Another poster commented that they hate their LG SMART TV. I particularly love mine and it just got updated to have Google Play Movies and TV App. (Doesn't help me since I am an Amazon Prime customer but still a feature useful to many). The magic remote is fantastic. It's MiraCast compatible (hopefully Chromecast too soon, but for now it works).
I have two Rokus sitting in the garage. Having to use only one remote is really nice. I hate switching back and forth between Roku remote and TV remote for volume. I would buy mine again.
I was actually thinking of iPhone / iPad when I made this comment, but good point that Apple also does still sell Macs.
That being said, the rest of your comment proves my point. We aren't living in a locked down world. We are in a world where you can either have complete control or you can use locked devices. I don't see anything wrong with having a choice.
Except that we're not really losing any of this. Certain hardware that is sold at a loss is pretty locked down. Apple devices are locked up tight but they are so overpriced for the hardware that it doesn't matter.
The vast majority of non-subsidized phones, tablets, and laptops that you buy are completely open. You can also buy a wider range of general purpose equipment than ever. Raspberry Pi anybody? Cyagenomod runs great on any Nexus branded hardware.
The FOSS tools are the best they've ever been. You can run a Linux desktop without feeling left out all the time. The Clang compiler is as good as commercial alternatives.
I've tried to live a life of "control" over my devices in the past and it was pretty miserable. If I had to do it today, I might not even notice.
Except that you have missed the point of the takedown notices. The time between when the copyright holder notices the infringement and the time that they get in front of a judge can be quite long. Especially if the person has attempted to mask their identity (Harder to do with residential Internet, but not impossible.) Given the prevalence of infringement this would also overwhelm the courts. The issue is what happens during that time. The DMCA provides a provision that, once notified, the ISP of the alleged infringer has to take down the infringing content and also notify the subscriber. At that point, the subscriber can file counter-notice that they are not infringing and this will be passed to the copyright claimant along with the subscribers identity. At that point the ISP reinstates the content. This is an optional procedure. But by participating, the ISP gains "safe harbor" and can't be held liable for contributory infringement. ISPs don't have to do this. At the time of authorship the thought was that almost all takedown claims would be legitimate so the counterclaim process would not be burdensome. This hasn't worked out well because a notice takes almost no effort to generate but puts a heavy burden on the ISPs. The vast majority of claims seem to be false positives which means there needs to be some revision.
When I was in HS, kids would sign their friends up for hundreds of magazine subscriptions at a time and thought it was funny. I think you can still fill out those cards and prank your friends, although I've never tried.
I understand the challenge with cancelled service, but how are they getting things like gravel delivered without a deposit of some sort. Heck if I were the gravel company, I'd be happy to take a deposit, call the victim, agree not to deliver the gravel and split the deposit with them!
Which the cable company would *love*. Then they can make it even harder to cancel and all subscriptions become essentially lifetime. Sorry the DNA sample you submitted with your cancellation request seems to be contaminated. You'll have to submit another and allow six to eight weeks for processing before we can cancel your service.
The ISP does not make a determination. They take down the content and then the accuses can file a counter-claim. Whether this is a good process or not, its what we have.
I wish I could mod you up. This is how the DMCA was sold and I wish it was operating this way. The problem is that the takedown notices place so little burden on the person sending them that the false positive rates are obscene. I'm not sure what a good solution would be. A judge could issue an injunction against an organization that has too high of an FP rate, but this just might be a game of whack-a-mole. Of course that's how the rights holders probably feel about the infringers.
I'll get modded into oblivion, but monthly fee streaming services (rental) are probably the way of the future. The revenue stream is smaller for the creators but it's super-convenient for the customer and only the poorest people or those who have some sort of digital hoarding syndrome will really want to build huge offline collections.
Certainly not YouTube. Google is able and willing to defend users who are falsely accused. The problem for companies like Cox is that they don't know which accusations are real. Youtube has different issues with DMCA takedowns, but the situation isn't analogous.
