Yes it's a non sequitur. To paraphrase my original comment - Oxford City Council may have had legitimate reasons for wishing CCTVs in taxis e.g. crime investigation. Following up by saying some councils abused RIPA may be true but it has absolutely no bearing on my comment or Oxford City Councils intentions regarding this measure. It literally does not follow what I said. It's a non sequitur.
I'm sure digital property would greatly annoy certain interest groups which is why I believe the best chance it has of taking off is if it was legislated into existence. It could also be preferentially favoured in the tax regime which would be an incentive for publishers and consumers to favour it. For example in the UK people gripe that ebooks incur VAT but that's because you're buying a software licence, not a book. If people actually bought the book then it would not incur VAT and would therefore be 20% cheaper. Movies & music do incur VAT but perhaps some lower rate could be set for digital content or licenced content even higher.
I'm a realist so I don't except such a thing to happen any time soon unless of course people start pushing for it. It boggles my mind that people so readily lock themselves into a service for their music, videos and books. One might understand it of console / computer games since they're software programs which are inherently platform specific. But anything which is just data really should be treated like property assuming it contains suitable DRM controls there to protect the owner of the content rather than just the rights holder.
Well people can copy physical DVDs and CDs and even books right now so I don't see it as being much of a flaw, as much as just a reflection of the way things are. I'd also note that suppliers could watermark content and identify it in the wild. Perhaps players could even refuse to play watermarked content for which they have no corresponding ownership key. Aside from that if there were such a thing as digital property and a common platform supported by all devices then perhaps the incentive for piracy would diminish because a vibrant second hand market would lower the cost of ownership and also of brand new content.
..Bitcoin can digitally sign money and facilitate transfer of ownership, I really see no reason that other forms of digital property couldn't do likewise. It might require some kind of vendor neutral DRM and key escrow to enable transfer of ownership and stop people being able to play their old copies, but I think it would be quite feasible to do.
The main issue is that people don't actually own the music they purchase, they own a licence to the music and the licence is flagged non transferrable. That is why I believe the first step is for a country to precisely describe in law what digital property is and also through some means encourage its adoption in a fair and universal fashion.
Pretty icy. They also discontinued flash mobile, same week. I think we're going to see a new class of development tool from adobe here in the next few months. All of this is a leadup to that, I think.
Not necessarily. I think it's quite feasible for them to repurpose their authoring tools so they crap out HTML 5 instead of flash content, at least in those cases where there is analogous functionality.
I think someone else is being paranoid here. Oxford City Council is not "the government", and I expect the intent of CCTV is to assist in criminal investigations and to protect the driver and passengers from crimes that often occur in taxis. It may well be that it has been mandated in a heavy handed manner, but to think this is big brother spying on you is absurd and paranoid.
PS Move works like a Wii Plus remote, but is more accurate. The remote relays it's pitch, rotation etc. and the PS3 does some simply geometry to track the ball on the end to work out it's exact position in space. It's remarkably accurate. That said there haven't been many standout titles for it. Like Kinect, most games only include a move experience as some kind of afterthought, e.g. a mini game or whatever, or throw it in as an alternative control scheme. I tried the controls with Killzone 3 and thought it was pretty awkward though some people appear to like it. More successful are where it was integrated with EyePet and Heavy Rain strangely. Best example of it in use has to be Tumble where you can pick up blocks and build towers to complete challenges.
Kinect isn't any better. Defenders will claim how it's oh so much more than an EyeToy but the net result is a glorified EyeToy. Most of the games rely on you performing simplistic exaggerated body motions and as may be expected not many traditional games map onto simplistic exaggerated body motions.
So due to the nature and limitations of the device it has sunk almost immediately into a morass of shovelware with dance & fitness games massively over represented and others which have throwaway mini games bolted onto the side of traditional control main game. Some titles do standout however such as Once Upon a Monster for doing something interesting with the tech.
The main buzz for the tech appears to be from hackers who discovered you can do some neat things with a camera with some depth finding capabilities.
