If they don't put it into Sunnyvale unless you make it mandatory it's for the simple reason that the people who live there aren't willing to pay for it and companies would be making a loss.
In that particular case, you'd be wrong. I live in Sunnyvale, can pay for it, and want to pay for it. They won't put it in Sunnyvale because half the neighborhood are retirees who aren't demanding better performance, living on a fixed income, who are willing to accept the status quo. They would make less profit because they'd be paying off the loan more slowly because they would have way less than 100% penetration. That's not the same thing as taking a loss.
A secondary effect is that if you mandate that poor neighborhoods are brought up to the infrastructure standards of rich neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become more desirable and housing prices will rise. So, by imposing your preferences on poor neighborhoods, you are really preparing them for gentrification.
Quite possibly, but that doesn't mean poor kids should be denied Internet connections that are good enough for them to do as well in school as their non-poor counterparts. And that's what you're arguing—that the poor should have to find some way to raise enough money to move to a better neighborhood so that their kids aren't disadvantaged. Sure, the difference between cable and fiber today probably isn't enough to keep them from getting into college, but that was true for the difference between dialup and DSL just fifteen years ago.
By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer,
That's pure fiction and fabrication.
Citation needed. In rural areas, from what I've read, the average cost of fiber to the curb is somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500 per customer. Assume that the ISP charges about the U.S. average fee—$35 per customer. Part of that goes to the upstream ISP for providing the bandwidth, and part of it goes to the cost of interest on that fiber cost, so let's say that maybe $25 of that actually goes towards paying down the principal. You're now talking about 8.3 years just to break even.
Ah, but it gets worse. The cost of buildout skyrockets if you're just doing it for one customer, so you basically have to build the capacity for the expected number of customers up front. This means that if you only get half the people to buy service, that number doubles. Get a third of the people to buy service, and it triples. Get four competitors in a market, and you're talking about a whopping 33 years before you break even. Care to place bets on whether some new technology will have superseded that fiber you're running before you pay it off at that rate? And that's before you factor in the cost of line maintenance, replacing signal amplifiers, upgrading hardware at the head end, replacing customer premises equipment, recovering the costs associated with nonpaying customers, handling technical support, or any of the other myriad costs associated with running an ISP.
So no, it's not pure fiction and fabrication. There's no way in you-know-where that anyone can feasibly create true competition at the infrastructure level unless you're in a big city or unless you manage to trick somebody into footing the bill who has insane amounts of money to burn. I've seen rural areas try to get competition, and it always fails. Why? Because the incumbent provider always has a tremendous financial advantage caused by having already mostly paid off their infrastructure costs. Get rid of that advantage by starting with multiple companies from the outset, and you might end up with two competitors if you're really lucky. Unfortunately, to be perfectly frank, a stable duopoly isn't much better than a monopoly in terms of how badly the customers get bent over a barrel, in my experience. Heck, the cell phone market is barely competitive, and that has four major players.
What you ideally want, assuming you truly want enough competition to actually do some good, is somewhere closer to the dozen competitors that we had back in the DSL era (where the phone company was required to lease lines to any ISP that paid them). Using the earlier math, if twelve companies all built separate fiber infrastructure, that would mean a 100-year break-even point, on average. Even in a big city, where the fiber cost is more like $750 per customer, that's still a 30-year payoff even without factoring in other costs. No bank in the world is going to underwrite that loan. The only way you can make it work is to take the infrastructure cost—the high barrier to entry into the market—out of the equation entirely.
without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas.
So you're saying that regulations currently force people to subsidize a suburban and low density lifestyle and we should have even more of those subsidies. In different words, progressives and liberals who keep whining and complaining about the suburban lifestyle, the lack of public transportation, environmental destruction, lack of high speed Internet, are, in fact, subsidizing the very things they criticize, and the very problems they use to then justify even more subsidies. Thank you for pointing that out so clearly.
Why would you get "real competition" out of increasing government restrictions?
By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer, and without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas. But you can have competition in the service providers that sit atop that infrastructure. It just requires two rules: a universal must-serve rule and a mandatory leased access rule.
It's called tiered marketing and discriminatory pricing. I'm not sure which business school you went to, but the AACSB accredited one I went to described this situation pretty well to the undergrads, and it makes perfect sense - it's just complex.
Well, it makes sense up until a disruptive technology tears down the boundaries to importing. Like... airplanes. I mean, that sort of crap is the reason Canon USA is sending scare emails to all their customers warning them of the dangers of buying grey market cameras... knowing full well that most of the grey market importers stand behind it with a warranty that's approximately as trustworthy as Canon's, for several hundred bucks less.
Artificially segmenting markets was pretty silly even way back in the DVD era. Now, in the Internet era, it's just plain sad....
If I'm a TV provider in the uk, I don't want Netflix picking and choosing the content they want, and then undercutting me. I want to lock access to game of thrones down so they can only get it via me.
The U.S. broadcast networks don't have exclusivity after the first year. Why should U.K. broadcast networks be different?
DNS trickery, proxies, VPN, etc. are all very easy to set up, technologically. Try opening a U.S. bank account tied to a U.S. address as somebody who is not a U.S. resident. Good luck.
Why can't you just:
Open a mailbox with a scanning service in the U.S.,
Netflix is obligated to do this to maintain its licensing agreements with the Media Mafia.
Yeah, I understand that. What I don't understand is why the big media conglomerates put such baffling restrictions into their licenses in the first place. Is it to comply with licensing agreements that they made? Is it truly idiotic licensing all the way down?
As far as I'm concerned, the general public needs to keep fighting this crap. Whenever the content police tighten the screws, change to a different approach. For example, you might convince people with fast upstream and downstream connections to resell a small portion of their bandwidth for other people's Netflix streaming in a sort of peer-to-peer VPN approach so that it will be impossible for Netflix to cut off people using the VPNs without cutting off a lot of their U.S. customers. Encourage U.S. customers to use location-hiding VPNs, too. And so on.
