Those were blustery speeches by telcos, with no action or hint of action. They were just saying they were displeased.
Oh please. You OBVIOUSLY didn't read either article. They both said a HELL of a lot more than "we're displeased".
I'll bet you didn't know that AT&T Wireless Internet already blocks Skype traffic on their network. No action?
Didn't you read my original post even? Network neutrality laws would not affect what Comcast did, because they didn't throttle traffic - they forged response packets which had the EFFECT of slowing down the system but would not fall under any guidelines for not altering traffic flow. Torrent traffic was free to flow as fast as it wanted, it's just that the fake packets Comcast sent confused the clients.
The single problem that ACTUALLY occurred, the regulation would not even prevent!
Except that it would, because the specific technical action doesn't matter; the end result DOES matter. It doesn't matter how traffic prioritization is done. Filtering, blocking, spoofing, packet editing, whatever. The law would say that the net effect should not be to selectively interfere with the proper flow of traffic, and, thus, most certainly would apply in this case.
You have yet to explain why the "inevitable" has not happened yet despite the links you sent having the AT&T quote from 2005! Five years, and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. Yet you are all "Panic Panic! Something may happen, so something must be done!".
Nice strawman. Do I REALLY have to explain the concept of proactive prevention versus reactive remediation to you? It WILL happen if something isn't done; it is already happening. That you choose to downplay it and stick your head in the sand hoping it will go away by itself without regulation doesn't change that simple fact.
Wrong yet again. Regulators are not charged with serving you; they are not elected. They are charged with doing what the group they are with does, which for the FCC is moderate use of networks...and what is the FCC's charter, again? Oh, yeah to "ensure that the American people have available, at reasonable costs and without discrimination, rapid, efficient, Nation- and world-wide communication services; whether by radio, television, wire, satellite, or cable".
Sounds an awful lot like they are charged with serving me, since I rarely hear telcos referred to as "the American people".
And they most certainly ARE beholden to industry shills who are free to lobby the regulators with a nice meal and a trip and explain why, to protect copyright, all BitTorrent traffic must be blocked...and Cable/telco companies aren't beholden to such pressures? At least regulators have to maintain SOME level of decorum and resist even the appearance of impropriety, lest they be caught and held accountable for said impropriety. The FCC is far too exposed to the public eye for that level of corruption to go unnoticed for long, unlike, say, the MMS.
Yet again, if Net Neutrality laws are crafted to DISallow ANY monkeying with network data, even by the government, pretty much the same as it has been for decades with voice service. When was the last time you heard about the government blocking phone service to someone based on who they were calling and what was said on the line? Phone service has been heavily regulated off and on for a long time (since 1934, to be sure).
I certainly do not intend to stand by and watch THAT happen, which is why I'm attempting to point out why should head off regulation at the pass.
Well 4000 years of human history says otherwise but I'm SURE this time it will be different.
So government standards and regulation have ALWAYS been corrupted and perverted? It has never worked? Is that REALLY your argument? O.o
Better chance of it not happening in government than in the private sector. Corporations have no cause to resist the temptation to be unethical in the name of profits. The gov
I would also like to add that the current telco that provides us DSL and cable (with no internet access) is legally chartered in our city/county as the ONLY one who can so operate such services. So, not only is there no competition, there can be no competition!
This state of affairs is all-too-common across much of the US.
This is the core of the matter. You (and others) want to impose regulations to stop this exact problem. And this is the EXACT problem that has never occurred, and that there is no hint of occurring in the near future, from any ISP of any level of evil. Not even Comcast is considering it, so that should tell you just how likely it is to occur.
Those are not the only instances, either. Comcast throttling Bittorrent traffic, regardless of legitimacy, likely planned due to their investment in their own P2P streaming video service.
The fact that it hasn't happened yet wholesale has no bearing on "just how likely it is to occur". Private companies can and will do whatever they want to pursue profits. They can be sticking their toe in the water and beating their chests about it today, and tomorrow, it will be realized as the norm. Sans third-party regulation, the absolute worst of industry can and does come home to roost eventually.
