You can sue anyone. That person might end up winning the lawsuit, but that doesn't mean that they weren't sued. And beyond that, they had to spend time and money to defend themselves, so it's not at all reasonable to pretend that if they won the lawsuit it was identical to it not happening.
Particularly given the FISA Court's nearly 100% history of agreeing to anything requested by the prosecution, it's comforting that the ultimate control over data privacy doesn't rest with the courts. If the judiciary were truly independent, as they much more used to be, I'd be more comfortable trusting the courts to balance the interests of the prosecution and the accused.
Apple's using "thin" as a measure of engineering excellence. That is, they are engineering all sorts of tricky things, like special display stacking and chip arrangement techniques, in order to make their phones ever thinner. And, of course, thinner = more elegant, lighter and more convenient.
It's a bit like how Intel focused on clock speed as their key goal, and spent a fortune optimizing their clock speeds (with chip design tools optimized for clock speed, etc.).
In both cases, people who didn't care about that metric saw it as wasted effort, and argued that the companies were being stupid. But in both cases, by focusing on a clear goal they focused their engineering teams on, and delivered, ever improving products, and they gave consumers something that they cared about, even if the people doing the complaining didn't.
Apple never ships technology first - they take emergent technologies and push them into the mainstream. 3" floppy disks, mice, GUIs, USB, LANs, networked printers, MP3 players, DVD burners, smartphones, digital music stores, tablet computers, etc., all existed before Apple's versions, but they generally kinda sucked to use. Apple took the technology, make it more usable, and delivered it in mainstream consumer devices. So now they're trying to do the same thing with digital wallets and smart watches. Do you really want to bet against them?
With Apple Pay, the current digital wallets really suck, and Apple's got all the right players aligned, with what looks like great usability and security, so it might really win big.
With the Apple Watch, Pebble and Google have decent products, so it's not as clear a path to success - I'd bet that Apple makes a good business out of it, but don't dominate.
This proposal just serves to muddy the clear definition of the role of an ISP, and they can then use that ambiguity to create problems and extract more revenue by charging to fix their problems. It's critical that there be a clear definition of an ISPs role in the network, and the IETF has maintained those clear distinctions for decades now. Let's not let the business deal-makers muck things up!
Perhaps you should have done more research than 5 seconds in Google.
Democrat donors are at the top of the list of reported donations because they are more likely to report their donations. The whole point of how the Koch brothers route their money, and money funneled through their network of PACs, "think tanks", etc., is to hide the fact that they are funding it, so that their organizations all sound like "independent" supports of the Koch agenda. So they route it through "non-profits" or by providing non-cash benefits (e.g. providing a free vacation / educational conference), and of course pumping a fortune into "independent" issue campaigns, which are unregulated and whose funding sources are largely unreported. And, of course, the un-reported money flow is much larger than the reported money flow.
And you really can't equate the two.
In terms of assets, the Koch Brothers have 20x as much as Soros. So that's not even close.
And in terms of tactics, the Soros' political donations are well documented and transparent - be is open about what he supports, and he lobbies and promotes it in an open fashion. The Koch Brothers' money flow is generally hidden, and goes to subversive organizations like ALEC that literally write legislation, give it to legislators, who they give free vacations and political donations to, and has them pass it, sometimes literally in the middle of the night behind locked doors so nobody can see what they're doing. So you can't equate their tactics.
All the law does is increase the cost/effort of reselling stolen phones. It's impossible, as with any security measure, to prevent anything 100% of the time. But if you make it more complex/expensive, it discourages the attack because criminals will move on to easier/more rewarding targets.
CA is big enough that manufacturers will do what it takes to sell there. If they manufacture cars for CA, with separate *hardware*, then they can easily make phones for CA, where it's a trivial software configuration difference.
In the 'old days' hacking was about learning and proving coolness (e.g. by breaking into something and proving it, but doing no damage because that's not cool). These days much of it is about money. Either way, there's not much reason to go brick a bunch of phones randomly - you'd just piss off a lot of people, leading to arrests when the figure out who did it.
It's what CarPlay does. Which apps Apple approves is up to Apple, though they showed about a dozen apps on the web page and invited inquiries, so it doesn't feel like they're aiming at "a few carefully selected partners". The language on the page is about apps being well designed not to distract users from the road.
