That said, we probably won't see anything super blatant in the next month or two though -- that would be too obvious. They'll need some time to gloat about how they kept their promises and let the populace forget about the issue before they start breaking those promises. I expect that, provided the title II is revoked and no new regulations are created to replace it, we'll start seeing the evidence you want in a year or two.
The problem isn't that Comcast is going to charge Amazon more -- they could already raise the rates if they wanted.
The problem is that if Comcast has an agreement with Amazon, and you're a Verizon customer.. Verizon may throttle Amazon because Verizon has a contract with Walmart who is trying to promote their own online shopping.
So, - Comcast and Amazon have an agreement. - Verizon and Walmart have an agreement. - You're a Verizon customer.
At no point is there an agreement between Amazon and Verizon. The only place where these agreements cross over is the Comcast/Verizon peering and since Comcast is almost certainly going to do the exact same thing that Verizon is (in their case, throttling walmart.com,) neither of them will be feeling much desire to rock the boat.
Amazon could try suing Verizon to be sure.. but since there's no direct business arrangement between the two, they wouldn't really have much footing. Their only option is to pay Verizon for no service (or at least, a manufactured non-service,) in addition to paying Comcast (for actual service.) Its essentially corporate extortion.
Many countries are already routing around the US due to your horrific privacy laws.. which provide for approximately zero protections for anyone who isn't a US citizen -- even your closest ally countries are basically treated as guilty until proven innocent.. and then probably still guilty. Its just too big of a risk to our own national security to route things through the US anymore. The fact that you're planning on allowing ISPs to extort your web companies is rather of secondary concern.
Not really. The ISPs themselves exist because of government subsidies. The fact that they're frequently monopolies is because the government decided to only subsidize one company instead of 2 or 3.
Drop all government interference and you'll likely get a competitive market place in New York, LA and other high density areas.. but you've already got competition in those areas even under the existing system.
People in Bumfuck, Idaho on the other hand wouldn't even have basic 911 service if the phone companies weren't being incentivized either by direct subsidies or guarantee of monopoly access or other such things because its just not cost effective to service those areas without getting something extra to sweeten the deal.
Its slowly changing as tech improves and gets cheaper. Things like municipal broadband are at least on the table now (even if those old monopoly-granting agreements are still holding it back in some jurisdictions.) But at best that means you've moved from a monopoly to a duopoly, and at worse the private company will pull out all together (and probably sue your pants off on their way) leaving you with yet another monopoly, but this one being entirely government operated.
So yes, net neutrality in essence is one regulation (don't fuck people over) patching up another one (you're only able to fuck people over because of the monopoly we granted.) But that original one was highly necessary for telephone, and later internet, to be spread around and matter at all.
If you could lease an electric car for $100/mo, and leases for all other types of cars were unavailable for some reason (meaning you'd have to pay the full price outright,) you'd certainly see a hell of a lot more electric cars.
SaaS vs local software isn't exactly the same as cars. Or even an analogy that makes sense.
Never mind the additional benefits that SaaS can have (if the service is built to do so) such as live document sharing in Google Docs, the ability to access it from anywhere with a simple web browser -- no dicking around with VPNs and remote desktop or other similar techniques to access your home/office PC while on the road. Those sort of aspects take your car analogy from not really making sense to being just flat out incorrect all together.
Not dead. Just get more concentrated in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and similar who are able to afford the extortion fees that we'll expect to see.
Also probably not right away. ISPs are unlikely to begin extorting on day one -- that would look bad enough that even Pai's FCC would have to stop and rethink their decision.
Likely it will be a slow erosion that will start a year or so from now after the hubbub has died down and continue until either its so ubiquitous that its accepted as the way of things (and internet users finally complete their reclassification to strictly internet consumers,) or a new government is elected that starts eyeing up the possibility of reintroducing net neutrality and the ISPs will go back to laying low for a while, maybe even rolling back in a few small ways to make it look like they're being good guys rather than just biding their time.
There is negative benefit to removing net neutrality for end users (we're slowed or barred from sites we like who don't or can't pay up.) There is little- to no-, and sometimes even negative, benefit for most companies, depending on their size and internet needs. There's a huge benefit for ISPs who will be given essentially free reign to abuse their (near-)monopolies. Its absolutely ridiculous that we allow industry talking heads to be in charge of overseeing their own industries. But not only is this allowed under Trump, it seems to be his preference across the board (FCC, EPA, education, probably others I don't recall off the top of my head.)
