Just about the only time I use copy/paste on my phone is during setup, when I need to input my long, pseudorandom WPA key. It is certainly very useful during this time. Otherwise, in practice, I just don't use it very much.
I agree. I should have said "The problem with this idea is information glut." The real root problem is certainly that people are making changes without notifying their customers. My point is that the band-aid to that problem is still broken.
That said, most TOS include language allowing the company to change them materially, that it's up to the user to follow those changes, and that continued use of the site constitutes acceptance of those changes. That's bad, but frankly, most people don't read the TOS anyway (which is another problem--when the TOS are too long and full of legalese, it's annoying, difficult, and unexpected for people to bother reading them.)
Not just for every visit--every time they make a request!
Seriously, this sort of thing is a great idea. I wish there was a standardized protocol for displaying the policies, for notifying users of changes, and of what those changes are. I'd love to have that kind of thing in my RSS, customized for the sites I use.
Why? Reverting to older policies may be just as important to people, particularly if the older policy was more onerous or problematic for some reason. Or the page could have been erroneously edited and pushed out, and the reversion is just to get back to what the real policy actually is. The problem is that a machine can't tell if it's a reversion to an old policy or a problem with synchronization of the servers behind the load balancer. Some heuristics could probably help with that (you could detect bouncing back and forth) but you can't be sure which version is correct.
TOSBack does something similar for Terms of Service for various websites. The problem is information glut. The terms of service may change frequently in very small, unimportant ways (such as formatting, or even in a few cases inconsequential HTML getting inserted.) The page can be absent one moment and back the next--causing two change notifications to show up. Sometimes the pages don't get changed across all of the website's servers, causing TOSBack to go back and forth between two changes (sometimes several times over the course of a day or more.) It becomes almost as much of a burden to check TOSBack as it does to just scan the TOS every once in a while.
The problem is that our phones are becoming more and more like computers..., but we don't have the ability to do whatever we want with the software on those computers.
In fact, the computers I was referring to were the phones.
Certainly not, but you can look at track records. No phone in history (that I'm aware of) has been updated like the iPhone. Most computer operating system vendors supply updates for security, some (Microsoft, for example) for longer than others.
The assertion of his post was that AT&T exclusivity for iPhones in the US allowed Android to get a foothold in the market that carrier-agnostic iPhone availability would have stifled. Now he didn't exactly back that up--rather, he stated that if the iPhone comes to Verizon, a bunch of people simply won't care. And he listed a few reasons for that, one of which is that for current Verizon customers to switch, they will have to pony up the full price of the phone. And he was seemingly replying directly to this statement from his parent:
There may be a few people out there who decided to go with Android because they didn't want to switch to AT&T.
Now I'm not sure why any of it matters, anyway, but his point are valid. AT&T has had exclusivity for over three years. Anyone wanting an iPhone and willing to switch carriers has had more than enough time to fulfill their current contracts and switch. In the meantime, Android has flourished on the other carriers, and has essentially been billed as an alternative to the iPhone. In fact, the Droid (Verizon's first Android phone) shipped in late 2009--over two years since the first iPhone. I note two years because that's the magic number for most contracts. The Droid and various other Android phones on Verizon have sucked up a good chunk of the iPhone's potential customers, and all of those people are now locked into a contract.
I don't think that the $500 cost is misleading--I think it's irrelevant. The only thing it points to is the fact that the iPhone likely won't make a huge splash on Verizon, as most people have had plenty of time to switch or try new platforms and get locked in. It has little to do with what I perceived as the point of the post--which was that Apple could have essentially ruled the market if they hadn't given exclusivity to AT&T from day one. Apple has an uphill battle now on their new carrier, whereas they'd just be a juggernaut if things had gone a little differently three years ago.
The $500 price came up because of this tidbit in one of the ancestor comments:
now that the iPhone is possibly coming, existing Verizon customers won't care: now that the iPhone is possibly coming, existing Verizon customers won't care: 1) We're already locked in 1-2 year contracts so we're not going to pay $500 for a new phone
The whole point was that people already under contract on Verizon won't (likely) want to pay $500 for a new phone.
This is the problem with not paying attention to the ancestor posts.
