Now everyone will be able to say "We support HTML" even though nobody fully supports all aspects of the spec. Just like today,...
Yeah, and the major benefit will be that developers of web sites will no longer waste their time trying to figure out what numbered version to declare in their DOCTYPE line, and pointing their fingers accusingly at browsers that don't support exactly that standard. They'll go right to testing against a flock of more-or-less current browsers (plus IE6;-), and making sure their HTML works somewhat sensibly in all of them.
Fact is, it has never worked very well to study any particular HTML standard and code strictly to that one. Since no browser actually implements that standard, we have always had to test against what passes for the real world, and tweak our HTML so it passes whatever test browsers the gang we're working with has decided to use.
One of my favorite counterexamples has been the ongoing attempts to persuade us to stop using the <center> tag, and replace it with CSS. It's funny to read the various suggested CSS "solutions" for this, then try them out against whatever browsers you've collected, and find that they don't work for some significant subset. Eventually you decide to just shrug and go with the center tag, which works (nearly) everywhere, and is syntactically simple. But lots of developer groups waste a lot of time fighting idiotic things like this, trying to follow some supposed expert's idea of the "right" way to do it, then finally giving up and just going with what seems to work (today).
The HTML "standards" are a mess, in large part due to the fact that the commercial browser developers see little reason to bother implementing even one numbered version correctly. This is helped along by management that has a motive to push for "walled gardens" (like IE6;-) that intentionally ignore or misinterpret part of the standards. This problem isn't going away. The best thing for HTML would be to face it, and work toward documenting what we might call a "real world standard" that is what most browser writers have deigned to implement. This would have to be replete with warnings about the unsolvable incompatibilities, and advice on either avoiding them or finding a workaround that at least displays semi-sensibly everywhere.
But that's probably beyond the purview of any official standards organization. After all, who would want to admit that the standard that you've worked so long at is being intentionally sabotaged by many or most of the commercial world?;-)
And as for ISP's wanting to charge more? Why did you sell me a high speed link if you didn't expect me to actually use it?
They didn't sell you a high-speed link. Try "abusing" it by actually using the bandwidth that you thought you were buying, and watch what happens to your download speed.
They advertised a high-speed link, but that was just to draw in the suckers who believe advertising. If you check the fine print of your contract, you'll find that the advertised service wasn't quite what you're paying for.
So the goal of a non-profit business is to make a profit?
Actually, yes, for some non-profits. They are, of course, expected to funnel those profits into the good works for which they're incorporated.
There are some non-profit corporations that remain non-profit by funneling all their excess money into bonuses and/or perks for their top management. This goes against the reason that "non-profit" status was invented, but it is often unchallenged, especially if a portion of the corporation's profits also goes into campaign contributions to the right politicians' re-election campaigns.
The most notorious cases are the religious "ministries", whose leaders live a lavish tax-free life style at the expense of their non-profit corporations. I suppose there's no need to name names...
Well, I expected that, but I didn't actually know it. It's fairly common for people, especially "social commentators", to use "downloading MP3s" to mean "criminal". Like they use "hacker" to mean "criminal".
Yes, this is a nerd/geek forum, where people often use such terms in their technical sense. I've downloaded linux ISOs, as have many of us, but that doesn't change the fact that to most people (including the management of major ISPs), someone who downloads files by the GByte is ipso facto suspected of criminal behavior. Similarly, the "hacker"/"criminal" inference is based on the common idea that anyone with strong computer expertise is assumed to engage in criminal activity.
If you google for phrases like "MP3 download" or "music download", and look at the results, you'll find that almost all of them are talking about illegal downloading, while never actually saying so. This is because they understand "download" and "copyright violation" to be synonyms. In common speech, "illegal" is an automatic qualifier that need not be stated explicitly before "download".
If we want people to approach such things sensibly, it's probably a good idea to call people on such invalid assumptions whenever they (appear to) make them. The passage I replied to seems to make this mistake, and would be read by most non-geeks as referring to illegal downloading, since "downloading", "copyright violation" and "criminal behavior" are synonyms to them. We should be pointing out the error in such comments when we see them, to try to get people to stop making the implicit connection between downloading and criminality.
Except from IP address, do you know any other way to block someone from accessing your web resources?
Except from IP address, do you know any other way to block someone from accessing your web resources?
Yeah, use cookies.;-)
No, seriously; 99% of the Web's users have never deleted a cookie, and wouldn't know how to do it.
There are growing problems with IP address as an ID number, and not just because we're running out of them. For the last few years, in the US and Europe at least, most "computer" sales have been portables. First laptops, then smaller versions with slightly different names, then tablets and "smart phones". These move around and change their IP address frequently as a result, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. My wife has an iPhone and I have a G1; web testing on both of them quickly showed that successive HTTP requests from them often come from different IP addresses, even when they're sitting still on the desk. So with smart-phones (and probably tablets), the IP address can't even be used short-term to identify a session; it changes on a timescale of seconds. This is using their cell-phone wireless, not wi-fi, of course. But if they use wi-fi, they have the same IP address as the desktop machines in our house. IP address can't be used to distinguish machines behind NAT.
OTOH, my wife has an iMac, on which she has installed virtualization software so she can run MS Windows "for work". The OSX part of her machine accesses the Internet via the above IP address, while the Windows part connects via VPN to work, and has an address from her office's NAT gateway. So that machine has two unrelated IP addresses. This is fairly common in the telecommuting world. It looks and acts like two unrelated machines at two unrelated physical locations. That's what VPN does; it's not a fluke.