The DMCA is a bad law, but the judge is only doing his job interpreting it. Basically the DMCA gives information providers two choices. Throw their customers under the bus at the most frivolous allegation. Or stand up for their customers and become jointly liable for the behavior. I think that part of the goal was to force information providers (and, apparently, ISPS to do) is to police their own networks. When a customer is accused, they have to already know whether the person is guilty and how to respond. Or better yet, proactively take action. Cox took neither of these actions and now they're in a bind just like everybody else. I hope that this law is thrown out on constitutional grounds but that doesn't seem to be the place of a trial judge. It's not clear that the argument has even been raised.
There are plenty of people who will pay for the news. I'm one of them. Of course I only buy Kindle subscriptions, not dead trees. The problem with the news business right now is that everybody is writing up the same high-level summaries of the same stories. How many different accounts do we need of one event? In the meantime, not too many organizations are digging deep. That's harder to do as a daily than a weekly, but still needs to happen. The web killed the market for reworking wire stories, but there are whole new growth areas available. From what I understand, papers with a local focus are doing much better since they are on the right track.
So people block ads because they are so concerned about security. But then when faced with the choice of turning off the ad blocker or paying money, they turn it off. I don't see how we can say that these users care about security. Also 'hijacking' isn't an issue on iOS devices. If you could successfully do this, the bounty is US $1 Million. You wouldn't drive-by install a root kit on the devices, you'd just take the reward. Ad blocking on iOS makes sense to save bandwidth but even then only if you are on a metered connection. It doesn't save anything on WiFi except annoyance. The choice offered here seems reasonable. View the ad, pay money, or go away. The fact that people overwhelmingly view the ads is a pretty solid piece of evidence that the world isn't how many of us wish it to be.
Except that we really don't have this option because the behavior is so pervasive. There's not a single thing that you can buy or do without giving money to a business that acts in ways that are ethically questionable at best. Let's say you whip a group into a frenzy and they all decide to go to a different theme park. Tomorrow we'll find an issues with those places. I support voting with your wallet on the most egregious issues, but it can't be a universal solution. We need government that functions.
I hope this gets a +5 Informative mod since you are the only guy in history to use your ISP-provided email address and, therefore, uniquely qualified to comment on this situation!
They aren't denying access. They are requiring that you not use an Ad Blocker. If you are concerned that this would be "insecure," run it in a dedicated VM or dedicated hardware. You have a simple workaround. If it's a free account, this may not even matter since they might owe you nothing. Also it's not a tort since they haven't communicated with your business partner. If they sent your contacts an email saying that you aren't responding to them due to your ad blocker, that might be a tort case. I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't get legal advice on/. However, what's provided here is certainly better than what you proposed!
I congratulate you on your +5 funny, but I have an iPhone and would go back to my BB10 at the first opportunity. I also have used a Nexus/6 until about two weeks ago and same feeling. BB10 has this great ability to compost your data from different sources without it actually leaking across sources. And the Blackberry hub is exactly how a phone should work. They also run Android apps. And, historically, security was way better. However, with this announcement, I suppose that I will give up the ship.
Although I mostly agree with you, I feel compelled to put out that in order to write software today, one must know both the technical programming aspects *and* be an expert on the target domain model. The days of a business analyst writing requirements are over. The world changes too fast. If you're implementing tax software, the IRS publishes new rules and you have to be ready on January 1st. "Poor" code that implements the rules correctly is valuable. "Good" code that doesn't quite understand the domain model and gets some things wrong isn't useful. In terms of the triple-constraints, time is *usually* the primary constraint and quality is the tertiary constraint. The "poor" apps survive because their authors get to market and make money. A *good* security solution is one that would make things go *faster* not slower. Then there would be widespread adoption.
The problem is that, in non-trivial applications, it's not always easy to tell *where* in the architecture the data should be sanitized. Security experts accidentally write SQLi. Web applications are especially problematic because you have to escape for so many different contexts. It's not possible to do it all in one place since, at the time of receipt, you don't know the context. Is it going into a database? One type of escaping is required. HTML context? Completely different. What if it's going to be reflected *and* stored.
If your application is 10 lines long, it's pretty inexcusable to get this wrong. But when there are multiple layers, it's easy to get confused which layer is responsible. And if you double-escape, things just won't work. And I can't tell you how many web sites are broken if you have an apostrophe in your name!
