Any enterprise running Firefox just got sent two huge signals. The first: Get the hell off Firefox. Pronto. The second: Reconsider CA's for trust models, if your security needs exceed the limitations of that model. I agree. It can be a big hole for certain applications, but nothing is airtight. It depends upon the security requirements.
In the case of the first signal, Mozilla told the enterprise customer this point blank weeks ago. They're not interested in supporting enterprise customers, but enterprise customers are always welcome to take the source and maintain their own versions. QED by the release strategy. Otherwise, Mozilla would provide an LTS channel or some alternative to the rapid release channel.
It's bad enough that all our sh!t is made in China, without it being a literal fact.
I say we sick a bunch of enraged grizzlies on them to demonstrate our continued superiority. To hell with biofuels. This makes me want panda burgers.;^)
That name brought mayflies to mind first time I read it. And if the takedown rules are for real, that may be a telling descriptor of how this thing will work.
Bayfile: n. A transient stored file that is taken down quickly. Usage: "It was here and gone like a Bayfile."
Um, I have to jailbreak an Apple device that *I* own to do what *I* want with it? This is like saying "To make sure you don't electrocute yourself or burn down the house you bought, the local authority is going to control what you plug in to any given 15 amp socket."
They do, via "UL Listing" and innumerable safety and electrical code requirements. Its just not overly draconian.
That's QA, not DRM. The Apple model is more like: "No flying toasters. Because they draw too many amps. They don't draw more than 15 on their own, but they draw 3.1-7.5a. They meet the spec, but if you plug in two of them, you might trip a breaker as 6.2-15a is too close to tolerance, and at the very least, your lights going dim makes Apple's iHouse look bad. Yes! I know your kitchen has 20a outlets. Too bad. You might try to make 8 slices of flying toast in your bedroom. So no flying toasters."
Yup. And 80% of that is all the accidents that happen. Nobody knows how to drive in the stuff. Then the tow trucks run into ditches trying to get to them. The emergency crews aren't trained to drive in it either, so they get there to save the tow trucks reeeal slow.
The 2-inch effect is really just a classic demonstration of our crippling national dependency on the automobile. Like construction on the 405 this year. It's no joke.
No argument about that. That doesn't qualify it as an "evacuate NYC"-level of false alarm, however.
You're right, but only in hindsight.
Problem is, the time it takes to really "evacuate the island" is somewhat longer than the window of accurate forecast for this sort of storm. So basically, you don't know that it's going to fizzle when you're making the call. You just know that if you don't, and it doesn't, you're responsible for thousands of deaths, and you didn't give them the information that would let them choose between holding out, or fleeing.
That's the government's job here, to provide the best recommendation for likely and possible, but not certain, worst cases. Even if it's a 20% likelihood. Not to spin a sugary story like this storm, (death toll: 38 as I post, btw), turned out to be.
To give you an example of things not going well, we had a serious blizzard here in Chicago this past winter. Town hall did not close Lake Shore Drive, because it really didn't look like it was going to be a problem in the near term (several hours of safety were predicted). They decided to leave LSD open to get people away from downtown quickly before the worst hit. The thing blew a portion of Lake Michigan (as snow) onto the drive in a space of about 10 minutes. Basically, they had the right call, but then 10 minutes later, everyone on LSD was stranded and in danger of freezing to death. It was the damnedest thing I've ever seen.
This happened because the storm was particularly large, not because it was necessarily intense.
Now imagine that happens when millions of people are trying to clear out from a larger affected area, and the nature of the problem becomes apparent. In Chicago's case, 10 minutes later, after making a reasonable, responsible but ultimately wrong decision, they were hosed. Apologies all round. We pulled together and dug them out.
What made this call was the size, not the intensity. There is more than one metric than wind speed at work here. There is moisture content, and radius, and tornadoes on the border. Even as a tropical storm, it deluged Vermont. Imagine if it had still been merely a Class 1 when it hit New York. That might have been a serious emergency. And historically, hurricanes like Irene have ambled unpredictably up the East coast for centuries. It's not beyond the realm of imagination or even history. Any time something that big forms, no matter the current intensity of wind, which is capable of throwing large parts of the Atlantic onto Manhattan, you have to err on the side of caution. For the tunnels, evacuation routes may be flooded, which will then leave a lot of people stranded in traffic on suspension bridges in high winds. Manhattan is hard to clear once the festivities begin.
