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So what does that mean for Brian Barrett and the Wired ? Impunity in the mainstream is the main cause for Fake News. Wired should have apologized for publishing nonsense.

Maybe not in my lifetime, but it will. Either that or we have some horrible social upheaval like the French Revolution and start from scratch.

An example.

Everybody like the new self-driving car craze? Google's car passed 300,000 miles without an incident, all that? Can't wait to have your car drive your drunk ass home from the bar, or have your car take your elderly mother to the store for you? Sounds 100% good doesn't it?

Check out these two links. Self driving truck delivers beer. There are 3.5 million truck drivers employed in the USA.

Now I ask you. When, and that's not if but when all 3.5 million of these people are unemployed...what are we going to do with them? It's going to happen and nobody is planning for it.

How about some others?

Robots could possibly wipe out 6 million retail jobs.
Agriculture set to lose 1 million jobs to robots
Coal industry set to lose half their workforce inside of 10 years

We're going to have to do something, and soon.

Here's your answer.

I have no idea what action you are crediting this to, but Eternal September was in 1993 when AOL brought them to USENET. I

"May 26, 1995: Gates, Microsoft Jump on "Internet Tidal Wave"

https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/

You mean the domestic spying which got its real start when Bush forced telecom companies to install equipment which allowed the government to listen in on every phone call without a warrant?

You might want to roll back that date just a little bit. From the article, the first secret room was built in 2002, but they were already sharing data in 2001. It was already a "rumor" back in the mid 1990s that the internet POPs had monitoring gear in them. Based on the dates in the article, that is likely true, just that it was scaled up as time went on.

Hypothetically, retailers could give Google their raw data, and I expect such a thing to be an option in the future.

It already is. The companies that manage loyalty cards have been data-sharing with facebook for years now. That doesn't cover every purchase, but it covers a lot of purchases.

Does that really introduce a problem not already caused by pervasive advertising?

Sorry, your apologia for boiling the frog of basic privacy expectations is unacceptable.

it's unlikely to get written down or posted inadvertently on the internet.

Yes, that would obviously never happen.

DNC says FBI never asked. "In its statement, the FBI agreed with the DNC’s implication that it had instead relied on data from Crowdstrike." https://www.wired.com/2017/01/...

How is the CIA going to get into an interesting washing machine if the home network is now secure?
CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher (03.15.12)
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/...
"particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft"

Interesting.

Without a teletype, a programmer would need to enter software into the Honeywell using the 16 buttons on the front panel, each of which corresponds to a bit. A pressed button represented a one, and un-pushed button signaled a zero. “The chances that you would get a program right doing it one bit at a time like that were so low,” Spicer said. “The first peripheral people bought for [the Honeywell] was a teletype so they could speak to it.”

But it came with a two-week training class to teach you how to use the thing.

- meh, don't worry, the compiler will catch any typos....or your recipe will just turn out bad.

"My desktop feels like it's been standing still for the last ten years, where it hasn't been going backwards. This is across OSes, applications, windows managers and fricken monitor resolutions come to think of it."

This is due to webpage bloat. Web programmers either suck, or don't have the freedom to veto all the garbage that is getting shoved into webpages.

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-original-doom/>

And THAT is the problem.

The view that it has to be one way and one way alone.

I'm the guy who originally posted the bit you're replying to. I don't know if you are the one I replied to with that post or not, but you responded to my post, and I think it's worth addressing, whether or not you ever actually read this.

Now, first off, I will not disavow that I hold freedom to do what you want with your own property to be sacrosanct. It is one of the most, if not the most, important things about computing. On that precept lies just about everything we depend on for computer systems in one way or another. It determines whether or not our actions with those devices are our own, or merely permitted by another entity, whether our data is our own or under control of another entity, whether our transmissions and communications are our own or censored and dictated by another entity. The list could go on, and one could write books on the subject. This has serious consequences, both short-term and long-term, and both practical and theoretical. The fact that other entities (such as the ISP) are involved and may have, say, censorship abilities, is inconsequential; two wrongs don't make a right, and your computer system, which is what is being discussed, is the end point for you personally and is far more important.

However, the thing is. If you want training wheels, then I'm FINE with that. A lot of people will want training wheels and they will want them forever. That's fine, in and of itself. I totally get it. What I'm looking for? A switch to remove the training wheels. One that's built-in, does not require a hack or error, and is not patched out, either blatantly or "accidentally."