Yes and no. If your data isn't stored locally, then any malware you pick up will at best only be able to monitor your real-time activities (keyloggers and the such.) Something like ransomware is irrelevant since you don't have anything worth ransoming on your local PC.
It is highly predicated though on the cloud provider being better at security than you are. If they suck just as much as you do, then you're absolutely right you've just opened up a second attack vector with no real benefit.
Something like Dropbox which attaches a pseudofolder to Windows kind of crosses the bound here. I would hope that they have some protection against ransomware just hooking up that folder and treating it like any other shared folder.. but if they can't or don't then again its absolutely just a second attack vector for the same problem.
On the other hand, something like Google's Docs is significantly more secure (assuming Google is more secure than your PC, which is a pretty safe assumption.) Nothing is ever stored locally and there's no direct local access either (or at least there wasn't last time I checked) -- everything is done strictly through their website. I guess an attack specifically targeted at grabbing your Google password and then interfacing with their website to mangle your documents would be possible but it would have to be individually coded for each cloud service, so you're still better off than if it was able to blindly encrypt your entire hard drive.
Many people that run Linux already spent money on a "professionally" written OS that came preinstalled on their system and was included in the price tag. Not sure if that goes into the territory of "most" (I mean I'm sure Linux enthusiasts are more likely to also build their own PCs but its hardly a one-to-one correspondence and its near impossible to find a consumer-grade prebuilt that doesn't already have Windows on it.)
If you know apriori that everyone in the world is going to sit on the chair and crush you, then I would indeed highly recommend not sitting on it. Unless you favor suicide by ridiculous analogy.
For example, if every Mac OS X install had a remote root vulnerability, but only %1 of Windows 10 installs were still vulnerable to a similarly bad thing, then Windows would not be as attractive based on numbers and impact.
Absolutely true. However, there's basically no instance where one OS will be 100% vulnerable while another is only 1%. Typical numbers will either be about equal (if its a bug in say a web browser that's common to both OS') or it will be on the scale of some double-digit percent vs 0% because very rarely does a bug apply even remotely equally between two completely different code bases.
Also, given that the OS split is a bit above 80% Windows and a bit below 12% Mac (as per the current Wikipedia article's numbers at least,) a Mac virus would need to be about 7-8 times more relevant for your hypothetical scenario to play out. That's certainly a far cry from the 100x you brought up, but its still almost an order of magnitude.
The bigger problem though isn't how many machines are vulnerable -- if a vulnerability is discovered by nefarious types before its found (and fixed) by the OS vendor, it WILL be abused. For any OS. Even Linux with its undiscovered ones are more numerous on Mac.
This is just the dark side of free software's many-eyeballs quip: The more people that are looking, the better chance a bug will be found. But not finding them doesn't mean they aren't there -- it just means we (white hat or black) haven't bothered looking hard enough.
updates how and when you want them,
So your suggestion to avoid Windows' forced updates is that, instead of disabling updates all together you should just move to a system where you can ignore the updates without having to actively disable them? That seems like a bold plan.
I mean I have plenty of issues with the way MS has decided to force updates (especially the ones that are essentially just sales pitches but they call "critical" anyway like that GetWindowsX nagware you alluded to, or constantly pushing you to install Skype and things like that) but ignoring updates on Linux isn't really any better than disabling them on Windows -- at the end of the day, you're still running an unpatched system.
I would be hesitant to follow that advice. If your data is in a shared location (as it almost certainly would be in an organization with more than a couple PCs,) then all you've done is provide three attack vectors instead of one.
If all you care about is individual workstations being operational then sure, get out of the monoculture. But if you care about your operation as a whole being secure then removing as many attack vectors as you can is by far the more useful solution.
Using Apache instead of IIS on Windows has no effect on this at all. Perhaps Apache is generally more secure than IIS (or maybe it isn't I don't know,) but one monoculture is effectively the same as another and while IIS may have slightly more ties into the OS, Apache has plenty enough to do damage if they're not used in a safe fashion.
Now if you wanted to do something like load balancing between an IIS and an Apache server, neither of which have shares or other links to internal sensitive data.. then that's fine -- in that case you ARE more concerned about the particular machine than you are about the rest of the operation. So there are times when breaking away from the monoculture can be helpful. Its just not all the time, and in particular is not applicable in any scenario where the machines in question have shared access to important resources.
used widely in high-value enterprise servers that it most certainly is attacked by malware, hackers, etc on a regular basis
The real question is how often those attacks succeed. We're seeing a near-constant stream of companies announcing security breaches. How many more go unannounced? And how many are targeting Linux vs Windows vs some other vector? Those questions are rarely answered with any confidence.