The US enshrines freedom of speech but it doesn't enshrine an individual's right to privacy. The EU does via the Directive on Data Protection so it offers a lot more protections to individuals. It prevents some of the abuses that we see mentioned in the US. e.g. companies reading their employees private email without permission, personal information being used outside of its stated purpose, or being sold and merged without a user's permission, etc. The US does have some protections in place around some particular areas, e.g. personal health information, HIPAA and protections to curb nuisance caused by personal data such as junk faxes, telemarketers. But its nothing compared to Europe.
Depends I guess if there is an algorithm. Apple (assuming they were smart) could use genuinely random noise to generate 128-bit uuids. They could maintain a list of the ones in use and there would no possibility of generating one except by (extremely slim) chance. Of course maybe they do just allocate them from a block or in some other predictable way. In which case they're fucked. As they would if there is a way to get an iPhone to cough up its id, e.g. by walking past while doing a bluetooth discovery, pretending to be a free wifi spot, nmaping phones on the local wifi or some other ruse.
They'd have to fallback on IP analysis and perhaps subtle differences in behaviour between a genuine device and a fake one.
More interesting would be if someone crafts an app (an android app even) which can eavesdrop or provoke nearby iPhones to yield their ids. Perhaps the surrogate siri app could even implement this functionality - you walk down the street, the app harvests a bunch of ids. If one id gets banned it goes off onto the next, or perhaps uses them in rotation. You could leech off the local population indefinitely like that until Apple got its act together and changed the protocol, used encryption via keys embedded into the iPhone or worked with mobile operators to identify rogue phones using their IP addresses.
Firefox more than holds it's own against those other browsers and I suggest the recent changes to more timely updates are an indication that they are streamlining their release process.
When you build off of GPL software you're legally obligated to release the modifications, so yeah, Google releasing a significant portion of Android is not "extra" it is the minimum required by law. That's not to say they did not also release some code they did not strictly have to, but since they had promised to do so, changing their mind at this stage would have been willfully misleading consumers and partners.
Only the kernel is GPL and they've been releasing their changes for that all along. The rest of it, all the user land stuff is BSD licenced. So Google can release it as and when they see fit. Or not at all.
My own thoughts are that they withheld 3.0 simply to piss on Amazon's parade and to give their tier 1 partners a honeymoon free from cheaper competing products. It may well be that a lot of the phone functionality was bitrotten / discarded in 3.x in their race to make it work on tablets so there is that too. But mainly the Amazon thing.
Anyway I am very happy that they've opened up again. This is great news for everyone.
They only get to see your content assuming your own server grants them access through its response for them to see your content. So I guess if you were uber worried about what you may or may not expose that you would audit that code extremely closely and deny access to content you didn't wish them to see. Obviously below that point you have to trust the code to behave the way its meant to behave but I don't see that as being any different from other kinds of software. You have the source, you have the control over how it runs & hosting, so yes there may be bugs but ultimately you have total control over what it does or does not disclose.
What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...
Well you've just answered it. All the source code is there to run your own pod so if you are paranoid about the official host you can run your own and disclose what you like. See http://podupti.me/ for some pods that already exist. As for reviewing the code, the code is all there too on https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora so review it to your own satisfaction or not. Diaspora makes no bones about being in alpha so I'm quite certain there are bugs to be found. Doesn't mean that the principle is sound and from reviewing some of the federation protocols in the wiki it appears to take reasonable security precautions, and takes advantage of emerging standards for distributed comment / pubsub feedback such as Salmon.
Can you review Facebook's code? Can you see what data they capture on your behaviour and activities and what they do with it? Can you host your own code? The answer is no you can't. Facebook Europe does offer some toos for limited disclosure of data but certainly not enough to satisfy people who are identified major omissions in it.