The reality is that in this day and age, nothing short of worldwide licensing makes sense. In a world of physical media, there was at least some plausibility to the notion of export restrictions and region coding. In a world where humans have cast off the shackles of physical bodies... err... media (sorry, movie trailer authoring mode kicked in for a minute there), those limitations are archaic and silly, not to mention unenforceable. They need to go away. We need to kill the restrictions with fire. There's simply no room in a modern world for such pointlessness. It quite literally does not benefit anyone anywhere, from the far end of the content supply chain all the way to the customer. All it does is piss people off for no reason.
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for something involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless...
You mean like the Linux kernel which has thousands of contributors, a massive, shared copyright and is not a work for hire?
Now try getting all those people to agree to license the Linux kernel commercially under a non-GPL license. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I reiterate that previous statement, with a slight clarification:
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for a commercial work involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless you can quantitatively determine what percentage of the copyright every single crew member, cast member, and extra should get. Such a scheme would also effectively mean that the work in question could never be commercially exploited after the period ends anyway, because you'd never get all of those hundreds of people to agree to a new license.
where "commercial work" is defined as a work sold by a company, rather than being given away for free.
All I heard was "blah blah I'm a terrible producer who relies on actors with day jobs blah". If you hire an actor, you are their boss. Not the TGIF lunch shift manager. If you aren't paying enough for someone to stop waiting tables, then you aren't really hiring anyone.
Nobody said I hired anyone. I was talking about indie film production, which often involves unpaid cast to hit a very low budget. In short, I was describing the reality of authors who try to make movies of their own books, explaining why it isn't all that practical. Yes, if the author has money to burn, and can pay the cast $30 an hour, that author won't run into that. Then again, if an author has that kind of money, his or her books are popular enough that they'll routinely get optioned by a major studio anyway.
Everything else in there has absolutely nothing to do with the OP's comment on "short animated films".
Correct. Unlike that comment, I live in reality, where short animated films are excrement that nobody watches for more than about twenty seconds. I think I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than watch an entire book in the form of an animated film with robotic voices.
Besides, animated movies are great for children's stories, but are pretty much doomed to obscurity for most serious subjects. For example, I can only think of one animated sci-fi film, Titan AE, and its box office gross was something like half its budget. Most people see animated movies as being mainly for kids and people with kids. You won't get past that stigma easily.
Okay, the South Park movie, but that's the exception that proves the rule....
Translation: "I want stuff for free, and I don't want to have to pay for anything. Screw the authors and composers who busted their a**es to create what I'm enjoying."
Clearly you haven't thought about the consequences of your idea. Because if you thought about it for more than ten seconds, you'd realize that your proposal would make authors and composers hopelessly dependent upon large corporate backers. Without a major corporation handling the advertising and marketing of your works, an average author or composer cannot possibly hope to make enough money in the first five years on just about any work to make ends meet.
So the inevitable result of your proposal is a creative class of wage slaves, hopelessly beholden to their corporate backers, unable to take risks, unable to truly be creative. Your ideas represent the death of the creativity, and the dawn of a new dark age of humanity, bereft of any inspired works of authorship, a period where mindless drones sit mindlessly in front of a TV set that shows mindless content, the tedious, vacuous pablum of a world of monotony.
And in music, the result would be even more cacophonous. To compose large musical scores, it can take months. Imagine having to charge enough money for a musical composition that you could earn a living off of only a few large compositions per year. Figure that unless you're backed by a big corporation, you might sell only a few hundred copies in the first five years. Imagine a piece of sheet music costing fifty bucks. Imagine a band music score costing $200. Basically, you're talking about a factor of five to ten increase in the cost of sheet music unless you want composers to all die penniless.
Somehow, I don't particularly care for your "utopia". Just saying. Suck it up and pay for what you consume.
Sorry, but you're doing it wrong. If you've started your novel in 2001, and you've decided to write two more over a total period of 14 years before even considering publishing it, then you're not operating a business, you're playing a hobby.
If by "hobby", you mean "side business", you're correct. While writing those books, I was working for a computer company as a paid staff writer. They paid my bills while I worked on those books. In effect, I worked under a patronage system, and these three works were the ones that had no patron backing them, hence one reason that they took so long to finish..
The other reason it took so long to publish the trilogy is that the books's timelines are tied together in parallel, which means that I couldn't safely publish the first book until I finished writing the third. Were it not for that, the first book would have been published in about 2004, give or take. If I were not having to create my own publishing toolchain, and having to do all the copyediting myself, and doing the cover design, and doing custom font design, the third book would have been published in 2011, give or take.
What you should be doing (or should have done before) is publish your first novel quickly, or even publish a few short stories first to get real feedback from customers.
That's great advice if your goal is to create more of the same pablum that is typical of today's book market. It's terrible advice if your goal is to find your own voice, because creativity seldom occurs by committee.
That is what copyright is intended for: to accelerate the creation and dissemination process.
Copyright is to encourage the creation of new works, period. If its purpose were to accelerate the dissemination process, it would not apply to many classes of creative work, such as art, which almost by definition have only one copy. If its purpose were dissemination, then the historical 14-year copyright term would have begun at the date of creation, rather than the date of publication. So clearly that has never been the primary purpose of copyright.
Hobbyists don't need the incentives of copyright as they're quite happy to spend years writing at their own pace, even if it costs them opportunities, readership, and their own money.
Again, you couldn't be more wrong. Would I write if my works weren't protected by copyright? Probably not. It's one thing to create things without any guaranteed payoff. It's quite another to create things with a guarantee of no payoff. And that's what you're missing.
I don't buy the "studios would wait until the copyright expires." Once the term expires every studio would make a movie of a popular work to capitalize and they'd all cannibalize each other. It would be way more profitable to secure the exclusive rights and profit now rather than wait 20 years and compete.
Well, maybe, but there are a lot more books than could ever readily be made into movies, and most movies aren't based on books, so I'd expect it to come down to probability. The highly popular books (e.g. your Harry Potter example) would, of course, be licensed, but that's because there's a lot more money to be made by making those movies quickly than delaying them (with the exclusivity being an added bonus). However, lots of other books that get licensed today (e.g. my Princess Bride example) probably wouldn't get licensed under a 20-year limit.
