Isn't "Active Directory" pretty much just a collection of otherwise-standard technologies and protocols like DNS, Kerberos and LDAP with some Microsoft extensions and better Windows integration?
I don't mean to suggest that AD isn't easier to implement than rolling your own solution using the constituent parts, but it's not like you can't do it. And we're talking about Russia, not your local school district. They probably have a software development budget larger than Microsoft's.
It would be easier for the ISPs to just charge by peak bandwidth and by the GB. So you get a plan that's $19.95 a month with 5Mb guaranteed speed with 25GB data included, $.25 per gigabyte over - that kind of thing.
Charging by guaranteed bandwidth is basically what I'm talking about. So for example you get a connection which is "up to" 10Mbps with 256kbps guaranteed or whatever you like. Then they provision you at 256kbps but if your neighbors aren't using their allocations at any given time, and most generally aren't, then you can have theirs too and get up to 10Mbps.
But I don't see the point of monthly allocations. If you're going to "guarantee" some minimum amount of bandwidth, there is going to be a day when they're streaming the Superbowl or something and you end up needing some very large fraction of that "guaranteed" bandwidth to actually be available unless you want your phone lines explode with pissed off customers wanting to cancel their service and sue you for not providing the bandwidth you promised. And if the guaranteed bandwidth is actually available, it's available all the time, so what's the point of rationing it? All the ISP would be doing is suppressing consumption of the "surplus" bandwidth of one's neighbors that one is allowed to use when the neighbor who paid for it is not using it, and in so doing reducing demand for higher guaranteed rates (and an associated proportionality on whose packets get dropped first) since paying for higher guarantees is unnecessary if you can effectively mooch off your neighbors.
The thing is we'll have whiners coming out of the woodwork because people want their cake and they want to eat it too. "Whaaaa - where's my unlimited data and 20Mb connection for $35 a month?! Whaaaaa, we need the FCC to step in and get me what I want!".
If people want unlimited 20Mb connections for $35/month, either the government is going to be subsidizing them or they're going to be disappointed. One way or the other, I don't see what it has to do with what I've laid out.
I can choose to switch to Verizon from AT&T. I can't choose to switch to some other government from the FCC.
Well, first of all, people are talking about moving to avoid a local monopoly telco anyway. Did you know that you can move to other countries?
But more than that, tell me: Which one of AT&T or Verizon has pledged to adhere to network neutrality in the absence of any regulations, so that I may vote with my wallet? Neither of them, you say?
And boycotting is a joke. The whole point of a boycott is that you cost them more than it's costing you, because you can get your goods or services from somewhere else but they can only get your money from you. You can't effectively boycott a cartel, because you know and they know that it costs you more to not have phone service than it costs them to not have you as a customer, so they can just wait you out.
At best, the government is incompetent. At worst, it is tyrannical.
Wow, the more you write the dumber you sound. I'm going to quote Washington for you: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Now notice the difference between what he said and what you said. Government is dangerous, not useless. You have to use care not to get burned, but you can't be so afraid of it that you're willing to freeze to death.
If you don't let them do _any_ such management, then how do they do the legitimate stuff?
I think you're overstating to what degree the "legitimate stuff" actually exists. I don't think anyone is objecting if they drop packets based on current bandwidth consumption, i.e. if the shared link is full and one user (across all their connections) is transferring at 1000Kbps and the other who pays for the same plan is transferring at 100Kbps, they drop up to 900Kbps of the first user's packets before you drop any of the second user's. That solves all your problems related to one user using BitTorrent or watching HD lolcats on YouTube while their neighbor is trying to make a VOIP call -- the VOIP user doesn't transfer many packets, so none of them get dropped. And if that user wants to do VOIP at the same time as they use BitTorrent, they themselves should use a gateway/router that does QoS, so that the user is the one saying application A is more important than application B.
Then you only run into the "problem" where one neighbor is sucking up a lot of bandwidth on some allegedly low value endeavor while the neighbor needs to suck up a lot of bandwidth on some allegedly high value endeavor. But screw that kind of prioritization -- if both users are paying the same amount for their connections, they should get the same speed. If you want to get 200Kbps with no packet loss when your neighbor is losing packets above 100Kbps then you should pay extra for the higher speed plan. Get the 10Mbps service instead of the 5Mbps service or whatever.
That works better for everyone. The people who want high bandwidth with low packet loss get it, but pay for it, regardless of what they want it for. The people who want to do things that require high bandwidth and low packet loss can buy a more expensive plan which has sufficient bandwidth to do everything they want even during heavy traffic hours, or can buy the cheaper plan and not be able to use that application during certain hours. The people doing bulk transfers can buy the cheap plan but end up with the lowest speeds when the network gets congested, or can buy the expensive plan if they want their bulk transfers to go faster. It's called paying for what you get and getting what you pay for.
