"8:54 AM PDT We'd like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it's difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We're starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them. "
As much as I hate to admit that the crazies are right, these things really are Stalin's wet dream: mobile devices are a wonderland of surveillance hardware. It's past time to push back on this, hard. That means two things:
1) free and open-source operating systems and 2) a public policy framework that makes this kind of data logging so terrifying and risky for companies that they really would prefer you to have control over your phone.
One lever of influence gone: European courts*. What other levers exist to pressure ISPs into filtering?
Since the courts (or, more specifically, the threat of lengthy legal hassle) can no longer be used as a lever on ISPs to “voluntarily” filter content, what non-legal levers of influence will pro-filtering actors use on the ISPs? These aren't illegal levers, just ones which don't require the courts as bully. The separation of business interests (content creators and pipe-providers, for instance) suddenly becomes very important.
*Assuming the AG's opinion becomes a ruling, which is likely. Read the opinion -- pretty strong stuff.
I can video commute to nearly any major city in a few seconds. Voice gets me even farther. The age of 'road warrior' business travel is closing, with high fuel prices and much, much better telepresense on the horizon. Admittedly the options today kind of suck, even the really groundbreaking ones like Skype. But that growth curve is just starting -- I'm going to have a large screen, high band telepresence rig in my home office before I hit retirement.
If you want to increase my personal travel speed, get some fiber piped to my house.
> I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point
The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant? I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.
Given that we run an economy that burns through billions of barrels of petrol a year, finding a use for the stuff that doesn't involve setting the shit on fire for heat seems like a pretty big step forward. And given that the petrol economy is basicly a sunk cost in terms of economic impact, using something that is cheap and available to lower power costs sounds pretty sustainable to me.
They set out to lower power use. They did that, using a material that is far less impactful than the metals in the servers. Good job.
Other than pinging the radio once in a while (which it could do while charging, if you wanted to be nice about it), putting ads on the e-ink screens do not draw extra power. The Kindle already flashes the screen once to show a "screen saver" image.
At a hardware level, the e-ink screen is begging for this kind of treatment. When powered off, it's basically a coffee-table billboard waiting to happen, married to all the radios and spyware you need to profile the house its sitting in and deliver the ads.
I'm totally grossed out by this. For now it's opt in, but it won't be in the future. Expect this to show up on all kinds of crap as e-ink screen prices drop. Lunch boxes, refrigerators, etc.
Just another reason the $75 Kobo is the best e-reader on the market (I've owned a Nook, Kindle and Kobo).
> But security must also involve trust, and, to date, there is no total transparency about Truecrypt's developers.
Wow, the developers who created regime-threatening encryption software registered their domain at a fake address. The makers of a powerful privacy tool seem to like privacy? Scandal!
Code review or STFU. I don't see what else could matter than what's in the source.
This is a nice thing for everyone to be doing, but it's still a trust relationship with no transparency. Bad actors won't respect my wishes. That's the definition of a bad actor.
The solution has to be on client side. Otherwise it's just more trust, which is what we've been using all along. I'd much rather trust the Ghostery extension to just block the tracker scripts to begin with.
Video made by the US government is by rule and tradition (not law, if I recall correctly) in the public domain. The video was shot by the local Republican Party, which is not the government, much as they may like blurring the lines when it serves their interests.
The problem is the devices. In the case of EXIF data, no phone should ever embed location data into an image without you knowledgeably opting in to that level of sharing. You shouldn't have to be trained in image metadata to use a phone. It's not your job to turn it off. It's the phone designer's job.
Or, since that has clearly failed, it's the role of public policy to set clear, stable boundaries on what hardware and software makers can and can't do with end user's information. The end user will never be aware of those rules, but Apple and co will have to respect them.
If this is a joke, it is begging for a libel suit. I mean, financial damages much? And it's not very funny. I'm waiting for confirmation, but it doesn't look good.
A boycott is incredibly inadequate. The computers have already sold. The market didn't have this information at time of sale. And it doesn't have this information about any other product.
The answer is criminal charges for wiretapping, amplified by the number of units shipped. Throw the CEO and their corporate council in jail, and I suspect it won't happen again.
