INDIRECT toll roads, where charges vary by car manufacturer or the brand of fuel inside them, or some other nonsense. If it were only toll roads, paid by all the users as they use it, it really wouldn't be a problem at all. (IMHO that would be downright good news for everyone, and we can only hope we're able to get to such a situation.) It's the bundling and attempts change at what point a person makes a decision about when to pay for bandwidth, to obscure costs and control who can cost-effectively particate, that is so ugly here.
Bill me, not the people who made my HTPC (Apple, in this story's case). Charge me the road's toll, not Chevy or Chevron. We need the numbers foremost, not obscured (and almost certainly inflated as a result of being freed of market forces).
If there's a cap, no party's traffic should ever be exempt from it. No party's traffic should be billed at a different rate. (If there are different rates, it ought to be based on stuff like QoS, time-of-day, and so on -- actual cost/congestion factors.)
If your local power utility sold appliances that were exempt from KWH charges (or made deals with certain manufacturers so that their appliances were exempt), nobody would be fooled by such obvious bullshit or think the appliances in question were "great deals." Everyone would be demanding that the government either stop enforcing the monopoly, or else prohibit such behavior.
This is blatantly corrupt, and at a minimum, needs to become a violation of franchise terms.
If this was about standard TV then there wouldn't be any negotiations with Apple at all. People could just plug the cable into their HDHomeRun or Apple-brand ClearQAM decoder, and Comcast wouldn't have any say in the matter.
Being nonstandard is how Comcast leverages and gets a seat at the table and prevents all the usual market forces from taking effect.
they'd follow the order. But what makes you think a person taking part in the WoT would refuse a court order where a CA would roll over?
The WoT lets you resist this scenario. If you have multiple paths, then you can force your adversary to point guns at multiple people. Those people might not all be as easy to find or intimidate as one person (they might not all be in the same jurisdiction) and also, each one of them can more safely spill-the-beans without getting blamed. "I'm not the one who leaked that you're MitMing my friend; it was one of the other signers!"
Let's say the US federal government signed Joe's key. You don't fully trust the US government (I'm putting that mildly; laugh it up, post-2013 mainstream) , so you're not sure that key is really Joe's. Let's say the Chinese government also signed Joe's key. You don't trust them either. Yet I bet you're fairly sure you have Joe's key, because it's difficult to imagine an adversary who is coercing both of those signers. And you trust it even more if your wife also signed that key, too.
You should meet Jennifer. (Side-effect: both Josh and Joe will be grateful.) Until then, 43% may be worse than flipping a coin but it's still a whole lot better than zero, and it's the best thing we have.
People have been trying to think of something better. And it always comes back to you meeting Jennifer, or for some group of people (or entities) to step up and start meeting a whole lot more people (perhaps state governments or even.. (my idea here) banks should be prolific signers), and for Joe to teach his non-geek friends to get in on all this.
As to what can be done about it, switching from PGP to X.509 code signing would be an obvious candidate.
The "obviously stupid" candidate, maybe. Surely that idea doesn't stay on the table for more than a second or two before everyone starts laughing.
Whatever it is that you do, in order to be able to trust an X.509 CA, you can do the same exact thing to trust a PGP CA. Go meet them.
The difference is that if you're not quite able to do that (as is the case for many many people; i.e. nearly everyone; I have never heard anyone say they actually "met" the Verisign signer), then with PGP (huh.. except I have met signers here) you have a backup plan B: partially trust a few people, and require a conspiracy in order for you to lose. With X.509 that plan isn't on the table: if you don't trust the sole signer, then either you live with that increased risk, or else you are denied ability to communicate.
Ok, but aside from the n% increase over the n% increase over the n% increase over the n% increase, what has Intel done for us?
Intel makes the 2 fast core processor right now, today, and it'll cost you a staggering $120 to $150. It's called the Haswell Core i3 and each of its cores is faster than any of the cores in your $5000 machine from 2007. It will run Dwarf Fortress faster than anyone would have imagined back then.
Of course there's no limit to what you'd like, but if you have a problem with the amazing shit you can buy today, the problem is with you, not the amazing shit.
Tests have already been done on countless millions of people. None of them complained about being dead, said they'd rather be doing something else, or petitioned to be made no-longer dead. Zero.
Our common sense (and some very strong instincts) tell us it's an extremely bad thing, but thousands of years of observations suggest that once it happens, nobody really cares anymore.
The right wing should be opposed on free-market principles. The left wing should be opposed on environmental grounds. So which politicians should be in favour of this regulation again?
The apolitical ones, untainted by all that divisive right/left idealism. You know, the ones everyone votes for: Democrats and Republicans.
