A good con game is built around knowing the probable behavior of the victim. I would never go to a Springsteen concert whereas you would. Your movements have become more predictable. It's not irrational paranoia, it's a plausible but not likely avenue to a variety of attacks. Break in to your home when you're away at a concert, plant illegal substances on you while you're there, etc.. These things are all assisted by knowing something about what you like.
The word is that most advertisers refuse to be associated with 4chan. Would you want your company logo displayed right next to the average post on/b/?
Because demand for adspace is low ads are relatively cheap and thus not very profitable. I suppose it's too late to go back to the "donation drive" model for support...
May I introduce you to the concept of operational security? Not divulging seemingly-harmless information has value, because the aggregation of a large amount of seemingly-harmless information can result in a great deal being revealed that is unintended. Facebook is helping any adversary interested in harming you by doing a great deal of his intel work for him. What's more, it is doing such gathering right now even if he won't be interested in you for a couple years. Once he wants to build a profile of who you are it's a trivial matter of data mining. And that's *even if* you were being careful about what you post on facebook.
Facebook is an untrusted channel used to catalog information for present and future adversaries. its use in any form is unwise. If you think you're never going to want to keep something from someone for a legitimate reason, think again.
IMO it would help to have a much, much larger number of mods (janitors too) patrolling/b/. Just banning threads that belong on topic boards would be a start. Change the/b/ mandate from "anything goes" to "anything that's offtopic elsewhere" and then ban accordingly.
Or turn back on the black-screen CSS thing. That made/b/ almost pleasant again for one glorious day.
4chan's problems have to do with scale and not popularity.
Facebook's problem, well one of them anyway, is that despite how useful it may be for some purposes it is a permanent invasion into your life and a usurpation of fundamentals of the internet. Implementing applications over HTTP and the facebook API instead of doing them properly is only harmless as long as it's not the norm.
And how is this different from the USA? If you can't afford to pay your lawyer long enough to win the case then you'll still go broke. If you don't have a lawyer chances are you make some legal fumbles that make you lose when you could have won.
I haven't read the bill, but generally speaking, I don't think first to file really does that. The only way someone can do that under first to file is by breaking the law by claiming they invented it when they really got the invention from your publication
That can still put you in the unenviable situation of having to convince the patent office, and perhaps a court of law, that the original filer was lying. That's not trivial or fast.
The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.
I stopped reading here, nothing else you say matters if you're stuck on this point. Technical superiority is 100% irrelevant. Take a moment to read it again, maybe it will sink in. If it's illegal for e.g. Mozilla to use it, and it is, then it doesn't matter if it has some advantages--even vast advantages--over the thing that is legal for them to ship. Superior is nice, but royalty-free is king.
. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used
No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.
OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.
Don't make "Reply to all" easy to do or don't make it easy to mistake for "Reply", or both.
I would suggest that overloading the Reply button would be the best approach. It would behave much like the Firefox "back" button: Click to reply, click and hold for a menu that includes "reply to all." Yes it's a little slower if reply to all is common for you, but that's what toolbar customization is for. You certainly will make no more mistakes.
Alternatively, put "Reply to all" *FAR AWAY* from "Reply." Like on the right-hand side of the toolbar, where "Reply" would remain on the left. Simple, effective. I've no idea why these changes were not implemented years ago.
I like your idea, but 110% is awfully low. Patents really do need to allow for a reasonable profit. Let's set it at 200%, so you double your investment. That is pretty fair.
Better yet, I'd like to include a clause that lets a third party assert that the patent has paid for itself. At such a time a court would examine the situation in a trial-like fashion and if it found that the patent had generated a gross profit of some reasonable multiple of its registered cost--say ten times as much--then the patent becomes public domain at that time without any further payments.
That way for really expensive patents lawyering it away would be pretty cheap.
Of course you'd also have to have a mechanism to prevent people from always writing "10 billion dollars!" as the research cost and using chicanery to make it seem reasonable. There'd have to be a legal framework to challenge the research cost justification.
Note the big distinction here between "Anonymous" the identifiable group with it's culture and symbols, as apposed and very distinct to the to the word, anonymous. You have also explained that Anonymous has some loos group rules and telling us what the group's ideals and identity is about - extremely group-orientated behavior!
