The roll-up of the CIA’s networks reignited debates within the U.S. intelligence community about the merits of high-tech versus low-tech methods of communicating with sources. Within some corners of the intelligence world, “there was a widely held belief that technology was the solution to all communications problems,” according to one of the former officials. Proponents of older methods — such as chalk marks, burst communications, brush passes and one-time pads — were seen as “troglodytes,” said this official. - https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html
This strikes me as a fundamental point. The further away you get from an understanding of first principles, the easier for common mode failures to occur -- and I think it ties as well into a failure of imagination about those failure modes as a direct result of lack of familiarity with them. It's easy to say "low tech is a solved problem, so let's focus on all the sexy high-tech stuff"; but low-tech pattern recognition can bite you just as easily, if not moreso.
One problem with breaking up Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, is that often these companies have ONE service which dominates their revenue. It's not like the old Standard Oil or AT&T in which you can break them up into smaller regional interests which are roughly equivalent. In Google's case, there's no point in breaking up search and advertising, because search is what drives eyeballs, while advertising is what funds damn near everything else they do.
And how the heck would you split up Facebook or Twitter? Nothing they do is really all that significant outside of their ONE primary product. How would breaking up Facebook even work? Facebook1 and Facebook2? Randomly split up accounts? Duplicate them and make people choose? You can't really make a case for splitting apart their advertising and social media platform, as one drives the revenue for the other. And everything else they do is a sideshow by comparison. Even moreso with Twitter.
I'm not sure you understand: That's the point. Breaking up the social networks from the advertising, and the data tracking/brokering from either, (and possible the cloud offerings from everything as well) is the important middle goal. By breaking up the technology players, they can choose among ad networks, ads can be more tightly regulated, and consumer tracking can be placed into its own regulated area (think credit bureaus). Broken up into individual platforms, Google can't use its near-monopoly in ad revenue to throw billions at industries in an anti-competitive way. This isn't about splitting up popular sites per se, it's about levelling the playing field for upcoming startups.
This is a vertical monopoly, not a horizontal monopoly.
In a future mind-controlling game, death row convicts are forced to battle in a 'Doom'-type environment. Convict Kable, controlled by Simon, a skilled teenage gamer, must survive thirty sessions in order to be set free. Or won't he?
I liked that the villain in that movie was basically Mark Zuckerberg, played by the guy who was Dexter. It was fairly shlockish, but I think it would probably been seen in a much better light if it were to come out now, with us being on the far side of the social networks' ill effects on society.
Yeah. Turns out that when you make your software freely available, you do not get paid for it. If you're not OK with that, don't put it under an open source license.
This is a feature of open source, not a bug.
I feel like this article had to have been written for Millennials. Specifically, for Millennial app devs who've been told by their DevOps teams (which have no system administrators on staff) about this thing called "Linux" running underneath their java calls and JS routines and are wondering why a Google Ad isn't displayed on every 5th bash prompt.
There's really no way around it... Eventually Chrome will take authentication into the browser, which of course is integration into the Google Service in the back end, and just use that to bypass.
If you're not signed into Chrome (thus signed into Google), you'll get captchas of varying degrees of annoyance until/unless Google no longer needs people to categorize visuals for its AI training, at which point Google will just make a login mandatory under the guise of identity assurance.
You've successfully "Don't Be Evil"-ed enough so that no one in their right mind would possibly agree to live there unless they wanted to become an Alphabet serf.
Disney at its most malicious would be 1000x more trustworthy than Alphabet in this regard, and I'd sooner live the rest of my days in the RCID than step foot in Googleville.
Did you see the van with the back windows platered over with stickers? That van would not get a block before being pulled over and over and over again.
You seriously underestimate the amount of crazy shit that exists on a day to day basis in Florida.
Maybe this is a 'Only Nixon could go to China' moment for civil behavior.
I mean, if freaking Stallman can admit that it is time to be civil, then maybe everybody can make the same assessment
There's nothing wrong with being civil, and even Linus in his most inflammatory periods would agree (even if he's violating them). The CC and CoC-enforcement community wants far more than a minimal definition of "civil", and that's the rub.