I don't know about you, but I am not willing to wait on the inevitable before I do something about it. Reactive remediation is ALWAYS more costly and difficult by at least an order of magnitude than proactive prevention.
We may well see something like ComTube. But it's a far, far cry from there to where they ALSO rate limit YouTube.
Considering they are already talking about it, and have done some investing in streaming video technologies, I think it is a lot closer than you realize.
But the same can be said for regulators. The only difference is that with regulators there is literally no-where else to turn when the worst possible thing happens, because they are the be-all and end all of what is allowed. With companies when one displeases you you simply stop buying services from them. There used to be very little choice, but there's usually at least a choice between Cable and DSL internet, and with WiMax coming online that's enough competition that no ISP would make the suicidal move of rate limiting YouTube.
If you are displeased with regulators, what can you do? Vote in someone who say they will fix it, hope fifty other states do the same more or less, and THEN hope a politician keeps his promise to you? I'd even take voice menus on a help line direct to India over that!'
No, the same can NOT be said for regulators, simply because their job description says that they are charged with serving *me* as one of the people, not the industry schills. Now, they can shirk that charge, and eventually they will be replaced and any damage they did from their corruption repaired. That's simply not an option with corporations. I have ZERO say in what a corporation does. There are no elected / appointed public servants in control of corporations. The only choice I have is as you say, to not use their services. Except where I live there IS no choice. We have DSL. That's it. We have just gotten cable now, but it is owned by the SAME telephone company that provides our DSL, and they do not provide, nor have any plans to provide, internet over it. There is no WiMax or municipal option. This is the situation MANY MILLIONS of Americans are still in, and it is not likely to change much in the next decade, simply because these companies have ZERO incentive to improve on what's out there.
Maybe you live in a big city where there are now (finally!) a few choices, but if they all do the same thing, what choice is there? Without regulation, ISPs who don't cheat can't compete with others who are cheating, so they have to do it, too, or go out of business.
And again, the REALITY is that companies have not done what you are so sure they would do, despite having had any years to do so.
Well, again, you are wrong, because they ARE, and are openly making pla
It also stops companies from charging you more for expediting certain kinds of data. Well, what if I as a consumer WANT to pay a bit more to have my Comcast voice work really well with video, or to get faster bandwidth to some CDN's so that I could really replace cable video with internet video? Why should they and I not be allowed to do that?
I haven't read any proposed rule-making for Net Neutrality that prevents ISPs from offering expedited services to customers/endpoints as a paid option. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you paying as a consumer/endpoint for the QoS prioritization you desire; that's the entire point of QoS.
The problem is that many big ISPs started out as content suppliers as well, or want to be in that business. Thus, they wish to control access to their competition's content by either blocking it, or by rate-limiting it on their networks so as to be difficult to impossible to access, unless their competition pays them a toll on the back end to carry it.
A more proper analogy would be that you are a long-time YouTube user. You're on a big ISP like Comcast. Comcast sets up its own user-video service called YouCast. They then start blocking/rate limiting YouTube unless YouTube pays them an exorbitant toll to carry their traffic. As a result, you as the YouTube user are faced with a number of rather unfair options: no access or painfully slow and choppy access to YouTube, or now YouTube has to charge you money (or more money) so they can afford to pay the "toll" just to serve you. But, hey! YouCast is still free/cheap, and boy is it FAST!
Normally, in an open, competitive market, you have lots of choices, and you can simply toss Comcast into the garbage can and go with a REAL ISP who doesn't pull those types of shenanigans, because either it is run by more ethical people, or they don't have a content division which is going to end up competing unfairly via their ISP division. However, because of the way the Internet has come about (and, yes, I realize the government had a hand in the debacle), those "other choices" don't exist for the vast majority of consumers.
The first problem that needs to be fixed is that ISPs should not be allowed to have content divisions and vice versa. The people who own/run the pipes should have no vested interest in what content flows through the pipes. Ever. Likewise, the people who supply the content that flows through the pipes should have no vested interest in the pipes themselves. As long as there are businesses which do both, there is a HUGE potential for abuse, including wanton violations of the Sherman act which need to be prosecuted.
