"Hey now, I already block ads and I definitely do give a shit"
Ad blocking to stop it cluttering your screen (or sucking bandwidth) is worthwhile, but it also tells the websites you're adblocking.
Adblockers which click on every single ad and follow links and generally fuck with statistics do far more damage to advertising models than adblockers, if you have the bandwidth.
As I'm not bandwidth limited, I'm leaning toward the latter than the former.
"I'm a bit surprised you've encountered Tier 2 or Tier 3 who bounce it back."
The ISPs in question are all UK-based:
Talktalk British Telecom Orange.
Unsurprisingly they're the ISPs with the largest advertising budgets AND bottom of customer satisfaction stakes.
Whilst the UK has LLU, the reality is that the "big 7" ISPs are all awful and people aren't really aware there are alternatives.
Additionally they've been heavily sold ISP-based email addreses which act as "lockin" devices. They don't seem to realise they can trivially setup a freemail account and direct all their friends to that.
"Once it hists the Tier 1 or Tier 2, they're not going to bounce it back down to Tier 1 to walk through all the menus of irrelvavant support questions again."
I can think of (and have experienced) outfits where they do just that.
"Personally I think a better way to handle such natural monopolies might be to separate infrastructure from service: There's one power line company, one dataline company, one waterline company, etc"
This was effectively forcibly spun out of the incumbent telco(*)(**) after 2 decades of predatory/monopolist behaviour and effectively transformed New Zealand out of the "Hostile telecommunications environment" that's put off business activity for years (foreign companies wouldn't invest in NZ if they needed big infrastructure and local ones would move out of the country once they got to any decent size)
One of the first effects has been that access to all the ducts in the ground are now being leased out to cable companies and telcos which in the past were direct competitors to the incumbent and therefore refused access. You can get dark fibre now too, which was previously impossible.
The result has been a minor revolution in the New Zealand market. Service is now what matters, not who has the loudest voice or shiniest adverts.
If you analyse the USA market, AT&T has almost completed reassembling itself, minus that pesky "universal service" obligation and managed to cement a tighter monopoly on lineside while they were at it. It takes regulators with some cajones to break this trend.
(*) When the incumbent was turned into a state-run company (previously a govt department) it was split into 7 regional operating companies and 1 mobile company, baby-bell style. Within 24 months of them being sold off to Ameritech+Bell Atlantic it had reassembled itself Borg-style and proceeded to rape/pillage on price and access for 20 years, even after the Bells quit their shareholding.
(**) The incumbent was forced to provide LLU and given targets to hit. They didn't and were clearly dragging their feet. After divesting the lines company, those LLU targets were hit extremely quickly because the new company didn't just provide LLU, it actively went out and sought LLU customers - and THAT is the lesson to be taken home about the difference between forcing the incumbent to provide LLU (even as a separate business unit) and cleaving the lines side off into its own separate company without shared management.
I'm not dissing their abilities, but 90%+ of the population are held at starvation level and the primary reason people join the NKPA is so that they and their families will get fed.
The NK's greatest achievements so far have been the ability to counterfeit currencies in economy-destabilising volumes and to produce 95%+ of the world's supply of methamphetamines - and contrary to popular belief it's not the chinese assisting them on this, it's the Russians, via their 30-mile-wide border with the country (most shipping is interdicted enough that it's not practical for them to try smuggling out via sea).
The chinese tolerate NK, but would prefer the leadership was gone. They cut off oil and power exports to NK for 4 months during 2013 and it's clear their biggest fear isn't military, but the thought of millions of NK refugees pouring across the border if there's a regime change.
One of the problems with the hacker/cracker thing is that to the wider USA population "cracker" is a racist insult, so it will never take root as a media term.
It'd take a lot of effort but it might be possible to get the "skiddie" meme circulating in the media.
The iranians and the cubans wont' be the boogeymonsters for much longer.
The USG needs a new boogeymonster to keep the population cowering(*). Can't use the Middle east anymore...
If anyone actually believes NK is behind the attacks, they're naive as all hell. (Although the NKs are making out like bandits on the accusations). The language structure, graphics used and name the attackers chose all point to a domestic USA origin.