For your two factors: 1) I don't know about that. I suspect its applied more consistently more because Linux has a higher percentage of server vs desktop usage than Windows, and server administrators tend to be better at maintaining the systems than your average home user (and even among home users, Linux people tend to be more technically inclined than their Windows brethren.)
2) Virus writers constantly go after Android and iOS. The difference there is that there's that wall around the walled garden. Google and Apple stand between the virus writers and the end users. Many viruses are written (particularly for Android where its easy to turn off the wall) but few make it through to the storefronts.
Linux dominates the enterprise environment and would theoretically be more valuable of a target to attack than Windows.
And individual enterprise system is certainly more valuable than an individual home PC on average, but that's hardly the full equation: Quantity can beat quality hands down when you're talking a couple of orders of magnitude difference. Not to mention that while enterprise servers are typically locked down fairly tight (even Windows servers,) many enterprise desktops are just as bad as their home user counterparts (sometimes even worse if there's corporate policies against running updates on a whim.) So Windows still gives you a pretty strong attack vector into the enterprise. Even if its not directly to their servers, getting in the door is usually the hardest part.
Basically, as always when one of these "Linux is safe!" stories comes out, the real problem is lack of data. We simply don't know if Linux is inherently safer than Windows or if its just a scaling effect and may become just as bad if it somehow ever manages to catch up to Windows' popularity. The Android case suggests the latter given how rampant the viral load is when you peek outside of the walled garden, though its not a strong case given that Android is a fairly different beast by this point regardless of its Linux roots and thus doesn't directly indicate how secure (or not) desktop Linux would be.
It indicates to me that no one has been capable of doing them yet. The FCC doesn't just make rules up out of thin air because they're bored. They make rules up when they see a potential problem area and decide to put a stop to it before it becomes a real problem area.
If you can come up with one good reason why ISPs would not want to prioritize content based on who pays them the most, please post it. The obvious go-to answer is competition but as has been reiterated hundreds of times, that only applies in very small parts of the country -- most ISPs are in a local monopoly or duopoly and its not exactly something you can just order from Amazon if your local suppliers are out to lunch.
Hell even in areas where there's actual competition, relying on companies to "do the right thing" voluntarily is a huge risk. Say for example Comcast makes an exclusive deal with HBO and Verizon makes an exclusive deal with Netflix. Now if you want to watch both Game of Thrones and whatever's on Netflix.. you not only have to buy two separate subscriptions to their respective channels, you have to buy two entire separate internet connections (at least, assuming you want to stay legitimate of course.)
Companies have really only two checks on their power to abuse their customers: Competition and regulation. Competition is a bust in the ISP market. True competition is just too sparse to be nationally useful. That leaves regulation. Because I can guarantee you that just trusting them to give up potential profit in order to be nice isn't going to happen -- it goes against their entire purpose for existing.
So then you're suggesting that net neutrality does block free speech by.. ensuring that the ISPs are forced to allow everyone to post and read online equally?
Not to mention the ISPs aren't themselves government entities and the first amendment doesn't apply to them. Net neutrality (or the lack thereof) doesn't instruct the ISPs to block or allow any particular speech. If they decide to block something, that's on them and there's nothing the unconstitutional about that because they aren't the government. Net neutrality just claims that, if they allow you to speak, they must also allow me to speak and your speech can't be given priority over my speech (or vice-versa.)
That's not leftist. The left wants to protect average people from the rich and powerful who usually control things. Yes that usually amounts to expanded government (because who else has the ability to put checks on the already-powerful?) But expanding government in itself is not the goal. Most leftists would be perfectly happy with a smaller government if they could still get the protections they want.
The DMCA on the other hand protects the profits of a few large corporations (ie: the rich an powerful,) at the cost of smaller corporations and average people. That's exactly the opposite of the leftist ideals. And just like the left generally has no problem shrinking government when its plausible to do so without losing protections, the right wingers generally have no problem expanding government the occasional time it benefits them.
You also have to keep in mind that the Democratic party is only "left" in comparison to the Republicans. They're at best hovering around center if you consider the entire political spectrum. They may try to be more balanced about it but at the end of the day, the democrats are taking just as many bri^W campaign contributions from big corporations as the Republicans are.
Well given that they explicitly said they're deleting all their data, any clone you find is probably also a fake.
