People needed antivirus software from your "friends" because your OSes were vulnerable in the first place, having a track record of being hackable by displaying a picture (e.g. the wmf bug) or by being present on the Internet (e.g. the "blaster" bug).
Also, people could accuse you of abusing your monopoly position because 1) you had a monopoly on the desktop OS market and 2) you had a history of taking advantage of that position; both being problems that you could fix at any time if you really had any interest.
Accusing antivirus vendors of being the cause for your OS requiring twice as much RAM as its/successor/ is inelegant and the accuses themselves are unbelievable to me.
PC manufacturers have been using these for a long time. They started out as 8-bit MCUs with a builtin ROM and have been getting more and more powerful with time.
Technically, the iPhone wasn't any more innovative than what Palm had already created.
Whatever. Dude, I owned a Palm back in the 90's. I also, shortly before the iPhone came out, bought my first "smartphone" -- a Symbian device -- which made me conclude that there just wasn't really any use for having a smartphone.
You're looking back at the first iPhone with rose-tinted glasses. With a Symbian phone of the era, you could take pictures that did not suck, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it had a toy camera. With a Symbian phone, you could do video calls, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it didn't have a front-facing camera. You could use a Symbian phone as a navigator, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it didn't have a GPS receiver. Most importantly, the first iPhone wasn't programmable, so it couldn't even be classified as a smartphone. And I'm not even talking about nerdy features such as Bluetooth, FM radio, SD card slots and IR blasters, that you would find on a Symbian phone but not on the iPhone.
I think that people bought the iPhone because it was an innovative combination of design and usability, not because of its technical advancements or intrinsic usefulness. Also, it was marketed well.
We are social animals: our lives are intermingled with the lives of the other persons with whom we interact. In particular, we can't just choose to go to work earlier or later arbitrarily, because our timetables depend on the timetables of others: means of transportation (trains, buses, airplanes), factors of production (markets, banks, factories), people who will be our customers, people who will be our competitors, people whom we will be working for, people who will be working for us, people who will be working with us. So most people have no freedom to decide when to work. On the other hand, governments have neither the power nor any technical means to tell everybody when to work. Even if they could, supposedly in the case of an authoritarian government and a society that is perfectly receptive to its directives, the net result would be the same that we can achieve in the real world by simply shifting the hands of the clock.
There are many things that "people" find annoying, and would probably be overwhelming against them in opinion polls: paying taxes certainly, but also dying in car accidents because of working in the dark. Decisions shouldn't be taken by the people's belly; they should be based on rational evidence.
Apple could just make the battery of their phones removable; instead, they ask their customers to throw away half a day of their life in order to drive to an authorized extortion center and wait for hours for the battery to be replaced, while paying 89 € (plus 12,20 € of shipping fees) for the privilege of the experience.
In order to implement "fast lanes", an ISP must throttle non-"fast lane" packets, which is a negation of net neutrality.
Moreover, how would a "fast lane" be defined? If the "fast lane" is defined by the kind of traffic, then the ISP would have to inspect its customers' packets in order to determine the application-level exchange that they are part of, and this again would violate net neutrality (and the customers' privacy, but we already know that that battle is lost). And more importantly, such inspection would be impossible with TLS, which means that a protocol-based "fast lane" wouldn't work with most of the Internet.
It is possible for "fast lanes" to be defined by the packets' destination IP address, which would mean that the ISP could, say, slow down packets going to and from Vimeo in order to speed up packets going to and from YouTube. And since only large video providers would be important enough to be part of a destination-based "fast lane" option on an ISP's network, this would be unfair against small players and market newcomers, and of course a violation of net neutrality.
This law proposal seems to me at best damage control by a party that received a larger-than-expected backlash from what they perceived to be just ordinary lobby service, and at worst an attempt to enshrine in law the negation of net neutrality. I'll be happy to be proved wrong.