The Koch brothers get criticized a lot because they're secretive billionaires with a political agenda, who pump their fortune into the US political system through sneaky means on a massive scale, funneling their money through hundreds of "anonymous" groups so that it's difficult to trace, writing legislation to promote their agenda and businesses, and trying to get it passed when nobody is looking, and generally doing their best to subvert the democratic process. Oddly enough, the vast majority of Americans don't approve of their methods, and don't agree with their agenda, so their behavior generates criticism when it's discovered.
And don't think for a minute that Republicans don't expand government - when they're in charge, they expand the government, and run up spending and debt, faster than Democrats. They just like spending money on different things than Democrats - wars and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, for example, rather than education and infrastructure. That and they like to regulate people's private lives a lot more than Democrats, while Democrats prefer personal liberties and regulating businesses.
It's not just dropping packages. ISPs can come up with all sorts of ways to distort traffic to extract more revenue, which can be far more subtle (and evil) than selectively dropping packages. For example, when customers try to go to Google, the ISP could send them to Bing (for a kickback), or rewrite Amazon affiliate tags so all Amazon purchases pay a percentage of the ISP. These aren't hypothetical - look at what wireless cell phone companies do to their customers and to content providers - it's a nightmare - and ask yourself why they haven't done the same thing to the internet? And if there aren't any rules enforcing good behavior, ask yourself how long those companies good behavior will last in the face of the opportunity for increased profits?
And do those arguing that they don't want the FCC "regulating" the internet, ask yourself what happens to the internet if there aren't any rules, but all participants start breaking everything possible in order to extract fees?
Note that the car companies care about compatability, and there's a while ecosystem built around using cigarette lighters into cars. That's why they're all over minivans - they're no longer for cigarettes, they're now the standard car power plugs.:-)
That being said, cars are starting to get USB jacks. That's a good thing. But car technology changes slowly, for good reasons - if they put something into millions of consumer cars, people have to live with it for many years, so they are cautious about making changes.
I'd think that as a part of integrating iPhones/Lightning cables into cars, Apple would have to commit to supporting the technology for 5+ years, with backwards compatibility, so that people could plug their phones 5 years from now into the car that they buy now and have it "just work". Both the car companies and Apple care about that. Google too, most likely.
Except for power, of course. Plug in a phone into a cable and it's got high speed data and power. Connect a phone via bluetooth and it's got decent speed data but a power drain.
For nuclear power, there's a similar argument to military - do you want your key infrastructure to be dependent on a supply chain that's not under your control? Imagine, for example, that key components come from China or Korea, and those countries decide to cut us off so we can't get repair parts. That could (eventually) force the US to have to either operate unsafely or shut down power plants.
This isn't theoretical - the US has done exactly this to cut off allies who became enemies, grounding their airplanes, shutting down their nuclear power plants, screwing up their telecommunications, etc.
I was replying to the comment that said "Let's not hamstring projects with a feel good but impractical 'Buy American' requirement. That's the main reason for military gear being so overpriced. If Korea, Japan or China can get components to us faster, more power to them.".
For civilian products, using whoever is most competitive can make sense (though our policy of paying companies to decimate their US manufacturing and engineering capability is stupid). But for military systems in particular, outsourcing to China or Korea is a fantastically bad idea. Even if it costs more, it's worth it to maintain control over the supply chain because the risk of not doing so is unacceptable.
Having your military supply chain depend on countries that you might be fighting against is a terrible plan. It's also in the national interest for the US to retain engineering and manufacturing capabilities. And, of course there's the possibility that they embed controls into the devices that they sell us, the way the NSA pre-hacked hardware being sold by US companies only in the other direction.
There's plenty of legal p2p traffic. Almost all large videogames, particularly MMORPGs, use p2p to deliver installers and updates. At Pando, what we found was that not only were the economics much better, but the successful download percentage for managed p2p downloads, measured by people completing the download and getting the game installed and running, was MUCH higher for p2p downloads than HTTP downloads. It's pretty easy to see why - p2p protocols detect and correct for errors, and are quite persistent at getting people correct data, and are engineered to move huge files, while HTTP was never really intended to move single files the size of a modern MMORPG.