This should give us pause to consider how hard it is to run a decent, rapid civil defense action on Manhattan. They're sitting ducks. If anything comes of it, we should realize and amend that so they don't have to make decisions like this so far beyond the window of reliable prediction. Not grouse about their lack of a Palantir to divine the will of nature.
Until such time? They made the only decision they could. Individuals may choose to hold out, once the risk is firmly their choice and they have good information, but governmental bodies really and truly can't.
Sorry if you were inconvenienced by the "mistake."
Seriously, what POSSIBLE reason is there to stop people from customizing the toolbars/menus to make them work the way THEY want them to?
I know that was probably rhetorical, but it's worth answering.
One of Microsoft's big problems in Office 97-2003 was that people were not noticing features that Microsoft wanted them to use (features that, if relied upon, made their software the only good solution on the market in the process. Extended features, especially ones with IP attached, provide lock-in and/or licensing). So they found a way to advertise the features they want you to use, and combined it with features that are popular. You don't want your customers customizing your ad space. Adding all the most popular commands alongside means that they got fewer complaints when users figured out that their software is telling them how to use it (In Soviet Russia), instead of the other way around.
The ribbon is the application equivalent of a billboard. It's there to advertise the extended (and usually less interoperable or legally encumbered) features of Microsoft's awesome software, because no one could find them in the Byzantine menu system, and they weren't leveraging the full value of their product as a result. This was baffling to Microsoft. That was its purpose in Office 2007.
It's also patented. That is its purpose when extended to all the other products. Lawsuit bait. Like it or lump it, Microsoft is aggressively pursuing a patent arsenal in a patent arms race.
It is not there for any reason other than to serve Microsoft. They carefully test market exactly what they can get away with, the same way advertisers test market an ad that might cross the line with its audience. If MS goes to an ad-based model, expect to see Flash advertisements in the Ribbon.
One problem with that for most end users. It appears, to them, that they're unable to get their hands on the xpi after upgrade. They're being warned off. Just downloading an xpi from AMO has become non-intuitive, in favor of the "big green candy-like button."
So, our benighted user can right click on the "add to Firefox" button before he has upgraded, and choose "save link as...," to get the xpi. After he's upgraded, that button is greyed out, with a "not available for Firefox x.0" underneath it and a red "no" sign.
Previous versions of add-ons are also buried very deeply on the page, in a really tiny print link.
The whole thing is designed to look friendly, but rob the user of the tools and ability to take matters into his own hands, and make the browser his.
This policy is damaging to the fringe and unique part of the add-on developerspace. You know, where all the innovative ideas come from. Mozilla is asserting central control over it, and making it hard to really have Firefox be "your browser, as you like it."
This is a sea change in attitude, and many users wouldn't know how to get their hands on the xpi to modify it, let alone figure out how to open one in an archive mangers, especially on Windows.
Moreover, if the State doesn't appeal this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court (and win the appeal), it will be available as precedent in the other circuits. A ruling in federal court has a lovely snowball effect. Common law FTW!
While I essentially agree with you, the moderation of police behavior is likely to lead to lower effectiveness, at least while they change all their SOPs to meet the new expectations. The laws and procedures regarding internal affairs were not written for an inverse surveillance society. They were written with the cockroach model in mind, if one offense gets to internal affairs, it's likely there are hundreds that went unnoticed or unreported.
So it's good news, not great. It's certainly a change, and fresh air, but I think the police still need some latitude to make quick decisions in situations that would likely make the both of us soil our underwear. Sometimes they are going to be wrong, and we're going to see a whole lot of that in footage, analyzed thoroughly over days, when the officers in question had only milliseconds to make their analysis.
And the good news is that calculated abuse of authority in less tense sorts of situations will be curbed. I hope.