This allows your activities on the computer to be fully free, since you always have a way out and always have a way to do what you want with it. Now this carries certain risks - for instance, I could see it being justified that carrying this out means that software technical support goes out the window unless you reset the device fully to default, which probably involves wiping it. And it probably requires a lot of deliberate tasks to be done to make certain that it's very, very, very difficult indeed to do it by accident.

However, the mere presence of this option on every phone or computer will make sure the keepers of the Garden will keep on their toes to neither be too restrictive nor too overbearing, as it always ensures a way out. Similarly, unless you end up causing some kind of changes to critical portions of the system (which are not necessarily the outcome of simply turning off Walled Garden mode), OS updates should still occur. In fact, I think Google, irony of ironies, actually has something along these lines built into some of their branded phones (I want to say Pixel). Although I don't know if the OS updates after, I do know that it won't suddenly try to wrestle away control from you after you specify you want to root the phone using the built-in procedure (or at least, I'd be very surprised if it did).

A real way out that's fully supported that does not require a hack or potentially damaging the hardware, and is not sold at a premium. That's what I want, and I suspect it would satisfy the vast majority of people who are up in arms over this. While we value freedom, that doesn't mean you absolutely must ditch the Garden. Just give an exit to it for those who choose to leave it without abandoning the platform entirely, especially since there are so few to choose from.

Make the Walled Garden a garden. Not a jail with pretty plants.

But let's take a look at the sources of Android malware. You said it yourself - installing random shit was the term I believe you used. This means either they've found this stuff in the Walled Garden, mitigating its supposed security properties (in particular, with apps that are fake knock-offs of actual, popular apps), or they got it

You'd be better off to direct your ire at the year old nature of the story, especially since the Slashdot summary is more akin to mocking it for a Sci-fi plot. A bad one. You're just too easily triggered by Climate Change, it sets you off into a tizzy.

Of course, given that this is a Russian site of infection, it is just as likely a cover-up for some bioweapons experiment.

Now do methane, which is clearly the bigger danger

There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!

There are already more than 10k Alexa skills [1]. I'd prefer an AI that cuts it down to the 5 you need.

On the learning curve, I still haven't discovered how to get the local time your Alexa unit is in. In the end I made my skill get the time from a local web server, since the concept of time zones is still alien to Amazon. I'd describe the API as childishly bureaucratic.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...

I learned a lot about DRM from this website when I was much younger. It has only gotten worse since then, with DRM infesting not just DVDs etc but now John Deere tractors, which are hostile architecture black boxes preventing farmers from optimizing their super expensive machines. So there is no free software or open secondary market for GPS data gathered (i.e. something that would sense micro conditions and efficiently apply another tech). This is hugely dangerous to the human race at large since we are dependent on the tractors for survival. I would argue it ought to be one of the biggest deals to face. If something goes wrong with John Deere we skid right back to sticks rather easily.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/...
https://www.extremetech.com/co...
http://boingboing.net/2017/03/...
"Now, farmers find themselves in desperate straits. Not only does Deere gouge them on repairs ("$230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize [a user-swapped] part"), but the repair shops can be far away or busy, and thus a half-million dollar tractor can sit immobilized while a farmer frets about getting his crops in."

https://www.ifixit.com/Answers...
http://www.npr.org/sections/al...
http://freeknowledge.eu/campai...
Totally unacceptable situation here.

So doing some reading based on your comment. I had no idea the extent of viruses ending up in our DNA... since ancient times and they can be very very beneficial. Some of this article sounds so insanely weird, I almost feel like it is fake. Time to read other sources.

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...

Quote: "The placenta example points to a second way for endogenous retroviruses to turn beneficial: if their viral genes are straight up reused in new way. The same gene that allowed a virus to fuse to a mammal cell now lets cells of the placenta fuse together to form the organ. Interestingly, primates and mice and rabbits and cats all got their placental genes from separate viral infections. Not only does this endogenous retrovirus-turned-good story happen, but itâ(TM)s happened multiple times."

I'm sure all the relevant important traffic for these sites was and is at least TLS encrypted, right? Right?

And it's not as if that espionage on banks isn't a totally normal thing:
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.reuters.com/article...

