Huh? I'm going to ignore most of your rant and concentrate on the part that actually applied to my post:
To make the statement "innocent until proven guilty" true, we should call the individuals "prospects" until they are proven "suspects."
What are you talking about? What part of the definition of "suspect" implies a finding of fact as to guilt? Law enforcement "suspects" them of committing a crime. They are free to announce them as suspects. What in the world would they do to prove that they are suspects? Should they have to sign an affidavit certifying that they suspect someone of committing a crime?
That seems, at least to me, to be a huge invasion of privacy.
I agree with you here. I believe, though, that this type of thing is one of the few remaining aspects of life in the US that the federal government hasn't claimed jurisidction over.
As a result, how much information constitutes an "invasion of privacy" is really up to the local community. It's perfectly possible that residents of Omaha are OK with this and are used to it.
Arrest you because you made an aftermarket modification to your own property?
I believe that the equipment in this case is owned by the provider, not the customer. But this isn't really relevant, as I explain below.
The solution isn't to arrest the people that uncap their modems. The solution is to install a packet shaper to manage bandwidth usage from a location inaccessible to your customers.
You are making the assumption that the physical/link layers of the network in this case are in any way similar to the point-to-point links of dialup or DSL.
Many cable networks are actually of a one-to-many type. The technology used to broadcast television programming does not require switching or anything else that might facilitate a secure, one-to-one packet switched network to the customer.
Think of it like satellite TV. There's nothing the satellite operator can do to prevent me from receiving the same satellite signal that everyone else in the country receives. The best they can do is invent horribly complex encryption schemes, smart card systems, and lobby for laws that make tampering with these systems illegal. If it were legal for me to do whatever I wanted with my satellite receiver, such that I could gain access to programming I otherwise would be unable to access, that's still illegal.
Now, obviously your cable modem isn't the same as satellite TV, but the problems cable operators face are the same: due to the technology (one-to-many programming distribution), they cannot rely on the security you can ordinarily have with a one-to-one data connection. So, instead, they have to place some of their trust in hardware on the customer premesis.
This is why there can be "theft of service" and why modification of your "own" equipment can be made illegal.
Note that I am still against a cable operator trying to hide behind these laws when it is within their power to adopt technological measures to prevent abuse like this, but if they've done all they reasonably can, I have no problem with them needing to rely on laws like this to prevent users from raping their service.
Like most others, though, I think a letter to the customer and cancellation of service could have sufficed perfectly. They are not like a satellite TV operator in that they can physically disconnect service to their customers...
greeted at the door by armed FBI agents with guns drawn
There is no factual data supporting this that we've seen. The only thing that mentions the FBI having their guns drawn is the article submitter's sensationalistic summary of the story. You'll note that the article only indicates the FBI confiscated equipment. It does not mention how.
I completely agree.. The first rule of computer/application security: Never trust the user. Once a piece of hardware is installed on customer premesis (or in some cases, customer-installed hardware that they purchased on their own), the ISP should never trust that hardware. Any security mechanisms (authentication, authorization, bandwidth caps, IP address assignment, etc.) need to exist on the ISP side, not the customer side.
But on the flip side, the nature of some cable networks makes some of this fairly difficult. Satellite TV is in the same situation: they can't flip a switch on a satellite and keep that satellite signal from being received at your home. Instead, they have to resort to tricks with smart cards and encryption on the client end to keep their customers honest. There will always be the possibility of emulation and unauthorized modification of this equipment, though, and as a result, we have laws like these in place to protect them.
I do oppose companies (cable or otherwise) taking these laws for granted and refusing to do the obvious to secure things on their end instead of just relying on the FBI to prosecute customers that take advantage of what may be fairly trivial mechanisms to get around provider restrictions.
Still, there is an assumption here that their guns are drawn. There is no mention of this as fact in the article. I submit that there is just as much of a probability that their guns were not drawn.
I think the original poster is right: this is just sensationalism to try and make this more interesting and more emotional.
