The companies might not, but lawmakers and judges certainly do. If lawmakers spend a bunch of time and effort coming up with a law and the first thing you do is skirt it, they're going to patch it up pretty quick. Its one thing when someone finds a loophole down the line, or there's a loophole intentionally left in.. its quite another to be blatantly flagrant about it.
Judges also tend to be pretty pissy about things like that (even moreso than the lawmakers lately it feels like,) so if it ended up in court for some reason there'd be a bit of an uphill battle there as well for such companies.. and given the type of thing we're talking about, groups like the EFF would be lining up to drop lawsuits.
Perhaps you should list some examples of things Firefox users "didn't want"? Cause I'm pretty sure most people just want their browser to work with the websites they visit, and really don't care about much beyond that.
It became even sillier to use Firefox after Firefox started imitating Chrome's appearance and behavior more and more
I agree with this one, though I think you have cause and effect reversed: Mimicking Chrome I'm pretty sure was an attempt to draw users back who had already switched. Still silly to be sure, but I view it more as an after-the-fact panic move than a reason for their decline.
Chrome won because a) Google was still considered the perfect angel company at that point -- "Do no evil" was still the prevalent mindset, at least publicly, and everyone thought anything Google did would be amazing so they should give it a try. And b) Chrome was significantly faster (which gets back to the "just wants it to work" aspect,) so once they tried it there was little incentive to go back.
Really, Google wasn't even advertising it that much back in those days. The giant annoying popup you see now when you visit Google with something other than Chrome came (relatively) recently -- long after Firefox had fallen out of favor. Most of their "advertising" seemed to be word of mouth as much as anything (though I suppose some of the "word of mouth" may have been shills..)
And then of course there's Safari. All those Mac users no longer caring about Firefox after OSX came out since again, Safari passed the bar of "it just works."
Hell, if Microsoft had actually bothered maintaining and improving IE over those years it would probably still be the standard in Windows, antitrust lawsuits be damned. But as MS is wont to do, they sat back and shat the bed while the world moved around them and then tried to play catch up, adding plugins and whatnot at the eleventh hour after everyone had long stopped caring (and then they throw Edge in the mix as well, so even the users who did still care about IE can be confused as fuck by this new browser that has almost the same icon, works kind of the same for most pages.. and then suddenly breaks and tells you to load IE for the next page you click on..)
So.. pretty much exactly like now? Or at least a couple of years ago (maybe more video providers have ported their DRM modules to Linux by now? I haven't heard or checked in a while..)
This won't stop you from playing non-DRM video. All it does is give DRM providers a standardized API to implement (or not) their individual DRM schemes.
It does mean one less option (or at least a more difficult option) for hackers to try to grab the decrypted stream perhaps, since the browser itself will be in control rather than having to load a library that could potentially be hooked. But I somehow doubt that will stop them for long.
They're still taking down a few torrent sites but that's mostly for show
They've actually taken down quite a few. I mean its a game of whack-a-mole since torrent sites are far from difficult to set up, and they're not nearly as restricted by international borders as the laws they're trying to skirt.
But really.. this is exactly the right thing for them to do. I know there's the argument that torrent sites aren't technically hosting the content they're providing access to and the possible slippery slope toward wider link-banning laws, but the media companies obviously won't (and to be honest, can't) just do nothing, so its far better that they go after a single torrent site than another hundred thousand John Doe privacy-destroying fishing expedition like they were originally attempting and got little more than egg on their face for the effort.
Which "real" web are you talking about? The geocities era where every monkey with a computer made a loud, MIDI-laden, flashing pink-and-yellow disaster of a page and little else existed anywhere?
Or perhaps you mean the pre-Google days when sites like Webcrawler, Yahoo!, Netscape, AOL etc ruled the realm with their "web portals" which were 99% ads splattered everywhere and you had to Where's Waldo the search box in order to find content that was actually useful. If you were lucky.
Or maybe the flash era when pages started getting autoplay videos and menu animations and other such garbage? (And of course, flash-based ads. Can't forget those.)
So what prominence are you referring to, exactly? The web started getting commercialized almost as soon as Netscape's browser gained public acceptance, and that happened almost as soon as the internet itself gained public acceptance (Trumpet Winsock anyone?) And the non-commercial corners of the web have only gotten better with improved technology.
I mean I can understand the need for those rose colored glasses when you hit up an old Geocities page on the wayback machine -- gotta filter all that excess pink out somehow -- but really the web hasn't ever been much other than what it is, at least not once it got out of academia and into the wild. It was smaller to be sure, and in some ways that would make finding specific needles easier since there was less hay around, but the number of needles has also increased over the years if you're willing to be less focused on a specific one.
This announcement shows that they absolutely have not admitted defeat.
If you don't like their DRM, you always have the option of not reading/listening to/viewing their content. You may own the machine its playing on, but you don't own the copyright to their works and whether you like it or not, intellectual property is legally protected (DRM or not.)
But really, DRM isn't the problem. When done properly, DRM is perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with say, Netflix' implementation of DRM. Its out of the way, it doesn't affect average users, and it protects the content its meant to protect.
