Hypothetically, what would have happened if he has hacked into the account of some unimportant person without governmental connections? I imagine absolutly nothing. The police wouldn't consider him worth the time to investigate, and the feds wouldn't consider him worth the effort of prosecuting. The worst he'd get is the loss of service from his ISP if they recieved a complaint - and probably not even that, as ISPs ignore most complaints due to the cost of investigating them. This is why there is so much anger at the jail time. It's percieved as an example of people being unequal under the law - of Palin's place in the spotlight and friends in government ensuring that even her personal, non-government email is more protected. Of the nobility warning the surfs to keep their heads down do as they are told.
We might also see an open, possibly technologically superior alternative created that then never catches on due to the installed support base of the preexisting solution. GIF had PNG, MP3 had OGG. WebM might be the counterpart in h264. Open, free, and possibly even superior (I really don't know), but unable to overcome the advantage that comes from being the first to become widespread.
I have thought for some time that the reason Apple is so against Flash isn't entirely due to it's processor-using battery-sucky ways - though those are serious flaws. It's also because Flash is a competitor for the app store. A lot of those apps are little flash games (think Angry Birds, for a well-known example) - exactly the type of thing that could be written in flash, and has been. There are thousands, tens of thousands of Flash games available. I know: I work at a school, blocking them all.
WebM and x264 are substantially similar internally - in theory I imagine much of the same hardware could be used to decode them. It would need a lot of coder-hours to make it work, but I imagine Google will do that for Android at some point.
Apple won't. They own a substantial stake in the h264 patent pool - WebM is their direct competitor, so they arn't going to do anything to aid it.
Everyone kept right on using it, I recall. There was an unpatented alternative created, PNG - but, even though it was superior in every way, it didn't take off until the Unisys patent expired. GIF just had too much momentum at the time: Every browser supported it. It's still the format most used for trivial animation on the internet, even though it's technology is terribly dated, because it's the one format for trivial animation you can be sure works.
The standard is open, and there are open source encoders and decoders. So in that sense, it's open: Everything is fully and publicly documented. However, it is also covered by hundreds of patents, which means you can't actually use any of that information without getting a licence from the patent holders. One of whome is Microsoft, who stands to make a lot of money from it. Others include Sony and Apple, who stand to make a lot too. So far the consortium that administers the patent pool has been quite reasonable about terms - free for noncommercial use, low costs even for commercial - but there is a fear that if x264 were to become so established it were impossible to do without it then there would be a temptation for them to start milking more money from those patents.
The old sharereactor did something similar, many years ago. Back in the day it was one of the top piracy sites on the net. Gone now. Torrent tracker sites largely replaced it's role.
There is one key difference: Google has enough skilled lawyers that the copyright organisations know not to mess with them. Rapidshare is small fry, and can easily be crushed beneath their expensive designer boots.
Plus it wouldn't work. Soon it'd be full of encrypted RARs of filenames like aiegflaeaergfaer.rar, or possibly sales_reports.rar... no way anyone could tell what they are unless they are a member of the private forum where the link and decryption password are posted.
The effect is perminant, too - people who are obese as children still have the inflated fat cell numbers when adults. Maybe intensive liposuction would help.
Probably secret? It's a list of the top child porn sites on the internet. Of course it'll be secret. Plus that means that any embarassing mistakes will never come to light, too. Espicially if the filter works by returning a false 404 error or just dropping packets, so it isn't readily apparent that the site was deliberatly blocked at all. The most effective censorship is the type that is never even discovered.
And note that in that case, you don't even get to know the obvious ones are illegal until after you have downloaded and looked at them... or at least looked and left them in your browser cache.
I suppose you could report them, but I imagine most people wouldn't want to risk drawing police attention themselves in such a way. It might result in their computer being siezed as vital evidence, which could turn up other crimes. Best to just delete throughly and pretend you never saw it.
Because:
1. The ISPs don't want to be charged with a list of child porn sites, something so dangerous that to even look at it could get you jailed.
2. If the block were DNS based, pedophiles would just switch to using IP addresses instead.
3. Some blocks would be over-broad. Sites that host more than one site under the same DNS name. The same problem as IP blocks, from the different direction.
