It's the difference between a company advertising to you when you call them (or trying to upsell, etc) and the phone company listening into your calls and breaking in when they have something to sell you. You're dealing with the company on the other side (google, in this case) as an equal. Your ISP holds a lot of power over you, and abusing it's wrong.
Unless for some reason they use the same engines, what's the problem with this practice? Opera's security isn't Firefox's responsibility. The fact that they notified opera at all went above and beyond what they needed to do, and asking firefox to be less open with their community is asking them to risk their image for the sake of opera and its users. Unless I'm missing something here, Firefox was being polite and Opera's throwing a world class hissy fit.
I don't see it as an attack. It sounds like Opera didn't respond to Mozilla's notification at all. In addition, it's not Mozilla's obligation to make sure that Opera's secure, and it is their obligation to be open with the community to the extent that they can be while still being secure. Sometimes waiting to disclose can bite you in the end like it did with php a few months back. Add to that the bullshit excuse that you can't evaluate a security risk in one day and I think that Opera's just lashing out because they're embarrassed that they have a security flaw.
As far as I can tell, Firefox had a flaw, they fixed it and notified Opera that they had the same flaw the day before Firefox's fix was announced. Sounds to me like the only thing that Firefox did wrong was notice that it affected Opera at all, because if they hadn't Opera would have been left with egg on their face and nothing to bitch about.
You're right. Hiding these from our enemies makes sense, but we should stop hiding them from our friends, because that's just rude.
Besides, it's always prudent to hold things back from everyone, even your closest allies. Back when US and UK intelligence communities were really close, there was the danger that a single leak in either department could divulge the secrets of both. It's the same as using a different user for each of the processes running on your linux user. Just because you're protecting access and knowledge doesn't mean that you think everyone else is an enemy, it just means that you can't distinguish and it's better to treat everyone that way when in doubt.
That's a nice theory, but you can't argue that Microsoft is the most popular vendor for a lot of software and is, therefore, the biggest target. While Microsoft seems to have a bigger security problem than other vendors, there's no way to tell if other vendors and products would fail miserably given the same scrutiny.
The problem with that is the number of sites that happen to host malware without meaning to. Too often the malware comes through advertising services or sneak through in user generated content that would be fine if not for a browser vulnerability. Google does a lot as it is, outright blocking the sites goes too far (unless that's the only thing that the site is made for, which is rare and would probably mean that the site is ranked low in the first place).
I read that article, and honestly, it comes off as someone trying to sound smart who really isn't. "Spyware" (used in the article) isn't the term for something that changes the behavior of the computer; it would be applicable if the software reports back to google about the browsing habits, but this isn't what's described in the article. It should be considered "malware" or "adware."
Further, the argument about the name seems frivolous. Expecting a non-technical user to even realize that their error pages are being changed in the first place is stretching it; to suggest that the program could somehow name itself in such a way that a non-technical user would know what it did is ridiculous. If you know about the problem, the name is as good as any I could come up with, and certainly better than anything that could properly be called "spyware".
Finally, the article would be 1/3 the length, but he's too busy talking about how he's so morally superior. Granted, OpenDNS is an awesome service that I recommend wide and far, but the fact that he's fixing the problem is enough to show most people that.
The name "Browser Error Redirector" doesn't make its purpose clear to a non-technical user I would argue that there is no way to make its purpose clear to the non-technical user without using at least a full sentence, probably a paragraph. For those who are familiar with the concept of error page redirection in the first place, it's a very adequate description, very honest and the first thing I would suspect once I realized there was a problem. If it had been "Browser Helper" or "DNS Accelerator" or "Bonzai Buddy" then arguing that the name wasn't clear would be applicable; as it is, it's a specific name for a specific condition that doesn't hide what it is.
We all swim in the same pool...when someone takes a crap on themselves in this pool, eventually it's going to wash off of them and float over to US And when that happens, we don't protect them from the consequences, we pile on consequences as fast as we can (usually in the form of fists and feet up their ass). Likewise, we don't make them wear pool diapers, we trust that people will act responsibly and learn from their mistakes. You're right that we can't say that something only hurts the person involved; but that doesn't mean that we keep people from hurting themselves. Freedom means that we can hurt ourselves and make bad decisions, and we accept it because it's better for everyone in the end. We shouldn't let people die in the streets, and we should do our best to help those in trouble, but we shouldn't try to prevent people from making bad decisions and we shouldn't erase the consequences of bad choices completely.