Not just a few banks or lowly consumer creditcard companies, but SWIFT itself, the system that all banks use to transfer money around the globe. Not just traffic but actual inside data.
Not to mention a ton of routers inside various banks all over the middle east.

Buzzfeed seems to only link their own articles in their stories, so it's not convenient to fact-check them. I would have prefered some other information on this subject and since there is none in the TFA, I will provide you with some more info on this lobbying dollout:

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/...

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

http://www.cbronline.com/news/...

From an obnoxious website that I won't link because of how totally obnoxious their javascript is; you may wish to read this anyway:

f the surprising election win by President-elect Donald Trump left you feeling dispirited, you may be looking for a way to take action.
One way you could do so is donating money or time to causes you believe stand against Trump's politics. Conversely, you could hold back your money â" by boycotting companies and/or corporate executives that stand against your beliefs.
As of mid-September, no CEO of a Fortune 100 company supported Trump by donating to his campaign.
But in other ways, and in the time since, a few big companies have shown support for the president-elect â" directly or indirectly.
Here are five examples.
New Balance
The day after the election, Matthew LeBretton, vice president of public affairs for the sneaker brand New Balance, told a Wall Street Journal reporter: "The Obama administration turned a deaf ear to us and frankly with President-elect Donald Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction."
After that message went out, angry people on Twitter shared photos showing them destroying or trashing their New Balance shoes.
In response, New Balance issued a statement to Sole Collector clarifying its position.
"As the only major company that still makes athletic shoes in the United States, New Balance has a unique perspective on trade and trade policy in that we want to make more shoes in the United States, not less," the statement reads. "New Balance publicly supported the trade positions of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump prior to Election Day that focused on American manufacturing job creation and we continue to support them today."
Yuengling
On a final campaign swing through Pennsylvania at the end of October, Trump's son Eric stopped by the Yuengling Brewery in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
Richard "Dick" Yuengling Jr., who is 73 and the fifth-generation owner of the nation's oldest beer company, gave him a tour.
"Our guys are behind your father," Yuengling said, the Reading Eagle reported. "We need him in there."
Eric Trump promised a Trump presidency would help businesses like Yuengling, a $550 million company with breweries in Pottsville and East Norwegian Township in Pennsylvania and Tampa, Florida.
"Maybe your dad will build a hotel in Pottsville, or serve Yuengling in his hotels," Yuengling said, jokingly, according to the Eagle.
Following the visit, there were calls on Twitter for a consumer boycott of the beermaker.
Home Depot
Kenneth Langone, one of the co-founders of Home Depot, has been publicly supporting Trump since May.
After supporting GOP presidential candidates New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and then Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Langone settled on Trump.
"And you want to know something?" Langone said on CNBC's "Closing Bell" in May. "I think he'll do a hell of a good job. At least I'm hoping."
Langone even doubled down after Trump bragged about sexual assault in the bus video leaked in October.
When asked for comment about the Langone's support, Stephen Holmes, the director of corporate communications for Home Depot said: "The Home Depot nor our CEO endorse Presidential candidates. Ken is a co-founder, and was once on our board of direc

Will Deprive More Public Schools From Getting Internet Access

Things' prices ought to reflect their real costs. By twisting Internet- and other service-providers, governments keep services scarce and expensive for all.

It's not clear, but speculated that with chip and sign, it is entirely possible:
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/...

However, what has actually happened is that most fraudsters, who are as technically capable as your average script kiddie, have just found other ways of defrauding you rather than try to solve a hard technical problem. The most popular method now, and which I personally know many people have been facing, is opening a credit card in your name and using your potentially great credit score against you. This is ALSO because credit card companies are dropping the ball.

This is why we should not let idiots with MBA degrees use statistics to make decisions. "If I make this one change, I will fix 60% of the problem! I'm done!", and a month later the mole pops up another hole. So no doubt they will try to close this new hole, and the criminal element will look elsewhere, perhaps back at cracking EMV and it's known weaknesses, one of which has been identified:

http://blog.unibulmerchantserv...
(TL;DR: It's not guaranteed and work for some uses, but it's a crack in the wall)

A "failed concept" that has resulted in numerous breakthroughs, such as beating a Go grandmaster with a fraction of the expected computing power.

And I imagine all further AI research will continue to be dismissed by you as "just algorithms" up to and including the day it finally produces an artificial True Scotsman.