I don't get why I would want my ISP to have a say in whether or not (or how!) I disable my personal computer. But I also don't get why I'd want my government to have a role in that discussion either.
It's "self-sustaining" until you run out of whales. They say that by the year 3000, there won't be any of them left up there. This isn't some virtually limitless resource like sardines, which are capable of supplying all the oil we'll ever need.
If I were to justify my misspelling as an attempt to invent a new word that includes the meanings of both "vicious" and "viscous" would you call my bluff? Oh shit, I mean: what if I asked you that, but didn't say anything about it being a bluff?
Maybe I lack patience, but really, why are we still writing text based code?
Why did you submit your question as written sentences? Surely you could have expressed whatever you're asking, by carving a few notches on a stick, taking a picture and posting to imgur.
I lack the patience to try to figure out what you're trying to say, as text. Ask again, in stick, where we can communicate more efficiently.
I think it's not a terribly uncommon opinion (I might even be in the majority on this, but maybe not) to feel that speed limits are generally bullshit. Especially on the wide-open highway, which is the most common place to see speedtrap-warning light-flashing, anyway. Bullshit laws should be violated, and it is in everyone's interest for everyone else to ignore them, disrespect them, resist them, mock them, undermine them, and shit upon those who enact them and enforce them. "Fuck you pigs" and so on. I want people to be able to drive 90 MPH in arbitrarily-marked 75 MPH zones, and I want them to get away with breaking the law, just as I hope to get away with breaking the law, too.
Usually. There's a catch, and this is where it gets really fun.
I've been caught speeding several times over the last few decades, and yet despite what I wrote above, about it being good for people to get away with it, I also think that every time I got caught, I deserved it and it was also probably in society's interest that I didn't get away with it. WTF?! Contradiction?
No. I deserved it, not because I was speeding, but because I was inattentive enough to get caught. I really was driving unsafely, but speed wasn't the main safety problem.
Speedtraps are an "are you paying attention?" TEST! And while I want people to generally get away with speeding and for speeding laws to not be successfully enforced, and for the cops who try to enforce them to have horrible days of frustration and failure with nothing to show for it, I don't want people to get away with failing "are you paying attention?" pop quizzes. I'd like everyone to pass those pop quizzes, but of course, we all know not everyone will. And if people fail their pop quizzes too often, I want 'em to flunk out of driving on public roads. So maybe not-so-fast on the "fuck you pigs" that I said above. I usually mean it, but this time, there's a lot less conviction behind the angry words. Sorry, pigs! I suppose I owe one of you a beer for all the "fuck you"s.
Flashers: you're helping daydreamers, space cases, vision-impaired, mirror-makeup queens, drunks, dumbfucks, etc cheat on their pop quizzes. Do you sincerely think that is a good idea? I am totally with you in disrespecting the law and thinking the government is, on average (with some admitted exceptions) is generally evil and that usually good for everyone, that it be opposed, restricted, resisted, mocked, shat-upon, disregarded, etc. But "are you paying attention?" tests really are a good idea and in the interests of public safety, no?
You're not worried about people speeding, but I don't think I have ever sat next to any other driver for very long, who didn't eventually rant about one of those people out there, who is driving like a dumbfuck. The cellphone jabberer is almost cliche, where just driving behind them watching how their car moves, you can tell what they're doing without even needing to see them holding the phone. Testing is how you're going to weed those fuckers out.
All we need, is just for it to be a fair test. It can be sudden and demand some quick reactions, but if it's further away than what a car should reasonably be expected to ever have to deal with, then whoa there. The cop shouldn't have concealment or look like something other than a cop (an "innocent" van, for example). But if you want to implement the test as an "innocent" van that suddenly looks like a cop and then starts measuring your speed so people have one second after that to get under the limit, ok. That sounds like a good test.
No, not the code. It's about giving freedom to the user. With GPLed code, nothing prevents a user from being able to maintain their system, except their own limitations (budget, tech knowledge, time, etc). With BSD-licensed code, the user may be able to maintain the system (if the developer opted to also BSD-license it to them) or they might have no (legal) options at all, other than to go begging on their hands and knees to the developer and agreeing to whatever terms are demanded. (It's almost as though, in the user-developer relationship, there are [at least] two perspectives. Imagine that!)
Some people, if they have ever stood in the shoes of a user rather than a developer (or been in a complicated love triangle, where there's a library/compiler/whatever hacker, an application hacker (who lives in both worlds at once), and a user), have a problem with that whole "go begging on your hands and knees" part, thinking it to have some faint whiff of not-freedom in it. I think this only happens to those people who don't create their entire systems from scratch, like when that guy who wrote that text editor, suddenly found himself needing to use someone else's printer driver. Because he was too much of a wimp to build his own printer, I guess. You know, a zealot.