While I agree in general, there's more to be considered than just "we're IT, so we care more." Privacy doesn't exist solely in the IT world; for most people, the majority of the privacy that they get isn't from their IT policies, it's from their home's walls, the blinds on their windows and the door on the bathroom. Likewise, most identity theft comes from dumpster diving and other traditional means, with online identity theft actually going down. If you use that as a metric of privacy (the important data not getting into the wrong hands), then that would indicate that IT privacy is actually getting better than other areas.
What this actually means is that people are more used to dealing with privacy than other areas. Everyone in the world cares about privacy to one extent or another, and it's practically (if not literally) an instinct since we're taught it from birth, which puts advocates of online privacy in a better position than a fitness nut or a dentist. We can draw real, direct analogies between facebook's policies and brick and mortar company's policies. If my credit card offers me double rewards at a coffee house, should that coffee house get my address, full name, mother's maiden name and social security number just for having that relationship with my card company? Should the guy who sets up a chess game in a cafe get all the personal information of the people they play against?
Privacy isn't new, and it's problems aren't unique to IT. All we need to do is put the issues in plain terms and let people make their own decisions.
That would be offset by the cost of having to learn a new language, new customs, etc. I mean, what's the exchange rate between a hockey goal and a touchdown nowadays? When do you append "eh" to the end of a sentence? How, exactly, are you supposed to say "schedule"? These are all serious barriers to companies relocating to Canada.
It would be more along the lines of the Earth's becoming more secular and wicked, so the whole things being sent to Hell. As the Earth approaches Hell, of course, it's going to get hotter.
Do arms races ever work? Depends on your objective. Generally, arms races preserve the status quo, which, in this instance, is exactly what they're trying to do.
Since domain tasting actually doesn't cost them anything, there would be no harm for them to taste every possible domain, regardless of whether it's actually useful or not. That's the real problem with domain tasting. If it cost $1 every time, then at least they would have a financial incentive not to do this bullshit. As it stands now, they can get away with just about anything.
Every male in my high school played starcraft, no matter what social group they came from. The same could be said for halo. Gaming should be thought of as a medium or a category, like comics are a subcategory of literature, and RPGs are a subcategory of card/board games. I don't see the popularity of Halo or of Guitar Hero-type games fading.
So Google would block any.com with a corresponding.xxx domain No, they would block any.com site whose content is identical to that of a.xxx site, since there's no legitimate reason to use the.xxx tld unless you're actually a porn site.
Why would new porn publishers would stop registering.com names? Typing ".com" is a reflex for most web surfers; they'd be idiots not to register that version along with their.xxx domain. Nowadays, most people find their sites through search engines, etc. If it becomes reflex to type.xxx when going to a porn site, then that's what people will type. It's reflex to type.gov when going to a government page already, it can become that way with porn. But the real meat of the argument is this: in your opinion, it will never change, and in my opinion, there's a chance that it will.
you'll have to come up with some actual advantages Name recognition, a completely untouched namespace, and an easy way for people to recognize/find the porn sites. Most of these are advantages for legitimate porn sites, and there's very little cost to actually implementing the idea. Where's the down side to using a xxx tld?
No, it sounds like they're actually applying something of a legal term to them. Instead of some dumb-ass congressman trying to explain what they are, they're explaining the regulations that apply to them.
That's a series of ridiculous suppositions that aren't supported at all. Even if porn sites all had both xxxample.com and xxxample.xxx, that does two things: it makes it easier to find them (ie porn-model.xxx will certainly be a porn site, porn-model.com might not be), and it makes it so that google can easily tell if the.com is a porn site because it's the same as the domain with the.xxx tld.
For existing porn sites, this wouldn't free up the.com space at all since no serious website administrator would give up a domain willingly, but for future sites it'll offer the opportunity to use just a xxx name. After all, if you're going to be another youtube knock off that offer porn, might as well use just a.xxx domain.
So, whether it would remove a single pussy or cock shot from the.com namespace or not, there are still considerable advantages.
Because storing pure hydrogen is tricky. It's hard to get a lot of it in there, and it happens to be the most reactive element on the periodic table. Also, if you can use gasoline as the hydrocarbon, then you're not even changing the fuel you're putting into the car in the first place.
As for charging times, you can charge it when you're sleeping There are no convenient outlets near my apartment building.
