I have no problem with my ISP "overselling" as long as it doesn't impact the end users. They know that if they have 10,000 customers with 100mbps connections, that doesn't mean they need to be able to provide 1tbps of bandwidth, but just because they used to be able to get away with only having a total of 1gbps and they now need 10gbps to handle the same load is just a cost of doing business. (numbers made up on the spot, and probably not accurate, but the principle still applies) They should be thankful that they don't actually need to provide the 1tbps that would actually be required if people were filling the pipes they sold them.
I would say the ISP has three choices. 1) Admit they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and stop selling that level of bandwidth. 2) Realize they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and upgrade the network until they can handle the average spikes in said load. 3) Beg netflix to give them a local cache to save them on having to do either 1 or 2 What they should not be doing is getting paid twice for the same bandwidth.
Which is why you already pay more for a 100mbps connection than you do for a 10mbps connection than you do for a 1mbps connection. If all you do is read plaintext slashdot, you only need the 1mbps connection to do just fine, if you stream HD movies you'll need probably the 10mbps connection, if you want multiple 4KHD streams pay for the 100mbps connection. Sure the ISPs pay their own upstream costs in terms of what bandwidth they need, but you pay them in a very similar way.
What SHOULD be happening is that the ISPs should be crawling to Netflix hat in hand begging for a local cache to save them on upstream bandwidth, not trying to extort extra money for something they've already been paid for!
And your average home connection, which is quite asymmetrical, would suddenly drop from being able to stream multiple HD streams at once, to not even being able to stream a single SD stream without issues.
Interesting, my 1983 300sd had the throttle jam open on me once too, wasn't grease though, the pedal broke off the metal lever and jammed against it. It's a good thing I was able to think fast and turn off the ignition and stand on the brake because it chose to do this at a very inopportune moment entering a small and very crowded parking lot. Of course that was back in the days when you had the option to shut off the ignition without using an unintuitive interface to ask permission from the same computer that may be misbehaving while you try to do so... The brake pedal should include a physical disconnect for the throttle, not implemented in software.
By default android takes an all or nothing approach, it tells you what permissions the app wants, and you decide if you want to install it or not. There are however 3rd party solutions for rooted phones which allow you to deny specific permissions and these work well (for example I told my weather app that it didn't need permission to vibrate the phone, I'm capable of deciding when I want to look at the weather). The problem here is two fold though: 1) you can allow or deny, but you can't fake, which means if an app decides not to run without reading your contact list to show you the weather, you can't show it a blank contact list to trick it in to running, I think you should. 2) and this one is more important. Accessing arbitrary files all over the internal file system (such as what VAC is doing in this case) is not considered a permission, it's allowed by default, and is not one of the things you can block, or even see if the app needs.
This is ridiculous. I could deny every permission in android, and a program like VAC could still read my DNS cache. Now I could stop it from contacting the internet, but obviously that's something I want an online game to be able to do. So even the most "advanced" OSs we have today in this area, STILL don't stop apps from accessing random files that they have no business accessing. This is a major security concern.
Sure it does, it just doesn't do it using the browser. it checks what DNS lookups you've made, and assumes that it's the same thing (which it pretty much is for this purpose) The problem is, it shouldn't have access to read that file. Only your DNS resolver should. Security on modern OSs is a big problem, the fact that none of them take it seriously, and all of them allow every piece of software to do whatever it likes on your computer is what needs to change.
I think you misunderstand me, I'm actually not complaining about what VAC does, I'm complaining about what our modern OSs allow EVERY app to do. Not using this app doesn't fix the underlying security concern that every app on my computer has the same access and can do whatever it wants with the information. This is what we need to fix. Our computers need to stop blindly trusting every app.
Then I can give them permission to do so. The OS should assume the worst from any application asking for access outside of itself, and let the user decide. I should be able to give it access, deny it access, or fake the results.
The problem here isn't what VAC is doing, the problem is that any app can do this without any oversight at all.
As a side note, anti-virus and anti-malware wouldn't be issues if we stopped this ridiculous idea that every app should have full and complete control of the user's system.
So your excuse is because this one application has a use you like, all OSs should allow ALL applications free reign.
This is a technical answer exploiting a security hole that shouldn't exist to try to prevent a social problem. If people stayed away from VAC in protest it wouldn't fix the underlying broken concept in every OS that says apps should have free reign over the system.