The real problem here isn't blocking *some* child porn. That's doable. But if the ISPs block some, then they know that people and politicians will soon be blameing them for every child-porn file that makes it through. They'll become responsible for a task they can't achieve perfectly, and every shortcoming will result in outrage that they wern't protecting children hard enough.
Changing the law is hard. But changing a policy is comparatively easy. If they can get the filtering technology mandated for another reason - child porn is as good a way as any - then getting it expanded to copyright infringement might be as simple as convincing one key politician.
I imagine that once the technology is in place, it's use will be expanded. How long before the big copyright organisations start lobbying for laws to add major copyright infringing websites to the list, thus allowing them to finally be rid of the pirate bay?
This would almost be an acceptable justification, if not for one detail: They previously promised more then they are now able to deliver. This is bordering on false advertising, made legal only by a line of small print that allows them to change the contract any time they wish. If they don't have the ability to deliver larger amounts of data, they shouldn't have promised customers they would
Or possibly the handset manufacturers, or network operators in the case of contract-supplied phones, have. I have an android phone by HTC, and like many PCs it comes with a great deal of bundled manufacturer software, including some that runs in the background. I see no reason it would be different in the case of a windows phone.
What the other two said about extensions. Also, a modern CPU has a huge number of more recent technologies. Some obvious - hyperthreading, speedstep - and a lot of fine details I am sure in just how the piplineing, cache management, branch prediction and such all work. So, although you could make a processor not covered by any current patents, it's performance would be so pathetic it'd be of use only in embedded applications.
It's partly residual reputation. When the PS3 came out, it's chip was one of the fastest you could get in raw flops - and better than anything else for the price. It was very impressive. Since then PC processors have continued to improve, while the PS3 has stayed just the same.
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Hypothetically, what would have happened if he has hacked into the account of some unimportant person without governmental connections? I imagine absolutly nothing. The police wouldn't consider him worth the time to investigate, and the feds wouldn't consider him worth the effort of prosecuting. The worst he'd get is the loss of service from his ISP if they recieved a complaint - and probably not even that, as ISPs ignore most complaints due to the cost of investigating them. This is why there is so much anger at the jail time. It's percieved as an example of people being unequal under the law - of Palin's place in the spotlight and friends in government ensuring that even her personal, non-government email is more protected. Of the nobility warning the surfs to keep their heads down do as they are told.
He found dirt. It just wan't very good dirt. As scandals go, it was uimportant, and almost insignificent beside more serious concerns.
This is Sarah Palin. I imagine she gets so many abusive emails, she has a secretary dedicated to deleting them.
We might also see an open, possibly technologically superior alternative created that then never catches on due to the installed support base of the preexisting solution. GIF had PNG, MP3 had OGG. WebM might be the counterpart in h264. Open, free, and possibly even superior (I really don't know), but unable to overcome the advantage that comes from being the first to become widespread.
I have thought for some time that the reason Apple is so against Flash isn't entirely due to it's processor-using battery-sucky ways - though those are serious flaws. It's also because Flash is a competitor for the app store. A lot of those apps are little flash games (think Angry Birds, for a well-known example) - exactly the type of thing that could be written in flash, and has been. There are thousands, tens of thousands of Flash games available. I know: I work at a school, blocking them all.
WebM and x264 are substantially similar internally - in theory I imagine much of the same hardware could be used to decode them. It would need a lot of coder-hours to make it work, but I imagine Google will do that for Android at some point.
Apple won't. They own a substantial stake in the h264 patent pool - WebM is their direct competitor, so they arn't going to do anything to aid it.
Everyone kept right on using it, I recall. There was an unpatented alternative created, PNG - but, even though it was superior in every way, it didn't take off until the Unisys patent expired. GIF just had too much momentum at the time: Every browser supported it. It's still the format most used for trivial animation on the internet, even though it's technology is terribly dated, because it's the one format for trivial animation you can be sure works.