What makes you think Google, Facebook etc are so keen to sell your data while AT&T etc would never consider it, despite them knowing everything from your home address and daily movements to your TV watching habits and full browsing history?

Just like Google & Facebook, the major ISPs don't sell your data but do use it to run targeted ad networks of their own, taking full advantage of their far more extensive knowledge of you - and they're much harder to avoid. Examples of abuse abound, like Verizon being fined for their zombie supercookies, or AT&T charging an extra $29/month if you don't care to be targeted.

You can easily avoid Google or Facebook, but how do you avoid your only local broadband provider, or the telco you bought your phone from? It seems the GOP's answer is to avoid the internet completely.

Let's get a few things straight here:

First of all, nothing gives "professional quality movies" the right to exist. People have the right not to be charged with a crime for trying to make them, but it's that person's own responsibility to figure out how to fund it.

Second: nothing about "[my] values being set in law" by reforming copyright would change that: people would still have the right not to be charged with a crime for making movies, and it would still be that person's responsibility to fund the process. Having less monopoly enforcement (or even no grant of monopoly at all) might make that harder, but that's not the same as prohibiting it by law. Even in an environment without copyright there are still plenty of ways to fund movies, such as by patronage (including crowdfunding), subsidizing them with other goods/services (e.g. merchandising or product placement), etc.

Third, it's not an issue of "ideological purity," it's an issue of human rights. "Free speech" means free exchange of ideas, and free exchange of ideas depends on the Public Domain. Requiring some third-party's permission before sharing an idea is the opposite of that. In other words, copyright is fundamentally censorship, and copyright enforced by DRM without regard for Fair Use is even more so. Moreover, copyright is increasingly an infringement upon actual property rights too. In fact, copyright maximalists are trying to create a world where "ownership" is only for corporations, but not for people: neo-feudalism, a.k.a. tyranny.

This is another interesting case. Here the lady basically takes a webcam and translates that to sound. Seems she's able to perceive depth and other fairly impressive things with it.
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/...

How many of those fools will start using free VPN providers that make their privacy and security even worse: Proxy Services Are Not Safe. Try These Alternatives

"You should realize that your congress critters work for rich people ...blah, blah, blah"

Standard tin-foil, knee-jerk response above.

Have you ever actually written to, or called your congressional reps? There are ways to be heard...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://theslot.jezebel.com/how...
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/...

With lower prices, faster speeds and better service, you bet people would want municipal broadband.

None of the above. Remember the previous bright idea of this kind — municipal WiFi?

One only needs to take an Amtrak train trying to use their "free WiFi" to get a feeling, what government-provided Internet will be:

• Connecting and maintaining connection is a constant struggle — so bad, passengers with unlimited cellular data just use that;
• Must accept their stupid "rules" every time connection is dropped and reacquired;
• Can't upgrade apps on your phone (silly rabbit, Net Neutrality is for KKKorporation$, government enterprises are exempt);
• Can't read an article on Playboy.com — the entire site is blocked;

If Republicans would stop preventing broadband competition

It is not a competition, if one of the competitors is the City Hall. It is a monopoly.

The dearth of decent options is due to the local governments. They must not be rewarded for it...

And the DMCA, which of course was signed into law by Bill Clinton.

You just can't screw with the engine controls. Contrary to your line of argument, doing that has a very high probability of changing its emissions (like 100%).

No.

First of all, merely "changing" the emissions does not necessarily mean making the vehicle violate the emission standards. For example, if the owner made modifications elsewhere -- such as by switching to a cleaner fuel, like biodiesel -- it's entirely possible for there to be different settings that optimize the engine operation while still maintaining equal or better emissions. For that reason alone the EPA rule is overreaching.

Second, the ECU performs an increasingly large number of functions beyond just things that affect emissions. That means the bullshit emissions argument is used as an excuse to DRM all the other computerized functions in the tractor, up to and including things like GPS tracking or self-driving modes. Even worse than that, John Deere has argued that the DRM infection means the farmer only "licenses" the entire fucking tractor , including the hardware parts!

Therefore, this claim of yours:

You can modify all sorts of crap on a JD tractor. Tires get changed all the time. You can change the entire cab if you want.