There's no chance of any of this changing, until we switch over to IPv6. We should've done this 10 years ago, and it has happened in much of academia, but probably won't happen in the "public" Internet until the business world is dragged kicking and screaming onto IPv6. There's a good chance that nobody alive now will live to see IPv4 phased out.
So cookies are your best bet. I'll let someone else list all the reasons why that doesn't work so well. Any experienced web developer can give you the details.
1. They have tried these sorts of software export regulations before, and it failed miserably before.::cough::RSA::cough::
I still have my RSA "munitions" t-shirt, with the couple lines of perl that implement the RSA algorithm. I never did get to wear it to the airport for an international flight before they finally gave in and made RSA legal. It probably wouldn't have mattered that much, though, since the few international flights I took after I bought the t-shirt were all on foreign airlines like SAS and Finnair.
2. The US government pretty much invented the damned internet, you would think that they would know how it works 3. The insanity of doing the same, ineffective things, over and over again, is generally lost on anyone in government.
The basic problem with both these is that the US government, like any government, isn't an intelligent, thinking being. It's a collection of several million people, no two quite alike. Some of them understand the Internet quite well. Most are typical office drones or politicians who are interested in other things than being a network geek.
In any case, there's an old observation that the intelligence of a group of people is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. There's dispute about just what the inverse function is, because little actual research has been done on the topic. But it is clear that adding people to a group of humans decreases the group's overall intelligence.
Expecting intelligence from a government made up of millions of people is simply unrealistic. The best that can be done is to develop expertise on specific topics, and defer to those experts when making policy decisions. This was done during the development of the ARPAnet/Internet. But policies like the export controls under discussion here are made by politicians, not the government's network geeks. And most of those politicians got their office (directly or by appointment) via a vote of at least several hundred thousand people. This tells you about all you need to know about the likelihood of intelligence in the making of such policies.
So there... take that.... nya nya nya. You don't get to use this cool web browser, unless you jump through some minor hoops to make it work. That will really teach you!
In any case, it's probably basically pointless. The Iranian government has apparently followed the lead of most other Middle-Eastern governments and "standardized" on IE6 and MS Windows. So their computers are probably mostly controlled by the competing botnets run from a long list of other countries.
Actually, I'd suspect that the reason the US government has given google a hard time is that google hasn't cooperated with the usual (i.e., Microsoft) practice of accepting US government add-ons to the software for selected clients. But don't anyone tell the Iranian government about this. We wouldn't want them getting all paranoid, y'know.
(My wife, who has studied Arabic for some years, is constantly grumbling about how most of the online stuff for learning or using Arabic, and most Arabic-script web sites, only work with IE. She hates having to install such crappy, malware-infested software just to read news sources in the original language. The same is reported to be true of Farsi, though we haven't personally verified that.;-)
... It's like how downloading an MP3 off the net and selling bootlegs on the street are both forms of copyright infringement: you can argue all you like about whether either should be legal or not based on potential benefits and costs to society and all that, but you can't pretend one of them is somehow *not* a form of copyright infringement.
So I downloaded a number of MP3 a few weeks ago, from amazon.com where I'd paid for them. I was led to believe this was a legal purchase. Are you telling me that buying them from amazon is legally (or morally) the same as buying bootlegs on the street?
I wonder how amazon is getting away with doing this so openly?
The part you seem to be missing is that good businesses don't treat people like crap.
No, I didn't miss that. We're talking about businesses in which the IT managers blame the "worker bees" for problems caused mostly by conflicting management demands. Such companies don't qualify as "good business".
I therefor declare your comment an OT troll, on the grounds that you're attempting to confuse the issue by introducing the concept of a "good" business in a discussion of "normal" business.;-)
The workers are learning the lesson business is teaching them. Get whatever you can by any means. The only thing that matters is the bottom line.
It's not just business that teaches that lesson. Anyone who's been reading/. for long has read the claims here that profit is the only legitimate business goal. Some have even claimed that corporate management can be sued for doing things that interfere with making a profit. I've occasionally that they cite cases where such prosecution has happened, and gotten no reply, but people keep saying such things, and asserting that this is how a business should behave.
The idea that it's proper to do anything you like for personal profit, even if it seriously damages other people, is a very widespread attitude in our society. The psychologists' name for this behavior is "psychotic", of course. And it's not just concentrated in corporate management; it's a very common attitude.
The ecliptic from the Earth's perspective is constant (by definition), and the Sun's travel across the ecliptic is about as constant.
This brought to mind an image of hundreds of astronomers grinning and chuckling as they read it.;-)
The ecliptic, generally defined as the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun, is hardly a constant for most astronomers' purposes. There are all sorts of variations happening to the Earth's orbit over time, and most of them have been measured to at least several decimal places. For example, the Earth is strongly affected by the Moon, whose orbit is inclined by a bit over 5 degrees to the ecliptic, producing a quite measurable up-down motion of the Earth relative to the supposed plane of its orbit (which isn't nearly a plane due to this motion). Over longer periods, larger up-down wiggles in the Earth's motion are induced by Jupiter and Saturn (and all the other planets, but those are the two biggies). Jupiter and Saturn have orbits inclined 1.3 and 2.5 degrees relative to the Earth's orbit, so their pull has a small vertical component that's quite measurable, and causes slow changes in the Earth's orbit over the years.
