With so many people ditching Cable and Sat TV plans in favor of an Internet-Only household, and with the Cable Companies being the majority providers of Internet Access, of course we had to see this coming.
Vz and Comcast aren't going to sit idly by while their subscribers ditch the media services and keep only the delivery service, and spend their money at Netflix and other media services.
The question is, will it be considered anti-competitive for them to allow unlimited delivery of their own media over the pipe, while charging extra for media from their competitors? I certainly think that's anti-competitive, and where net neutrality needs to come into play. But, I doubt we'll see it happen, at least in the US.
Of course it's a giant conflict of interest that cable companies provide Internet service. However, it's not obvious how this should be fixed. So far, it doesn't seem likely that truly independent ISPs will come along as a result of purely market forces. The government could force the businesses to be separate, but they don't have a terribly good record dealing with stuff like that.
This is a good thing, but corporations contributing to Free Software projects has been business as usual for over a decade now. Generally, they do so because they correctly perceive that cooperation is more beneficial to their respective bottom lines than keeping everything secret. Even Oracle, a corporation with a clear history of hostility to Free and Open Source software has supported development of the Btrfs Linux file system for many years. Cooperation between competing corporations is nothing new. Observe how Apple continues to buy essential components like CPUs from Samsung while both continually beat on each other in court.
Not "people of Benghazi". Some people of Benghazi demonstrated against the attacks. You conveniently forget about the existence of other people of Benghazi, who e.g. were hoisting black Shahada flags (the very same that al-Qaeda uses) over government buildings not long ago.
Shoot. I guess we should nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
This reminds me of the pro-US demonstration when Iraq was first occupied.
Actually, I lie. That probably comprised a few dozen genuine hopefuls, while these people's banners suggest fear of American reprisals. Which, looking at the last decade of US foreign policy, is quite understandable.
The essential reality you're ignoring is that unlike Iraq, US troops have not invaded and will not invade Libya. There simply isn't the political will to start yet another pointless war that lasts over a decade. If the US gets involved in another war, it will be with Iran, so we certainly don't have time for Libya.
They're not pulling it from Egypt and Libya because of fear it might undermine the Google brand in those countries, they're pulling it because the movie is being used as a pretext to kill people.
This isn't about merely avoiding offense. This is about trying to avoid escalating an already terrible situation.
Extremists and terrorists will use whatever excuses they can. It's quite likely that the attack in Benghazi would have happened regardless of the movie. Both Libya and Egypt are very young democracies and need to work out a healthy balance between freedom of speech and rule of law. It is not Google's or anyone else's responsibility to accomodate terrorists or other misguided people who use stupid YouTube videos as excuses for violence.
"A man is only as big as the things that make him angry"
those muslims reacting violently because of that stupid video is pretty damn lame, they should be hunted down and killed in a public execution without mercy as an example for the rest of them. if they want to live like wild dogs then give them law & order wild west style
You're absolutely right. The only way to teach intolerant people to be more tolerant is to outdo them at their own game.
Cue a hundred posts on how awful Islam is, even though this is just a pretext for more hatred for the Middle East and distraction from the way the elite classes are behaving at home. Cue a dozen people mourning about the loss of another spoilt diplomat who did the nasty government's bidding while hundreds of US soldiers continue to be engaged in unnecessary military activities and civilians continue to either be killed or to die from lack of resources.
Yes, Islam is silly.
Yes, it's just like all dogma in this respect, whether or not accompanied by a sky fairy.
Yes, Mohammed was just some strategically brilliant warmonger with an ego.
But don't allow yourself to be riled up like the desperate fools who are encouraged to violently protest just so their behaviour can be used against them.
You're certainly right about Libya. They all hate us there for invading and occupying the country. Wait a minute, I was momentarily confused. Actually, people of Benghazi, Libya have demonstrated against the terrorist attack on the consulated and in support of the US. If you paint Libya, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan with the same brush, you're making the same kind of logical mistakes as demonstrators that equate a low-budget video on YouTube with US foreign policy.
What about the rest of the Islamic world? Do they really think this will be enjoyed and improve the Google brand in places like Saudia Arabia? How about Palestine, Indonesia, Pakistan and a host of other Islamic countries?
Or are they going to wait for riots and then pull the video in those locations?
Google is only demonstrating that they will react to perceived threats to their brands as any corporation would. They don't actually believe in the principle of free speech. They know that the movie had been available for months before anyone rioted over it, only becoming controversial once it was translated into Arabic. It's clearly being exploited by anti-American opportunists and whether that will spread to the entire Muslim world isn't clear.
Restrict the video only in places where they can't handle the freedom of speech without maniacal violence. Google got it right for the first time in a while.
The situation in Libya is very different from Egypt. In Egypt, the people elected an Islamist President and haven't forgotten the decades of US support for oppressive regimes. It remains to be seen if the current government will tolerate mob violence or maintain the right balance between freedom of speech and rule of law.