Perhaps I should explain - the Pando P2P network delivered guaranteed throughput by using both traditional CDN and P2P networking. For example, if a video stream has a target of 1 mbps rate, and it's getting 700 kbps from peers, it'll pull the remaining 300 kbps from a CDN. This reduces the CDN deliver volume (and cost) by 70%. And it turns out that when peers can pull from thousands of other peers, the comulative delivery rate can often exceed the traditional CDN delivery rate, and it's generally more resilient to networking issues, because an issue that might throttle or stall a single stream, such as a congested router, often won't affect other streams in parallel because they're independent routes.
The 80% was actually measured in a test run in partnership with a number of major ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, Telefonica, AT&T, etc.). We captured all p2p data transfer volumes, then analyzed them to analyze the network data flows, and compared a number of different peer allocation algorithms. Peer assignment that is aware of network topology did, in fact, reduce inter-ISP traffic volumes by 80%. And by rather more on the ISPs that provide symmetric bandwidth, because peers within an ISPs network can exchange data faster than with peers outside the ISP network.
IMO, it's Verizon (finally) getting smart and taking advantage of their superior fiber network, giving their customers symmetric bandwidth that cable providers can't provide. Cable companies built a cheaper infrastructure, that physically can't provide as much uplink as downlink. So if Verizon can get people to value symmetric bandwidth, instead of just downlink, suddenly they have the winning network!
Start watching movies in HD (Apple TV, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video) and it'll consume any connection. Then have each of your kids watch their own video streams in their rooms...
I built that network (Pando Networks) a few years ago. The content companies were generally pretty slow to adopt p2p technology, but game companies are all over it. One pleasant aspect was that the advantage of p2p wasn't just economics, though those were great, it was performance. Because downloading from dozens of sources is much more resilient, and on good networks more performant, than downloading from one source. And, with an intelligent network, it could connect you with peers that are close to you in the network, reducing network congestion at the interconnects by 80%. When we ran a large scale test across all the major ISPs, we in fact saw that p2p clients were able to reduce inter-ISP data exchanges (for the p2p network) by 80%, simply through intelligent peer selection, which ISPs loved, and download performance was better, which downloaders loved.
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You can sue anyone. That person might end up winning the lawsuit, but that doesn't mean that they weren't sued. And beyond that, they had to spend time and money to defend themselves, so it's not at all reasonable to pretend that if they won the lawsuit it was identical to it not happening.
Particularly given the FISA Court's nearly 100% history of agreeing to anything requested by the prosecution, it's comforting that the ultimate control over data privacy doesn't rest with the courts. If the judiciary were truly independent, as they much more used to be, I'd be more comfortable trusting the courts to balance the interests of the prosecution and the accused.
Apple's using "thin" as a measure of engineering excellence. That is, they are engineering all sorts of tricky things, like special display stacking and chip arrangement techniques, in order to make their phones ever thinner. And, of course, thinner = more elegant, lighter and more convenient.
It's a bit like how Intel focused on clock speed as their key goal, and spent a fortune optimizing their clock speeds (with chip design tools optimized for clock speed, etc.).
In both cases, people who didn't care about that metric saw it as wasted effort, and argued that the companies were being stupid. But in both cases, by focusing on a clear goal they focused their engineering teams on, and delivered, ever improving products, and they gave consumers something that they cared about, even if the people doing the complaining didn't.
Apple never ships technology first - they take emergent technologies and push them into the mainstream. 3" floppy disks, mice, GUIs, USB, LANs, networked printers, MP3 players, DVD burners, smartphones, digital music stores, tablet computers, etc., all existed before Apple's versions, but they generally kinda sucked to use. Apple took the technology, make it more usable, and delivered it in mainstream consumer devices. So now they're trying to do the same thing with digital wallets and smart watches. Do you really want to bet against them?
With Apple Pay, the current digital wallets really suck, and Apple's got all the right players aligned, with what looks like great usability and security, so it might really win big.
With the Apple Watch, Pebble and Google have decent products, so it's not as clear a path to success - I'd bet that Apple makes a good business out of it, but don't dominate.
This proposal just serves to muddy the clear definition of the role of an ISP, and they can then use that ambiguity to create problems and extract more revenue by charging to fix their problems. It's critical that there be a clear definition of an ISPs role in the network, and the IETF has maintained those clear distinctions for decades now. Let's not let the business deal-makers muck things up!
Perhaps you should have done more research than 5 seconds in Google.