As for the Sun's "travel" around the ecliptic, that presumably means its apparent motion in the sky due to the Earth's rotational speed. If you look that up, you'll find that the current estimate of the Earth's mean orbital speed is 29.78 km/s, but this varies from 29.29 km/s at aphelion (~ July 4) to 30.29 km/s at perihelion (~ Jan 3). This 1 km/s difference is about 3% of the orbital speed, so the Earth's orbital speed is only "constant" to one decimal place, but not to two places. The sun's apparent motion relative to the background stars would be the same as these numbers, and calling a 3% speed variation a constant would get you laughed out of amateur astronomer clubs.
Over longer periods of time, these variations in the Earth's orbit are fairly large relative to the current numbers. And, of course, there's the problem of the solar system's motions around the galaxy, which include interactions with all the nearby stars. Astronomers have accurate measurements of the "proper motion" of at least several hundred of the closest stars, none of which is quite in a constant position relative to the solar system. Their gravitational pulls on us produce small variations in the orbits of everything in the solar system, adding to the general chaos that gives large error bars to orbital predictions more than a thousand or so years in the future.
Actually, I read an interesting article a few years back that gave numbers for the effects on the Earth's orbit from the passage of several large near-Earth asteroids, and also for a few of the recent mass ejections from the sun. These also have a measurable effect on the Earth's orbit, which add up over the eons. This makes the concept of the "ecliptic" as a fixed plane an extreme over-simplification. The ecliptic is actually a very fuzzy concept. It describes a roughly planar volume that's a few thousand km thick (over a few years' time), and which slowly warps over eons. The Earth's actual position relative to this fuzzy volume varies in a complex manner that requires some extremely difficult calculations involving all the other massive bodies in the vicinity (including those near-Earth asteroids, which aren't entirely known, and solar mass ejections, which aren't predictable at all).
But I suppose it's all constant enough for an astrologer.;-)
I'm sorry, you must be using a different Bing than I do. Your statements regarding Bing's performance do NOT match up to my experience with it in the slightest.
Perhaps you're confusing bing.com with google.com/bing ? =)
Funny, when I click on that link, all I get is the familiar 404 Not Found page.
If this was a joke, I guess it was a bit too subtle for me.;-)
I don't think the general case is for people to remain connected 24 hrs/day for 2 weeks straight.
Actually, with cell phones, this is what most people do. Granted, they're on "idle" for 99% of that time, but they're still connected, and their phones will respond to incoming calls by ringing, etc. But very few people turn off their cell phones at night, or any other time.
This might seem trivial, except that just yesterday we had an article about the latest Windows Mobile phone that uses so much bandwidth at "idle" that it would eat up 5GB just idling for a week or so. We might think that's not surprising, since MS is notorious for such wastefulness (and Vista can eat up an impressive part of your bandwidth when idling on a wired connection). But we've been watching the recent explosion of cell phone "apps", many of which like to phone home periodically to keep you up to date with their topic. The iPhone is becoming a bandwidth hog when idling, and other smart-phones are starting to show the same sort of behavior.
This could be one of the reasons that various cell-phone distros haven't had flash. Adobe's flash viewer is somewhat notorious for heavy traffic when idling. I've watch the cpu and network usage of several browsers on several OSs, and see them go from near zero to a significant percentage when a flash-heavy site (such as youtube) is visited -- and stay much higher than zero after all the flash pages are closed. There are other apps that behave this way, but I don't know that they've been characterized. Any page that uses a meta refresh tag could be part of the problem, if its time interval is short enough. (Why don't browsers give you a way to say "Ignore meta refresh tags"?)
WOW you guys in the USA really need to define the legal term for "unlimited' in court,...
Ah, but here in the US, that would be called "government regulation" of private corporations, which our current political leaders consider the cause of all the evils in the world. Those would be the political leaders who mostly ran their campaigns on contributions from large corporations, so it's understandable why they might take that approach.
(Around here, government regulation is even worse than people who use mismatched quotes.;-)
Lately, I've been getting a fair amount of junk mail from the phone companies, loudly touting one of the latest smart-phones "FREE". Sure enough, the fine print inside says that accepting the phone signs you up for a 2-year service contract. Some years back, this was considered fraudulent advertising, but nowadays in the US, companies know that they can get away with such fraud, because no government agency is likely to bother taking them to court over it.
OTOH, it does mean that a large part of the US population knows that any mail with the word "FREE" on the cover is a scam, and just tosses it in the trash unopened. But junk mail is still subsidized by the Postal Service, so if only a few victims succumb to the scams, it's still worthwhile to mail out millions of such "offers".
The people who are so against "government regulation" don't seem to be bothered by government subsidies of corporate junk/scam mail.
We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.
Heh; good summary. But I'd think that the best counter-argument is Jimmy Wales' own site. As long as wikipedia exists, and uses sensible HTML that works on all browsers, there's at least one very good reason that the Web isn't going away.
And in general, anyone who simply wants to make their information available online has little if any motive for writing a specialized app. That means producing hundreds of programs, one for each model of phone and tablet, to do a job that can be done quite well by any browser (if you use sensible html). A sensible person will look at this, ask why they should pay developers to write those hundreds of specialized apps when the job can be done just as well via a browser.
Yes, we have things like video games that don't work well in browsers. We've had them a long time, and they've been no challenge to the Web. There's no reason (logical or practical) that the Web can't live a full life in the presence of specialized apps, and vice versa.