The problem here is not VAC, the problem is the OS allowing every single app unlimited access to the system, something we should not be allowing.
On a "sex-party" bus, the clients would explicitly NOT want the bus to have cameras, and, depending on the crowd, may or may not, want their own pictures. The OP wants the reverse, which tells me he either wants a blackmail bus, or he doesn't really expect anything that exciting to happen in the first place and just wants to play extortion with memories of a fun evening.
I can find arguments for everyone records, or nobody records, but the "we want our cameras and they can't have theirs" ideal shows the real motive here.
So you're ok with your word processor telling it's owners every website you've ever visited, and possibly your online banking info that was in your cache too while it's at it? how about your image viewer? that weather widget should be able to access every file on your computer and every register in memory too and phone it home, why not? after all, you gave it "explicit permission" (the same permission you gave VAC, a simple install, your OS didn't ask for more.)
The point is that whatever you think of this particular use, it just shows how we don't handle any form of security from the biggest threat on our computers, the apps we install. This SHOULD have come out when the first user installed it and his OS asked permission, instead it came out after people discovered it through other means. There's just no excuse for our OS (and I mean every common OS out there) allowing this by default for every single app.
The people and companies who write the apps don't trust us, so why do we continue to implicitly trust them?
Why would the famous person want to stop themselves from taking their own pictures while allowing their driver to do so? sorry, doesn't make sense. This is not about preventing paparazzi, they can't get on the bus, tinted windows stop them just fine. This is about screwing over their own customers, plain and simple. Either they expect illicit behaviour on the bus and want to be the only ones with blackmail footage ("girls gone wild" or "coke snorting senator" or whatnot), or they simply want to profit by selling normal customers the only picture of their own fun times. Either way they're being dicks.
Nobody hiring a limo tells the driver to record them, and also wants a technical solution to stop them from taking their own pictures.
If it were anti-paparazzi they wouldn't be worried about cameras on the bus they'd be worried about cameras from the outside, this is easy, tinted windows. The combination of them looking to block cameras from their clients on the bus, combined with wanting to take their own pictures, tells me they just want to be jerks about the whole thing.
You want to have your own cameras capturing everything on board, but you want to prevent your guests from doing the same. Best advice is to stop being a dick.
People use limousine buses for special events and parties. These are the times people most want to remember and are likely to want to take their own pictures. Preventing them from doing so (even if it were possible, which in your stated scenario seems dubious) would be a pretty dick move.
now try using it on a tablet without a keyboard... (you know, what it was ostensibly designed for) Work recently took away my XP laptop and replaced it with a windows 8 tablet... my productivity has halved... (and that's an optimistic estimate) our best guess is that some VP thought it would look cooler in front of customers if we were on tablets instead of laptops, never mind that we've lost most of our functionality.
All I ask is that the OS asks first. and ideally gives you the choice of allowing, denying, or faking the results.
If I want my email program to be able to load an attachment to forward, I'll tell it that's ok. If some random game wants to see what my browser did last I'll either deny, or give it false info. (I don't cheat, nor do I visit cheat sites, but I also don't think they have any right to know what sites I do visit)
Did your OS stop it from accessing random files on your hard drive until you gave it permission to do so? If not, are you saying that you have no problem with EVERY application on your computer having similar access to snoop through every file on your hard drive and tell whoever it likes?
Just because you happen to like what this one piece of software does, doesn't mean it isn't doing it in a way that should concern us about what our systems allow with no checks and balances.
In fact this report directly compares the leader of North Korea to a specific devout Christian who committed many atrocities just under a hundred years ago...
Actually the UN is very definitely favourable towards the US, the US has veto power, you hardly give that to someone you aren't favourable towards. The problem with the UN is that they are favourable towards TOO MANY people and gave out veto power to several countries who never agree. This ensures that the UN can never actually accomplish anything because they must get all veto powered countries to agree (something that simply doesn't happen)
For the UN to be effective they have to stop the idea of ANY country having veto power, it just means that those countries are immune to the UN rules.
This particular case may have a "noble" goal, but the exact same techniques could be (and probably are) used for much more nefarious purposes. There is no good reason why it is even possible for any app to do this. Apps should NEVER have access to anything outside of themselves without explicit permission. There is no good reason for it, under any circumstances, and it causes huge security holes.