Democrat donors are at the top of the list of reported donations because they are more likely to report their donations. The whole point of how the Koch brothers route their money, and money funneled through their network of PACs, "think tanks", etc., is to hide the fact that they are funding it, so that their organizations all sound like "independent" supports of the Koch agenda. So they route it through "non-profits" or by providing non-cash benefits (e.g. providing a free vacation / educational conference), and of course pumping a fortune into "independent" issue campaigns, which are unregulated and whose funding sources are largely unreported. And, of course, the un-reported money flow is much larger than the reported money flow.
And you really can't equate the two.
In terms of assets, the Koch Brothers have 20x as much as Soros. So that's not even close.
And in terms of tactics, the Soros' political donations are well documented and transparent - be is open about what he supports, and he lobbies and promotes it in an open fashion. The Koch Brothers' money flow is generally hidden, and goes to subversive organizations like ALEC that literally write legislation, give it to legislators, who they give free vacations and political donations to, and has them pass it, sometimes literally in the middle of the night behind locked doors so nobody can see what they're doing. So you can't equate their tactics.
All the law does is increase the cost/effort of reselling stolen phones. It's impossible, as with any security measure, to prevent anything 100% of the time. But if you make it more complex/expensive, it discourages the attack because criminals will move on to easier/more rewarding targets.
The law doesn't give the state the ability to do a remote wipe, it gives the *owner* that ability. See the difference?
CA is big enough that manufacturers will do what it takes to sell there. If they manufacture cars for CA, with separate *hardware*, then they can easily make phones for CA, where it's a trivial software configuration difference.
In the 'old days' hacking was about learning and proving coolness (e.g. by breaking into something and proving it, but doing no damage because that's not cool). These days much of it is about money. Either way, there's not much reason to go brick a bunch of phones randomly - you'd just piss off a lot of people, leading to arrests when the figure out who did it.
It's what CarPlay does. Which apps Apple approves is up to Apple, though they showed about a dozen apps on the web page and invited inquiries, so it doesn't feel like they're aiming at "a few carefully selected partners". The language on the page is about apps being well designed not to distract users from the road.
The Koch brothers get criticized a lot because they're secretive billionaires with a political agenda, who pump their fortune into the US political system through sneaky means on a massive scale, funneling their money through hundreds of "anonymous" groups so that it's difficult to trace, writing legislation to promote their agenda and businesses, and trying to get it passed when nobody is looking, and generally doing their best to subvert the democratic process. Oddly enough, the vast majority of Americans don't approve of their methods, and don't agree with their agenda, so their behavior generates criticism when it's discovered.
And don't think for a minute that Republicans don't expand government - when they're in charge, they expand the government, and run up spending and debt, faster than Democrats. They just like spending money on different things than Democrats - wars and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, for example, rather than education and infrastructure. That and they like to regulate people's private lives a lot more than Democrats, while Democrats prefer personal liberties and regulating businesses.
It's not just dropping packages. ISPs can come up with all sorts of ways to distort traffic to extract more revenue, which can be far more subtle (and evil) than selectively dropping packages. For example, when customers try to go to Google, the ISP could send them to Bing (for a kickback), or rewrite Amazon affiliate tags so all Amazon purchases pay a percentage of the ISP. These aren't hypothetical - look at what wireless cell phone companies do to their customers and to content providers - it's a nightmare - and ask yourself why they haven't done the same thing to the internet? And if there aren't any rules enforcing good behavior, ask yourself how long those companies good behavior will last in the face of the opportunity for increased profits?
And do those arguing that they don't want the FCC "regulating" the internet, ask yourself what happens to the internet if there aren't any rules, but all participants start breaking everything possible in order to extract fees?
Note that the car companies care about compatability, and there's a while ecosystem built around using cigarette lighters into cars. That's why they're all over minivans - they're no longer for cigarettes, they're now the standard car power plugs. :-)
That being said, cars are starting to get USB jacks. That's a good thing. But car technology changes slowly, for good reasons - if they put something into millions of consumer cars, people have to live with it for many years, so they are cautious about making changes.
I'd think that as a part of integrating iPhones/Lightning cables into cars, Apple would have to commit to supporting the technology for 5+ years, with backwards compatibility, so that people could plug their phones 5 years from now into the car that they buy now and have it "just work". Both the car companies and Apple care about that. Google too, most likely.