In Libya, the Islamist parties did not do well in elections and most Libyans are thankful for US support of the rebellion against Gaddafi. The attack that killed the American diplomats and Libyan security personnel was perpetrated by a fringe group that does not have the support of average Libyans.
So, Google using the same policy in both Egypt and Libya does not make sense. The fact that they are voluntarily censoring content anywhere that neither violates their policy nor legal standards sets a bad precedent. I expect the video is just as poor quality and offensive as many have said, but the same could be said for a large portion of YouTube videos that nobody ever riots about. If there's any principle Americans can unhypocritically demonstrate to fledgling democracies, it's freedom of speech.
Operating Systems are fundamentally boring. Once you get past the fanboi-ism, they are just software that sits there on your computer. They are there to *facilitate* your work, but they don't produce anything in and of themselves.
So you have to jazz them up as much as you can, so people will take notice.
Operating systems should be boring to ordinary users, including the PHBs that might be swayed by a name. Sysadmins and others who might reasonably be excited by particular operating system features should know better than choosing based on names.
You can patent something truly horrific, then not use your patent or let anyone else use it. Hopefully that's what they're going for here.
No, a government-granted monopoly on a despicable business practice is not a good way to prevent it from being used. If it is necessary to prevent such a practice, it should be made illegal, not more potentially profitable.
How do these malicious URIs get access to the underlying Operating System?
If you'd read TFA, you'd know this is potentially useful as part of a phishing attack to fool users supplying private data such as login credentials to an attacker. It is not a vulnerability in any browser.
Find someone who is competetent at Unix system administration and willing to learn. Regardless of current Windows knowledge, it's more likely she will be able to learn the nuances necessary in a heterogenous environment than the average Windows admin.
I'm currently doing my internship at the IT dept. of a joint-municipal group responsible for about 15k windows computers(mostly for schools, vocational schools and a uni of applied sciences) and today the department heads made the decision to uninstall java from all machines except those in lab networks disconnected from outside world.
It sounds like you're really interested in security, so while you're at it, uninstall Internet Explorer too.
Remind me, is i possible to serve XHMTL 1.0 accross the board yet? I think it just about it, and we are to the point of "why the fuck bother anymore", if you can do better at getting shit implemented go right ahead, but so far HsTML5 has made more tangible progress than just about any other single initiative of W3C.
I think IE 9 finally handles XHTML properly. Of course it's far too late, since XHTML is completely dead.
The real answer is a new standard that is designed for application presentation and deliver, that does not have so much in-band signaling. We need to get it right the first time by building security into the system, not extend an already bloated monstrosity to make up for the inevitable security problems that result from turning a language for describing documents into a platform for running distributed software with malicious users.
Images and text can be sanitized reliably. The problem is that this strips out all of the non-essential features. Users have a hard time understanding that, because users do not understand the trade-offs involved.
But the process is easy: Map all images to meta-data and compression free formats (pnm, e.g.) then recompress with a trusted compressor. For text, accept plain ASCII, RTF and HTML 2.0. Everything else, convert either to images or to cleaned PDF/Postscript by "printing" and OCR'ing.
If you'd read TFA, you'd know that it explains why this is insufficient:
For a while, we focused on content sanitization as a possible workaround - but in many cases, we found it to be insufficient. For example, Aleksandr Dobkin managed to construct a purely alphanumeric Flash applet, and in our internal work the Google security team created images that can be forced to include a particular plaintext string in their body, after being scrubbed and recoded in a deterministic way.
HOW MANY YEARS have we been waiting for v5? I've HONESTLY lost count and any capacity to give a damn when we reached a decade -- Just looked it up, 12 years.
But HTML 5 is already here! It's just that it's not like the standards of old, it's a living standard. And if you don't like that, you're not agile enough.
I'm not sure if they're on the right track in general, but at least the WHATWG is honestly recognizing that web developers have never waited for an official standard to use new browser features. It's a chicken and egg problem: if nobody used a new feature until it were described in an official standard, browsers wouldn't have much motivation to implement and test the feature.
Do whatever kind of development floats your boat and pays the bills. As much as some aspects of web development suck, it is getting gradually better and it can't be ignored. The answer to web development problems certainly isn't to return to platform-specific binaries.
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With so many people ditching Cable and Sat TV plans in favor of an Internet-Only household, and with the Cable Companies being the majority providers of Internet Access, of course we had to see this coming.
Vz and Comcast aren't going to sit idly by while their subscribers ditch the media services and keep only the delivery service, and spend their money at Netflix and other media services.
The question is, will it be considered anti-competitive for them to allow unlimited delivery of their own media over the pipe, while charging extra for media from their competitors? I certainly think that's anti-competitive, and where net neutrality needs to come into play. But, I doubt we'll see it happen, at least in the US.