The lower case usage is deliberate.
The rest is a failure of the language. I lack the language to explain to you what anonymous is without making it sound like I am talking about a distinct group. You can read in to what I say whatever mistakes you like, but that doesn't support your position ("anonymous is a group") or discredit mine. I'm not playing rhetorical games, even if you are, and I am only interested in communication. Not knowing how else to attempt an explanation I attempt a bad one. I'm sorry that I have failed you.
You'd be more correct by saying: "Some Anonymous identify themselves as a group with this name and with certain symbols, some anonymous' people don't (and therefore are not associating themselves with this particular group). Some of anonymous' actions are publicly visible (everyday you see anon people walking on the street), some (anonymous' people) aren't (for example, when they are in their bedrooms)."
It's more convoluted to say it correctly. "Some actions taken by anonymous are publicly visible," for example. Rephrasing to avoid using him/her/they and plural confusion is possible but annoying, so I don't always bother.
I agree that "Bob Dole" and "Bob Dylan" are not a group ("in any but the most trivial and irrelevant senses") because they have the name Bob. After this I think is where the logic you outline falls short: Your saying two Bobs don't make a group, so therefore the hundreds (or more) who have associated with the name "Anonymous" (as apposed and very distinct to the to the word, anonymous) and its symbols are also not a group. This comparison does not hold up. Everything else you mention after this appears to be based off this faulty logic.
I am not saying "two" I am saying "any number greater than one." Although, in fact, there aren't hundreds of persons associated with "Anonymous," there is only one anonymous.
And you've made another mistake: I am not making an argument based on logic. I am trying to describe something to you. Logic doesn't enter in to it.
I agree with most of what your saying, except for one basic point: "Anonymous isn't a group". It certainly is a group: just because it has no organization, no fixed philosophy or members, "no pride", has a pure anarchic "direction" - whatever - none of that disqualifies it from being a group
Up to here you are technically correct. I call it "not a group" to counter the prevailing media opinion that it is some kind of organization, but if you know what kind of a 'group' it is then further belaboring would be pointless.
It was a group from the instance more than one person decided to use the same name "Anonymous" to attribute to their random _publicly visible_ action(s). "Anonymous" the group has gone even further than that though by taking up unique symbols to identify itself with. The only way to not be a group is to all go back to being individuals with different names, different symbols - then "they" would be a truly anonymous in the real sense of the word again.
And now you're off track again. What's in a name? What's in a symbol? Some anonymous identify with certain images, some don't. Some of anonymous' actions are publicly visible, some aren't. Just because two people using the same name perform "publicly visible actions" doesn't mean they're a group. Bob Dole and Bob Dylan aren't a group, despite both being named Bob. If they both started calling themselves anonymous they would still not be a group in any but the most trivial and irrelevant senses. The name doesn't matter.
Further, the moment any group real or imaginary has a recognizable free for all to use name/symbol, it is vulnerable to false flag attacks - the organizational structure and everything else you mentioned is irrelevant.
See above, it's not a group. Perhaps some people imagine it is, but it's not. It's impossible, I will stress again, to have a false flag anonymous.
Example: Hypothetically - if the general population started to see many and repeated reports in the news of any group Name/symbols always being associated with something that motivates their emotions (say, Child porn), then it will not be long before the majority of the population automatically associates that groups name and their symbols as being equal to child porn.
Again, it's not a group name, it's an individual's name. Secondly, anonymous is known to be pedo. What I mean is this has already happened. What the majority of the population thinks is irrelevant; the majority appears to think anonymous is a group instead of an individual. It is known that the majority is stupid. I thought we were trying to discuss what is, not what the unwashed masses believe.
f some random individual with no previous connection to anyone else decides to setup a webpage, or go out in public wearing the mask, wave around the name or the symbol - they are automatically judged a pedo - any other mesage they might have will be lost and irrelevant
Correct. Good. All anonymous people are all other anonymous people. Messages are irrelevant.
Enough negativity in the population associated with the group, and individuals would decide to stop using the name/symbols.