Now, that said, there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with large content providers buying big pipes into many major ISPs to make sure that their content is delivered faster to as many people as possible. The difference between that and what AT&T is talking about is that the default situation is not intentionally degraded by AT&T as an ISP in an effort to extort money from said content providers.
The last note I want to offer is one of caution - if you choose to regulate the internet, which until now has been free and open, you invite special interests to follow up and shape what the regulation means. If the government has a hand in regulating the flow of the network it can just as easily decree that MPAA blacklisted torrent trackers MUST be blocked or the ISP would face a fine. Is that really the world you want to move forward into?
That's a no-brainer for me. I know how corporations work. They are a known quantity, and I can fully expect them to do the worst possible at all times in the name of their single-minded pursuit of the Almighty Profit. The government, on the other hand, in principle, is intended to protect and serve the people. It doesn't always work out that way, but it does do so often enough for me to feel pretty comfortable in giving it a chance to make the corporations do the right thing when they have zero incentive to do so otherwise.
There are TONS of "arguments against his message" all OVER the place. Start off with "arguments against Glenn Beck" in Google, and go from there.
I would simply say that Glenn Beck is a grandstanding pseudoreligious douchebag, but the man is a frickin' GENIUS the way he has so completely suckered the gullible masses of the conservative right with his so-called "message".
Simple. When you provide your website as a service to others to display their own content, you have only a limited amount of responsibility for what is displayed, simply because you AREN'T responsible for what the users upload; THEY are. It is technologically and humanly infeasible to accurately determine what is and is not legitimate content.
That is why the law (correctly) puts the onus on copyright holders to protect their own content. Simply because it is significantly infeasible to do it any other way.
You get it right in your last sentence.. your ISP wouldn't be responsible for uploading random videos to your personal website, YOU would be. Youtube falls under the auspices of the "common carrier" legal distinction, precisely because it NEVER has any ownership in the content uploaded to its site that it displays to everyone.
That said, they DO have a responsibility to stop being a secondary (known in legal vernacular as a "vicarious" and "contributory") party to displaying content not owned or licensed by the person uploading it. That's where the DMCA comes in, and where even big copyright holders have to step up to the plate to defend their works, just like everyone else.
It is also why copyrights are super-cheap to obtain. If we really want the government or big industry to police them for us, someone has to pay for it. So, which would you rather have: 1) Cheap copyrights that you have to police yourself, or 2) Expensive (talking thousands of dollars each) copyrights that some other big bureaucracy polices for you?
Given the odious nature of copyrights in the natural order of things to begin with, I know which one *I* would choose.
It isn't feasible, and it isn't the direction or intention of Linden Lab to host such content going forward.
For many years now, they have been approaching their viewer design as a "browser", potentially adding the ability to pull assets (textures, sounds, animations, etc) via http from any source. That's sort of what their newest feature "html-on-a-prim" or "media-on-a-prim" is all about; the beginning of a move towards that. It is a good idea, as it allows for the same decentralization of asset services which allows for a more robust set of capabilities for content creation and sharing, as well as taking some of the load off of their backs.
The vulnerability isn't theirs (and it also has been fixed for a long time now), so there really isn't a whole lot they can do about it.
It is just a URL that you enter into a field in the in-world parcel data. The simulator hands it to the viewer (client/browser) and tells it to play that and put it onto a texture that is drawn on a 3D surface. The viewer hands the URL to Quickslime, which then plays it. SL's backend never sees the video file/data, as it is directly downloaded from the target host specified in the URL.
I supposed you could argue why don't they run some kind of scanner on the URL before allowing it to be posted. Of course, that is pointless for any number of reasons, including:
1) There is no scanner to check all possible video formats that Quickslime plays, nor one which is foolproof in terms of detecting vulnerabilities. 2) Since the file/data is not hosted by Linden Lab, a single scan would be useless, as an attacker could put up a valid file, run the scan, then replace the file with a malicious one anytime afterwards.