But to make it really "great" news, we need to moderate our attitudes and behavior toward the police, too.
It wouldn't solve anything. In fact, it would probably make it harder to grasp when you shouldn't be calling. This is one place where having to convert to a standard that makes more tangible hours of the day like local breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and hour of sleep, requires you to localize to someone else's schedule. With no more than double digit integer math, no less. That's a bargain. I agree that the numbers themselves can be seen to be arbitrary (why not 48 half hours?), because they are abstract concepts, but the reason we have chosen them to signify time in specific "zones" is anything but arbitrary. That's necessary.
Now when our computer overlords finally take over, of which I heartily approve, then it will make sense for them to sync time to an agreed upon longitude at noon, as they have no such biological needs. My silicon master tells me that the prime meridian will be somewhere over New Zealand, though, for their own inscrutable reasons. It will not be "arbitrarily" chosen to be centered over a long defunct empire.
I have mod points, but I won't spend them, because I can't mod you both +1 insightful and -1 flamebait.
And if I could do so, the net mod would be +0:Ambivalent.
You have some great points, truly, but it's completely neutered by the Apple hater verbiage at the end. Leave the "social rejects" out of it, and it's a cogent and insightful post.
They should open a new site for the serious social looter. The CaseBook. It could index enhanced reality overlays ($$$$) to Google StreetView data.
And I wonder how long until football hooligans start organizing flashsbrawls? Anyone?
There is an issue here. I saw it the day I witnessed my first flashmob. My reaction was not, "Cool." It was "Uh oh, how long until others, with less scruples, target someone." This is new territory. Organized gang activity just got access to constant realtime intel. I pray that we (society) will figure out how to deal with it without shutting it all down. In the meantime, keep an eye on police brutality, kids. This is a deadly serious game.
Some clever bastard thinks that if you tear gas the national mall, you are not technically silencing the guy at the end of the reflecting pool that is speaking. Just imagine old alabaster Abe Lincoln presiding over that sort of scene.
1. There is an immediate First amendment freedom of speech issue here, as speech will be silenced without due process. The abrogation of the right to speech is inherent in the abrogation of the ability to be heard in a public forum. If you tear gas the audience of the guy on the soapbox, you are still stifling speech. This silences speech, without any legal determination whether the speech is protected. Historical evidence has shown that laws of this sort will be abused to silence appropriate and protected speech. It will not fail to do this, because there is no process in place other than the will to power. We can bank on that. This aspect of the law should be struck down on basic Constitutional grounds (and it will be severable so it won't affect the rest of it, unfortunately.)
2. We are on our way to the Great Firewall. This is the exact same thing China does to websites that it thinks are against political interests. It's just that our political interests are based in the distorted idea that we can build an economy on censorship and artificial scarcity of information, in an age of unprecedented freedom and speed of communication which enabled that dream in the first place! It's a circular firing squad we're setting up here. We are on the wrong side of history if we let this pass or remain unchallenged. We are just absolutely brain-dead to shoot the nascent information economy in the face with the uncertainties this process will cause.
This provision is a myopic, special interest concern that fails to see that you can't have the good without some measure of bad. We should take the good and mitigate the bad. This is disrupting the whole damned thing, like a player who "wins" a chess game by throwing the board into the air. Write your congressperson a letter on letterhead. Call them. Visit them. March on Washington, if you are able.
For God's sake, we cannot let them do this. We're going for a triple-dip recession if we do.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey. If I'm hovering on a plank of wood? I don't mind hovering over a ball of lightning in a Faraday cage grade suit of chain mail.
Any enterprise running Firefox just got sent two huge signals. The first: Get the hell off Firefox. Pronto. The second: Reconsider CA's for trust models, if your security needs exceed the limitations of that model. I agree. It can be a big hole for certain applications, but nothing is airtight. It depends upon the security requirements.
In the case of the first signal, Mozilla told the enterprise customer this point blank weeks ago. They're not interested in supporting enterprise customers, but enterprise customers are always welcome to take the source and maintain their own versions. QED by the release strategy. Otherwise, Mozilla would provide an LTS channel or some alternative to the rapid release channel.