The standard is open, and there are open source encoders and decoders. So in that sense, it's open: Everything is fully and publicly documented. However, it is also covered by hundreds of patents, which means you can't actually use any of that information without getting a licence from the patent holders. One of whome is Microsoft, who stands to make a lot of money from it. Others include Sony and Apple, who stand to make a lot too. So far the consortium that administers the patent pool has been quite reasonable about terms - free for noncommercial use, low costs even for commercial - but there is a fear that if x264 were to become so established it were impossible to do without it then there would be a temptation for them to start milking more money from those patents.
And what about companies smaller than google?
The old sharereactor did something similar, many years ago. Back in the day it was one of the top piracy sites on the net. Gone now. Torrent tracker sites largely replaced it's role.
There is one key difference: Google has enough skilled lawyers that the copyright organisations know not to mess with them. Rapidshare is small fry, and can easily be crushed beneath their expensive designer boots.
Plus it wouldn't work. Soon it'd be full of encrypted RARs of filenames like aiegflaeaergfaer.rar, or possibly sales_reports.rar... no way anyone could tell what they are unless they are a member of the private forum where the link and decryption password are posted.
The effect is perminant, too - people who are obese as children still have the inflated fat cell numbers when adults. Maybe intensive liposuction would help.
Probably secret? It's a list of the top child porn sites on the internet. Of course it'll be secret. Plus that means that any embarassing mistakes will never come to light, too. Espicially if the filter works by returning a false 404 error or just dropping packets, so it isn't readily apparent that the site was deliberatly blocked at all. The most effective censorship is the type that is never even discovered.
It's not the only one. I've seen a site on gardening classified as drugs advocacy because it contained such words as 'pot' and 'weed.'
And note that in that case, you don't even get to know the obvious ones are illegal until after you have downloaded and looked at them... or at least looked and left them in your browser cache.
I suppose you could report them, but I imagine most people wouldn't want to risk drawing police attention themselves in such a way. It might result in their computer being siezed as vital evidence, which could turn up other crimes. Best to just delete throughly and pretend you never saw it.
Because:
1. The ISPs don't want to be charged with a list of child porn sites, something so dangerous that to even look at it could get you jailed.
2. If the block were DNS based, pedophiles would just switch to using IP addresses instead.
3. Some blocks would be over-broad. Sites that host more than one site under the same DNS name. The same problem as IP blocks, from the different direction.
The real problem here isn't blocking *some* child porn. That's doable. But if the ISPs block some, then they know that people and politicians will soon be blameing them for every child-porn file that makes it through. They'll become responsible for a task they can't achieve perfectly, and every shortcoming will result in outrage that they wern't protecting children hard enough.
Changing the law is hard. But changing a policy is comparatively easy. If they can get the filtering technology mandated for another reason - child porn is as good a way as any - then getting it expanded to copyright infringement might be as simple as convincing one key politician.
I imagine that once the technology is in place, it's use will be expanded. How long before the big copyright organisations start lobbying for laws to add major copyright infringing websites to the list, thus allowing them to finally be rid of the pirate bay?
Was. As I said, the practice has been banned in the EU now. Don't know about other places.
This would almost be an acceptable justification, if not for one detail: They previously promised more then they are now able to deliver. This is bordering on false advertising, made legal only by a line of small print that allows them to change the contract any time they wish. If they don't have the ability to deliver larger amounts of data, they shouldn't have promised customers they would
Or possibly the handset manufacturers, or network operators in the case of contract-supplied phones, have. I have an android phone by HTC, and like many PCs it comes with a great deal of bundled manufacturer software, including some that runs in the background. I see no reason it would be different in the case of a windows phone.
What the other two said about extensions. Also, a modern CPU has a huge number of more recent technologies. Some obvious - hyperthreading, speedstep - and a lot of fine details I am sure in just how the piplineing, cache management, branch prediction and such all work. So, although you could make a processor not covered by any current patents, it's performance would be so pathetic it'd be of use only in embedded applications.
Someone is. It's called AsbestOS. The last I heard it was partially functional, with development ongoing.
It's partly residual reputation. When the PS3 came out, it's chip was one of the fastest you could get in raw flops - and better than anything else for the price. It was very impressive. Since then PC processors have continued to improve, while the PS3 has stayed just the same.