In Iran, the state has draconian control over the press as well as any "companies" which act as communication feeds. Not so in the US, where communications companies are (for the most part) autonomous and protected like a sacred cow (thanks to the First Amendment).
I think a better analogy would be blocking porn (child or otherwise) in Iran. I don't live there, and I don't directly know anyone who does, but the known/published government actions and policies are VERY strict, so I would expect there would be a LOT less ability to access porn of *any* kind in Iran.
In contrast, in the US, there is very little to no active efforts to filter anything, but rather to detect actual access to illegal porn and prosecute at the individual lawbreaker level. However, even that is a spotty and half-hearted effort at best.
In Iran, you have to register your website with the government, and they can and do block access country-wide to popular internet sites as they deem unfit (YouTube, for example).
As a result, while it is not impossible to get access to internet content deemed verboten by the state there, the bar has been significantly raised to do so. Thus, any claims to circumvent it without some really revolutionary technology to back them up have to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I am glad the guy made the effort, and happy for what little freedom it may provide to someone in Iran looking for hope outside their dismal state of being there, but I also don't want people to get snookered into a false hope that this is something far more than what it claims. Over there, people are jailed/murdered by the state for violating their insanely draconian laws.
Yeah, I think there is a bit of hype involved. It sounds basically like an obfuscating proxy server. Requests and data are encrypted and obfuscated in normal requests to innocuous websites like weather.com.
The thing is that it still will require use of a proxy server, and it most certainly can be EASILY detected with a number of methods, ranging from diff-ing to statistical analysis of data being transferred. I have no doubts that the Iranian government has the ability to get a copy of the software and determining what proxy servers it connects to, then blocking them. It then goes back to the same level of effort as with current proxies like Tor -- a game of Whack-A-Mole.
"'Governments will demand it,' he says, referring to full accountability and a 'name service for people,' possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports."
I don't care about "governments"; I only care about MY government. If they want to try and shove that through the meat grinder called Congress, best of luck to them. I will hold out until the very last minute, then it will be time to call it quits.
"The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go"
No, you can't, because you can't GET enough of "my messaging" that tells you squat about where I am and where I might be going. Since I don't use ANY of the "social web" crapplications, it's going to be VERY tough getting either where I am or where I am going.
"... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"
There are VERY few photos of me online and, of the ones that are, there is no identification that can be traced back to me. I sure as fuck do NOT have any goddamn Farcebook photos, nor will I EVER have such.
Yet more doom'n'gloom prognostication from someone who has become increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Here, let me adjust that tinfoil hat for you, Mr. Schmidt.
The only reason it is possible for anyone to be "easily identifiable" on the 'net is because that person actively and consciously GAVE the 'net enough personally identifiable information to make that possible. If that person then realizes "hey, maybe sharing all that deep personal info was a bad idea after all", well, too fucking late.
We don't need to have power over the ENTIRE planet. We have to have just enough power over just enough of the planet to change it just enough to make our lives miserable beyond compare.
You can test this theory easily at home. Your house is MUCH bigger than you are. Go to the garage, put a hose on your car's tailpipe and run it into the house. Start the car before you go to bed. If you survive until the morning, you can tell us that you didn't have enough power over your environment to make a difference.
Add to that fact that humans are tool-users, and we've made some pretty awesome and LARGE tools to help us do things, like clear millions of acres of land, and burning trillions of pounds/gallons of natural carbon-based fuels (which took the planet MILLIONS of YEARS to sequester down there). No, individual humans don't have a significant, measurable effect on the world environment, but it is conceivable that BILLIONS of us, along with all our tools, machines, and activities over hundreds of years ARE having a significant measurable effect on it. The world environment is still a closed, finite system, just like your house is. It DOES have its own remediation capability, but even that has limits in the short term.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion" or whether it is "prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
Disallowing prayer in schools *IS* "prohibiting the free exercise thereof". REQUIRING prayer, or even LEADING prayer constitutes an "establishment of religion". Both are similarly odious, and both must be denied / stopped / prevented under the law.