...is not true, at least from John Deere's perspective. If this sort of tyranny is allowed to stand, there would be nothing stopping John Deere from requiring farmers to obtain its permission even to change the fucking tires (using only John Deere "licensed" parts), in exactly the same way e.g. Lexmark tries to pretend it's illegal to use third-party ink.

And then we can put it on the list along with other nerd arguments like: There's NO WAY Bell can stop our Blue Boxes! There's TOTALLY ILLEGAL for the government to spy on all our comms! There's NO WAY they can patent computer code! No one will ever get sued when using BitTorrent! etc.

Fuck off with your strawman arguments!

"Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some 'SJWs' criticised them? "

Something along those lines, absolutely! Intel has been an extremely successful company with its predominately white, predominately male workforce. This "diversity" bullshit is nothing but a collective mental illness which permeates contemporary culture & Intel is trying to capitalize on it. The whole effort is a big public image campaign.

It's not just "some SJWs" criticizing them. Every single time this is discussed in the media, government or academia, the "whiteness" and "maleness" in the tech industry is framed in the context of a problem that needs to be solved.

e.g.
Wired: Intel isn't diverse enough

Gizmodo: The Alarming Downsides to Tech Industry Diversity Reports

It's even framed as a problem from a public policy standpoint!
EEOC: "...the lack of diversity among high tech workers [has] become [a] central public policy [concern]."

You never (except in the comments section) hear the hypothesis that there just might be fundamental differences across the races and the sexes and that the composition of the workforce is a function of those differences. They also conveniently gloss over the fact that these evil white racists in tech seem to hire plenty of minorities of Asian/East Asian heritage.
F*** Intel. If they're going to have a big PR campaign where white men are viewed as a "problem", they won't be getting my $$$.

As I posted here: Seems to me that TBL could have done a much better job phrasing the point that backdoors might be intended only for government use, but bad guys always find a way to use them to break security systems wide open.

What is the person on the street really going to make of "they may end up getting better at it than you are"?

He could have pointed to a physical-world analogy: the TSA 'master keys' that can open all sorts of luggage padlocks. For a while, only the government had them. Today, anyone with a 3D printer can make a working copy.

Refs: NY Times, Wired, Boston Globe.

So even though our systems costs significantly more. We don't have better supply or better results.

Actually, given that more than 75% of the people in my metro area (and many others, for that matter) live in apartments or condos, and of those, only a very tiny minority live in buildings that were constructed recently enough (past 10 years or so) to adopt the newer guidelines of having electrical outlets in each parking stall, I don't think that my use case is that atypical. It's not an insurmountable issue for people with private garages, but many people do not have those.

I'm reminded of an anecdote. from wired. The point is well made.. at a line-up in a gas-station, each person you are behind is going to cost you maybe 5 minutes of your time, while at an electric charging station, you may as well just leave and try to find another one somewhere else because unless you are next, it could be hours before you get to charge.

And in a kind of catch-22, the rate at which new public charging stations are added is limited by the number of electric cars out there, and the number of people who buy electric cars is going to be limited by the availability of convenient charging outlets.

Sure it will probably happen eventually.... but remember, it took over a century for motorized vehicles to become the norm over horses. I would be very surprised if the existing inertia of using a gasoline infrastructure were to be overcome in my lifetime.

The CIA likes the idea.
A smart TV that did not need network access to place the code.
Re "suspicious data is going out of our computer"
A person would have to enter the room, access and alter the smart TV, wait for a recoding, a person to collect the data later. No need for the data collected to be networked out later. No network code litter to alter the smart TV, no code litter left in the smart tv later, no changes to any network.
The idea been no network had to be entered to alter the smart TV. No code litter on any network, no need for very strange listening devices in the room.
What new methods could offer is the room change issue. Alter all rooms smart TV's? Just the guests expected to have interesting conversations?
The ability to quickly alter a smart TV in a room that was an unexpected meeting place?
Too late for a human to enter and alter the smart TV, any network code litter might expose the entry attempt, but a new way exists to alter all smart TV's if needed.
The part the CIA liked was the "they can also be turned off " did not work. The smart TV seemed like it was powered off but it was an always on live mic.
CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher (03.15.12)
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/...

In an article posted by the Verge today, the members of Congress who voted to Shred the ISP Privacy Rules are listed, by name, along with information of how much they received in donations from the telecom industry and employees of those corporations.