Mobile has not really done any better. most mobile OSs will tell you what permissions an app is asking for, but won't allow you to select which ones to allow. In addition, the apps are still not fully sandboxed. For example on my android phone I have an app that won't run on rooted phones. It doesn't request root permission, so it SHOULD have no possible way of knowing I'm rooted, however it has full access to the file system (without any special permissions) and therefore can figure it out on it's own. It's time we stopped letting apps have the run of our devices. Developers have repeatedly proven that they don't trust their users, it's time we stopped implicitly trusting them.
This particular case has a "noble" goal, but the exact same techniques could be used for much more nefarious purposes. There is no good reason why it is even possible for an app to do this. Apps should NEVER have access to anything outside of themselves without explicit permission. There is no good reason for it, and it causes huge security holes.
The more I see stories about various programs accessing all sorts of stuff they aren't supposed to, the more I wonder why we still allow this? I use my browser for something, there shouldn't be any other program on the computer that knows about it. It's time we eliminate this idea that every app has access to every file on our computers. I really don't understand why sandboxing every app is not only not the default, but also very rarely even available on most operating systems.
It seems these days most apps are hostile to the users, it's time we treated them as such and stopped letting them have the run of our computers.
Sure there is a distance limit, butit is far enough that, in the city, there is no reason not to place the equipment close enough to the customers (like our local telco does) coax doesn't have a distance limit the same way, but it has a number of subscribers limit that basically works out to the same thing anyway. Both technologies require placing equipment throughout the city to cover it properly. Failure to do so is not a failure of the technology but a failure of the business to implement it properly. Here the competition between telco and cableco is so intense that both are doing everything they can to make the most of their technology. I use DSL because I strongly belive it to be the technically superior option. That said, the local telco definitely recognises that we will at some point in the near future run in to the limits of DSL technology, and as such all communities, and new apartment buildings built in the past 5 years or so run on fibre instead of twisted pair. And about 2 years ago they started to overlay fibre in to existing neighbourhoods, any new customer who signs up in those areas, or any existing customer who adds new services is moved to the fibre.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with my ISP "overselling" as long as it doesn't impact the end users. They know that if they have 10,000 customers with 100mbps connections, that doesn't mean they need to be able to provide 1tbps of bandwidth, but just because they used to be able to get away with only having a total of 1gbps and they now need 10gbps to handle the same load is just a cost of doing business. (numbers made up on the spot, and probably not accurate, but the principle still applies) They should be thankful that they don't actually need to provide the 1tbps that would actually be required if people were filling the pipes they sold them.
I would say the ISP has three choices.
1) Admit they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and stop selling that level of bandwidth.
2) Realize they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and upgrade the network until they can handle the average spikes in said load.
3) Beg netflix to give them a local cache to save them on having to do either 1 or 2
What they should not be doing is getting paid twice for the same bandwidth.
Which is why you already pay more for a 100mbps connection than you do for a 10mbps connection than you do for a 1mbps connection. If all you do is read plaintext slashdot, you only need the 1mbps connection to do just fine, if you stream HD movies you'll need probably the 10mbps connection, if you want multiple 4KHD streams pay for the 100mbps connection.
Sure the ISPs pay their own upstream costs in terms of what bandwidth they need, but you pay them in a very similar way.
What SHOULD be happening is that the ISPs should be crawling to Netflix hat in hand begging for a local cache to save them on upstream bandwidth, not trying to extort extra money for something they've already been paid for!
And your average home connection, which is quite asymmetrical, would suddenly drop from being able to stream multiple HD streams at once, to not even being able to stream a single SD stream without issues.
Interesting, my 1983 300sd had the throttle jam open on me once too, wasn't grease though, the pedal broke off the metal lever and jammed against it. It's a good thing I was able to think fast and turn off the ignition and stand on the brake because it chose to do this at a very inopportune moment entering a small and very crowded parking lot.
Of course that was back in the days when you had the option to shut off the ignition without using an unintuitive interface to ask permission from the same computer that may be misbehaving while you try to do so...
The brake pedal should include a physical disconnect for the throttle, not implemented in software.