What i would like to know is what separates Facebook from AOL, Myspace, AIM, ICQ, BBS etc that came and went.
Facebook is more integrated into the rest of the web than all those other things.
None of the things you just mentioned, had millions of other sites embedding "like buttons" which give free intelligence to them whenever someone loads that other site's pages. Facebook, Google [Analytics], AddThis, and a few other things (Comscore and Quantcast) do something sort of similar (but at greater cost to themselves). I don't remember seeing AOL/MySpace/AIM/ICQ play that game. Go ahead, tell me what script or iframe tag MySpace (or AOL, ha!) ever got some other site to serve to all their users.
AOL and MySpace never (AFAIK) ran an OpenID server, or if they did, they convinced hardly anyone to use it. Facebook did that, except went a step further and did their own protocol instead of OpenID, and lots of sites use it. Look at the "sign in with" part of this page and tell me you see AOL or MySpace. The four (and only four) companies you see there, fucked the users by deviating from standards, and as their reward they get an explicit mention/branding instead of a generic enter-your-openid-URL blank. (If this ain't proof that Evil Is Basically A Good Idea, then I don't know what is. But that's beside the point.)
Do you remember ever seeing other sites show free ads to users, for MySpace or AOL, and where the webmasters thought it was basically a good/sane idea in their self interest? I can think of lots of sites I visit, where that site says "follow us on Facebook" complete with a link to Facebook. Facebook pays $0.00000000 CPM for this ad. It's a dumb ad too, since if you follow the link, you just see a scaled down abbreviated version of that site's own content and links back to that site. (Well, that plus some additional ads that Facebook got paid to run -- and where some of those ads, might even be for competitors to site you came from!)
If in 1997 you told you something like that could possibly exist, I would have laughed in your face. I still do laugh in your face in 2014 over the same thing, but it's a laugh of madness, drowned in the cacophony of a world gone mad.
Facebook is a bad site (there's no reason you should ever point your browser there), but on the other hand, they were brilliantly clever compared to all that came before them, in terms of getting value out of other sites. When Site X becomes the next big thing, there's a reasonably good chance that every pageload they acquire, will also help Facebook a little. Can you say MySpace was ever in such a position? Ever heard of dialup BBS that gained free data, sent from the user's computer, whenever a user picked any menu option on any of a few million other BBSes? Did you ever go to any site, where if you had firewalled off ICQ's servers, that other unrelated site wasn't able to offer all its usual interactivity?
Facebook is a totally different beast than MySpace, with basically nothing in common with it. MySpace was just some website that was popular for a while. Facebook is Shub-Internet.
Geeks: "The public does a bunch of very insecure things. Someone could abuse all the myriad mistakes, where we don't even vaguely try to adopt best practices, and they do something bad."
News: "These people have started exploiting everyone's known bad practices. So have these people. And these people. And them. And them."
Geeks: "Also, theoretically, these people and these people and these other people, could started exploiting our bad practices too."
Public: "Yeah, but that's hypothetical."
Snowden: "The government has decided to exploit everyone's bad practices."
Public: "HEY!!!!"
President: "Oh. Ok, we'll stop exploiting it quite so much."
but how long until an airline gets sued because a passenger was unable to take an emergency-related call?
If you leave it to the market and then a passenger chooses to buy a ticket on a no-phones airline, then it's the call receiver who is responsible for declining the emergency call. "Our customer wanted to be in a phoneless environment and paid for that, furthermore demonstrating his preference. Sue him for not taking your call."
Furthermore, it's hard to imagine any scenario where anyone could ever have a reasonable expectation for being able to take an emergency call. Even if I fab an extreme over-the-top example (as I, like anyone, would love to do).
Guy happens to be the Last Doctor In The World. He says, "I want to fly on someone else's airplane, but I want to not listen to anyone else talking." So he buys a ticket on a no-phones airline. While waiting in the terminal, he turns off his phone. One second later, the President's wife calls him, and leaves this voice mail: "The President is choking on pizza! What do I do? WHAT DO I DO!?" but since the doctor turned off his phone, he doesn't see the call come in. He boards his flight, oblivious to the coming disaster.
Mid-flight, one of the passengers starts talking to another passenger. The doctor screams, "hey, shut the fuck up!" and everyone quiets down, because you never know when you might want to be on The Last Doctor In The World's good side. The captain makes an announcement over the intercom. The doctor glares, hatefully. He doesn't make a scene, but he writes the captain's name in his no-treatment book. The engines drone on, and he grimaces with discomfort, noting he's never going to treat anyone who works at Boeing, where they make such loud engines.
