There's an interesting thing that hitting a target with a high energy inert round often doesn't do a whole lot of damage. There was a case in WWII of some armed merchant cruisers (i.e. cargo ships with a couple of obsolete guns welded on) were mistaken for cruisers by some German raiders. The raiders engaged at long range with AP rounds and scored some direct hits. The AP rounds went all the way through the unarmored ships and out the other side without detonating (they were designed to penetrate a bit into armor and then detonate: the lack of armor caused the warhead to not trigger). The end result was that the ships wound up with some perfectly survivable 15" holes in them and managed to escape.
Good stuff here. I just have to add that this effect is seen throughout the age of gunpowder: unless gunnery hit the enemy magazine, all they were doing was making pinpricks in the opposing fleet. Keegan's Price of Admiralty describes Lord Nelson's fleet and the HMS Dreadnought being involved in these kinds of battles.
They want us to think there needs to be a whole new particle, eh? TFS makes it seem like the galaxy is just slightly dim, so, are we just having tons of mini clusters being washed out of our instruments' views?
I'm all about FF on the desktop. I've hesitated porting my entire Paranoia Setup (cookie whitelist, Noscript, big ole hosts file) to mobile though, because of the adjustment period which would be necessary to get my trusted sites (bank, mostly) working right. I suppose it's just laziness at this point. Let me fix that! Thanks.
Is a page a cohesive product, ads and all? The law is very unclear on this.
Uh, only in the sense of copyright is this a legal concern. It's your browser and your pipes; they can only cripple their own layout, not enforce your victimhood.
On a side note, what are people using currently for mobile browsing on Android? Every once in a while I'll pull up links friends send me, and after about 2 seconds of scrolling around some misaligned full page overlay shows up with the close button off-screen. I'd like to step up my blocking game on the phone...
Yeah, that's a tough one. About the only thing I can think of would be to just disable them entirely, as you said, breaking 'much' of the 'Net, just so you can be an informed data consumer.
But I'm the kind of person who disabled Flash entirely and uses Hosts & NoScript to break the 'Net already, so that would be a small step for me.
Where is this insistence on real-naming coming from? Not the users (ie, 'the product'), but the advertisers (ie, 'the customers'). The users know their friends' aliases, but the advertisers can't or won't make that leap without some help in the form of arbitrary Terms of Use.
The policy IS the issue. The drag performers are just a symptom.
Sorry, I've been only vaguely aware of your Time Cube-esque ranting over the past few months, but I've wondered the entire time and am now asking, why would someone need a program to edit their hosts file?
No, I didn't miss that point, but I'm probably communicating my own position somewhat unclearly.
You may be surprised that, in fact, I actually consider myself to be something of a privacy advocate, although probably not nearly as extreme as some. I guess I still see the good that the advertising revenue has done for the web as well as the bad, so I guess I've been taking a somewhat contrary position to balance the debate.
I love a well-reasoned contrary position; nothing wrong with forcing people to think about their own.
Keep in mind that I view "advertisement" and "intrusive personal data mining" as distinct issues as well, although it would be naive to dismiss the relationship, of course.
And I said I don't mind advertising, only the distinct feeling that there's an entity-like algorithm behind the scenes ticking boxes when I do things.
Ultimately, we're probably going to need some "complete opt-out" legislation, perhaps similar to the "do not call" list for telemarketers.
That would take quite an honest & vigorous debate to enact; I doubt ten years is enough time for this, so I prefer to advocate personal obfuscation *now*...
I assume you're asking about free as in "freedom"?
No, actually; As you point out, we have "Freedom"-free (at least at the moment before the Impending US Net Neutrality Murder has played out completely). I'm saying that giving up our privacy is a 'beer-cost' which we're certainly not getting full dollar value for, at least in the US.