As for why they don't want their sites to outlast them.. primarily because there's no incentive to do so. Most torrent site operators are in it for the money -- that's why most torrent sites have ads pasted all over the damned place and half their links that look like the "download" button are actually even more ads (and since theoretically-legitimate advertisers like Google don't like working with illegal sites, the ads they get tend to be either porn or completely bogus and have a higher-than-normal-ads chance of being viruses to boot since most of the shady advertisers are a lot less concerned about the quality or source of their ads as long as they get paid. Kind of the defining quality of being shady.)
So its not about dick size (or at least no more than anything else is,) but its also not about freedom of information or other ideologies either -- its about money plain and simple and when they're no longer getting paid, they also no longer care about their site. (And even if they did care, deciding to release their site contents right after it was looking like possible legal trouble coming their way could look pretty bad for their case should the possibility become reality.)
Sure there's the odd site like TPB that's really in it for the ideology.. and you can tell that by the fact that they keep coming back after being shutdown and having key members prosecuted and so forth. But they're the rare exception.
TPB may be becoming the only well-known torrent site, but its hardly the only existing one. If they fall, others will fill the gap. It may take a while before another one takes precedence as "the" torrent site, but it will happen.
Just like killing Napster didn't end file sharing, nor will killing TPB (yet again..) and Napster was in far far more of a "the only one" situation at the time.
That's the fact that the RIAA and MPAA refuse to face. The constant game of legal whack-a-mole can only provide them with at best a temporary reprieve. File sharing of one form or another is simply significantly cheaper, easier and faster to setup than the legal hassles of taking it down again, and there's always someone somewhere willing to take the risk.
"Voluntarily" tends to mean something different when it comes to situations like this than you expect from the daily usage of the word.
While there's maybe a few sites that close on their own here and there for whatever reason, if you start seeing a whole spat of them at once, there's a good chance that some police organization or other has sent them a message along the lines of "We know who you are. Shut down on your own or we'll do it for you." Its technically "voluntary" by the strictest definition of the word, but highly coerced.
Its hard, but not impossible. Using a bitcoin-style blockchain system should allow for a distributed index with fairly strong protection against tampering.
You're perfectly free to disagree with the law, but claiming its not a crime is flat out factually wrong -- the DMCA and similar laws do exist, whether you like it or not.
I believe there actually is a clause in the repeal legislation they're trying to push that specifically denies future reversals. And you thought "no take backs" died in primary school!
Of course, there's still the possibility of reimplementing some form of net neutrality in a different manner, but that will be significantly more work than simply reclassifying ISPs from Title I to Title II, which is all the FCC did the first time.
This is already happening, though for different reasons. Infrastructure is of course a major concern that government doesn't really have the funds to deal with, so there's a fairly large push for private companies to build toll roads in their stead.
While I doubt we'll see them turn you away for driving a Toyota instead of a Mazda, they are already in essence turning away the poorer people who can barely afford gas for their car and can't handle the additional cost of tolls, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them start turning away large trucks or unsightly cars or the such in order to keep maintenance costs down, assuming they aren't already doing such things.
Its in line with Trump's campaign platform. He really only promoted two policies of his own: Building a wall and "winning."
Everything else he promised pretty much was rolling back one piece of Obama's work or another.
Oh well, and lowering taxes. But that's been a "promise" of every Republican candidate for decades. At this point its more of a "good morning" for them than an actual promise they plan on fulfilling beyond a small token tax break for the rich.
And if the ISPs had the ability to do things like deep packet inspection back in 1998, do you think we'd have the relatively free internet we do now?
The FCC didn't decide to impose regulations randomly because they were bored one day. They saw that things were looking to turn bad and they tried to head it off at the pass.
The big ISPs are not going to give you an open internet of their own free will -- there is zero incentive to do so and a huge profit incentive to lock it down as much as possible. There is little or no competition outside of a handful of major cities, and most of the competition that does exist are, if not colluding, at least all looking at taking similar measures so there's no real "voting with your dollar" available either unless you plan to go entirely off the internet.
And you can't blame the companies. Their job is maximizing profit at any cost. There are two balances against "any cost" ballooning into "untenable cost": Competition and regulation. As already noted, competition just doesn't really exist. That leaves one option.
OK there is actually another option: accepting a pinky swear that they'll take a profit hit because its the Right Thing To Do for the little guy. That's a plan that works out every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because government regulation is always good?
Right, because corporate greed is always good? Especially in a monopoly (or close to it) scenario?
Moderation in all things. Too much government is bad. Too little government is also bad.
provide any evidence of their fears actually coming true?
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/186576-verizon-caught-throttling-netflix-traffic-even-after-its-pays-for-more-bandwidth There's one instance. There are plenty of others, though few are as news-worthy as Verizon fighting with Netflix -- we all like to watch the heavyweights battle it out.