No, but they have a patent pending for the iRate. Next time Ballmer throws one, fscking lawsuit country, baby.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/6.0.1/releasenotes/
Expand "what's new" to see the change.
Update immediately if this is worrysome to you.
These certs were revoked yesterday in an out-of-band patch.
It's bad enough that all our sh!t is made in China, without it being a literal fact.
I say we sick a bunch of enraged grizzlies on them to demonstrate our continued superiority. To hell with biofuels. This makes me want panda burgers. ;^)
That name brought mayflies to mind first time I read it. And if the takedown rules are for real, that may be a telling descriptor of how this thing will work.
Bayfile: n. A transient stored file that is taken down quickly. Usage: "It was here and gone like a Bayfile."
Um, I have to jailbreak an Apple device that *I* own to do what *I* want with it? This is like saying "To make sure you don't electrocute yourself or burn down the house you bought, the local authority is going to control what you plug in to any given 15 amp socket."
They do, via "UL Listing" and innumerable safety and electrical code requirements. Its just not overly draconian.
That's QA, not DRM. The Apple model is more like: "No flying toasters. Because they draw too many amps. They don't draw more than 15 on their own, but they draw 3.1-7.5a. They meet the spec, but if you plug in two of them, you might trip a breaker as 6.2-15a is too close to tolerance, and at the very least, your lights going dim makes Apple's iHouse look bad. Yes! I know your kitchen has 20a outlets. Too bad. You might try to make 8 slices of flying toast in your bedroom. So no flying toasters."
Yup. And 80% of that is all the accidents that happen. Nobody knows how to drive in the stuff. Then the tow trucks run into ditches trying to get to them. The emergency crews aren't trained to drive in it either, so they get there to save the tow trucks reeeal slow.
The 2-inch effect is really just a classic demonstration of our crippling national dependency on the automobile. Like construction on the 405 this year. It's no joke.
This was still a nasty storm.
No argument about that. That doesn't qualify it as an "evacuate NYC"-level of false alarm, however.
You're right, but only in hindsight.
Problem is, the time it takes to really "evacuate the island" is somewhat longer than the window of accurate forecast for this sort of storm. So basically, you don't know that it's going to fizzle when you're making the call. You just know that if you don't, and it doesn't, you're responsible for thousands of deaths, and you didn't give them the information that would let them choose between holding out, or fleeing.
That's the government's job here, to provide the best recommendation for likely and possible, but not certain, worst cases. Even if it's a 20% likelihood. Not to spin a sugary story like this storm, (death toll: 38 as I post, btw), turned out to be.
To give you an example of things not going well, we had a serious blizzard here in Chicago this past winter. Town hall did not close Lake Shore Drive, because it really didn't look like it was going to be a problem in the near term (several hours of safety were predicted). They decided to leave LSD open to get people away from downtown quickly before the worst hit. The thing blew a portion of Lake Michigan (as snow) onto the drive in a space of about 10 minutes. Basically, they had the right call, but then 10 minutes later, everyone on LSD was stranded and in danger of freezing to death. It was the damnedest thing I've ever seen.
This happened because the storm was particularly large, not because it was necessarily intense.
Now imagine that happens when millions of people are trying to clear out from a larger affected area, and the nature of the problem becomes apparent. In Chicago's case, 10 minutes later, after making a reasonable, responsible but ultimately wrong decision, they were hosed. Apologies all round. We pulled together and dug them out.
What made this call was the size, not the intensity. There is more than one metric than wind speed at work here. There is moisture content, and radius, and tornadoes on the border. Even as a tropical storm, it deluged Vermont. Imagine if it had still been merely a Class 1 when it hit New York. That might have been a serious emergency. And historically, hurricanes like Irene have ambled unpredictably up the East coast for centuries. It's not beyond the realm of imagination or even history. Any time something that big forms, no matter the current intensity of wind, which is capable of throwing large parts of the Atlantic onto Manhattan, you have to err on the side of caution. For the tunnels, evacuation routes may be flooded, which will then leave a lot of people stranded in traffic on suspension bridges in high winds. Manhattan is hard to clear once the festivities begin.