Steam is similar -- for the most part it just works and you don't even notice -- though there's the argument that you would lose access to all of your games if Valve goes under (countered by the argument that they're less likely to go under -- at least in the foreseeable future -- than most people are to scratch or lose or otherwise render their game discs unplayable. Which are also DRM-protected by the way. Similarly, you'd lose all of your DRM-free GoG games if they went under, unless you retained a local copy of every installer yourself, and don't misplace or delete your collection.)
No, the real problem is the DMCA and similar laws around the world that allow DRM to be used in manners that go far beyond simply protecting content from copyright infringement -- killing research, taking down perfectly legal content a company just doesn't happen to like, suing 12 year olds for millions or billions of dollars just "to make a point," etc.
Now you could make a futility argument if you wanted. Bittorrent is a thing that exists, and if it ever doesn't exist it will just be replaced by something else in the same way it replaced Limewire and eMule which replaced Napster and so on (I'm probably skipping a few steps but you get the point..) Of course that's not you breaking DRM (outside of a relatively small group of "you.") That's you downloading a copy of something that someone else already broke the DRM on for you. Which perhaps is a minor distinction legally, but its a fairly large distinction when you start saying things like "were not supposed to do x with something on your machine." You're already not doing x on your machine in this case. Someone else is. You're just reaping the benefits of some unknown ripper's effort.
Most houses don't get robbed much so there's no point in buying locks, correct?
Assuming that users are stupid makes the users stupid.
It only appears that way if you don't pay attention. Its not because it makes a previously not-stupid user magically become stupid, but because widening the audience to allow for stupider users brings down the average. If you want to appeal to a larger market, its the way to go. If you want to stick to communities that shun non-technical people out of hand well.. there's plenty of those around the internet also.
Or to put in terms of a quippy rebuttal: Assuming there are no stupid users makes you stupid.
Get something like stunnel and wrap/unwrap the security in-stream. Problem solved. Or install an older version of the browser and then you don't even have the problem in the first place.
The world needs to be secure by default -- not just the web but email and cars and IoT pacemakers and basically everything else. Devices are too connected and hackers willing to abuse those devices too prevalent for us to continue leaving things insecure in order to avoid the odd edge case here and there.
In your case, sure they system "may" not be internet connected.. But what if it is? What if someone decides to connect it up 4 years from now having completely forgotten all about the security holes you've intentionally left in place in order to avoid updating your product? Is that really a worthwhile risk? Maybe to you personally but is it a worthwhile risk across the entire population of users?
Now of course a single browser enforcing security on two domains that typically aren't used for public-facing servers anyway is a far cry from "secure by default," but its at least a step in the right direction, even if its only slightly beyond symbolic.
Most people don't just jump into the #1 sales job at the biggest companies either -- they start at the bottom as well just like baseball players.
Basically, you say there's no single number that matters in baseball, and then you lay out the single most important number: batting average. That's the one that everyone talks about, and its the primary measure of how good you are at batting, and thus how likely the coach is to put you on the plate.
Or take hockey. If you score a high number of goals, of course you'll get played more. But if you score few goals while getting a high number of assists, you'll also get played more because the metric they use isn't "number of goals" its "number of goals+assists" and maybe a few other factors like interceptions and whatnot.
To bring it back to sales.. would they benefit from a metric beyond pure "total dollars?" Probably.
Customer satisfaction (measured by say, the number of return customers) may be something they look at. Some places probably track any interaction the customer has with the operation and thus could reward "assists" rather than just closes. Or track support calls later if you're in a business that has such so that you can get a long-term measurement of the sales' overall profit rather than just the immediate amount that might be lost to future costs. And so on. And I'm sure some places do these things (and likely things I've never thought of) because they're not stupid and in many (maybe most) cases, sales is a team effort.
There are exceptions of course. Real estate for example is usually a situation where the customer deals with a single realtor from start to finish. There's not really any "assists" involved, there's no future costs (once the sale is made and finalized, they're done with you unless there's something horrific enough gone wrong to prompt like lawsuits or something) and for most sales, there won't be any repeat business in the short term as most people don't buy and sell houses too often (and most of the ones that do have their own system in place). There's really no other metric needed beyond "how many houses did they sell?"
But if you're a sales rep for say, Coca-Cola.. you're looking at long-terms sales with (hopefully) repeat business on a weekly or monthly basis. You have to keep your customers happy over the long term, deal with the occasional "support" issue if there was a damaged crate or something, have a backup sales person to cover when you're on holidays and so forth. In those scenarios there's plenty of metrics to work with beyond just the flat dollar amount of the initial close.
Hm.. I didn't consider that. Looks like there's a paragraph way down TFA mentioning the possibility but yikes. If they went that route they'd be really asking for a battle as "showing the opt-in box continuously until the user clicks yes" is not really any different from being opted in automatically. What's the point of a "no" button if it does effectively nothing? Essentially they'd be 100% violating the spirit of the new law.
They do realize it. These people aren't stupid. What they are is uncaring. If they can convince a single person to make one purchase, they've covered the ad cost for a week or a month. That's the problem with digital advertising -- its so bloody cheap that it doesn't have to really be effective to produce a ROI.