That said, we probably won't see anything super blatant in the next month or two though -- that would be too obvious. They'll need some time to gloat about how they kept their promises and let the populace forget about the issue before they start breaking those promises. I expect that, provided the title II is revoked and no new regulations are created to replace it, we'll start seeing the evidence you want in a year or two.
The problem isn't that Comcast is going to charge Amazon more -- they could already raise the rates if they wanted.
The problem is that if Comcast has an agreement with Amazon, and you're a Verizon customer.. Verizon may throttle Amazon because Verizon has a contract with Walmart who is trying to promote their own online shopping.
So,
- Comcast and Amazon have an agreement.
- Verizon and Walmart have an agreement.
- You're a Verizon customer.
At no point is there an agreement between Amazon and Verizon. The only place where these agreements cross over is the Comcast/Verizon peering and since Comcast is almost certainly going to do the exact same thing that Verizon is (in their case, throttling walmart.com,) neither of them will be feeling much desire to rock the boat.
Amazon could try suing Verizon to be sure.. but since there's no direct business arrangement between the two, they wouldn't really have much footing. Their only option is to pay Verizon for no service (or at least, a manufactured non-service,) in addition to paying Comcast (for actual service.) Its essentially corporate extortion.
I don't know if you'd consider it "proof," but here's an article describing at least one instance: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/186576-verizon-caught-throttling-netflix-traffic-even-after-its-pays-for-more-bandwidth
Many countries are already routing around the US due to your horrific privacy laws.. which provide for approximately zero protections for anyone who isn't a US citizen -- even your closest ally countries are basically treated as guilty until proven innocent.. and then probably still guilty. Its just too big of a risk to our own national security to route things through the US anymore. The fact that you're planning on allowing ISPs to extort your web companies is rather of secondary concern.
Not really. The ISPs themselves exist because of government subsidies. The fact that they're frequently monopolies is because the government decided to only subsidize one company instead of 2 or 3.
Drop all government interference and you'll likely get a competitive market place in New York, LA and other high density areas.. but you've already got competition in those areas even under the existing system.
People in Bumfuck, Idaho on the other hand wouldn't even have basic 911 service if the phone companies weren't being incentivized either by direct subsidies or guarantee of monopoly access or other such things because its just not cost effective to service those areas without getting something extra to sweeten the deal.
Its slowly changing as tech improves and gets cheaper. Things like municipal broadband are at least on the table now (even if those old monopoly-granting agreements are still holding it back in some jurisdictions.) But at best that means you've moved from a monopoly to a duopoly, and at worse the private company will pull out all together (and probably sue your pants off on their way) leaving you with yet another monopoly, but this one being entirely government operated.
So yes, net neutrality in essence is one regulation (don't fuck people over) patching up another one (you're only able to fuck people over because of the monopoly we granted.) But that original one was highly necessary for telephone, and later internet, to be spread around and matter at all.
If you could lease an electric car for $100/mo, and leases for all other types of cars were unavailable for some reason (meaning you'd have to pay the full price outright,) you'd certainly see a hell of a lot more electric cars.
SaaS vs local software isn't exactly the same as cars. Or even an analogy that makes sense.
Never mind the additional benefits that SaaS can have (if the service is built to do so) such as live document sharing in Google Docs, the ability to access it from anywhere with a simple web browser -- no dicking around with VPNs and remote desktop or other similar techniques to access your home/office PC while on the road. Those sort of aspects take your car analogy from not really making sense to being just flat out incorrect all together.
Not dead. Just get more concentrated in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and similar who are able to afford the extortion fees that we'll expect to see.
Also probably not right away. ISPs are unlikely to begin extorting on day one -- that would look bad enough that even Pai's FCC would have to stop and rethink their decision.
Likely it will be a slow erosion that will start a year or so from now after the hubbub has died down and continue until either its so ubiquitous that its accepted as the way of things (and internet users finally complete their reclassification to strictly internet consumers,) or a new government is elected that starts eyeing up the possibility of reintroducing net neutrality and the ISPs will go back to laying low for a while, maybe even rolling back in a few small ways to make it look like they're being good guys rather than just biding their time.
There is negative benefit to removing net neutrality for end users (we're slowed or barred from sites we like who don't or can't pay up.) There is little- to no-, and sometimes even negative, benefit for most companies, depending on their size and internet needs. There's a huge benefit for ISPs who will be given essentially free reign to abuse their (near-)monopolies. Its absolutely ridiculous that we allow industry talking heads to be in charge of overseeing their own industries. But not only is this allowed under Trump, it seems to be his preference across the board (FCC, EPA, education, probably others I don't recall off the top of my head.)
