enjoyed by copyright holders whose works face exploitation online, subject to four activity-specific safe harbor limitations on liability. For example, § 512(a) of the DMCA offers safe harbor for ISPs that store intermediate and transient copies of infringing material in the course of digital transmissions. In contrast, § 512(c) offers safe harbor for ISPs that store infringing material at the direction of users, subject to a strict notice-and-takedown requirement. In applying § 512(a), some courts consider the terms intermediate and transient to be facially ambiguous and look to the DMCA\u27s legislative history for interpretive guidance. Relying heavily on a legislative committee report discussing a rejected version of the statute, courts in the Ninth Circuit have concluded that § 512(a) codifies the result of Netcom. Based on this conclusion, these courts endorse reliance on Netcom\u27s facts as an example of § 512(a) activity. This Comment argues that courts should not consider or apply Netcom\u27s facts as an example of intermediate and transient storage under § 512(a) for three reasons. First, the eleven-day storage of infringing material at issue in Netcom would not constitute intermediate and transient storage as subsequently defined by § 512(a). Second, courts that apply Netcom\u27s facts as an example of intermediate and transient storage under § 512(a) obviate § 512(c)\u27s notice-and-takedown requirement. Third, the DMCA\u27s text and legislative history confirm that Congress decided against codifying Netcom in favor of safe harbors that differ considerably from Netcom\u27s holding. As a result, courts and prospective litigants must either wait for a predictable definition of intermediate and transient storage to develop through judicial interpretation of § 512(a)\u27s express terms or lobby Congress for a more definitive codified standard. ISP defendants might also seek timely relief under § 512(c) or assert common law defenses not codified within the DMCA\u27s four comers

One Size Does Not Fit All: The Failure of Washington\u27s Licensing Standards for Alcohol and Drug Treatment Programs and Facilities to Meet the Needs of Indians

It is well recognized that culturally and spiritually relevant alcohol and chemical dependency treatment programs are most successful. Washington\u27s licensing standards for such programs and facilities, however, fail to address the cultural and spiritual needs of Indians who they serve. The State\u27s current one-size-fits-all approach offers no hope for improved treatment outcomes for Indians. This Comment demonstrates the inadequacy of Washington\u27s current treatment facility and program licensing standards and examines the high costs of maintaining these standards. The Comment concludes with a proposal for specific legislation for the State of Washington

Why Beggar Thy Indian Neighbor? The Case for Tribal Primacy in Taxation in Indian Country

This report presents legal, practical, and moral arguments to demonstrate that as a legal and economic matter, Indian tax policy is deeply flawed and must be changed

Computationally Assessing Diamond as an Ultrafast Pulse Shaper for High Power Ultrawide Band Radar

Diamond devices hold promise to reshape ultrafast and high power electronics. One such device is the diode avalanche shaper (DAS), which functions as an ultrafast closing switch where sub-nano-second closing is caused by the formation of the streamer traversing the diode much faster than 10$^7$ cm/s. One of the most prominent applications of DAS is in ultrawide band (UWB) radio/radar. Here we simulate a diamond-based DAS and compare the results to a silicon-based DAS. All DAS were simulated in 3D in mixed mode as ideal devices using the drift-diffusion model. The simulations show that diamond DAS promises to outperform Si DAS when sharpening kilovolt nanosecond input pulse

Pemenuhan Hak konstitusional Akta Kelahiran Bagi Anak Terlantar di Kota Surabaya

Skripsi ini membahas tentang pengimplementasian dan efektifitas Undang-Undang Perlindungan Anak dalam melakukan tindakan perlindungan, perawatan, pemeliharaan, serta pemenuhan kebutuhan hak secara konstitusional terhadap anak terlantar. Wewenang dan upaya Pemerintah Kota dan Lembaga Kesejahteraan Sosial Anak atau LKSA dapat memberikan atau memenuhi hak konstitusional akta kelahiran anak terlantar yang memang tidak diketahui asal-usulnya atau bahkan sudah tidak memiliki berkas-berkas identitas lainnya. Hak konstitusional akta kelahiran merupakan hak dasar dalam penentuan identitas pengakuan status kewarganegaraan. Undang-Undang Perlindungan Anak memberikan ketentuan dalam pengakuan orang terlantar melalui penetapan pengadilan, agar dari penetapan pengadilan itulah Negara memberikan jaminan hidup yang layak bagi anak terlantar kususnya di Kota Surabaya. Dasar hukum yang digunakan pada Undang-Undang Perlindungan Anak adalah Pasal 55, Pasal 57, Pasal 58. Masalah yang dikaji dalam penelitian skripsi ini adalah: (1) Bagaimana wewenang Pemerintah Kota dan Lembaga Kesejahteraan Sosial Anak di Kota Surabaya terkait pemenuhan hak konstitusional akta kelahiran anak terlantar berdasarkan Undang-Undang Perlindungan Anak; dan (2) Apa saja faktor yang menjadi kendala atau hambatan-hambatan dalam pemenuhan hak konstitusioal akta kelahiran anak terlantar. Metode penelitian dalam penulisan skripsi ini menggunakan pendekatan hukum secara yuridis normatif, yaitu penelitian terhadap bahan hukum primer peraturan perundang-undangan yang menjadi pembahasan dalam penelitian ini, dan bahan hukum sekunder yang mencakup bahan hukum primer seperti hasil dari penelitian terdahulu, wawancara narasumber, buku-buku, artikel, internet yang berkaitan dengan penelitian skripsi ini. Hasil dari penelitian skripsi ini yaitu meberikan pandangan dan masukan terkait peraturan pada pasal yang perlu diperhatikan atau ditinjau kembali dalam melakukan pemenuhan hak konstitusional akta kelahiran anak terlantar