Now Amazon in particular, having extremely good knowledge of your sales history in addition to providing the ads, could potentially do much better. They used to do better but somewhere along the way they kind of dropped the ball for reasons I couldn't begin to guess -- maybe its better this way (sales-wise,) or maybe they were getting backlash from people who were worried that the computers were too smart (because you know, data tracking isn't insidious if its not used in a way you can immediately see, right?) Or maybe as more third party sellers came online, they were starting to see too much abuse of the "smart" system and dumbed it down to make it harder for shady sellers to promote their products in places they weren't supposed to. Who knows.
At the end of the day though, as long as ad revenue is based on views and clicks rather than conversions, we're probably not going to see a big push to clean the whole system up, because it really doesn't matter how many useless ads get displayed to users at their current cost.
I'd say especially movie previews, and the worse the movie the more deceptive the trailers since they just jam the 2 minutes of quality screen time into the trailer (and in some cases, they've even used stuff that was cut from the film in the trailers) and you end up sitting through 78 minutes of crap in order to see the 2 minutes of good that you've already seen. And frequently the context manages to make those 2 minutes even worse.
You say that, but here's how the problem breaks down:
Them: $0.000001 and 0.001sec to send the email to one extra address.
You: 2-3sec to notice and delete the email, if you recognize it right away and are pretty quick with your mouse. Anywhere from 10-30sec if you're not so lucky.
It is your problem, far more than theirs. In fact its so much of a problem for end users that email service providers and email reader developers are willing to take that burden off of your shoulders, for free (or at least no additional charge over their base rate,) and use the quality of their spam filter as a selling feature.
And even the best of them don't catch everything, so you're still stuck click delete on anywhere from a few dozen a month to hundreds per day, depending on how wide-spread your email address is on public forums, websites, etc.
Basically yes, and they're implying that if you remove that income stream, they'll just go ahead and implement something even worse to be a new income stream.
Of course, that leaves out the little tidbit that if they could actually use all those popups and shit as a revenue stream, they would already be doing it. Its not like ISPs are known to be terribly scrupulous.
You don't paste a URL into a SEARCH BAR, you nimrod. It's a URL.
You don't explicitly say it, but your phrasing certainly implies that you expect "nimrods" to know that.
And yet here you are.
I've never claimed to be above discussing pointless things. That said, I was referring more to the larger community "discussing" it in the sense of going to the trouble of writing and publishing academic papers and whatnot more than the sense of random posters on random forums ranting at each other for a few hours before the topic gets pushed to page 2..
Then you obviously don't know where that phrase comes from, or what it applies to:P.
Basically it means that its better to stop on the first error than sit there accumulating errors, possibly past a point where you can recover from them.
No it doesn't universally apply. It only really applies when there's errors for which there is no obvious, automatic way to proceed -- that just happens to be the majority of errors though (partly because anything we can recover from in an obvious way, we don't usually call an "error," we call it a special case or similar verbage.)
There is no voting system that can be both safe and verifiable, regardless of the scheme you come up with.
If you are able to verify your vote after you leave the polling station, then someone else is potentially able to watch over your shoulder while you do so, and could therefore make good on any threat they'd provided you to ensure you voted the way they wanted you to.
Its kind of like the MPAA trying to stop you from pirating movies -- all sorts of digital tricks can be employed, but at the end of the day if the movie can be seen by your eyes, it can be seen by your friends' eyes, or your camcorder. Any protection that math gives you is lost the second you've exposed the information in human-readable form, because no math in the world can stop those photons from reaching a second human's eyes (or a recording device.)
Typically there will be a "need" if either a) the vote is within some given percentage of 50/50 and you want to be absolutely sure that everything got counted appropriately (because you know, humans are so much less error-prone than computers..) or b) there's enough concern about the machine being tampered with to warrant putting in the effort.
a) is rare but certainly not unheard of. Most of the time though, even in "close" districts, there's a big enough difference between the winner and second place that it would take serious issues (or serious tampering) to effect the outcome. The odd rejected ballot or whatever wouldn't be sufficient so nobody would bother.
b) depends a lot on the system in question. Some voting machines have notoriously bad reputations (hence having this discussion in the first place) while others are relatively trusted. Simple bubble-sheet Scantron machines seem to be fairly well liked in this forum for example -- they're not dedicated election machines (meaning it would be less likely, though probably not impossible, to tamper with them in an election-rigging manner) and you have the paper trail if you decide you want a manual recount.
As for the incumbent winning.. that I imagine depends on your jurisdiction. Up here in Canada for example, the incumbent has no say in the matter -- its up to Elections Canada (who is, at least in principle, neutral, and provincial elections are operated by similar province-level bodies.) So the odds would be pretty good that a questionable tally would be recounted, even if it showed the incumbent winning.
That's not really all that useful. Being able to verify that somewhere, the fact that I voted was recorded, doesn't tell me a) if it tallied the correct vote I gave it or b) if the verification service and the vote record match.
That is, for a) you could punch in Democrat and it silently, internally records a vote for Republican. Since your after-the-fact check only notes that you did vote, not who you voted for, you still have no way to prove this one.
And for b) the verification website/service/whatever could be separated from the tally so it knows that you made a vote, but didn't actually count it. Or conversely, being able to verify that you voted doesn't prevent the tally from adding 1000 ghost votes -- you don't have any way to verify anybody else' vote.