It's easy to blame the programmers but the web frameworks are really at fault. Data should not be received in a String type. There should be a separate TaintedString class that receives this type of data and the frameworks should be built that way.
Stored procedures *mostly* solve this until you get a stored procedure that makes a web services call and then builds dynamic SQL or something hideous along those lines and then you are back to having SQLi again.
Not understanding injection defects in today's day and age makes you poorly qualified to write software for a living. But misunderstanding part of the security architecture of a large application is something that happens to the best.
The problem with central planning is that there can be only two outcome. Either the central planner gets it exactly right in which case the quantity of production is exactly the same as a free market. Or, the central planner gets it wrong and then the economy as a whole suffers. There are lots of problems in market economies but they always balance supply and demand. And you can't have a centralized economic policy without a centralized political policy. If the central planners tell me to produce ten jars of apple sauce and two apple pies, but my customers prefer apple pie, I will go out and make ten apple pies and two jars of apple sauce. I'm happier selling more and my customer gets what they want. So how do you force people to follow the central planning? The only way I *won't* do this is if you threaten me with excessive punishment. For that you need centralized political power. China has shown you can (to some extent) have centralized political power and a free market. But even that is tenuous. Businesses are making bad decisions all the time because the government is suppressing information needed to make accurate choices. We don't teach young earth creationism in science class and we don't teach centrally planned economies in economics class. It's really the same argument.
But most video producers don't have the resources to fight. So a DMCA takedown is essentially a death sentence for their content even if it is entirely non-infringing. What Google is saying is that if you are a little fish whose content gets flagged wrongly in a DMCA takedown, rather than fold, they will help you fight. This has the effect of increasing the cost of sending takedown notices and hopefully discourages the practice of sending the notice first and asking questions later.
Slashdot Mirror
Another poster commented that they hate their LG SMART TV. I particularly love mine and it just got updated to have Google Play Movies and TV App. (Doesn't help me since I am an Amazon Prime customer but still a feature useful to many). The magic remote is fantastic. It's MiraCast compatible (hopefully Chromecast too soon, but for now it works). I have two Rokus sitting in the garage. Having to use only one remote is really nice. I hate switching back and forth between Roku remote and TV remote for volume. I would buy mine again.
I was actually thinking of iPhone / iPad when I made this comment, but good point that Apple also does still sell Macs. That being said, the rest of your comment proves my point. We aren't living in a locked down world. We are in a world where you can either have complete control or you can use locked devices. I don't see anything wrong with having a choice.
Except that we're not really losing any of this. Certain hardware that is sold at a loss is pretty locked down. Apple devices are locked up tight but they are so overpriced for the hardware that it doesn't matter. The vast majority of non-subsidized phones, tablets, and laptops that you buy are completely open. You can also buy a wider range of general purpose equipment than ever. Raspberry Pi anybody? Cyagenomod runs great on any Nexus branded hardware. The FOSS tools are the best they've ever been. You can run a Linux desktop without feeling left out all the time. The Clang compiler is as good as commercial alternatives. I've tried to live a life of "control" over my devices in the past and it was pretty miserable. If I had to do it today, I might not even notice.
Except that you have missed the point of the takedown notices. The time between when the copyright holder notices the infringement and the time that they get in front of a judge can be quite long. Especially if the person has attempted to mask their identity (Harder to do with residential Internet, but not impossible.) Given the prevalence of infringement this would also overwhelm the courts. The issue is what happens during that time. The DMCA provides a provision that, once notified, the ISP of the alleged infringer has to take down the infringing content and also notify the subscriber. At that point, the subscriber can file counter-notice that they are not infringing and this will be passed to the copyright claimant along with the subscribers identity. At that point the ISP reinstates the content. This is an optional procedure. But by participating, the ISP gains "safe harbor" and can't be held liable for contributory infringement. ISPs don't have to do this. At the time of authorship the thought was that almost all takedown claims would be legitimate so the counterclaim process would not be burdensome. This hasn't worked out well because a notice takes almost no effort to generate but puts a heavy burden on the ISPs. The vast majority of claims seem to be false positives which means there needs to be some revision.