There isn't even anything in there to suggest they were arrested, only indicted. The feds probably stopped by, knocked on the door, presented a search warrant, and carted some equipment off. These guys are not violent criminals, so there was probably no reason to suspect they'd run. Most of them will probably get off with a slap on the hand or a fine, if anything at all.
Whether it's "standard procedure" or not to have guns drawn when presenting a search warrant isn't really relevant. The submitter of this article added that information on his own to dress it up. It's annoying.
I guess it just extends the old policy of allowing any cable TV issues to be held at the federal level. Maybe it's because CATV providers tend to be multi-state in nature, or maybe it's because the programming traverses state lines.
In my opinion, federal jurisdiction needs to be applied only when there is a need for it to be applied at the national level. Just because someone can find some aspect of a service that in some way makes use of resources in another state, that should not automatically mean it's in the federal jursidiction. In theory, you can claim just about anything as being within the federal jursidiction because there's always going to be something involved nowadays that involves another state.
I really don't understand why the feds are so eager to expand their jurisdiction so much. Why take on additional work when the states can handle it on their own? And due to the vague commerce clause in the constitution, the courts have no choice but to uphold the constitutionality of it all.
Sorry for the rant, but this erosion of local and state governments really annoys me sometimes. The federal government is getting much too big.
Why is the article posting the FULL names including street adresses... This would be highly illegal in most of the rest of the world
I don't think it's illegal here, but it is very rare to see that. I imagine the author of that piece will get slapped around for doing it, but maybe not. Who knows, this may be the norm for that community.
including street adresses of the fugitives (and that is what they are at this point, i guess)?
What makes them fugitives? In the US, they are suspects (innocent until proven guilty and all that). Additionally, they'd have to be on the run in order to be a fugitive. According to the article, they were only just recently indicted. Arrests usually follow indictment.
Most MTA's allow for "non-fatal" error messages. These could be due to DNS problems, connection problems, etc. It would be trivial to extend this to include access problems for the user and would essentially amount to a warning being sent in response to an e-mail message saying the e-mail may not actually be delivered immediately.
I would even take this a step further and insist that proper SMTP "fatal" bounces be generated for all unread e-mail left in a user's mailbox if that user's account is finally cancelled.
It was in "scare quotes" because this is how it was spelled in the article. Though the poster should have added a [sic] or something to avoid responses like this.
I agree, I do not consider this news at all....unless Slashdot wants to create a section that involves HOWTOs, tips, tricks, and other "articles" of content that aren't necessarily news. I'd have no problem with that, but don't lump these in with the rest of the day's news.
It's kind of nifty that any Joe can do this, but one of the things I see these types of video walls being able to do is to change the arrangement and utilization of the 16 monitors, so that one second you might have a 4x4 video stream, and the next you might have a 2x2 stream in the center with some other type of content elsewhere, or a 3x4 stream with 4 1x1 screens of other information, that sort of thing. If there was an easy way to define these types of "programs", independently of the video stream(s), that might make these things a little more fun to play with.
There are other ways of cheating. If you understand how the results are packaged and sent back to the server, you could pretty easily forge messages with bogus results back to the server.
You could, though, apply a similar technique with the results. Generally the processing done on each work unit is the same across each platform, right? If so, they could generate a hash based in some way on the work actually done, and send that hash back with the results. The only way to come up with that has would be to actually do the work. Since SETI@Home gives the same work unit out to multiple parties, they'd just have to raise an alarm whenever they got a hash that disagreed with someone else. If other factors raise an alarm, they could process the same work unit locally and compare its hash with what was submitted. If they can identify someone that's not giving correct hashes, then they clearly did not do the work and all of their work units could be zeroed or re-done.