Basically, there's absolutely nothing preventing the machines from running the electoral equivalent of double books -- one side that can be used to (individually) verify whatever they want, but not show or provide any mechanism to manually recount while also having the second side that shows blind (and for all you know, arbitrary) totals without allowing individual verification -- and make it look to any outside viewer that those two sides are linked.
That's why everyone wants a paper trail -- something that the voter can review before leaving the polling station to ensure that their correct vote is at least noted somewhere that's human-readable, at least in principle. Of course as I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread, that's really just kicking the issue down the line and while it might be better in some ways (primarily, the trust is spread around more people and thus less chance of all of them being corrupted) but its still not the panacea that a lot of posters like to claim -- you still have some level of trust involved rather than end-to-end guarantees.
Its not hard to count the number of voters who signed in and compare it to the total votes reported by the machine. The only way that would fail is if the machine just reports a winner rather than the counts, and that would be dumb even by voting machine standards.
Making sure it recorded the correct vote for each voter, without removing their voting privacy, is far more challenging.
just print out a ballot card with the appropriate votes clearly marked
Trouble with that (and trouble with the opposite direction of scanned ballots) is that there's no technical reason that the machine has to print the same thing that it recorded (or record the same thing that it scanned.) You're just having to trust it.
It always comes down to trust. We have yet to come up with any ballot system (even paper ballots) that don't require you to trust someone along the line. Or at least if anyone thinks they've come up with one, we haven't tried putting it into practice yet.
Nah. Its primarily cost. Paper ballots are expensive to print and once the counts are confirmed, they're entirely useless and just get burned. So you have a few hundred million sheets of paper to print and distribute across the country that you just dispose of a day or two later.
E-voting removes the majority of that cost. You just pull them out from storage, plug them in and away you go.
Or at least they would remove the majority of the cost if we'd start auditing the suppliers of these things instead of just trusting the lowest bidder without any form of oversight whatsoever and having to buy an entire new set of machines every year or two after the black hat conference proves that yes, companies still do the bare minimum with regards to computer security if they think they can get away with it, even when they're not acting intentionally malicious.
The problem is almost all of your arguments against e-voting also apply to paper ballots. What proof do you have that all paper ballots have been counted? You drop your slip in to a box and then trust that the people doing the tallying (and their overseers) are going to be honest. You don't retain any sort of receipt to indicate how you voted (because if you did you'd have that whole voting enforcer issue again.)
Similarly, how do you know the paper ballot is going to be counted as it was cast? Once again you're simply trusting the people doing the tallying.
And counting speed? That's entirely irrelevant. The counting in an electronic machine is done on the fly, so the watchers can count the number of voters by simply counting how many people go into a booth -- something that generally happens well slow enough to keep track of. Of course in that case the watchers wouldn't be able to distinguish who each voter voted for, but they'd be able to maintain an overall count if they really wanted.
Overall though, all you're doing is shifting trust from the makers of the voting machines to the people tallying the votes. You, personally, will never know if your particular vote out of the thousands at your station was counted the right way, never mind knowing if all of them were. Even a voting receipt, if you wanted to issue those, are pretty pointless since you'd never be able to convince everyone to bring their receipts back in should you decide that the ballots were tampered with, so a recount would almost certainly differ from the original count if you tried to do it that way.
The only argument I've seen against e-voting that isn't exactly the same problem with paper ballots is the number of vote counters: If a jurisdiction buys e-voting machines, they typically will buy the same one for all of their polling stations meaning they're placing their trust entirely within the realm of the one provider where as with paper ballots, each polling station has a couple of counters and one or two overseers meaning a whole lot more people would need to be corrupted in order to affect even a slightly significant number of polling stations. Which is definitely a valid argument, but one that could be entirely overridden if we ever manage to find a supplier of e-voting machines that is actually trustworthy.
And as others have pointed out, there are encryption-based voting schemes that can provide even stronger guarantees than any paper ballot -- but they still have to be implemented by a trustworthy supplier so that's still an issue.
We only really have two parties federally -- the Liberals and the Conservatives, and its been a battle between those two for decades. The NDP took over the opposition spot for the one election cycle because Jack Layton was amazing and showed up as the NDP leader right as the Liberals shit the bed, but even then we just ended up with the Liberals being nearly irrelevant and we still had effectively two parties.
As for BC.. the Green's still aren't a major party even though they ended up having an amount of power far above their number of seats due to the near-tie between the other two parties. That's not quite the same as breaking out from the two-party mold.
And keep in mind, when we say "two-party system" we don't mean that there's literally only two parties -- just that there's two main parties that end up sharing the vast majority of the seats. That doesn't mean there can't be other parties in the election (and indeed even in the US, there are third parties running for pretty much every election) and those third parties can cause upsets via the spoiler effect (eg: Nader and Gore in the US' 2000 election.) And of course in the fairly rare case like BC where the two main parties are effectively tied and the otherwise-powerless third party ends up being the tiebreaker (which may or may not also have involved a spoiler effect as well.. not sure where those three Green seats would have gone had they not run.)