Incorrect. It's not a name and a symbol, it's a being. Either you are anonymous or you aren't, it doesn't matter what other people think that means. Anonymous is a cold, uncaring monster. Anonymous is a warm, loving mother. Anonymous is a predator and a victim. If one day all the world equates being anonymous with the worst possible religions and political things, then that's good. And irrelevant.
Anonymous has so far been no serious threat to any major power base. It has not done anything to piss off the majority of the population. The name and it's symbols are not associated with something the population automatically fear's and/or hates (it is nowhere near the negative n
I have only one agenda here and that is to see Microsoft die and Free Software win. The former is due to well earned hatred, the second to carefully chosen ideology. I can admit when Microsoft makes something good, though I do not like to, such as their take on PDF. That's a good format. OOXML is just stupid. ODF to the extent that it is deficient could be fixed sanely. Legacy support is vital to competition and Microsoft and you are disingenuous to dismiss specification of legacy formatting as irrelevant. If Microsoft were an honest actor then they would have simply improved ODF.
I think your mixing things up a bit there. Crypto-Signature of Mr X vs Mr Y does not make the two any less anonymous... it only makes any anonymous message they wish to send distinguishable.
know you're missing the point. As much as identifiability isn't desired just so distinguishability isn't desired. On 4chan it's also known as namefagging and is frowned upon.
There is no possibility of a false flag; all people claiming to be anonymous are legitimate so long as they do not attempt to identify themselves or distinguish themselves from any other anonymous. All despicable, harmful and illegal activities carried out by anonymous are legitimate and anonymous approves so long as it's funny.
Personally I find it interesting that a group that more or less prides itself on being security experts leaves themselves wide open to one of the oldest and simplest of attacks though.
Anonymous isn't a group. Anonymous does not pride itself on anything except possibly jackassery and certainly does not claim to be a security expert. Anonymous does not fight for freedom, justice, morality or a baby's smile; anonymous fights for the lulz and for hatred. The HBGary hack was funny, period. Any other motivation you attribute is a mistake.
All the excuse needed to justify contracting a few more HBGary 'cyber-security' firms, throw a few more extreme laws against the internet and open communication onto the books.
Who cares? This was not a campaign against security firms like hbgary, this was malice directed at one person who worked for hbgary. Mission accomplished. Hire as many similar companies as you like.
You're missing the point. "They" don't care, they're anonymous. Anonymous does not desire for you to know which "faction" is at work. If identifiability was desired a group would be formed with a name. Factions are irrelevant.
It would not work in the United States because (1) to be a broadband ISP you simply must own the cables and infrastructure is very expensive, and (2) local governments routinely give away monopolies that prevent competitors from operating.
In the USA broadband internet access is classified differently from telephone service and doesn't require any sharing of physical lines. Before broadband when everything was dial-up you could start your own ISP with almost trivial effort: a little hardware and a good uplink. Now entry into the field is a multi-million (more likely -billion) dollar proposition, even if you could get approval from the government.
In a country where regulation is detested this kind of thing is permitted because it's "business friendly" - meaning that Comcast has bribed enough officials to keep the competition out, so the result is friendly to them.
Yes, you lose the on-demand capability, but probably 50% of what gets streamed these days would disappear by allowing OTA broadcasts to be seen where ever you happen to be.
Nonsense. On demand capability is a killer feature and people want it very, very badly. Those that don't want it will want it, and those that don't know they want it now will miss it if it went away. People are used to the television and radio model of tuning in at a certain time, but it's not something anyone really wants and doesn't make any sense for things that aren't live. We have gone too far down the on demand slide to ever go back.
Anyone who knows enough to speak authoritatively on a subject probably has an interest in it, financially speaking, one way or another. To ignore the conclusions of such people would be to throw away the best possible advice. The trick is not to ignore information coming from sources with conflicts of interest but to aggregate information on the same subject coming from sources with different conflicts of interests so as to obtain a cross-section of probable-neutral information.
It's possible that someone with a conflict of interest isn't misleading you just to line his own pockets. I know this is hard to believe, but it's true. Sometimes he's telling you the absolute truth (as he sees it). The fact that your rational response will tend to line his pockets just means that's he's smart enough to be in the right business. What else should such a person do? Keep quiet to avoid the appearance of a conflict, to the detriment of the people who might have liked have the information he could provide?