OTOH, it'll be interesting to see how successful HTML is at taking over a small part of the niche of specialized apps. I'd guess that it will succeed for a small (very useful) part, but there'll still be some jobs that are best not shoehorned into a browser, but should be done in a separate app.
Actually, it's pretty easy to find a popular example of this: email. Let's face it, good as sites like gmail.com might be, they're still nowhere near as useful as a specialized email reader. For that matter, all the online forums that have moved to the Web have produced a mess of forum software that are all different and inconsistent. It's getting to be time to point this out, and start pushing for a move back to usenet, so we only have to learn one GUI tool to read them all.
It's all a tempest in a teacup, though. And it'll get a lot messier before people wise up and make it better.
I had assumed that the sic tag was used because of the word "another." I can't remember any of the previous nuclear wars, although I may not have been paying attention at the time.
You may have missed WWII or the Cold War... both were nuclear. One used a couple of atomic bombs, the other used the threat of them.
Something I've found fun is to challenge people to name the country that has used nuclear weapons in war. Sometimes I include the hint that it was done twice. It's funny how many people give me a blank (or non-believing) look. Maybe it's because they're mostly Americans (which is who I'm surrounded with most of the time), and have the typical American understanding of history and geography.
I think I have a bit of a reputation among my acquaintances for joking about history. But claiming that some country has actually used nuclear weapons is so far out that many people are just puzzled about why I would make up such a story, since there's no visible humor in it.
guilty until proven innocent, that's the new american way!
Nah; it's not new at all. Look around at a bit of history, and you'll find it everywhere.
When a crime has been committed, the natural behavior of humans is to pick an easily-available suspect and just assume they did it. It typically takes some pretty good defensive evidence to overcome this. We all agree with "innocent until proven guilty" in principle, but most of us reverse the wording when faced with an actual crime. It's more important to punish someone than it is to find the actual criminal(s) and punish them.
Of course, in the wikileaks case, people keep pointing out that there doesn't seem to be any actual crime. Exposing official corruption isn't against the law much of anywhere. If there was any violation of security laws, it was done by the leakers, not the people running wikileaks. But it's still an uphill battle to protect whistleblowers from those who are actually guilty of something, namely the corrupt officials.
Or more generally, anything you send to anyone on the Internet that isn't encrypted should be considered public. Your ISP is almost certainly mining it for commercial (e.g., advertising) purposes, and is probably also looking for keywords that your government is interested in. Anyone along the route that the packets take is capable of intercepting your packets and doing whatever they like with them.
One of the long-standing bits of advice from the security people is that nothing except end-to-end encryption is secure. The Internet (actually its predecessor the ARPAnet) was designed with this in mind. The low-level networking stuff doesn't much do "security", because they knew back in the 1960s that this was pointless. You can't ever trust any of the owners of the "tubes". Your only defense, if you don't want your packets forwarded to your worst enemies, has always been end-to end encryption. Everything else should always be considered public.
There's a reason that almost all browsers have controls to enable/disable java and/or javascript. Programmers who have used these languages normally understand why you don't want your browser to automatically execute code downloaded from strangers, and browse with "scripting" disabled. Maybe we can teach others to do the same. If you tell us here which browser(s) you use, we can probably tell you where the controls are to turn off the execution of outside code. If you browser doesn't allow this, you should probably use a different browser.
Some browsers, such as firefox, have the ability to enable/disable scripting selectively for specific sites. Those browsers are much safer than the others.
(And to the geeks here: Yes, I know you know all that. I'm talking to the large part of the population who don't seem to know it. This obviously includes whoever wrote TFA.;-)
Moreover the 'figures' that the lawyers cites as saying Assange should be executed have no actual authority in the US. They cite Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, neither of whom hold political office and (I'm guessing - and hoping) will not have any official political power in the near future.
Funny you should mention those two, whose names have been heard a lot in the last couple of days in connection with the event in Tucson. It seems clear that neither Palin nor Huckabee had any direct connection with those shootings. But since one of their suggested assassinations seems to have carried out, people naturally wonder if it was a coincidence.
Among its 300-million citizens, the US has a good supply of marginally-sane nutcases who are available to carry out such actions in a way that's not connected with people in power. So if something similar were to happen to Assange, hardly anyone would be surprised. The people actually in power would be oh-so-sorry about it, of course, but Hollywood has taught us that they're probably the ones responsible.
When the wikileaks story first hit the press here in the US, the main reaction I heard from the people I know was "How long does he have to live?" Not that my acquaintances are a random cross-section of the population, of course, but it's interesting that so many Americans seem to be openly expressing such a thought. The US government does seem to have a serious image problem among its own citizens.
Maybe the authorities will eventually decide they have to give him protection, to avoid the universal suspicion if he were to have an "unfortunate accident".
The fact that this argument cannot be dismissed as ridiculous, hyperbolic poppycock is testament to how far the United States has fallen in the world's estimation.
The mention of Guantanamo should be a good hint why we don't think it's ridiculous, hyperbolic, or poppycock.
Slashdot Mirror
So, in the future it's impossible to figure out what browser supports what?
Why would you expect the future to be different from the past?
Now everyone will be able to say "We support HTML" even though nobody fully supports all aspects of the spec. Just like today, ...