No, iOS backups don't include the OS. When you restore an iOS backup, iTunes writes the OS first, then restores your data and apps on top of it. And because Apple stops signing the old OS images for your device about a day after a new OS release ships, as I understand it, there's no way for iTunes to install anything but the latest OS image even if you have a copy of the previous OS image.
Not being facetious, but so what? If the film studio is willing to wait, then your story just isn't that valuable. If it is, then another studio would pick it up to beat them to market.
You're starting from a bad assumption—the assumption that the book is extremely popular. Those are the uninteresting cases, because those authors already made a crapton of money on the book. I'm talking about the adaptations of less well-known books. These often take many, many years, simply because it takes time to even discover that the books exist. If you discover a book after fifteen years, and if the copyright term is only twenty years, you won't have to wait long.
To give you an example, The Princess Bride was released in 1973. The movie based on that book came out in 1987. That's 14 years. Given that nobody had adapted it in 14 years, the odds of somebody else adapting it and releasing it over the following 6 years would have been low. So under the proposed 20-year duration, Goldman would probably have gotten shafted by the studio. Worse, as I understand it, that book made most of its money after the movie came out, so he also wouldn't have made much money on the book.
According to your logic, The Princess Bride should never have been made, because the book was still under copyright. Yet it was made, and the resulting movie is so popular that it gets quoted in about every other Slashdot article, so clearly it was valuable. Based on that counterexample alone, I find your argument inconceivable.
The original term was 14 years, are you saying that in a time where the market is insanely bigger, the cost of creation is insanely smaller, and worldwide distribution is almost free you believe you should have a longer license to control your creation? That's insane.
The original term (or at least the first nationwide term in the U.S.) was 14 years, with the ability to renew for 14 more years if you were still alive at the end of the first term, for a total of 28 years, which is considerably longer than the 20 years proposed, even in purely absolute terms. Further, that original 28-year term (14+14) was essentially the rest of your life in that era, even if you were young. The proposed twenty-year period would be about a fourth of the rest of your life these days.
The cost of creation is not significantly smaller than it was then. It still takes a long time to write a book. Yes, mechanically, it takes less time to type than to write by hand, but that's a minuscule fraction of the time spent creating a compelling story. If anything, the cost of creation is much higher now on average, because a much higher percentage of modern stories are written in a distant future, or in an alternative fantasy world that does not actually exist. Today, the author has to create the universe in addition to creating the characters and the plot. And modern readers are more demanding when it comes to self-consistency in that universe.
The potential audience might be larger, but the number of writers increased proportionally to the number of people on Earth, so the market is effectively the same. The only difference is that now you have to compete using more than just word-of-mouth, because that same-sized potential number of readers is spread across a larger area.
The cost of production and distribution is lower. Unfortunately, because more people can afford to publish their works, on average, each writer makes less money.
But the biggest reason that copyright should be a reasonable percentage of the author's is as a partial defense against the growing inequality between individual authors and the corporate world. Even with the current copyright durations, we see authors getting locked into extended contracts, and publishers dragging their heels on reprints, hurting the author's ability to profit off of their creations. Imagine if they could drag their heels just a few more years, and then reprint those works for free. They would do so. At every possible opportunity. The publishers would get everything, and the actual authors would get screwed.
Basically, in an era where lots of works are still highly popular after forty or fifty years, in a world where corporations have the ability to trivially outlive the authors and out-wait them, the copyright for works of individual authorship needs to be long enough to at least partially restore the balance.
Answer this: Would the knowledge that no movie studio would pay you millions to license your novels have stopped you from writing them? You can argue that that possibility factored into your thinking, but that's not the point. The point is: If that possibility, and that alone, were completely removed, would you have chosen not to write?
No, but only because writing is not my core profession. But the correct question is not whether any particular person would choose not to write, but whether the number and calibre of people who choose to write would decrease (in aggregate). I'm fairly certain that both metrics would decrease.
You see, writing books is in some ways like playing the lottery. Yes, you can write great books and you might find a following, but the vast majority of authors eke out a fairly meager living even if they do find a following. There are pretty much two ways that you can do substantially better than that: sell a lot more books than average or get discovered and have your book optioned for a movie. Cutting out one of those options significantly reduces your chances of not dying penniless.
But unlike playing the lottery, writing involves a lot of skill, and requires you to devote a lot of time and energy. In a way, choosing to write is a bit like choosing a major in college. A few people choose majors based solely on what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but far more people choose majors in part based on whether the major will land them a job that pays a decent salary. As careers in specific fields pay less money over time, the calibre of students progressively declines. So as you reduce the odds of a potential payoff, you'll get fewer skilled writers choosing it as a career, and the writers who do choose it as a career will also decline in quality, on average.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the quality of TV news in the past couple of decades. That's what happens when salaries start out bad and then fail to keep up with inflation.
Your notion of basing it on gross revenue is interesting, but I think it would be too easy for big studios to game.
It's easy to game the net, but it shouldn't be possible to game the gross receipts. After all, people either paid money to see the film or they didn't. I mean, maybe if everyone went to a subscription model....
I couldn't help but read that in the synthesized tone of "MongoDB is web scale" made with XtraNormal. Anyone who has a computer and can write a screenplay can produce an animated short film that no one will watch. And tools to mark up a screenplay for conversion to an animated film will only get better, so you can make even better animated shorts that no one will watch.
FTFY.:-)
Just in case anybody reads your comment and assumes that you're being serious (I'm pretty sure you aren't), here's an idea of the magnitude of effort involved....
I once created a feature-length movie from script to finished product. Writing the script was maybe 5% of the effort. When I finished with that, I began location scouting and casting. Fortunately, I had ready access to a number of shooting locations that met most of my needs, so that part was relatively tame.
After shooting began, I had to find times when all of the cast members for each scene were available, and the location was also available. The more people involved in a scene, the crazier that got. Add in a few horses, or a scene at a hospital ER (shot at something like 2 in the morning), or police officers doing a drive-by and arresting one of the cast members (for a scene, not for real), and even a relatively straightforward production with minimal effects gets complicated pretty quickly.