On behalf of the Estate of JRR Tolkien I demand you provide the Estate with contact information for the authors of the cited work ("Three Billy Goats Gruff") so that the Estate may serve proper infringement notices.
The Intellectual Property "troll" is patently integral to the Tolkien Estate's Intellectual Property known as "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and therefore, remains the property of The Estate. Uses of "troll" purportedly appearing before the publication or production of "Lord of the Rings" are clear cases of infringement of the Intellectual Property of the Estate by a party or parties in possession of an apparatus for transfer of information or objects across a fold of space-time ("Time Machine") with the intent of defaming the Tolkien Estate, diluting the value of the Estate's Intellectual Property and stealing past and future revenue from the "Lord of the Rings" property.
Failure to comply with this demand within 30 may make you a liable as a co-conspirator for losses suffered due to the infringement activity.
I had been hoping that your phone scenario would happen with Meaemo as the OS. It was looking for a while like it could: The entire stack is stock desktop stuff, they threw on a pretty decent mobile UI. All they needed was to support some protocols for stuff you mention (wireless video out, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless data transfer, etc) and port existing Linux desktop apps to it--mostly just a matter of a recompile, but making them detect whether a big screen is present and automatically choosing the full or mobile UI would be better. The protocols aren't quite there yet, but they will be and then you'd have a great "I carry my environment with me" thing going, without having to haul a laptop around or fiddle with cords. Except for power since wireless power is nowhere near suitable.
But Maemo got dumped for Meego, which could still have done it, but Nokia doesn't care about Meego any more and doesn't seem to have been interested in this target audience. The last hope for this is that Intel will pull it off but I, frankly, don't think they have it in them.
The rest of the mobile OSes on the market just aren't suitable. You say Windows 7 is, but I say that it's not free enough for me and that I desire a future where the OS is from multiple vendors, so I count it out.
Slashdot Mirror
A good con game is built around knowing the probable behavior of the victim. I would never go to a Springsteen concert whereas you would. Your movements have become more predictable. It's not irrational paranoia, it's a plausible but not likely avenue to a variety of attacks. Break in to your home when you're away at a concert, plant illegal substances on you while you're there, etc.. These things are all assisted by knowing something about what you like.
The word is that most advertisers refuse to be associated with 4chan. Would you want your company logo displayed right next to the average post on /b/?
Because demand for adspace is low ads are relatively cheap and thus not very profitable. I suppose it's too late to go back to the "donation drive" model for support...
Ahhhahah, Jon Katz. That takes me back.
I say bring him back! It would liven up the place.
May I introduce you to the concept of operational security? Not divulging seemingly-harmless information has value, because the aggregation of a large amount of seemingly-harmless information can result in a great deal being revealed that is unintended. Facebook is helping any adversary interested in harming you by doing a great deal of his intel work for him. What's more, it is doing such gathering right now even if he won't be interested in you for a couple years. Once he wants to build a profile of who you are it's a trivial matter of data mining. And that's *even if* you were being careful about what you post on facebook.
Facebook is an untrusted channel used to catalog information for present and future adversaries. its use in any form is unwise. If you think you're never going to want to keep something from someone for a legitimate reason, think again.
IMO it would help to have a much, much larger number of mods (janitors too) patrolling /b/. Just banning threads that belong on topic boards would be a start. Change the /b/ mandate from "anything goes" to "anything that's offtopic elsewhere" and then ban accordingly.
Or turn back on the black-screen CSS thing. That made /b/ almost pleasant again for one glorious day.
4chan's problems have to do with scale and not popularity.
Facebook's problem, well one of them anyway, is that despite how useful it may be for some purposes it is a permanent invasion into your life and a usurpation of fundamentals of the internet. Implementing applications over HTTP and the facebook API instead of doing them properly is only harmless as long as it's not the norm.
In the USA if you win you can request that the loser pay for your fees. It's not automatic, but it's common.
And how is this different from the USA? If you can't afford to pay your lawyer long enough to win the case then you'll still go broke. If you don't have a lawyer chances are you make some legal fumbles that make you lose when you could have won.