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The companies might not, but lawmakers and judges certainly do. If lawmakers spend a bunch of time and effort coming up with a law and the first thing you do is skirt it, they're going to patch it up pretty quick. Its one thing when someone finds a loophole down the line, or there's a loophole intentionally left in.. its quite another to be blatantly flagrant about it.
Judges also tend to be pretty pissy about things like that (even moreso than the lawmakers lately it feels like,) so if it ended up in court for some reason there'd be a bit of an uphill battle there as well for such companies.. and given the type of thing we're talking about, groups like the EFF would be lining up to drop lawsuits.
You do know that essentially all (major) streaming media sites are already DRM-protected right? This just standardizes it a bit.
Perhaps you should list some examples of things Firefox users "didn't want"? Cause I'm pretty sure most people just want their browser to work with the websites they visit, and really don't care about much beyond that.
It became even sillier to use Firefox after Firefox started imitating Chrome's appearance and behavior more and more
I agree with this one, though I think you have cause and effect reversed: Mimicking Chrome I'm pretty sure was an attempt to draw users back who had already switched. Still silly to be sure, but I view it more as an after-the-fact panic move than a reason for their decline.
Chrome won because a) Google was still considered the perfect angel company at that point -- "Do no evil" was still the prevalent mindset, at least publicly, and everyone thought anything Google did would be amazing so they should give it a try. And b) Chrome was significantly faster (which gets back to the "just wants it to work" aspect,) so once they tried it there was little incentive to go back.
Really, Google wasn't even advertising it that much back in those days. The giant annoying popup you see now when you visit Google with something other than Chrome came (relatively) recently -- long after Firefox had fallen out of favor. Most of their "advertising" seemed to be word of mouth as much as anything (though I suppose some of the "word of mouth" may have been shills..)
And then of course there's Safari. All those Mac users no longer caring about Firefox after OSX came out since again, Safari passed the bar of "it just works."
Hell, if Microsoft had actually bothered maintaining and improving IE over those years it would probably still be the standard in Windows, antitrust lawsuits be damned. But as MS is wont to do, they sat back and shat the bed while the world moved around them and then tried to play catch up, adding plugins and whatnot at the eleventh hour after everyone had long stopped caring (and then they throw Edge in the mix as well, so even the users who did still care about IE can be confused as fuck by this new browser that has almost the same icon, works kind of the same for most pages.. and then suddenly breaks and tells you to load IE for the next page you click on..)
So.. pretty much exactly like now? Or at least a couple of years ago (maybe more video providers have ported their DRM modules to Linux by now? I haven't heard or checked in a while..)
This won't stop you from playing non-DRM video. All it does is give DRM providers a standardized API to implement (or not) their individual DRM schemes.
It does mean one less option (or at least a more difficult option) for hackers to try to grab the decrypted stream perhaps, since the browser itself will be in control rather than having to load a library that could potentially be hooked. But I somehow doubt that will stop them for long.
They're still taking down a few torrent sites but that's mostly for show
They've actually taken down quite a few. I mean its a game of whack-a-mole since torrent sites are far from difficult to set up, and they're not nearly as restricted by international borders as the laws they're trying to skirt.
But really.. this is exactly the right thing for them to do. I know there's the argument that torrent sites aren't technically hosting the content they're providing access to and the possible slippery slope toward wider link-banning laws, but the media companies obviously won't (and to be honest, can't) just do nothing, so its far better that they go after a single torrent site than another hundred thousand John Doe privacy-destroying fishing expedition like they were originally attempting and got little more than egg on their face for the effort.
Which "real" web are you talking about? The geocities era where every monkey with a computer made a loud, MIDI-laden, flashing pink-and-yellow disaster of a page and little else existed anywhere?
Or perhaps you mean the pre-Google days when sites like Webcrawler, Yahoo!, Netscape, AOL etc ruled the realm with their "web portals" which were 99% ads splattered everywhere and you had to Where's Waldo the search box in order to find content that was actually useful. If you were lucky.
Or maybe the flash era when pages started getting autoplay videos and menu animations and other such garbage? (And of course, flash-based ads. Can't forget those.)
So what prominence are you referring to, exactly? The web started getting commercialized almost as soon as Netscape's browser gained public acceptance, and that happened almost as soon as the internet itself gained public acceptance (Trumpet Winsock anyone?) And the non-commercial corners of the web have only gotten better with improved technology.
I mean I can understand the need for those rose colored glasses when you hit up an old Geocities page on the wayback machine -- gotta filter all that excess pink out somehow -- but really the web hasn't ever been much other than what it is, at least not once it got out of academia and into the wild. It was smaller to be sure, and in some ways that would make finding specific needles easier since there was less hay around, but the number of needles has also increased over the years if you're willing to be less focused on a specific one.
I don't care if it's copyright infringement
You might not, but they do.
is already an admission of defeat.
This announcement shows that they absolutely have not admitted defeat.
If you don't like their DRM, you always have the option of not reading/listening to/viewing their content. You may own the machine its playing on, but you don't own the copyright to their works and whether you like it or not, intellectual property is legally protected (DRM or not.)
But really, DRM isn't the problem. When done properly, DRM is perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with say, Netflix' implementation of DRM. Its out of the way, it doesn't affect average users, and it protects the content its meant to protect.