But it gets better when you find yourself having to adapt to changing schedules, as cast members' bosses change their work schedule from week to week. Been there, done that.
When shooting is done, then you get to spend time editing, adding special effects, composing a film score, and recording the music. If you don't have the skills to do all of these things yourself, you'll probably have to pay other people to do them. On an author's income, that's not easy.
The bottom line is that if you already have extensive TV production experience, and if you and at least two other people can devote a minimum of two months full-time to the project (through the end of principal photography), and if you have a dozen friends who can act and don't have full-time jobs that limit your shooting schedule and don't want a huge chunk of money in exchange for acting, then it is marginally feasible to make a movie version of a book that doesn't involve any special effects.
So although I can think of (a few) authors who could pull off turning their books into feature films, not many of them are crazy enough to make the attempt.:-)
However, the law would need to specify a maximum contract duration beyond which those limits kick in so that companies wouldn't license it for [lifetime of copyright minus one day].
Or the director could just avoid doubt by exclusively licensing the motion picture to the studio for 20 years. This would be long enough for the theatrical release, the current home video format, and the next home video format, after which point the copyright reverts to the director.
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for something involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless you can quantitatively determine what percentage of the copyright every single crew member, cast member, and extra should get. Such a scheme would also effectively mean that the work in question could never be commercially exploited after the period ends anyway, because you'd never get all of those hundreds of people to agree to a new license.
Twenty years from first publication might be reasonable, but it is still problematic for works of fiction, because it is a short enough period of time that a film studio wanting to make a movie would be sorely tempted to wait out the copyright rather than paying the author for the use of his or her work.
That's not been shown to be problematic for pharmaceuticals, where companies routinely wait out the patent before producing a generic drug.
That's a completely different situation, because both the patent holder and the generic drug maker are on roughly equal footing in terms of their ability to exploiting the property. A drug company can make a drug and can market it readily; that's what they do. An individual who writes a book cannot realistically make a movie version of that book, because A. they don't have that kind of money, and B. they are not likely to have the required skill set.
For example, you might set a twenty year limit for works for hire, but make the duration be 75 years for copyright owned by individuals.
Then companies would just structure their deals to, say, assign copyright in a film to the film's director but then exclusively license the copyright back to the studio.
By definition, any permanent license is a work for hire. So no, they couldn't do precisely that. However, the law would need to specify a maximum contract duration beyond which those limits kick in so that companies wouldn't license it for [lifetime of copyright minus one day].
If copyrights are "intellectual property", then tax them like property [wikipedia.org]. Have each copyright owner self-assess the value of his works, and levy a tax on that value. To prevent publishers from avoiding tax by lowballing the value, let people crowdfund the donation of each work to the public domain by paying this value to the copyright owner.
It would be far easier to simply tax the past income from the work as part of the copyright fees. Actual income tends to be a good indicator of the value of a work.
Twenty years from creation (copyright is currently defined as starting at creation) is way too short. I'm about to publish a trilogy of novels, and I started on the first one in 2001. By your standards, six years of profiting from my works should be enough. That's laughable.
Twenty years from first publication might be reasonable, but it is still problematic for works of fiction, because it is a short enough period of time that a film studio wanting to make a movie would be sorely tempted to wait out the copyright rather than paying the author for the use of his or her work.
On the one hand, you have individuals creating works, and on the other hand, you have big corporations creating works. The former need a lot more time to exploit their works, because they have fewer resources for doing so. The latter can adequately exploit their works in just a few years, after which, they're essentially leeching off the public domain. A reasonable copyright scheme needs to consider both of those situations and treat them differently. For example, you might set a twenty year limit for works for hire, but make the duration be 75 years for copyright owned by individuals. Or you might require the copyright to be renewed every fifteen years at 1% of the property's total gross revenue, so a movie that brought in $40 million pays a $400,000 renewal fee every fifteen years, but a book that made only $7,000 pays a $70 renewal.
Sure they do. I've had computers go into sleep mode spontaneously. In the car, the analogue would be an equipment or software failure causing the system to believe it was meant to be switched off.
Just like my laptop won't go to sleep while a print job is on its way to a printer, a properly designed car computer shouldn't go to sleep while the vehicle is in motion. That's not hard to prevent. The only case that's hard to deal with is a full electrical failure, but that would likely kill more than just the computer (power steering, power brakes), resulting in little hope for a human driver stopping the car safely, either.
They don't get distracted fiddling with the radio, talking with passengers, or sending text messages
If they're smart enough not to give the self-drive system other things to do that it can get wrong and thus spend too much time on them and fail at driving, that's true. Even logging could fall into this category.
I think it is safe to assume that the automatic driving system would be separate (ideally, by law) from the normal computers used to operate other systems (like the entertainment system). So that shouldn't be an issue. I'd give Google more common sense credit than that.:-)
They don't have heart attacks or seizures.
Sure they do, at least, computer hardware does fail, just like our hardware.
My point is that humans' ability to drive is highly variable based on a lot of factors, such as age, time of day, health, and so on. Electronics tend to fail more predictably, based mostly on age and heat. Require the computers to be gutted every n years, and build them to last that long, and the failure rate should be very, very low. Besides, I'd expect any system like this (when deployed in production) to be built with at least three computers in a voting configuration, which would reduce the rate of computer-failure-induced accidents to somewhere near the level of statistical noise.
Additionally, computers have more visual information available to them than humans.
Right up until the sensors ice over, or whatever. When your eyelids have ice crystals on them, you can blink a bunch and get partial vision back. This in particular is what is holding self-driving cars back now, and for that matter, self-flying planes. If the stall indicators fail for any one of several reasons then your only hope is that the pilot will feel what's happening and correct it. We'll have to turn vehicles into a rolling collection of redundant sensors to fix this problem, and the cost of the car will double.