Just shows that if you don't have the skills, code you write even in C# will still be a POS. Oh wait.
When I was in HS, kids would sign their friends up for hundreds of magazine subscriptions at a time and thought it was funny. I think you can still fill out those cards and prank your friends, although I've never tried. I understand the challenge with cancelled service, but how are they getting things like gravel delivered without a deposit of some sort. Heck if I were the gravel company, I'd be happy to take a deposit, call the victim, agree not to deliver the gravel and split the deposit with them!
Wait until the SJW crowd adopts this technique!
Which the cable company would *love*. Then they can make it even harder to cancel and all subscriptions become essentially lifetime. Sorry the DNA sample you submitted with your cancellation request seems to be contaminated. You'll have to submit another and allow six to eight weeks for processing before we can cancel your service.
You got modded funny but they could probably offer this as a service. In fact, I may open a business doing just that!
Only if you don't file counter-notice for any of the accusations. A form letter will do.
The ISP does not make a determination. They take down the content and then the accuses can file a counter-claim. Whether this is a good process or not, its what we have.
I wish I could mod you up. This is how the DMCA was sold and I wish it was operating this way. The problem is that the takedown notices place so little burden on the person sending them that the false positive rates are obscene. I'm not sure what a good solution would be. A judge could issue an injunction against an organization that has too high of an FP rate, but this just might be a game of whack-a-mole. Of course that's how the rights holders probably feel about the infringers. I'll get modded into oblivion, but monthly fee streaming services (rental) are probably the way of the future. The revenue stream is smaller for the creators but it's super-convenient for the customer and only the poorest people or those who have some sort of digital hoarding syndrome will really want to build huge offline collections.
Certainly not YouTube. Google is able and willing to defend users who are falsely accused. The problem for companies like Cox is that they don't know which accusations are real. Youtube has different issues with DMCA takedowns, but the situation isn't analogous.
The DMCA is a bad law, but the judge is only doing his job interpreting it. Basically the DMCA gives information providers two choices. Throw their customers under the bus at the most frivolous allegation. Or stand up for their customers and become jointly liable for the behavior. I think that part of the goal was to force information providers (and, apparently, ISPS to do) is to police their own networks. When a customer is accused, they have to already know whether the person is guilty and how to respond. Or better yet, proactively take action. Cox took neither of these actions and now they're in a bind just like everybody else. I hope that this law is thrown out on constitutional grounds but that doesn't seem to be the place of a trial judge. It's not clear that the argument has even been raised.
I feel bad for those who switched from Lenovo to Dell after the SuperFish fiasco.
There are plenty of people who will pay for the news. I'm one of them. Of course I only buy Kindle subscriptions, not dead trees. The problem with the news business right now is that everybody is writing up the same high-level summaries of the same stories. How many different accounts do we need of one event? In the meantime, not too many organizations are digging deep. That's harder to do as a daily than a weekly, but still needs to happen. The web killed the market for reworking wire stories, but there are whole new growth areas available. From what I understand, papers with a local focus are doing much better since they are on the right track.
So people block ads because they are so concerned about security. But then when faced with the choice of turning off the ad blocker or paying money, they turn it off. I don't see how we can say that these users care about security. Also 'hijacking' isn't an issue on iOS devices. If you could successfully do this, the bounty is US $1 Million. You wouldn't drive-by install a root kit on the devices, you'd just take the reward. Ad blocking on iOS makes sense to save bandwidth but even then only if you are on a metered connection. It doesn't save anything on WiFi except annoyance. The choice offered here seems reasonable. View the ad, pay money, or go away. The fact that people overwhelmingly view the ads is a pretty solid piece of evidence that the world isn't how many of us wish it to be.
Except that we really don't have this option because the behavior is so pervasive. There's not a single thing that you can buy or do without giving money to a business that acts in ways that are ethically questionable at best. Let's say you whip a group into a frenzy and they all decide to go to a different theme park. Tomorrow we'll find an issues with those places. I support voting with your wallet on the most egregious issues, but it can't be a universal solution. We need government that functions.