Of course it's a giant conflict of interest that cable companies provide Internet service. However, it's not obvious how this should be fixed. So far, it doesn't seem likely that truly independent ISPs will come along as a result of purely market forces. The government could force the businesses to be separate, but they don't have a terribly good record dealing with stuff like that.
This is a good thing, but corporations contributing to Free Software projects has been business as usual for over a decade now. Generally, they do so because they correctly perceive that cooperation is more beneficial to their respective bottom lines than keeping everything secret. Even Oracle, a corporation with a clear history of hostility to Free and Open Source software has supported development of the Btrfs Linux file system for many years. Cooperation between competing corporations is nothing new. Observe how Apple continues to buy essential components like CPUs from Samsung while both continually beat on each other in court.
Too bad they didn't test Nuka Cola as well.
This is how you MAKE Nuka Cola.
No, it's how you make irradiated Nuka Cola. The regular stuff was made before the bombs fell.
No, just leave them the heck alone to settle their own differences.
I couldn't agree more. This is already generally the case in Libya and I hope it stays that way.
Not "people of Benghazi". Some people of Benghazi demonstrated against the attacks. You conveniently forget about the existence of other people of Benghazi, who e.g. were hoisting black Shahada flags (the very same that al-Qaeda uses) over government buildings not long ago.
Shoot. I guess we should nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
This reminds me of the pro-US demonstration when Iraq was first occupied.
Actually, I lie. That probably comprised a few dozen genuine hopefuls, while these people's banners suggest fear of American reprisals. Which, looking at the last decade of US foreign policy, is quite understandable.
The essential reality you're ignoring is that unlike Iraq, US troops have not invaded and will not invade Libya. There simply isn't the political will to start yet another pointless war that lasts over a decade. If the US gets involved in another war, it will be with Iran, so we certainly don't have time for Libya.
They're not pulling it from Egypt and Libya because of fear it might undermine the Google brand in those countries, they're pulling it because the movie is being used as a pretext to kill people.
This isn't about merely avoiding offense. This is about trying to avoid escalating an already terrible situation.
Extremists and terrorists will use whatever excuses they can. It's quite likely that the attack in Benghazi would have happened regardless of the movie. Both Libya and Egypt are very young democracies and need to work out a healthy balance between freedom of speech and rule of law. It is not Google's or anyone else's responsibility to accomodate terrorists or other misguided people who use stupid YouTube videos as excuses for violence.
"A man is only as big as the things that make him angry"
those muslims reacting violently because of that stupid video is pretty damn lame, they should be hunted down and killed in a public execution without mercy as an example for the rest of them. if they want to live like wild dogs then give them law & order wild west style
You're absolutely right. The only way to teach intolerant people to be more tolerant is to outdo them at their own game.
Cue a hundred posts on how awful Islam is, even though this is just a pretext for more hatred for the Middle East and distraction from the way the elite classes are behaving at home. Cue a dozen people mourning about the loss of another spoilt diplomat who did the nasty government's bidding while hundreds of US soldiers continue to be engaged in unnecessary military activities and civilians continue to either be killed or to die from lack of resources.
Yes, Islam is silly.
Yes, it's just like all dogma in this respect, whether or not accompanied by a sky fairy.
Yes, Mohammed was just some strategically brilliant warmonger with an ego.
But don't allow yourself to be riled up like the desperate fools who are encouraged to violently protest just so their behaviour can be used against them.
You're certainly right about Libya. They all hate us there for invading and occupying the country. Wait a minute, I was momentarily confused. Actually, people of Benghazi, Libya have demonstrated against the terrorist attack on the consulated and in support of the US. If you paint Libya, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan with the same brush, you're making the same kind of logical mistakes as demonstrators that equate a low-budget video on YouTube with US foreign policy.
What about the rest of the Islamic world? Do they really think this will be enjoyed and improve the Google brand in places like Saudia Arabia? How about Palestine, Indonesia, Pakistan and a host of other Islamic countries?
Or are they going to wait for riots and then pull the video in those locations?
Google is only demonstrating that they will react to perceived threats to their brands as any corporation would. They don't actually believe in the principle of free speech. They know that the movie had been available for months before anyone rioted over it, only becoming controversial once it was translated into Arabic. It's clearly being exploited by anti-American opportunists and whether that will spread to the entire Muslim world isn't clear.
Restrict the video only in places where they can't handle the freedom of speech without maniacal violence. Google got it right for the first time in a while.
The situation in Libya is very different from Egypt. In Egypt, the people elected an Islamist President and haven't forgotten the decades of US support for oppressive regimes. It remains to be seen if the current government will tolerate mob violence or maintain the right balance between freedom of speech and rule of law.
