but no one is holding a gun to anyone's head and telling them to use facebook "or else."
I am finding it increasingly hard to buy this argument. Now that I see billboards telling me not to visit myproduct.com, but facebook.com/myproduct. Bars and cafes offering discounts if I like them on Facebook. Invites to parties coming exclusively through Facebook, no longer by email. This is just the beginning. We are quickly moving into a world where you need to be on Facebook to stay in touch (you are a social outcast) and to access information (businesses prefer to be on Facebook than the open web).
Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head, but then again nobody ever holds guns to peoples heads any more. There are plenty of other ways to effectively force people to use a product.
Note that Google never had this power. Nobody was ever forced to use a Google product: we just did because they were useful. Every Google product has viable competitors, they just aren't as good. Don't want to use Google search? Use Bing or Yahoo. Don't want to use Gmail? Use Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Unlike Facebook, Gmail is compatible with other email providers. So I can function perfectly well in society without Google (I just choose to use them). But the same cannot be said about Facebook.
the Internet is a privilege not a right (and should remain as such)
That line of thinking is also quickly dying out. These days, I am expected to do my banking and my taxes on the Internet. I search for houses online. I apply for jobs online. If I don't have email, I can't function in nearly any job. I sure as hell wouldn't want that "privilege" taken away from me. You might have said in the 1900s that electricity was a privilege, not a right, yet these days you complain if the power goes out for an hour, and see third-world countries with villages that "don't even have basic electricity." As offline services like analog telephone get switched off, you'll wish the Internet was a basic right and not a "privilege".
Weird. Yeah I got the crazy partitions too which I have since erased (the 1 for the "who knows what" is, I believe, a shitty stripped down version of Windows XP designed to boot fast and play DVDs; I never used it).
But to their credit, I have since wiped the machine completely (in fact I purchased a new hard drive) and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP from the CD that came with the laptop.
So the law will essentially make a distinction between compressed and uncompressed files?
In other words (to simplify things massively), if I upload my own MP3 file and you upload your own identical MP3 file, and Amazon stores them on a server as two distinct files, that's OK.
But if Amazon applies gzip compression to their server, it will notice that the two files are identical and store the data only once. Now that's illegal because Amazon is serving two people with a single copy of the file.
Wikipedia often references pay-for material that isn't on the web. It's just as valid, but harder to verify (so it's preferable if there is free material on the web).
Personally, I think this is a problem with the "old model" of academia, not Wikipedia itself. Wikipedia thrives on free information (that's the whole point -- to make information free in a verifiable manner). Having information that is free, but only verifiable by paying sort of breaks that model. Academia needs to embrace the new model of the web rather than putting everything behind a paywall.
Note that the authors themselves do not receive any money for publishing work, so making it free won't actually hurt their business. The only businesses it would hurt are the publishers, that used to offer a valuable service (accept papers, clean them up, and print them on trees and distribute them) but which now require authors to format the paper themselves, and do little more than collect papers, send them to other academics for peer review (for free) -- something a simple PHP script could accomplish -- and then upload them behind a paywall. That business model can surely be dispensed with in this century.
Yes I'd like to see something a bit more scientific than "I bought two, and after setting it up they both had this program." Firstly, a scientific approach would take a byte-for-byte image of the hard drive before booting the machine even one time. That means you can investigate exactly the state of the machine as it arrived. Who knows? Maybe he was unlucky and using a dodgy network and someone on his network was injecting the software onto his machine some time after bootup?
Secondly, I'd like to see a packet capture to see if this software is really sending it out, and if so, how much? Obviously it's still bad even if it wasn't sending it out, but that would give some idea as to the severity of the crime.
Dell is pretty good. I got mine in 2008 as well with installation media. I would hope they still do that. I don't think many other vendors include it.
Honestly, we are in such a huge scam. When buying a computer, we are forced to pay Microsoft for an operating system we may not want (good luck purchasing a blank PC*), and even after having purchased it, we often don't get the actual CD so we just paid for a one-time OS that needs to be re-purchased to install a "clean" copy.
Of course, Windows is included in the price of the PC, so most people don't even realise they've paid for it.