An hour later, he gets off the plane. He turns on his phone, and sees a bunch of voicemails from the First Lady. He calls her back. "Get your husband to cough up the pizza," he offers, rolling his eyes, but his advice has arrived too late. The president has already asphyxiated to death.
Unfortunately, right after the president's death, a bill arrived on his desk, which would have outlawed mass puppy shredding. It didn't get signed quickly, because it took a while for the then-vice-president to catch up. So one hundred thousand puppies where shredded, while it was still legal to do so. One of those puppies had an important passphrase tattooed on its ear, but now it has been shredded. Without the passphrase, no one was able to stop the nuclear launch that resulted in the deaths of three billion people.
One of the people whose gardener died in the nuclear war, sues Samsung for designing a phone that has an off switch, based on the idea that people HAVE TO receive emergency calls, no matter what anyone (even the owner of the phone) wants.
You're on the jury. What's your decision? If you rule in favor of the plaintiff, Samsung owes someone $3 to replace the plant that the dead gardener never got around to watering. And I will harbor a hypothetical-$3 grudge against you, from now to the end of time. OTOH, if you rule for the defendent, then I agree with you, my friend. What's it going to be?
It's the FCC. Their argument will be that they're banning a radio tech (and in a specific context, without regard for what ever someone is saying over that radio), not speech itself. See that person in the seat next to you? Tell 'em how unfair King George's tea taxes are, and how unfair it is that Parliament doesn't ave a seat for us. The FCC won't stop you.
The reason we should shoot this down, is that there's no technical reason to ban the tech. The FCC doing this is merely a horrible. unnecessary, and un-American. But it's not unconstitutional. It's not as though the framers ever thought to add "don't be evil." They just assumed we didn't want evil government. Little did they know.
I agree. Someone once told me I should not go out at night, walk naked (except for a hundred dollar bill pasted to each of my nipples) to the highest-crime district in my city, and start yelling "Some of my best friends are you people!" They said I would be safer if I behaved differently, stayed home instead, and STFU-ed up with my crazy rants.
I explained that even if I behaved differently, that doesn't stop the Russians from launching a nuclear ICBM strike, killing us all, including me. Safe is safe, unsafe is unsafe, there are no degrees in between, and all of us face one single adversary who has one simple agenda.
Hopefully they weren't stupid enough to roll their own key format, and instead, they use standard OpenPGP keys. That way, people can have MitM-proof verified-identity conversations if they want that (and can tune the degree of MitM-proofing that is needed) but also have MitM-vulnerable pseudonymous conversations if they don't (for cases where you'd prefer to be anonymous).
When you're talking to your wife, it's ok for her to know who you are, and you to know you're talking to her, so you'd use the keys that you've exchanged out-of-band and that each of you have signed. When you're talking to your pirate buddies, you just to have the keyid that has in the past, been associated with uber-31337ness, but has never been signed by anyone. And when you're talking to another person in the company, you know who each other is and have at least some company CA as your introducer, any maybe signed yourselves too if it's a small enough company where everyone eventually meets each other in person.
Whatever your case, OpenPGP fits perfectly. The only thing it doesn't handle well, is tricking users into thinking they have a secure connection but really letting a third party listen in. For some reason, PGP isn't well-suited for that. Whenever I see someone not use PGP, I assume that's the reason they chose to use weaker tech.
I see what you did there, Slashdot editors. Brilliant.
If you had used an accurate headline, such as "Bomb hoax perp caught despite using the target's own network." then the "despite" part would have sounded stupid and you would have had an obviously non-story, right on the face of it. But by throwing in a random unrelated part of the story and misleadingly implying something about it, you made it sound interesting! More people need to learn this trick: lies make things interesting!
A guy puts on a mask and walks into a bank. He hands the teller a note, "My name is John Smith, and this is a robbery. Shhh. Give me $10k." Police later investigate John Smith, and confirm it was him. Headline: "robber caught despite using mask" because, clearly, masks are an important and very relevant part of the story!
if you and your bro were watching the game on the couch and he said he'd give you $5 to get him a fresh beer, you'd at least consider it...b/c you can buy a beer at the bar later w/ it
if you refused, but he then offered you $50 to get him the beer, most ppl wouldn't turn that down!
"Get me a beer and I'll give you $5."
"No. Get it yourself."
"Sudo get me a beer and I'll give you a tenth of $50."
"Okay! Here's your beer."
"Get me a beer and I'll give you a hundredth of $500."