The FCC is making much fuss and noise about "digital inclusion" and whatnot, but no one at any level is willing to talk about the fact that most of the country has two or less options in broadband. During the summer of love (2002, IIRC), the big telecoms took advantage of deregulation to divide up the broadband market by city, and it's been higher prices, lower caps and no new pipe in ten yearsever since. Verizon FiOS is dead. Wireless is consolidating. It's permanent monopoly time, and the FCC just keeps talking about broadband maps and Internet literacy training (?!) as the solution.
Here's a better answer: bring back common carrier rules for backbone service rates, and let the local ISPs (remember those?) come back to life. Pass network neutrality. Ban the ownership of both content services and pipes. Lay some city-owned dark fiber and let the private sector bid to operate it. It ain't rocket science, but it will require standing up to Comcast and AT&T.
More importantly, a big chunk of those RIAA revenue came through Amazon. They are the #2 music retailer after Walmart. They can slow down the money pipe, and quickly, for the label that gets in front of this bus. Worst case, they go scorched earth and quit selling that label's albums for a week. Every artist on the label's roster will freak. Investors will panic. Blood in the streets.
Amazon owns those guys. And that's while this will last. A smaller site could never get away with it. In the end, public policy and rule of law is once again a leaf on the wind when corporate interests clash. The loser is market competition, and eventually, all of us.
> bribery is pretty much how business is done in certain places.
At some firms, yes. At other firms, no. See, once a firm gets a name for being a paying firm, they are pretty much locked into that mode of operation. However, if a firm puts everyone on notice that they do not pay, ever, then pretty soon people stop asking. Business still gets done. Permits still get acquired. And along the way, institutions become a little more just.
So, the question for places like the SEC is, how do we reward the firms that do not pay and encourage more places to join them? Fines like this are a part of that.
Slashdot Mirror
"See, it only breaks when you use it" is not very reassuring.
Amazon's comments on the outage do not mention weather as a cause: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
"8:54 AM PDT We'd like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it's difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We're starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them. "
As much as I hate to admit that the crazies are right, these things really are Stalin's wet dream: mobile devices are a wonderland of surveillance hardware. It's past time to push back on this, hard. That means two things:
1) free and open-source operating systems and
2) a public policy framework that makes this kind of data logging so terrifying and risky for companies that they really would prefer you to have control over your phone.
Here's the best shot I've seen at the software side of this:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/for-paranoid-androids-guardian-project-supplies-smartphone-security.ars
One lever of influence gone: European courts*. What other levers exist to pressure ISPs into filtering?
Since the courts (or, more specifically, the threat of lengthy legal hassle) can no longer be used as a lever on ISPs to “voluntarily” filter content, what non-legal levers of influence will pro-filtering actors use on the ISPs? These aren't illegal levers, just ones which don't require the courts as bully. The separation of business interests (content creators and pipe-providers, for instance) suddenly becomes very important.
*Assuming the AG's opinion becomes a ruling, which is likely. Read the opinion -- pretty strong stuff.
I can video commute to nearly any major city in a few seconds. Voice gets me even farther. The age of 'road warrior' business travel is closing, with high fuel prices and much, much better telepresense on the horizon. Admittedly the options today kind of suck, even the really groundbreaking ones like Skype. But that growth curve is just starting -- I'm going to have a large screen, high band telepresence rig in my home office before I hit retirement.
If you want to increase my personal travel speed, get some fiber piped to my house.
> I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point
The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant? I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.
Given that we run an economy that burns through billions of barrels of petrol a year, finding a use for the stuff that doesn't involve setting the shit on fire for heat seems like a pretty big step forward. And given that the petrol economy is basicly a sunk cost in terms of economic impact, using something that is cheap and available to lower power costs sounds pretty sustainable to me.
They set out to lower power use. They did that, using a material that is far less impactful than the metals in the servers. Good job.
> Its more like Kindle with coupons!
KroupOn!
Other than pinging the radio once in a while (which it could do while charging, if you wanted to be nice about it), putting ads on the e-ink screens do not draw extra power. The Kindle already flashes the screen once to show a "screen saver" image.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Brand-NEW-KOBO-eReader-Black-Wifi-100-Free-Books-/330541520167?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4cf5cf5527
ebay. People are clearing out Borders locations and/or cashing in soon-to-be-void gift cards, then flipping the Kobo for a loss.