If we make it just as expensive for the user to cheat as it is to actually do the work, there ceases to be value in cheating.
looking for anomalous submissions and verifying them on my own, trusted hardware
Take this a step further, have each client generate a hash based on the processed data somehow. If they did the work they were originally designed to do, you could take the same work unit from another participant and it should have the same hash. If there are any "suspect" work units, or if multiple submissions of the same work unit, you could compare the hashes against each other, or your own test case, and incorrect hashes means someone tampered with the work unit or is attempting to cheat. I'd then re-examine all of their work units and potentially drop all of their contributions. *shrug*..
Why should I have to install a plug-in to view this content? This guy has basically decided he doesn't want to make the information on his site available in a standard fashion, so he went the "graphics design" approach and wrote it all in a little Flash application instead.
If he doesn't want to bother making his information available for those that don't want to or can't install this plug-in, I'm not going to bother installing that plug-in to view his content. *shrug* It's really not worth it to me.
Standards should always be the lowest-common denominator, with fluff like Flash used for tasks where it's appropriate, and only as a supplement. Here it appears he's relying 100% on it for his entire web site (or is it a "flash site" now?).
I might as well build a web site that just contains a Windows.exe file with my nifty little animations and custom display wisgets and all. Windows people can just click on 'Open' to start up my "web site", and to hell with other OS's that don't have a Windows compatibility layer.
Re:Slashdot: Don't bother linking to Flash-only si
on
Beautiful Case Modding
·
· Score: 1
This is a short-sighted attitude. The web is a loose collection of standards including things like HTML. Sites like this are just creating a standards-compliant frame as a wrapper to a proprietary Flash application. While everyone else is realizing that their content should be accessible, we have "web designers" like this that build content that can only be viewed in a web browser that has the proprietary plugin.
I don't understand why Malda said this was "solid site design". It's anything but.
This is the difference between people that publish information on the web for everyone to browse, and those that want their interactive glossy brochure available on the web for "most" people to see.
despite them having promised me that I could have one.
I've had more than one company try to do something like this to me (the notably recent one was Charter cable and their supposed HDTV support). I make it very painful for them by bringing it up mid-way through the installation. If they lied to you in order to get a sales guy in the door, and you haven't signed anything yet, you have every right to kick the guy out at that point with no compensation for them. The only verbal contract made involved their lie, so the contract is void. Hopefully the installer will get pissed and that will bubble up through his organization.
One of the primary uses I have for referrer information is locating bad or malicious links. If someone is sending large volumes of traffic to a particular page on my site, I'd like to know where that traffic is coming from. In addition, even to pages on my own site, if I see someone following a link to somewhere they either shouldn't be going or to a mistyped URL, the referrer information allows me to identify where they're coming from, and if it's a problem with my own site, it lets me correct it.
Perhaps referrer information should be released depending on the site's posted P3P privacy policies. If a site is interested in collecting information like this for marketing purposes, I can understand someone's reluctance to have their browser provide it. But for the rest of the sites (including those I maintain), the information is only ever used strictly for legitimate needs like those mentioned above. Please don't advocate that referrer information be restricted by default or for everyone, because that hampers my ability to troubleshoot problems.
At first I thought this was some sort of "client" for munging DNA data. Then I went to their site, saw the "Helix" name and the double-stranded DNA logo, and thought for sure this was some sort of DNA data client of some kind, maybe for keeping track of genes and identifying mutations and disease-causing traits or something. That'd be cool, if only I could get data into it. Then I read a bit further and see that it's a media player of some kind?
Am I the only one that thinks they've taken the whole "DNA" bit a little too far? That's like me going out, plastering up billboards with pictures of a computer, circuit boards, naming my company "SensorTronic" and my product "128-bit Heuristic Data Sampler 1.0", which is actually ketchup.
I disagree with the liability argument. I don't think banks could be held liable unless they were just genuinely negligent in putting information out there that could be trivially compromised.
Where I do side with banks, though, is the fact that by "certifying" their site's functionality and security with browser XYZ, I as a customer can be reasonably confident that when I open up my account in a supported browser, I won't be able to do something stupid so as to compromise my account information, and the browser doesn't easily give that information up to someone it shouldn't.
