So many knee-jerk comments here. Get a grip folks.
This is about how we treat data of a citizen from one large jurisdiction when it moves to or is stored in another large jurisdiction, and removing legal uncertainty for the companies doing so. For example, this very site's account info of EU residents being stored in the US (handle, email and encrypted password). Nothing overly private, but still falls under privacy laws of hundreds of countries, each of which could voice a problem and issue a warrant or subpoena. Without overarching legal frameworks governing and taming this legal diversity and uncertainty, it is basically impossible to run a large website. Plain and simple. If you're an engineer, you absolutely want to be insulated and protected from all this possible BS, regardless of how much of a non-issue your own data collection might be to your engineering mind.
Even is ISPs are relatively transparent about what they sell you, it is always about maximum download and upload speed, and never about latency and quality of service. In fact, sales and first-tier support folks don't even know these terms, much less what their company's typical values are. In practice, a stable, low latency broadband connection with 15 Mbit/s cap gives you a better overall experience than a jerky, high latency connection which on paper tops out at 50 Mbit/s.
I am very glad the FCC is including these numbers by default to judge a provider's disclosure practices. As an aside, test your connection at https://www.voipreview.org/spe... and see your latency, jitter and packet loss alongside the other metrics.
It's an iPhone 5C without secure area on the silicon itself. Much weaker than iPhone 6 and 6S, relying on software to do the job of the silicon. I'd expect newer iPhones to be secure for now.
If you've configured your site to allow arbitrary content from unknown third-parties, your site is compromised by design. If the mere act of rendering the content that your site is sufficient to get malware, then, yes, your page is compromised. Doesn't matter if the source of the malware was in somebody else's ad service. If that service feeds data directly into your site that you then present to your visitors without any sort of vetting or filtering, then you've allowed that malware to compromise your site.
You do realize that a site only embeds the ad network code, not the final downloaded content? I.e. yes, a site takes some sort of responsibility when deciding to run ads from an ad network. Beyond that, however, every user gets potentially different ads. There are real time bidding platforms and user profiling code in the middle, completely outside the direct control of the website.
The ads appeared when I visited those websites, therefore it appears the websites are responsible for spreading the malware.
If it were that easy this wouldn't be a problem. You've got a least three players here: The website running ads and trying to fight off the bad stuff, the ad networks which only sometimes care enough, and the advertiser trying to game the system into running bad ads. It's a continuous arms race, and as a website owner you end up in reactive mode, rather than proactive.
Here's an idea: How about someone writes an ad blocker that DOWNLOADS the ads, just like normal, but simply does not RENDER them on the screen, or execute any code? Seems like the best of both worlds: users that don't want to see the ads don't see them, and websites still get paid, since there's no way to tell if they actually got shown?
Won't work anymore. Big advertisers want proof that their ad was seen, via Double Verify or similar, and only pay for ads that were in front of users for a certain amount of time. Javascript and CSS make this easy to measure, and hard to work around.
I was very active on/. in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then life, work, and other interests took over. Can't day it was a conscious decision to stay away.
Well, some of us on the new team have been around for a while. I remember a magenta and white version of/. run out of Rob Malda's dorm room. It's like meeting up with a long lost friend - happy to be involved behind the scenes now.
HTTPs only encrypts the contents of what you are retrieving
HTTPS also blinds "proxies" and antivirus software which may have their own opinions of what should and should not travel over plain old port 80. ISPs have done stunts like ad injection, antivirus software routinely blocks websockets, and on and on. HTTPS is a godsend around this bullshit.
If we'd switch away from income tax to a national sales tax, all these tax evasion issues would go away instantly. Money, no matter how it was gotten and where it came from, eventually will be spent. Tax it then and profit!
Of course, there would still be loopholes, but I expect far fewer and harder to exploit.
National sales tax would also force banks such as Julius Baer into much cleaner business practices. A nice little side effect. Spoken as a Swiss citizen who has walked past Julius Baer HQ many times, but never been impressed by what they stand for.
Your comment should be labeled as both, funny and insightful. Come on, mods! The real meat of why this proposed ISO "standard" is deeply flawed needs to float to the top. Even non-techies can grasp that OOXML bad.
Ahh, you must have read my mind! If it weren't for your XP laptop at work, you could be me, in fact. Luckily, I need Unix-based computers for my SA job, so it's Macs right now.
Love this quote: "I like the idea of free software, but I'm not devoting my life to the cause. If it works best, I'll use it. If not, I'll pay to use whatever works best. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it is almost never their product." Right on the money (pun fully intended)!