Which I don't understand. The question for me isn't whether or not the carrier locks down my phone. The question is whether or not I can do what I want with it. If I can then I'll buy the phone. If not I'll find something else.
Part of the problem (for me) is that if I jailbreak my iPhone*, I eventually get to make a tough choice: apply a security patch or keep my jailbreak. Maybe the new firmware will be jailbroken, maybe not. Maybe there will be a third-party patch, and maybe not. But the problem is that I have to make that choice.
With the DroidX, can you replace the kernel? If not, and there is a kernel exploit, then what? You're running a vulnerable phone until Verizon decides to push an update (if they ever do.) The problem is that our phones are becoming more and more like computers, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that comes along with that, but we don't have the ability to do whatever we want with the software on those computers.
* I don't own an iPhone, but for the sake of this post, pretend that I do.
Of course it's better. One statement is saying that you shouldn't have any privacy, and one is saying that you don't have any privacy.
The question that prompted Eric's statement was
People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?
Eric says "I think that judgement matters" and then goes on to make that quote that I bet he wishes he could take back, and adds
if you really need this kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines do retain this information for some time
and mentions that Google, like anyone else, is subject to the laws of the land and may have to give up some information on its users to law enforcement.
Framed in that way, what he said makes perfect sense. Don't search Google for "how to kill my wife's boyfriend." Don't put on your Google calendar (privately) that you need to be at the corner of 5th and Franklin to sell dope. If you become the target of a police investigation, they will likely gain access to these records that you thought were private. The takeaway is that if it's in the cloud, it's not private.
Put concisely, what he said was "You don't have privacy for things you do online." without making any judgement on that fact.
First, some definitions. Words matter, so use the right ones.
Switch: Device usually operating at the data link layer that chooses which link to send a packet to.
Router: Device usually operating at the network layer that routes between different networks.
Very nearly all consumer-grade "routers" have a built-in switch, leading to a certain amount of confusion by people with just a little knowledge of the subject. Many enterprise-grade routers have the capability of doing switching, often by installing a particular blade in the chassis.
All that out of the way, NAT and VLANs are handled at the network layer, with just enough logic built into the switches to allow them to function in the environment. VLANs are handled by encapsulation--the entire packet sent by one end of the connection is incorporated into a new packet which is routed (and switched) accordingly. The data is unaffected.
It's the same with NAT, which really has nothing to do with switches. Rather than encapsulation, though, the router modifies the headers of the packet (again, not the data.) Of course, it has to keep track of the connections in order to correctly correlate connections to NAT IP addresses, except in the odd case of one-to-one NAT (when it isn't strictly necessary to do so, but most NAT devices will anyway.)
One of the important things to realize is that we really want to operate only on the headers if at all possible. This is because they are fixed length, making it very easy to optimize. When you start getting into variable-length calculations, it becomes much slower. You have to worry about whether or not there's really a header stored in the data portion of the packet, and if so, whether it's valid. There's a very good reason that data and routing information are separate in IP. We could probably use options to indicate the presence of this data, but we're still talking about considerable additional load on the router. This will lower the packets per second that the router can handle, and since you'll have additional fragmentation (due to needing to insert into the data field on already maximum-sized packets), you're drastically lowering performance.
In essence, to get any of this to work, you'll probably need to add or replace infrastructure anyway. So if you have to do that, why not just do it right?
Putting the remaining 2 sections on separate portion of the packet, keeping the first 4 sections normal, would allow legacy hardware to route these, yet trivial to make new hardware to understand.
This would have made minimal to no impact whatsoever for backbone networks at this moment, all it would have needed are:
- Some new edge routers for those who wish to extend
- Software update to operating systems of trivial level
- Instead of Class Cs given for new applicants, you give just a Class D (what is now single IP address)
So they go into the payload? Thus decreasing the amount of real, useful data that you can actually put into the packet and increasing the total number of packets flowing through the backbone, as well as the total amount of data that's being pushed through. This quite obviously impacts the backbone.
You seemingly haven't considered low-mtu links, either. The extra data you have to put into the packet will really start to add up there.