"No. Get it yourself."
"Sudo get me a beer and I'll give you a thousandth of $5000."
"Okay! Here's your beer."
globaljustin, you appear to be correct that the responses are varying, so I must reluctantly agree that your model is perfectly accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
INDIRECT toll roads, where charges vary by car manufacturer or the brand of fuel inside them, or some other nonsense. If it were only toll roads, paid by all the users as they use it, it really wouldn't be a problem at all. (IMHO that would be downright good news for everyone, and we can only hope we're able to get to such a situation.) It's the bundling and attempts change at what point a person makes a decision about when to pay for bandwidth, to obscure costs and control who can cost-effectively particate, that is so ugly here.
Bill me, not the people who made my HTPC (Apple, in this story's case). Charge me the road's toll, not Chevy or Chevron. We need the numbers foremost, not obscured (and almost certainly inflated as a result of being freed of market forces).
If there's a cap, no party's traffic should ever be exempt from it. No party's traffic should be billed at a different rate. (If there are different rates, it ought to be based on stuff like QoS, time-of-day, and so on -- actual cost/congestion factors.)
If your local power utility sold appliances that were exempt from KWH charges (or made deals with certain manufacturers so that their appliances were exempt), nobody would be fooled by such obvious bullshit or think the appliances in question were "great deals." Everyone would be demanding that the government either stop enforcing the monopoly, or else prohibit such behavior.
This is blatantly corrupt, and at a minimum, needs to become a violation of franchise terms.
If this was about standard TV then there wouldn't be any negotiations with Apple at all. People could just plug the cable into their HDHomeRun or Apple-brand ClearQAM decoder, and Comcast wouldn't have any say in the matter.
Being nonstandard is how Comcast leverages and gets a seat at the table and prevents all the usual market forces from taking effect.
The WoT lets you resist this scenario. If you have multiple paths, then you can force your adversary to point guns at multiple people. Those people might not all be as easy to find or intimidate as one person (they might not all be in the same jurisdiction) and also, each one of them can more safely spill-the-beans without getting blamed. "I'm not the one who leaked that you're MitMing my friend; it was one of the other signers!"
Let's say the US federal government signed Joe's key. You don't fully trust the US government (I'm putting that mildly; laugh it up, post-2013 mainstream) , so you're not sure that key is really Joe's. Let's say the Chinese government also signed Joe's key. You don't trust them either. Yet I bet you're fairly sure you have Joe's key, because it's difficult to imagine an adversary who is coercing both of those signers. And you trust it even more if your wife also signed that key, too.
You should meet Jennifer. (Side-effect: both Josh and Joe will be grateful.) Until then, 43% may be worse than flipping a coin but it's still a whole lot better than zero, and it's the best thing we have.
People have been trying to think of something better. And it always comes back to you meeting Jennifer, or for some group of people (or entities) to step up and start meeting a whole lot more people (perhaps state governments or even .. (my idea here) banks should be prolific signers), and for Joe to teach his non-geek friends to get in on all this.
The "obviously stupid" candidate, maybe. Surely that idea doesn't stay on the table for more than a second or two before everyone starts laughing.
Whatever it is that you do, in order to be able to trust an X.509 CA, you can do the same exact thing to trust a PGP CA. Go meet them.
The difference is that if you're not quite able to do that (as is the case for many many people; i.e. nearly everyone; I have never heard anyone say they actually "met" the Verisign signer), then with PGP (huh.. except I have met signers here) you have a backup plan B: partially trust a few people, and require a conspiracy in order for you to lose. With X.509 that plan isn't on the table: if you don't trust the sole signer, then either you live with that increased risk, or else you are denied ability to communicate.
Ok, but aside from the n% increase over the n% increase over the n% increase over the n% increase, what has Intel done for us?
Intel makes the 2 fast core processor right now, today, and it'll cost you a staggering $120 to $150. It's called the Haswell Core i3 and each of its cores is faster than any of the cores in your $5000 machine from 2007. It will run Dwarf Fortress faster than anyone would have imagined back then.
Of course there's no limit to what you'd like, but if you have a problem with the amazing shit you can buy today, the problem is with you, not the amazing shit.
Tests have already been done on countless millions of people. None of them complained about being dead, said they'd rather be doing something else, or petitioned to be made no-longer dead. Zero.
Our common sense (and some very strong instincts) tell us it's an extremely bad thing, but thousands of years of observations suggest that once it happens, nobody really cares anymore.
The apolitical ones, untainted by all that divisive right/left idealism. You know, the ones everyone votes for: Democrats and Republicans.