Yes and no. If your data isn't stored locally, then any malware you pick up will at best only be able to monitor your real-time activities (keyloggers and the such.) Something like ransomware is irrelevant since you don't have anything worth ransoming on your local PC.
It is highly predicated though on the cloud provider being better at security than you are. If they suck just as much as you do, then you're absolutely right you've just opened up a second attack vector with no real benefit.
Something like Dropbox which attaches a pseudofolder to Windows kind of crosses the bound here. I would hope that they have some protection against ransomware just hooking up that folder and treating it like any other shared folder.. but if they can't or don't then again its absolutely just a second attack vector for the same problem.
On the other hand, something like Google's Docs is significantly more secure (assuming Google is more secure than your PC, which is a pretty safe assumption.) Nothing is ever stored locally and there's no direct local access either (or at least there wasn't last time I checked) -- everything is done strictly through their website. I guess an attack specifically targeted at grabbing your Google password and then interfacing with their website to mangle your documents would be possible but it would have to be individually coded for each cloud service, so you're still better off than if it was able to blindly encrypt your entire hard drive.
Many people that run Linux already spent money on a "professionally" written OS that came preinstalled on their system and was included in the price tag. Not sure if that goes into the territory of "most" (I mean I'm sure Linux enthusiasts are more likely to also build their own PCs but its hardly a one-to-one correspondence and its near impossible to find a consumer-grade prebuilt that doesn't already have Windows on it.)
If you know apriori that everyone in the world is going to sit on the chair and crush you, then I would indeed highly recommend not sitting on it. Unless you favor suicide by ridiculous analogy.
For example, if every Mac OS X install had a remote root vulnerability, but only %1 of Windows 10 installs were still vulnerable to a similarly bad thing, then Windows would not be as attractive based on numbers and impact.
Absolutely true. However, there's basically no instance where one OS will be 100% vulnerable while another is only 1%. Typical numbers will either be about equal (if its a bug in say a web browser that's common to both OS') or it will be on the scale of some double-digit percent vs 0% because very rarely does a bug apply even remotely equally between two completely different code bases.
Also, given that the OS split is a bit above 80% Windows and a bit below 12% Mac (as per the current Wikipedia article's numbers at least,) a Mac virus would need to be about 7-8 times more relevant for your hypothetical scenario to play out. That's certainly a far cry from the 100x you brought up, but its still almost an order of magnitude.
The bigger problem though isn't how many machines are vulnerable -- if a vulnerability is discovered by nefarious types before its found (and fixed) by the OS vendor, it WILL be abused. For any OS. Even Linux with its undiscovered ones are more numerous on Mac.
This is just the dark side of free software's many-eyeballs quip: The more people that are looking, the better chance a bug will be found. But not finding them doesn't mean they aren't there -- it just means we (white hat or black) haven't bothered looking hard enough.
updates how and when you want them,
So your suggestion to avoid Windows' forced updates is that, instead of disabling updates all together you should just move to a system where you can ignore the updates without having to actively disable them? That seems like a bold plan.
I mean I have plenty of issues with the way MS has decided to force updates (especially the ones that are essentially just sales pitches but they call "critical" anyway like that GetWindowsX nagware you alluded to, or constantly pushing you to install Skype and things like that) but ignoring updates on Linux isn't really any better than disabling them on Windows -- at the end of the day, you're still running an unpatched system.
I would be hesitant to follow that advice. If your data is in a shared location (as it almost certainly would be in an organization with more than a couple PCs,) then all you've done is provide three attack vectors instead of one.
If all you care about is individual workstations being operational then sure, get out of the monoculture. But if you care about your operation as a whole being secure then removing as many attack vectors as you can is by far the more useful solution.
Using Apache instead of IIS on Windows has no effect on this at all. Perhaps Apache is generally more secure than IIS (or maybe it isn't I don't know,) but one monoculture is effectively the same as another and while IIS may have slightly more ties into the OS, Apache has plenty enough to do damage if they're not used in a safe fashion.