- Software update to operating systems of trivial level
Networking stacks are hard--not because the protocol itself is hard, but because interoperability is absolutely essential. We can't get IPv4-only network stacks right. To suggest that this would be a trivial modification blows my mind.
- System requests dns for slashdot.org - Switch detects this and waits for response - Response is arriving, switch looks into the results: (changed to extended) slashdot.org. 3583 IN A 216.34.181.45.100.100
Changes response IP to: 224.216.100.100
And this adds a huge amount of complexity by breaking the networking stack model wide open. Switches modifying content? No. Just...no.
Because the "defense" budget seems to primarily be used to attack people who didn't attack us.
Because if you are restricting it to these 4 categories, then the War On Drugs must be in defense, federal prisons holding those dangerous marijuana smokers must be in defense, and the people going after those dangerous thieves who steal ideas must be in defense.
If these things aren't in defense, and you consider them epsilon, then gosh, I guess the government can do whatever it wants as long as the big four dwarf it in spending.
I'm continually surprised how many/.ers are really right wing, pro-corporate, anti-union, anti-tax freeloaders. 40 years of "government is bad" has become a lifestyle for a lot of people here.
They are right-wing, anti-union, anti-high-tax citizens. The left wing faction unfairly tacks on "pro-corporate" and "anti-tax freeloaders" to demonize them.
It's not that unfair. While no one can speak for me or my views any more than I can speak for his, "small government" types usually think that government should be small across the board--including regulation of corporations. This is effectively pro-corporation, as few corporations have ever demonstrated self-restraint. Worse, there aren't many real "small government" politicians anymore. Conservatives (/Republicans) used to be, but the neocon movement has somewhat changed that.
Personally, I'm more of a populist, which is an ideology which is demonized by both liberals and conservatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is cut and paste and multitasking?
Just about the only time I use copy/paste on my phone is during setup, when I need to input my long, pseudorandom WPA key. It is certainly very useful during this time. Otherwise, in practice, I just don't use it very much.
If I were to guess, this would throw a wrench in those works. From TFS:
At least one of the linked articles says the new OS, though home-grown, would run Windows software.
I like it!
That came across as awfully snarky. Yes, of course those solutions work--as long as the website implements them.
I'd love that. I think that confusing the customer ultimately gives the corporation more power.
I agree. I should have said "The problem with this idea is information glut." The real root problem is certainly that people are making changes without notifying their customers. My point is that the band-aid to that problem is still broken.
That said, most TOS include language allowing the company to change them materially, that it's up to the user to follow those changes, and that continued use of the site constitutes acceptance of those changes. That's bad, but frankly, most people don't read the TOS anyway (which is another problem--when the TOS are too long and full of legalese, it's annoying, difficult, and unexpected for people to bother reading them.)
Not just for every visit--every time they make a request!
Seriously, this sort of thing is a great idea. I wish there was a standardized protocol for displaying the policies, for notifying users of changes, and of what those changes are. I'd love to have that kind of thing in my RSS, customized for the sites I use.
Why? Reverting to older policies may be just as important to people, particularly if the older policy was more onerous or problematic for some reason. Or the page could have been erroneously edited and pushed out, and the reversion is just to get back to what the real policy actually is. The problem is that a machine can't tell if it's a reversion to an old policy or a problem with synchronization of the servers behind the load balancer. Some heuristics could probably help with that (you could detect bouncing back and forth) but you can't be sure which version is correct.
TOSBack does something similar for Terms of Service for various websites. The problem is information glut. The terms of service may change frequently in very small, unimportant ways (such as formatting, or even in a few cases inconsequential HTML getting inserted.) The page can be absent one moment and back the next--causing two change notifications to show up. Sometimes the pages don't get changed across all of the website's servers, causing TOSBack to go back and forth between two changes (sometimes several times over the course of a day or more.) It becomes almost as much of a burden to check TOSBack as it does to just scan the TOS every once in a while.
The problem is that our phones are becoming more and more like computers..., but we don't have the ability to do whatever we want with the software on those computers.
In fact, the computers I was referring to were the phones.
Certainly not, but you can look at track records. No phone in history (that I'm aware of) has been updated like the iPhone. Most computer operating system vendors supply updates for security, some (Microsoft, for example) for longer than others.