Yeah, and the major benefit will be that developers of web sites will no longer waste their time trying to figure out what numbered version to declare in their DOCTYPE line, and pointing their fingers accusingly at browsers that don't support exactly that standard. They'll go right to testing against a flock of more-or-less current browsers (plus IE6 ;-), and making sure their HTML works somewhat sensibly in all of them.
Fact is, it has never worked very well to study any particular HTML standard and code strictly to that one. Since no browser actually implements that standard, we have always had to test against what passes for the real world, and tweak our HTML so it passes whatever test browsers the gang we're working with has decided to use.
One of my favorite counterexamples has been the ongoing attempts to persuade us to stop using the <center> tag, and replace it with CSS. It's funny to read the various suggested CSS "solutions" for this, then try them out against whatever browsers you've collected, and find that they don't work for some significant subset. Eventually you decide to just shrug and go with the center tag, which works (nearly) everywhere, and is syntactically simple. But lots of developer groups waste a lot of time fighting idiotic things like this, trying to follow some supposed expert's idea of the "right" way to do it, then finally giving up and just going with what seems to work (today).
The HTML "standards" are a mess, in large part due to the fact that the commercial browser developers see little reason to bother implementing even one numbered version correctly. This is helped along by management that has a motive to push for "walled gardens" (like IE6 ;-) that intentionally ignore or misinterpret part of the standards. This problem isn't going away. The best thing for HTML would be to face it, and work toward documenting what we might call a "real world standard" that is what most browser writers have deigned to implement. This would have to be replete with warnings about the unsolvable incompatibilities, and advice on either avoiding them or finding a workaround that at least displays semi-sensibly everywhere.
But that's probably beyond the purview of any official standards organization. After all, who would want to admit that the standard that you've worked so long at is being intentionally sabotaged by many or most of the commercial world? ;-)
And as for ISP's wanting to charge more? Why did you sell me a high speed link if you didn't expect me to actually use it?
They didn't sell you a high-speed link. Try "abusing" it by actually using the bandwidth that you thought you were buying, and watch what happens to your download speed.
They advertised a high-speed link, but that was just to draw in the suckers who believe advertising. If you check the fine print of your contract, you'll find that the advertised service wasn't quite what you're paying for.
Until....buffering......buffering..... pesky.....buffering...buffering.... Comcast et al does their dirty deeds.
Well, you can expect that this will soon improve for movies owned by NBC. ;-)
So the goal of a non-profit business is to make a profit?
Actually, yes, for some non-profits. They are, of course, expected to funnel those profits into the good works for which they're incorporated.
There are some non-profit corporations that remain non-profit by funneling all their excess money into bonuses and/or perks for their top management. This goes against the reason that "non-profit" status was invented, but it is often unchallenged, especially if a portion of the corporation's profits also goes into campaign contributions to the right politicians' re-election campaigns.
The most notorious cases are the religious "ministries", whose leaders live a lavish tax-free life style at the expense of their non-profit corporations. I suppose there's no need to name names ...
Well, I expected that, but I didn't actually know it. It's fairly common for people, especially "social commentators", to use "downloading MP3s" to mean "criminal". Like they use "hacker" to mean "criminal".
Yes, this is a nerd/geek forum, where people often use such terms in their technical sense. I've downloaded linux ISOs, as have many of us, but that doesn't change the fact that to most people (including the management of major ISPs), someone who downloads files by the GByte is ipso facto suspected of criminal behavior. Similarly, the "hacker"/"criminal" inference is based on the common idea that anyone with strong computer expertise is assumed to engage in criminal activity.
If you google for phrases like "MP3 download" or "music download", and look at the results, you'll find that almost all of them are talking about illegal downloading, while never actually saying so. This is because they understand "download" and "copyright violation" to be synonyms. In common speech, "illegal" is an automatic qualifier that need not be stated explicitly before "download".
If we want people to approach such things sensibly, it's probably a good idea to call people on such invalid assumptions whenever they (appear to) make them. The passage I replied to seems to make this mistake, and would be read by most non-geeks as referring to illegal downloading, since "downloading", "copyright violation" and "criminal behavior" are synonyms to them. We should be pointing out the error in such comments when we see them, to try to get people to stop making the implicit connection between downloading and criminality.
Bla bla bla bla ..... more non-sense.
Except from IP address, do you know any other way to block someone from accessing your web resources?
Except from IP address, do you know any other way to block someone from accessing your web resources?
Yeah, use cookies. ;-)
No, seriously; 99% of the Web's users have never deleted a cookie, and wouldn't know how to do it.
There are growing problems with IP address as an ID number, and not just because we're running out of them. For the last few years, in the US and Europe at least, most "computer" sales have been portables. First laptops, then smaller versions with slightly different names, then tablets and "smart phones". These move around and change their IP address frequently as a result, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. My wife has an iPhone and I have a G1; web testing on both of them quickly showed that successive HTTP requests from them often come from different IP addresses, even when they're sitting still on the desk. So with smart-phones (and probably tablets), the IP address can't even be used short-term to identify a session; it changes on a timescale of seconds. This is using their cell-phone wireless, not wi-fi, of course. But if they use wi-fi, they have the same IP address as the desktop machines in our house. IP address can't be used to distinguish machines behind NAT.
OTOH, my wife has an iMac, on which she has installed virtualization software so she can run MS Windows "for work". The OSX part of her machine accesses the Internet via the above IP address, while the Windows part connects via VPN to work, and has an address from her office's NAT gateway. So that machine has two unrelated IP addresses. This is fairly common in the telecommuting world. It looks and acts like two unrelated machines at two unrelated physical locations. That's what VPN does; it's not a fluke.