I hope this gets a +5 Informative mod since you are the only guy in history to use your ISP-provided email address and, therefore, uniquely qualified to comment on this situation!
They aren't denying access. They are requiring that you not use an Ad Blocker. If you are concerned that this would be "insecure," run it in a dedicated VM or dedicated hardware. You have a simple workaround. If it's a free account, this may not even matter since they might owe you nothing. Also it's not a tort since they haven't communicated with your business partner. If they sent your contacts an email saying that you aren't responding to them due to your ad blocker, that might be a tort case. I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't get legal advice on /. However, what's provided here is certainly better than what you proposed!
I congratulate you on your +5 funny, but I have an iPhone and would go back to my BB10 at the first opportunity. I also have used a Nexus/6 until about two weeks ago and same feeling. BB10 has this great ability to compost your data from different sources without it actually leaking across sources. And the Blackberry hub is exactly how a phone should work. They also run Android apps. And, historically, security was way better. However, with this announcement, I suppose that I will give up the ship.
Although I mostly agree with you, I feel compelled to put out that in order to write software today, one must know both the technical programming aspects *and* be an expert on the target domain model. The days of a business analyst writing requirements are over. The world changes too fast. If you're implementing tax software, the IRS publishes new rules and you have to be ready on January 1st. "Poor" code that implements the rules correctly is valuable. "Good" code that doesn't quite understand the domain model and gets some things wrong isn't useful. In terms of the triple-constraints, time is *usually* the primary constraint and quality is the tertiary constraint. The "poor" apps survive because their authors get to market and make money. A *good* security solution is one that would make things go *faster* not slower. Then there would be widespread adoption.
The problem is that, in non-trivial applications, it's not always easy to tell *where* in the architecture the data should be sanitized. Security experts accidentally write SQLi. Web applications are especially problematic because you have to escape for so many different contexts. It's not possible to do it all in one place since, at the time of receipt, you don't know the context. Is it going into a database? One type of escaping is required. HTML context? Completely different. What if it's going to be reflected *and* stored. If your application is 10 lines long, it's pretty inexcusable to get this wrong. But when there are multiple layers, it's easy to get confused which layer is responsible. And if you double-escape, things just won't work. And I can't tell you how many web sites are broken if you have an apostrophe in your name! It's easy to blame the programmers but the web frameworks are really at fault. Data should not be received in a String type. There should be a separate TaintedString class that receives this type of data and the frameworks should be built that way. Stored procedures *mostly* solve this until you get a stored procedure that makes a web services call and then builds dynamic SQL or something hideous along those lines and then you are back to having SQLi again. Not understanding injection defects in today's day and age makes you poorly qualified to write software for a living. But misunderstanding part of the security architecture of a large application is something that happens to the best.
The problem with central planning is that there can be only two outcome. Either the central planner gets it exactly right in which case the quantity of production is exactly the same as a free market. Or, the central planner gets it wrong and then the economy as a whole suffers. There are lots of problems in market economies but they always balance supply and demand. And you can't have a centralized economic policy without a centralized political policy. If the central planners tell me to produce ten jars of apple sauce and two apple pies, but my customers prefer apple pie, I will go out and make ten apple pies and two jars of apple sauce. I'm happier selling more and my customer gets what they want. So how do you force people to follow the central planning? The only way I *won't* do this is if you threaten me with excessive punishment. For that you need centralized political power. China has shown you can (to some extent) have centralized political power and a free market. But even that is tenuous. Businesses are making bad decisions all the time because the government is suppressing information needed to make accurate choices. We don't teach young earth creationism in science class and we don't teach centrally planned economies in economics class. It's really the same argument.
But most video producers don't have the resources to fight. So a DMCA takedown is essentially a death sentence for their content even if it is entirely non-infringing. What Google is saying is that if you are a little fish whose content gets flagged wrongly in a DMCA takedown, rather than fold, they will help you fight. This has the effect of increasing the cost of sending takedown notices and hopefully discourages the practice of sending the notice first and asking questions later.