With what you seem to be suggesting, i.e. ISPs prioritizing based on application, what happens to the person who is willing to pay a little extra to make their bulk transfers go faster? More importantly, what happens to the novel application which your ISP has never heard of, which they therefore have to classify as ultra-low priority to prevent the applications they want at ultra-low priority from altering their signatures to fool the QoS equipment?
It sounds more and more like the solution to all of this is to separate the devices from the carriers. We need to get to a point where you can buy a phone from Motorola the same way you buy a PC from Dell, then use it with any carrier the same way you can use a PC with any ISP.
I mean you're saying that Android fragmentation is intentionally caused by the phone companies. That means the phone companies necessarily have the same incentive to destroy the iPhone, or at least relegate it to a market share the size of one of the Android fragments, for the same reasons. Along with any other phone that "solves" the fragmentation "problem" with Android.
Fixing that is going to require wresting control over the devices from the phone companies, one way or another.
Is it so hard to imagine a regulation later being tweaked to add content provisions "for the children"?? Can you really not see that happening?
What makes you think one thing has anything to do with the other? Congress can pass a law tomorrow that says websites have to restrict access to minors for all material harmful to minors. In fact, they already did. (Then the courts said it was unconstitutional.)
There is nothing about network neutrality that makes it harder or easier to pass subsequent content-based regulations. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is completely unrelated. Your argument is that we should not prohibit trademark infringement because if we do then tomorrow someone will want to prohibit the sale of pornography. We can do one without the other, and other people can do the other without the one.
The CORRECT answer here is for the FCC to brand the internet common carrier.
I feel like you're falling into the propaganda. Saying "the internet" is like saying "earth" -- you're covering more than you intended. That's why AT&T is always talking about not "regulating the internet" and trying to get you to think that means them -- they're not the internet. They're the phone company. People don't want to regulate "the internet" for good reason -- you don't want content-based regulations. You don't want to regulate the endpoints. AT&T and Comcast want you to think that means you also shouldn't regulate them, never mind that we already do and always have.
What you want is to regulate common carriers of data -- telecommunications providers -- as common carriers.
And I'm sure that's what you meant, but let's not adopt their propaganda phrases in defining what we want.
So I'm going to post this near the beginning of the thread since the OP is correct but confusing and the signal to noise ratio in the comments is terrible. It appears the general consensus is this:
1) Russian criminals have control over the wikileaks.org and wikileaks.info domains and are distributing malware. The current real wikileaks website is wikileaks.ch.
2) Spamhaus has been telling people about (1).
3) The Russian criminals are now retaliating by using their botnets to DDoS Spamhaus under the flag of AnonOps.
4) Some of the people who call themselves Anonymous may or may not also be participating in the DDoS against Spamhaus because they are idiots.
I'm not saying that DRM actually works; but just that studio DRM requirements will prevent an OSS netflix streamer more or less forever.
The record companies pretty much accepted the futility of it. You don't think the studios are ever going to get tired of throwing money into a pit for no actual reduction in piracy?
The difference is that breaking closed-source DRM can take a relatively long time (especially when hardware is involved, like DVD CSS or HDCP) while cracking open-source DRM would take literally a matter of minutes, regardless of whether it's something as simple as a game's CD check or something as complicated as HDCP.
It seems to me there are really two goals behind DRM. The first is to keep stuff off of the pirate websites. This goal is utterly hopeless. There is at least one pirate somewhere in the world who has enough talent and time to break whatever it is, and by the time you even realize it's broken, your entire catalog is on their website. Moreover, technologies overlap. If they can get it from a DVD, it doesn't matter that they can't get it from Netflix streaming.
The other goal is to keep Joe Average from making copies of his movies for his friends. Which "open source" DRM does just as well as any, because out of the box he can't copy it and it isn't worth his time to do anything about that.
You cannot build a DRM system that is both "OSS" in any useful sense and effective
That's the thing though: You can't build a DRM system that is effective, period. I don't get the cognitive dissonance. DVD CSS is broken, HDCP is broken, AACS is effectively broken, on and on.
We're talking about streaming video here. I assume they're encrypting it, but at some point they have to do a key exchange. That means it has to be authenticated. That means either there is a public key already on your machine (e.g. they're using a regular CA), in which case you just open up whatever file on your PC that contains the CA's public key and replace it with a public key you've generated yourself, then you can MITM the connection and copy the stream. Alternatively, they hard code their public key in some kind of binary blob which is downloaded to your computer unencrypted (since you have to have it before you can use it to authenticate), so you just do the same thing and install your own public key to the binary blob as it passes over the network. The only reason this hasn't happened already, assuming it hasn't happened already, is that there are other, easier ways to get higher quality rips of the same material.
The only way to avoid all this is to authenticate the specific device the media is being sent to, which first of all has privacy implications that will make the Pentium III serial number look like nothing happened. More than that, it requires every device to authenticate itself, since otherwise the pirate can just pretend to be the device that doesn't have to. And, it requires every device to be actually secure, since otherwise the pirates just choose the weakest link to extract a key. If these people seriously think that they can make every device that plays media actually secure against thousands of determined attackers with physical control over the devices, I don't want anything to do with whatever they're smoking.