If you think that's not Interstate Commerce, I have some marijuana to sell you.
I don't get why I would want my ISP to have a say in whether or not (or how!) I disable my personal computer. But I also don't get why I'd want my government to have a role in that discussion either.
It's "self-sustaining" until you run out of whales. They say that by the year 3000, there won't be any of them left up there. This isn't some virtually limitless resource like sardines, which are capable of supplying all the oil we'll ever need.
If I were to justify my misspelling as an attempt to invent a new word that includes the meanings of both "vicious" and "viscous" would you call my bluff? Oh shit, I mean: what if I asked you that, but didn't say anything about it being a bluff?
I think "mining" is a pretty damn euphemistic way to talk about viscious slaughter of all the moon's whales.
Why did you submit your question as written sentences? Surely you could have expressed whatever you're asking, by carving a few notches on a stick, taking a picture and posting to imgur.
I lack the patience to try to figure out what you're trying to say, as text. Ask again, in stick, where we can communicate more efficiently.
Speech issues aside...
I think it's not a terribly uncommon opinion (I might even be in the majority on this, but maybe not) to feel that speed limits are generally bullshit. Especially on the wide-open highway, which is the most common place to see speedtrap-warning light-flashing, anyway. Bullshit laws should be violated, and it is in everyone's interest for everyone else to ignore them, disrespect them, resist them, mock them, undermine them, and shit upon those who enact them and enforce them. "Fuck you pigs" and so on. I want people to be able to drive 90 MPH in arbitrarily-marked 75 MPH zones, and I want them to get away with breaking the law, just as I hope to get away with breaking the law, too.
Usually. There's a catch, and this is where it gets really fun.
I've been caught speeding several times over the last few decades, and yet despite what I wrote above, about it being good for people to get away with it, I also think that every time I got caught, I deserved it and it was also probably in society's interest that I didn't get away with it. WTF?! Contradiction?
No. I deserved it, not because I was speeding, but because I was inattentive enough to get caught. I really was driving unsafely, but speed wasn't the main safety problem.
Speedtraps are an "are you paying attention?" TEST! And while I want people to generally get away with speeding and for speeding laws to not be successfully enforced, and for the cops who try to enforce them to have horrible days of frustration and failure with nothing to show for it, I don't want people to get away with failing "are you paying attention?" pop quizzes. I'd like everyone to pass those pop quizzes, but of course, we all know not everyone will. And if people fail their pop quizzes too often, I want 'em to flunk out of driving on public roads. So maybe not-so-fast on the "fuck you pigs" that I said above. I usually mean it, but this time, there's a lot less conviction behind the angry words. Sorry, pigs! I suppose I owe one of you a beer for all the "fuck you"s.
Flashers: you're helping daydreamers, space cases, vision-impaired, mirror-makeup queens, drunks, dumbfucks, etc cheat on their pop quizzes. Do you sincerely think that is a good idea? I am totally with you in disrespecting the law and thinking the government is, on average (with some admitted exceptions) is generally evil and that usually good for everyone, that it be opposed, restricted, resisted, mocked, shat-upon, disregarded, etc. But "are you paying attention?" tests really are a good idea and in the interests of public safety, no?
You're not worried about people speeding, but I don't think I have ever sat next to any other driver for very long, who didn't eventually rant about one of those people out there, who is driving like a dumbfuck. The cellphone jabberer is almost cliche, where just driving behind them watching how their car moves, you can tell what they're doing without even needing to see them holding the phone. Testing is how you're going to weed those fuckers out.
All we need, is just for it to be a fair test. It can be sudden and demand some quick reactions, but if it's further away than what a car should reasonably be expected to ever have to deal with, then whoa there. The cop shouldn't have concealment or look like something other than a cop (an "innocent" van, for example). But if you want to implement the test as an "innocent" van that suddenly looks like a cop and then starts measuring your speed so people have one second after that to get under the limit, ok. That sounds like a good test.
No, not the code. It's about giving freedom to the user. With GPLed code, nothing prevents a user from being able to maintain their system, except their own limitations (budget, tech knowledge, time, etc). With BSD-licensed code, the user may be able to maintain the system (if the developer opted to also BSD-license it to them) or they might have no (legal) options at all, other than to go begging on their hands and knees to the developer and agreeing to whatever terms are demanded. (It's almost as though, in the user-developer relationship, there are [at least] two perspectives. Imagine that!)