Long-distance travel will take a major hit when the oil runs out Which won't be for a long, long time, certainly not in the next few decades. Oil wells are still putting out a lot, when they're out there's a lot of shale laying around in Canada and the US, then there's the ability to extract it from coal. Oil's going to be around for a while.
But electric cars need to run off of batteries, and batteries are very bad at storing energy. They also take too long to recharge. They've tried pushing electric cars on the market and they were pushed right back off. I take road trips of over 300 miles every couple of months, and there's no way that an electric car would be able to make it in the same time period that my gas car can.
That's one of the worse summaries I've seen on Slashdot, and as we all know, that's saying something. Basically, there are three parts to the plan. Instead of using an internal combustion engine, you use a reactor that changes the hydrocarbon chains into hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen is used to power the car using the already developed fuel cells while the carbon is stored. You fuel at a station, but instead of just filling up with hydrocarbon (like we do now), you also give back the carbon that your car's been storing.
In the short term, this carbon would be taken and sequestered in a variety of methods that scientists have been studying for years, either under the ocean, in old oil wells, other underground locations, or in solid carbonate form. In the long term, the carbon would go back and be remade into hydrocarbon chains to be distributed back out. As someone else pointed out, you could also use the carbon for nanotubes.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between a company advertising to you when you call them (or trying to upsell, etc) and the phone company listening into your calls and breaking in when they have something to sell you. You're dealing with the company on the other side (google, in this case) as an equal. Your ISP holds a lot of power over you, and abusing it's wrong.
Unless for some reason they use the same engines, what's the problem with this practice? Opera's security isn't Firefox's responsibility. The fact that they notified opera at all went above and beyond what they needed to do, and asking firefox to be less open with their community is asking them to risk their image for the sake of opera and its users. Unless I'm missing something here, Firefox was being polite and Opera's throwing a world class hissy fit.
I don't see it as an attack. It sounds like Opera didn't respond to Mozilla's notification at all. In addition, it's not Mozilla's obligation to make sure that Opera's secure, and it is their obligation to be open with the community to the extent that they can be while still being secure. Sometimes waiting to disclose can bite you in the end like it did with php a few months back. Add to that the bullshit excuse that you can't evaluate a security risk in one day and I think that Opera's just lashing out because they're embarrassed that they have a security flaw.
As far as I can tell, Firefox had a flaw, they fixed it and notified Opera that they had the same flaw the day before Firefox's fix was announced. Sounds to me like the only thing that Firefox did wrong was notice that it affected Opera at all, because if they hadn't Opera would have been left with egg on their face and nothing to bitch about.
Are you referring to the Death Star from Star Wars or from the Alan Parson's Project?
You're right. Hiding these from our enemies makes sense, but we should stop hiding them from our friends, because that's just rude.
Besides, it's always prudent to hold things back from everyone, even your closest allies. Back when US and UK intelligence communities were really close, there was the danger that a single leak in either department could divulge the secrets of both. It's the same as using a different user for each of the processes running on your linux user. Just because you're protecting access and knowledge doesn't mean that you think everyone else is an enemy, it just means that you can't distinguish and it's better to treat everyone that way when in doubt.
That's a nice theory, but you can't argue that Microsoft is the most popular vendor for a lot of software and is, therefore, the biggest target. While Microsoft seems to have a bigger security problem than other vendors, there's no way to tell if other vendors and products would fail miserably given the same scrutiny.
The problem with that is the number of sites that happen to host malware without meaning to. Too often the malware comes through advertising services or sneak through in user generated content that would be fine if not for a browser vulnerability. Google does a lot as it is, outright blocking the sites goes too far (unless that's the only thing that the site is made for, which is rare and would probably mean that the site is ranked low in the first place).
I read that article, and honestly, it comes off as someone trying to sound smart who really isn't. "Spyware" (used in the article) isn't the term for something that changes the behavior of the computer; it would be applicable if the software reports back to google about the browsing habits, but this isn't what's described in the article. It should be considered "malware" or "adware."
Further, the argument about the name seems frivolous. Expecting a non-technical user to even realize that their error pages are being changed in the first place is stretching it; to suggest that the program could somehow name itself in such a way that a non-technical user would know what it did is ridiculous. If you know about the problem, the name is as good as any I could come up with, and certainly better than anything that could properly be called "spyware".