By default android takes an all or nothing approach, it tells you what permissions the app wants, and you decide if you want to install it or not. There are however 3rd party solutions for rooted phones which allow you to deny specific permissions and these work well (for example I told my weather app that it didn't need permission to vibrate the phone, I'm capable of deciding when I want to look at the weather). The problem here is two fold though:
1) you can allow or deny, but you can't fake, which means if an app decides not to run without reading your contact list to show you the weather, you can't show it a blank contact list to trick it in to running, I think you should.
2) and this one is more important. Accessing arbitrary files all over the internal file system (such as what VAC is doing in this case) is not considered a permission, it's allowed by default, and is not one of the things you can block, or even see if the app needs.
This is ridiculous. I could deny every permission in android, and a program like VAC could still read my DNS cache. Now I could stop it from contacting the internet, but obviously that's something I want an online game to be able to do. So even the most "advanced" OSs we have today in this area, STILL don't stop apps from accessing random files that they have no business accessing. This is a major security concern.
Sure it does, it just doesn't do it using the browser. it checks what DNS lookups you've made, and assumes that it's the same thing (which it pretty much is for this purpose)
The problem is, it shouldn't have access to read that file. Only your DNS resolver should. Security on modern OSs is a big problem, the fact that none of them take it seriously, and all of them allow every piece of software to do whatever it likes on your computer is what needs to change.
I think you misunderstand me, I'm actually not complaining about what VAC does, I'm complaining about what our modern OSs allow EVERY app to do. Not using this app doesn't fix the underlying security concern that every app on my computer has the same access and can do whatever it wants with the information.
This is what we need to fix. Our computers need to stop blindly trusting every app.
Then I can give them permission to do so.
The OS should assume the worst from any application asking for access outside of itself, and let the user decide. I should be able to give it access, deny it access, or fake the results.
The problem here isn't what VAC is doing, the problem is that any app can do this without any oversight at all.
As a side note, anti-virus and anti-malware wouldn't be issues if we stopped this ridiculous idea that every app should have full and complete control of the user's system.
So your excuse is because this one application has a use you like, all OSs should allow ALL applications free reign.
This is a technical answer exploiting a security hole that shouldn't exist to try to prevent a social problem. If people stayed away from VAC in protest it wouldn't fix the underlying broken concept in every OS that says apps should have free reign over the system.
The problem here is not VAC, the problem is the OS allowing every single app unlimited access to the system, something we should not be allowing.
On a "sex-party" bus, the clients would explicitly NOT want the bus to have cameras, and, depending on the crowd, may or may not, want their own pictures. The OP wants the reverse, which tells me he either wants a blackmail bus, or he doesn't really expect anything that exciting to happen in the first place and just wants to play extortion with memories of a fun evening.
I can find arguments for everyone records, or nobody records, but the "we want our cameras and they can't have theirs" ideal shows the real motive here.
So you're ok with your word processor telling it's owners every website you've ever visited, and possibly your online banking info that was in your cache too while it's at it? how about your image viewer? that weather widget should be able to access every file on your computer and every register in memory too and phone it home, why not? after all, you gave it "explicit permission" (the same permission you gave VAC, a simple install, your OS didn't ask for more.)
The point is that whatever you think of this particular use, it just shows how we don't handle any form of security from the biggest threat on our computers, the apps we install. This SHOULD have come out when the first user installed it and his OS asked permission, instead it came out after people discovered it through other means. There's just no excuse for our OS (and I mean every common OS out there) allowing this by default for every single app.
The people and companies who write the apps don't trust us, so why do we continue to implicitly trust them?
Why would the famous person want to stop themselves from taking their own pictures while allowing their driver to do so? sorry, doesn't make sense.
This is not about preventing paparazzi, they can't get on the bus, tinted windows stop them just fine. This is about screwing over their own customers, plain and simple. Either they expect illicit behaviour on the bus and want to be the only ones with blackmail footage ("girls gone wild" or "coke snorting senator" or whatnot), or they simply want to profit by selling normal customers the only picture of their own fun times. Either way they're being dicks.
Nobody hiring a limo tells the driver to record them, and also wants a technical solution to stop them from taking their own pictures.
If it were anti-paparazzi they wouldn't be worried about cameras on the bus they'd be worried about cameras from the outside, this is easy, tinted windows. The combination of them looking to block cameras from their clients on the bus, combined with wanting to take their own pictures, tells me they just want to be jerks about the whole thing.