Coding to standards is one thing, but not every "standards-following" browser is either reliable or entirely standards-compliant. If there are known issues or caveats, I appreciate the fact that my bank is making the effort to find those.
On the flip side, it might be a good idea on all sides if they still allowed me to access my information, but only by acknowledging the fact that MyBrowser/1.0 may be insecure or break.
Your information is dated. There are smarter filesystems nowadays that can allocate data from more than one file into a single "cluster". ReiserFS is one such filesystem for Linux, but there are surely others.
I think a lot of it is due to pressure to get a product out. Developers are relying exclusively nowadays on high-level languages, even in OS design, and those that write the compilers don't spend as much time on getting good, compact, precise and optimized code out of high-level code. Nobody cares. CPU is cheap, hard disk is cheap. Why should they work to make their stuff efficient when they can just claim their product is so advanced it requires twice the resources.
Part of it also lies on the shoulders of developers. A lot of developers today are simply programmers that learned C in high school. They have little understanding of machine languages, assembly, or the CPU architectures they're coding for. They know just what the high-level languages look like and one or two ways of accomplishing their goal. What they need to know is how their software design decisions actually get implemented by the assembler and executed by the architecture. Memory efficiency never even crosses their mind. Who wants to pay for programmers that actually know their shit when they can just claim their product is so advanced it now requires four times the resources?
Perhaps this is another area in which OpenSource software can shine some day...
While I agree with what you're saying, bear in mind that this article is discussing compactness of machine code, not source code. A good compiler/optimizer will produce tight, efficient and compact machine code, even if you have to be a little more verbose in your source code so as to preserve the ability to easily read and maintain it. Nowadays (on Windows especially), even small or trivial functions invariably cause the executable to contain an enormous amount of bloat. The author here is simply making a point (at least at the start of the page) that a lot of this bloat is unnecessary and just needlessly consumes disk space.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? I'm going to ignore most of your rant and concentrate on the part that actually applied to my post:
To make the statement "innocent until proven guilty" true, we should call the individuals "prospects" until they are proven "suspects."
What are you talking about? What part of the definition of "suspect" implies a finding of fact as to guilt? Law enforcement "suspects" them of committing a crime. They are free to announce them as suspects. What in the world would they do to prove that they are suspects? Should they have to sign an affidavit certifying that they suspect someone of committing a crime?
That seems, at least to me, to be a huge invasion of privacy.
I agree with you here. I believe, though, that this type of thing is one of the few remaining aspects of life in the US that the federal government hasn't claimed jurisidction over.
As a result, how much information constitutes an "invasion of privacy" is really up to the local community. It's perfectly possible that residents of Omaha are OK with this and are used to it.
But probably not.
Arrest you because you made an aftermarket modification to your own property?
I believe that the equipment in this case is owned by the provider, not the customer. But this isn't really relevant, as I explain below.
The solution isn't to arrest the people that uncap their modems. The solution is to install a packet shaper to manage bandwidth usage from a location inaccessible to your customers.
You are making the assumption that the physical/link layers of the network in this case are in any way similar to the point-to-point links of dialup or DSL.
Many cable networks are actually of a one-to-many type. The technology used to broadcast television programming does not require switching or anything else that might facilitate a secure, one-to-one packet switched network to the customer.
Think of it like satellite TV. There's nothing the satellite operator can do to prevent me from receiving the same satellite signal that everyone else in the country receives. The best they can do is invent horribly complex encryption schemes, smart card systems, and lobby for laws that make tampering with these systems illegal. If it were legal for me to do whatever I wanted with my satellite receiver, such that I could gain access to programming I otherwise would be unable to access, that's still illegal.
Now, obviously your cable modem isn't the same as satellite TV, but the problems cable operators face are the same: due to the technology (one-to-many programming distribution), they cannot rely on the security you can ordinarily have with a one-to-one data connection. So, instead, they have to place some of their trust in hardware on the customer premesis.