Remember... Congress didn't need to do this. Newly-promoted FCC chairman Ajit Pai was going to gut the FCC rule behind Internet privacy all by himself. But with this move, the members of Congress named in this list took the extra step under the authority of the Congressional Review Act to expressly cause the privacy rules to "have no force or effect" and prohibit the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future .

They might say that this move was just a legal technicality... that the real power for privacy should properly rest with the FTC. Bullshit. The resolution they passed eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.

All that's left to happen is for Trump to sign it, and then, that's that. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Not sure what can be done about it except to use the Internet as little as possible.

What can be done along with running your own secure mail servers, it to set up and run your own DNSSEC service.
Set Up a DNS Name Server
Domain Name System Security Extensions

For the last few years, my home network has had a small subnet that can only reach the Internet via the Tor Network. As a Comcast subscriber with no other options in ISP's, I'm seriously considering putting all the family devices into this subnet and setting up private VPN access into it for the mobile devices while on the road.

I assume you're referring to all the anti-terrorism Snowden shit, that started under W. but continued under Obama (and six years of GOP-controlled Congress). And damn-well ain't gonna let up any under Trump.

But let's put it in context. The GOP, after years of screaming and gnashing of teeth, when the chips were finally down could NOT get enough of their own shit together to repeal Obamacare, that thing they say they hate more than anything in the whole world. But, just a few days later, these same guys managed to put their differences aside to crush a tiny consumer-protection rule for Internet users.

... and the punch line? They didn't even need to! The GOP-installed FCC chairman can and said he would do away with the rule all by himself. But no. All the GOP, from Congress to the White House, must, must take a courageous stand against opt-out Internet Privacy in the name of those good shareholders of the nation's ISP's. That's right, it turns out the GOP really can live with Obamacare, but a world where ISP's can't sell your data? Heavens-to-Betsy!

That's who we're dealing with here, people. Still insist that Dems are the worst? Ancient history, get over it. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, and shit it's only been 12 weeks!

but on the other hand, doesn't Ivanka's clothing line just look spanky!

I know everyone wants to back the little guy, but Netflix is actually recreating the very monopolies we are trying to break-up:

The common complaint about cable was that they bundled everything together. You had to pay a monthly fee, you couldn't pick your channels a la carte, and if you wanted to watch "Game Of Thrones" you had to subscribe to HBO and pay monthly, even for just one show. In addition, nobody liked having to pay for cable TV & internet both, since it felt like the same service from the same company. Then to make matters worse, you had to buy HBO on cable just to stream the show on HBO's web site, which made no sense. (HBO might have fixed this, but the same goes for other channels, and sporting events.) This drove piracy mainstream.

But the bigger issue is that telecommunications companies are buying out content providers. This merging is dangerous, because a telecom company controlling say, a media news outlet, can't be unbiased. And there is nothing to stop them from offering certain content on their networks only.

Netflix threatened to break that all up. I could buy my internet from anyone, subscribe to Netflix, and have so much content we didn't need cable TV. We no longer paid for TV "channels" we didn't need. But then Amazon Prime came along, and then we needed to buy Netflix + Amazon. Oh, and buy Hulu for your TV watching. So now, we need to again buy all these services in order to have access to a full catalog of content. We are back to premium TV channels again. But at least we gained our a la carte stations!

But if Amazon and Netflix start to offer exclusive content, we get back to the media companies (Amazon, Netflix) being content providers too. I want to watch just one show, and I have to subscribe to Netflix. I's the HBO Game-of-thrones scenario all over again.

The solution is, and has been for 40+ years, to break apart the monopolies. We must separate content delivery companies from content creating companies. That no longer just means the telecom monopolies shouldn't be content providers, but it also means the streaming companies can't be content creators, and transitively, the telecom can't be either one. This gets us back to the ideal world where we choose our telecom company, choose our streaming service, and choose our content - all separately. Every streaming service should be able to provide all content, or nearly all of it. Competition comes back, we no longer have the zero-rating problem..

So cheer Netflix's success, but be careful what you wish for. At the present rate, we will all be paying $50/month for all these streaming services just to get the content we need.

P.S. We also need to stop each streaming service provider from using their own protocol. You bought a Roku box last year huh? Well, you can't access the newest coolest streaming service because they didn't make a firmware update for that service. If 20 years ago, you told people that their TV or cable-box needed a firmware update every time a new channel came-out, they would be attacking the telecom companies with pitchforks. Yet that is happening today and people accept it.

