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How many of you stupid fucks still do not realize that Firefox's release cycle is the same as Chrome's? And that they have an enterprise version with slightly longer time between updates so that if you don't want the new features, you can have the security fixes?

The problem with Firefox's releases is they keep screwing with the UI. Little things here and there - like day I suddenly found muscle memory broken because the awesomebar stopped autocompleting full URLs and only did domains? (It's fine for the most part, but if you have URLs that are fairly deep... or say to get directly to a forum...).

If Mozilla updated firefox like chrome - where they don't mess with UI things at all (or default them to "off" for upgrade installs so it behaves exactly the same as it did pre-update) then a lot less people would care. But they don't. I don't care what version Chrome is at because it works the same today as it did yesterday. But every new update to Firefox brings trepidatoin in the form "what did they screw with now? And can I disable it?"

Ars Technica periodically runs browser wars charts that show how each version of a browser is adopted. Consistently while a large number of people update, a significant number of people don't, much more than Chrome.

Being that this was a Java exploit which required a visit to a website at the least, I would say that those that got infected have more time on their hands than they know what to do with.

That was a bit quick to jump to conclusions:

Rather than using typical targeted approaches like "spear phishing" with e-mails to individuals, the attackers used a "watering hole" attack—compromising the server of a popular mobile developer Web forum and using it to spring the zero-day Java exploit on site visitors.

"The attack was injected into the site's HTML, so any engineer who visited the site and had Java enabled in their browser would have been affected," Sullivan told Ars, "regardless of how patched their machine was."

Source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/facebook-computers-compromised-by-zero-day-java-exploit/

Stopped looking at WaPo front page some time ago because of the horrible stories there, but would read stories in it on occasion if linked or sent to me. Stopped reading WaPo entirely after this complete junk free internet story. I live in DC and local blogs are better news sources than WaPo for local news, and for national news there are plenty of other sources. WaPo is never anything but an utter waste of time. Too bad--newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein and all that.

Last month, just a couple days prior to the launch of MEGA, Slashdot ran a story that informed us all that each user would get 50GB gratis storage on the service. This story brought with it a comment from the creator of ScatterBytes, the distributed storage backend that MEGA uses. The entire reason that gratis 50GB can even be offered to all users, and indeed one of the oft-touted improvements of MEGA over MegaUpload (to try and convince us we won't lose our data at the whim of any given government like last time), is that anyone with spare storage space and bandwidth can be financially compensated for hosting the (encrypted) data of other MEGA users.

The concept of this distributed storage and accompanying financial compensation system is certainly a more novel approach to what file lockers have offered in the past, and this is precisely what ScatterBytes is providing to the infrastructure of the MEGA network. But I was shocked to learn, in the comment of ScatterBytes creator, that the financial compensation system would be using PayPal. Why the creators of MEGA & Scatterbytes would be so short-sighted and foolish to base their system off of a centralised, USA-based payment company widely known to be the Internet sector of the US financial-military-industrial complex was completely beyond me.

As a server operator myself, why would I want my disk space (NOT in the USA) to be a part of the MEGA network (NOT a US website) when details of my contribution (and a cut of the profits) would be handed directly to a US company known to directly work with the US government? Had the people behind MEGA & ScatterBytes not been paying any attention to PayPal's history? Shouldn't the operators of a file locker site which was mercilessly raided by the moneyed American corporate interests trying to stymy progress (and currently entangled in a court case) be slightly more intelligent and aware than this?

In my response to his comment, I asked the ScatterBytes creator why they are creating a system that would hand the US government banking-level details of MEGA collaborators , easily sortable by size of contributions no less! For the successor site to MegaUpload, this level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing. MegaUpload's servers are still sitting in limbo, and people have served jailtime over this service. Why any third-party (ie most of us on Slashdot) would be enthusiastic to contribute to the relaunch of this service, even if it does differ technologically from the previous incarnation, when it means giving all of our personal information to an organisation as nefarious and unfriendly to progress as PayPal is beyond me. To Jack's Complete Lack of Suprise, within a week of the launch of MEGA, an organisation seemingly created to kill file locker services (at least ones which multimedia publishing cartels decide to target) worked to shut off PayPal access to the primary MEGA resellers. So much for paying attention to history.