This is why there can be "theft of service" and why modification of your "own" equipment can be made illegal.
Note that I am still against a cable operator trying to hide behind these laws when it is within their power to adopt technological measures to prevent abuse like this, but if they've done all they reasonably can, I have no problem with them needing to rely on laws like this to prevent users from raping their service.
Like most others, though, I think a letter to the customer and cancellation of service could have sufficed perfectly. They are not like a satellite TV operator in that they can physically disconnect service to their customers...
greeted at the door by armed FBI agents with guns drawn
There is no factual data supporting this that we've seen. The only thing that mentions the FBI having their guns drawn is the article submitter's sensationalistic summary of the story. You'll note that the article only indicates the FBI confiscated equipment. It does not mention how.
I completely agree.. The first rule of computer/application security: Never trust the user. Once a piece of hardware is installed on customer premesis (or in some cases, customer-installed hardware that they purchased on their own), the ISP should never trust that hardware. Any security mechanisms (authentication, authorization, bandwidth caps, IP address assignment, etc.) need to exist on the ISP side, not the customer side.
But on the flip side, the nature of some cable networks makes some of this fairly difficult. Satellite TV is in the same situation: they can't flip a switch on a satellite and keep that satellite signal from being received at your home. Instead, they have to resort to tricks with smart cards and encryption on the client end to keep their customers honest. There will always be the possibility of emulation and unauthorized modification of this equipment, though, and as a result, we have laws like these in place to protect them.
I do oppose companies (cable or otherwise) taking these laws for granted and refusing to do the obvious to secure things on their end instead of just relying on the FBI to prosecute customers that take advantage of what may be fairly trivial mechanisms to get around provider restrictions.
Still, there is an assumption here that their guns are drawn. There is no mention of this as fact in the article. I submit that there is just as much of a probability that their guns were not drawn.
I think the original poster is right: this is just sensationalism to try and make this more interesting and more emotional.
There isn't even anything in there to suggest they were arrested, only indicted. The feds probably stopped by, knocked on the door, presented a search warrant, and carted some equipment off. These guys are not violent criminals, so there was probably no reason to suspect they'd run. Most of them will probably get off with a slap on the hand or a fine, if anything at all.
Whether it's "standard procedure" or not to have guns drawn when presenting a search warrant isn't really relevant. The submitter of this article added that information on his own to dress it up. It's annoying.
How does this become a Federal crime?
Agreed!
I guess it just extends the old policy of allowing any cable TV issues to be held at the federal level. Maybe it's because CATV providers tend to be multi-state in nature, or maybe it's because the programming traverses state lines.
In my opinion, federal jurisdiction needs to be applied only when there is a need for it to be applied at the national level. Just because someone can find some aspect of a service that in some way makes use of resources in another state, that should not automatically mean it's in the federal jursidiction. In theory, you can claim just about anything as being within the federal jursidiction because there's always going to be something involved nowadays that involves another state.
I really don't understand why the feds are so eager to expand their jurisdiction so much. Why take on additional work when the states can handle it on their own? And due to the vague commerce clause in the constitution, the courts have no choice but to uphold the constitutionality of it all.
Sorry for the rant, but this erosion of local and state governments really annoys me sometimes. The federal government is getting much too big.
Why is the article posting the FULL names including street adresses ... This would be highly illegal in most of the rest of the world
I don't think it's illegal here, but it is very rare to see that. I imagine the author of that piece will get slapped around for doing it, but maybe not. Who knows, this may be the norm for that community.
including street adresses of the fugitives (and that is what they are at this point, i guess)?
What makes them fugitives? In the US, they are suspects (innocent until proven guilty and all that). Additionally, they'd have to be on the run in order to be a fugitive. According to the article, they were only just recently indicted. Arrests usually follow indictment.
Note that the article is already a few days old.