*Yes, you can buy PC parts and build it yourself, but it's pretty hard to do with a laptop.
you CANT RUN A BUSINESS BASED ON LINUX, UNLESS IT'S SOME KIND OF WEB SERVICE THING
"People usually don't" and "you can't" are very different things. You don't see Linux in industry for a variety of reasons. One is that, obviously, Microsoft Windows is extremely popular. Two, lots and lots of people know how to deal with Windows and fix problems. Three, many universities teach pure Microsoft. Four, Microsoft provides incentives for businesses to use their software.
Now you can argue that Windows is "better" than Linux or the other way around, but I maintain that the above four reasons are the clear reasons why Microsoft is everywhere, and it has nothing to do with which is better. "I use it because its popular" is a circular argument which means you aren't necessarily using the best tools, and nothing can ever beat the incumbent. It is a reasonably dumb reason to use anything.
Surely even if you have your bookmarks sorted by category, it is generally easier to type a few letters of one and hit enter than search through your categorised bookmarks folders?
Sorry, what functionality was removed in the old location bar that isn't in awesome bar? Seriously, I am trying to remember but I don't remember anything going missing.
Not really. That's why we have a license. When I choose to apply GPL to my code, I am not licensing my code under "anything the FSF ever says on the matter in the future", I am applying the license as it is worded. Otherwise, I could write a license which says "You may not use this work commercially," get a bunch of people to apply that license to their works, and then a few years later clarify "Oh, when I said commercially, I meant selling it for over $1000. Anything under that is fine." Which would probably not go down too well with the people who used my license.
In fact, there is (in some sense) a way to license your code in such a way that you defer to the FSF's future clarifications: use the "or any later version" clause. If you use that clause, you are stating that you trust any future clarifications made by the FSF to apply to your work. Linus specifically did not use this clause because he doesn't trust the philosophy of the FSF, only the specific wording of the GPLv2.
Just pointing that out. I do agree with the FSF here.
I was testing out my temporal router yesterday. I decided at 2:05 that at 2:15 I would send a message to myself ten minutes in the past. A message instantly arrived in my inbox. "Hi Matt, just testing the temporal email system." Brilliant! It worked.
Now, to send it back to myself. I clicked the "forward" button -- no need to re-type the message -- and typed into the "To" field "xxxx@yyyy.com:2011-03-17_2:05:00". Then, I came up with a crazy plan. I would break my promise to myself. When the clock ticked over to 2:15, I would just sit there, smugly, and not do anything. Then we'd see who was really in control of their own destiny. I waited nine harrowing minutes. As the clock ticked down, I wondered about the harrowing consequences of not sending the message. Maybe I would be responsible for destroying the universe? At the last second, I decided it wasn't worth pissing off the Powers that Be, and clicked Send. But it was still my choice, I swear!
If anybody else managed to do the same experiment but avoid sending the mail back to themselves, let me know. Nobody? I bet you all wussed out too (or never received the message in the first place).
That wouldn't work for the Google example -- the content-type of the <img> is an image type. Similarly, if the site was actually serving JavaScript only to logged-in users, you could request one of those resources in the <script> tag.
I think you are focussing on the wrong word: "open" rather than "standard".
You say that VP8 is not an "open standard" because it's not "open".
I say that VP8 is not an "open standard" because it's not a "standard".
In other words, VP8 is by any definition "open". (Sure a lot of people are saying it was developed behind closed doors. That doesn't have any bearing on what it is now.) The spec is freely available. It can be implemented and distributed for free. The source code is available, and it can be incorporated into any product for free. This is an open technology by any means.
Is it a standard? No. Not yet. No standards board has ratified it, neither is it a "de facto" standard. So allow me to correct your statement by moving the quotes:
Until Google submits VP8 to ISO or some other standards body, it's not an open "standard", it's an open "Google says it's cool so I guess that's what we should do" technology.
It's not about whether the spec is available (for a fee or not). It's about what you are allowed to do with the spec and have it.
Everybody here is talking about C++ also being an ISO standard. The difference is, although you have to pay for the C++ standard, once you have it, you are free to implement it, and distribute your compiler. The product created with the standard is unencumbered, and that's what makes the standard open (even if the actual text that makes up the document is copyrighted and not available for distribution). To put it another way, I could read the source to a C++ compiler and write my own spec, and nobody could sue me for it (it's my own copyrighted description of how the technology works). But with H.264, I can't distribute an implementation of the spec without being sued.