To see adoption of BitCoin is good news, but it's what should have been done at launch. It's 2013. We don't need centralised US-controlled middlemen spying on all of our financial transactions and taking our money anytime we want to transfer funds. We ha

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/at-facebook-zero-day-exploits-backdoor-code-bring-war-games-drill-to-life/

"The FBI e-mail, zero-day exploit, and backdoor code, it turns out, were part of an elaborate drill Facebook executives devised to test the company's defenses and incident responders. The goal: to create a realistic security disaster to see how well employees fared at unraveling and repelling it. While the attack was simulated, it contained as many real elements as possible."

If you have a Bluetooth handset that looks like an ordinary cell phone, what's the point of having the phone built-in to the watch? Just use an ordinary cell phone to make your calls instead of using Bluetooth handset that looks like an ordinary cell phone.

well... it's not really a funny joke if you have to explain it.

It would be a better joke if he wasn't describing a product that already exists: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/smartphone-too-big-get-a-smaller-phone-for-your-smartphone/

Have you read the Ars Technica article about how 2 guys an ocean apart managed to construct an artificial hand for a boy? Read it and then you'll know that decent 3D printers are available, are making useful stuff and will only get better. Enough with the skepticism, embrace your inner optimist ;)

Are you retarded or were you dropped on your head too often as a child?

2007 saw a 35%ish percent increase of Mac sales, OSX Leopard was flying off the shelf, the iPod had total control of the MP3 market, and the iPhone was introduced that year leading to a few million sales that year.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2007/12/apple-2007-best-year-ever/

That $150 million dollars was a tiny fraction on Apple's profit that year.

Apple was not close to tanking in 2007. Mac had a double digit growth rates and they had near total lock on MP3 players, iPhone was beginning and was a success from day 1. Where you 10 in 2007? http://arstechnica.com/apple/2007/12/apple-2007-best-year-ever/ If you think that Dell today and Apple in 2007 bear any resemblance you really shouldn't be in this discussion.

I remember hearing battery problems for practically every iOS version from 5.0 onwards.
http://osxdaily.com/2011/10/16/ios-5-battery-life-fix-tips/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/12/ios-6-0-2-suspected-of-draining-batteries/
What gives?

http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/10/aclu-23-of-us-population-lives-in-constitution-free-zone/

But not nearly as good as most of the alternatives, if you want it to work like Win 7. If you still long for the days of XP and earlier, though, then go for it.

Ars Technica has tested some of them here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/help-ive-got-windows-8-and-i-miss-my-start-menu/

Technical users hoping for Apple to miss an exploitable bug or two and, thanks to Copyright Office, in US being able to legally jailbreak iPhone, but not iPad.

Superior, right.

It's not "default mode". It's only intended mode.

I say, Internet's pretty unsafe for non-technical people, and we're just giving them more freedom than they can be responsible for with unfettered access. We should implement a country-wide whitelist, and technical people can always fully unlock it with an out of country VPS.

Now, wouldn't that be an inroad for censorship?

Take a look at this

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/two-year-old-phone-receives-15-month-old-software-update/

even when you get the update, it's still out of date. That's real BS

Technical users hoping for Apple to miss an exploitable bug or two and, thanks to Copyright Office, in US being able to legally jailbreak iPhone, but not iPad.

Superior, right.

It's not "default mode". It's only intended mode.

I say, Internet's pretty unsafe for non-technical people, and we're just giving them more freedom than they can be responsible for with unfettered access. We should implement a country-wide whitelist, and technical people can always fully unlock it with an out of country VPS.

A quick search revealed these gems

http://tech2.in.com/news/android/malware-found-in-updates-app-on-google-play/523862

http://www.androidauthority.com/google-hosted-malware-on-its-play-store-during-q3-but-how-much-131309/

http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/more-malware-found-hosted-in-google-android-market/

I recall that Comcast does not count some streaming video services against the data caps. There were some (like Netflix) who complained this was not in the spirit of net neutrality. So maybe they are still not counting some of the video you stream, depending on where you are streaming it from? Just a guess.

Here's some more info on this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/net-neutrality-concerns-raised-about-comcasts-xbox-on-demand-service/.

As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back.

Also, I really like the idea of a gesture based UI. So far the reviewers have loved the Blackberry gesture based UI.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/review-blackberry-10-is-better-much-better-late-than-never/

If there is a build for the S2, I will definitely flash it. The chance to have the open platform of Linux/Android with the native speed of IOS is worth at least trying out.