As for TFA, you'll most likely NEVER see Netflix on Linux, just as you won't see the big software like Photoshop and autoCAD natively supported. Why? We all know why, it is because of DRM.
Are you sure Photoshop even has DRM?
There isn't a Linux version of that stuff because all of their paying customers are businesses and there aren't anywhere near enough businesses in those industries with Linux on the desktop to be worth porting.
It would just be too trivial to compile a custom kernel that bypasses the DRM or fools it into thinking it is working while allowing the video to be captured, and three days after the first client was released the hack that allowed recording would be all over the net, probably in an easy to install package.
But you just finished explaining how the whole point of DRM is to keep Joe Average from making copies of his DVDs. Joe Average is going to install Linux and then figure out how to install some shady package that replaces the kernel?
It seems to me the lack of first party media viewers on Linux is the entire reason that most of the third party DRM-ignoring media viewers even exist. It's like the PS3 other OS thing. Suppose Netflix wrote a streaming client for Linux. Their code, as published, doesn't provide for copying. They could even publish the source to it, but with a license that says you can't distribute any version without the anti-copying bits. In other words, nobody can get a copying-enabled version in the package manager because it will be rejected for violating the license. That way Joe Average would have to go to some shady website to get some untrustworthy code the same way as he does on Windows.
And at that point anybody on Linux could already watch Netflix, without even having a binary blob, so nobody needs to write their own Netflix viewer for Linux which would end up as the default viewer in every distribution and would inevitably not have implemented the DRM.
(And no, no "Net neutrality" legislation will fix that. To do so it would have to ban both server colocation and schemes like performance-reactive RRDNS, and that would be pretty much unenforceable.)
Well, you could just require them to expand capacity of the uplinks within a defined period of time if they've been at 100% utilization more than an average of e.g. 15% of the day over a period of 90 days.
Comcast wants a Tier 1 peering agreement where their networks connect at a smaller number of points, and more data would be routed over their Tier 1 network, and then they balance the ratio by sending more traffic L3's way for free.
I kind of doubt that's it. Having Level 3 pay for the links to near the endpoints saves Comcast money vs. having to maintain them itself, and nothing stops them from using all of the smaller points of contact to upload data to Level 3, assuming that's even what's going on. In fact, that is probably more efficient, because the sources of that upload data aren't all in the same place anyway.
Now, what it sounds like you're saying is that Comcast wants to a) be a Tier 1 provider and b) be their own, sole Tier 1 provider, and use that monopoly over Comcast ISP customers to extract money from everyone who needs to be able to reach Comcast ISP customers.
In the end, because there is a lot of competition between CDNs and not so much between ISPs, Comcast has the upper hand.
In other words, Comcast is holding its ISP customers hostages in order to collect a ransom.
Comcast is paying TATA for the imbalance since TATA is a transit provider and Comcast is their customer.
The Level 3 issue is separate as Level 3 wants a FREE interconnection. If you want FREE then you should maintain a 1:1, or up to a 2:1 depending on the contract, traffic ratio.
So what you're saying is that Level 3 ought to put the Netflix data center in a separate business unit and then Level 3 should charge Comcast for transit between Comcast and the Netflix business unit.
This is clearly Comcast holding their customers hostage for money. I can see no principled distinction between Level 3 and TATA.
Civil disobedience is going further and saying "I not only believe this is wrong, but I believe it enough to go to jail for my belief (though admittedly, for it to be standard civil disobedience, in the west you will probably just be in the overnight lockup.)
I feel like this is really the problem with your complaint: Suppose these people are more than willing to spend the night in jail but not willing to spend 5 to 10 years.
The problem is that we've given up on law enforcement as justice and adopted law enforcement as punishing people into compliance regardless of the reason for resistance. Being willing to get arrested for "illegally" protesting and thrown in jail for a day or a week or a month, then going right back out and doing it again, shows that you value the point you're making more than the cost of getting arrested. It's making a serious statement about the weight of your position.
But if the laws cost you your right to vote and a multi-year mandatory minimum sentence, plus three strikes means you're in for life, anonymity becomes a necessity. If the only way you can protest without it being "terrorism" is if you're willing to go to jail for half a decade and in so doing lose your job and not be there to see your kids grow up, you can't very well protest very often without being a "terrorist" -- and that is going to mean more "terrorists" by your definition.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you want people to show their faces, the government should stop threatening to thoroughly ruin their lives if they show their faces.
Wow, that's so deeply misleading as to count as an argument the other way. The obvious followup is, "And how many of you would have paid for it if it were available for free?"
You can borrow basically any book you can think of, for free, from a public library. People still buy those same books, do they not?
My *hypothesis*, (note "I believe") is that users themselves can serve this function by rating comments.
I believe the point is that someone has to administer the rating system. Otherwise what stops spammers from creating a million accounts and then rating their spam as legit and legit stuff as spam?