Steam is similar -- for the most part it just works and you don't even notice -- though there's the argument that you would lose access to all of your games if Valve goes under (countered by the argument that they're less likely to go under -- at least in the foreseeable future -- than most people are to scratch or lose or otherwise render their game discs unplayable. Which are also DRM-protected by the way. Similarly, you'd lose all of your DRM-free GoG games if they went under, unless you retained a local copy of every installer yourself, and don't misplace or delete your collection.)
No, the real problem is the DMCA and similar laws around the world that allow DRM to be used in manners that go far beyond simply protecting content from copyright infringement -- killing research, taking down perfectly legal content a company just doesn't happen to like, suing 12 year olds for millions or billions of dollars just "to make a point," etc.
Now you could make a futility argument if you wanted. Bittorrent is a thing that exists, and if it ever doesn't exist it will just be replaced by something else in the same way it replaced Limewire and eMule which replaced Napster and so on (I'm probably skipping a few steps but you get the point..) Of course that's not you breaking DRM (outside of a relatively small group of "you.") That's you downloading a copy of something that someone else already broke the DRM on for you. Which perhaps is a minor distinction legally, but its a fairly large distinction when you start saying things like "were not supposed to do x with something on your machine." You're already not doing x on your machine in this case. Someone else is. You're just reaping the benefits of some unknown ripper's effort.
Most houses don't get robbed much so there's no point in buying locks, correct?
Assuming that users are stupid makes the users stupid.
It only appears that way if you don't pay attention. Its not because it makes a previously not-stupid user magically become stupid, but because widening the audience to allow for stupider users brings down the average. If you want to appeal to a larger market, its the way to go. If you want to stick to communities that shun non-technical people out of hand well.. there's plenty of those around the internet also.
Or to put in terms of a quippy rebuttal: Assuming there are no stupid users makes you stupid.
Get something like stunnel and wrap/unwrap the security in-stream. Problem solved. Or install an older version of the browser and then you don't even have the problem in the first place.
The world needs to be secure by default -- not just the web but email and cars and IoT pacemakers and basically everything else. Devices are too connected and hackers willing to abuse those devices too prevalent for us to continue leaving things insecure in order to avoid the odd edge case here and there.
In your case, sure they system "may" not be internet connected.. But what if it is? What if someone decides to connect it up 4 years from now having completely forgotten all about the security holes you've intentionally left in place in order to avoid updating your product? Is that really a worthwhile risk? Maybe to you personally but is it a worthwhile risk across the entire population of users?
Now of course a single browser enforcing security on two domains that typically aren't used for public-facing servers anyway is a far cry from "secure by default," but its at least a step in the right direction, even if its only slightly beyond symbolic.
Most people don't just jump into the #1 sales job at the biggest companies either -- they start at the bottom as well just like baseball players.
Basically, you say there's no single number that matters in baseball, and then you lay out the single most important number: batting average. That's the one that everyone talks about, and its the primary measure of how good you are at batting, and thus how likely the coach is to put you on the plate.
Or take hockey. If you score a high number of goals, of course you'll get played more. But if you score few goals while getting a high number of assists, you'll also get played more because the metric they use isn't "number of goals" its "number of goals+assists" and maybe a few other factors like interceptions and whatnot.
To bring it back to sales.. would they benefit from a metric beyond pure "total dollars?" Probably.
Customer satisfaction (measured by say, the number of return customers) may be something they look at. Some places probably track any interaction the customer has with the operation and thus could reward "assists" rather than just closes. Or track support calls later if you're in a business that has such so that you can get a long-term measurement of the sales' overall profit rather than just the immediate amount that might be lost to future costs. And so on. And I'm sure some places do these things (and likely things I've never thought of) because they're not stupid and in many (maybe most) cases, sales is a team effort.
There are exceptions of course. Real estate for example is usually a situation where the customer deals with a single realtor from start to finish. There's not really any "assists" involved, there's no future costs (once the sale is made and finalized, they're done with you unless there's something horrific enough gone wrong to prompt like lawsuits or something) and for most sales, there won't be any repeat business in the short term as most people don't buy and sell houses too often (and most of the ones that do have their own system in place). There's really no other metric needed beyond "how many houses did they sell?"
But if you're a sales rep for say, Coca-Cola.. you're looking at long-terms sales with (hopefully) repeat business on a weekly or monthly basis. You have to keep your customers happy over the long term, deal with the occasional "support" issue if there was a damaged crate or something, have a backup sales person to cover when you're on holidays and so forth. In those scenarios there's plenty of metrics to work with beyond just the flat dollar amount of the initial close.
Hm.. I didn't consider that. Looks like there's a paragraph way down TFA mentioning the possibility but yikes. If they went that route they'd be really asking for a battle as "showing the opt-in box continuously until the user clicks yes" is not really any different from being opted in automatically. What's the point of a "no" button if it does effectively nothing? Essentially they'd be 100% violating the spirit of the new law.
They do realize it. These people aren't stupid. What they are is uncaring. If they can convince a single person to make one purchase, they've covered the ad cost for a week or a month. That's the problem with digital advertising -- its so bloody cheap that it doesn't have to really be effective to produce a ROI.