Well, I do pay taxes for roads, and hopefully you do too. I own property and pay property tax, which pays for most local roads, which are the ones I use with my bike. Given that my household of 5 drivers only puts two cars on the road while all others use bicycles and cause MUCH less wear and tear, I might actually be subsidizing your road. So there. (That's for the US, but I suspect the situation is somewhat similar in spirit elsewhere.)
Where I work any transfer to an from a.edu address is pretty much guaranteed to go over I2. Given your Knoppix throughput numbers, I'd be willing to bet you were using the I2 backbone, too. No way you can reach these speeds over the commercial internet. Short of getting the skinny from your institution's network admins there's no clearcut way of knowing for sure, though. That's the beauty of flexible routing.
Much of it has been implemented for a while now. I forget when exactly my institution obtained access, but it was years ago. Back then it was not at the current speed, obviously, but still MUCH faster than the clogged public network. Of course it helps to get timely access if you're near a major node, in our case San Diego Supercomputer Center, and if you are a bona fide research center.
Funny thing is that a 5.1 or 7.1 home theater would technically violate this rule. Same for an elaborate stereo system with separate speaker boxes for bass, mids and highs. One can only hope that sanity prevails when interpreting such rules as technology progresses...
Philip Greenspun has been dealing with this since there were only a few dozen web sites total. His solution is a Hall of Shame which he has vowed to keep up forever. Of course it helps that he hosts his images himself, and that he never caves to take down and cease-and-desist letters regarding his Hall of Shame. He explains the genesis of his approach here (search for "Personal Approach to Copywright"). As Philip puts it "it has to be muchmore efficient for society than a bunch of corporations hiring lawyers to sling mud at each other in court. Under my system, we can enjoy seeing our work (with credit) on other folks' sites, vent our spleens at midnight by adding to a Web page of transgressors, and then move on to new productive activities."
You are absolutely right, TOU billing should work to the advantage of most consumers, and if it doesn't there are underlying issues which need to be addressed. As you rightly point out, PV system produce the most energy during peak hours. The largest energy uses in many CA homes are for AC during the summer and items such as pool pump, as another poster stated. Both uses are typically highest during peak pricing hours, but they can be avoided or engineered around, as has been pointed out, or at least moved to off-peak hours. But more fundamentally, these uses represent elective luxury items and aren't strictly necessary at all. I'm taking a fairly lax view of "necessary" and factor most appliances, such as refrigerator, TV, etc. into it, but the pool does definitely not qualify, and cooling in summer shouldn't be necessary in a properly constructed and insulated house in coastal areas such as Rancho Palos Verdes as quoted in TFA.
As such, if a home's roof doesn't have enough area to allow for a PV system to cover most or all of the net electricity needs, then a home owner needs to critically look at electricity uses and rectify the situation BEFORE a PV system goes in. And PV installers should learn to collaborate with energy consultants, insulation installers and others in order to provide more complete and appropriate solutions.
If you yourself can break even with less than 100% PV electricity capacity while hitting the 300% of baseline usage price bracket AND using AC 24/7, then anyone should be able to as well.
And they need to act fast. As the maintainer of a local copy of GenBank it saddens me that the patent section of GenBank has been growing far faster lately than say, the plant section or even the primate section. What does that say about us scientists? Blech!
You're right, this whole thing is very disingenuous. Everybody who complained about Steve Jobs' self-serving stance last week must RTFLetter and tell us how it could get any worse in terms of disinformation. Steve at least was technically correct, and on the pulse of things. But this is simply awful in how it tries to co-opt ISPs to do the dirty work. I hope ISP lawyers will talk some sense into their companies' management before they get with this program.
You seem to enjoy splitting hairs, but there's no need. As far as I'm aware the license to enjoy my CDs is per household, and not per individual. I can play my CD loud and let everyone in the house enjoy it. In fact, I can open the windows and let my neighbors catch an earful too, legally. I just cannot play the CD at a public event to which people pay admission, and free public events are a grey zone.
Also, the American Homerecording Act allows me to record all CDs I own. This implies encoding to MP3 is legal. And I can do this multiple times, and everyone in my household can legally use and enjoy any of those recordings.
Well, if you're a pro and decide to upload your work to a public website it's incumbent on you to check how your stuff will be made available to the public. Basic business savvy, due diligence and such... If you make a mistake here, your pro designation isn't really worth much, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot just consume and hope nobody cares that you don't give back.
So many knee-jerk comments here. Get a grip folks.