I know everyone wants to back the little guy, but Netflix is actually recreating the very monopolies we are trying to break-up:

The common complaint about cable was that they bundled everything together. You had to pay a monthly fee, you couldn't pick your channels a la carte, and if you wanted to watch "Game Of Thrones" you had to subscribe to HBO and pay monthly, even for just one show. In addition, nobody liked having to pay for cable TV & internet both, since it felt like the same service from the same company. Then to make matters worse, you had to buy HBO on cable just to stream the show on HBO's web site, which made no sense. (HBO might have fixed this, but the same goes for other channels, and sporting events.) This drove piracy mainstream.

But the bigger issue is that telecommunications companies are buying out content providers. This merging is dangerous, because a telecom company controlling say, a media news outlet, can't be unbiased. And there is nothing to stop them from offering certain content on their networks only.

Netflix threatened to break that all up. I could buy my internet from anyone, subscribe to Netflix, and have so much content we didn't need cable TV. We no longer paid for TV "channels" we didn't need. But then Amazon Prime came along, and then we needed to buy Netflix + Amazon. Oh, and buy Hulu for your TV watching. So now, we need to again buy all these services in order to have access to a full catalog of content. We are back to premium TV channels again. But at least we gained our a la carte stations!

But if Amazon and Netflix start to offer exclusive content, we get back to the media companies (Amazon, Netflix) being content providers too. I want to watch just one show, and I have to subscribe to Netflix. I's the HBO Game-of-thrones scenario all over again.

The solution is, and has been for 40+ years, to break apart the monopolies. We must separate content delivery companies from content creating companies. That no longer just means the telecom monopolies shouldn't be content providers, but it also means the streaming companies can't be content creators, and transitively, the telecom can't be either one. This gets us back to the ideal world where we choose our telecom company, choose our streaming service, and choose our content - all separately. Every streaming service should be able to provide all content, or nearly all of it. Competition comes back, we no longer have the zero-rating problem..

So cheer Netflix's success, but be careful what you wish for. At the present rate, we will all be paying $50/month for all these streaming services just to get the content we need.

P.S. We also need to stop each streaming service provider from using their own protocol. You bought a Roku box last year huh? Well, you can't access the newest coolest streaming service because they didn't make a firmware update for that service. If 20 years ago, you told people that their TV or cable-box needed a firmware update every time a new channel came-out, they would be attacking the telecom companies with pitchforks. Yet that is happening today and people accept it.

The USA has a lot of old systems than have to be looked after.
The Undead. (03.01.99)
https://www.wired.com/1999/03/...

The point is to dramatically reduce the sonic-boom effect with better, modern designs.

Are you fucking kiding me. i know you know how to google. but here are just a few.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-event...

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...\

https://arstechnica.com/securi...

I remember when people on slashdot knew how not to be fucking morons and look for information if they wanted to learn something. people like you make me sick.

I'm all for distributed systems, but for many big companies, mainframes still make a lot of economic sense:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/...
"While some believe that smaller distributed servers provide the agility needed in today's fast-moving cognitive era, the IBM mainframe is the preferred solution for many of the world's most competitive businesses, including:
92 of the top 100 banks worldwide
70%+ of the world's largest retailers
23 of the world's 25 largest airlines"

And see also, on a smaller scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"IBM designed IBM i as a "turnkey" operating system, requiring little or no on-site attention from IT staff during normal operation. For example, IBM i has a built-in DB2 database which does not require separate installation. Disks are multiply redundant, and can be replaced on line without interrupting work. Hardware and software maintenance tasks are integrated. System administration has been wizard-driven for years, even before that term was defined. This automatic self-care policy goes so far as to automatically schedule all common system maintenance, detect many failures and even order spare parts and service automatically. Organizations using i sometimes have sticker shock when confronting the cost of system maintenance on other systems.[1]"

In general:
"Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes?"
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/...
"Business is more mobile than ever. Yet however lightweight those mobile devices feel in your pocket, they can still make good use of a big, powerful machine chugging away in a back room, not going anywhere."

Mainframes are also more than just hardware. Mainframes are in a sense a culture of 100% uptime and reliability.

That said, distributed computing continues to improve... And distributed computing culture continues to improve...