Finally, the article would be 1/3 the length, but he's too busy talking about how he's so morally superior. Granted, OpenDNS is an awesome service that I recommend wide and far, but the fact that he's fixing the problem is enough to show most people that.
While I agree in general, there's more to be considered than just "we're IT, so we care more." Privacy doesn't exist solely in the IT world; for most people, the majority of the privacy that they get isn't from their IT policies, it's from their home's walls, the blinds on their windows and the door on the bathroom. Likewise, most identity theft comes from dumpster diving and other traditional means, with online identity theft actually going down. If you use that as a metric of privacy (the important data not getting into the wrong hands), then that would indicate that IT privacy is actually getting better than other areas.
What this actually means is that people are more used to dealing with privacy than other areas. Everyone in the world cares about privacy to one extent or another, and it's practically (if not literally) an instinct since we're taught it from birth, which puts advocates of online privacy in a better position than a fitness nut or a dentist. We can draw real, direct analogies between facebook's policies and brick and mortar company's policies. If my credit card offers me double rewards at a coffee house, should that coffee house get my address, full name, mother's maiden name and social security number just for having that relationship with my card company? Should the guy who sets up a chess game in a cafe get all the personal information of the people they play against?
Privacy isn't new, and it's problems aren't unique to IT. All we need to do is put the issues in plain terms and let people make their own decisions.
That would be offset by the cost of having to learn a new language, new customs, etc. I mean, what's the exchange rate between a hockey goal and a touchdown nowadays? When do you append "eh" to the end of a sentence? How, exactly, are you supposed to say "schedule"? These are all serious barriers to companies relocating to Canada.
It would be more along the lines of the Earth's becoming more secular and wicked, so the whole things being sent to Hell. As the Earth approaches Hell, of course, it's going to get hotter.
Since domain tasting actually doesn't cost them anything, there would be no harm for them to taste every possible domain, regardless of whether it's actually useful or not. That's the real problem with domain tasting. If it cost $1 every time, then at least they would have a financial incentive not to do this bullshit. As it stands now, they can get away with just about anything.
Every male in my high school played starcraft, no matter what social group they came from. The same could be said for halo. Gaming should be thought of as a medium or a category, like comics are a subcategory of literature, and RPGs are a subcategory of card/board games. I don't see the popularity of Halo or of Guitar Hero-type games fading.
No, it sounds like they're actually applying something of a legal term to them. Instead of some dumb-ass congressman trying to explain what they are, they're explaining the regulations that apply to them.
That's a series of ridiculous suppositions that aren't supported at all. Even if porn sites all had both xxxample.com and xxxample.xxx, that does two things: it makes it easier to find them (ie porn-model.xxx will certainly be a porn site, porn-model.com might not be), and it makes it so that google can easily tell if the .com is a porn site because it's the same as the domain with the .xxx tld.
.com space at all since no serious website administrator would give up a domain willingly, but for future sites it'll offer the opportunity to use just a xxx name. After all, if you're going to be another youtube knock off that offer porn, might as well use just a .xxx domain.
.com namespace or not, there are still considerable advantages.
For existing porn sites, this wouldn't free up the
So, whether it would remove a single pussy or cock shot from the
Because storing pure hydrogen is tricky. It's hard to get a lot of it in there, and it happens to be the most reactive element on the periodic table. Also, if you can use gasoline as the hydrocarbon, then you're not even changing the fuel you're putting into the car in the first place.
But electric cars need to run off of batteries, and batteries are very bad at storing energy. They also take too long to recharge. They've tried pushing electric cars on the market and they were pushed right back off. I take road trips of over 300 miles every couple of months, and there's no way that an electric car would be able to make it in the same time period that my gas car can.
That's one of the worse summaries I've seen on Slashdot, and as we all know, that's saying something. Basically, there are three parts to the plan. Instead of using an internal combustion engine, you use a reactor that changes the hydrocarbon chains into hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen is used to power the car using the already developed fuel cells while the carbon is stored. You fuel at a station, but instead of just filling up with hydrocarbon (like we do now), you also give back the carbon that your car's been storing.
In the short term, this carbon would be taken and sequestered in a variety of methods that scientists have been studying for years, either under the ocean, in old oil wells, other underground locations, or in solid carbonate form. In the long term, the carbon would go back and be remade into hydrocarbon chains to be distributed back out. As someone else pointed out, you could also use the carbon for nanotubes.