In Libya, the Islamist parties did not do well in elections and most Libyans are thankful for US support of the rebellion against Gaddafi. The attack that killed the American diplomats and Libyan security personnel was perpetrated by a fringe group that does not have the support of average Libyans.
So, Google using the same policy in both Egypt and Libya does not make sense. The fact that they are voluntarily censoring content anywhere that neither violates their policy nor legal standards sets a bad precedent. I expect the video is just as poor quality and offensive as many have said, but the same could be said for a large portion of YouTube videos that nobody ever riots about. If there's any principle Americans can unhypocritically demonstrate to fledgling democracies, it's freedom of speech.
Operating Systems are fundamentally boring. Once you get past the fanboi-ism, they are just software that sits there on your computer. They are there to *facilitate* your work, but they don't produce anything in and of themselves.
So you have to jazz them up as much as you can, so people will take notice.
Operating systems should be boring to ordinary users, including the PHBs that might be swayed by a name. Sysadmins and others who might reasonably be excited by particular operating system features should know better than choosing based on names.
You can patent something truly horrific, then not use your patent or let anyone else use it. Hopefully that's what they're going for here.
No, a government-granted monopoly on a despicable business practice is not a good way to prevent it from being used. If it is necessary to prevent such a practice, it should be made illegal, not more potentially profitable.
Description reads more like a sociology paper to me.
If you can get a patent on a business method or algorithm, why not a social engineering method?
I *knew* I should have patented the paper armor I made for myself when I was a kid.
Sorry, but there is prior art.
How do these malicious URIs get access to the underlying Operating System?
If you'd read TFA, you'd know this is potentially useful as part of a phishing attack to fool users supplying private data such as login credentials to an attacker. It is not a vulnerability in any browser.
Find someone who is competetent at Unix system administration and willing to learn. Regardless of current Windows knowledge, it's more likely she will be able to learn the nuances necessary in a heterogenous environment than the average Windows admin.
I have a vpn like most sane people. Leaving port 22 open is just asking for abuse.
I think actively blocking attackers with something like fail2ban is at least as good as an additional standard VPN or using non standard ports.
I'm currently doing my internship at the IT dept. of a joint-municipal group responsible for about 15k windows computers(mostly for schools, vocational schools and a uni of applied sciences) and today the department heads made the decision to uninstall java from all machines except those in lab networks disconnected from outside world.
It sounds like you're really interested in security, so while you're at it, uninstall Internet Explorer too.
You sound like someone who shouldn't be giving technical advice.
C/C++ has advantages over Java, just like Java has advantages over C/C++
Saying you should use one over the other for every purpose is foolhardy.
You can develop web site extensions in C++. It's a new-fangled technology called "ActiveX" and it's much more secure than Java applets.
Remind me, is i possible to serve XHMTL 1.0 accross the board yet? I think it just about it, and we are to the point of "why the fuck bother anymore", if you can do better at getting shit implemented go right ahead, but so far HsTML5 has made more tangible progress than just about any other single initiative of W3C.
I think IE 9 finally handles XHTML properly. Of course it's far too late, since XHTML is completely dead.
The real answer is a new standard that is designed for application presentation and deliver, that does not have so much in-band signaling. We need to get it right the first time by building security into the system, not extend an already bloated monstrosity to make up for the inevitable security problems that result from turning a language for describing documents into a platform for running distributed software with malicious users.
Let us know how that works out.
Images and text can be sanitized reliably. The problem is that this strips out all of the non-essential features. Users have a hard time understanding that, because users do not understand the trade-offs involved.
But the process is easy: Map all images to meta-data and compression free formats (pnm, e.g.) then recompress with a trusted compressor. For text, accept plain ASCII, RTF and HTML 2.0. Everything else, convert either to images or to cleaned PDF/Postscript by "printing" and OCR'ing.
If you'd read TFA, you'd know that it explains why this is insufficient:
For a while, we focused on content sanitization as a possible workaround - but in many cases, we found it to be insufficient. For example, Aleksandr Dobkin managed to construct a purely alphanumeric Flash applet, and in our internal work the Google security team created images that can be forced to include a particular plaintext string in their body, after being scrubbed and recoded in a deterministic way.
HOW MANY YEARS have we been waiting for v5? I've HONESTLY lost count and any capacity to give a damn when we reached a decade -- Just looked it up, 12 years.
But HTML 5 is already here! It's just that it's not like the standards of old, it's a living standard. And if you don't like that, you're not agile enough.
I'm not sure if they're on the right track in general, but at least the WHATWG is honestly recognizing that web developers have never waited for an official standard to use new browser features. It's a chicken and egg problem: if nobody used a new feature until it were described in an official standard, browsers wouldn't have much motivation to implement and test the feature.
Do whatever kind of development floats your boat and pays the bills. As much as some aspects of web development suck, it is getting gradually better and it can't be ignored. The answer to web development problems certainly isn't to return to platform-specific binaries.