Now if you wanted to do something like load balancing between an IIS and an Apache server, neither of which have shares or other links to internal sensitive data.. then that's fine -- in that case you ARE more concerned about the particular machine than you are about the rest of the operation. So there are times when breaking away from the monoculture can be helpful. Its just not all the time, and in particular is not applicable in any scenario where the machines in question have shared access to important resources.
used widely in high-value enterprise servers that it most certainly is attacked by malware, hackers, etc on a regular basis
The real question is how often those attacks succeed. We're seeing a near-constant stream of companies announcing security breaches. How many more go unannounced? And how many are targeting Linux vs Windows vs some other vector? Those questions are rarely answered with any confidence.
For your two factors:
1) I don't know about that. I suspect its applied more consistently more because Linux has a higher percentage of server vs desktop usage than Windows, and server administrators tend to be better at maintaining the systems than your average home user (and even among home users, Linux people tend to be more technically inclined than their Windows brethren.)
2) Virus writers constantly go after Android and iOS. The difference there is that there's that wall around the walled garden. Google and Apple stand between the virus writers and the end users. Many viruses are written (particularly for Android where its easy to turn off the wall) but few make it through to the storefronts.
Linux dominates the enterprise environment and would theoretically be more valuable of a target to attack than Windows.
And individual enterprise system is certainly more valuable than an individual home PC on average, but that's hardly the full equation: Quantity can beat quality hands down when you're talking a couple of orders of magnitude difference. Not to mention that while enterprise servers are typically locked down fairly tight (even Windows servers,) many enterprise desktops are just as bad as their home user counterparts (sometimes even worse if there's corporate policies against running updates on a whim.) So Windows still gives you a pretty strong attack vector into the enterprise. Even if its not directly to their servers, getting in the door is usually the hardest part.
Basically, as always when one of these "Linux is safe!" stories comes out, the real problem is lack of data. We simply don't know if Linux is inherently safer than Windows or if its just a scaling effect and may become just as bad if it somehow ever manages to catch up to Windows' popularity. The Android case suggests the latter given how rampant the viral load is when you peek outside of the walled garden, though its not a strong case given that Android is a fairly different beast by this point regardless of its Linux roots and thus doesn't directly indicate how secure (or not) desktop Linux would be.
It indicates to me that no one has been capable of doing them yet. The FCC doesn't just make rules up out of thin air because they're bored. They make rules up when they see a potential problem area and decide to put a stop to it before it becomes a real problem area.
If you can come up with one good reason why ISPs would not want to prioritize content based on who pays them the most, please post it. The obvious go-to answer is competition but as has been reiterated hundreds of times, that only applies in very small parts of the country -- most ISPs are in a local monopoly or duopoly and its not exactly something you can just order from Amazon if your local suppliers are out to lunch.
Hell even in areas where there's actual competition, relying on companies to "do the right thing" voluntarily is a huge risk. Say for example Comcast makes an exclusive deal with HBO and Verizon makes an exclusive deal with Netflix. Now if you want to watch both Game of Thrones and whatever's on Netflix.. you not only have to buy two separate subscriptions to their respective channels, you have to buy two entire separate internet connections (at least, assuming you want to stay legitimate of course.)
Companies have really only two checks on their power to abuse their customers: Competition and regulation. Competition is a bust in the ISP market. True competition is just too sparse to be nationally useful. That leaves regulation. Because I can guarantee you that just trusting them to give up potential profit in order to be nice isn't going to happen -- it goes against their entire purpose for existing.
So then you're suggesting that net neutrality does block free speech by.. ensuring that the ISPs are forced to allow everyone to post and read online equally?
Not to mention the ISPs aren't themselves government entities and the first amendment doesn't apply to them. Net neutrality (or the lack thereof) doesn't instruct the ISPs to block or allow any particular speech. If they decide to block something, that's on them and there's nothing the unconstitutional about that because they aren't the government. Net neutrality just claims that, if they allow you to speak, they must also allow me to speak and your speech can't be given priority over my speech (or vice-versa.)
That's not leftist. The left wants to protect average people from the rich and powerful who usually control things. Yes that usually amounts to expanded government (because who else has the ability to put checks on the already-powerful?) But expanding government in itself is not the goal. Most leftists would be perfectly happy with a smaller government if they could still get the protections they want.
The DMCA on the other hand protects the profits of a few large corporations (ie: the rich an powerful,) at the cost of smaller corporations and average people. That's exactly the opposite of the leftist ideals. And just like the left generally has no problem shrinking government when its plausible to do so without losing protections, the right wingers generally have no problem expanding government the occasional time it benefits them.
You also have to keep in mind that the Democratic party is only "left" in comparison to the Republicans. They're at best hovering around center if you consider the entire political spectrum. They may try to be more balanced about it but at the end of the day, the democrats are taking just as many bri^W campaign contributions from big corporations as the Republicans are.