Yeah, I get the pitot tube reference, but there's nothing remotely equivalent in automobiles, because cars stay on the ground. What makes flying problematic is that there's only a narrow speed range in which the plane will stay in the air. Go too fast, and you stall. Go too slowly, and you descend. And the exact speed at which these transitions occur depends on the speed of the air around you, not just your speed relative to the ground.
Cars, by contrast, are a heck of a lot simpler. There's a maximum safe speed based on road conditions, but you know the vehicle's speed because you have wheels that are spinning on the road surface. And any self-driving car would also have GPS, which is your fallback if the wheel speed sensors all miraculously die simultaneously. It isn't perfectly accurate, but the rolling average over a couple of seconds will give you speeds accurate to within 1 MPH or so, which is an order of magnitude more accurate than is required to avoid going dangerously fast in even the worst weather conditions....
As for cameras, a self-driving car would have to ha
Wordpress is widely adopted. Very widely. The #1 reason it is insecure is because it is targeted so often.
No, the #1 reason it is insecure is that it isn't secure. The #1 reason it looks insecure is because it is targeted so often.
Along with WP, plenty of other platforms plainly store their database credentials in some config file. It might be PHP, maybe XML, maybe JSON... irrelevant. The credentials are stored in plaintext on the server.
There's nothing wrong with doing that. The database shouldn't be accessible from arbitrary machines anyway, so having the credentials buys an attacker nothing. Besides, how the heck else are you going to provide credentials to a script? No, the real problems are that:
Many servers are misconfigured so that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can access the database and wreak havoc after they manage to steal those credentials.
Many web servers are misconfigured so that it isn't possible to allow the script to access those config files without allowing other unrelated users to access them.
Many shared web servers are misconfigured in ways that allow PHP scripts owned by other users to access those same files, with no way to prevent that access.
All of these fall under the category of sysadmin configuration mistakes, not flaws in the software, per se, though in some cases, the software may create files with poor permissions (or in an insecure way, allowing for race condition attacks) that exacerbate those problems.
All these platforms do things in their own way. I'm a Magento developer and it is a platform that is notorious for it's complexity. I understand it pretty damn well, but the majority of the code I see was clearly written by folks who don't understand it very well. I've seen/www/var/log left wide open and the justification was that/www/var/log doesn't contain anything important. Just errors and stuff like that. For those paying attention, what's the difference between Mage::log($order, null, 'orders.log') and Mage::log($order->debug(), null, 'orders.log')? If you said, "the first one will log the entire object -- including database credentials", you get a cookie.
To some degree, that points to the need for both better logging systems and better back-end software design. When I'm writing code, I'm very careful to explicitly have separate debug levels, with explicit comments about the security or insecurity of each of those levels. Those security-risky debug levels are turned on only for short periods of time while fixing authentication-related bugs, and any secret info goes into a separate log file in a location outside the web root so that you can't trivially access it by making requests to the server itself—and never to a syslog daemon (whose log files are potentially readable by other users on shared hosting systems).
I also segregate user credentials into separate objects/variables. With the exception of the numeric user ID itself, none of that info is ever used outside of my authentication and authorization code, which is segregated into separate files to avoid accidental disclosure. Thus, none of the authentication information ever appears in any object that could realistically get logged. The obvious exceptions are objects associated with the database, which ostensibly contain database auth information, but I'm never going to print_r a database connection object (assuming that's even possible), so that's mostly moot.
The number of "insecure" PHP sites is probably much closer to 100% than advertised, but it usually isn't PHP's fault.
Actually, it is probably much lower, for several reasons:
OS X v10.9 gets regular security updates, and ships with a version lower than the version they list. However, Apple routinely patches the software that they ship (rather than updating it) when security vulnerab
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In that particular case, you'd be wrong. I live in Sunnyvale, can pay for it, and want to pay for it. They won't put it in Sunnyvale because half the neighborhood are retirees who aren't demanding better performance, living on a fixed income, who are willing to accept the status quo. They would make less profit because they'd be paying off the loan more slowly because they would have way less than 100% penetration. That's not the same thing as taking a loss.
Quite possibly, but that doesn't mean poor kids should be denied Internet connections that are good enough for them to do as well in school as their non-poor counterparts. And that's what you're arguing—that the poor should have to find some way to raise enough money to move to a better neighborhood so that their kids aren't disadvantaged. Sure, the difference between cable and fiber today probably isn't enough to keep them from getting into college, but that was true for the difference between dialup and DSL just fifteen years ago.
Citation needed. In rural areas, from what I've read, the average cost of fiber to the curb is somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500 per customer. Assume that the ISP charges about the U.S. average fee—$35 per customer. Part of that goes to the upstream ISP for providing the bandwidth, and part of it goes to the cost of interest on that fiber cost, so let's say that maybe $25 of that actually goes towards paying down the principal. You're now talking about 8.3 years just to break even.
Ah, but it gets worse. The cost of buildout skyrockets if you're just doing it for one customer, so you basically have to build the capacity for the expected number of customers up front. This means that if you only get half the people to buy service, that number doubles. Get a third of the people to buy service, and it triples. Get four competitors in a market, and you're talking about a whopping 33 years before you break even. Care to place bets on whether some new technology will have superseded that fiber you're running before you pay it off at that rate? And that's before you factor in the cost of line maintenance, replacing signal amplifiers, upgrading hardware at the head end, replacing customer premises equipment, recovering the costs associated with nonpaying customers, handling technical support, or any of the other myriad costs associated with running an ISP.
So no, it's not pure fiction and fabrication. There's no way in you-know-where that anyone can feasibly create true competition at the infrastructure level unless you're in a big city or unless you manage to trick somebody into footing the bill who has insane amounts of money to burn. I've seen rural areas try to get competition, and it always fails. Why? Because the incumbent provider always has a tremendous financial advantage caused by having already mostly paid off their infrastructure costs. Get rid of that advantage by starting with multiple companies from the outset, and you might end up with two competitors if you're really lucky. Unfortunately, to be perfectly frank, a stable duopoly isn't much better than a monopoly in terms of how badly the customers get bent over a barrel, in my experience. Heck, the cell phone market is barely competitive, and that has four major players.