4 symbols, about 180k common words in the english language = 1,049,760,000,000,000,000,000 unique passwords. this thing can do 350 billion password attempts a second, and unless my math is wrong (which it most likely is) it would take 95 years to try all of those combinations.

OK.

From Wikipedia:

SNES - 49m
Gameboy - 118m
Nintendo 64 - 33m
GameCube - 22m

Wii - 99m
Nintendo DS - 153m

Total for Nintendo - 474 million.

iPad - 84 million
iPhone - 250 million
iPod Touch - 46 million

Total for Apple - 380 million.

Now, should we praise Nintendo as one of the leaders in PC market?

Great, you want to throw away all our helium on the basis of some shitty article from Forbes? Forbes, which routinely publishes climate-denier rhetoric and any other bullshit PR that someone can use to make a little more money?

Most people are smarter than the market, the market is dumb as shit. What the market does well is maximizing short-term gains, and there are a lot of gains to be had in the short-term if we blind ourselves to long term environmental costs, including blowing through our natural resources like helium.

There are far more qualified people making a far more compelling case about the need to conserve helium.

I believe it's using Qt and that they're working closely with the KDE Plasma team, however, I'm pretty sure they are not using KDE or Plasma. However, if you are interesed in a KDE tablet, I believe you can find more information here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/new-kde-tablet-to-liberate-linux-enthusiasts-from-walled-garden/

At the root of it all, this is a government problem. The government created a defacto national identification number via social security, and after telling everyone that it would only be used to track an individuals earnings, they promptly let banks and a whole bunch of unrelated programs use the number as an identifier.

Thing is, the social security number was never designed to be an identifier so it isn't secure. Heck, on the older cards (not the new ones, so I guess it apparently changed) it said "Not for identification."

So, we have these agencies that use an improper and insecure identification scheme to track everything about you (Because we totally have to identify everyone some way, right? I mean, it's totally always been that way) and we wonder why it goes wrong? Not advocating for REAL ID or anything, just that if the government actually cared they'd instantly put a stop to the practice of anyone but the SSA using social security numbers as individual identifiers.

but it was the first one that did not SUCK. I had a Diamond RIO and it's UI and operation utterly sucked. most everything after that continued to suck in durability and usability until the ipod came out.

I'm always astonished how Apple users feel the need to rewrite history...especially considering the irony. Apple lifted the UI wholesale from Creative. It got know as the 'ZEN' patent, Apple got Creative to go away with $100Million Dollars and the chance to make third party accessories.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6838-2/

I'm always astonished at the double-standard applied to Apple. The patent in question is,

A method of selecting at least one track from a plurality of tracks stored in a computer-readable medium of a portable media player configured to present sequentially a first, second, and third display screen on the display of the media player, the plurality of tracks accessed according to a hierarchy, the hierarchy having a plurality of categories, subcategories, and items respectively in a first, second, and third level of the hierarchy

Digital files organized in a hierarchal sequence? Just like every file system since the invention of the nested directory forty years ago? Just another example of Apple patenting something that's been around forever! That patent should be thrown out of court!

  Oh wait, it's being used against Apple. Thank goodness someone's finally standing up to the copycat!

but it was the first one that did not SUCK. I had a Diamond RIO and it's UI and operation utterly sucked. most everything after that continued to suck in durability and usability until the ipod came out.

I'm always astonished how Apple users feel the need to rewrite history...especially considering the irony. Apple lifted the UI wholesale from Creative. It got know as the 'ZEN' patent, Apple got Creative to go away with $100Million Dollars and the chance to make third party accessories.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6838-2/

I don't think you should be discussing a legal threat in a public forum.

Agreed. It is possibly dangerous.

From this article: Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanner.

Another tactic that clearly has an effect: speaking out, even when done anonymously. It hardly seems a coincidence that the Project Paperless patents were handed off to a web of generic-sounding LLCs, with demand letters signed only by “The Licensing Team,” shortly after the “Stop Project Paperless” website went up. It suggests those behind such low-level licensing campaigns aren’t proud of their behavior. And rightly so.

No, the best approach is to discuss the case with competent legal counsel.

That might not be true in this case. According to this story at Ars Technica

The best strategy for target companies? It may be to ignore the letters, at least for now. “Ignorance, surprisingly, works,” noted Prof. Chien in an e-mail exchange with Ars.