There are distributed ways to do this though, e.g. trust users who behave like you do: Have every client generate a public key and then sign the message with the corresponding private key when the user marks a message as spam or legit. Then you flag stuff as spam or legit yourself and your client keeps track of which keys signed a flag for things you flagged the same way, and by this method your client knows which keys to trust when viewing new data which you haven't reviewed yet.
What I see happening is big corps like Google paying for GPL V2 versions of code to be continued and updated, which they will lock down via eFuses and other TiVo tricks thus screwing the original developers unless they hire them to work for the corp.
There is basically no reason for a corporation to maintain a fork of GPL code all on their own. Half the point of using OSS is that you can make the changes you need and push them back into the tree without having to maintain your own version of everything in the world. If you're going to maintain it all yourself with no community involvement then you might as well just write the whole thing without using any GPL code. If that was Google's intent then why didn't they start with BSD and then never need to publish the source for their changes?
Meanwhile the GPL V3 code will be less used or fragmented, since you'll be able to use the GPL V2 code in the GPL V3 branch but not the other way around
So you're saying that because the GPL V3 version will have improvements made by certain corporations and the community instead of just the improvements made by those corporations, fewer people are going to use it?
But if you think the headset makers and telecos are actually gonna embrace openness?
Oh, they'll fight it. But right now they control the phones because they subsidize them and people buy their phones from the phone company to get the subsidy. What happens when the price comes down on phones to the point that they don't need a subsidy? They're going to turn away paying customers just because the customer bought their phone on Amazon without the lockdown package?
They have seen the iPhone app store model and have $$$ dancing in their eyes, they sure as hell ain't gonna let you install or do anything they don't get a cut of, sorry.
Someone was just telling me how the app store model doesn't make Apple very much money (they make much more by selling the device), and I'm not sure AT&T is making anything from it directly either. They certainly make more by selling ~$100/month service plans. Sure, AT&T likes that they can "discourage" apps that use cellular bandwidth to make VOIP calls instead of making AT&T voice calls, but all it takes is a wedge. One provider allowing open phones. Then it isn't a matter of losing a few bucks out of a $100/month wireless plan, it's a matter of losing the whole contract to the company that lets their customers save a few percent by using VOIP.
He does not do it organically and so he really does not care about Java other than he has control and is able to sell it to the enterprise.
This might work well enough when you're selling a database. But Java is a language. If people stop improving or writing code in Java because Oracle is being a prick then "owning" Java will be like "owning" Cobol: It might not be totally worthless but the value will only go down over time.
And the original point of Java was to get people to write code that would run on Solaris and SPARC even if most people are running it on Windows and Intel. I don't know if Oracle cares whether there continues to be any third party software that will run on SPARC, but if they want people to buy SPARC hardware and associated service contracts then they probably ought to consider caring about that sort of thing.
Oh I understand the US government's refusal to redact perfectly. They probably asked themselves the next questions and came up with similar answers:
You're forgetting to add that by delineating between what should be released and what shouldn't, they would in effect be admitting that the things they say are OK to release were improperly classified.
Don't get your hopes up. They're talking about shipments, not installed base.
People pretty much stopped buying new PCs once they had a Core 2 Duo or faster. It isn't that no one is using PCs anymore, it's that no one is buying a new one because the old one is still plenty fast.
Incidentally, you can expect the same thing to happen in phones in a couple of years. Once you have a phone which is fast enough to play video and has a battery that lasts all day, the biggest improvements are going to come as software update and you won't care about the hardware any more than you currently care whether you have a 2.6GHz CPU vs. a 3GHz CPU -- both are fast enough to do whatever so nobody cares anymore.
I guess so...it is not preferable to set up a situation where individuals are expected to always second guess their superiors. But there should at least be a defense, in retrospect, in situations where superiors act incorrectly. The first priority should be to include more checks and balances in the classification process to prevent improperly classified secrets. Easier said than done, true, but ultimately it is necessary; we cannot stand for "take my word for it."
You're right about the principle. The problem is that if we excuse publication when the publisher is "right" then we get more publication, including more publication when the publisher think they're right but they aren't.
Honestly, the Wikileaks model is actually a pretty good solution: Let the person with the classified data they think is improperly classified give it to several reasonable news organizations anonymously. (Unlike what happened in this case, the person should then STFU about it. Then we can have a policy of punishing them but not have anyone to punish.) Then the news organizations can go to the government and say "hey, we got this stuff, give us a reason not to publish it." And if the government can provide a reason that will persuade all of them, it doesn't get published, which provides a check on some random soldier thinking things should be published when they shouldn't without getting into "take my word for it."
Of course, we still end up having to take the news organizations' word for it. But you have to trust somebody, and better them than Uncle Sam.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't "Active Directory" pretty much just a collection of otherwise-standard technologies and protocols like DNS, Kerberos and LDAP with some Microsoft extensions and better Windows integration?