Simply put, if the kids want to pray, let them pray, and to whomever and about whatever they please. However, the teachers, administrators, counselors, etc, should not be leading said prayer, nor should the school policies require it in any way, shape, or form.
Besides, to whom, for whom, or for what reason are the kids going to be required to pray / led to pray? That's where this gets sticky. Muslims and Jews aren't going to pray to Jesus. Atheists aren't going to pray to anyone. Buddhists and Hindus are going to be looking at each other going "wtf?".
That's why the whole notion of challenging the foundational concept of the separation of church and state is, to put it very mildly, so wrong.
We've been going at this for over two centuries, and we're still debating this? It's settled. It's done. It is just and correct. Leave it the hell alone. (I know I am mostly preaching to the choir here; it is just a mini-rant directed at the "conservatives" in Texas rehashing this stupidity).
It won't follow the existing model of Guild Wars 1.. a few short months of "experiencing the story", followed by years of title grinding for a bronze wall plaque in the sequel.
In fact, after reading the spec, I don't see anything patent-worthy about it at all.
It's basically nothing more than an externally-driven meta-scenegraph, and a VERY generic one at that. One that would encompass a GREAT DEAL of content already in existence in virtual worlds, even in Second Life. It is WAY WAY WAY too broad.
You do know that similar functionality is already in use in SL by a number of different projects, right? Object backup/copying solutions, web-driven interfaces, etc.
I mean, this smacks so much of something like patenting a business method that has been used for many years, just because it is "over the internet". "HTTP for virtual worlds", indeed.
Why are you bothering to patent it? Doesn't that kinda contravene the point of making it "open" and "free for all"?
I mean, once you publish it and implementations using it, it becomes prior art and no one else can patent it, either.
Besides my general distaste for process, software, and business-method patents, I have to ask:
Is it really worthy of patent protection? Is it really that new and novel to deserve 20 years of government-mandated monopolistic protection? Do the development costs justify it?
I've yet to see anything protocol-related that is nothing more than an inductively-developed solution to a problem , or a variation on a existing one, that anyone with ordinary skill in the industry could come up with.
"It is all well and good to say "they should have known" but that is clearly "high insight" where if they did really know they would have never fell for the scam."
Well, I think that is kinda the point. Most people don't even bother to TRY to find out; they just blithely accept whatever they see or are told at face value and jump off of that particular cliff because some bad person told them they wouldn't get hurt doing so. Most people just don't have any points spent in their Critical Thinking skill. I personally think that some amount of Social Darwinism is a good thing. It's kinda like the "live a clean lifestyle" argument all over again. You don't expose yourself to risk, your body doesn't get a chance to learn to fight certain kinds of infection, then all of a sudden, you get something rather inoccuous, and it nearly kills you. I especially like it happening in games rather than in RL, because it is mostly a "play" environment, where the real risk is incredibly minimal.
I do support going after serious predators in RL, but I support even more people educating themselves and protecting themselves, because, in the end, they are the most responsible party for the safety of themselves and their possessions. When it comes to virtual worlds, though, I would rather the developers focus on making a more fun, stable world than wasting time becoming nanny to take care of the users. We CAN easily learn to protect ourselves, and the lessons we learn from making "virtual mistakes" are valuable in helping us develop the necessary critical thinking skills that can help us in RL. Yeah, it sucks to lose that US$150.00 to a scam, but I think that is a rather cheap price to pay for a lesson well-learned that could one day save our entire life savings in RL.
"Make contracts enforceable in second life. Write up a simple description language for them, with in-world actions as clauses."
Contracts in SL are already enforceable, if you get the real person behind the avatar to sign it with their real name. A contract is a contract; it doesn't matter if it is over something in a virtual world or the real one.