This is about how we treat data of a citizen from one large jurisdiction when it moves to or is stored in another large jurisdiction, and removing legal uncertainty for the companies doing so. For example, this very site's account info of EU residents being stored in the US (handle, email and encrypted password). Nothing overly private, but still falls under privacy laws of hundreds of countries, each of which could voice a problem and issue a warrant or subpoena. Without overarching legal frameworks governing and taming this legal diversity and uncertainty, it is basically impossible to run a large website. Plain and simple. If you're an engineer, you absolutely want to be insulated and protected from all this possible BS, regardless of how much of a non-issue your own data collection might be to your engineering mind.
Even is ISPs are relatively transparent about what they sell you, it is always about maximum download and upload speed, and never about latency and quality of service. In fact, sales and first-tier support folks don't even know these terms, much less what their company's typical values are. In practice, a stable, low latency broadband connection with 15 Mbit/s cap gives you a better overall experience than a jerky, high latency connection which on paper tops out at 50 Mbit/s.
I am very glad the FCC is including these numbers by default to judge a provider's disclosure practices.
As an aside, test your connection at https://www.voipreview.org/spe... and see your latency, jitter and packet loss alongside the other metrics.
It's an iPhone 5C without secure area on the silicon itself. Much weaker than iPhone 6 and 6S, relying on software to do the job of the silicon.
I'd expect newer iPhones to be secure for now.
If you've configured your site to allow arbitrary content from unknown third-parties, your site is compromised by design. If the mere act of rendering the content that your site is sufficient to get malware, then, yes, your page is compromised. Doesn't matter if the source of the malware was in somebody else's ad service. If that service feeds data directly into your site that you then present to your visitors without any sort of vetting or filtering, then you've allowed that malware to compromise your site.
You do realize that a site only embeds the ad network code, not the final downloaded content? I.e. yes, a site takes some sort of responsibility when deciding to run ads from an ad network. Beyond that, however, every user gets potentially different ads. There are real time bidding platforms and user profiling code in the middle, completely outside the direct control of the website.
The ads appeared when I visited those websites, therefore it appears the websites are responsible for spreading the malware.
If it were that easy this wouldn't be a problem. You've got a least three players here: The website running ads and trying to fight off the bad stuff, the ad networks which only sometimes care enough, and the advertiser trying to game the system into running bad ads. It's a continuous arms race, and as a website owner you end up in reactive mode, rather than proactive.
Here's an idea: How about someone writes an ad blocker that DOWNLOADS the ads, just like normal, but simply does not RENDER them on the screen, or execute any code? Seems like the best of both worlds: users that don't want to see the ads don't see them, and websites still get paid, since there's no way to tell if they actually got shown?
Won't work anymore. Big advertisers want proof that their ad was seen, via Double Verify or similar, and only pay for ads that were in front of users for a certain amount of time. Javascript and CSS make this easy to measure, and hard to work around.
I was very active on /. in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then life, work, and other interests took over. Can't day it was a conscious decision to stay away.
Well, some of us on the new team have been around for a while. I remember a magenta and white version of /. run out of Rob Malda's dorm room.
It's like meeting up with a long lost friend - happy to be involved behind the scenes now.
HTTPs only encrypts the contents of what you are retrieving
HTTPS also blinds "proxies" and antivirus software which may have their own opinions of what should and should not travel over plain old port 80. ISPs have done stunts like ad injection, antivirus software routinely blocks websockets, and on and on. HTTPS is a godsend around this bullshit.
Aaahh the sweet smell of justice done!
Can't wait for sanctions against this scumbag. Hopefully other overzealus lawyers will take notice too.
If we'd switch away from income tax to a national sales tax, all these tax evasion issues would go away instantly. Money, no matter how it was gotten and where it came from, eventually will be spent. Tax it then and profit!
Of course, there would still be loopholes, but I expect far fewer and harder to exploit.
National sales tax would also force banks such as Julius Baer into much cleaner business practices. A nice little side effect. Spoken as a Swiss citizen who has walked past Julius Baer HQ many times, but never been impressed by what they stand for.
Totally agree! Well said!
I'm really enjoying this series. It brings back many fond memories, and some less fond ones also.
Your comment should be labeled as both, funny and insightful. Come on, mods!
The real meat of why this proposed ISO "standard" is deeply flawed needs to float to the top. Even non-techies can grasp that OOXML bad.
Ahh, you must have read my mind! If it weren't for your XP laptop at work, you could be me, in fact. Luckily, I need Unix-based computers for my SA job, so it's Macs right now.
Love this quote:
"I like the idea of free software, but I'm not devoting my life to the cause. If it works best, I'll use it. If not, I'll pay to use whatever works best. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it is almost never their product."