The assertion of his post was that AT&T exclusivity for iPhones in the US allowed Android to get a foothold in the market that carrier-agnostic iPhone availability would have stifled. Now he didn't exactly back that up--rather, he stated that if the iPhone comes to Verizon, a bunch of people simply won't care. And he listed a few reasons for that, one of which is that for current Verizon customers to switch, they will have to pony up the full price of the phone. And he was seemingly replying directly to this statement from his parent:
There may be a few people out there who decided to go with Android because they didn't want to switch to AT&T.
Now I'm not sure why any of it matters, anyway, but his point are valid. AT&T has had exclusivity for over three years. Anyone wanting an iPhone and willing to switch carriers has had more than enough time to fulfill their current contracts and switch. In the meantime, Android has flourished on the other carriers, and has essentially been billed as an alternative to the iPhone. In fact, the Droid (Verizon's first Android phone) shipped in late 2009--over two years since the first iPhone. I note two years because that's the magic number for most contracts. The Droid and various other Android phones on Verizon have sucked up a good chunk of the iPhone's potential customers, and all of those people are now locked into a contract.
I don't think that the $500 cost is misleading--I think it's irrelevant. The only thing it points to is the fact that the iPhone likely won't make a huge splash on Verizon, as most people have had plenty of time to switch or try new platforms and get locked in. It has little to do with what I perceived as the point of the post--which was that Apple could have essentially ruled the market if they hadn't given exclusivity to AT&T from day one. Apple has an uphill battle now on their new carrier, whereas they'd just be a juggernaut if things had gone a little differently three years ago.
The pedantry here is astounding.
The $500 price came up because of this tidbit in one of the ancestor comments:
now that the iPhone is possibly coming, existing Verizon customers won't care: now that the iPhone is possibly coming, existing Verizon customers won't care:
1) We're already locked in 1-2 year contracts so we're not going to pay $500 for a new phone
The whole point was that people already under contract on Verizon won't (likely) want to pay $500 for a new phone.
This is the problem with not paying attention to the ancestor posts.
Which I don't understand. The question for me isn't whether or not the carrier locks down my phone. The question is whether or not I can do what I want with it. If I can then I'll buy the phone. If not I'll find something else.
Part of the problem (for me) is that if I jailbreak my iPhone*, I eventually get to make a tough choice: apply a security patch or keep my jailbreak. Maybe the new firmware will be jailbroken, maybe not. Maybe there will be a third-party patch, and maybe not. But the problem is that I have to make that choice.
With the DroidX, can you replace the kernel? If not, and there is a kernel exploit, then what? You're running a vulnerable phone until Verizon decides to push an update (if they ever do.) The problem is that our phones are becoming more and more like computers, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that comes along with that, but we don't have the ability to do whatever we want with the software on those computers.
* I don't own an iPhone, but for the sake of this post, pretend that I do.
Of course it's better. One statement is saying that you shouldn't have any privacy, and one is saying that you don't have any privacy.
The question that prompted Eric's statement was
People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?
Eric says "I think that judgement matters" and then goes on to make that quote that I bet he wishes he could take back, and adds
if you really need this kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines do retain this information for some time
and mentions that Google, like anyone else, is subject to the laws of the land and may have to give up some information on its users to law enforcement.
Framed in that way, what he said makes perfect sense. Don't search Google for "how to kill my wife's boyfriend." Don't put on your Google calendar (privately) that you need to be at the corner of 5th and Franklin to sell dope. If you become the target of a police investigation, they will likely gain access to these records that you thought were private. The takeaway is that if it's in the cloud, it's not private.
Put concisely, what he said was "You don't have privacy for things you do online." without making any judgement on that fact.
First, some definitions. Words matter, so use the right ones.
Switch: Device usually operating at the data link layer that chooses which link to send a packet to.
Router: Device usually operating at the network layer that routes between different networks.
Very nearly all consumer-grade "routers" have a built-in switch, leading to a certain amount of confusion by people with just a little knowledge of the subject. Many enterprise-grade routers have the capability of doing switching, often by installing a particular blade in the chassis.