And the same could be said about the C++ and ODF standards yet those are called "open" standards by the same people talking about how H.264 is "closed".
How are C++ and ODF similar to H.264? I assume you are saying they are all three of them ISO standards. Therefore, if you implement C++ or ODF you are a hypocrite if you oppose H.264.
The difference being that H.264 is, as well as being an ISO standard, patented. C++ and ODF are, to my knowledge, not, and can be freely implemented in open source.
Therefore your claim is about as sensible as saying "Terrorists drive cars. School teachers drive cars too, so if you think our society should tolerate school teachers, then you should not have a problem with terrorists."
Sure, they are GPL, but the GP said "given the patent policies of many GNU/Linux distributors". He wasn't referring to licenses. Patents. Patent-encumbered GPL code is not considered "free software" and can't be included in many distros, including Debian and (with key exceptions) Ubuntu.
The point of TFA was that having browsers delegate to the OS is actually bad for web standards, because it means all the browsers will implement a dozen different codecs, and then web site authors will have dozens to choose from, and they will all choose different ones. Then we'll need to install *all* of them in order to browse the full web. That leads to lack of standardisation. If there is two or (preferably) one codec incorporated into all browsers, that gives us a de facto standard.
Also think about what you are saying: "It's frustrating that only the OS-provided solutions (Safari and IE) are doing this right by handing it off to the OS." How can a non-OS-specific browser hand off video decoding to the OS? This would immediately render it non-portable.
Sure, Firefox could delegate to the Windows video decoder on Windows, the Mac video decoder on Mac, the Gstreamer framework on Linux, etc. But it's still not portable, it merely runs on three platforms. How can you port Firefox Mobile to the next device?
Slashdot Mirror
Or for Hassan, if it turns out to be false.
Oh wait... (Slashdot lost my above comment before I could post it ... good thing, as I found this story in the meantime.)
I am finding it increasingly hard to buy this argument. Now that I see billboards telling me not to visit myproduct.com, but facebook.com/myproduct. Bars and cafes offering discounts if I like them on Facebook. Invites to parties coming exclusively through Facebook, no longer by email. This is just the beginning. We are quickly moving into a world where you need to be on Facebook to stay in touch (you are a social outcast) and to access information (businesses prefer to be on Facebook than the open web).
Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head, but then again nobody ever holds guns to peoples heads any more. There are plenty of other ways to effectively force people to use a product.
Note that Google never had this power. Nobody was ever forced to use a Google product: we just did because they were useful. Every Google product has viable competitors, they just aren't as good. Don't want to use Google search? Use Bing or Yahoo. Don't want to use Gmail? Use Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Unlike Facebook, Gmail is compatible with other email providers. So I can function perfectly well in society without Google (I just choose to use them). But the same cannot be said about Facebook.
That line of thinking is also quickly dying out. These days, I am expected to do my banking and my taxes on the Internet. I search for houses online. I apply for jobs online. If I don't have email, I can't function in nearly any job. I sure as hell wouldn't want that "privilege" taken away from me. You might have said in the 1900s that electricity was a privilege, not a right, yet these days you complain if the power goes out for an hour, and see third-world countries with villages that "don't even have basic electricity." As offline services like analog telephone get switched off, you'll wish the Internet was a basic right and not a "privilege".
Weird. Yeah I got the crazy partitions too which I have since erased (the 1 for the "who knows what" is, I believe, a shitty stripped down version of Windows XP designed to boot fast and play DVDs; I never used it).
But to their credit, I have since wiped the machine completely (in fact I purchased a new hard drive) and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP from the CD that came with the laptop.
I am in Australia. Does this make a difference?
So the law will essentially make a distinction between compressed and uncompressed files?
In other words (to simplify things massively), if I upload my own MP3 file and you upload your own identical MP3 file, and Amazon stores them on a server as two distinct files, that's OK.
But if Amazon applies gzip compression to their server, it will notice that the two files are identical and store the data only once. Now that's illegal because Amazon is serving two people with a single copy of the file.
Your old laws do not work in this universe.
Wikipedia often references pay-for material that isn't on the web. It's just as valid, but harder to verify (so it's preferable if there is free material on the web).