There's no chance of any of this changing, until we switch over to IPv6. We should've done this 10 years ago, and it has happened in much of academia, but probably won't happen in the "public" Internet until the business world is dragged kicking and screaming onto IPv6. There's a good chance that nobody alive now will live to see IPv4 phased out.
So cookies are your best bet. I'll let someone else list all the reasons why that doesn't work so well. Any experienced web developer can give you the details.
1. They have tried these sorts of software export regulations before, and it failed miserably before. ::cough::RSA::cough::
I still have my RSA "munitions" t-shirt, with the couple lines of perl that implement the RSA algorithm. I never did get to wear it to the airport for an international flight before they finally gave in and made RSA legal. It probably wouldn't have mattered that much, though, since the few international flights I took after I bought the t-shirt were all on foreign airlines like SAS and Finnair.
2. The US government pretty much invented the damned internet, you would think that they would know how it works
3. The insanity of doing the same, ineffective things, over and over again, is generally lost on anyone in government.
The basic problem with both these is that the US government, like any government, isn't an intelligent, thinking being. It's a collection of several million people, no two quite alike. Some of them understand the Internet quite well. Most are typical office drones or politicians who are interested in other things than being a network geek.
In any case, there's an old observation that the intelligence of a group of people is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. There's dispute about just what the inverse function is, because little actual research has been done on the topic. But it is clear that adding people to a group of humans decreases the group's overall intelligence.
Expecting intelligence from a government made up of millions of people is simply unrealistic. The best that can be done is to develop expertise on specific topics, and defer to those experts when making policy decisions. This was done during the development of the ARPAnet/Internet. But policies like the export controls under discussion here are made by politicians, not the government's network geeks. And most of those politicians got their office (directly or by appointment) via a vote of at least several hundred thousand people. This tells you about all you need to know about the likelihood of intelligence in the making of such policies.
So there... take that.... nya nya nya. You don't get to use this cool web browser, unless you jump through some minor hoops to make it work. That will really teach you!
In any case, it's probably basically pointless. The Iranian government has apparently followed the lead of most other Middle-Eastern governments and "standardized" on IE6 and MS Windows. So their computers are probably mostly controlled by the competing botnets run from a long list of other countries.
Actually, I'd suspect that the reason the US government has given google a hard time is that google hasn't cooperated with the usual (i.e., Microsoft) practice of accepting US government add-ons to the software for selected clients. But don't anyone tell the Iranian government about this. We wouldn't want them getting all paranoid, y'know.
(My wife, who has studied Arabic for some years, is constantly grumbling about how most of the online stuff for learning or using Arabic, and most Arabic-script web sites, only work with IE. She hates having to install such crappy, malware-infested software just to read news sources in the original language. The same is reported to be true of Farsi, though we haven't personally verified that. ;-)
... It's like how downloading an MP3 off the net and selling bootlegs on the street are both forms of copyright infringement: you can argue all you like about whether either should be legal or not based on potential benefits and costs to society and all that, but you can't pretend one of them is somehow *not* a form of copyright infringement.
So I downloaded a number of MP3 a few weeks ago, from amazon.com where I'd paid for them. I was led to believe this was a legal purchase. Are you telling me that buying them from amazon is legally (or morally) the same as buying bootlegs on the street?
I wonder how amazon is getting away with doing this so openly?
The part you seem to be missing is that good businesses don't treat people like crap.
No, I didn't miss that. We're talking about businesses in which the IT managers blame the "worker bees" for problems caused mostly by conflicting management demands. Such companies don't qualify as "good business".
I therefor declare your comment an OT troll, on the grounds that you're attempting to confuse the issue by introducing the concept of a "good" business in a discussion of "normal" business. ;-)
I'm pretty sure [running a porn server] would fall under misuse (or personal use) of company assets...
Only if you take all the profits yourself, and don't share them with management.
The workers are learning the lesson business is teaching them. Get whatever you can by any means. The only thing that matters is the bottom line.
It's not just business that teaches that lesson. Anyone who's been reading /. for long has read the claims here that profit is the only legitimate business goal. Some have even claimed that corporate management can be sued for doing things that interfere with making a profit. I've occasionally that they cite cases where such prosecution has happened, and gotten no reply, but people keep saying such things, and asserting that this is how a business should behave.
The idea that it's proper to do anything you like for personal profit, even if it seriously damages other people, is a very widespread attitude in our society. The psychologists' name for this behavior is "psychotic", of course. And it's not just concentrated in corporate management; it's a very common attitude.
The ecliptic from the Earth's perspective is constant (by definition), and the Sun's travel across the ecliptic is about as constant.
This brought to mind an image of hundreds of astronomers grinning and chuckling as they read it. ;-)
The ecliptic, generally defined as the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun, is hardly a constant for most astronomers' purposes. There are all sorts of variations happening to the Earth's orbit over time, and most of them have been measured to at least several decimal places. For example, the Earth is strongly affected by the Moon, whose orbit is inclined by a bit over 5 degrees to the ecliptic, producing a quite measurable up-down motion of the Earth relative to the supposed plane of its orbit (which isn't nearly a plane due to this motion). Over longer periods, larger up-down wiggles in the Earth's motion are induced by Jupiter and Saturn (and all the other planets, but those are the two biggies). Jupiter and Saturn have orbits inclined 1.3 and 2.5 degrees relative to the Earth's orbit, so their pull has a small vertical component that's quite measurable, and causes slow changes in the Earth's orbit over the years.