I don't mean to suggest that AD isn't easier to implement than rolling your own solution using the constituent parts, but it's not like you can't do it. And we're talking about Russia, not your local school district. They probably have a software development budget larger than Microsoft's.
It would be easier for the ISPs to just charge by peak bandwidth and by the GB. So you get a plan that's $19.95 a month with 5Mb guaranteed speed with 25GB data included, $.25 per gigabyte over - that kind of thing.
Charging by guaranteed bandwidth is basically what I'm talking about. So for example you get a connection which is "up to" 10Mbps with 256kbps guaranteed or whatever you like. Then they provision you at 256kbps but if your neighbors aren't using their allocations at any given time, and most generally aren't, then you can have theirs too and get up to 10Mbps.
But I don't see the point of monthly allocations. If you're going to "guarantee" some minimum amount of bandwidth, there is going to be a day when they're streaming the Superbowl or something and you end up needing some very large fraction of that "guaranteed" bandwidth to actually be available unless you want your phone lines explode with pissed off customers wanting to cancel their service and sue you for not providing the bandwidth you promised. And if the guaranteed bandwidth is actually available, it's available all the time, so what's the point of rationing it? All the ISP would be doing is suppressing consumption of the "surplus" bandwidth of one's neighbors that one is allowed to use when the neighbor who paid for it is not using it, and in so doing reducing demand for higher guaranteed rates (and an associated proportionality on whose packets get dropped first) since paying for higher guarantees is unnecessary if you can effectively mooch off your neighbors.
The thing is we'll have whiners coming out of the woodwork because people want their cake and they want to eat it too. "Whaaaa - where's my unlimited data and 20Mb connection for $35 a month?! Whaaaaa, we need the FCC to step in and get me what I want!".
If people want unlimited 20Mb connections for $35/month, either the government is going to be subsidizing them or they're going to be disappointed. One way or the other, I don't see what it has to do with what I've laid out.
I can choose to switch to Verizon from AT&T. I can't choose to switch to some other government from the FCC.
Well, first of all, people are talking about moving to avoid a local monopoly telco anyway. Did you know that you can move to other countries?
But more than that, tell me: Which one of AT&T or Verizon has pledged to adhere to network neutrality in the absence of any regulations, so that I may vote with my wallet? Neither of them, you say?
And boycotting is a joke. The whole point of a boycott is that you cost them more than it's costing you, because you can get your goods or services from somewhere else but they can only get your money from you. You can't effectively boycott a cartel, because you know and they know that it costs you more to not have phone service than it costs them to not have you as a customer, so they can just wait you out.
At best, the government is incompetent. At worst, it is tyrannical.
Wow, the more you write the dumber you sound. I'm going to quote Washington for you: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Now notice the difference between what he said and what you said. Government is dangerous, not useless. You have to use care not to get burned, but you can't be so afraid of it that you're willing to freeze to death.
If you don't let them do _any_ such management, then how do they do the legitimate stuff?
I think you're overstating to what degree the "legitimate stuff" actually exists. I don't think anyone is objecting if they drop packets based on current bandwidth consumption, i.e. if the shared link is full and one user (across all their connections) is transferring at 1000Kbps and the other who pays for the same plan is transferring at 100Kbps, they drop up to 900Kbps of the first user's packets before you drop any of the second user's. That solves all your problems related to one user using BitTorrent or watching HD lolcats on YouTube while their neighbor is trying to make a VOIP call -- the VOIP user doesn't transfer many packets, so none of them get dropped. And if that user wants to do VOIP at the same time as they use BitTorrent, they themselves should use a gateway/router that does QoS, so that the user is the one saying application A is more important than application B.
Then you only run into the "problem" where one neighbor is sucking up a lot of bandwidth on some allegedly low value endeavor while the neighbor needs to suck up a lot of bandwidth on some allegedly high value endeavor. But screw that kind of prioritization -- if both users are paying the same amount for their connections, they should get the same speed. If you want to get 200Kbps with no packet loss when your neighbor is losing packets above 100Kbps then you should pay extra for the higher speed plan. Get the 10Mbps service instead of the 5Mbps service or whatever.
That works better for everyone. The people who want high bandwidth with low packet loss get it, but pay for it, regardless of what they want it for. The people who want to do things that require high bandwidth and low packet loss can buy a more expensive plan which has sufficient bandwidth to do everything they want even during heavy traffic hours, or can buy the cheaper plan and not be able to use that application during certain hours. The people doing bulk transfers can buy the cheap plan but end up with the lowest speeds when the network gets congested, or can buy the expensive plan if they want their bulk transfers to go faster. It's called paying for what you get and getting what you pay for.
With what you seem to be suggesting, i.e. ISPs prioritizing based on application, what happens to the person who is willing to pay a little extra to make their bulk transfers go faster? More importantly, what happens to the novel application which your ISP has never heard of, which they therefore have to classify as ultra-low priority to prevent the applications they want at ultra-low priority from altering their signatures to fool the QoS equipment?