I haven't read the bill, but generally speaking, I don't think first to file really does that. The only way someone can do that under first to file is by breaking the law by claiming they invented it when they really got the invention from your publication
That can still put you in the unenviable situation of having to convince the patent office, and perhaps a court of law, that the original filer was lying. That's not trivial or fast.
The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.
I stopped reading here, nothing else you say matters if you're stuck on this point. Technical superiority is 100% irrelevant. Take a moment to read it again, maybe it will sink in. If it's illegal for e.g. Mozilla to use it, and it is, then it doesn't matter if it has some advantages--even vast advantages--over the thing that is legal for them to ship. Superior is nice, but royalty-free is king .
. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used
No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.
OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.
Don't make "Reply to all" easy to do or don't make it easy to mistake for "Reply", or both.
I would suggest that overloading the Reply button would be the best approach. It would behave much like the Firefox "back" button: Click to reply, click and hold for a menu that includes "reply to all." Yes it's a little slower if reply to all is common for you, but that's what toolbar customization is for. You certainly will make no more mistakes.
Alternatively, put "Reply to all" *FAR AWAY* from "Reply." Like on the right-hand side of the toolbar, where "Reply" would remain on the left. Simple, effective. I've no idea why these changes were not implemented years ago.
Lost = Had - Have
Missed = Possible - Received
So
Lost = 0 - 1337
Therefore he lost -1337, aka he gained.
Nitpicking is the soul of law(suits). Welcome to life!
I like your idea, but 110% is awfully low. Patents really do need to allow for a reasonable profit. Let's set it at 200%, so you double your investment. That is pretty fair.
Better yet, I'd like to include a clause that lets a third party assert that the patent has paid for itself. At such a time a court would examine the situation in a trial-like fashion and if it found that the patent had generated a gross profit of some reasonable multiple of its registered cost--say ten times as much--then the patent becomes public domain at that time without any further payments.
That way for really expensive patents lawyering it away would be pretty cheap.
Of course you'd also have to have a mechanism to prevent people from always writing "10 billion dollars!" as the research cost and using chicanery to make it seem reasonable. There'd have to be a legal framework to challenge the research cost justification.
+101, The Truth
Except it should be "over 9,000 misleading statements"
Note the big distinction here between "Anonymous" the identifiable group with it's culture and symbols, as apposed and very distinct to the to the word, anonymous. You have also explained that Anonymous has some loos group rules and telling us what the group's ideals and identity is about - extremely group-orientated behavior!
The lower case usage is deliberate.
The rest is a failure of the language. I lack the language to explain to you what anonymous is without making it sound like I am talking about a distinct group. You can read in to what I say whatever mistakes you like, but that doesn't support your position ("anonymous is a group") or discredit mine. I'm not playing rhetorical games, even if you are, and I am only interested in communication. Not knowing how else to attempt an explanation I attempt a bad one. I'm sorry that I have failed you.
You'd be more correct by saying: "Some Anonymous identify themselves as a group with this name and with certain symbols, some anonymous' people don't (and therefore are not associating themselves with this particular group). Some of anonymous' actions are publicly visible (everyday you see anon people walking on the street), some (anonymous' people) aren't (for example, when they are in their bedrooms)."
It's more convoluted to say it correctly. "Some actions taken by anonymous are publicly visible," for example. Rephrasing to avoid using him/her/they and plural confusion is possible but annoying, so I don't always bother.
I agree that "Bob Dole" and "Bob Dylan" are not a group ("in any but the most trivial and irrelevant senses") because they have the name Bob. After this I think is where the logic you outline falls short: Your saying two Bobs don't make a group, so therefore the hundreds (or more) who have associated with the name "Anonymous" (as apposed and very distinct to the to the word, anonymous) and its symbols are also not a group. This comparison does not hold up. Everything else you mention after this appears to be based off this faulty logic.
I am not saying "two" I am saying "any number greater than one." Although, in fact, there aren't hundreds of persons associated with "Anonymous," there is only one anonymous.
And you've made another mistake: I am not making an argument based on logic. I am trying to describe something to you. Logic doesn't enter in to it.