Right on the money (pun fully intended)!
Pay some road tax. Damn cyclists.
Well, I do pay taxes for roads, and hopefully you do too. I own property and pay property tax, which pays for most local roads, which are the ones I use with my bike. Given that my household of 5 drivers only puts two cars on the road while all others use bicycles and cause MUCH less wear and tear, I might actually be subsidizing your road. So there.
(That's for the US, but I suspect the situation is somewhat similar in spirit elsewhere.)
Where I work any transfer to an from a .edu address is pretty much guaranteed to go over I2. Given your Knoppix throughput numbers, I'd be willing to bet you were using the I2 backbone, too. No way you can reach these speeds over the commercial internet. Short of getting the skinny from your institution's network admins there's no clearcut way of knowing for sure, though. That's the beauty of flexible routing.
Much of it has been implemented for a while now. I forget when exactly my institution obtained access, but it was years ago. Back then it was not at the current speed, obviously, but still MUCH faster than the clogged public network. Of course it helps to get timely access if you're near a major node, in our case San Diego Supercomputer Center, and if you are a bona fide research center.
[Simply going by your quote from the linked text]
Funny thing is that a 5.1 or 7.1 home theater would technically violate this rule. Same for an elaborate stereo system with separate speaker boxes for bass, mids and highs. One can only hope that sanity prevails when interpreting such rules as technology progresses...
Philip Greenspun has been dealing with this since there were only a few dozen web sites total. His solution is a Hall of Shame which he has vowed to keep up forever. Of course it helps that he hosts his images himself, and that he never caves to take down and cease-and-desist letters regarding his Hall of Shame. He explains the genesis of his approach here (search for "Personal Approach to Copywright"). As Philip puts it "it has to be muchmore efficient for society than a bunch of corporations hiring lawyers to sling mud at each other in court. Under my system, we can enjoy seeing our work (with credit) on other folks' sites, vent our spleens at midnight by adding to a Web page of transgressors, and then move on to new productive activities."
You are absolutely right, TOU billing should work to the advantage of most consumers, and if it doesn't there are underlying issues which need to be addressed. As you rightly point out, PV system produce the most energy during peak hours. The largest energy uses in many CA homes are for AC during the summer and items such as pool pump, as another poster stated. Both uses are typically highest during peak pricing hours, but they can be avoided or engineered around, as has been pointed out, or at least moved to off-peak hours. But more fundamentally, these uses represent elective luxury items and aren't strictly necessary at all. I'm taking a fairly lax view of "necessary" and factor most appliances, such as refrigerator, TV, etc. into it, but the pool does definitely not qualify, and cooling in summer shouldn't be necessary in a properly constructed and insulated house in coastal areas such as Rancho Palos Verdes as quoted in TFA.
As such, if a home's roof doesn't have enough area to allow for a PV system to cover most or all of the net electricity needs, then a home owner needs to critically look at electricity uses and rectify the situation BEFORE a PV system goes in. And PV installers should learn to collaborate with energy consultants, insulation installers and others in order to provide more complete and appropriate solutions.
If you yourself can break even with less than 100% PV electricity capacity while hitting the 300% of baseline usage price bracket AND using AC 24/7, then anyone should be able to as well.
And they need to act fast. As the maintainer of a local copy of GenBank it saddens me that the patent section of GenBank has been growing far faster lately than say, the plant section or even the primate section. What does that say about us scientists? Blech!
You're right, this whole thing is very disingenuous. Everybody who complained about Steve Jobs' self-serving stance last week must RTFLetter and tell us how it could get any worse in terms of disinformation. Steve at least was technically correct, and on the pulse of things. But this is simply awful in how it tries to co-opt ISPs to do the dirty work. I hope ISP lawyers will talk some sense into their companies' management before they get with this program.
You seem to enjoy splitting hairs, but there's no need. As far as I'm aware the license to enjoy my CDs is per household, and not per individual. I can play my CD loud and let everyone in the house enjoy it. In fact, I can open the windows and let my neighbors catch an earful too, legally. I just cannot play the CD at a public event to which people pay admission, and free public events are a grey zone.
Also, the American Homerecording Act allows me to record all CDs I own. This implies encoding to MP3 is legal. And I can do this multiple times, and everyone in my household can legally use and enjoy any of those recordings.
Well, if you're a pro and decide to upload your work to a public website it's incumbent on you to check how your stuff will be made available to the public. Basic business savvy, due diligence and such...
If you make a mistake here, your pro designation isn't really worth much, is it?