Diaspora is like Facebook mashed up with Twitter. You have a stream to write musings and to listen to other people's. You subscribe to topics using hash tags and you have "aspects" (akin to groups / circles) to put associates / friends / family / followers into. Where it might appeal to geeks or just people interested in their privacy is that privacy is concretely defined and the project itself is open source so there are likely to be many hosts cropping up over time. Once hosts pop up you should be able to export your data as xml and import it into the new one. It would be nice if hosts joined together with some Jabber like IPC so it didn't strictly matter where you or your friends resided as long as they were reachable between nodes.
One area of particular appeal I see for the project is in serving enterprises. I can see Diaspora being pretty useful for places that want a facebook like application to serve an internal audience. e.g. you have 20,000 people in the company you might use aspects and the wall for general team and company level chitchat. Perhaps that's how the project ultimately intends to make money, selling support to these places.
Anyway I think it's early days for the project. It got a lot of bad press about 12 months back but its really rolling out in alpha form. It's still slow (and currently suffering from a bit of a Slashdotting), but it shows a lot of promise.
Diaspora has only really just launched and it works reasonably well for it too. It's a little slow but the experience is slick and I would have thought the privacy guarantees would meant at least geeks but possibly a wider audience would find the attraction in using it.
You can't book Ryanair through other websites. You have to do it through their own site, running the gauntlet of nickel and diming that transforms your "free" flight into one costing 160 euros. If Ryanair did launch a service to this godforsaken volcano they'd advertise it as Gran Canaria with small print explaining that breathable air, fire retardent clothing & rescue was a €300 surcharge.
That's what I do but I don't think that justifies ubuntu sucking by default. And if I were looking at installing a dist on a VM or bare machine I certainly wouldn't choose Ubuntu at the moment. If people get fed up with a dist they'll favour another one and I think Fedora will be one of the main beneficiaries.
Ubuntu wasn't always annoying. I think until recently it was one of the most polished user friendly experiences there was. I think with their recent missteps that it is becoming annoying. Unity sucks and there is no indication in the latest release that the penny has dropped in Ubuntu land what they need to do to fix it.
A lot of people might contemplate going over to Fedora. It works pretty well with GNOME Shell. I doubt the different package manager means anything most of the time but yum has one pretty compelling feature - the presto plugin for yum which downloads and applies delta rpms. For the life of me I do not understand why deltas haven't been a standard feature of every dist for the last decade. Downloading a 30MB file just to apply a fix which probably only touched a few lines makes no damned sense.
I think part of the beauty of complex games is seeing how you can exploit them. I used to love Nethack for this but inevitably they plugged virtually all of the exploits and I think in the process killed half of the charm of the game.
Windows works more than adequately for me and the vast majority of people who buy a new PC. It has a wealth of commercial and free software, games and is the defacto supported platform for virtually every peripheral and gadget. For most people there is simply no reason to switch.
I'd go as far as saying it's a waste of time persuading individuals to switch. The strategy has never worked and never will. There aren't many incentives in switching and plenty of disincentives. It would be far more productive to evangelise products that are OS agnostic - Firefox, Libre/OpenOffice, PostgreSQL, Java etc. while refining WINE so that apps like Steam run on Linux. If this were to be done and people cared more about their apps then perhaps they wouldn't care as much what the OS was underneath.
The saddest part is other LEGO games fly like shit off a shovel. And you only have to look at the likes of Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters to imagine the possibilities for a LEGO MMO game done properly for kids.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it's a non sequitur. To paraphrase my original comment - Oxford City Council may have had legitimate reasons for wishing CCTVs in taxis e.g. crime investigation. Following up by saying some councils abused RIPA may be true but it has absolutely no bearing on my comment or Oxford City Councils intentions regarding this measure. It literally does not follow what I said. It's a non sequitur.
I'm a realist so I don't except such a thing to happen any time soon unless of course people start pushing for it. It boggles my mind that people so readily lock themselves into a service for their music, videos and books. One might understand it of console / computer games since they're software programs which are inherently platform specific. But anything which is just data really should be treated like property assuming it contains suitable DRM controls there to protect the owner of the content rather than just the rights holder.