Except for power, of course. Plug in a phone into a cable and it's got high speed data and power. Connect a phone via bluetooth and it's got decent speed data but a power drain.
Apps that run on phones are fantastic for in-car use: Waze, NextExit, GasBuddy, etc.
They just want to be on a larger display, and integrated with the driver's controls.
Which, amazingly enough, is what CarPlay does.
For nuclear power, there's a similar argument to military - do you want your key infrastructure to be dependent on a supply chain that's not under your control? Imagine, for example, that key components come from China or Korea, and those countries decide to cut us off so we can't get repair parts. That could (eventually) force the US to have to either operate unsafely or shut down power plants.
This isn't theoretical - the US has done exactly this to cut off allies who became enemies, grounding their airplanes, shutting down their nuclear power plants, screwing up their telecommunications, etc.
I was replying to the comment that said "Let's not hamstring projects with a feel good but impractical 'Buy American' requirement. That's the main reason for military gear being so overpriced. If Korea, Japan or China can get components to us faster, more power to them.".
For civilian products, using whoever is most competitive can make sense (though our policy of paying companies to decimate their US manufacturing and engineering capability is stupid). But for military systems in particular, outsourcing to China or Korea is a fantastically bad idea. Even if it costs more, it's worth it to maintain control over the supply chain because the risk of not doing so is unacceptable.
Having your military supply chain depend on countries that you might be fighting against is a terrible plan. It's also in the national interest for the US to retain engineering and manufacturing capabilities. And, of course there's the possibility that they embed controls into the devices that they sell us, the way the NSA pre-hacked hardware being sold by US companies only in the other direction.
So really, it kinda does matter.
There's plenty of legal p2p traffic. Almost all large videogames, particularly MMORPGs, use p2p to deliver installers and updates. At Pando, what we found was that not only were the economics much better, but the successful download percentage for managed p2p downloads, measured by people completing the download and getting the game installed and running, was MUCH higher for p2p downloads than HTTP downloads. It's pretty easy to see why - p2p protocols detect and correct for errors, and are quite persistent at getting people correct data, and are engineered to move huge files, while HTTP was never really intended to move single files the size of a modern MMORPG.
Perhaps I should explain - the Pando P2P network delivered guaranteed throughput by using both traditional CDN and P2P networking. For example, if a video stream has a target of 1 mbps rate, and it's getting 700 kbps from peers, it'll pull the remaining 300 kbps from a CDN. This reduces the CDN deliver volume (and cost) by 70%. And it turns out that when peers can pull from thousands of other peers, the comulative delivery rate can often exceed the traditional CDN delivery rate, and it's generally more resilient to networking issues, because an issue that might throttle or stall a single stream, such as a congested router, often won't affect other streams in parallel because they're independent routes.
The 80% was actually measured in a test run in partnership with a number of major ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, Telefonica, AT&T, etc.). We captured all p2p data transfer volumes, then analyzed them to analyze the network data flows, and compared a number of different peer allocation algorithms. Peer assignment that is aware of network topology did, in fact, reduce inter-ISP traffic volumes by 80%. And by rather more on the ISPs that provide symmetric bandwidth, because peers within an ISPs network can exchange data faster than with peers outside the ISP network.
More details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... .
IMO, it's Verizon (finally) getting smart and taking advantage of their superior fiber network, giving their customers symmetric bandwidth that cable providers can't provide. Cable companies built a cheaper infrastructure, that physically can't provide as much uplink as downlink. So if Verizon can get people to value symmetric bandwidth, instead of just downlink, suddenly they have the winning network!
Start watching movies in HD (Apple TV, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video) and it'll consume any connection. Then have each of your kids watch their own video streams in their rooms...
I built that network (Pando Networks) a few years ago. The content companies were generally pretty slow to adopt p2p technology, but game companies are all over it. One pleasant aspect was that the advantage of p2p wasn't just economics, though those were great, it was performance. Because downloading from dozens of sources is much more resilient, and on good networks more performant, than downloading from one source. And, with an intelligent network, it could connect you with peers that are close to you in the network, reducing network congestion at the interconnects by 80%. When we ran a large scale test across all the major ISPs, we in fact saw that p2p clients were able to reduce inter-ISP data exchanges (for the p2p network) by 80%, simply through intelligent peer selection, which ISPs loved, and download performance was better, which downloaders loved.
And symmetric fiber networks are awesome at p2p.