Her study of startups targeted by patent trolls found that when confronted with a patent demand, 22 percent ignored it entirely. Compare that with the 35 percent that decided to fight back and 18 percent that folded. Ignoring the demand was the cheapest option ($3,000 on average) versus fighting in court, which was the most expensive ($870,000 on average).

The "Professor Chien" referred to is a law professor and the author of Startups and Patent Trolls.

This is propaganda for the RIAA.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/katy-perry-rihanna-sign-ad-attacking-pandora-for-copyright-proposal/

I suspect that Facebook's reputation for being a brogrammer culture is an exaggeration perpetuated by the movie. If there was even a time when their work environment resembled anything in The Social Network, the company has matured since then. This article about their release process paints a different picture.

Hasn't YouTube figured it out? Sounds like Mega just needs a pseudo-copyright infringement tool to scan what's submitted.

All the content on the new Mega site is encrypted and the site owners don't have the decryption keys to the encrypted content. Without the keys they can't do automated scanning like YouTube does.

Other site(s) are publishing links to Mega content with decryption keys embedded. I assume these are what are used for the take-down notices. Since each take-down notice includes the decryption key, it allows Mega to see the content and verify that it should be taken down.

The whole point of Mega is that they don't have to automatically scan all the content.

ArsTechnica has a user comment (scroll down, its the 'editors pick') showing the problem with the camera:

I should also point out that the iPhone's applied far more contrast to the picture and, as a result, lost detail - look at the flat area of darkness in the trunk compared to the range of tones present in the pic from the BB. These are all post-processing problems, though, and (assuming both devices were on default settings) really just tell you that Apple's software is set to produce 'punchier' pictures out of the box as opposed to the lighter processing done by the BB, which ultimately retains more of the image.

so its not crap, it just doesn't aggressively sharpen everything like the iPhone does, so it appears less defined and misty. Its just appearance though, slap it through the same amount of software processing and you'll get the same result.

Anyway, they say the keyboard is excellent and can be used with 1 hand (or 1 thumb) which is a definite design win.

Well since the files are encrypted, these 150 files are simply ones where the user shared the link and the key in the URL. This can also be done via mega-search.me. In fact, according to Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/wait-for-it-select-files-from-mega-now-indexed-on-third-party-site/, several people have shared copyrighted material using Mega as storage and mega-search.me as the locator. These files can easily be checked by the copyright holder.

We've given MS a lot shit over the years.

That might be understatement of the day. ;)

Lately, though, MS seems tame (as they are not a serious player in the markets that matter) compared to some of these companies of today.

Believe it or not, they're doing quite well for themselves.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/microsoft-fails-to-notice-the-death-of-the-pc-posts-record-revenue-figures-instead/

I should have known nobody wants to hear that, before I submitted it. I'm a dummy.

At one time many home users had free or inexpensive access to MS Office through enterprise licensing. I recall install such a free copy on my mothers machine years back. If such free licensing were still available, I could see home users accessing MS Office.

The Microsoft Home Use Program is still very much alive.

HUP has a global reach and is multilingual.

The current bundle is Office Professional Plus 2013, which includes Lync.

Regional pricing varies a little, up and down. If you happen to be one of the sixty or so people living in the Pitcarin Islands, the cost is $15, plus S&H on the media. if required.

Ars Technica had this to say about Office 365 Home Premium:

Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013---Office 2013 Home and Student---is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.
Home Premium also comes with licenses for five installs of the suite---including Office 2011 for Mac installs for those households with mixed operating system allegiances. Home and Student has been trimmed down to allowing just one installation per license. And as part of its subscription, customers will also get 60 minutes a month of Skype calls to phone numbers within the US (as Microsoft continues to position Skype as the consumer version of its Lync enterprise voice, video, and messaging service). And it comes with an additional 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive cloud storage.
While you can install Office on five systems at once through Home Premium, where those five licenses are is fungible. You can manage which computers are actively using their Office user licenses from the account webpage, and you can shut off one to make room for another when necessary. That means your licenses can travel with you from computer to computer, and---at least theoretically, if you keep all your data in SkyDrive or a networked drive---you can be up and running with a new PC in a manner of minutes.

Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Phrases like "home user" mislead the geek, I think.

"Software for the professional working at home and abroad" would be closer to the truth for a product like Office. Everyone in the family may be using the program --- in part because they share the same interests and ambitions.