What you ideally want, assuming you truly want enough competition to actually do some good, is somewhere closer to the dozen competitors that we had back in the DSL era (where the phone company was required to lease lines to any ISP that paid them). Using the earlier math, if twelve companies all built separate fiber infrastructure, that would mean a 100-year break-even point, on average. Even in a big city, where the fiber cost is more like $750 per customer, that's still a 30-year payoff even without factoring in other costs. No bank in the world is going to underwrite that loan. The only way you can make it work is to take the infrastructure cost—the high barrier to entry into the market—out of the equation entirely.
Nowhere did I even suggest that urban are
By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer, and without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas. But you can have competition in the service providers that sit atop that infrastructure. It just requires two rules: a universal must-serve rule and a mandatory leased access rule.
You were expecting change?
Well, it makes sense up until a disruptive technology tears down the boundaries to importing. Like... airplanes. I mean, that sort of crap is the reason Canon USA is sending scare emails to all their customers warning them of the dangers of buying grey market cameras... knowing full well that most of the grey market importers stand behind it with a warranty that's approximately as trustworthy as Canon's, for several hundred bucks less.
Artificially segmenting markets was pretty silly even way back in the DVD era. Now, in the Internet era, it's just plain sad....
Presumably, they based their decision on the issuing bank, which may or may not be the best idea.
The U.S. broadcast networks don't have exclusivity after the first year. Why should U.K. broadcast networks be different?
Why can't you just:
?
Yeah, I understand that. What I don't understand is why the big media conglomerates put such baffling restrictions into their licenses in the first place. Is it to comply with licensing agreements that they made? Is it truly idiotic licensing all the way down?
As far as I'm concerned, the general public needs to keep fighting this crap. Whenever the content police tighten the screws, change to a different approach. For example, you might convince people with fast upstream and downstream connections to resell a small portion of their bandwidth for other people's Netflix streaming in a sort of peer-to-peer VPN approach so that it will be impossible for Netflix to cut off people using the VPNs without cutting off a lot of their U.S. customers. Encourage U.S. customers to use location-hiding VPNs, too. And so on.
The reality is that in this day and age, nothing short of worldwide licensing makes sense. In a world of physical media, there was at least some plausibility to the notion of export restrictions and region coding. In a world where humans have cast off the shackles of physical bodies... err... media (sorry, movie trailer authoring mode kicked in for a minute there), those limitations are archaic and silly, not to mention unenforceable. They need to go away. We need to kill the restrictions with fire. There's simply no room in a modern world for such pointlessness. It quite literally does not benefit anyone anywhere, from the far end of the content supply chain all the way to the customer. All it does is piss people off for no reason.
Now try getting all those people to agree to license the Linux kernel commercially under a non-GPL license. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I reiterate that previous statement, with a slight clarification:
where "commercial work" is defined as a work sold by a company, rather than being given away for free.
Nobody said I hired anyone. I was talking about indie film production, which often involves unpaid cast to hit a very low budget. In short, I was describing the reality of authors who try to make movies of their own books, explaining why it isn't all that practical. Yes, if the author has money to burn, and can pay the cast $30 an hour, that author won't run into that. Then again, if an author has that kind of money, his or her books are popular enough that they'll routinely get optioned by a major studio anyway.
Correct. Unlike that comment, I live in reality, where short animated films are excrement that nobody watches for more than about twenty seconds. I think I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than watch an entire book in the form of an animated film with robotic voices.
Besides, animated movies are great for children's stories, but are pretty much doomed to obscurity for most serious subjects. For example, I can only think of one animated sci-fi film, Titan AE, and its box office gross was something like half its budget. Most people see animated movies as being mainly for kids and people with kids. You won't get past that stigma easily.
Okay, the South Park movie, but that's the exception that proves the rule....
Translation: "I want stuff for free, and I don't want to have to pay for anything. Screw the authors and composers who busted their a**es to create what I'm enjoying."
Clearly you haven't thought about the consequences of your idea. Because if you thought about it for more than ten seconds, you'd realize that your proposal would make authors and composers hopelessly dependent upon large corporate backers. Without a major corporation handling the advertising and marketing of your works, an average author or composer cannot possibly hope to make enough money in the first five years on just about any work to make ends meet.
So the inevitable result of your proposal is a creative class of wage slaves, hopelessly beholden to their corporate backers, unable to take risks, unable to truly be creative. Your ideas represent the death of the creativity, and the dawn of a new dark age of humanity, bereft of any inspired works of authorship, a period where mindless drones sit mindlessly in front of a TV set that shows mindless content, the tedious, vacuous pablum of a world of monotony.
And in music, the result would be even more cacophonous. To compose large musical scores, it can take months. Imagine having to charge enough money for a musical composition that you could earn a living off of only a few large compositions per year. Figure that unless you're backed by a big corporation, you might sell only a few hundred copies in the first five years. Imagine a piece of sheet music costing fifty bucks. Imagine a band music score costing $200. Basically, you're talking about a factor of five to ten increase in the cost of sheet music unless you want composers to all die penniless.
Somehow, I don't particularly care for your "utopia". Just saying. Suck it up and pay for what you consume.
If by "hobby", you mean "side business", you're correct. While writing those books, I was working for a computer company as a paid staff writer. They paid my bills while I worked on those books. In effect, I worked under a patronage system, and these three works were the ones that had no patron backing them, hence one reason that they took so long to finish..
The other reason it took so long to publish the trilogy is that the books's timelines are tied together in parallel, which means that I couldn't safely publish the first book until I finished writing the third. Were it not for that, the first book would have been published in about 2004, give or take. If I were not having to create my own publishing toolchain, and having to do all the copyediting myself, and doing the cover design, and doing custom font design, the third book would have been published in 2011, give or take.
That's great advice if your goal is to create more of the same pablum that is typical of today's book market. It's terrible advice if your goal is to find your own voice, because creativity seldom occurs by committee.
Copyright is to encourage the creation of new works, period. If its purpose were to accelerate the dissemination process, it would not apply to many classes of creative work, such as art, which almost by definition have only one copy. If its purpose were dissemination, then the historical 14-year copyright term would have begun at the date of creation, rather than the date of publication. So clearly that has never been the primary purpose of copyright.