Exploring the Monero Peer-to-Peer Network

As of September 2019, Monero is the most capitalized privacy- preserving cryptocurrency, and is ranked tenth among all cryptocurren- cies. Monero’s on-chain data privacy guarantees, i.e., how mixins are selected in each transaction, have been extensively studied. However, de- spite Monero’s prominence, the network of peers running Monero clients has not been analyzed. Such analysis is of prime importance, since po- tential vulnerabilities in the peer-to-peer network may lead to attacks on the blockchain’s safety (e.g., by isolating a set of nodes) and on users’ privacy (e.g., tracing transactions flow in the network). This paper provides the first step study on understanding Monero’s peer- to-peer (P2P) network. In particular, we deconstruct Monero’s P2P pro- tocol based on its source code, and develop a toolset to explore Monero’s network, which allows us to infer its topology, size, node distribution, and node connectivity. During our experiments, we collected 510 GB of raw data, from which we extracted 21,678 IP addresses of Monero nodes distributed in 970 autonomous systems. We show that Monero’s network is highly centralized — 13.2% of the nodes collectively maintain 82.86% of the network connections. We have identified approximately 2,758 ac- tive nodes per day, which is 68.7% higher than the number reported by the MoneroHash mining pool. We also identified all concurrent outgoing connections maintained by Monero nodes with very high probability (on average 97.98% for nodes with less than 250 outgoing connections, and 93.79% for nodes with more connections)

Instantaneous Decentralized Poker

We present efficient protocols for amortized secure multiparty computation with penalties and secure cash distribution, of which poker is a prime example. Our protocols have an initial phase where the parties interact with a cryptocurrency network, that then enables them to interact only among themselves over the course of playing many poker games in which money changes hands. The high efficiency of our protocols is achieved by harnessing the power of stateful contracts. Compared to the limited expressive power of Bitcoin scripts, stateful contracts enable richer forms of interaction between standard secure computation and a cryptocurrency. We formalize the stateful contract model and the security notions that our protocols accomplish, and provide proofs using the simulation paradigm. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation in Ethereum/Solidity for the stateful contracts that our protocols are based on. We also adopt our off-chain cash distribution protocols to the special case of stateful duplex micropayment channels, which are of independent interest. In comparison to Bitcoin based payment channels, our duplex channel implementation is more efficient and has additional features

Lightweight Virtual Payment Channels

Blockchain systems have severe scalability limitations e.g., long confirmation delays. Layer-2 protocols are designed to address such limitations. The most prominent class of such protocols are payment channel networks e.g., the Lightning Network for Bitcoin where pairs of participants create channels that can be concatenated into networks. These allow payments across the network without interaction with the blockchain. A drawback is that all intermediary nodes within a payment path must be online. Virtual Channels, as recently proposed by Dziembowski et al. (CCS\u2718), allow payments without this limitation. However, these can only be implemented on blockchains with smart contract capability therefore limiting its applicability. Our work proposes the notion of --Lightweight-- Virtual Payment Channels, i.e. only requiring timelocks and multisignatures, enabling Virtual Channels on a larger range of blockchain systems of which a prime example is Bitcoin. More concretely, other contributions of this work are (1) to introduce a fully-fledged formalization of our construction, and (2) to present a simulation based proof of security in Canetti\u27s UC Framework

Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are programs that execute autonomously on blockchains. Their key envisioned uses (e.g. financial instruments) require them to consume data from outside the blockchain (e.g. stock quotes). Trustworthy data feeds that support a broad range of data requests will thus be critical to smart contract ecosystems. We present an authenticated data feed system called Town Crier (TC). TC acts as a bridge between smart contracts and existing web sites, which are already commonly trusted for non-blockchain applications. It combines a blockchain front end with a trusted hardware back end to scrape HTTPS- enabled websites and serve source-authenticated data to re- lying smart contracts. TC also supports confidentiality; it enables private data requests with encrypted parameters and secure use of user credentials to scrape access-controlled on- line data sources. We describe TC’s design principles and architecture and report on an implementation that uses Intel’s recently introduced Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to furnish data to the Ethereum smart contract system. We formally model TC and define and prove its basic security properties in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. Our results include definitions and techniques of general interest relating to resource consumption (Ethereum’s “gas” fee system) and TCB minimization. We also report on experiments with three example applications. We plan to launch TC soon as an online public service

Blockchain Trilemma Solver Algorand has Dilemma over Undecidable Messages

Recently, an ingenious protocol called Algorand has been proposed to overcome these limitations. Algorand uses an innovative process - called cryptographic sortition - to securely and unpredictably elect a set of voters from the network periodically. These voters are responsible for reaching consensus through a Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocol on one block per time, guaranteeing an overwhelming probability of linearity of the blockchain. In this paper, we present a security analysis of Algorand. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first security analysis as well as the first formal study on Algorand. We designed an attack scenario in which a group of malicious users tries to break the protocol, or at least limiting it to a reduced partition of network users, by exploiting a possible security flaw in the messages validation process of the BA. Since the source code or an official simulator for Algorand was not available at the time of our study, we created a simulator (which is available on request) to implement the protocol and assess the feasibility of our attack scenario. Our attack requires the attacker to have a trivial capability of establishing multiple connections with targeted nodes and costs practically nothing to the attacker. Our results show that it is possible to slow down the message validation process on honest nodes, which eventually forces them to choose default values on the consensus; leaving the targeted nodes behind in the chain as compared to the non-attacked nodes. Even though our results are subject to the real implementation assumption, the core concept of our attack remains valid.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, and 2 table