It sounds more and more like the solution to all of this is to separate the devices from the carriers. We need to get to a point where you can buy a phone from Motorola the same way you buy a PC from Dell, then use it with any carrier the same way you can use a PC with any ISP.
I mean you're saying that Android fragmentation is intentionally caused by the phone companies. That means the phone companies necessarily have the same incentive to destroy the iPhone, or at least relegate it to a market share the size of one of the Android fragments, for the same reasons. Along with any other phone that "solves" the fragmentation "problem" with Android.
Fixing that is going to require wresting control over the devices from the phone companies, one way or another.
Is it so hard to imagine a regulation later being tweaked to add content provisions "for the children"?? Can you really not see that happening?
What makes you think one thing has anything to do with the other? Congress can pass a law tomorrow that says websites have to restrict access to minors for all material harmful to minors. In fact, they already did. (Then the courts said it was unconstitutional.)
There is nothing about network neutrality that makes it harder or easier to pass subsequent content-based regulations. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is completely unrelated. Your argument is that we should not prohibit trademark infringement because if we do then tomorrow someone will want to prohibit the sale of pornography. We can do one without the other, and other people can do the other without the one.
The CORRECT answer here is for the FCC to brand the internet common carrier.
I feel like you're falling into the propaganda. Saying "the internet" is like saying "earth" -- you're covering more than you intended. That's why AT&T is always talking about not "regulating the internet" and trying to get you to think that means them -- they're not the internet. They're the phone company. People don't want to regulate "the internet" for good reason -- you don't want content-based regulations. You don't want to regulate the endpoints. AT&T and Comcast want you to think that means you also shouldn't regulate them, never mind that we already do and always have.
What you want is to regulate common carriers of data -- telecommunications providers -- as common carriers.
And I'm sure that's what you meant, but let's not adopt their propaganda phrases in defining what we want.
So I'm going to post this near the beginning of the thread since the OP is correct but confusing and the signal to noise ratio in the comments is terrible. It appears the general consensus is this:
1) Russian criminals have control over the wikileaks.org and wikileaks.info domains and are distributing malware. The current real wikileaks website is wikileaks.ch.
2) Spamhaus has been telling people about (1).
3) The Russian criminals are now retaliating by using their botnets to DDoS Spamhaus under the flag of AnonOps.
4) Some of the people who call themselves Anonymous may or may not also be participating in the DDoS against Spamhaus because they are idiots.
I'm not saying that DRM actually works; but just that studio DRM requirements will prevent an OSS netflix streamer more or less forever.
The record companies pretty much accepted the futility of it. You don't think the studios are ever going to get tired of throwing money into a pit for no actual reduction in piracy?
The difference is that breaking closed-source DRM can take a relatively long time (especially when hardware is involved, like DVD CSS or HDCP) while cracking open-source DRM would take literally a matter of minutes, regardless of whether it's something as simple as a game's CD check or something as complicated as HDCP.
It seems to me there are really two goals behind DRM. The first is to keep stuff off of the pirate websites. This goal is utterly hopeless. There is at least one pirate somewhere in the world who has enough talent and time to break whatever it is, and by the time you even realize it's broken, your entire catalog is on their website. Moreover, technologies overlap. If they can get it from a DVD, it doesn't matter that they can't get it from Netflix streaming.
The other goal is to keep Joe Average from making copies of his movies for his friends. Which "open source" DRM does just as well as any, because out of the box he can't copy it and it isn't worth his time to do anything about that.
You cannot build a DRM system that is both "OSS" in any useful sense and effective
That's the thing though: You can't build a DRM system that is effective, period. I don't get the cognitive dissonance. DVD CSS is broken, HDCP is broken, AACS is effectively broken, on and on.
We're talking about streaming video here. I assume they're encrypting it, but at some point they have to do a key exchange. That means it has to be authenticated. That means either there is a public key already on your machine (e.g. they're using a regular CA), in which case you just open up whatever file on your PC that contains the CA's public key and replace it with a public key you've generated yourself, then you can MITM the connection and copy the stream. Alternatively, they hard code their public key in some kind of binary blob which is downloaded to your computer unencrypted (since you have to have it before you can use it to authenticate), so you just do the same thing and install your own public key to the binary blob as it passes over the network. The only reason this hasn't happened already, assuming it hasn't happened already, is that there are other, easier ways to get higher quality rips of the same material.
The only way to avoid all this is to authenticate the specific device the media is being sent to, which first of all has privacy implications that will make the Pentium III serial number look like nothing happened. More than that, it requires every device to authenticate itself, since otherwise the pirate can just pretend to be the device that doesn't have to. And, it requires every device to be actually secure, since otherwise the pirates just choose the weakest link to extract a key. If these people seriously think that they can make every device that plays media actually secure against thousands of determined attackers with physical control over the devices, I don't want anything to do with whatever they're smoking.
I wouldn't expect Netflix to do anything for 3% of potential user base.