The problem is that there was NO contract between Ginko and its customers. NP called his organization a "bank", and at some point, started handing out notecards to his new customers that said something to the effect of "funds availability is not guaranteed; investments may lose value", et cetera. It still doesn't make what he did right, but there was definitely nothing a contract would have solved in that case anyway. People gave him money on his avatar's virtual word and nothing else. Worse, supposedly, the guy is a Brazilian national. Good luck suing, even if you had a contract.
Lastly, the problem with contracts for most things in Second Life is the value of what the contract is meant to protect. In most cases, you're talking US$100 or less, maybe MAYBE up to US$1000. It's not worth the cost of going to court over it, let alone getting a lawyer involved.
I'm an avid SL resident, and have been vocal about the Ginko subject in the SL community forums on numerous occasions.
Basically, as many have said there and elsewhere, when you participate in one of these "banks", you give your money to someone. That's how LL sees it. You are GIVING your money to someone. Whether they give it back or not, let alone pay you any extra for the privilege, is gratis, and they have no intention of doing anything about it if the owner of bank X up and disappears with the money. ANYone can set up ATM machines anywhere and do what Ginko did. Well, they can't any more, as people have already been burned and are wary, but there are still many naive people out there who will blithely go up to an ATM, see flowery words and fabulous interest rates, and deposit every L$ in their account, never suspecting that it isn't a "real" bank.
Yes, it is only "virtual money". Any real world value it holds is subject to change at any time. Most cases, it isn't a lot of money that is lost in these scams. It's an expensive lesson to learn, but it is far from life-breaking for anyone.
What is kind of telling is that LL does stop pyramid schemes and other such money scams, but does nothing to stop Ponzi schemes, like Ginko's (not-so-affectionately called the "Porto-Ponzi" in the SL forums). Ponzi schemes are a variation on pyramid schemes and, if one is regulated, the other should be as well. It is left as an exercise to the reader why LL can't seem to fathom this concept and put an end to SL "banks".
In the end, though, it is and should remain caveat emptor. In some ways, I think it is a good training ground for RL. The money involved is often nothing more than discretionary income for most folks, so losing it shouldn't hurt any more than losing it in a poker game. There's more than enough wisdom out there for people to obtain and investigate before giving their money to anyone. Whether they choose to ignore it falls squarely on their shoulders and no one else's.
People could ALREADY play each other online. It didn't enable anything that they already didn't have. You could already play other people online via one of several methods. The only thing you got from battle.net was a lousy MATCHMAKER service as well as a way to store characters.
I severely doubt you can back up the assertion that the primary users of bnetd were people who pirated their games. I bought and paid for every copy of Blizzard games I had in my possession (multiple copies, even). The people I played with ALSO had purchased their copies. So, as far as *I* am concerned, that assetion is pure grade A bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't share your rose-colored-glasses view of Blizzard. Evil is as evil does.
I understand perfectly the situation they were in; it didn't justify their actions in the least.
Lastly, while I don't expect you to believe anything I say (and I really don't care), I've been in the corporate software development world for 30 years now, so I understand the issues of piracy intimately.
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Those were blustery speeches by telcos, with no action or hint of action. They were just saying they were displeased.
Oh please. You OBVIOUSLY didn't read either article. They both said a HELL of a lot more than "we're displeased".
I'll bet you didn't know that AT&T Wireless Internet already blocks Skype traffic on their network. No action?
Didn't you read my original post even? Network neutrality laws would not affect what Comcast did, because they didn't throttle traffic - they forged response packets which had the EFFECT of slowing down the system but would not fall under any guidelines for not altering traffic flow. Torrent traffic was free to flow as fast as it wanted, it's just that the fake packets Comcast sent confused the clients.
The single problem that ACTUALLY occurred, the regulation would not even prevent!
Except that it would, because the specific technical action doesn't matter; the end result DOES matter. It doesn't matter how traffic prioritization is done. Filtering, blocking, spoofing, packet editing, whatever. The law would say that the net effect should not be to selectively interfere with the proper flow of traffic, and, thus, most certainly would apply in this case.