(*) As long as the federal US govt stays on a war footing, they don't have to devolve power back to individual states. Therefore the federal USG benefits from having a revolving-door set of "foreign enemies" to point at. They've been flailing around increasingly desperately for such enemies since the end of the Cold War.
The NSA's input into the original DES password crypto stuff bears looking at. They managed to prevent a whole block of cyphers being used in the 1970s and it wasn't until the late 1990s that civilian researchers found out how borken that particular set was.
In that case the NSA was _shoring up_ crypto, not breaking it down.
Back in the late 1990s, I needed to explain how public key crypto (pgp-style) worked to one of my elderly customers. His response: "Oh ok. We were using that stuff in the late 1940s" - it turned out he was a military comms expert during/just after WW2 and still bound by secrecy laws about what he'd worked on.
These organisations missed out on patent royalties because such methods were considered so far "above top secret" that they couldn't afford to admit they even existed until well after civilians had rediscovered the methods.
It's entirely possible that the NSA (or whatever agency has replaced them - the fact their existence is public virtually ensures there's a new secret one which has replaces it) has broken many common crypto methods, but no govt would admit that and they certainly wouldn't pass such information down to lower levels orgs such as the FBI or LEOs.
"Early systems were stretching their embedded 386 just to handle the protocol messages."
SS7 existed before the 8088 was a twinkle in Intel's eye, let alone "386s"
FWIW it wasn't blue boxes or Captain Crunch that drove SS7 - it existed before all that stuff happened.
The driver for SS7 was digitisation of the phone system, which started in the early 1960s. Having worked on analog transmission and multiplexing systems, with their hundred of thousands of exquisitely tuned quartz crystal blocks and experienced the fragility of such networks (not to mention the analog noise added at every step along the chain), it was a good thing.
On-the-fly encryption was a pipe dream back then. Scambling as it was, consisted of slicing up the audio band and jumbling it across carriers, then unjumbling at the other end and it always had nasty artifacts.
Access was expensive and usually tied to state-sanctioned monopolies (even the bells were state sanctioned).
That all started to fall apart form the mid 1980s onwards, but SS7 specs were never updated - the old "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality falls apart when something works as designed but is trivially subverted.
Govt players don't need to break into SS7. All they need is a warrant to plug into the telco's "snoop port". Hollywood style line tapping is something that hasn't existed for 40+ years.
and the the entire planet's phone routing system for that matter.
Is that it explicitly assumes that only those who are trusted have access to the network at that level.
That assumption has been blown apart time and time again.
Hijacked phone ranges were a problem in the 1990s well before the problem of hijacked IP netblocks started being noticed and defended against on the Internet - and they're still a problem which isn't defended against.
SS7 attacks have been around a long time and telcos won't do anything about it because it's not economically worthwhile.
As with railway companies being legally forced to put adequate braking systems on trains, telcos will only take action on these issues when legislation forces them to.
You can only be in contempt of court if you breach a court order. Holding the law in contempt is another matter
The interesting part would be to obtain a court order prohibiting XYZ police department from arresting people for filming them or deleting evidence.
The reason for it being "interesting" is that someone in contempt is usually held in the courtroom cells and can be held indefnitely without trial (they get pulled out periodically to face the judge, who decides if they are still in contempt at his/her personal discretion).
The main point of all these stories is that the USA doesn't actually have a police service, it has a bunch of area paramilitaries who are not held accountable for their activities at a state/federal level - just ilke any number of shitty 3rd world dictatorships.
"The answer isn't to go from zero to "jail" in 15 seconds for something that is most likely due to piss-poor training."
They have already had "training" and warnings that what they are doing is illegal.
Beyond that point, if the practice continues it IS time to go from "zero to jail" as you put it. Anything else proves to the rest of the police that they really are immune to the rule of law.
Yes, they should be charged and more miportantly, they've proven they do not have the trustworthiness to _ever_ be employed as police again.
In other countries police who get fired for illegal behaviour end up on national blacklists. It is rather telling that the USA does not have such things.
Falcon XX superheavy (or equivalents) would indeed be up to the job _for exploration trips_ - although getting back from Mars in the same time period would be problematic.