Some people, if they have ever stood in the shoes of a user rather than a developer (or been in a complicated love triangle, where there's a library/compiler/whatever hacker, an application hacker (who lives in both worlds at once), and a user), have a problem with that whole "go begging on your hands and knees" part, thinking it to have some faint whiff of not-freedom in it. I think this only happens to those people who don't create their entire systems from scratch, like when that guy who wrote that text editor, suddenly found himself needing to use someone else's printer driver. Because he was too much of a wimp to build his own printer, I guess. You know, a zealot.
WTF? When was DRM removed?
Facebook is more integrated into the rest of the web than all those other things.
None of the things you just mentioned, had millions of other sites embedding "like buttons" which give free intelligence to them whenever someone loads that other site's pages. Facebook, Google [Analytics], AddThis, and a few other things (Comscore and Quantcast) do something sort of similar (but at greater cost to themselves). I don't remember seeing AOL/MySpace/AIM/ICQ play that game. Go ahead, tell me what script or iframe tag MySpace (or AOL, ha!) ever got some other site to serve to all their users.
AOL and MySpace never (AFAIK) ran an OpenID server, or if they did, they convinced hardly anyone to use it. Facebook did that, except went a step further and did their own protocol instead of OpenID, and lots of sites use it. Look at the "sign in with" part of this page and tell me you see AOL or MySpace. The four (and only four) companies you see there, fucked the users by deviating from standards, and as their reward they get an explicit mention/branding instead of a generic enter-your-openid-URL blank. (If this ain't proof that Evil Is Basically A Good Idea, then I don't know what is. But that's beside the point.)
Do you remember ever seeing other sites show free ads to users, for MySpace or AOL, and where the webmasters thought it was basically a good/sane idea in their self interest? I can think of lots of sites I visit, where that site says "follow us on Facebook" complete with a link to Facebook. Facebook pays $0.00000000 CPM for this ad. It's a dumb ad too, since if you follow the link, you just see a scaled down abbreviated version of that site's own content and links back to that site. (Well, that plus some additional ads that Facebook got paid to run -- and where some of those ads, might even be for competitors to site you came from!)
If in 1997 you told you something like that could possibly exist, I would have laughed in your face. I still do laugh in your face in 2014 over the same thing, but it's a laugh of madness, drowned in the cacophony of a world gone mad.
Facebook is a bad site (there's no reason you should ever point your browser there), but on the other hand, they were brilliantly clever compared to all that came before them, in terms of getting value out of other sites. When Site X becomes the next big thing, there's a reasonably good chance that every pageload they acquire, will also help Facebook a little. Can you say MySpace was ever in such a position? Ever heard of dialup BBS that gained free data, sent from the user's computer, whenever a user picked any menu option on any of a few million other BBSes? Did you ever go to any site, where if you had firewalled off ICQ's servers, that other unrelated site wasn't able to offer all its usual interactivity?
Facebook is a totally different beast than MySpace, with basically nothing in common with it. MySpace was just some website that was popular for a while. Facebook is Shub-Internet.
Geeks: "The public does a bunch of very insecure things. Someone could abuse all the myriad mistakes, where we don't even vaguely try to adopt best practices, and they do something bad."
News: "These people have started exploiting everyone's known bad practices. So have these people. And these people. And them. And them."
Geeks: "Also, theoretically, these people and these people and these other people, could started exploiting our bad practices too."
Public: "Yeah, but that's hypothetical."
Snowden: "The government has decided to exploit everyone's bad practices."
Public: "HEY!!!!"
President: "Oh. Ok, we'll stop exploiting it quite so much."
Problem solved.
Geeks: "No, act--"
I SAID, PROBLEM SOLVED.
If you leave it to the market and then a passenger chooses to buy a ticket on a no-phones airline, then it's the call receiver who is responsible for declining the emergency call. "Our customer wanted to be in a phoneless environment and paid for that, furthermore demonstrating his preference. Sue him for not taking your call."
Furthermore, it's hard to imagine any scenario where anyone could ever have a reasonable expectation for being able to take an emergency call. Even if I fab an extreme over-the-top example (as I, like anyone, would love to do).
Guy happens to be the Last Doctor In The World. He says, "I want to fly on someone else's airplane, but I want to not listen to anyone else talking." So he buys a ticket on a no-phones airline. While waiting in the terminal, he turns off his phone. One second later, the President's wife calls him, and leaves this voice mail: "The President is choking on pizza! What do I do? WHAT DO I DO!?" but since the doctor turned off his phone, he doesn't see the call come in. He boards his flight, oblivious to the coming disaster.
Mid-flight, one of the passengers starts talking to another passenger. The doctor screams, "hey, shut the fuck up!" and everyone quiets down, because you never know when you might want to be on The Last Doctor In The World's good side. The captain makes an announcement over the intercom. The doctor glares, hatefully. He doesn't make a scene, but he writes the captain's name in his no-treatment book. The engines drone on, and he grimaces with discomfort, noting he's never going to treat anyone who works at Boeing, where they make such loud engines.