This functionality cannot be used by an open source kernel. This functionality cannot be used by an open source userspace. Why should it be maintained by the open source community? It doesn't belong on kernel.org; it should stay within Google together with the rest of the binary nonsense that they develop and keep in order to fulfill their contractual obligations with Disney.
Nobody said that DRM in the kernel was "the end of the world". The point is that asking the open source developers, that is the very people whom this functionality is designed to mistrust and block, to maintain its code forever, is immoral.
private, non-government, corporations didn't exist in Italy at the time?
What? Private, non-government corporations were *the main sponsors* of Mussolini at the time. Entrepreneurs were freaking out because of the strikes and factory occupations by the workers in the 20s and welcomed his ascent to power as the best insurance against further disruption of their economic interests and of the established social order.
Java and ActionScript couldn't access the host memory, too, but that didn't prevent the Java plugin and Flash from becoming the preferred carriers for browser malware. And those ran type- and memory- safe languages, not C. In order to reach an awful lot of people, an exploit needn't work on every machine, it's enough for it to target the most commonly used platform. Given that the browser landscape has been converging towards a monoculture lately, this could become even easier than it was in the past.
But JavaScript programs cannot smash a buffer and write into another variable, as is required by the C memory model, and JavaScript libraries are not distributed in minified form (before development).
Humanity is not OK with suing children at any age.
Deal with cheating the way it's meant to be done, and if you really care about the public image of your company, drop that lawsuit already, instead of making up supposedly unwritten, omertà-like rules of business life in order to justify your antisocial behaviour. DMCA is not a tool for businesses to suppress things they don't like.
Am I alone in thinking that giving CPU-level access to our browser to ad networks, hackers, scammers, governments* from all around the world with no authentication and no accountability whatsoever** is a bad idea? Haven't we seen what happened in the past with Java and ActiveX***? Moreover, back then at least Java ran "safe" high-level bytecode, whereas this thing will give to honest programmers the joy of buffer-smashing into adjacent variables, and to dishonest programmers the power to mine bitcoins at nearly native speeds! And once the next hip web frameworks start relying on this technology, there's no way we'll be able to disable it if we want to access the Internet as it's intended.
* in no particular order of undesirability.
** the same-origin policy helps but is not enough, we can't make a trust decision every time we click on a URL, especially now that browser authors have made it so difficult to even see what a link points to, or even understand whether something is a link in the first place. Also, web developers tend to include large amounts of third-party code that they do not inspect, and if such code comes in binary form even before they minify it, then they won't be able to audit that code even nominally.
*** I'm not adding JavaScript to the list. See? I'm not an old person. I like new things!
An average person would have to work for years to buy that car (without eating while doing so). He will flaunt its destruction only to have people talk about him on twitter.
I also live in Europe, and the first time I saw the night sky the way our ancestors had seen it for millions of years wasn't before I got 20-something years old. I happened to spend the night on a small island with little artificial lighting; for some reason I threw a random look to the sky, and I saw an unexpected spectacle that left me so amazed that I wouldn't look back down for minutes. I discovered that the Milky Way was something that one could actually see in the sky, in its immense size, and not only in pictures on a book. It was quite a revelation, I couldn't believe that such a sight had been denied to me for a lifetime, without me - or anybody near me - ever knowing.
...so I think they have very little to teach in that respect.
Moreover, what they are publishing is merely a style guide, and has nothing to with the fact that “many developers aren’t very interested in documentation aspect”. It is only useful to make the documentation from third-party contributors look like the one that Google have written themselves. It won’t help with the technical quality of anyone’s else documentation.
The title is sensationalistic. Even the original bug the author talks about, calling it repeatedly a "Java" bug, was actually a bug in the Apache Commons Collections library, not in the platform, and it could only be triggered if a server using the library allowed customers to provide serialized data for itself to deserialize, which is severely wrong in the first place (it's akin to eval()-ing client-provided text).
They've just validated the opinion expressed in the memo, according to which workers at Google having a dissenting opinion must keep silent lest them be fired.