As to the original article, IBM is still shooting itself in the foot with this move away from supporting remote work... What IBM needs to be creative is not colocation but "slack" in the Tom DeMarco sense:
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
"Why is it that today's superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth."

That was the great thing about IBM Research when I worked there around 2000 -- a bit of slack to be creative and good work/life balance. But, IBMers even then said the rest of IBM was not like Research...

This seems like a remake of an earlier-discussed movie, where:

1. Towns sabotage ISPs' efforts to come in.
2. Towns then claim "market failure" and attempt their own "municipal broadband" (because the earlier-touted municipal WiFi was such a roaring success).
3. Existing and new state laws against governments undertaking commercial enterprises are used to suppress those efforts.
4. Slashdot denounces the evil and corrupt state officials — RethugliKKKan$ all of them, naturally — interfering in the towns' affairs.

I wonder, if this current remake will have a different the ending — AirBNB is generally liked here, unlike the ISPs...

Well, in the past it was cash. And back then it was aid agencies and human rights agencies he was extorting.

Or maybe he's wanting them to sign some sort of absurd contract like the insane NDAs he used to make Wikileaks members sign.

It could put CNN out of business

You mean Breitbart who literally, in the truest sense of the word, has put up false and fake information (it can't be called news). Even Bannon has called them out for posting fake information.

It's why companies have ditched advertising on the fake site.

But let me guess, "alternative facts"? Or is it a camera in a microwave?

Given that AI can catch 99.9% of spam

wrong metric. You can hit it by saying "it's spam" 99.9% of the time without looking at the message. You'll get a lot of false positives, but you'll hit the metric.

Could be ex and former staff selling mi/gov grade product to their cult, faith, embassy, other parts of the US gov, the private sector.
Once the devices got handed out to NATO nations, the different EU nation police forces all their ex and former staff can sell the US product to the private sector.
The US is now been flooded with its own products as once very secret tech finds its way into every embassy and the private sector.
Other nations front companies, US dual citizens helping their real nations.
The UK had the same issues. Some ore gov, mil other are just random efforts by different groups.
What the UK did can often show what could be in the USA.
Fake Mobile Phone Towers Operating In The UK (09 June 2015)
http://news.sky.com/story/fake...
UK Cops Using Fake Mobile Phone Tower to Intercept Calls, Shut Off Phones (10.31.11)
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/...
Fake mobile phone towers discovered in London: Stingrays come to the UK (6/11/2015)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

The other US side would be to track US police, city workers to ensure they did not have a task force on any emerging private sector products or services.
Once a map of every phone in a wide city area was tracked, tracking undercover officials would be easy given a lack of digital counter surveillance training.
New "staff" or users reporting back into a government building every few days or weeks for a set time would be very easy to map.
Another aspect would be to counter any journalist trying undercover work. Their origin and return to their place of work would be detected if they ever had two working phones with them. Their undercover story phone and their journalist phone.
Other tracking could counter bloggers and web 2.0 attempts by citizen journalism to enter political parties or party political fund raising.
They might make an error with two phones in use. One they used for undercover work in the past, one they use for their blog.
Lack of cash could see device reuse and very easy tracking.
Also the meeting of any gov worker, federal official, contractor, mil, political staff with any journalist would be tracked by the mil, gov, party, contractor. A vast database of journalist. A political and private sector version of the NSA's FIRSTFRUIT.
The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports (May 17 2016)
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
“.. over 5,000 insecurity-related records” ranging from “espionage damage assessments” to “liaison exchanges.”
Someone is not tracking the fake networks for some reason. Political over, mil, police or gov use? Gov workers detect the fake cell products and nothing is done?

Given that AI can catch 99.9% of spam, the spam problem has largely been solved.

DMARC isn't even an anti-spam protocol, it's simply a protocol that prevents E-mail addresses from getting forged. But given the huge number of E-mail providers out there, spammers don't need to bother forging the source of E-mails. In addition, spammers can always corrupt and subvert domain registrars. So, DMARC is likely to be of negligible effectiveness compared to existing AI techniques.

DMARC and similar systems would mainly serve to eliminate privacy and threaten free speech by making every piece of E-mail traceable to its real-world sender. That's the real reason why these crooks are trying to push this technology on us even though we don't need it. Don't let them fool you. Tell them to get lost and shove their 1984-fantasies where the sun don't shine.