As for the Sun's "travel" around the ecliptic, that presumably means its apparent motion in the sky due to the Earth's rotational speed. If you look that up, you'll find that the current estimate of the Earth's mean orbital speed is 29.78 km/s, but this varies from 29.29 km/s at aphelion (~ July 4) to 30.29 km/s at perihelion (~ Jan 3). This 1 km/s difference is about 3% of the orbital speed, so the Earth's orbital speed is only "constant" to one decimal place, but not to two places. The sun's apparent motion relative to the background stars would be the same as these numbers, and calling a 3% speed variation a constant would get you laughed out of amateur astronomer clubs.
Over longer periods of time, these variations in the Earth's orbit are fairly large relative to the current numbers. And, of course, there's the problem of the solar system's motions around the galaxy, which include interactions with all the nearby stars. Astronomers have accurate measurements of the "proper motion" of at least several hundred of the closest stars, none of which is quite in a constant position relative to the solar system. Their gravitational pulls on us produce small variations in the orbits of everything in the solar system, adding to the general chaos that gives large error bars to orbital predictions more than a thousand or so years in the future.
Actually, I read an interesting article a few years back that gave numbers for the effects on the Earth's orbit from the passage of several large near-Earth asteroids, and also for a few of the recent mass ejections from the sun. These also have a measurable effect on the Earth's orbit, which add up over the eons. This makes the concept of the "ecliptic" as a fixed plane an extreme over-simplification. The ecliptic is actually a very fuzzy concept. It describes a roughly planar volume that's a few thousand km thick (over a few years' time), and which slowly warps over eons. The Earth's actual position relative to this fuzzy volume varies in a complex manner that requires some extremely difficult calculations involving all the other massive bodies in the vicinity (including those near-Earth asteroids, which aren't entirely known, and solar mass ejections, which aren't predictable at all).
But I suppose it's all constant enough for an astrologer. ;-)
I'm sorry, you must be using a different Bing than I do. Your statements regarding Bing's performance do NOT match up to my experience with it in the slightest.
Perhaps you're confusing bing.com with google.com/bing ? =)
Funny, when I click on that link, all I get is the familiar 404 Not Found page.
If this was a joke, I guess it was a bit too subtle for me. ;-)
I don't think the general case is for people to remain connected 24 hrs/day for 2 weeks straight.
Actually, with cell phones, this is what most people do. Granted, they're on "idle" for 99% of that time, but they're still connected, and their phones will respond to incoming calls by ringing, etc. But very few people turn off their cell phones at night, or any other time.
This might seem trivial, except that just yesterday we had an article about the latest Windows Mobile phone that uses so much bandwidth at "idle" that it would eat up 5GB just idling for a week or so. We might think that's not surprising, since MS is notorious for such wastefulness (and Vista can eat up an impressive part of your bandwidth when idling on a wired connection). But we've been watching the recent explosion of cell phone "apps", many of which like to phone home periodically to keep you up to date with their topic. The iPhone is becoming a bandwidth hog when idling, and other smart-phones are starting to show the same sort of behavior.
This could be one of the reasons that various cell-phone distros haven't had flash. Adobe's flash viewer is somewhat notorious for heavy traffic when idling. I've watch the cpu and network usage of several browsers on several OSs, and see them go from near zero to a significant percentage when a flash-heavy site (such as youtube) is visited -- and stay much higher than zero after all the flash pages are closed. There are other apps that behave this way, but I don't know that they've been characterized. Any page that uses a meta refresh tag could be part of the problem, if its time interval is short enough. (Why don't browsers give you a way to say "Ignore meta refresh tags"?)
WOW you guys in the USA really need to define the legal term for "unlimited' in court, ...
Ah, but here in the US, that would be called "government regulation" of private corporations, which our current political leaders consider the cause of all the evils in the world. Those would be the political leaders who mostly ran their campaigns on contributions from large corporations, so it's understandable why they might take that approach.
(Around here, government regulation is even worse than people who use mismatched quotes. ;-)
Lately, I've been getting a fair amount of junk mail from the phone companies, loudly touting one of the latest smart-phones "FREE". Sure enough, the fine print inside says that accepting the phone signs you up for a 2-year service contract. Some years back, this was considered fraudulent advertising, but nowadays in the US, companies know that they can get away with such fraud, because no government agency is likely to bother taking them to court over it.
OTOH, it does mean that a large part of the US population knows that any mail with the word "FREE" on the cover is a scam, and just tosses it in the trash unopened. But junk mail is still subsidized by the Postal Service, so if only a few victims succumb to the scams, it's still worthwhile to mail out millions of such "offers".
The people who are so against "government regulation" don't seem to be bothered by government subsidies of corporate junk/scam mail.
We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.
Heh; good summary. But I'd think that the best counter-argument is Jimmy Wales' own site. As long as wikipedia exists, and uses sensible HTML that works on all browsers, there's at least one very good reason that the Web isn't going away.
And in general, anyone who simply wants to make their information available online has little if any motive for writing a specialized app. That means producing hundreds of programs, one for each model of phone and tablet, to do a job that can be done quite well by any browser (if you use sensible html). A sensible person will look at this, ask why they should pay developers to write those hundreds of specialized apps when the job can be done just as well via a browser.