Also, in order to justify something as deplorable as firing someone for political reasons, a lot of people are attributing to him sentences that he never wrote, a character assassination that is typical of authoritarian regimes.
Not only this is obviously wrong, but it is even counterproductive to the cause of a progressive society, because it will foster the persecution complexes of certain voters, urging them to elect even more far-right extremists in order to fix society. Well done, really.
Where in my comment did I ignore the scientific consensus to the point of deserving to be called "delusional"? It wasn't a comment against nuclear power, it was against the use of conspiracy theories, false dichotomies, and appeals to authority which are the exact opposite of scientific reasoning.
Russia keeps extending the life of pre-Chernobyl RBMK reactors making them last years longer than they were originally designed for. RBMKs are certainly neither safe nor clean, I think that even the most orthodox nuclear supporter will concede that, and this tells us that Russia isn't a good example of a country which is reaching the goal of obtaining safe, clean *and* cheap energy through nuclear power.
Additionally, the worldwide trend to extend the life span of existing nuclear power plants tells us another information: that nuclear power is so expensive that operators need to squeeze up to the last dime out of existing installations, by making their service life extremely long, even if doing so exposes them to greater costs for maintenance, monitoring and insurance. Often, when accidents happen to one of those old power plants, nuclear power supporters will dismiss their relevance because of the age of the affected installation, but this way they ignore the fact that having to keep outdated designs running for decades is actually an implicit requirement for nuclear power's competitiveness.
I find it ironic that nuclear power supporters here get condescending and accuse everyone else of being anti-scientific and of living in a fantasy world, all while pointing at worldwide conspiracies in order to explain why no one invests in nuclear energy anymore, without accepting the more simple and realistic explanation that the energy source they believe to be cheap, safe and clean is neither cheap, nor safe, nor clean. It's always only a couple years away from becoming such, but its's not just there yet. And it has been so since the 80s.
Not exactly, the point of EME is that the plugin won't have to manage content presentation, in the way that Adobe flash does today, but will only have to manage access conditioning. In fact, Firefox already ships with an optional DRM plugin today. But, it's up to the content provider whether to allow an application plugin to protect their content or to require user surveillance at the operating system level.
With EME, not only you can be forced to install a specific plugin to browse the open web, but it's much more likely that you'll be forced to actually install a specific browser or even a specific operating system - most probably of the kind oriented to "media consumption", with spyware built-in and not fully controllable and observable by its owner.
Slashdot Mirror
People needed antivirus software from your "friends" because your OSes were vulnerable in the first place, having a track record of being hackable by displaying a picture (e.g. the wmf bug) or by being present on the Internet (e.g. the "blaster" bug). Also, people could accuse you of abusing your monopoly position because 1) you had a monopoly on the desktop OS market and 2) you had a history of taking advantage of that position; both being problems that you could fix at any time if you really had any interest. Accusing antivirus vendors of being the cause for your OS requiring twice as much RAM as its /successor/ is inelegant and the accuses themselves are unbelievable to me.
PC manufacturers have been using these for a long time. They started out as 8-bit MCUs with a builtin ROM and have been getting more and more powerful with time.
You're looking back at the first iPhone with rose-tinted glasses. With a Symbian phone of the era, you could take pictures that did not suck, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it had a toy camera. With a Symbian phone, you could do video calls, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it didn't have a front-facing camera. You could use a Symbian phone as a navigator, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it didn't have a GPS receiver. Most importantly, the first iPhone wasn't programmable, so it couldn't even be classified as a smartphone. And I'm not even talking about nerdy features such as Bluetooth, FM radio, SD card slots and IR blasters, that you would find on a Symbian phone but not on the iPhone.
I think that people bought the iPhone because it was an innovative combination of design and usability, not because of its technical advancements or intrinsic usefulness. Also, it was marketed well.
Can we do without super childish language at least here on Slashdot? Super pretty please.