Again, you couldn't be more wrong. Would I write if my works weren't protected by copyright? Probably not. It's one thing to create things without any guaranteed payoff. It's quite another to create things with a guarantee of no payoff. And that's what you're missing.
Well, maybe, but there are a lot more books than could ever readily be made into movies, and most movies aren't based on books, so I'd expect it to come down to probability. The highly popular books (e.g. your Harry Potter example) would, of course, be licensed, but that's because there's a lot more money to be made by making those movies quickly than delaying them (with the exclusivity being an added bonus). However, lots of other books that get licensed today (e.g. my Princess Bride example) probably wouldn't get licensed under a 20-year limit.
No, iOS backups don't include the OS. When you restore an iOS backup, iTunes writes the OS first, then restores your data and apps on top of it. And because Apple stops signing the old OS images for your device about a day after a new OS release ships, as I understand it, there's no way for iTunes to install anything but the latest OS image even if you have a copy of the previous OS image.
You're starting from a bad assumption—the assumption that the book is extremely popular. Those are the uninteresting cases, because those authors already made a crapton of money on the book. I'm talking about the adaptations of less well-known books. These often take many, many years, simply because it takes time to even discover that the books exist. If you discover a book after fifteen years, and if the copyright term is only twenty years, you won't have to wait long.
To give you an example, The Princess Bride was released in 1973. The movie based on that book came out in 1987. That's 14 years. Given that nobody had adapted it in 14 years, the odds of somebody else adapting it and releasing it over the following 6 years would have been low. So under the proposed 20-year duration, Goldman would probably have gotten shafted by the studio. Worse, as I understand it, that book made most of its money after the movie came out, so he also wouldn't have made much money on the book.
According to your logic, The Princess Bride should never have been made, because the book was still under copyright. Yet it was made, and the resulting movie is so popular that it gets quoted in about every other Slashdot article, so clearly it was valuable. Based on that counterexample alone, I find your argument inconceivable.
The original term (or at least the first nationwide term in the U.S.) was 14 years, with the ability to renew for 14 more years if you were still alive at the end of the first term, for a total of 28 years, which is considerably longer than the 20 years proposed, even in purely absolute terms. Further, that original 28-year term (14+14) was essentially the rest of your life in that era, even if you were young. The proposed twenty-year period would be about a fourth of the rest of your life these days.
The cost of creation is not significantly smaller than it was then. It still takes a long time to write a book. Yes, mechanically, it takes less time to type than to write by hand, but that's a minuscule fraction of the time spent creating a compelling story. If anything, the cost of creation is much higher now on average, because a much higher percentage of modern stories are written in a distant future, or in an alternative fantasy world that does not actually exist. Today, the author has to create the universe in addition to creating the characters and the plot. And modern readers are more demanding when it comes to self-consistency in that universe.
The potential audience might be larger, but the number of writers increased proportionally to the number of people on Earth, so the market is effectively the same. The only difference is that now you have to compete using more than just word-of-mouth, because that same-sized potential number of readers is spread across a larger area.
The cost of production and distribution is lower. Unfortunately, because more people can afford to publish their works, on average, each writer makes less money.
But the biggest reason that copyright should be a reasonable percentage of the author's is as a partial defense against the growing inequality between individual authors and the corporate world. Even with the current copyright durations, we see authors getting locked into extended contracts, and publishers dragging their heels on reprints, hurting the author's ability to profit off of their creations. Imagine if they could drag their heels just a few more years, and then reprint those works for free. They would do so. At every possible opportunity. The publishers would get everything, and the actual authors would get screwed.
Basically, in an era where lots of works are still highly popular after forty or fifty years, in a world where corporations have the ability to trivially outlive the authors and out-wait them, the copyright for works of individual authorship needs to be long enough to at least partially restore the balance.
It reduces the motivation to become an author.
No, but only because writing is not my core profession. But the correct question is not whether any particular person would choose not to write, but whether the number and calibre of people who choose to write would decrease (in aggregate). I'm fairly certain that both metrics would decrease.
You see, writing books is in some ways like playing the lottery. Yes, you can write great books and you might find a following, but the vast majority of authors eke out a fairly meager living even if they do find a following. There are pretty much two ways that you can do substantially better than that: sell a lot more books than average or get discovered and have your book optioned for a movie. Cutting out one of those options significantly reduces your chances of not dying penniless.
But unlike playing the lottery, writing involves a lot of skill, and requires you to devote a lot of time and energy. In a way, choosing to write is a bit like choosing a major in college. A few people choose majors based solely on what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but far more people choose majors in part based on whether the major will land them a job that pays a decent salary. As careers in specific fields pay less money over time, the calibre of students progressively declines. So as you reduce the odds of a potential payoff, you'll get fewer skilled writers choosing it as a career, and the writers who do choose it as a career will also decline in quality, on average.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the quality of TV news in the past couple of decades. That's what happens when salaries start out bad and then fail to keep up with inflation.
It's easy to game the net, but it shouldn't be possible to game the gross receipts. After all, people either paid money to see the film or they didn't. I mean, maybe if everyone went to a subscription model....
FTFY. :-)
Just in case anybody reads your comment and assumes that you're being serious (I'm pretty sure you aren't), here's an idea of the magnitude of effort involved....
I once created a feature-length movie from script to finished product. Writing the script was maybe 5% of the effort. When I finished with that, I began location scouting and casting. Fortunately, I had ready access to a number of shooting locations that met most of my needs, so that part was relatively tame.
After shooting began, I had to find times when all of the cast members for each scene were available, and the location was also available. The more people involved in a scene, the crazier that got. Add in a few horses, or a scene at a hospital ER (shot at something like 2 in the morning), or police officers doing a drive-by and arresting one of the cast members (for a scene, not for real), and even a relatively straightforward production with minimal effects gets complicated pretty quickly.
But it gets better when you find yourself having to adapt to changing schedules, as cast members' bosses change their work schedule from week to week. Been there, done that.