But for him, it is one of the fundamental tools of his trade.

The article closes by asking 'Will you [pay up]?' The consensus in the comments is a resounding 'NO,' with frequent mentions of the suitability of OpenOffice for home productivity.

Perfectly predictable ---

and as utterly meaningless as the responses to any self-selecting online poll.

Now and again Ars Technica enjoys puncturing the geek's wish-fulfillment and over-inflated ego with a headline like this: Microsoft fails to notice the death of the PC, posts record revenue figures instead.

"The Windows Division once more becomes the company's biggest money-maker."

Or at least get it for consoles, where DRM isn't an issue.

Incorrect. DRM is still an "issue" on consoles; it's simply an issue which is so completely integrated into the system, that most people aren't even aware of it... but the reality is that console DRM is even harder to (ahem) "work around" than PC DRM. As an example: Try to make a copy of one of your console games, and then give that copy to your best friend, so that the two of you can play online together. Go ahead... we'll wait.

Well, not really... nobody is waiting for you. But then, why should we wait, when you're exceptionally unlikely to succeed at making that copy? The thing is, the process required to make a legitimate "backup" of a game (in order to have a fail-safe should your game disc ever become scratched or damaged) is exactly the same as the process required in the piracy scenario described above. This applies pretty much to all modern consoles -- and in some cases, the DRM isn't only applied to the games, but also to the saved game data and downloadable content. One recent story which highlights this with respect to Nintendo is over at ArsTechnica.com, but these issues exist to differing degrees on both PlayStation and XBox as well.

Personally I think old Ballmer has too damned much on his plate to give a shit about Linux one way or another ATM

Then why has B-17 Ballmer's company continued to pressure manufacturers of Android smartphones, charging them as much for the use of FAT file system patents and other essential patents as it would charge for a license of Windows Phone itself?

namely "Become Apple" which he is learning

Hence the patent suits.

Have you SEEN the new Acer ChromeBook? You have an X86 CPU, hard drive, RAM, etc that are so bog standard it hurts yet is so locked down you can't even run Linux X86 on the damned thing!

To reformat an Acer Chromebook into developer mode, hold F3 and Esc while turning on the power, then press Ctrl+D.

Uglier? Aero Glass was ugly and cheap looking. Windows 8 looks miles better, finally pulling away from the Fisher-Price look that Windows has had since XP.

Here are some of the under the hood improvements. They are pretty significant.

Yeah I'd say it's legit when they actually employ people, making something. What remains to be seen is if they'll pull a Google to get out of paying taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/google-shifts-a-record-10b-to-bermuda-shell-firm-avoids-billions-in-taxes/

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/11/dutch-sandwich-with-a-side-of-tax-relief-may-soon-be-off-googles-menu/

Yeah I'd say it's legit when they actually employ people, making something. What remains to be seen is if they'll pull a Google to get out of paying taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/google-shifts-a-record-10b-to-bermuda-shell-firm-avoids-billions-in-taxes/

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/11/dutch-sandwich-with-a-side-of-tax-relief-may-soon-be-off-googles-menu/

802.11ac doesn't include the just announced frequency expansion.

From the Mega TOS*:
"8. Our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload or give someone else access to where it determines that that data is an exact duplicate of original data already on our service. In that case, you will access that original data."

That seems to point to deduplication -- if things were actually encrypted and the keys unknown to Mega, dedupe would be impossible.

[*] - http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/megabad-a-quick-look-at-the-state-of-megas-encryption/

This is about a dedicated high speed connection only between the ISP and Netflix.

And where did you read that? All I read was that Netflix requires that the ISP peers with Netflix. You can peer with someone without a direct dedicated connection. My guess is they required this because of companies like Comcast, who abused monopolistic powers to pervert the definition of "peering". http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/timewarner-net-neutrality-foes-cry-foul-netflix-requirements-for-super-hd/

You seem to have failed to respond to my points.Do you now accept that violent crime is a much more useful measure of the efficacy of particular legislation?

Yes it does. http://arstechnica.com/science/2007/01/6601/ [arstechnica.com]

Have you read that "study". It tries to control for so many factors it basically looks like they are obscuring the numbers and it certainly does not correlate with international numbers. I can't even find what the un-adjusted numbers they used were.