For anything other than "sending 3-6 humans and their supplies", you'd need a fleet of them, which simply isn't practical - and sending that few people to explore means very little will get done that couldn't be done better, faster with much cheaper robots.
In a market with free choice (and despite the noise, there IS free choice in the search engine market) , people use Google because they trust it. If they stop trusting, they go elsewhere.
The same applies to DNSBLs.
Hollywood and the "entertainment industry" are so far removed from reality that they don't realise they're tiny fish in a big pond and annoying the big fish too much _will_ result in their being removed from the pond.
All it would take is Comcast accountants pointing out that they can make far more money from allowing customers to "pirate" than from allowing Universal to continue particpating in these attacks on those same customers.
It's worth noting that in 1999 in Australia/New Zealand, APRA (The australasian performing rights association) came up with a proposal that ISPs would be allowed to let their customers download anything they wanted for a flat payment of $1 per customer, per year. Many smaller ISPs were fully in favour of this, whilst the large-telco ones opposed it on "cost grounds". The recording industry managed to block the proposal.
This data points to the fact that there _are_ workable models which result in copyright holders being paid - the problem for the MPAA and RIAA and friends is that it results in a loss of "control" of what goes where - essentially a breakup of the world's copyrigth cartels - and that's what scares them more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey now, I already block ads and I definitely do give a shit"
Ad blocking to stop it cluttering your screen (or sucking bandwidth) is worthwhile, but it also tells the websites you're adblocking.
Adblockers which click on every single ad and follow links and generally fuck with statistics do far more damage to advertising models than adblockers, if you have the bandwidth.
As I'm not bandwidth limited, I'm leaning toward the latter than the former.
Of course they do.
A multi-page article gets more ad impressions.
"I'm a bit surprised you've encountered Tier 2 or Tier 3 who bounce it back."
The ISPs in question are all UK-based:
Talktalk
British Telecom
Orange.
Unsurprisingly they're the ISPs with the largest advertising budgets AND bottom of customer satisfaction stakes.
Whilst the UK has LLU, the reality is that the "big 7" ISPs are all awful and people aren't really aware there are alternatives.
Additionally they've been heavily sold ISP-based email addreses which act as "lockin" devices. They don't seem to realise they can trivially setup a freemail account and direct all their friends to that.
Real VIPs don't need cards. People know who they are already.
"Once it hists the Tier 1 or Tier 2, they're not going to bounce it back down to Tier 1 to walk through all the menus of irrelvavant support questions again."
I can think of (and have experienced) outfits where they do just that.
A&A are extremely good, but they're also expensive (I move 3-4TB/month).
If anyone actually needed to say shibboleet to them I'd be extremely surprised.
"But the state of customer service is what it is because people generally aren't willing to pay for more."
Even if they're willing to pay more: In most locations the choices are Comcast or Comcast.
That's no incentive to keep prices low OR to provide decent customer service. Monopolies naturally tend to "shaft the customer" attitudes.
The irony is that PUCs - setup to prevent that kind of issue - are aiding and abetting this kind of thing.
I eat fresh baby chickens every morning.
"Personally I think a better way to handle such natural monopolies might be to separate infrastructure from service: There's one power line company, one dataline company, one waterline company, etc"
As long as FRAND-type rules are enforced, this does work. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This was effectively forcibly spun out of the incumbent telco(*)(**) after 2 decades of predatory/monopolist behaviour and effectively transformed New Zealand out of the "Hostile telecommunications environment" that's put off business activity for years (foreign companies wouldn't invest in NZ if they needed big infrastructure and local ones would move out of the country once they got to any decent size)
One of the first effects has been that access to all the ducts in the ground are now being leased out to cable companies and telcos which in the past were direct competitors to the incumbent and therefore refused access. You can get dark fibre now too, which was previously impossible.
The result has been a minor revolution in the New Zealand market. Service is now what matters, not who has the loudest voice or shiniest adverts.
If you analyse the USA market, AT&T has almost completed reassembling itself, minus that pesky "universal service" obligation and managed to cement a tighter monopoly on lineside while they were at it. It takes regulators with some cajones to break this trend.