Well people can copy physical DVDs and CDs and even books right now so I don't see it as being much of a flaw, as much as just a reflection of the way things are. I'd also note that suppliers could watermark content and identify it in the wild. Perhaps players could even refuse to play watermarked content for which they have no corresponding ownership key. Aside from that if there were such a thing as digital property and a common platform supported by all devices then perhaps the incentive for piracy would diminish because a vibrant second hand market would lower the cost of ownership and also of brand new content.
The main issue is that people don't actually own the music they purchase, they own a licence to the music and the licence is flagged non transferrable. That is why I believe the first step is for a country to precisely describe in law what digital property is and also through some means encourage its adoption in a fair and universal fashion.
Your response is called a non sequitur.
Pretty icy. They also discontinued flash mobile, same week. I think we're going to see a new class of development tool from adobe here in the next few months. All of this is a leadup to that, I think.
Not necessarily. I think it's quite feasible for them to repurpose their authoring tools so they crap out HTML 5 instead of flash content, at least in those cases where there is analogous functionality.
I think someone else is being paranoid here. Oxford City Council is not "the government", and I expect the intent of CCTV is to assist in criminal investigations and to protect the driver and passengers from crimes that often occur in taxis. It may well be that it has been mandated in a heavy handed manner, but to think this is big brother spying on you is absurd and paranoid.
And Sony haven't done that? Oh wait they did.
PS Move works like a Wii Plus remote, but is more accurate. The remote relays it's pitch, rotation etc. and the PS3 does some simply geometry to track the ball on the end to work out it's exact position in space. It's remarkably accurate. That said there haven't been many standout titles for it. Like Kinect, most games only include a move experience as some kind of afterthought, e.g. a mini game or whatever, or throw it in as an alternative control scheme. I tried the controls with Killzone 3 and thought it was pretty awkward though some people appear to like it. More successful are where it was integrated with EyePet and Heavy Rain strangely. Best example of it in use has to be Tumble where you can pick up blocks and build towers to complete challenges.
So due to the nature and limitations of the device it has sunk almost immediately into a morass of shovelware with dance & fitness games massively over represented and others which have throwaway mini games bolted onto the side of traditional control main game. Some titles do standout however such as Once Upon a Monster for doing something interesting with the tech.
The main buzz for the tech appears to be from hackers who discovered you can do some neat things with a camera with some depth finding capabilities.
The US enshrines freedom of speech but it doesn't enshrine an individual's right to privacy. The EU does via the Directive on Data Protection so it offers a lot more protections to individuals. It prevents some of the abuses that we see mentioned in the US. e.g. companies reading their employees private email without permission, personal information being used outside of its stated purpose, or being sold and merged without a user's permission, etc. The US does have some protections in place around some particular areas, e.g. personal health information, HIPAA and protections to curb nuisance caused by personal data such as junk faxes, telemarketers. But its nothing compared to Europe.
They'd have to fallback on IP analysis and perhaps subtle differences in behaviour between a genuine device and a fake one.
More interesting would be if someone crafts an app (an android app even) which can eavesdrop or provoke nearby iPhones to yield their ids. Perhaps the surrogate siri app could even implement this functionality - you walk down the street, the app harvests a bunch of ids. If one id gets banned it goes off onto the next, or perhaps uses them in rotation. You could leech off the local population indefinitely like that until Apple got its act together and changed the protocol, used encryption via keys embedded into the iPhone or worked with mobile operators to identify rogue phones using their IP addresses.
Firefox more than holds it's own against those other browsers and I suggest the recent changes to more timely updates are an indication that they are streamlining their release process.
When you build off of GPL software you're legally obligated to release the modifications, so yeah, Google releasing a significant portion of Android is not "extra" it is the minimum required by law. That's not to say they did not also release some code they did not strictly have to, but since they had promised to do so, changing their mind at this stage would have been willfully misleading consumers and partners.
Only the kernel is GPL and they've been releasing their changes for that all along. The rest of it, all the user land stuff is BSD licenced. So Google can release it as and when they see fit. Or not at all.