Personally, I think this is a problem with the "old model" of academia, not Wikipedia itself. Wikipedia thrives on free information (that's the whole point -- to make information free in a verifiable manner). Having information that is free, but only verifiable by paying sort of breaks that model. Academia needs to embrace the new model of the web rather than putting everything behind a paywall.
Note that the authors themselves do not receive any money for publishing work, so making it free won't actually hurt their business. The only businesses it would hurt are the publishers, that used to offer a valuable service (accept papers, clean them up, and print them on trees and distribute them) but which now require authors to format the paper themselves, and do little more than collect papers, send them to other academics for peer review (for free) -- something a simple PHP script could accomplish -- and then upload them behind a paywall. That business model can surely be dispensed with in this century.
Yes I'd like to see something a bit more scientific than "I bought two, and after setting it up they both had this program." Firstly, a scientific approach would take a byte-for-byte image of the hard drive before booting the machine even one time. That means you can investigate exactly the state of the machine as it arrived. Who knows? Maybe he was unlucky and using a dodgy network and someone on his network was injecting the software onto his machine some time after bootup?
Secondly, I'd like to see a packet capture to see if this software is really sending it out, and if so, how much? Obviously it's still bad even if it wasn't sending it out, but that would give some idea as to the severity of the crime.
Dell is pretty good. I got mine in 2008 as well with installation media. I would hope they still do that. I don't think many other vendors include it.
Honestly, we are in such a huge scam. When buying a computer, we are forced to pay Microsoft for an operating system we may not want (good luck purchasing a blank PC*), and even after having purchased it, we often don't get the actual CD so we just paid for a one-time OS that needs to be re-purchased to install a "clean" copy.
Of course, Windows is included in the price of the PC, so most people don't even realise they've paid for it.
*Yes, you can buy PC parts and build it yourself, but it's pretty hard to do with a laptop.
"People usually don't" and "you can't" are very different things. You don't see Linux in industry for a variety of reasons. One is that, obviously, Microsoft Windows is extremely popular. Two, lots and lots of people know how to deal with Windows and fix problems. Three, many universities teach pure Microsoft. Four, Microsoft provides incentives for businesses to use their software.
Now you can argue that Windows is "better" than Linux or the other way around, but I maintain that the above four reasons are the clear reasons why Microsoft is everywhere, and it has nothing to do with which is better. "I use it because its popular" is a circular argument which means you aren't necessarily using the best tools, and nothing can ever beat the incumbent. It is a reasonably dumb reason to use anything.
Very interesting technology. But the dresses are all black and triangulated. Make yourself look like a character in a late-90s videogame!
No, almost the opposite. She's creating a 3D polygonal model from a 2D drawing. Watch the video. (WTFV?)
Surely even if you have your bookmarks sorted by category, it is generally easier to type a few letters of one and hit enter than search through your categorised bookmarks folders?
Sorry, what functionality was removed in the old location bar that isn't in awesome bar? Seriously, I am trying to remember but I don't remember anything going missing.
True. I agree with that.
Humble Indie Bundle? :D
Not really. That's why we have a license. When I choose to apply GPL to my code, I am not licensing my code under "anything the FSF ever says on the matter in the future", I am applying the license as it is worded. Otherwise, I could write a license which says "You may not use this work commercially," get a bunch of people to apply that license to their works, and then a few years later clarify "Oh, when I said commercially, I meant selling it for over $1000. Anything under that is fine." Which would probably not go down too well with the people who used my license.
In fact, there is (in some sense) a way to license your code in such a way that you defer to the FSF's future clarifications: use the "or any later version" clause. If you use that clause, you are stating that you trust any future clarifications made by the FSF to apply to your work. Linus specifically did not use this clause because he doesn't trust the philosophy of the FSF, only the specific wording of the GPLv2.
Just pointing that out. I do agree with the FSF here.
I was testing out my temporal router yesterday. I decided at 2:05 that at 2:15 I would send a message to myself ten minutes in the past. A message instantly arrived in my inbox. "Hi Matt, just testing the temporal email system." Brilliant! It worked.