All that out of the way, NAT and VLANs are handled at the network layer, with just enough logic built into the switches to allow them to function in the environment. VLANs are handled by encapsulation--the entire packet sent by one end of the connection is incorporated into a new packet which is routed (and switched) accordingly. The data is unaffected.
It's the same with NAT, which really has nothing to do with switches. Rather than encapsulation, though, the router modifies the headers of the packet (again, not the data.) Of course, it has to keep track of the connections in order to correctly correlate connections to NAT IP addresses, except in the odd case of one-to-one NAT (when it isn't strictly necessary to do so, but most NAT devices will anyway.)
One of the important things to realize is that we really want to operate only on the headers if at all possible. This is because they are fixed length, making it very easy to optimize. When you start getting into variable-length calculations, it becomes much slower. You have to worry about whether or not there's really a header stored in the data portion of the packet, and if so, whether it's valid. There's a very good reason that data and routing information are separate in IP. We could probably use options to indicate the presence of this data, but we're still talking about considerable additional load on the router. This will lower the packets per second that the router can handle, and since you'll have additional fragmentation (due to needing to insert into the data field on already maximum-sized packets), you're drastically lowering performance.
In essence, to get any of this to work, you'll probably need to add or replace infrastructure anyway. So if you have to do that, why not just do it right?
Not that I know of, though your router may be able to do it (or may be flashable to a firmware that can.)
It seems like the AC has a point.. You may not be shouting it to the world, but you're certainly shouting it to everyone in the swarm.
Your acknowledgement packets probably aren't getting through.
http://www.benzedrine.cx/ackpri.html
With IPv6, we're redesigning everything anyway, but we're trying to do it right rather than hacking something onto IPv4.
Putting the remaining 2 sections on separate portion of the packet, keeping the first 4 sections normal, would allow legacy hardware to route these, yet trivial to make new hardware to understand.
This would have made minimal to no impact whatsoever for backbone networks at this moment, all it would have needed are:
- Some new edge routers for those who wish to extend
- Software update to operating systems of trivial level
- Instead of Class Cs given for new applicants, you give just a Class D (what is now single IP address)
So they go into the payload? Thus decreasing the amount of real, useful data that you can actually put into the packet and increasing the total number of packets flowing through the backbone, as well as the total amount of data that's being pushed through. This quite obviously impacts the backbone.
You seemingly haven't considered low-mtu links, either. The extra data you have to put into the packet will really start to add up there.
- Software update to operating systems of trivial level
Networking stacks are hard--not because the protocol itself is hard, but because interoperability is absolutely essential. We can't get IPv4-only network stacks right. To suggest that this would be a trivial modification blows my mind.
- System requests dns for slashdot.org
- Switch detects this and waits for response
- Response is arriving, switch looks into the results: (changed to extended)
slashdot.org. 3583 IN A 216.34.181.45.100.100
Changes response IP to:
224.216.100.100
And this adds a huge amount of complexity by breaking the networking stack model wide open. Switches modifying content? No. Just...no.
But who enforces that? The small government?
Defense.
Because the "defense" budget seems to primarily be used to attack people who didn't attack us.
Because if you are restricting it to these 4 categories, then the War On Drugs must be in defense, federal prisons holding those dangerous marijuana smokers must be in defense, and the people going after those dangerous thieves who steal ideas must be in defense.
If these things aren't in defense, and you consider them epsilon, then gosh, I guess the government can do whatever it wants as long as the big four dwarf it in spending.
Your views remain vapid and unfair no matter how you try to rationalize them.
Unfair compared to what?
They are right-wing, anti-union, anti-high-tax citizens. The left wing faction unfairly tacks on "pro-corporate" and "anti-tax freeloaders" to demonize them.
It's not that unfair. While no one can speak for me or my views any more than I can speak for his, "small government" types usually think that government should be small across the board--including regulation of corporations. This is effectively pro-corporation, as few corporations have ever demonstrated self-restraint. Worse, there aren't many real "small government" politicians anymore. Conservatives (/Republicans) used to be, but the neocon movement has somewhat changed that.
Personally, I'm more of a populist, which is an ideology which is demonized by both liberals and conservatives.