An hour later, he gets off the plane. He turns on his phone, and sees a bunch of voicemails from the First Lady. He calls her back. "Get your husband to cough up the pizza," he offers, rolling his eyes, but his advice has arrived too late. The president has already asphyxiated to death.
Unfortunately, right after the president's death, a bill arrived on his desk, which would have outlawed mass puppy shredding. It didn't get signed quickly, because it took a while for the then-vice-president to catch up. So one hundred thousand puppies where shredded, while it was still legal to do so. One of those puppies had an important passphrase tattooed on its ear, but now it has been shredded. Without the passphrase, no one was able to stop the nuclear launch that resulted in the deaths of three billion people.
One of the people whose gardener died in the nuclear war, sues Samsung for designing a phone that has an off switch, based on the idea that people HAVE TO receive emergency calls, no matter what anyone (even the owner of the phone) wants.
You're on the jury. What's your decision? If you rule in favor of the plaintiff, Samsung owes someone $3 to replace the plant that the dead gardener never got around to watering. And I will harbor a hypothetical-$3 grudge against you, from now to the end of time. OTOH, if you rule for the defendent, then I agree with you, my friend. What's it going to be?
It's the FCC. Their argument will be that they're banning a radio tech (and in a specific context, without regard for what ever someone is saying over that radio), not speech itself. See that person in the seat next to you? Tell 'em how unfair King George's tea taxes are, and how unfair it is that Parliament doesn't ave a seat for us. The FCC won't stop you.
The reason we should shoot this down, is that there's no technical reason to ban the tech. The FCC doing this is merely a horrible. unnecessary, and un-American. But it's not unconstitutional. It's not as though the framers ever thought to add "don't be evil." They just assumed we didn't want evil government. Little did they know.
I agree. Someone once told me I should not go out at night, walk naked (except for a hundred dollar bill pasted to each of my nipples) to the highest-crime district in my city, and start yelling "Some of my best friends are you people!" They said I would be safer if I behaved differently, stayed home instead, and STFU-ed up with my crazy rants.
I explained that even if I behaved differently, that doesn't stop the Russians from launching a nuclear ICBM strike, killing us all, including me. Safe is safe, unsafe is unsafe, there are no degrees in between, and all of us face one single adversary who has one simple agenda.
Hopefully they weren't stupid enough to roll their own key format, and instead, they use standard OpenPGP keys. That way, people can have MitM-proof verified-identity conversations if they want that (and can tune the degree of MitM-proofing that is needed) but also have MitM-vulnerable pseudonymous conversations if they don't (for cases where you'd prefer to be anonymous).
When you're talking to your wife, it's ok for her to know who you are, and you to know you're talking to her, so you'd use the keys that you've exchanged out-of-band and that each of you have signed. When you're talking to your pirate buddies, you just to have the keyid that has in the past, been associated with uber-31337ness, but has never been signed by anyone. And when you're talking to another person in the company, you know who each other is and have at least some company CA as your introducer, any maybe signed yourselves too if it's a small enough company where everyone eventually meets each other in person.
Whatever your case, OpenPGP fits perfectly. The only thing it doesn't handle well, is tricking users into thinking they have a secure connection but really letting a third party listen in. For some reason, PGP isn't well-suited for that. Whenever I see someone not use PGP, I assume that's the reason they chose to use weaker tech.
I see what you did there, Slashdot editors. Brilliant.
If you had used an accurate headline, such as "Bomb hoax perp caught despite using the target's own network." then the "despite" part would have sounded stupid and you would have had an obviously non-story, right on the face of it. But by throwing in a random unrelated part of the story and misleadingly implying something about it, you made it sound interesting! More people need to learn this trick: lies make things interesting!
A guy puts on a mask and walks into a bank. He hands the teller a note, "My name is John Smith, and this is a robbery. Shhh. Give me $10k." Police later investigate John Smith, and confirm it was him. Headline: "robber caught despite using mask" because, clearly, masks are an important and very relevant part of the story!
"Get me a beer and I'll give you $5."
"No. Get it yourself."
"Sudo get me a beer and I'll give you a tenth of $50."
"Okay! Here's your beer."
"Get me a beer and I'll give you a hundredth of $500."
"No. Get it yourself."
"Sudo get me a beer and I'll give you a thousandth of $5000."
"Okay! Here's your beer."
globaljustin, you appear to be correct that the responses are varying, so I must reluctantly agree that your model is perfectly accurate.