Legislation was passed to stop the CDC from collecting information about this because people were concerned when the CDC started building a database of personally identifiable information on gun owners

It was the CDC, But I see no evidence for that. Indeed if it was that, they could have simply banned the collection of such personally identifiable information. The truth is the ban came about simply because of lobbying by the NRA, because they dislike data which shows gun control is a good thing.

You assign motives that are not that stated motives and which don't even seem to make sense. Yes, the NRA was lobbying for action to stop the CDC and yes they got it. That does not by any means mean that the results of any study would have been contradictory to all the other major studies that don't seem to find any real benefit to gun control laws aside from lowering the rate of successful suicides, but it certainly did stop the collection of data about gun owners and for all we know may have prevented that information from being released to the detriment of many people's right to privacy. After all, that is what this article is about. The government cannot be trusted with this data, as demonstrated. More scientific study is needed, but certainly we need more precautions about the type of data and we need real evidence gun control laws will have a positive instead of negative effect before we pass some law out of empathy for children that would not have been helped by that law in the first place.

I read in a different article that it's a peering point of Netflix's choice. And peering equipment of Netflix's choice. Oh, and the ISP pays for maintaining Netflix's equipment at the peering point.

This article quotes Netflix saying otherwise:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/timewarner-net-neutrality-foes-cry-foul-netflix-requirements-for-super-hd/

Netflix responded to Time Warner's accusation, telling Multichannel News that "Open Connect provides Netflix data at no cost to the location the ISP desires and doesn't seek preferential treatment.

Basically, Netflix is saying "we don't care if your network can handle the bandwidth, we'll only give your customer SuperHD if you'll set up your network our way". The right way to do it is for Netflix to set throughput and latency targets and say "if your ISP can provide x and y, you'll get SuperHD".

Well, I think they are saying "We're tired of paying internet transit costs to give your customers the content they are demanding - give us a 10Gig port to your network at the major peering point of your choice (and if your network spans more than one goegraphical area, we'll pipe the content to that area for you) and we'll pump the content directly into your network and save ourselves a bundle while giving your customers a better experience.

I thought Netflix was agreeing to deliver the content to the peering point of the ISP's choice - the only cost to the ISP is a port on their border gateway and a cheap peering interconnect.

I can't be bothered to find out, but I assumed this was part of the peering dance that has been going on for two decades or whatever between all players on the internet.

Basically the network engineering dept knows its universally a win to peer for "free" as much as possible with as many other people as possible rather than pay for transit. However the MBAs on both sides of a peering arrangement love to dance around with daydreams of bonuses in their heads of getting the other guy to purchase transit instead of freely peer. So historically you've always had idiotic showdowns (slowdowns?) and dumb marketing tricks (we only peer with other tier 1 providers... whats a tier 1 provider? Well its anyone we either a) want to peer with or b) couldn't get to pay us for transit, that's the def of a tier 1 provider).

So you can't be bothered to find out anything about what Netflix is asking, but you know that Netflix is asking ISP's to pay money?

Here's a few more details:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/timewarner-net-neutrality-foes-cry-foul-netflix-requirements-for-super-hd/

Netflix isn't charging ISPs to be part of its private network, but the ISPs do have to meet a list of requirements. For example, the ISP must connect to the same peering locations as used by the Netflix network and establish connections of at least 10Gbps. By requiring the use of its own network, Multichannel News notes that "Netflix saves money on third-party CDN transit fees by connecting directly with ISPs.

So it sounds like Netflix isn't asking for money, but stands to make some significant cost savings with little additional cost to the ISP.

Per Ars Technica, this thinktank's got a history of opposing Net Neutrality.

Actually, read the Ars article. It's better quality than this paid hit piece. Did anyone notice that the final link in the summary goes to Fox Propaganda?

For example, murder is murder, but according to your hypothesis murder rates would go up with rates of gun ownership, since "being shot is clearly worse" and you don't get much worse than death. But that correlation does not happen.

Yes it does.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2007/01/6601/

Legislation was passed to stop the CDC from collecting information about this because people were concerned when the CDC started building a database of personally identifiable information on gun owners

It was the CDC, But I see no evidence for that. Indeed if it was that, they could have simply banned the collection of such personally identifiable information. The truth is the ban came about simply because of lobbying by the NRA, because they dislike data which shows gun control is a good thing.

According to http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/megabad-a-quick-look-at-the-state-of-megas-encryption/ it uses javascript. Which would be client side.

Talking about Ars, there is an interesting article about Mega encryption