"do we have any online privacy?", and unfortunately, the answer is "probably not". What is the danger of a lack of privacy, aside from being worthwhile in itself? The collected data could potentially be used to actually curtail freedom instead of simply passively eroding privacy - the temptation to do so is huge. So, yeah, I do believe it's a real concern, and it's going to be a huge issue in the next decade or so as we figure out how to balance all of this realistically.
Well said, but the danger of a lack of privacy is, should be, self-evident: If I've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to see.
All that being said, I still think you're pining for an internet which basically few people actually used except a handful of academics and enthusiasts (sort of like Linux fifteen years ago, I guess). I was there, I saw it, and it was pretty damn uninteresting and far less practical than the internet we have today.
The impracticality protected us from being interesting enough to spy on. The impracticality for the average computer owner kept them off; ubiquity of the internet makes the target interesting enough to spy upon. "News for Nerds" vs. "News for Everyone"... I know it's not coming back, by the way... I just miss it.
I think you mean website developers are so reliant on JS these days, that they think they can't write a site without such heavy use of it that sneezing at it will break their site.
Javascript does some good stuff. When I'm building something, I make sure that the good stuff it does is on the same domain as the website on which I want it done, though. Your mileage will vary.
Of course I use Google for searching, but I've moved on to Startpage at present to minimize my Google footprint. Youtube existed before Google bought it, and it was unarguably a better place, if not quite as convenient with respect to speed or uploading.
And that is what I think you've missed, here in the comments of a story about how onerous it is to avoid becoming a data point in dozens, hundreds of advertisers' and Snowden-knows-what-else's data files:
We don't have a choice any more.
Back when the internet was hard to use, we didn't have mom or grandma our Cousin Suzy to worry about shining a light on us. The advertising you seem to celebrate has undoubtedly expanded the internet and 'free' content availability, but this is the very situation which I'm "overly nostalgic" against.
For the record, I'm not against ads or seeing them; I'm against that relationship of one-ad-on-one-site and the rest of my browsing habits being linked or traceable or contributory outside of that scenario where I've seen an ad on one particular site. You'll say that these interlinks and the industry behind it have 'made money' out of views, but, again, my position is that the Internet is for things the Host loves, not an opportunity to make money from the mere fact of traffic.
Every one of them free for you and paid for partially or entirely with ad revenue.
Money is not the only cost. And we're barely into the debate of what the real cost of 'free' sites is.
One anecdote: I do the.NET for a Fortune 200's 'dotCom' site. I was testing something the other day, functionality based on presence of a cookie generated from a different page view and had cleared all cookies and reloaded our homepage. Other than our site, I was floored to see one hundred and forty tracking and advertising cookie domains (not just cookies) populate my list. Do you seriously still think that the 'free internet' is free?
And that fact is largely to blame for most of the problems I have with the internet.
The internet used to be a labor of love: if you loved something, you had a site. It wasn't about making a buck off of people. Call me whatever name you like, but I'd rather 300 baud of people who love what they're hosting than 1Gbps of adware.
Unfortunately, for all the talk of micro-payments, I've never seen a serious attempt at implementing them.
So the problem isn't that commercial websites are greedy, it's that banks, et al, are greedy? Surely there's a simple solution staring everyone in the face that I can't think of right now either.
Also, I'm not discounting the fact that Google is a big part of the Ad Thing's perpetuation. Finding [N] on the internet used to be done differently when you weren't guaranteed money for it...
Slashdot Mirror
There's an interesting thing that hitting a target with a high energy inert round often doesn't do a whole lot of damage. There was a case in WWII of some armed merchant cruisers (i.e. cargo ships with a couple of obsolete guns welded on) were mistaken for cruisers by some German raiders. The raiders engaged at long range with AP rounds and scored some direct hits. The AP rounds went all the way through the unarmored ships and out the other side without detonating (they were designed to penetrate a bit into armor and then detonate: the lack of armor caused the warhead to not trigger). The end result was that the ships wound up with some perfectly survivable 15" holes in them and managed to escape.