RMS's statement seems quite reasonable, because it basically boils down to: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's a much better foundation for a conduct agreement than the course listing at your local humanities department.
This has always puzzled me. Violence and murder, on film or in TV programming, is generally allowed, with a "PG" or "R" rating or equivalent. Sex is rated "X" or "XXX" depending on the explicitness. And yet, in real life, most people (outside Chicago, at least) will probably never witness a murder or experience a shooting.
Are you an American? If so, the answer should be obvious. The US culturally has a certain outlook on the profane and the sacred, steming partially from its Puritan roots and partly from the ethics of the time as the US spread west. Explicit sexuality is protected more, while the more violent aspects are seen as... well, just part of life.
It's pretty much the exact opposite of the European/Old World view on these matters, where sex is presented far more openly in real life, but guns are harder to come by. And in entertainment, sex and nudity gets a pass while violence will lead to more restrictive movie and video game ratings (or be censored out).
When people (like the GP, honestly) complain about US views on sex and violence, they're usually just whining about it without addressing the underlying principle: the US is simply different about these things. It's a different cultural choice. It doesn't mean you're oppressed, and it doesn't mean that parental-management tools (such as this) are wrong for having different default choices than you'd prefer.
China might be a bit of a realpolitik pass (or at least warning) given its economic position and (more validly) the fact that it has the highest population in the world. Everyone else? Tell them to knock it off, and then go bomb them if they don't.
Think that's too harsh, but the US needs to ban straws? That's a clear sign that you're simply not serious about the issue and are more interested in meaningless, performative wokeness than you are in a utilitarian solution.
The summary almost goes into the differences between AGPLv3 and SSPL, but then decides to fill space with a meaningless quote instead.
What are the practical differences?
“Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.”
IANAL, but the basic issue seems to be that a modified version of the OSS under AGPL would have to be provided, but nothing else needed to make your SaaS version of the original OSS product work would be.
AIUI, under SSPL if you now sell "MongoDB Instances" for people to connect to, and that you'll cover replication and backups for those MongoDB Instances them using some nifty new proprietary add-on you built, then you're going to need to open source that replication and backup code too.
I don't think this would cover some large SaaS provide that simply *uses* MongoDB on the backend, only one that's *selling* MongoDB instances as a service in and of itself.
The depressing thing about our current times, is that people are speaking past each other so much there's little that's agreed on.
Teaching (or at least reminding people of) ethics in technology is a noble goal... One of my favorite courses as an undergrad (despite the textbook itself being rather poorly written) was an Ethics in Computing course, and I'm sure there's a lot more to be said now.
"All science, no philosophy" leads to bad outcomes, I think we can agree. The problem is that I don't know that I trust any of Silicon Valley to do so in any sort of neutral manner.... Mozilla's Ethics are that Brendan Eich should have been fired. Can't say I agree with that.
Seems like that itself can be handled with regular blocking of Caller ID ("Restricted") rather than spoofing thereof. What does spoofing give you that a blocked number doesn't in that case?
I work in an inbound-only call center (tech support for web host). If we call a client back, we spoof our number so the number they see on their caller ID is the same toll free number they called to reach us in the first place. We used to not do this, and every outbound call looked like it came from somewhere in Colorado (we're in Oklahoma), so it helped our customers in more than one way. First, they recognize it's us calling them back about their ticket, and two, they can call the number they saw on caller ID and reach us again. Previously the Colorado local number they saw went nowhere, it was just some bulk trunk line owned by Verizon and leased by our call ACD routing cloud software company.
I'd argue it was worse for our clients when we couldn't spoof. They had no idea who was calling them, they get dead-air if they tried to call it back.
Yeah, I think this would be a clear case where regulations should be able to authorize this. The number indicated is a working number going back to the entity making the outbound call. I imagine plenty of other institutions could also have reasons for this (for example, outbound calls from an office where everyone has extensions should just go to the trunk/main number, not one of the random outbound circuits). This is where validation and maybe a self-certification combined with fee would be fine. What we need are stiff fines for telcos that entities *other* than this to do this.
I realize certain infrastructure bits need to be able to do this, but why not a regulation that requires outbound data be verified to be under the control of the "real" sending entity? A service (Skype, say) initiating an outbound call with a user-entered number must first validate control (voice call or SMS, etc) and record/audit such validation before putting injecting it into the POTS.
Make that a best-practice at the ITU, but enforce it by regulation for domestic.
That just leaves international calls as suspect (which has long been the case anyways) and international-but-still-in-NANPA calls as notable (ditto).
A bit late to the party, aren't we? I mean -- overall "Better late than never" still rings true, but it's hard to ignore the fact that tech titans have been doing things that are unethical in different ways for quite a while.
Amazon has been gobbling up larger chunks of the economy for a decade, and will likely face a breakup at some point. Facebook ran unethical (no explicit consent) experiments in 2012 seeing who they could persuade to vote and who they couldn't. Google had a "collect first, ask later" data policy, and their initial maps datasets were picked up by wardriving around the US storing everyone's open WiFi network data and taking photographs long before that was an accepted data-gathering norm. Twitter kickbans whomever they like, which is fine, but makes a showing of it being an open discussion forum for international politics and routinely "just happens" to silence folks that don't match the political whims of the Bay. Everyone else has been making Skinner boxes for a decade and a half, trying to find any way to keep folks more and more addicted to their specific forms of entertainment, in a way far more insidious than the tobacco industry ever did. Apple... is doing basically okay.
I'm glad people are waking up to the power of the tech. It shouldn't have had to take Chinese dissident crackdowns to do it. And GPLv3+No-Military-Use-Because-I-Don't-Like-Your-View-On-SSM isn't the answer.
Republicans are as fed up with, if not more, with Big Tech as Democrats are. This isn't a "elect us and we'll do it" moment, and Republicans can (and, IMO, should) work with them and push it through in a bipartisan fashion.
No one is forcing your personal computer to display this message (and if they were, open source obviously would be the solution, yadda yadda yadda).
He said handheld PCs, so he means phones/tablets. Those DO force your loss of control. Open source phone systems are not feasible yet, but they should eventually be. Maybe. If we legislate the manufacturers stop locking bootloaders. The only way to disable those 3am amber alerts is to root your phone and disable that alert app which for normal folks is not very easy. The legality is also questionable. I don't give 2 shits. I root all my phones and delete that annoying app. I don't care if the pres needs to get that info out there, as you put it. I'm not stopping him. But I sure as fuck DO NOT HAVE TO LISTEN TO HIM!
TLDR: As supplied by your carrier, you DO NOT have autonomy over the operation, monitoring, or performance of your portable personal computing device.
Buried in your rant is the key: If your device communicates via cell tower and can make a POTS call, it's subject to the various relevant FCC regulations here, which are basically just extrapolations from the FCC's regulations on licensed radio spectrum for TV and radio broadcast. Your iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle, or iPad *without* cell/SIM connectivity is unaffected by this --- *those* are "handheld PC's" from a regulatory perspective. Cell phones are not. If you don't like that, replace your smartphone with a dumb "regular" phone and purchase a tablet/phablet/handheld device that doesn't have a CDMA/GSM/cell radio transmitter.
If consumers end up economically demanding centralized monopolies under pain of mass piracy, that suggests that the era of Tech Giants will be systemically reinforced for the foreseeable future.
Competition is great, but it's bad enough that the promise of mass economic markets generally means only the largest survive due to economies of scale, but now even a properly-competitive market participant can't win against the network effects of lock-in. Yikes.
Slashdot Mirror
This strikes me as a fundamental point. The further away you get from an understanding of first principles, the easier for common mode failures to occur -- and I think it ties as well into a failure of imagination about those failure modes as a direct result of lack of familiarity with them. It's easy to say "low tech is a solved problem, so let's focus on all the sexy high-tech stuff"; but low-tech pattern recognition can bite you just as easily, if not moreso.
One problem with breaking up Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, is that often these companies have ONE service which dominates their revenue. It's not like the old Standard Oil or AT&T in which you can break them up into smaller regional interests which are roughly equivalent. In Google's case, there's no point in breaking up search and advertising, because search is what drives eyeballs, while advertising is what funds damn near everything else they do.
And how the heck would you split up Facebook or Twitter? Nothing they do is really all that significant outside of their ONE primary product. How would breaking up Facebook even work? Facebook1 and Facebook2? Randomly split up accounts? Duplicate them and make people choose? You can't really make a case for splitting apart their advertising and social media platform, as one drives the revenue for the other. And everything else they do is a sideshow by comparison. Even moreso with Twitter.
I'm not sure you understand: That's the point. Breaking up the social networks from the advertising, and the data tracking/brokering from either, (and possible the cloud offerings from everything as well) is the important middle goal. By breaking up the technology players, they can choose among ad networks, ads can be more tightly regulated, and consumer tracking can be placed into its own regulated area (think credit bureaus). Broken up into individual platforms, Google can't use its near-monopoly in ad revenue to throw billions at industries in an anti-competitive way. This isn't about splitting up popular sites per se, it's about levelling the playing field for upcoming startups.
This is a vertical monopoly, not a horizontal monopoly.
Sounds like a B movie!
Actually, sounds more like 2009's Gamer:
I liked that the villain in that movie was basically Mark Zuckerberg, played by the guy who was Dexter. It was fairly shlockish, but I think it would probably been seen in a much better light if it were to come out now, with us being on the far side of the social networks' ill effects on society.
Yeah. Turns out that when you make your software freely available, you do not get paid for it. If you're not OK with that, don't put it under an open source license.
This is a feature of open source, not a bug.
I feel like this article had to have been written for Millennials. Specifically, for Millennial app devs who've been told by their DevOps teams (which have no system administrators on staff) about this thing called "Linux" running underneath their java calls and JS routines and are wondering why a Google Ad isn't displayed on every 5th bash prompt.
There's really no way around it... Eventually Chrome will take authentication into the browser, which of course is integration into the Google Service in the back end, and just use that to bypass.
If you're not signed into Chrome (thus signed into Google), you'll get captchas of varying degrees of annoyance until/unless Google no longer needs people to categorize visuals for its AI training, at which point Google will just make a login mandatory under the guise of identity assurance.
Congratulations, Google...
You've successfully "Don't Be Evil"-ed enough so that no one in their right mind would possibly agree to live there unless they wanted to become an Alphabet serf.
Disney at its most malicious would be 1000x more trustworthy than Alphabet in this regard, and I'd sooner live the rest of my days in the RCID than step foot in Googleville.
Did you see the van with the back windows platered over with stickers?
That van would not get a block before being pulled over and over and over again.
You seriously underestimate the amount of crazy shit that exists on a day to day basis in Florida.
Hint: You've got a better chance of surviving The Purge if you're a gun-totin' prepper type... not a campus hipster.
Your country has a better chance of not having a purge if its full of campus hipsters vs prepper types
Any country has a better chance of not having a purge if it's homogeneous, but I don't think that's a proper aim.
fuck the law.
fuck those who enforce it.
fuck this country too.
I hope there's a new rebellious spirit born in the US and it will look like 1968 all over again.
Hint: You've got a better chance of surviving The Purge if you're a gun-totin' prepper type... not a campus hipster.
Maybe this is a 'Only Nixon could go to China' moment for civil behavior.
I mean, if freaking Stallman can admit that it is time to be civil, then maybe everybody can make the same assessment
There's nothing wrong with being civil, and even Linus in his most inflammatory periods would agree (even if he's violating them). The CC and CoC-enforcement community wants far more than a minimal definition of "civil", and that's the rub.
RMS's statement seems quite reasonable, because it basically boils down to:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's a much better foundation for a conduct agreement than the course listing at your local humanities department.