(*) When the incumbent was turned into a state-run company (previously a govt department) it was split into 7 regional operating companies and 1 mobile company, baby-bell style. Within 24 months of them being sold off to Ameritech+Bell Atlantic it had reassembled itself Borg-style and proceeded to rape/pillage on price and access for 20 years, even after the Bells quit their shareholding.
(**) The incumbent was forced to provide LLU and given targets to hit. They didn't and were clearly dragging their feet. After divesting the lines company, those LLU targets were hit extremely quickly because the new company didn't just provide LLU, it actively went out and sought LLU customers - and THAT is the lesson to be taken home about the difference between forcing the incumbent to provide LLU (even as a separate business unit) and cleaving the lines side off into its own separate company without shared management.
The movie would have bombed financially. Pulling it and blaming the attackers was an easy way out.
"North Korea has built compact nuclear warheads"
which fizzled
"put satellites in orbit,"
Which no other nation was able to track in orbit
I'm not dissing their abilities, but 90%+ of the population are held at starvation level and the primary reason people join the NKPA is so that they and their families will get fed.
The NK's greatest achievements so far have been the ability to counterfeit currencies in economy-destabilising volumes and to produce 95%+ of the world's supply of methamphetamines - and contrary to popular belief it's not the chinese assisting them on this, it's the Russians, via their 30-mile-wide border with the country (most shipping is interdicted enough that it's not practical for them to try smuggling out via sea).
The chinese tolerate NK, but would prefer the leadership was gone. They cut off oil and power exports to NK for 4 months during 2013 and it's clear their biggest fear isn't military, but the thought of millions of NK refugees pouring across the border if there's a regime change.
One of the problems with the hacker/cracker thing is that to the wider USA population "cracker" is a racist insult, so it will never take root as a media term.
It'd take a lot of effort but it might be possible to get the "skiddie" meme circulating in the media.
The iranians and the cubans wont' be the boogeymonsters for much longer.
The USG needs a new boogeymonster to keep the population cowering(*). Can't use the Middle east anymore...
If anyone actually believes NK is behind the attacks, they're naive as all hell. (Although the NKs are making out like bandits on the accusations). The language structure, graphics used and name the attackers chose all point to a domestic USA origin.
(*) As long as the federal US govt stays on a war footing, they don't have to devolve power back to individual states. Therefore the federal USG benefits from having a revolving-door set of "foreign enemies" to point at. They've been flailing around increasingly desperately for such enemies since the end of the Cold War.
A couple of anecdotes:
The NSA's input into the original DES password crypto stuff bears looking at. They managed to prevent a whole block of cyphers being used in the 1970s and it wasn't until the late 1990s that civilian researchers found out how borken that particular set was.
In that case the NSA was _shoring up_ crypto, not breaking it down.
Back in the late 1990s, I needed to explain how public key crypto (pgp-style) worked to one of my elderly customers.
His response: "Oh ok. We were using that stuff in the late 1940s" - it turned out he was a military comms expert during/just after WW2 and still bound by secrecy laws about what he'd worked on.
These organisations missed out on patent royalties because such methods were considered so far "above top secret" that they couldn't afford to admit they even existed until well after civilians had rediscovered the methods.
It's entirely possible that the NSA (or whatever agency has replaced them - the fact their existence is public virtually ensures there's a new secret one which has replaces it) has broken many common crypto methods, but no govt would admit that and they certainly wouldn't pass such information down to lower levels orgs such as the FBI or LEOs.
"Early systems were stretching their embedded 386 just to handle the protocol messages."
SS7 existed before the 8088 was a twinkle in Intel's eye, let alone "386s"
FWIW it wasn't blue boxes or Captain Crunch that drove SS7 - it existed before all that stuff happened.
The driver for SS7 was digitisation of the phone system, which started in the early 1960s. Having worked on analog transmission and multiplexing systems, with their hundred of thousands of exquisitely tuned quartz crystal blocks and experienced the fragility of such networks (not to mention the analog noise added at every step along the chain), it was a good thing.
On-the-fly encryption was a pipe dream back then. Scambling as it was, consisted of slicing up the audio band and jumbling it across carriers, then unjumbling at the other end and it always had nasty artifacts.