Now, to send it back to myself. I clicked the "forward" button -- no need to re-type the message -- and typed into the "To" field "xxxx@yyyy.com:2011-03-17_2:05:00". Then, I came up with a crazy plan. I would break my promise to myself. When the clock ticked over to 2:15, I would just sit there, smugly, and not do anything. Then we'd see who was really in control of their own destiny. I waited nine harrowing minutes. As the clock ticked down, I wondered about the harrowing consequences of not sending the message. Maybe I would be responsible for destroying the universe? At the last second, I decided it wasn't worth pissing off the Powers that Be, and clicked Send. But it was still my choice, I swear!
If anybody else managed to do the same experiment but avoid sending the mail back to themselves, let me know. Nobody? I bet you all wussed out too (or never received the message in the first place).
No -- the Facebook and Twitter ones work like that. The Gmail exploit, in TFA, is the following code:
<img style="display:none;" />
onload="logged_in_to_gmail()"
onerror="not_logged_in_to_gmail()"
src="https://mail.google.com/mail/photos/static/ <snip to avoid Slashdot filter >"
So it's an image loading an image, just from a different domain.
That wouldn't work for the Google example -- the content-type of the <img> is an image type. Similarly, if the site was actually serving JavaScript only to logged-in users, you could request one of those resources in the <script> tag.
I think you are focussing on the wrong word: "open" rather than "standard".
You say that VP8 is not an "open standard" because it's not "open".
I say that VP8 is not an "open standard" because it's not a "standard".
In other words, VP8 is by any definition "open". (Sure a lot of people are saying it was developed behind closed doors. That doesn't have any bearing on what it is now.) The spec is freely available. It can be implemented and distributed for free. The source code is available, and it can be incorporated into any product for free. This is an open technology by any means.
Is it a standard? No. Not yet. No standards board has ratified it, neither is it a "de facto" standard. So allow me to correct your statement by moving the quotes:
It's not about whether the spec is available (for a fee or not). It's about what you are allowed to do with the spec and have it.
Everybody here is talking about C++ also being an ISO standard. The difference is, although you have to pay for the C++ standard, once you have it, you are free to implement it, and distribute your compiler. The product created with the standard is unencumbered, and that's what makes the standard open (even if the actual text that makes up the document is copyrighted and not available for distribution). To put it another way, I could read the source to a C++ compiler and write my own spec, and nobody could sue me for it (it's my own copyrighted description of how the technology works). But with H.264, I can't distribute an implementation of the spec without being sued.
How are C++ and ODF similar to H.264? I assume you are saying they are all three of them ISO standards. Therefore, if you implement C++ or ODF you are a hypocrite if you oppose H.264.
The difference being that H.264 is, as well as being an ISO standard, patented. C++ and ODF are, to my knowledge, not, and can be freely implemented in open source.
Therefore your claim is about as sensible as saying "Terrorists drive cars. School teachers drive cars too, so if you think our society should tolerate school teachers, then you should not have a problem with terrorists."
Exactly. That's why I tolerate the need to use Flash (Closed Source) to play videos, but not the H.264 requirement (Closed Standard*).
*Subject to your definition of open/closed standard. I would argue that a standard you need to pay to implement is closed.
Sure, they are GPL, but the GP said "given the patent policies of many GNU/Linux distributors". He wasn't referring to licenses. Patents. Patent-encumbered GPL code is not considered "free software" and can't be included in many distros, including Debian and (with key exceptions) Ubuntu.
The version of FFmpeg included with Debian/Ubuntu, for example, has been specifically modified to remove H.264 support.
The point of TFA was that having browsers delegate to the OS is actually bad for web standards, because it means all the browsers will implement a dozen different codecs, and then web site authors will have dozens to choose from, and they will all choose different ones. Then we'll need to install *all* of them in order to browse the full web. That leads to lack of standardisation. If there is two or (preferably) one codec incorporated into all browsers, that gives us a de facto standard.
Also think about what you are saying: "It's frustrating that only the OS-provided solutions (Safari and IE) are doing this right by handing it off to the OS." How can a non-OS-specific browser hand off video decoding to the OS? This would immediately render it non-portable.
Sure, Firefox could delegate to the Windows video decoder on Windows, the Mac video decoder on Mac, the Gstreamer framework on Linux, etc. But it's still not portable, it merely runs on three platforms. How can you port Firefox Mobile to the next device?
Quiet! You might give them ideas.