You want to have your own cameras capturing everything on board, but you want to prevent your guests from doing the same.
Best advice is to stop being a dick.
People use limousine buses for special events and parties. These are the times people most want to remember and are likely to want to take their own pictures. Preventing them from doing so (even if it were possible, which in your stated scenario seems dubious) would be a pretty dick move.
now try using it on a tablet without a keyboard... (you know, what it was ostensibly designed for) Work recently took away my XP laptop and replaced it with a windows 8 tablet... my productivity has halved... (and that's an optimistic estimate) our best guess is that some VP thought it would look cooler in front of customers if we were on tablets instead of laptops, never mind that we've lost most of our functionality.
All I ask is that the OS asks first. and ideally gives you the choice of allowing, denying, or faking the results.
If I want my email program to be able to load an attachment to forward, I'll tell it that's ok. If some random game wants to see what my browser did last I'll either deny, or give it false info. (I don't cheat, nor do I visit cheat sites, but I also don't think they have any right to know what sites I do visit)
Did your OS stop it from accessing random files on your hard drive until you gave it permission to do so? If not, are you saying that you have no problem with EVERY application on your computer having similar access to snoop through every file on your hard drive and tell whoever it likes?
Just because you happen to like what this one piece of software does, doesn't mean it isn't doing it in a way that should concern us about what our systems allow with no checks and balances.
In fact this report directly compares the leader of North Korea to a specific devout Christian who committed many atrocities just under a hundred years ago...
Actually the UN is very definitely favourable towards the US, the US has veto power, you hardly give that to someone you aren't favourable towards. The problem with the UN is that they are favourable towards TOO MANY people and gave out veto power to several countries who never agree. This ensures that the UN can never actually accomplish anything because they must get all veto powered countries to agree (something that simply doesn't happen)
For the UN to be effective they have to stop the idea of ANY country having veto power, it just means that those countries are immune to the UN rules.
This particular case may have a "noble" goal, but the exact same techniques could be (and probably are) used for much more nefarious purposes. There is no good reason why it is even possible for any app to do this.
Apps should NEVER have access to anything outside of themselves without explicit permission. There is no good reason for it, under any circumstances, and it causes huge security holes.
Mobile has not really done any better. most mobile OSs will tell you what permissions an app is asking for, but won't allow you to select which ones to allow. In addition, the apps are still not fully sandboxed. For example on my android phone I have an app that won't run on rooted phones. It doesn't request root permission, so it SHOULD have no possible way of knowing I'm rooted, however it has full access to the file system (without any special permissions) and therefore can figure it out on it's own.
It's time we stopped letting apps have the run of our devices. Developers have repeatedly proven that they don't trust their users, it's time we stopped implicitly trusting them.
This particular case has a "noble" goal, but the exact same techniques could be used for much more nefarious purposes. There is no good reason why it is even possible for an app to do this.
Apps should NEVER have access to anything outside of themselves without explicit permission. There is no good reason for it, and it causes huge security holes.
The more I see stories about various programs accessing all sorts of stuff they aren't supposed to, the more I wonder why we still allow this? I use my browser for something, there shouldn't be any other program on the computer that knows about it. It's time we eliminate this idea that every app has access to every file on our computers. I really don't understand why sandboxing every app is not only not the default, but also very rarely even available on most operating systems.
It seems these days most apps are hostile to the users, it's time we treated them as such and stopped letting them have the run of our computers.
Sure there is a distance limit, butit is far enough that, in the city, there is no reason not to place the equipment close enough to the customers (like our local telco does) coax doesn't have a distance limit the same way, but it has a number of subscribers limit that basically works out to the same thing anyway. Both technologies require placing equipment throughout the city to cover it properly. Failure to do so is not a failure of the technology but a failure of the business to implement it properly. Here the competition between telco and cableco is so intense that both are doing everything they can to make the most of their technology. I use DSL because I strongly belive it to be the technically superior option.
That said, the local telco definitely recognises that we will at some point in the near future run in to the limits of DSL technology, and as such all communities, and new apartment buildings built in the past 5 years or so run on fibre instead of twisted pair. And about 2 years ago they started to overlay fibre in to existing neighbourhoods, any new customer who signs up in those areas, or any existing customer who adds new services is moved to the fibre.