When shooting is done, then you get to spend time editing, adding special effects, composing a film score, and recording the music. If you don't have the skills to do all of these things yourself, you'll probably have to pay other people to do them. On an author's income, that's not easy.
The bottom line is that if you already have extensive TV production experience, and if you and at least two other people can devote a minimum of two months full-time to the project (through the end of principal photography), and if you have a dozen friends who can act and don't have full-time jobs that limit your shooting schedule and don't want a huge chunk of money in exchange for acting, then it is marginally feasible to make a movie version of a book that doesn't involve any special effects.
So although I can think of (a few) authors who could pull off turning their books into feature films, not many of them are crazy enough to make the attempt. :-)
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for something involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless you can quantitatively determine what percentage of the copyright every single crew member, cast member, and extra should get. Such a scheme would also effectively mean that the work in question could never be commercially exploited after the period ends anyway, because you'd never get all of those hundreds of people to agree to a new license.
That's a completely different situation, because both the patent holder and the generic drug maker are on roughly equal footing in terms of their ability to exploiting the property. A drug company can make a drug and can market it readily; that's what they do. An individual who writes a book cannot realistically make a movie version of that book, because A. they don't have that kind of money, and B. they are not likely to have the required skill set.
By definition, any permanent license is a work for hire. So no, they couldn't do precisely that. However, the law would need to specify a maximum contract duration beyond which those limits kick in so that companies wouldn't license it for [lifetime of copyright minus one day].
It would be far easier to simply tax the past income from the work as part of the copyright fees. Actual income tends to be a good indicator of the value of a work.
Twenty years from creation (copyright is currently defined as starting at creation) is way too short. I'm about to publish a trilogy of novels, and I started on the first one in 2001. By your standards, six years of profiting from my works should be enough. That's laughable.
Twenty years from first publication might be reasonable, but it is still problematic for works of fiction, because it is a short enough period of time that a film studio wanting to make a movie would be sorely tempted to wait out the copyright rather than paying the author for the use of his or her work.
On the one hand, you have individuals creating works, and on the other hand, you have big corporations creating works. The former need a lot more time to exploit their works, because they have fewer resources for doing so. The latter can adequately exploit their works in just a few years, after which, they're essentially leeching off the public domain. A reasonable copyright scheme needs to consider both of those situations and treat them differently. For example, you might set a twenty year limit for works for hire, but make the duration be 75 years for copyright owned by individuals. Or you might require the copyright to be renewed every fifteen years at 1% of the property's total gross revenue, so a movie that brought in $40 million pays a $400,000 renewal fee every fifteen years, but a book that made only $7,000 pays a $70 renewal.
Either way, a flat twenty years is absurd.
Just like my laptop won't go to sleep while a print job is on its way to a printer, a properly designed car computer shouldn't go to sleep while the vehicle is in motion. That's not hard to prevent. The only case that's hard to deal with is a full electrical failure, but that would likely kill more than just the computer (power steering, power brakes), resulting in little hope for a human driver stopping the car safely, either.
I think it is safe to assume that the automatic driving system would be separate (ideally, by law) from the normal computers used to operate other systems (like the entertainment system). So that shouldn't be an issue. I'd give Google more common sense credit than that. :-)
My point is that humans' ability to drive is highly variable based on a lot of factors, such as age, time of day, health, and so on. Electronics tend to fail more predictably, based mostly on age and heat. Require the computers to be gutted every n years, and build them to last that long, and the failure rate should be very, very low. Besides, I'd expect any system like this (when deployed in production) to be built with at least three computers in a voting configuration, which would reduce the rate of computer-failure-induced accidents to somewhere near the level of statistical noise.
Yeah, I get the pitot tube reference, but there's nothing remotely equivalent in automobiles, because cars stay on the ground. What makes flying problematic is that there's only a narrow speed range in which the plane will stay in the air. Go too fast, and you stall. Go too slowly, and you descend. And the exact speed at which these transitions occur depends on the speed of the air around you, not just your speed relative to the ground.
Cars, by contrast, are a heck of a lot simpler. There's a maximum safe speed based on road conditions, but you know the vehicle's speed because you have wheels that are spinning on the road surface. And any self-driving car would also have GPS, which is your fallback if the wheel speed sensors all miraculously die simultaneously. It isn't perfectly accurate, but the rolling average over a couple of seconds will give you speeds accurate to within 1 MPH or so, which is an order of magnitude more accurate than is required to avoid going dangerously fast in even the worst weather conditions....
As for cameras, a self-driving car would have to ha
I sense the cornet servers are about to dump their cymbal tables.
No, the #1 reason it is insecure is that it isn't secure. The #1 reason it looks insecure is because it is targeted so often.
There's nothing wrong with doing that. The database shouldn't be accessible from arbitrary machines anyway, so having the credentials buys an attacker nothing. Besides, how the heck else are you going to provide credentials to a script? No, the real problems are that:
All of these fall under the category of sysadmin configuration mistakes, not flaws in the software, per se, though in some cases, the software may create files with poor permissions (or in an insecure way, allowing for race condition attacks) that exacerbate those problems.
To some degree, that points to the need for both better logging systems and better back-end software design. When I'm writing code, I'm very careful to explicitly have separate debug levels, with explicit comments about the security or insecurity of each of those levels. Those security-risky debug levels are turned on only for short periods of time while fixing authentication-related bugs, and any secret info goes into a separate log file in a location outside the web root so that you can't trivially access it by making requests to the server itself—and never to a syslog daemon (whose log files are potentially readable by other users on shared hosting systems).
I also segregate user credentials into separate objects/variables. With the exception of the numeric user ID itself, none of that info is ever used outside of my authentication and authorization code, which is segregated into separate files to avoid accidental disclosure. Thus, none of the authentication information ever appears in any object that could realistically get logged. The obvious exceptions are objects associated with the database, which ostensibly contain database auth information, but I'm never going to print_r a database connection object (assuming that's even possible), so that's mostly moot.
Actually, it is probably much lower, for several reasons: