I think people are learning the wrong lesson here. This story is why you want your computer (whether it's in a separate box or inside of the monitor) to be maintainable.
Boot your computer from rescue/install image and either remove the malware or re-install (preferably a newer version of the OS, which doesn't contain whatever bug enabled the installation of the malware in the first place). If you can't do that, then it's a shitty computer no matter how big the bundled monitor is.
It doesn't matter that the monitor and the computer are in the same enclosure. Many people are reasonably happy with their phones, tablets, iMacs, etc -- all essentially the same thing as "Smart TVs" just on a physically smaller scale.
You're just unhappy because the market is full of extremely shitty products, even if based on decent technology. Putting computers in everything is good, but that's assuming you aren't choosing user-hostile computers! Take any good application for a computer, and I could turn it into your worst nightmare by substituting the computer with a hostile computer. That doesn't make the tech bad, though.
If some software already serves the user's interests to the best degree possible, so that they perceive no need for maintenance, then I see how the distinction between Free Software and proprietary would seem irrelevant to most laymen. You're not ever looking at the code because you never feel a need to. In that case, it doesn't seem all that weird to conflate the ability to maintain software with actually having done (or not done) it. So it might seem like it's just about who you trust.
That also happens to be the case where the trust happens to have been warranted! The user trusted the developer, and as far as anyone knows, it worked out. This is the situation your post addresses.
It's the other cases, when the software doesn't do what the user wants (the trust wasn't warranted), that the distinction becomes stark.
Malfeatures require an "agreement to suck." Proprietary software's agreement has one member, so it's easy. Whatever malfeatures Microsoft decides to put into it, they have 100% of the vote so that's what you're going to get. There's no competing fork, or threat of a competing fork. (The closest thing they have to forks, are called "cracks" and that's hardly an efficient way to maintain software.)
Free Software requires an agreement between everyone who cares, where any single defector can say "I've had enough of this bullshit" and the agreement collapses. You could have a hundred veteran greybeard celebrities all agree to have vim automatically convert all tabs to spaces without user consent, and one newbie teenager can come in and say "I took that shit out of my fork." It doesn't matter whether you or I is the one who does it: anyone can, and the more annoying the malfeature, the sooner someone will.
And since all the developers know that making the software work against the user will just get forked out, few ever bother try. When they do, it's exciting news (e.g. Unity's Amazon ads), as opposed to the literally daily proprietary software newsfodder here on Slashdot, where people bitch about it or debate the ethics of "balance" between users and their adversaries.
Try to even imagine Free Software blatantly working against its users in ways like these:
iOS prevents people from running certain types of applications, especially so if the application in question is a competitor to Apple's store
Blu-ray players will refuse to send data to a device that fails HDCP handshake
Microsoft removed the "X" from the Windows 10 update
Facebook's chat tries to prevent interoperability
(Two of those stories are from today, which is just another day like any other. This shit is common.) That Free Software users aren't accustomed to these things, is because they know what processes and power relationship to trust, not who. It works despite the ever-present potential conflict of interest between developers (even OSS ones) and a users, and a user doesn't have to read a single line of code to reap the benefits. This is where your argument, IMHO, makes no sense whatsoever.
But my point was that despite the availability of software which does serve its users, many people accept things like the shit in the above list, where the software is blatantly working against them. It isn't even covert! That's bad news today and the consequences will only be worse as software becomes more capable (AI).
The "refusing to sell hurts sales" hypothesis was further confirmed today, but skeptics claim experiment is not reproducable. Zombie Jack Valenti claims, "I keep telling MPAA members that if they just hiss and spit at customers enough, and act sufficiently outraged whenever the public offers them money, the public will respond with increased demand. Keep saying No! No Sale is the only path to success. I know some of the younger businesspeople will be tempted by their shareholders' advice to 'maximize profit' or 'serve the financial interests of the company' or 'don't be a fraud and blatant mismanager' or 'condition people to be habitually paying customers instead of constantly offering them incentives to pirate' but don't be mislead by such witchcraft. Taking money from customers is not sound economic strategy!"
I am totally unconcerned with "making sure humans [emph mine] remain in control of super-intelligent machines." It's not that I think it's unimportant; it's just that I think it's trivial. The real issue is which humans.
AI is going to create super-powerful humans (or groups of humans, i.e. corporations and governments). You are probably not one of them. Nearly no one is, but someone (him? them? that board? that law enforcement division?) will be.
This isn't merely a fear, either: it's a contemporary diagnosis. We already see that a supermajority of people give control of their computers to other entities. "My computer must answer to me," isn't anyone's priority or requirement, except for "OSS zealots." And that's a problem: it means that our new gods' place is already nearly assured.
We don't need to remain in control; we need to regain control.
Look at your fucking phone, Blu-ray player, etc and tell me it isn't already (in 2016) running exactly the kind of software that metaphorically tells its users "I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't do that." It's not because it has gone off to left field with amazing inhuman inferences. It's because its master's desires and your desires conflict. This is a human-vs-human conflict, and most humans are losing because they have allowed their opponents to infiltrate their lives.
We live in an age where media-center computers and DVRs are ubiquitous, and all your TV really needs to be is a high-def monitor to connect to these devices
You just answered your own question: smart TVs are an idea for making those extra things less ubiquitous. One fewer power cords. Put the Pi inside the TV's enclosure and you just made everything better.
(Why would you want a camera in your phone, in an age where cameras (and GPS devices and game consoles) are ubiquitous?)
Smart TVs are a decent idea but like everything else related to communication or multimedia, it needs to run Free Software. We have all already been given tons of proof that nearly anything that you use to interface with the rest of the world (even if the user is just a "consumer" but moreso when they're not) is too easy to abuse if it can be made to primarily serve the interests of anyone else.
The user needs to be the top, final authority and master, and Free Software is the only way anyone has come up with so far, to make that be the case. Every other approach keeps failing, with apologists ending up using hilarious phrases like "strike a balance."
There is nothing wrong with it being networked; running proprietary software is its problem. If it's your machine, then the more powerful it is, the more powerful you are so the more it's worth. Or to put it another way: it's ok to phone home, if its home happens to be your home.
I am totally shocked to see the word "begins" in the headline. Has anyone verified it's true? I thought the whole damn point of persuading websites into using "like" buttons and other widgety things, was that they were already extremely interested in people who don't directly use Facebook's website, so they wanted them to talk to those peoples' browsers on the side.
The owner of the video (i.e. the guy that posted it to Youtube) can and hopefully will file a counter-notice. Youtube is then obliged by law to reinstate the deleted material in a reasonable time frame.
That is incorrect (in US; I don't know about NL).
After the counter-notice, Youtube can reinstate the material and they'll be free of liability to Fox. But that's all.DMCA does not contain anything requiring service providers to provide services to users. Youtube wasn't even required to provide hosting to sw1tched before the fraudulent notice, and the notice didn't magically give sw1tched new rights to hosting services.
A big part of the point of the notice/counternotice stuff is to give companies like Youtube a way out of being too involved in the battle between Fox and sw1tched. They want to be "just the messenger" and their concerns are primarily what this part of the law was intended to address.
Wait a minute... you wrote a.. a.. what did you call it? A "web browser?" And this web browser communicates with my website but you neglected to get a license?!?
Wow, they're not even hiding it or lying about it anymore. Remember when the caps used to be about "congestion?" Now the truth is explicitly admitted. Everyone, before you lose your cool over this, think. This really is progress. We've reached the point in "LA Story" where the someone is politely told, "Hi. My name is Bob. I'll be your robber." No subterfuge, denial, etc. It's out in the open.
They were predicted by the odds makers to be the top 3 horses! If you picked the horses with the best odds on every race you would "win" more than you would "lose". Common sense. Christ.
Makes you wonder why the oddsmakers paid out 540:1 for that common sense. Maybe the oddsmakers don't understand odds, and the entire gambling industry is just a bunch of incompetent rubes, waiting for someone with common sense and a desire for money to come along and clean the suckers out.
I think it takes a lot more than just intelligence to do "big things" (for good or ill).
As is usual (also for good or ill) in these kinds of discussions, let's look at our own meager little sample (Earth).
We may or may not be the only intelligent life in this planet's history. Look at other life today and you at least have to accept there are degrees of intelligence. But maybe you're still not all that impressed with dolphins and ravens. Ok. But imagine we had a magic spell (or a genetic alteration) that made their brains bigger. Say you had dolphins or ravens ten times (a hundred times?) as smart as what we have today. Surely they'd be intelligent life, no?
But it still wouldn't be enough. I don't care how smart a dolphin is: it's not going to build a radio or a coal-burning plant or (especially) a spaceship. Or really anything interesting. For all the things we look for in SETI, super-genius-dolphins would remain invisible. Nor will it build a uranium centrifuge, so it's off the hook for self-inflicted doomsday too. It can't do the job.
Even the smartest engineer needs someone with better-than-flippers to build their stuff, storing food surpluses is easier with dry storage (and if you can't buffer food, you'll never have any serious industry), and so on. It's also "too hard" to accomplish certain things if you're physically too small/weak; can you imagine any way a super-genius raven would forge iron? (Ok, fair enough: maybe I'm not smart enough!;-)
A lot of what-it-takes to build stuff seems to be derived from basic properties of universal reality, where you can't simply think your way out: your body and adapted environment matter a lot. Whatever galaxy you're in, you've got problems and even if you're smart, you might not be able to solve them.
It gets worse (if you're talking about SETI; or better if you're talking about avoiding self-inflicted doomsday). Our ancestors a million years ago weren't that much dumber than us. They should have had what it takes, but nevertheless didn't accomplish much. In fact, when it comes down to getting shit done, we didn't do it even ten thousand years ago, and those people were just like us. Here on our super-convenient Earth where conditions to either kill ourselves or take-over-the-universe seem damn-near ideal, we simply didn't do much until ridiculously recently. That's within an approx two billion year history of life (a significant fraction of the universe's age), and within about 5 million years of hominids, and about a million years of people-about-as-smart-as-us.
So much time.
So much not-building-nukes (or spaceships or Internet or vaccines or...).
Biologically, they were up to the task. They would qualify as intelligent life no matter how absurdly narrow you define "intelligent" and yet they were still "safe" from the dangers (and advantages) of most technological progress. For nearly all of our species' history, our tech advanced so slowly it was indistinguishable from a standstill. It still wasn't enough, and I'm talking about homo-fucking-sapiens!!
It took some other accident of history (the right grass seed mutation? YOUR HYPOTHESIS HERE), and not that long ago within the ridiculously vast span of history, for our intelligence to become effective engineer intelligence. And even then, most societies weren't on track to discover fission.
There's no reason that tech progress had to be that slow. Oh, there are reasons that it was that slow! In fact, those reasons dominated almost all of history. Even when science advanced, it almost did so begrudgingly. Then something something really weird and "special" happened a blink-of-the-eye ago, and it didn't even happen everywhere, to the detriment of near
Best guess is that they know voters are ignorant. (Because really: we, as whole, are. We are horrifically disgusting in many ways, and ignorance is one of them. For all our complaining about American politics, the money, the fact that the major parties represent nobody's views, etc, America's biggest political problem is that our voters are horrible. We suck.)
This is a way for them to tell extremely stupid voters, "We are with you."
And yet they also don't have to worry about the consequences of it being enacted, because nobody would ever actually vote for such a bill (unless they were assured that enough people would vote against, so they get to play dissenting underdog).
Well, c'mon. The guy totally ripped of Led Zeppelin (and Foghat) (and even Ted Nugent) (and the list goes on and on and on). Geez, I was listening to him the other day, and it was obvious he was just some guy in a classic rock cover band.
X11 programs can see other programs' events. That's even true if I install the program from a.deb or a tarball, no? So WTF does this problem have to do with a package format?
(Oh, and if calling me ignorant/lazy or saying LMGTFY helps you explain it, fine. I'll take your assholiness as long as you have answers.)
It's not like fuckwits and liars are a new thing. In 5000 BC you would have heard the same complaints.
This is the same exact world that you lived in during your most idealistic and hopeful moments. Don't get depressed; just hate them and occasionally fight them. Eternal vigilance is the deal you signed up for, and it's not that bad of deal. Most people have something worse going on.
Everyone, you can either be a conspirator or a theorist. They say the grass is always greener on the other side, but that isn't true at all. The theorists sometimes wish they were with us conspirators, but we conspirators never wish we were the theorists. We'll always have the advantage, so join us!
I think the point of the RFM69 hardware is to use less power (and also get more range!). Wifi might be "standard" but not necessarily the right tool for the job. It's not that hard to have another little "gateway" arduino-like with same kind of radio -- listening, powered by and communicating over USB to a "real computer."
Slashdot Mirror
I think people are learning the wrong lesson here. This story is why you want your computer (whether it's in a separate box or inside of the monitor) to be maintainable.
Boot your computer from rescue/install image and either remove the malware or re-install (preferably a newer version of the OS, which doesn't contain whatever bug enabled the installation of the malware in the first place). If you can't do that, then it's a shitty computer no matter how big the bundled monitor is.
It doesn't matter that the monitor and the computer are in the same enclosure. Many people are reasonably happy with their phones, tablets, iMacs, etc -- all essentially the same thing as "Smart TVs" just on a physically smaller scale.
You're just unhappy because the market is full of extremely shitty products, even if based on decent technology. Putting computers in everything is good, but that's assuming you aren't choosing user-hostile computers! Take any good application for a computer, and I could turn it into your worst nightmare by substituting the computer with a hostile computer. That doesn't make the tech bad, though.
sudo apt-get install apg
If some software already serves the user's interests to the best degree possible, so that they perceive no need for maintenance, then I see how the distinction between Free Software and proprietary would seem irrelevant to most laymen. You're not ever looking at the code because you never feel a need to. In that case, it doesn't seem all that weird to conflate the ability to maintain software with actually having done (or not done) it. So it might seem like it's just about who you trust.
That also happens to be the case where the trust happens to have been warranted! The user trusted the developer, and as far as anyone knows, it worked out. This is the situation your post addresses.
It's the other cases, when the software doesn't do what the user wants (the trust wasn't warranted), that the distinction becomes stark.
Malfeatures require an "agreement to suck." Proprietary software's agreement has one member, so it's easy. Whatever malfeatures Microsoft decides to put into it, they have 100% of the vote so that's what you're going to get. There's no competing fork, or threat of a competing fork. (The closest thing they have to forks, are called "cracks" and that's hardly an efficient way to maintain software.)
Free Software requires an agreement between everyone who cares, where any single defector can say "I've had enough of this bullshit" and the agreement collapses. You could have a hundred veteran greybeard celebrities all agree to have vim automatically convert all tabs to spaces without user consent, and one newbie teenager can come in and say "I took that shit out of my fork." It doesn't matter whether you or I is the one who does it: anyone can, and the more annoying the malfeature, the sooner someone will.
And since all the developers know that making the software work against the user will just get forked out, few ever bother try. When they do, it's exciting news (e.g. Unity's Amazon ads), as opposed to the literally daily proprietary software newsfodder here on Slashdot, where people bitch about it or debate the ethics of "balance" between users and their adversaries.
Try to even imagine Free Software blatantly working against its users in ways like these:
(Two of those stories are from today, which is just another day like any other. This shit is common.) That Free Software users aren't accustomed to these things, is because they know what processes and power relationship to trust, not who. It works despite the ever-present potential conflict of interest between developers (even OSS ones) and a users, and a user doesn't have to read a single line of code to reap the benefits. This is where your argument, IMHO, makes no sense whatsoever.
But my point was that despite the availability of software which does serve its users, many people accept things like the shit in the above list, where the software is blatantly working against them. It isn't even covert! That's bad news today and the consequences will only be worse as software becomes more capable (AI).
Right. Text should be:
I am totally unconcerned with "making sure humans [emph mine] remain in control of super-intelligent machines." It's not that I think it's unimportant; it's just that I think it's trivial. The real issue is which humans.
AI is going to create super-powerful humans (or groups of humans, i.e. corporations and governments). You are probably not one of them. Nearly no one is, but someone (him? them? that board? that law enforcement division?) will be.
This isn't merely a fear, either: it's a contemporary diagnosis. We already see that a supermajority of people give control of their computers to other entities. "My computer must answer to me," isn't anyone's priority or requirement, except for "OSS zealots." And that's a problem: it means that our new gods' place is already nearly assured.
We don't need to remain in control; we need to regain control.
Look at your fucking phone, Blu-ray player, etc and tell me it isn't already (in 2016) running exactly the kind of software that metaphorically tells its users "I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't do that." It's not because it has gone off to left field with amazing inhuman inferences. It's because its master's desires and your desires conflict. This is a human-vs-human conflict, and most humans are losing because they have allowed their opponents to infiltrate their lives.
This is like you bought a tower Dell that came with MS Windows, and from that you conclude that tower enclosures suck.
You just answered your own question: smart TVs are an idea for making those extra things less ubiquitous. One fewer power cords. Put the Pi inside the TV's enclosure and you just made everything better.
(Why would you want a camera in your phone, in an age where cameras (and GPS devices and game consoles) are ubiquitous?)
Why does the ap care whether or not I capitalize their acronym?
Smart TVs are a decent idea but like everything else related to communication or multimedia, it needs to run Free Software. We have all already been given tons of proof that nearly anything that you use to interface with the rest of the world (even if the user is just a "consumer" but moreso when they're not) is too easy to abuse if it can be made to primarily serve the interests of anyone else.
The user needs to be the top, final authority and master, and Free Software is the only way anyone has come up with so far, to make that be the case. Every other approach keeps failing, with apologists ending up using hilarious phrases like "strike a balance."
There is nothing wrong with it being networked; running proprietary software is its problem. If it's your machine, then the more powerful it is, the more powerful you are so the more it's worth. Or to put it another way: it's ok to phone home, if its home happens to be your home.
Anything worth doing, is worth doing while geekily obsessing over all the details.
I am totally shocked to see the word "begins" in the headline. Has anyone verified it's true? I thought the whole damn point of persuading websites into using "like" buttons and other widgety things, was that they were already extremely interested in people who don't directly use Facebook's website, so they wanted them to talk to those peoples' browsers on the side.
That is incorrect (in US; I don't know about NL).
After the counter-notice, Youtube can reinstate the material and they'll be free of liability to Fox. But that's all. DMCA does not contain anything requiring service providers to provide services to users. Youtube wasn't even required to provide hosting to sw1tched before the fraudulent notice, and the notice didn't magically give sw1tched new rights to hosting services.
A big part of the point of the notice/counternotice stuff is to give companies like Youtube a way out of being too involved in the battle between Fox and sw1tched. They want to be "just the messenger" and their concerns are primarily what this part of the law was intended to address.
Wait a minute... you wrote a .. a .. what did you call it? A "web browser?" And this web browser communicates with my website but you neglected to get a license?!?
Wow, they're not even hiding it or lying about it anymore. Remember when the caps used to be about "congestion?" Now the truth is explicitly admitted. Everyone, before you lose your cool over this, think. This really is progress. We've reached the point in "LA Story" where the someone is politely told, "Hi. My name is Bob. I'll be your robber." No subterfuge, denial, etc. It's out in the open.
But.. but.. saving money is bad for the economy! Those Windows aren't going to break themselv-- oh wait, that's exactly what happens.
Makes you wonder why the oddsmakers paid out 540:1 for that common sense. Maybe the oddsmakers don't understand odds, and the entire gambling industry is just a bunch of incompetent rubes, waiting for someone with common sense and a desire for money to come along and clean the suckers out.
Yep, I bet that's the situation.
I think it takes a lot more than just intelligence to do "big things" (for good or ill).
As is usual (also for good or ill) in these kinds of discussions, let's look at our own meager little sample (Earth).
We may or may not be the only intelligent life in this planet's history. Look at other life today and you at least have to accept there are degrees of intelligence. But maybe you're still not all that impressed with dolphins and ravens. Ok. But imagine we had a magic spell (or a genetic alteration) that made their brains bigger. Say you had dolphins or ravens ten times (a hundred times?) as smart as what we have today. Surely they'd be intelligent life, no?
But it still wouldn't be enough. I don't care how smart a dolphin is: it's not going to build a radio or a coal-burning plant or (especially) a spaceship. Or really anything interesting. For all the things we look for in SETI, super-genius-dolphins would remain invisible. Nor will it build a uranium centrifuge, so it's off the hook for self-inflicted doomsday too. It can't do the job.
Even the smartest engineer needs someone with better-than-flippers to build their stuff, storing food surpluses is easier with dry storage (and if you can't buffer food, you'll never have any serious industry), and so on. It's also "too hard" to accomplish certain things if you're physically too small/weak; can you imagine any way a super-genius raven would forge iron? (Ok, fair enough: maybe I'm not smart enough! ;-)
A lot of what-it-takes to build stuff seems to be derived from basic properties of universal reality, where you can't simply think your way out: your body and adapted environment matter a lot. Whatever galaxy you're in, you've got problems and even if you're smart, you might not be able to solve them.
It gets worse (if you're talking about SETI; or better if you're talking about avoiding self-inflicted doomsday). Our ancestors a million years ago weren't that much dumber than us. They should have had what it takes, but nevertheless didn't accomplish much. In fact, when it comes down to getting shit done, we didn't do it even ten thousand years ago, and those people were just like us. Here on our super-convenient Earth where conditions to either kill ourselves or take-over-the-universe seem damn-near ideal, we simply didn't do much until ridiculously recently. That's within an approx two billion year history of life (a significant fraction of the universe's age), and within about 5 million years of hominids, and about a million years of people-about-as-smart-as-us.
So much time.
So much not-building-nukes (or spaceships or Internet or vaccines or ...).
Biologically, they were up to the task. They would qualify as intelligent life no matter how absurdly narrow you define "intelligent" and yet they were still "safe" from the dangers (and advantages) of most technological progress. For nearly all of our species' history, our tech advanced so slowly it was indistinguishable from a standstill. It still wasn't enough, and I'm talking about homo-fucking-sapiens!!
It took some other accident of history (the right grass seed mutation? YOUR HYPOTHESIS HERE), and not that long ago within the ridiculously vast span of history, for our intelligence to become effective engineer intelligence. And even then, most societies weren't on track to discover fission.
There's no reason that tech progress had to be that slow. Oh, there are reasons that it was that slow! In fact, those reasons dominated almost all of history. Even when science advanced, it almost did so begrudgingly. Then something something really weird and "special" happened a blink-of-the-eye ago, and it didn't even happen everywhere, to the detriment of near
Best guess is that they know voters are ignorant. (Because really: we, as whole, are. We are horrifically disgusting in many ways, and ignorance is one of them. For all our complaining about American politics, the money, the fact that the major parties represent nobody's views, etc, America's biggest political problem is that our voters are horrible. We suck.)
This is a way for them to tell extremely stupid voters, "We are with you."
And yet they also don't have to worry about the consequences of it being enacted, because nobody would ever actually vote for such a bill (unless they were assured that enough people would vote against, so they get to play dissenting underdog).
Well, c'mon. The guy totally ripped of Led Zeppelin (and Foghat) (and even Ted Nugent) (and the list goes on and on and on). Geez, I was listening to him the other day, and it was obvious he was just some guy in a classic rock cover band.
;-) <-- in case not obvious.
The People: "I am not fucking voting for Hillary! I won't! I swear, I won't!!!"
Republicans: "Oh, yes you will. You will vote for exactly whom we want you to."
I haven't seen that movie since I was a little kid (and I liked it!), and now I'm afraid to (because I probably won't like it). Dare I?
X11 programs can see other programs' events. That's even true if I install the program from a .deb or a tarball, no? So WTF does this problem have to do with a package format?
(Oh, and if calling me ignorant/lazy or saying LMGTFY helps you explain it, fine. I'll take your assholiness as long as you have answers.)
It's not like fuckwits and liars are a new thing. In 5000 BC you would have heard the same complaints.
This is the same exact world that you lived in during your most idealistic and hopeful moments. Don't get depressed; just hate them and occasionally fight them. Eternal vigilance is the deal you signed up for, and it's not that bad of deal. Most people have something worse going on.
Everyone, you can either be a conspirator or a theorist. They say the grass is always greener on the other side, but that isn't true at all. The theorists sometimes wish they were with us conspirators, but we conspirators never wish we were the theorists. We'll always have the advantage, so join us!
I think the point of the RFM69 hardware is to use less power (and also get more range!). Wifi might be "standard" but not necessarily the right tool for the job. It's not that hard to have another little "gateway" arduino-like with same kind of radio -- listening, powered by and communicating over USB to a "real computer."