You have yet to explain why the "inevitable" has not happened yet despite the links you sent having the AT&T quote from 2005! Five years, and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. Yet you are all "Panic Panic! Something may happen, so something must be done!".
Nice strawman. Do I REALLY have to explain the concept of proactive prevention versus reactive remediation to you? It WILL happen if something isn't done; it is already happening. That you choose to downplay it and stick your head in the sand hoping it will go away by itself without regulation doesn't change that simple fact.
Wrong yet again. Regulators are not charged with serving you; they are not elected. They are charged with doing what the group they are with does, which for the FCC is moderate use of networks. ..and what is the FCC's charter, again? Oh, yeah to "ensure that the American people have available, at reasonable costs and without discrimination, rapid, efficient, Nation- and world-wide communication services; whether by radio, television, wire, satellite, or cable".
Sounds an awful lot like they are charged with serving me, since I rarely hear telcos referred to as "the American people".
And they most certainly ARE beholden to industry shills who are free to lobby the regulators with a nice meal and a trip and explain why, to protect copyright, all BitTorrent traffic must be blocked. ..and Cable/telco companies aren't beholden to such pressures? At least regulators have to maintain SOME level of decorum and resist even the appearance of impropriety, lest they be caught and held accountable for said impropriety. The FCC is far too exposed to the public eye for that level of corruption to go unnoticed for long, unlike, say, the MMS.
Yet again, if Net Neutrality laws are crafted to DISallow ANY monkeying with network data, even by the government, pretty much the same as it has been for decades with voice service. When was the last time you heard about the government blocking phone service to someone based on who they were calling and what was said on the line? Phone service has been heavily regulated off and on for a long time (since 1934, to be sure).
I certainly do not intend to stand by and watch THAT happen, which is why I'm attempting to point out why should head off regulation at the pass.
Well 4000 years of human history says otherwise but I'm SURE this time it will be different.
So government standards and regulation have ALWAYS been corrupted and perverted? It has never worked? Is that REALLY your argument? O.o
Better chance of it not happening in government than in the private sector. Corporations have no cause to resist the temptation to be unethical in the name of profits. The gov
I would also like to add that the current telco that provides us DSL and cable (with no internet access) is legally chartered in our city/county as the ONLY one who can so operate such services. So, not only is there no competition, there can be no competition!
This state of affairs is all-too-common across much of the US.
Also, the reason why I *know* the telcos are corrupt is that they continue corrupt practices for decades. Read Cringely's story about how our broadband future was ripped off by the telcos.
This is the core of the matter. You (and others) want to impose regulations to stop this exact problem. And this is the EXACT problem that has never occurred, and that there is no hint of occurring in the near future, from any ISP of any level of evil. Not even Comcast is considering it, so that should tell you just how likely it is to occur.
How soon we forget, eh?
Telefonic, too
Those are not the only instances, either. Comcast throttling Bittorrent traffic, regardless of legitimacy, likely planned due to their investment in their own P2P streaming video service.
The fact that it hasn't happened yet wholesale has no bearing on "just how likely it is to occur". Private companies can and will do whatever they want to pursue profits. They can be sticking their toe in the water and beating their chests about it today, and tomorrow, it will be realized as the norm. Sans third-party regulation, the absolute worst of industry can and does come home to roost eventually.
I don't know about you, but I am not willing to wait on the inevitable before I do something about it. Reactive remediation is ALWAYS more costly and difficult by at least an order of magnitude than proactive prevention.
We may well see something like ComTube. But it's a far, far cry from there to where they ALSO rate limit YouTube.
Considering they are already talking about it, and have done some investing in streaming video technologies, I think it is a lot closer than you realize.
But the same can be said for regulators. The only difference is that with regulators there is literally no-where else to turn when the worst possible thing happens, because they are the be-all and end all of what is allowed. With companies when one displeases you you simply stop buying services from them. There used to be very little choice, but there's usually at least a choice between Cable and DSL internet, and with WiMax coming online that's enough competition that no ISP would make the suicidal move of rate limiting YouTube.