Good stuff here. I just have to add that this effect is seen throughout the age of gunpowder: unless gunnery hit the enemy magazine, all they were doing was making pinpricks in the opposing fleet. Keegan's Price of Admiralty describes Lord Nelson's fleet and the HMS Dreadnought being involved in these kinds of battles.
MAXIMUM of 8 characters
That's not true at all; my password for Wells Fargo is 12 characters, and rejects if I try just the first 8.
You're not wrong that their minimum standard is weak, though. And I'm not sure about case-sensitivity.
aka "human garbage"
It's actually your adblocker pegging your CPU, hoss.
Drinking is not a game, son.
They want us to think there needs to be a whole new particle, eh? TFS makes it seem like the galaxy is just slightly dim, so, are we just having tons of mini clusters being washed out of our instruments' views?
I'm all about FF on the desktop. I've hesitated porting my entire Paranoia Setup (cookie whitelist, Noscript, big ole hosts file) to mobile though, because of the adjustment period which would be necessary to get my trusted sites (bank, mostly) working right. I suppose it's just laziness at this point. Let me fix that! Thanks.
Are you fishing for traffic or something?
Is a page a cohesive product, ads and all? The law is very unclear on this.
Uh, only in the sense of copyright is this a legal concern. It's your browser and your pipes; they can only cripple their own layout, not enforce your victimhood.
On a side note, what are people using currently for mobile browsing on Android? Every once in a while I'll pull up links friends send me, and after about 2 seconds of scrolling around some misaligned full page overlay shows up with the close button off-screen. I'd like to step up my blocking game on the phone...
I learned Project Management in grad school from Ted Kozman, and his guiding philosophy was the principle my peers and I codified as Kozman's Law:
If you fail to prepare to plan, plan to prepare to fail.
"Ham Shop"?
"Ham Shop"???
Re: Akamai
Yeah, that's a tough one. About the only thing I can think of would be to just disable them entirely, as you said, breaking 'much' of the 'Net, just so you can be an informed data consumer.
But I'm the kind of person who disabled Flash entirely and uses Hosts & NoScript to break the 'Net already, so that would be a small step for me.
Good luck to all of us.
0 = 1 ?
I suspect that what we'll eventually find is that 0 => 1 + -1
The policy isn't the issue.
Yes it is.
Where is this insistence on real-naming coming from? Not the users (ie, 'the product'), but the advertisers (ie, 'the customers'). The users know their friends' aliases, but the advertisers can't or won't make that leap without some help in the form of arbitrary Terms of Use.
The policy IS the issue. The drag performers are just a symptom.
There is a Youtube video (Yes, it is Flash
It's 2014. You can disable your Flash plugin and it plays just fine.
Sorry, I've been only vaguely aware of your Time Cube-esque ranting over the past few months, but I've wondered the entire time and am now asking, why would someone need a program to edit their hosts file?
The rest of you forgive the off-topic, please.
This just in: China was considering paying for an operating system!
IMO, the greatest video game of all time is Star Control 2 (1993)
Great nominee but I'd go with Mail-Order Monsters (1985), personally.
No, I didn't miss that point, but I'm probably communicating my own position somewhat unclearly.
You may be surprised that, in fact, I actually consider myself to be something of a privacy advocate, although probably not nearly as extreme as some. I guess I still see the good that the advertising revenue has done for the web as well as the bad, so I guess I've been taking a somewhat contrary position to balance the debate.
I love a well-reasoned contrary position; nothing wrong with forcing people to think about their own.
Keep in mind that I view "advertisement" and "intrusive personal data mining" as distinct issues as well, although it would be naive to dismiss the relationship, of course.
And I said I don't mind advertising, only the distinct feeling that there's an entity-like algorithm behind the scenes ticking boxes when I do things.
Ultimately, we're probably going to need some "complete opt-out" legislation, perhaps similar to the "do not call" list for telemarketers.