Now Amazon in particular, having extremely good knowledge of your sales history in addition to providing the ads, could potentially do much better. They used to do better but somewhere along the way they kind of dropped the ball for reasons I couldn't begin to guess -- maybe its better this way (sales-wise,) or maybe they were getting backlash from people who were worried that the computers were too smart (because you know, data tracking isn't insidious if its not used in a way you can immediately see, right?) Or maybe as more third party sellers came online, they were starting to see too much abuse of the "smart" system and dumbed it down to make it harder for shady sellers to promote their products in places they weren't supposed to. Who knows.
At the end of the day though, as long as ad revenue is based on views and clicks rather than conversions, we're probably not going to see a big push to clean the whole system up, because it really doesn't matter how many useless ads get displayed to users at their current cost.
I'd say especially movie previews, and the worse the movie the more deceptive the trailers since they just jam the 2 minutes of quality screen time into the trailer (and in some cases, they've even used stuff that was cut from the film in the trailers) and you end up sitting through 78 minutes of crap in order to see the 2 minutes of good that you've already seen. And frequently the context manages to make those 2 minutes even worse.
You say that, but here's how the problem breaks down:
Them: $0.000001 and 0.001sec to send the email to one extra address.
You: 2-3sec to notice and delete the email, if you recognize it right away and are pretty quick with your mouse. Anywhere from 10-30sec if you're not so lucky.
It is your problem, far more than theirs. In fact its so much of a problem for end users that email service providers and email reader developers are willing to take that burden off of your shoulders, for free (or at least no additional charge over their base rate,) and use the quality of their spam filter as a selling feature.
And even the best of them don't catch everything, so you're still stuck click delete on anywhere from a few dozen a month to hundreds per day, depending on how wide-spread your email address is on public forums, websites, etc.
Basically yes, and they're implying that if you remove that income stream, they'll just go ahead and implement something even worse to be a new income stream.
Of course, that leaves out the little tidbit that if they could actually use all those popups and shit as a revenue stream, they would already be doing it. Its not like ISPs are known to be terribly scrupulous.
Show me where I said they needed to be.
You don't paste a URL into a SEARCH BAR, you nimrod. It's a URL.
You don't explicitly say it, but your phrasing certainly implies that you expect "nimrods" to know that.
And yet here you are.
I've never claimed to be above discussing pointless things. That said, I was referring more to the larger community "discussing" it in the sense of going to the trouble of writing and publishing academic papers and whatnot more than the sense of random posters on random forums ranting at each other for a few hours before the topic gets pushed to page 2..
Then you obviously don't know where that phrase comes from, or what it applies to :P.
Basically it means that its better to stop on the first error than sit there accumulating errors, possibly past a point where you can recover from them.
No it doesn't universally apply. It only really applies when there's errors for which there is no obvious, automatic way to proceed -- that just happens to be the majority of errors though (partly because anything we can recover from in an obvious way, we don't usually call an "error," we call it a special case or similar verbage.)
There is no voting system that can be both safe and verifiable, regardless of the scheme you come up with.
If you are able to verify your vote after you leave the polling station, then someone else is potentially able to watch over your shoulder while you do so, and could therefore make good on any threat they'd provided you to ensure you voted the way they wanted you to.
Its kind of like the MPAA trying to stop you from pirating movies -- all sorts of digital tricks can be employed, but at the end of the day if the movie can be seen by your eyes, it can be seen by your friends' eyes, or your camcorder. Any protection that math gives you is lost the second you've exposed the information in human-readable form, because no math in the world can stop those photons from reaching a second human's eyes (or a recording device.)
Typically there will be a "need" if either a) the vote is within some given percentage of 50/50 and you want to be absolutely sure that everything got counted appropriately (because you know, humans are so much less error-prone than computers..) or b) there's enough concern about the machine being tampered with to warrant putting in the effort.
a) is rare but certainly not unheard of. Most of the time though, even in "close" districts, there's a big enough difference between the winner and second place that it would take serious issues (or serious tampering) to effect the outcome. The odd rejected ballot or whatever wouldn't be sufficient so nobody would bother.
b) depends a lot on the system in question. Some voting machines have notoriously bad reputations (hence having this discussion in the first place) while others are relatively trusted. Simple bubble-sheet Scantron machines seem to be fairly well liked in this forum for example -- they're not dedicated election machines (meaning it would be less likely, though probably not impossible, to tamper with them in an election-rigging manner) and you have the paper trail if you decide you want a manual recount.
As for the incumbent winning.. that I imagine depends on your jurisdiction. Up here in Canada for example, the incumbent has no say in the matter -- its up to Elections Canada (who is, at least in principle, neutral, and provincial elections are operated by similar province-level bodies.) So the odds would be pretty good that a questionable tally would be recounted, even if it showed the incumbent winning.
That's not really all that useful. Being able to verify that somewhere, the fact that I voted was recorded, doesn't tell me a) if it tallied the correct vote I gave it or b) if the verification service and the vote record match.
That is, for a) you could punch in Democrat and it silently, internally records a vote for Republican. Since your after-the-fact check only notes that you did vote, not who you voted for, you still have no way to prove this one.