Netflix has "over 16 million customers." 3% of that is 480,000 people. At $8/month that's $46 Million/Year. Is that not real money anymore?
This implementation would constitute a circumvention device, and using or distributing it would be illegal under the DMCA.
Now ask yourself this: If your open source version implements the DRM, is it circumventing the DRM?
As for TFA, you'll most likely NEVER see Netflix on Linux, just as you won't see the big software like Photoshop and autoCAD natively supported. Why? We all know why, it is because of DRM.
Are you sure Photoshop even has DRM?
There isn't a Linux version of that stuff because all of their paying customers are businesses and there aren't anywhere near enough businesses in those industries with Linux on the desktop to be worth porting.
It would just be too trivial to compile a custom kernel that bypasses the DRM or fools it into thinking it is working while allowing the video to be captured, and three days after the first client was released the hack that allowed recording would be all over the net, probably in an easy to install package.
But you just finished explaining how the whole point of DRM is to keep Joe Average from making copies of his DVDs. Joe Average is going to install Linux and then figure out how to install some shady package that replaces the kernel?
It seems to me the lack of first party media viewers on Linux is the entire reason that most of the third party DRM-ignoring media viewers even exist. It's like the PS3 other OS thing. Suppose Netflix wrote a streaming client for Linux. Their code, as published, doesn't provide for copying. They could even publish the source to it, but with a license that says you can't distribute any version without the anti-copying bits. In other words, nobody can get a copying-enabled version in the package manager because it will be rejected for violating the license. That way Joe Average would have to go to some shady website to get some untrustworthy code the same way as he does on Windows.
And at that point anybody on Linux could already watch Netflix, without even having a binary blob, so nobody needs to write their own Netflix viewer for Linux which would end up as the default viewer in every distribution and would inevitably not have implemented the DRM.
(And no, no "Net neutrality" legislation will fix that. To do so it would have to ban both server colocation and schemes like performance-reactive RRDNS, and that would be pretty much unenforceable.)
Well, you could just require them to expand capacity of the uplinks within a defined period of time if they've been at 100% utilization more than an average of e.g. 15% of the day over a period of 90 days.
Comcast wants a Tier 1 peering agreement where their networks connect at a smaller number of points, and more data would be routed over their Tier 1 network, and then they balance the ratio by sending more traffic L3's way for free.
I kind of doubt that's it. Having Level 3 pay for the links to near the endpoints saves Comcast money vs. having to maintain them itself, and nothing stops them from using all of the smaller points of contact to upload data to Level 3, assuming that's even what's going on. In fact, that is probably more efficient, because the sources of that upload data aren't all in the same place anyway.
Now, what it sounds like you're saying is that Comcast wants to a) be a Tier 1 provider and b) be their own, sole Tier 1 provider, and use that monopoly over Comcast ISP customers to extract money from everyone who needs to be able to reach Comcast ISP customers.
In the end, because there is a lot of competition between CDNs and not so much between ISPs, Comcast has the upper hand.
In other words, Comcast is holding its ISP customers hostages in order to collect a ransom.
Comcast is paying TATA for the imbalance since TATA is a transit provider and Comcast is their customer.
The Level 3 issue is separate as Level 3 wants a FREE interconnection. If you want FREE then you should maintain a 1:1, or up to a 2:1 depending on the contract, traffic ratio.
So what you're saying is that Level 3 ought to put the Netflix data center in a separate business unit and then Level 3 should charge Comcast for transit between Comcast and the Netflix business unit.
This is clearly Comcast holding their customers hostage for money. I can see no principled distinction between Level 3 and TATA.
Civil disobedience is going further and saying "I not only believe this is wrong, but I believe it enough to go to jail for my belief (though admittedly, for it to be standard civil disobedience, in the west you will probably just be in the overnight lockup.)
I feel like this is really the problem with your complaint: Suppose these people are more than willing to spend the night in jail but not willing to spend 5 to 10 years.
The problem is that we've given up on law enforcement as justice and adopted law enforcement as punishing people into compliance regardless of the reason for resistance. Being willing to get arrested for "illegally" protesting and thrown in jail for a day or a week or a month, then going right back out and doing it again, shows that you value the point you're making more than the cost of getting arrested. It's making a serious statement about the weight of your position.
But if the laws cost you your right to vote and a multi-year mandatory minimum sentence, plus three strikes means you're in for life, anonymity becomes a necessity. If the only way you can protest without it being "terrorism" is if you're willing to go to jail for half a decade and in so doing lose your job and not be there to see your kids grow up, you can't very well protest very often without being a "terrorist" -- and that is going to mean more "terrorists" by your definition.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you want people to show their faces, the government should stop threatening to thoroughly ruin their lives if they show their faces.
Wow, that's so deeply misleading as to count as an argument the other way. The obvious followup is, "And how many of you would have paid for it if it were available for free?"
You can borrow basically any book you can think of, for free, from a public library. People still buy those same books, do they not?