I agree with most of what your saying, except for one basic point: "Anonymous isn't a group". It certainly is a group: just because it has no organization, no fixed philosophy or members, "no pride", has a pure anarchic "direction" - whatever - none of that disqualifies it from being a group
Up to here you are technically correct. I call it "not a group" to counter the prevailing media opinion that it is some kind of organization, but if you know what kind of a 'group' it is then further belaboring would be pointless.
It was a group from the instance more than one person decided to use the same name "Anonymous" to attribute to their random _publicly visible_ action(s). "Anonymous" the group has gone even further than that though by taking up unique symbols to identify itself with. The only way to not be a group is to all go back to being individuals with different names, different symbols - then "they" would be a truly anonymous in the real sense of the word again.
And now you're off track again. What's in a name? What's in a symbol? Some anonymous identify with certain images, some don't. Some of anonymous' actions are publicly visible, some aren't. Just because two people using the same name perform "publicly visible actions" doesn't mean they're a group. Bob Dole and Bob Dylan aren't a group, despite both being named Bob. If they both started calling themselves anonymous they would still not be a group in any but the most trivial and irrelevant senses. The name doesn't matter.
Further, the moment any group real or imaginary has a recognizable free for all to use name/symbol, it is vulnerable to false flag attacks - the organizational structure and everything else you mentioned is irrelevant.
See above, it's not a group. Perhaps some people imagine it is, but it's not. It's impossible, I will stress again, to have a false flag anonymous.
Example: Hypothetically - if the general population started to see many and repeated reports in the news of any group Name/symbols always being associated with something that motivates their emotions (say, Child porn), then it will not be long before the majority of the population automatically associates that groups name and their symbols as being equal to child porn.
Again, it's not a group name, it's an individual's name. Secondly, anonymous is known to be pedo. What I mean is this has already happened. What the majority of the population thinks is irrelevant; the majority appears to think anonymous is a group instead of an individual. It is known that the majority is stupid. I thought we were trying to discuss what is, not what the unwashed masses believe.
f some random individual with no previous connection to anyone else decides to setup a webpage, or go out in public wearing the mask, wave around the name or the symbol - they are automatically judged a pedo - any other mesage they might have will be lost and irrelevant
Correct. Good. All anonymous people are all other anonymous people. Messages are irrelevant.
Enough negativity in the population associated with the group, and individuals would decide to stop using the name/symbols.
Incorrect. It's not a name and a symbol, it's a being. Either you are anonymous or you aren't, it doesn't matter what other people think that means. Anonymous is a cold, uncaring monster. Anonymous is a warm, loving mother. Anonymous is a predator and a victim. If one day all the world equates being anonymous with the worst possible religions and political things, then that's good. And irrelevant.
Anonymous has so far been no serious threat to any major power base. It has not done anything to piss off the majority of the population. The name and it's symbols are not associated with something the population automatically fear's and/or hates (it is nowhere near the negative n
I have only one agenda here and that is to see Microsoft die and Free Software win. The former is due to well earned hatred, the second to carefully chosen ideology. I can admit when Microsoft makes something good, though I do not like to, such as their take on PDF. That's a good format. OOXML is just stupid. ODF to the extent that it is deficient could be fixed sanely. Legacy support is vital to competition and Microsoft and you are disingenuous to dismiss specification of legacy formatting as irrelevant. If Microsoft were an honest actor then they would have simply improved ODF.
I think your mixing things up a bit there. Crypto-Signature of Mr X vs Mr Y does not make the two any less anonymous... it only makes any anonymous message they wish to send distinguishable.
know you're missing the point. As much as identifiability isn't desired just so distinguishability isn't desired. On 4chan it's also known as namefagging and is frowned upon.
There is no possibility of a false flag; all people claiming to be anonymous are legitimate so long as they do not attempt to identify themselves or distinguish themselves from any other anonymous. All despicable, harmful and illegal activities carried out by anonymous are legitimate and anonymous approves so long as it's funny.
Personally I find it interesting that a group that more or less prides itself on being security experts leaves themselves wide open to one of the oldest and simplest of attacks though.
Anonymous isn't a group. Anonymous does not pride itself on anything except possibly jackassery and certainly does not claim to be a security expert. Anonymous does not fight for freedom, justice, morality or a baby's smile; anonymous fights for the lulz and for hatred. The HBGary hack was funny, period. Any other motivation you attribute is a mistake.