Yes, we have things like video games that don't work well in browsers. We've had them a long time, and they've been no challenge to the Web. There's no reason (logical or practical) that the Web can't live a full life in the presence of specialized apps, and vice versa.
OTOH, it'll be interesting to see how successful HTML is at taking over a small part of the niche of specialized apps. I'd guess that it will succeed for a small (very useful) part, but there'll still be some jobs that are best not shoehorned into a browser, but should be done in a separate app.
Actually, it's pretty easy to find a popular example of this: email. Let's face it, good as sites like gmail.com might be, they're still nowhere near as useful as a specialized email reader. For that matter, all the online forums that have moved to the Web have produced a mess of forum software that are all different and inconsistent. It's getting to be time to point this out, and start pushing for a move back to usenet, so we only have to learn one GUI tool to read them all.
It's all a tempest in a teacup, though. And it'll get a lot messier before people wise up and make it better.
I had assumed that the sic tag was used because of the word "another." I can't remember any of the previous nuclear wars, although I may not have been paying attention at the time.
You may have missed WWII or the Cold War... both were nuclear. One used a couple of atomic bombs, the other used the threat of them.
Something I've found fun is to challenge people to name the country that has used nuclear weapons in war. Sometimes I include the hint that it was done twice. It's funny how many people give me a blank (or non-believing) look. Maybe it's because they're mostly Americans (which is who I'm surrounded with most of the time), and have the typical American understanding of history and geography.
I think I have a bit of a reputation among my acquaintances for joking about history. But claiming that some country has actually used nuclear weapons is so far out that many people are just puzzled about why I would make up such a story, since there's no visible humor in it.
The worst problem is ... lies, misunderstandings and myths are documented that remain for very long, ...
Of course, if you want some really good example of this phenomenon, all you have to do is look at any of our religions.
guilty until proven innocent, that's the new american way!
Nah; it's not new at all. Look around at a bit of history, and you'll find it everywhere.
When a crime has been committed, the natural behavior of humans is to pick an easily-available suspect and just assume they did it. It typically takes some pretty good defensive evidence to overcome this. We all agree with "innocent until proven guilty" in principle, but most of us reverse the wording when faced with an actual crime. It's more important to punish someone than it is to find the actual criminal(s) and punish them.
Of course, in the wikileaks case, people keep pointing out that there doesn't seem to be any actual crime. Exposing official corruption isn't against the law much of anywhere. If there was any violation of security laws, it was done by the leakers, not the people running wikileaks. But it's still an uphill battle to protect whistleblowers from those who are actually guilty of something, namely the corrupt officials.
Or more generally, anything you send to anyone on the Internet that isn't encrypted should be considered public. Your ISP is almost certainly mining it for commercial (e.g., advertising) purposes, and is probably also looking for keywords that your government is interested in. Anyone along the route that the packets take is capable of intercepting your packets and doing whatever they like with them.
One of the long-standing bits of advice from the security people is that nothing except end-to-end encryption is secure. The Internet (actually its predecessor the ARPAnet) was designed with this in mind. The low-level networking stuff doesn't much do "security", because they knew back in the 1960s that this was pointless. You can't ever trust any of the owners of the "tubes". Your only defense, if you don't want your packets forwarded to your worst enemies, has always been end-to end encryption. Everything else should always be considered public.
There's a reason that almost all browsers have controls to enable/disable java and/or javascript. Programmers who have used these languages normally understand why you don't want your browser to automatically execute code downloaded from strangers, and browse with "scripting" disabled. Maybe we can teach others to do the same. If you tell us here which browser(s) you use, we can probably tell you where the controls are to turn off the execution of outside code. If you browser doesn't allow this, you should probably use a different browser.
Some browsers, such as firefox, have the ability to enable/disable scripting selectively for specific sites. Those browsers are much safer than the others.
(And to the geeks here: Yes, I know you know all that. I'm talking to the large part of the population who don't seem to know it. This obviously includes whoever wrote TFA. ;-)
Moreover the 'figures' that the lawyers cites as saying Assange should be executed have no actual authority in the US. They cite Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, neither of whom hold political office and (I'm guessing - and hoping) will not have any official political power in the near future.
Funny you should mention those two, whose names have been heard a lot in the last couple of days in connection with the event in Tucson. It seems clear that neither Palin nor Huckabee had any direct connection with those shootings. But since one of their suggested assassinations seems to have carried out, people naturally wonder if it was a coincidence.
Among its 300-million citizens, the US has a good supply of marginally-sane nutcases who are available to carry out such actions in a way that's not connected with people in power. So if something similar were to happen to Assange, hardly anyone would be surprised. The people actually in power would be oh-so-sorry about it, of course, but Hollywood has taught us that they're probably the ones responsible.
When the wikileaks story first hit the press here in the US, the main reaction I heard from the people I know was "How long does he have to live?" Not that my acquaintances are a random cross-section of the population, of course, but it's interesting that so many Americans seem to be openly expressing such a thought. The US government does seem to have a serious image problem among its own citizens.
Maybe the authorities will eventually decide they have to give him protection, to avoid the universal suspicion if he were to have an "unfortunate accident".
The fact that this argument cannot be dismissed as ridiculous, hyperbolic poppycock is testament to how far the United States has fallen in the world's estimation.
The mention of Guantanamo should be a good hint why we don't think it's ridiculous, hyperbolic, or poppycock.