We are social animals: our lives are intermingled with the lives of the other persons with whom we interact. In particular, we can't just choose to go to work earlier or later arbitrarily, because our timetables depend on the timetables of others: means of transportation (trains, buses, airplanes), factors of production (markets, banks, factories), people who will be our customers, people who will be our competitors, people whom we will be working for, people who will be working for us, people who will be working with us. So most people have no freedom to decide when to work. On the other hand, governments have neither the power nor any technical means to tell everybody when to work. Even if they could, supposedly in the case of an authoritarian government and a society that is perfectly receptive to its directives, the net result would be the same that we can achieve in the real world by simply shifting the hands of the clock.
There are many things that "people" find annoying, and would probably be overwhelming against them in opinion polls: paying taxes certainly, but also dying in car accidents because of working in the dark. Decisions shouldn't be taken by the people's belly; they should be based on rational evidence.
Apple could just make the battery of their phones removable; instead, they ask their customers to throw away half a day of their life in order to drive to an authorized extortion center and wait for hours for the battery to be replaced, while paying 89 € (plus 12,20 € of shipping fees) for the privilege of the experience.
Moreover, how would a "fast lane" be defined? If the "fast lane" is defined by the kind of traffic, then the ISP would have to inspect its customers' packets in order to determine the application-level exchange that they are part of, and this again would violate net neutrality (and the customers' privacy, but we already know that that battle is lost). And more importantly, such inspection would be impossible with TLS, which means that a protocol-based "fast lane" wouldn't work with most of the Internet.
It is possible for "fast lanes" to be defined by the packets' destination IP address, which would mean that the ISP could, say, slow down packets going to and from Vimeo in order to speed up packets going to and from YouTube. And since only large video providers would be important enough to be part of a destination-based "fast lane" option on an ISP's network, this would be unfair against small players and market newcomers, and of course a violation of net neutrality.
This law proposal seems to me at best damage control by a party that received a larger-than-expected backlash from what they perceived to be just ordinary lobby service, and at worst an attempt to enshrine in law the negation of net neutrality. I'll be happy to be proved wrong.
This functionality cannot be used by an open source kernel. This functionality cannot be used by an open source userspace. Why should it be maintained by the open source community? It doesn't belong on kernel.org; it should stay within Google together with the rest of the binary nonsense that they develop and keep in order to fulfill their contractual obligations with Disney. Nobody said that DRM in the kernel was "the end of the world". The point is that asking the open source developers, that is the very people whom this functionality is designed to mistrust and block, to maintain its code forever, is immoral.
private, non-government, corporations didn't exist in Italy at the time?
What? Private, non-government corporations were *the main sponsors* of Mussolini at the time. Entrepreneurs were freaking out because of the strikes and factory occupations by the workers in the 20s and welcomed his ascent to power as the best insurance against further disruption of their economic interests and of the established social order.
Java and ActionScript couldn't access the host memory, too, but that didn't prevent the Java plugin and Flash from becoming the preferred carriers for browser malware. And those ran type- and memory- safe languages, not C. In order to reach an awful lot of people, an exploit needn't work on every machine, it's enough for it to target the most commonly used platform. Given that the browser landscape has been converging towards a monoculture lately, this could become even easier than it was in the past.
But JavaScript programs cannot smash a buffer and write into another variable, as is required by the C memory model, and JavaScript libraries are not distributed in minified form (before development).
Humanity is not OK with suing children at any age.
Deal with cheating the way it's meant to be done, and if you really care about the public image of your company, drop that lawsuit already, instead of making up supposedly unwritten, omertà-like rules of business life in order to justify your antisocial behaviour. DMCA is not a tool for businesses to suppress things they don't like.
Am I alone in thinking that giving CPU-level access to our browser to ad networks, hackers, scammers, governments* from all around the world with no authentication and no accountability whatsoever** is a bad idea? Haven't we seen what happened in the past with Java and ActiveX***? Moreover, back then at least Java ran "safe" high-level bytecode, whereas this thing will give to honest programmers the joy of buffer-smashing into adjacent variables, and to dishonest programmers the power to mine bitcoins at nearly native speeds! And once the next hip web frameworks start relying on this technology, there's no way we'll be able to disable it if we want to access the Internet as it's intended.