This has always puzzled me. Violence and murder, on film or in TV programming, is generally allowed, with a "PG" or "R" rating or equivalent. Sex is rated "X" or "XXX" depending on the explicitness. And yet, in real life, most people (outside Chicago, at least) will probably never witness a murder or experience a shooting.
Are you an American? If so, the answer should be obvious. The US culturally has a certain outlook on the profane and the sacred, steming partially from its Puritan roots and partly from the ethics of the time as the US spread west. Explicit sexuality is protected more, while the more violent aspects are seen as... well, just part of life.
It's pretty much the exact opposite of the European/Old World view on these matters, where sex is presented far more openly in real life, but guns are harder to come by. And in entertainment, sex and nudity gets a pass while violence will lead to more restrictive movie and video game ratings (or be censored out).
When people (like the GP, honestly) complain about US views on sex and violence, they're usually just whining about it without addressing the underlying principle: the US is simply different about these things. It's a different cultural choice. It doesn't mean you're oppressed, and it doesn't mean that parental-management tools (such as this) are wrong for having different default choices than you'd prefer.
...we should immediately bring the full front of US Foreign Policy against the five countries that put out more than the rest of the world combined: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
China might be a bit of a realpolitik pass (or at least warning) given its economic position and (more validly) the fact that it has the highest population in the world. Everyone else? Tell them to knock it off, and then go bomb them if they don't.
Think that's too harsh, but the US needs to ban straws? That's a clear sign that you're simply not serious about the issue and are more interested in meaningless, performative wokeness than you are in a utilitarian solution.
Guess I should bust out my qmail/vpopmail scripts from 2003. Everything old is new again.
The summary almost goes into the differences between AGPLv3 and SSPL, but then decides to fill space with a meaningless quote instead.
What are the practical differences?
IANAL, but the basic issue seems to be that a modified version of the OSS under AGPL would have to be provided, but nothing else needed to make your SaaS version of the original OSS product work would be.
AIUI, under SSPL if you now sell "MongoDB Instances" for people to connect to, and that you'll cover replication and backups for those MongoDB Instances them using some nifty new proprietary add-on you built, then you're going to need to open source that replication and backup code too.
I don't think this would cover some large SaaS provide that simply *uses* MongoDB on the backend, only one that's *selling* MongoDB instances as a service in and of itself.
Soyuz launches are suspended for a while and there is no Space Shuttle alternative available. Can Space X deliver?
Get Musk and Branson out of the way and Bezos will just Amazon Prime it up.
The depressing thing about our current times, is that people are speaking past each other so much there's little that's agreed on.
Teaching (or at least reminding people of) ethics in technology is a noble goal... One of my favorite courses as an undergrad (despite the textbook itself being rather poorly written) was an Ethics in Computing course, and I'm sure there's a lot more to be said now.
"All science, no philosophy" leads to bad outcomes, I think we can agree. The problem is that I don't know that I trust any of Silicon Valley to do so in any sort of neutral manner.... Mozilla's Ethics are that Brendan Eich should have been fired. Can't say I agree with that.
Seems like that itself can be handled with regular blocking of Caller ID ("Restricted") rather than spoofing thereof. What does spoofing give you that a blocked number doesn't in that case?
I work in an inbound-only call center (tech support for web host). If we call a client back, we spoof our number so the number they see on their caller ID is the same toll free number they called to reach us in the first place. We used to not do this, and every outbound call looked like it came from somewhere in Colorado (we're in Oklahoma), so it helped our customers in more than one way. First, they recognize it's us calling them back about their ticket, and two, they can call the number they saw on caller ID and reach us again. Previously the Colorado local number they saw went nowhere, it was just some bulk trunk line owned by Verizon and leased by our call ACD routing cloud software company.
I'd argue it was worse for our clients when we couldn't spoof. They had no idea who was calling them, they get dead-air if they tried to call it back.