All the excuse needed to justify contracting a few more HBGary 'cyber-security' firms, throw a few more extreme laws against the internet and open communication onto the books.
Who cares? This was not a campaign against security firms like hbgary, this was malice directed at one person who worked for hbgary. Mission accomplished. Hire as many similar companies as you like.
You're missing the point. "They" don't care, they're anonymous. Anonymous does not desire for you to know which "faction" is at work. If identifiability was desired a group would be formed with a name. Factions are irrelevant.
It would not work in the United States because (1) to be a broadband ISP you simply must own the cables and infrastructure is very expensive, and (2) local governments routinely give away monopolies that prevent competitors from operating.
In the USA broadband internet access is classified differently from telephone service and doesn't require any sharing of physical lines. Before broadband when everything was dial-up you could start your own ISP with almost trivial effort: a little hardware and a good uplink. Now entry into the field is a multi-million (more likely -billion) dollar proposition, even if you could get approval from the government.
In a country where regulation is detested this kind of thing is permitted because it's "business friendly" - meaning that Comcast has bribed enough officials to keep the competition out, so the result is friendly to them.
Yes, you lose the on-demand capability, but probably 50% of what gets streamed these days would disappear by allowing OTA broadcasts to be seen where ever you happen to be.
Nonsense. On demand capability is a killer feature and people want it very, very badly. Those that don't want it will want it, and those that don't know they want it now will miss it if it went away. People are used to the television and radio model of tuning in at a certain time, but it's not something anyone really wants and doesn't make any sense for things that aren't live. We have gone too far down the on demand slide to ever go back.
Anyone who knows enough to speak authoritatively on a subject probably has an interest in it, financially speaking, one way or another. To ignore the conclusions of such people would be to throw away the best possible advice. The trick is not to ignore information coming from sources with conflicts of interest but to aggregate information on the same subject coming from sources with different conflicts of interests so as to obtain a cross-section of probable-neutral information.
It's possible that someone with a conflict of interest isn't misleading you just to line his own pockets. I know this is hard to believe, but it's true. Sometimes he's telling you the absolute truth (as he sees it). The fact that your rational response will tend to line his pockets just means that's he's smart enough to be in the right business. What else should such a person do? Keep quiet to avoid the appearance of a conflict, to the detriment of the people who might have liked have the information he could provide?
Hmm, sorry Prior Art:
On behalf of the Estate of JRR Tolkien I demand you provide the Estate with contact information for the authors of the cited work ("Three Billy Goats Gruff") so that the Estate may serve proper infringement notices.
The Intellectual Property "troll" is patently integral to the Tolkien Estate's Intellectual Property known as "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and therefore, remains the property of The Estate. Uses of "troll" purportedly appearing before the publication or production of "Lord of the Rings" are clear cases of infringement of the Intellectual Property of the Estate by a party or parties in possession of an apparatus for transfer of information or objects across a fold of space-time ("Time Machine") with the intent of defaming the Tolkien Estate, diluting the value of the Estate's Intellectual Property and stealing past and future revenue from the "Lord of the Rings" property.
Failure to comply with this demand within 30 may make you a liable as a co-conspirator for losses suffered due to the infringement activity.
I had been hoping that your phone scenario would happen with Meaemo as the OS. It was looking for a while like it could: The entire stack is stock desktop stuff, they threw on a pretty decent mobile UI. All they needed was to support some protocols for stuff you mention (wireless video out, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless data transfer, etc) and port existing Linux desktop apps to it--mostly just a matter of a recompile, but making them detect whether a big screen is present and automatically choosing the full or mobile UI would be better. The protocols aren't quite there yet, but they will be and then you'd have a great "I carry my environment with me" thing going, without having to haul a laptop around or fiddle with cords. Except for power since wireless power is nowhere near suitable.
But Maemo got dumped for Meego, which could still have done it, but Nokia doesn't care about Meego any more and doesn't seem to have been interested in this target audience. The last hope for this is that Intel will pull it off but I, frankly, don't think they have it in them.
The rest of the mobile OSes on the market just aren't suitable. You say Windows 7 is, but I say that it's not free enough for me and that I desire a future where the OS is from multiple vendors, so I count it out.