My own thoughts are that they withheld 3.0 simply to piss on Amazon's parade and to give their tier 1 partners a honeymoon free from cheaper competing products. It may well be that a lot of the phone functionality was bitrotten / discarded in 3.x in their race to make it work on tablets so there is that too. But mainly the Amazon thing.
Anyway I am very happy that they've opened up again. This is great news for everyone.
They only get to see your content assuming your own server grants them access through its response for them to see your content. So I guess if you were uber worried about what you may or may not expose that you would audit that code extremely closely and deny access to content you didn't wish them to see. Obviously below that point you have to trust the code to behave the way its meant to behave but I don't see that as being any different from other kinds of software. You have the source, you have the control over how it runs & hosting, so yes there may be bugs but ultimately you have total control over what it does or does not disclose.
What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...
Well you've just answered it. All the source code is there to run your own pod so if you are paranoid about the official host you can run your own and disclose what you like. See http://podupti.me/ for some pods that already exist. As for reviewing the code, the code is all there too on https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora so review it to your own satisfaction or not. Diaspora makes no bones about being in alpha so I'm quite certain there are bugs to be found. Doesn't mean that the principle is sound and from reviewing some of the federation protocols in the wiki it appears to take reasonable security precautions, and takes advantage of emerging standards for distributed comment / pubsub feedback such as Salmon.
Can you review Facebook's code? Can you see what data they capture on your behaviour and activities and what they do with it? Can you host your own code? The answer is no you can't. Facebook Europe does offer some toos for limited disclosure of data but certainly not enough to satisfy people who are identified major omissions in it.
One area of particular appeal I see for the project is in serving enterprises. I can see Diaspora being pretty useful for places that want a facebook like application to serve an internal audience. e.g. you have 20,000 people in the company you might use aspects and the wall for general team and company level chitchat. Perhaps that's how the project ultimately intends to make money, selling support to these places.
Anyway I think it's early days for the project. It got a lot of bad press about 12 months back but its really rolling out in alpha form. It's still slow (and currently suffering from a bit of a Slashdotting), but it shows a lot of promise.
Diaspora has only really just launched and it works reasonably well for it too. It's a little slow but the experience is slick and I would have thought the privacy guarantees would meant at least geeks but possibly a wider audience would find the attraction in using it.
You can't book Ryanair through other websites. You have to do it through their own site, running the gauntlet of nickel and diming that transforms your "free" flight into one costing 160 euros. If Ryanair did launch a service to this godforsaken volcano they'd advertise it as Gran Canaria with small print explaining that breathable air, fire retardent clothing & rescue was a €300 surcharge.
That's what I do but I don't think that justifies ubuntu sucking by default. And if I were looking at installing a dist on a VM or bare machine I certainly wouldn't choose Ubuntu at the moment. If people get fed up with a dist they'll favour another one and I think Fedora will be one of the main beneficiaries.
A lot of people might contemplate going over to Fedora. It works pretty well with GNOME Shell. I doubt the different package manager means anything most of the time but yum has one pretty compelling feature - the presto plugin for yum which downloads and applies delta rpms. For the life of me I do not understand why deltas haven't been a standard feature of every dist for the last decade. Downloading a 30MB file just to apply a fix which probably only touched a few lines makes no damned sense.
I think part of the beauty of complex games is seeing how you can exploit them. I used to love Nethack for this but inevitably they plugged virtually all of the exploits and I think in the process killed half of the charm of the game.
I'd go as far as saying it's a waste of time persuading individuals to switch. The strategy has never worked and never will. There aren't many incentives in switching and plenty of disincentives. It would be far more productive to evangelise products that are OS agnostic - Firefox, Libre/OpenOffice, PostgreSQL, Java etc. while refining WINE so that apps like Steam run on Linux. If this were to be done and people cared more about their apps then perhaps they wouldn't care as much what the OS was underneath.
The saddest part is other LEGO games fly like shit off a shovel. And you only have to look at the likes of Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters to imagine the possibilities for a LEGO MMO game done properly for kids.