* in no particular order of undesirability.
** the same-origin policy helps but is not enough, we can't make a trust decision every time we click on a URL, especially now that browser authors have made it so difficult to even see what a link points to, or even understand whether something is a link in the first place. Also, web developers tend to include large amounts of third-party code that they do not inspect, and if such code comes in binary form even before they minify it, then they won't be able to audit that code even nominally.
*** I'm not adding JavaScript to the list. See? I'm not an old person. I like new things!
An average person would have to work for years to buy that car (without eating while doing so). He will flaunt its destruction only to have people talk about him on twitter.
I also live in Europe, and the first time I saw the night sky the way our ancestors had seen it for millions of years wasn't before I got 20-something years old. I happened to spend the night on a small island with little artificial lighting; for some reason I threw a random look to the sky, and I saw an unexpected spectacle that left me so amazed that I wouldn't look back down for minutes. I discovered that the Milky Way was something that one could actually see in the sky, in its immense size, and not only in pictures on a book. It was quite a revelation, I couldn't believe that such a sight had been denied to me for a lifetime, without me - or anybody near me - ever knowing.
Are you sure? https://developers.google.com/...
Moreover, what they are publishing is merely a style guide, and has nothing to with the fact that “many developers aren’t very interested in documentation aspect”. It is only useful to make the documentation from third-party contributors look like the one that Google have written themselves. It won’t help with the technical quality of anyone’s else documentation.
The title is sensationalistic. Even the original bug the author talks about, calling it repeatedly a "Java" bug, was actually a bug in the Apache Commons Collections library, not in the platform, and it could only be triggered if a server using the library allowed customers to provide serialized data for itself to deserialize, which is severely wrong in the first place (it's akin to eval()-ing client-provided text).
Also, in order to justify something as deplorable as firing someone for political reasons, a lot of people are attributing to him sentences that he never wrote, a character assassination that is typical of authoritarian regimes.
Not only this is obviously wrong, but it is even counterproductive to the cause of a progressive society, because it will foster the persecution complexes of certain voters, urging them to elect even more far-right extremists in order to fix society. Well done, really.
Where in my comment did I ignore the scientific consensus to the point of deserving to be called "delusional"? It wasn't a comment against nuclear power, it was against the use of conspiracy theories, false dichotomies, and appeals to authority which are the exact opposite of scientific reasoning.
Additionally, the worldwide trend to extend the life span of existing nuclear power plants tells us another information: that nuclear power is so expensive that operators need to squeeze up to the last dime out of existing installations, by making their service life extremely long, even if doing so exposes them to greater costs for maintenance, monitoring and insurance. Often, when accidents happen to one of those old power plants, nuclear power supporters will dismiss their relevance because of the age of the affected installation, but this way they ignore the fact that having to keep outdated designs running for decades is actually an implicit requirement for nuclear power's competitiveness.
I find it ironic that nuclear power supporters here get condescending and accuse everyone else of being anti-scientific and of living in a fantasy world, all while pointing at worldwide conspiracies in order to explain why no one invests in nuclear energy anymore, without accepting the more simple and realistic explanation that the energy source they believe to be cheap, safe and clean is neither cheap, nor safe, nor clean. It's always only a couple years away from becoming such, but its's not just there yet. And it has been so since the 80s.
Not exactly, the point of EME is that the plugin won't have to manage content presentation, in the way that Adobe flash does today, but will only have to manage access conditioning. In fact, Firefox already ships with an optional DRM plugin today. But, it's up to the content provider whether to allow an application plugin to protect their content or to require user surveillance at the operating system level.
With EME, not only you can be forced to install a specific plugin to browse the open web, but it's much more likely that you'll be forced to actually install a specific browser or even a specific operating system - most probably of the kind oriented to "media consumption", with spyware built-in and not fully controllable and observable by its owner.