At a hardware level, the e-ink screen is begging for this kind of treatment. When powered off, it's basically a coffee-table billboard waiting to happen, married to all the radios and spyware you need to profile the house its sitting in and deliver the ads.
I'm totally grossed out by this. For now it's opt in, but it won't be in the future. Expect this to show up on all kinds of crap as e-ink screen prices drop. Lunch boxes, refrigerators, etc.
Just another reason the $75 Kobo is the best e-reader on the market (I've owned a Nook, Kindle and Kobo).
> But security must also involve trust, and, to date, there is no total transparency about Truecrypt's developers.
Wow, the developers who created regime-threatening encryption software registered their domain at a fake address. The makers of a powerful privacy tool seem to like privacy? Scandal!
Code review or STFU. I don't see what else could matter than what's in the source.
But I've got baaaaaaaadges...
This is a nice thing for everyone to be doing, but it's still a trust relationship with no transparency. Bad actors won't respect my wishes. That's the definition of a bad actor.
The solution has to be on client side. Otherwise it's just more trust, which is what we've been using all along. I'd much rather trust the Ghostery extension to just block the tracker scripts to begin with.
Video made by the US government is by rule and tradition (not law, if I recall correctly) in the public domain. The video was shot by the local Republican Party, which is not the government, much as they may like blurring the lines when it serves their interests.
The problem is the devices. In the case of EXIF data, no phone should ever embed location data into an image without you knowledgeably opting in to that level of sharing. You shouldn't have to be trained in image metadata to use a phone. It's not your job to turn it off. It's the phone designer's job.
Or, since that has clearly failed, it's the role of public policy to set clear, stable boundaries on what hardware and software makers can and can't do with end user's information. The end user will never be aware of those rules, but Apple and co will have to respect them.
If this is a joke, it is begging for a libel suit. I mean, financial damages much? And it's not very funny. I'm waiting for confirmation, but it doesn't look good.
If only this could get posted to a forum full of thousands of angry nerds. Oh wait! Slashdot: get on this, please.
What's Belkin's deal?
A boycott is incredibly inadequate. The computers have already sold. The market didn't have this information at time of sale. And it doesn't have this information about any other product.
The answer is criminal charges for wiretapping, amplified by the number of units shipped. Throw the CEO and their corporate council in jail, and I suspect it won't happen again.
The FCC is making much fuss and noise about "digital inclusion" and whatnot, but no one at any level is willing to talk about the fact that most of the country has two or less options in broadband. During the summer of love (2002, IIRC), the big telecoms took advantage of deregulation to divide up the broadband market by city, and it's been higher prices, lower caps and no new pipe in ten yearsever since. Verizon FiOS is dead. Wireless is consolidating. It's permanent monopoly time, and the FCC just keeps talking about broadband maps and Internet literacy training (?!) as the solution.
Here's a better answer: bring back common carrier rules for backbone service rates, and let the local ISPs (remember those?) come back to life. Pass network neutrality. Ban the ownership of both content services and pipes. Lay some city-owned dark fiber and let the private sector bid to operate it. It ain't rocket science, but it will require standing up to Comcast and AT&T.
More importantly, a big chunk of those RIAA revenue came through Amazon. They are the #2 music retailer after Walmart. They can slow down the money pipe, and quickly, for the label that gets in front of this bus. Worst case, they go scorched earth and quit selling that label's albums for a week. Every artist on the label's roster will freak. Investors will panic. Blood in the streets.
Amazon owns those guys. And that's while this will last. A smaller site could never get away with it. In the end, public policy and rule of law is once again a leaf on the wind when corporate interests clash. The loser is market competition, and eventually, all of us.
> bribery is pretty much how business is done in certain places.
At some firms, yes. At other firms, no. See, once a firm gets a name for being a paying firm, they are pretty much locked into that mode of operation. However, if a firm puts everyone on notice that they do not pay, ever, then pretty soon people stop asking. Business still gets done. Permits still get acquired. And along the way, institutions become a little more just.
So, the question for places like the SEC is, how do we reward the firms that do not pay and encourage more places to join them? Fines like this are a part of that.
> I wonder why? Maybe even the act of looking something up might be considered dangerous.
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Chinese_protests
Or this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jasmine_Revolution_in_China_-_Beijing_11_02_20_crowd_2.jpg