Well given that they explicitly said they're deleting all their data, any clone you find is probably also a fake.
As for why they don't want their sites to outlast them.. primarily because there's no incentive to do so. Most torrent site operators are in it for the money -- that's why most torrent sites have ads pasted all over the damned place and half their links that look like the "download" button are actually even more ads (and since theoretically-legitimate advertisers like Google don't like working with illegal sites, the ads they get tend to be either porn or completely bogus and have a higher-than-normal-ads chance of being viruses to boot since most of the shady advertisers are a lot less concerned about the quality or source of their ads as long as they get paid. Kind of the defining quality of being shady.)
So its not about dick size (or at least no more than anything else is,) but its also not about freedom of information or other ideologies either -- its about money plain and simple and when they're no longer getting paid, they also no longer care about their site. (And even if they did care, deciding to release their site contents right after it was looking like possible legal trouble coming their way could look pretty bad for their case should the possibility become reality.)
Sure there's the odd site like TPB that's really in it for the ideology.. and you can tell that by the fact that they keep coming back after being shutdown and having key members prosecuted and so forth. But they're the rare exception.
TPB may be becoming the only well-known torrent site, but its hardly the only existing one. If they fall, others will fill the gap. It may take a while before another one takes precedence as "the" torrent site, but it will happen.
Just like killing Napster didn't end file sharing, nor will killing TPB (yet again..) and Napster was in far far more of a "the only one" situation at the time.
That's the fact that the RIAA and MPAA refuse to face. The constant game of legal whack-a-mole can only provide them with at best a temporary reprieve. File sharing of one form or another is simply significantly cheaper, easier and faster to setup than the legal hassles of taking it down again, and there's always someone somewhere willing to take the risk.
"Voluntarily" tends to mean something different when it comes to situations like this than you expect from the daily usage of the word.
While there's maybe a few sites that close on their own here and there for whatever reason, if you start seeing a whole spat of them at once, there's a good chance that some police organization or other has sent them a message along the lines of "We know who you are. Shut down on your own or we'll do it for you." Its technically "voluntary" by the strictest definition of the word, but highly coerced.
Its hard, but not impossible. Using a bitcoin-style blockchain system should allow for a distributed index with fairly strong protection against tampering.
Then you're wrong. Period.
You're perfectly free to disagree with the law, but claiming its not a crime is flat out factually wrong -- the DMCA and similar laws do exist, whether you like it or not.
I believe there actually is a clause in the repeal legislation they're trying to push that specifically denies future reversals. And you thought "no take backs" died in primary school!
Of course, there's still the possibility of reimplementing some form of net neutrality in a different manner, but that will be significantly more work than simply reclassifying ISPs from Title I to Title II, which is all the FCC did the first time.
This is already happening, though for different reasons. Infrastructure is of course a major concern that government doesn't really have the funds to deal with, so there's a fairly large push for private companies to build toll roads in their stead.
While I doubt we'll see them turn you away for driving a Toyota instead of a Mazda, they are already in essence turning away the poorer people who can barely afford gas for their car and can't handle the additional cost of tolls, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them start turning away large trucks or unsightly cars or the such in order to keep maintenance costs down, assuming they aren't already doing such things.
Its in line with Trump's campaign platform. He really only promoted two policies of his own: Building a wall and "winning."
Everything else he promised pretty much was rolling back one piece of Obama's work or another.
Oh well, and lowering taxes. But that's been a "promise" of every Republican candidate for decades. At this point its more of a "good morning" for them than an actual promise they plan on fulfilling beyond a small token tax break for the rich.
And if the ISPs had the ability to do things like deep packet inspection back in 1998, do you think we'd have the relatively free internet we do now?
The FCC didn't decide to impose regulations randomly because they were bored one day. They saw that things were looking to turn bad and they tried to head it off at the pass.
The big ISPs are not going to give you an open internet of their own free will -- there is zero incentive to do so and a huge profit incentive to lock it down as much as possible. There is little or no competition outside of a handful of major cities, and most of the competition that does exist are, if not colluding, at least all looking at taking similar measures so there's no real "voting with your dollar" available either unless you plan to go entirely off the internet.
And you can't blame the companies. Their job is maximizing profit at any cost. There are two balances against "any cost" ballooning into "untenable cost": Competition and regulation. As already noted, competition just doesn't really exist. That leaves one option.
OK there is actually another option: accepting a pinky swear that they'll take a profit hit because its the Right Thing To Do for the little guy. That's a plan that works out every time.