And for b) the verification website/service/whatever could be separated from the tally so it knows that you made a vote, but didn't actually count it. Or conversely, being able to verify that you voted doesn't prevent the tally from adding 1000 ghost votes -- you don't have any way to verify anybody else' vote.
Basically, there's absolutely nothing preventing the machines from running the electoral equivalent of double books -- one side that can be used to (individually) verify whatever they want, but not show or provide any mechanism to manually recount while also having the second side that shows blind (and for all you know, arbitrary) totals without allowing individual verification -- and make it look to any outside viewer that those two sides are linked.
That's why everyone wants a paper trail -- something that the voter can review before leaving the polling station to ensure that their correct vote is at least noted somewhere that's human-readable, at least in principle. Of course as I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread, that's really just kicking the issue down the line and while it might be better in some ways (primarily, the trust is spread around more people and thus less chance of all of them being corrupted) but its still not the panacea that a lot of posters like to claim -- you still have some level of trust involved rather than end-to-end guarantees.
Its not hard to count the number of voters who signed in and compare it to the total votes reported by the machine. The only way that would fail is if the machine just reports a winner rather than the counts, and that would be dumb even by voting machine standards.
Making sure it recorded the correct vote for each voter, without removing their voting privacy, is far more challenging.
just print out a ballot card with the appropriate votes clearly marked
Trouble with that (and trouble with the opposite direction of scanned ballots) is that there's no technical reason that the machine has to print the same thing that it recorded (or record the same thing that it scanned.) You're just having to trust it.
It always comes down to trust. We have yet to come up with any ballot system (even paper ballots) that don't require you to trust someone along the line. Or at least if anyone thinks they've come up with one, we haven't tried putting it into practice yet.
Nah. Its primarily cost. Paper ballots are expensive to print and once the counts are confirmed, they're entirely useless and just get burned. So you have a few hundred million sheets of paper to print and distribute across the country that you just dispose of a day or two later.
E-voting removes the majority of that cost. You just pull them out from storage, plug them in and away you go.
Or at least they would remove the majority of the cost if we'd start auditing the suppliers of these things instead of just trusting the lowest bidder without any form of oversight whatsoever and having to buy an entire new set of machines every year or two after the black hat conference proves that yes, companies still do the bare minimum with regards to computer security if they think they can get away with it, even when they're not acting intentionally malicious.
The problem is almost all of your arguments against e-voting also apply to paper ballots. What proof do you have that all paper ballots have been counted? You drop your slip in to a box and then trust that the people doing the tallying (and their overseers) are going to be honest. You don't retain any sort of receipt to indicate how you voted (because if you did you'd have that whole voting enforcer issue again.)
Similarly, how do you know the paper ballot is going to be counted as it was cast? Once again you're simply trusting the people doing the tallying.
And counting speed? That's entirely irrelevant. The counting in an electronic machine is done on the fly, so the watchers can count the number of voters by simply counting how many people go into a booth -- something that generally happens well slow enough to keep track of. Of course in that case the watchers wouldn't be able to distinguish who each voter voted for, but they'd be able to maintain an overall count if they really wanted.
Overall though, all you're doing is shifting trust from the makers of the voting machines to the people tallying the votes. You, personally, will never know if your particular vote out of the thousands at your station was counted the right way, never mind knowing if all of them were. Even a voting receipt, if you wanted to issue those, are pretty pointless since you'd never be able to convince everyone to bring their receipts back in should you decide that the ballots were tampered with, so a recount would almost certainly differ from the original count if you tried to do it that way.
The only argument I've seen against e-voting that isn't exactly the same problem with paper ballots is the number of vote counters: If a jurisdiction buys e-voting machines, they typically will buy the same one for all of their polling stations meaning they're placing their trust entirely within the realm of the one provider where as with paper ballots, each polling station has a couple of counters and one or two overseers meaning a whole lot more people would need to be corrupted in order to affect even a slightly significant number of polling stations. Which is definitely a valid argument, but one that could be entirely overridden if we ever manage to find a supplier of e-voting machines that is actually trustworthy.
And as others have pointed out, there are encryption-based voting schemes that can provide even stronger guarantees than any paper ballot -- but they still have to be implemented by a trustworthy supplier so that's still an issue.
We only really have two parties federally -- the Liberals and the Conservatives, and its been a battle between those two for decades. The NDP took over the opposition spot for the one election cycle because Jack Layton was amazing and showed up as the NDP leader right as the Liberals shit the bed, but even then we just ended up with the Liberals being nearly irrelevant and we still had effectively two parties.
As for BC.. the Green's still aren't a major party even though they ended up having an amount of power far above their number of seats due to the near-tie between the other two parties. That's not quite the same as breaking out from the two-party mold.
And keep in mind, when we say "two-party system" we don't mean that there's literally only two parties -- just that there's two main parties that end up sharing the vast majority of the seats. That doesn't mean there can't be other parties in the election (and indeed even in the US, there are third parties running for pretty much every election) and those third parties can cause upsets via the spoiler effect (eg: Nader and Gore in the US' 2000 election.) And of course in the fairly rare case like BC where the two main parties are effectively tied and the otherwise-powerless third party ends up being the tiebreaker (which may or may not also have involved a spoiler effect as well.. not sure where those three Green seats would have gone had they not run.)