Access was expensive and usually tied to state-sanctioned monopolies (even the bells were state sanctioned).
That all started to fall apart form the mid 1980s onwards, but SS7 specs were never updated - the old "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality falls apart when something works as designed but is trivially subverted.
Govt players don't need to break into SS7. All they need is a warrant to plug into the telco's "snoop port". Hollywood style line tapping is something that hasn't existed for 40+ years.
and the the entire planet's phone routing system for that matter.
Is that it explicitly assumes that only those who are trusted have access to the network at that level.
That assumption has been blown apart time and time again.
Hijacked phone ranges were a problem in the 1990s well before the problem of hijacked IP netblocks started being noticed and defended against on the Internet - and they're still a problem which isn't defended against.
SS7 attacks have been around a long time and telcos won't do anything about it because it's not economically worthwhile.
As with railway companies being legally forced to put adequate braking systems on trains, telcos will only take action on these issues when legislation forces them to.
"the real simple solution is a simple increase in the gas tax by a thumping amount,"
Or properly reinstate the public transport system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The DA is the president of a police organization that was helping fund Wilson's defense."
I'm pretty sure that fact wasn't disclosed to the GJ
In civilised countries that level of conflict of interest would result in a mistrial declaration on appeal AND the DA facing criminal charges himself.
The partial answer in the USA would be to make this kind of activity a _federal_ crime.
"At the very least they are in contempt of court"
You can only be in contempt of court if you breach a court order. Holding the law in contempt is another matter
The interesting part would be to obtain a court order prohibiting XYZ police department from arresting people for filming them or deleting evidence.
The reason for it being "interesting" is that someone in contempt is usually held in the courtroom cells and can be held indefnitely without trial (they get pulled out periodically to face the judge, who decides if they are still in contempt at his/her personal discretion).
The main point of all these stories is that the USA doesn't actually have a police service, it has a bunch of area paramilitaries who are not held accountable for their activities at a state/federal level - just ilke any number of shitty 3rd world dictatorships.
"The answer isn't to go from zero to "jail" in 15 seconds for something that is most likely due to piss-poor training."
They have already had "training" and warnings that what they are doing is illegal.
Beyond that point, if the practice continues it IS time to go from "zero to jail" as you put it. Anything else proves to the rest of the police that they really are immune to the rule of law.
"The police are under assault"
No, they're under increased observation - and they don't like it. It's making them accountable for their actions.
A crime has been committed - false arrest.
Yes, they should be charged and more miportantly, they've proven they do not have the trustworthiness to _ever_ be employed as police again.
In other countries police who get fired for illegal behaviour end up on national blacklists. It is rather telling that the USA does not have such things.
Falcon XX superheavy (or equivalents) would indeed be up to the job _for exploration trips_ - although getting back from Mars in the same time period would be problematic.
For anything other than "sending 3-6 humans and their supplies", you'd need a fleet of them, which simply isn't practical - and sending that few people to explore means very little will get done that couldn't be done better, faster with much cheaper robots.
Not at all.
In a market with free choice (and despite the noise, there IS free choice in the search engine market) , people use Google because they trust it. If they stop trusting, they go elsewhere.
The same applies to DNSBLs.
Hollywood and the "entertainment industry" are so far removed from reality that they don't realise they're tiny fish in a big pond and annoying the big fish too much _will_ result in their being removed from the pond.
All it would take is Comcast accountants pointing out that they can make far more money from allowing customers to "pirate" than from allowing Universal to continue particpating in these attacks on those same customers.
It's worth noting that in 1999 in Australia/New Zealand, APRA (The australasian performing rights association) came up with a proposal that ISPs would be allowed to let their customers download anything they wanted for a flat payment of $1 per customer, per year. Many smaller ISPs were fully in favour of this, whilst the large-telco ones opposed it on "cost grounds". The recording industry managed to block the proposal.
This data points to the fact that there _are_ workable models which result in copyright holders being paid - the problem for the MPAA and RIAA and friends is that it results in a loss of "control" of what goes where - essentially a breakup of the world's copyrigth cartels - and that's what scares them more than anything else.