This should give us pause to consider how hard it is to run a decent, rapid civil defense action on Manhattan. They're sitting ducks. If anything comes of it, we should realize and amend that so they don't have to make decisions like this so far beyond the window of reliable prediction. Not grouse about their lack of a Palantir to divine the will of nature.
Until such time? They made the only decision they could. Individuals may choose to hold out, once the risk is firmly their choice and they have good information, but governmental bodies really and truly can't.
Sorry if you were inconvenienced by the "mistake."
Did anyone see the latest Doctor Who? I mean, how timely is this?
Seriously, what POSSIBLE reason is there to stop people from customizing the toolbars/menus to make them work the way THEY want them to?
I know that was probably rhetorical, but it's worth answering.
One of Microsoft's big problems in Office 97-2003 was that people were not noticing features that Microsoft wanted them to use (features that, if relied upon, made their software the only good solution on the market in the process. Extended features, especially ones with IP attached, provide lock-in and/or licensing). So they found a way to advertise the features they want you to use, and combined it with features that are popular. You don't want your customers customizing your ad space. Adding all the most popular commands alongside means that they got fewer complaints when users figured out that their software is telling them how to use it (In Soviet Russia), instead of the other way around.
The ribbon is the application equivalent of a billboard. It's there to advertise the extended (and usually less interoperable or legally encumbered) features of Microsoft's awesome software, because no one could find them in the Byzantine menu system, and they weren't leveraging the full value of their product as a result. This was baffling to Microsoft. That was its purpose in Office 2007.
It's also patented. That is its purpose when extended to all the other products. Lawsuit bait. Like it or lump it, Microsoft is aggressively pursuing a patent arsenal in a patent arms race.
It is not there for any reason other than to serve Microsoft. They carefully test market exactly what they can get away with, the same way advertisers test market an ad that might cross the line with its audience. If MS goes to an ad-based model, expect to see Flash advertisements in the Ribbon.
One problem with that for most end users. It appears, to them, that they're unable to get their hands on the xpi after upgrade. They're being warned off. Just downloading an xpi from AMO has become non-intuitive, in favor of the "big green candy-like button."
So, our benighted user can right click on the "add to Firefox" button before he has upgraded, and choose "save link as...," to get the xpi. After he's upgraded, that button is greyed out, with a "not available for Firefox x.0" underneath it and a red "no" sign.
Previous versions of add-ons are also buried very deeply on the page, in a really tiny print link.
The whole thing is designed to look friendly, but rob the user of the tools and ability to take matters into his own hands, and make the browser his.
This policy is damaging to the fringe and unique part of the add-on developerspace. You know, where all the innovative ideas come from. Mozilla is asserting central control over it, and making it hard to really have Firefox be "your browser, as you like it."
This is a sea change in attitude, and many users wouldn't know how to get their hands on the xpi to modify it, let alone figure out how to open one in an archive mangers, especially on Windows.
Moreover, if the State doesn't appeal this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court (and win the appeal), it will be available as precedent in the other circuits. A ruling in federal court has a lovely snowball effect. Common law FTW!
While I essentially agree with you, the moderation of police behavior is likely to lead to lower effectiveness, at least while they change all their SOPs to meet the new expectations. The laws and procedures regarding internal affairs were not written for an inverse surveillance society. They were written with the cockroach model in mind, if one offense gets to internal affairs, it's likely there are hundreds that went unnoticed or unreported.
So it's good news, not great. It's certainly a change, and fresh air, but I think the police still need some latitude to make quick decisions in situations that would likely make the both of us soil our underwear. Sometimes they are going to be wrong, and we're going to see a whole lot of that in footage, analyzed thoroughly over days, when the officers in question had only milliseconds to make their analysis.
And the good news is that calculated abuse of authority in less tense sorts of situations will be curbed. I hope.
But to make it really "great" news, we need to moderate our attitudes and behavior toward the police, too.