That would take quite an honest & vigorous debate to enact; I doubt ten years is enough time for this, so I prefer to advocate personal obfuscation *now*...
I assume you're asking about free as in "freedom"?
No, actually; As you point out, we have "Freedom"-free (at least at the moment before the Impending US Net Neutrality Murder has played out completely). I'm saying that giving up our privacy is a 'beer-cost' which we're certainly not getting full dollar value for, at least in the US.
"do we have any online privacy?", and unfortunately, the answer is "probably not". What is the danger of a lack of privacy, aside from being worthwhile in itself? The collected data could potentially be used to actually curtail freedom instead of simply passively eroding privacy - the temptation to do so is huge. So, yeah, I do believe it's a real concern, and it's going to be a huge issue in the next decade or so as we figure out how to balance all of this realistically.
Well said, but the danger of a lack of privacy is, should be, self-evident: If I've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to see.
All that being said, I still think you're pining for an internet which basically few people actually used except a handful of academics and enthusiasts (sort of like Linux fifteen years ago, I guess). I was there, I saw it, and it was pretty damn uninteresting and far less practical than the internet we have today.
The impracticality protected us from being interesting enough to spy on. The impracticality for the average computer owner kept them off; ubiquity of the internet makes the target interesting enough to spy upon. "News for Nerds" vs. "News for Everyone"... I know it's not coming back, by the way... I just miss it.
I think you mean website developers are so reliant on JS these days, that they think they can't write a site without such heavy use of it that sneezing at it will break their site.
Javascript does some good stuff. When I'm building something, I make sure that the good stuff it does is on the same domain as the website on which I want it done, though. Your mileage will vary.
Of course I use Google for searching, but I've moved on to Startpage at present to minimize my Google footprint. Youtube existed before Google bought it, and it was unarguably a better place, if not quite as convenient with respect to speed or uploading.
And that is what I think you've missed, here in the comments of a story about how onerous it is to avoid becoming a data point in dozens, hundreds of advertisers' and Snowden-knows-what-else's data files:
We don't have a choice any more.
Back when the internet was hard to use, we didn't have mom or grandma our Cousin Suzy to worry about shining a light on us. The advertising you seem to celebrate has undoubtedly expanded the internet and 'free' content availability, but this is the very situation which I'm "overly nostalgic" against.
For the record, I'm not against ads or seeing them; I'm against that relationship of one-ad-on-one-site and the rest of my browsing habits being linked or traceable or contributory outside of that scenario where I've seen an ad on one particular site. You'll say that these interlinks and the industry behind it have 'made money' out of views, but, again, my position is that the Internet is for things the Host loves, not an opportunity to make money from the mere fact of traffic.
Every one of them free for you and paid for partially or entirely with ad revenue.
Money is not the only cost. And we're barely into the debate of what the real cost of 'free' sites is.
One anecdote: I do the .NET for a Fortune 200's 'dotCom' site. I was testing something the other day, functionality based on presence of a cookie generated from a different page view and had cleared all cookies and reloaded our homepage. Other than our site, I was floored to see one hundred and forty tracking and advertising cookie domains (not just cookies) populate my list. Do you seriously still think that the 'free internet' is free?
The web is largely funded by advertisement.
And that fact is largely to blame for most of the problems I have with the internet.
The internet used to be a labor of love: if you loved something, you had a site. It wasn't about making a buck off of people. Call me whatever name you like, but I'd rather 300 baud of people who love what they're hosting than 1Gbps of adware.
Please share your newsletter link.
You wouldn't be disallowing scripts from "fsdn.com" like I was, hm? That should do the trick.
So the problem isn't that commercial websites are greedy, it's that banks, et al, are greedy? Surely there's a simple solution staring everyone in the face that I can't think of right now either.
Also, I'm not discounting the fact that Google is a big part of the Ad Thing's perpetuation. Finding [N] on the internet used to be done differently when you weren't guaranteed money for it...