Yeah, I think this would be a clear case where regulations should be able to authorize this. The number indicated is a working number going back to the entity making the outbound call. I imagine plenty of other institutions could also have reasons for this (for example, outbound calls from an office where everyone has extensions should just go to the trunk/main number, not one of the random outbound circuits). This is where validation and maybe a self-certification combined with fee would be fine. What we need are stiff fines for telcos that entities *other* than this to do this.
I realize certain infrastructure bits need to be able to do this, but why not a regulation that requires outbound data be verified to be under the control of the "real" sending entity? A service (Skype, say) initiating an outbound call with a user-entered number must first validate control (voice call or SMS, etc) and record/audit such validation before putting injecting it into the POTS.
Make that a best-practice at the ITU, but enforce it by regulation for domestic.
That just leaves international calls as suspect (which has long been the case anyways) and international-but-still-in-NANPA calls as notable (ditto).
Consumers? Wouldn't at some point a technology company think of referring to people as "users" or "customers"?
"Consumers" implies what we should all already know, of course... but I still found it notable.
A bit late to the party, aren't we? I mean -- overall "Better late than never" still rings true, but it's hard to ignore the fact that tech titans have been doing things that are unethical in different ways for quite a while.
Amazon has been gobbling up larger chunks of the economy for a decade, and will likely face a breakup at some point.
Facebook ran unethical (no explicit consent) experiments in 2012 seeing who they could persuade to vote and who they couldn't.
Google had a "collect first, ask later" data policy, and their initial maps datasets were picked up by wardriving around the US storing everyone's open WiFi network data and taking photographs long before that was an accepted data-gathering norm.
Twitter kickbans whomever they like, which is fine, but makes a showing of it being an open discussion forum for international politics and routinely "just happens" to silence folks that don't match the political whims of the Bay.
Everyone else has been making Skinner boxes for a decade and a half, trying to find any way to keep folks more and more addicted to their specific forms of entertainment, in a way far more insidious than the tobacco industry ever did.
Apple... is doing basically okay.
I'm glad people are waking up to the power of the tech. It shouldn't have had to take Chinese dissident crackdowns to do it. And GPLv3+No-Military-Use-Because-I-Don't-Like-Your-View-On-SSM isn't the answer.
Republicans are as fed up with, if not more, with Big Tech as Democrats are. This isn't a "elect us and we'll do it" moment, and Republicans can (and, IMO, should) work with them and push it through in a bipartisan fashion.
He said handheld PCs, so he means phones/tablets. Those DO force your loss of control. Open source phone systems are not feasible yet, but they should eventually be. Maybe. If we legislate the manufacturers stop locking bootloaders. The only way to disable those 3am amber alerts is to root your phone and disable that alert app which for normal folks is not very easy. The legality is also questionable. I don't give 2 shits. I root all my phones and delete that annoying app. I don't care if the pres needs to get that info out there, as you put it. I'm not stopping him. But I sure as fuck DO NOT HAVE TO LISTEN TO HIM!
TLDR: As supplied by your carrier, you DO NOT have autonomy over the operation, monitoring, or performance of your portable personal computing device.
Buried in your rant is the key: If your device communicates via cell tower and can make a POTS call, it's subject to the various relevant FCC regulations here, which are basically just extrapolations from the FCC's regulations on licensed radio spectrum for TV and radio broadcast. Your iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle, or iPad *without* cell/SIM connectivity is unaffected by this --- *those* are "handheld PC's" from a regulatory perspective. Cell phones are not. If you don't like that, replace your smartphone with a dumb "regular" phone and purchase a tablet/phablet/handheld device that doesn't have a CDMA/GSM/cell radio transmitter.
It's not really an issue for me because I don't own a cell phone, listen to the radio, or watch TV.
You're either allergic to EM, in which case you might be living near the US NRQZ... or you're quite the hipster.
If consumers end up economically demanding centralized monopolies under pain of mass piracy, that suggests that the era of Tech Giants will be systemically reinforced for the foreseeable future.
Competition is great, but it's bad enough that the promise of mass economic markets generally means only the largest survive due to economies of scale, but now even a properly-competitive market participant can't win against the network effects of lock-in. Yikes.