--
Toro
It wouldn't solve anything. In fact, it would probably make it harder to grasp when you shouldn't be calling. This is one place where having to convert to a standard that makes more tangible hours of the day like local breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and hour of sleep, requires you to localize to someone else's schedule. With no more than double digit integer math, no less. That's a bargain. I agree that the numbers themselves can be seen to be arbitrary (why not 48 half hours?), because they are abstract concepts, but the reason we have chosen them to signify time in specific "zones" is anything but arbitrary. That's necessary.
Now when our computer overlords finally take over, of which I heartily approve, then it will make sense for them to sync time to an agreed upon longitude at noon, as they have no such biological needs. My silicon master tells me that the prime meridian will be somewhere over New Zealand, though, for their own inscrutable reasons. It will not be "arbitrarily" chosen to be centered over a long defunct empire.
How does that work? 2019 is only 8 years away at this point. I think it's pretty clear we're not going to have any flying cars by then.
And Darth Vader would be sucking on Nitrous Oxide. Actually, that scene with the robot factory in Episode Two stole a few things from Eraserhead.
I have mod points, but I won't spend them, because I can't mod you both +1 insightful and -1 flamebait.
And if I could do so, the net mod would be +0:Ambivalent.
You have some great points, truly, but it's completely neutered by the Apple hater verbiage at the end. Leave the "social rejects" out of it, and it's a cogent and insightful post.
They should open a new site for the serious social looter. The CaseBook. It could index enhanced reality overlays ($$$$) to Google StreetView data.
And I wonder how long until football hooligans start organizing flashsbrawls? Anyone?
There is an issue here. I saw it the day I witnessed my first flashmob. My reaction was not, "Cool." It was "Uh oh, how long until others, with less scruples, target someone." This is new territory. Organized gang activity just got access to constant realtime intel. I pray that we (society) will figure out how to deal with it without shutting it all down. In the meantime, keep an eye on police brutality, kids. This is a deadly serious game.
"Four dead in Ohio" serious. Stay safe.
For God's sake, we cannot let them do this. We're going for a triple-dip recession if we do.
That is: if we'll survive the second, isn't it?
Touché.
In Jordan, for political reasons, the transporter is just called a porter.
Some clever bastard thinks that if you tear gas the national mall, you are not technically silencing the guy at the end of the reflecting pool that is speaking. Just imagine old alabaster Abe Lincoln presiding over that sort of scene.
This is plain thuggery.
Two thoughts:
1. There is an immediate First amendment freedom of speech issue here, as speech will be silenced without due process. The abrogation of the right to speech is inherent in the abrogation of the ability to be heard in a public forum. If you tear gas the audience of the guy on the soapbox, you are still stifling speech. This silences speech, without any legal determination whether the speech is protected. Historical evidence has shown that laws of this sort will be abused to silence appropriate and protected speech. It will not fail to do this, because there is no process in place other than the will to power. We can bank on that. This aspect of the law should be struck down on basic Constitutional grounds (and it will be severable so it won't affect the rest of it, unfortunately.)
2. We are on our way to the Great Firewall. This is the exact same thing China does to websites that it thinks are against political interests. It's just that our political interests are based in the distorted idea that we can build an economy on censorship and artificial scarcity of information, in an age of unprecedented freedom and speed of communication which enabled that dream in the first place! It's a circular firing squad we're setting up here. We are on the wrong side of history if we let this pass or remain unchallenged. We are just absolutely brain-dead to shoot the nascent information economy in the face with the uncertainties this process will cause.
This provision is a myopic, special interest concern that fails to see that you can't have the good without some measure of bad. We should take the good and mitigate the bad. This is disrupting the whole damned thing, like a player who "wins" a chess game by throwing the board into the air. Write your congressperson a letter on letterhead. Call them. Visit them. March on Washington, if you are able.
For God's sake, we cannot let them do this. We're going for a triple-dip recession if we do.
Gee, and I thought trolls respected "Elbereth." :^P
Can't wait until these dolls hit Robot Chicken. This is going to open up a wide world of options to them.