My *hypothesis*, (note "I believe") is that users themselves can serve this function by rating comments.
I believe the point is that someone has to administer the rating system. Otherwise what stops spammers from creating a million accounts and then rating their spam as legit and legit stuff as spam?
There are distributed ways to do this though, e.g. trust users who behave like you do: Have every client generate a public key and then sign the message with the corresponding private key when the user marks a message as spam or legit. Then you flag stuff as spam or legit yourself and your client keeps track of which keys signed a flag for things you flagged the same way, and by this method your client knows which keys to trust when viewing new data which you haven't reviewed yet.
What I see happening is big corps like Google paying for GPL V2 versions of code to be continued and updated, which they will lock down via eFuses and other TiVo tricks thus screwing the original developers unless they hire them to work for the corp.
There is basically no reason for a corporation to maintain a fork of GPL code all on their own. Half the point of using OSS is that you can make the changes you need and push them back into the tree without having to maintain your own version of everything in the world. If you're going to maintain it all yourself with no community involvement then you might as well just write the whole thing without using any GPL code. If that was Google's intent then why didn't they start with BSD and then never need to publish the source for their changes?
Meanwhile the GPL V3 code will be less used or fragmented, since you'll be able to use the GPL V2 code in the GPL V3 branch but not the other way around
So you're saying that because the GPL V3 version will have improvements made by certain corporations and the community instead of just the improvements made by those corporations, fewer people are going to use it?
But if you think the headset makers and telecos are actually gonna embrace openness?
Oh, they'll fight it. But right now they control the phones because they subsidize them and people buy their phones from the phone company to get the subsidy. What happens when the price comes down on phones to the point that they don't need a subsidy? They're going to turn away paying customers just because the customer bought their phone on Amazon without the lockdown package?
They have seen the iPhone app store model and have $$$ dancing in their eyes, they sure as hell ain't gonna let you install or do anything they don't get a cut of, sorry.
Someone was just telling me how the app store model doesn't make Apple very much money (they make much more by selling the device), and I'm not sure AT&T is making anything from it directly either. They certainly make more by selling ~$100/month service plans. Sure, AT&T likes that they can "discourage" apps that use cellular bandwidth to make VOIP calls instead of making AT&T voice calls, but all it takes is a wedge. One provider allowing open phones. Then it isn't a matter of losing a few bucks out of a $100/month wireless plan, it's a matter of losing the whole contract to the company that lets their customers save a few percent by using VOIP.
He does not do it organically and so he really does not care about Java other than he has control and is able to sell it to the enterprise.
This might work well enough when you're selling a database. But Java is a language. If people stop improving or writing code in Java because Oracle is being a prick then "owning" Java will be like "owning" Cobol: It might not be totally worthless but the value will only go down over time.
And the original point of Java was to get people to write code that would run on Solaris and SPARC even if most people are running it on Windows and Intel. I don't know if Oracle cares whether there continues to be any third party software that will run on SPARC, but if they want people to buy SPARC hardware and associated service contracts then they probably ought to consider caring about that sort of thing.
Oh I understand the US government's refusal to redact perfectly. They probably asked themselves the next questions and came up with similar answers:
You're forgetting to add that by delineating between what should be released and what shouldn't, they would in effect be admitting that the things they say are OK to release were improperly classified.
Don't get your hopes up. They're talking about shipments, not installed base.
People pretty much stopped buying new PCs once they had a Core 2 Duo or faster. It isn't that no one is using PCs anymore, it's that no one is buying a new one because the old one is still plenty fast.
Incidentally, you can expect the same thing to happen in phones in a couple of years. Once you have a phone which is fast enough to play video and has a battery that lasts all day, the biggest improvements are going to come as software update and you won't care about the hardware any more than you currently care whether you have a 2.6GHz CPU vs. a 3GHz CPU -- both are fast enough to do whatever so nobody cares anymore.
I guess so...it is not preferable to set up a situation where individuals are expected to always second guess their superiors. But there should at least be a defense, in retrospect, in situations where superiors act incorrectly. The first priority should be to include more checks and balances in the classification process to prevent improperly classified secrets. Easier said than done, true, but ultimately it is necessary; we cannot stand for "take my word for it."
You're right about the principle. The problem is that if we excuse publication when the publisher is "right" then we get more publication, including more publication when the publisher think they're right but they aren't.
Honestly, the Wikileaks model is actually a pretty good solution: Let the person with the classified data they think is improperly classified give it to several reasonable news organizations anonymously. (Unlike what happened in this case, the person should then STFU about it. Then we can have a policy of punishing them but not have anyone to punish.) Then the news organizations can go to the government and say "hey, we got this stuff, give us a reason not to publish it." And if the government can provide a reason that will persuade all of them, it doesn't get published, which provides a check on some random soldier thinking things should be published when they shouldn't without getting into "take my word for it."
Of course, we still end up having to take the news organizations' word for it. But you have to trust somebody, and better them than Uncle Sam.