Most MTA's allow for "non-fatal" error messages. These could be due to DNS problems, connection problems, etc. It would be trivial to extend this to include access problems for the user and would essentially amount to a warning being sent in response to an e-mail message saying the e-mail may not actually be delivered immediately.
I would even take this a step further and insist that proper SMTP "fatal" bounces be generated for all unread e-mail left in a user's mailbox if that user's account is finally cancelled.
Like this?
It was in "scare quotes" because this is how it was spelled in the article. Though the poster should have added a [sic] or something to avoid responses like this.
I agree, I do not consider this news at all. ...unless Slashdot wants to create a section that involves HOWTOs, tips, tricks, and other "articles" of content that aren't necessarily news. I'd have no problem with that, but don't lump these in with the rest of the day's news.
And especially don't stick it on the front page.
It's kind of nifty that any Joe can do this, but one of the things I see these types of video walls being able to do is to change the arrangement and utilization of the 16 monitors, so that one second you might have a 4x4 video stream, and the next you might have a 2x2 stream in the center with some other type of content elsewhere, or a 3x4 stream with 4 1x1 screens of other information, that sort of thing. If there was an easy way to define these types of "programs", independently of the video stream(s), that might make these things a little more fun to play with.
There are other ways of cheating. If you understand how the results are packaged and sent back to the server, you could pretty easily forge messages with bogus results back to the server.
You could, though, apply a similar technique with the results. Generally the processing done on each work unit is the same across each platform, right? If so, they could generate a hash based in some way on the work actually done, and send that hash back with the results. The only way to come up with that has would be to actually do the work. Since SETI@Home gives the same work unit out to multiple parties, they'd just have to raise an alarm whenever they got a hash that disagreed with someone else. If other factors raise an alarm, they could process the same work unit locally and compare its hash with what was submitted. If they can identify someone that's not giving correct hashes, then they clearly did not do the work and all of their work units could be zeroed or re-done.
If we make it just as expensive for the user to cheat as it is to actually do the work, there ceases to be value in cheating.
looking for anomalous submissions and verifying them on my own, trusted hardware
Take this a step further, have each client generate a hash based on the processed data somehow. If they did the work they were originally designed to do, you could take the same work unit from another participant and it should have the same hash. If there are any "suspect" work units, or if multiple submissions of the same work unit, you could compare the hashes against each other, or your own test case, and incorrect hashes means someone tampered with the work unit or is attempting to cheat. I'd then re-examine all of their work units and potentially drop all of their contributions. *shrug*..
Why should I have to install a plug-in to view this content? This guy has basically decided he doesn't want to make the information on his site available in a standard fashion, so he went the "graphics design" approach and wrote it all in a little Flash application instead.
.exe file with my nifty little animations and custom display wisgets and all. Windows people can just click on 'Open' to start up my "web site", and to hell with other OS's that don't have a Windows compatibility layer.
If he doesn't want to bother making his information available for those that don't want to or can't install this plug-in, I'm not going to bother installing that plug-in to view his content. *shrug* It's really not worth it to me.
Standards should always be the lowest-common denominator, with fluff like Flash used for tasks where it's appropriate, and only as a supplement. Here it appears he's relying 100% on it for his entire web site (or is it a "flash site" now?).
I might as well build a web site that just contains a Windows
This is a short-sighted attitude. The web is a loose collection of standards including things like HTML. Sites like this are just creating a standards-compliant frame as a wrapper to a proprietary Flash application. While everyone else is realizing that their content should be accessible, we have "web designers" like this that build content that can only be viewed in a web browser that has the proprietary plugin.
I don't understand why Malda said this was "solid site design". It's anything but.
This is the difference between people that publish information on the web for everyone to browse, and those that want their interactive glossy brochure available on the web for "most" people to see.
despite them having promised me that I could have one.
I've had more than one company try to do something like this to me (the notably recent one was Charter cable and their supposed HDTV support). I make it very painful for them by bringing it up mid-way through the installation. If they lied to you in order to get a sales guy in the door, and you haven't signed anything yet, you have every right to kick the guy out at that point with no compensation for them. The only verbal contract made involved their lie, so the contract is void. Hopefully the installer will get pissed and that will bubble up through his organization.
One of the primary uses I have for referrer information is locating bad or malicious links. If someone is sending large volumes of traffic to a particular page on my site, I'd like to know where that traffic is coming from. In addition, even to pages on my own site, if I see someone following a link to somewhere they either shouldn't be going or to a mistyped URL, the referrer information allows me to identify where they're coming from, and if it's a problem with my own site, it lets me correct it.
Perhaps referrer information should be released depending on the site's posted P3P privacy policies. If a site is interested in collecting information like this for marketing purposes, I can understand someone's reluctance to have their browser provide it. But for the rest of the sites (including those I maintain), the information is only ever used strictly for legitimate needs like those mentioned above. Please don't advocate that referrer information be restricted by default or for everyone, because that hampers my ability to troubleshoot problems.
At first I thought this was some sort of "client" for munging DNA data. Then I went to their site, saw the "Helix" name and the double-stranded DNA logo, and thought for sure this was some sort of DNA data client of some kind, maybe for keeping track of genes and identifying mutations and disease-causing traits or something. That'd be cool, if only I could get data into it. Then I read a bit further and see that it's a media player of some kind?
Am I the only one that thinks they've taken the whole "DNA" bit a little too far? That's like me going out, plastering up billboards with pictures of a computer, circuit boards, naming my company "SensorTronic" and my product "128-bit Heuristic Data Sampler 1.0", which is actually ketchup.
I disagree with the liability argument. I don't think banks could be held liable unless they were just genuinely negligent in putting information out there that could be trivially compromised.
Where I do side with banks, though, is the fact that by "certifying" their site's functionality and security with browser XYZ, I as a customer can be reasonably confident that when I open up my account in a supported browser, I won't be able to do something stupid so as to compromise my account information, and the browser doesn't easily give that information up to someone it shouldn't.
Coding to standards is one thing, but not every "standards-following" browser is either reliable or entirely standards-compliant. If there are known issues or caveats, I appreciate the fact that my bank is making the effort to find those.
On the flip side, it might be a good idea on all sides if they still allowed me to access my information, but only by acknowledging the fact that MyBrowser/1.0 may be insecure or break.
Your information is dated. There are smarter filesystems nowadays that can allocate data from more than one file into a single "cluster". ReiserFS is one such filesystem for Linux, but there are surely others.
...assuming you're using a file system that only permits a single file's data in one cluster. There are more intelligent file systems out there.
I think a lot of it is due to pressure to get a product out. Developers are relying exclusively nowadays on high-level languages, even in OS design, and those that write the compilers don't spend as much time on getting good, compact, precise and optimized code out of high-level code. Nobody cares. CPU is cheap, hard disk is cheap. Why should they work to make their stuff efficient when they can just claim their product is so advanced it requires twice the resources.
Part of it also lies on the shoulders of developers. A lot of developers today are simply programmers that learned C in high school. They have little understanding of machine languages, assembly, or the CPU architectures they're coding for. They know just what the high-level languages look like and one or two ways of accomplishing their goal. What they need to know is how their software design decisions actually get implemented by the assembler and executed by the architecture. Memory efficiency never even crosses their mind. Who wants to pay for programmers that actually know their shit when they can just claim their product is so advanced it now requires four times the resources?
Perhaps this is another area in which OpenSource software can shine some day...
While I agree with what you're saying, bear in mind that this article is discussing compactness of machine code, not source code. A good compiler/optimizer will produce tight, efficient and compact machine code, even if you have to be a little more verbose in your source code so as to preserve the ability to easily read and maintain it. Nowadays (on Windows especially), even small or trivial functions invariably cause the executable to contain an enormous amount of bloat. The author here is simply making a point (at least at the start of the page) that a lot of this bloat is unnecessary and just needlessly consumes disk space.