If you are displeased with regulators, what can you do? Vote in someone who say they will fix it, hope fifty other states do the same more or less, and THEN hope a politician keeps his promise to you? I'd even take voice menus on a help line direct to India over that!'
No, the same can NOT be said for regulators, simply because their job description says that they are charged with serving *me* as one of the people, not the industry schills. Now, they can shirk that charge, and eventually they will be replaced and any damage they did from their corruption repaired. That's simply not an option with corporations. I have ZERO say in what a corporation does. There are no elected / appointed public servants in control of corporations. The only choice I have is as you say, to not use their services. Except where I live there IS no choice. We have DSL. That's it. We have just gotten cable now, but it is owned by the SAME telephone company that provides our DSL, and they do not provide, nor have any plans to provide, internet over it. There is no WiMax or municipal option. This is the situation MANY MILLIONS of Americans are still in, and it is not likely to change much in the next decade, simply because these companies have ZERO incentive to improve on what's out there.
Maybe you live in a big city where there are now (finally!) a few choices, but if they all do the same thing, what choice is there? Without regulation, ISPs who don't cheat can't compete with others who are cheating, so they have to do it, too, or go out of business.
And again, the REALITY is that companies have not done what you are so sure they would do, despite having had any years to do so.
Well, again, you are wrong, because they ARE, and are openly making pla
It also stops companies from charging you more for expediting certain kinds of data. Well, what if I as a consumer WANT to pay a bit more to have my Comcast voice work really well with video, or to get faster bandwidth to some CDN's so that I could really replace cable video with internet video? Why should they and I not be allowed to do that?
I haven't read any proposed rule-making for Net Neutrality that prevents ISPs from offering expedited services to customers/endpoints as a paid option. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you paying as a consumer/endpoint for the QoS prioritization you desire; that's the entire point of QoS.
The problem is that many big ISPs started out as content suppliers as well, or want to be in that business. Thus, they wish to control access to their competition's content by either blocking it, or by rate-limiting it on their networks so as to be difficult to impossible to access, unless their competition pays them a toll on the back end to carry it.
A more proper analogy would be that you are a long-time YouTube user. You're on a big ISP like Comcast. Comcast sets up its own user-video service called YouCast. They then start blocking/rate limiting YouTube unless YouTube pays them an exorbitant toll to carry their traffic. As a result, you as the YouTube user are faced with a number of rather unfair options: no access or painfully slow and choppy access to YouTube, or now YouTube has to charge you money (or more money) so they can afford to pay the "toll" just to serve you. But, hey! YouCast is still free/cheap, and boy is it FAST!
Normally, in an open, competitive market, you have lots of choices, and you can simply toss Comcast into the garbage can and go with a REAL ISP who doesn't pull those types of shenanigans, because either it is run by more ethical people, or they don't have a content division which is going to end up competing unfairly via their ISP division. However, because of the way the Internet has come about (and, yes, I realize the government had a hand in the debacle), those "other choices" don't exist for the vast majority of consumers.
The first problem that needs to be fixed is that ISPs should not be allowed to have content divisions and vice versa. The people who own/run the pipes should have no vested interest in what content flows through the pipes. Ever. Likewise, the people who supply the content that flows through the pipes should have no vested interest in the pipes themselves. As long as there are businesses which do both, there is a HUGE potential for abuse, including wanton violations of the Sherman act which need to be prosecuted.
Now, that said, there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with large content providers buying big pipes into many major ISPs to make sure that their content is delivered faster to as many people as possible. The difference between that and what AT&T is talking about is that the default situation is not intentionally degraded by AT&T as an ISP in an effort to extort money from said content providers.
The last note I want to offer is one of caution - if you choose to regulate the internet, which until now has been free and open, you invite special interests to follow up and shape what the regulation means. If the government has a hand in regulating the flow of the network it can just as easily decree that MPAA blacklisted torrent trackers MUST be blocked or the ISP would face a fine. Is that really the world you want to move forward into?
That's a no-brainer for me. I know how corporations work. They are a known quantity, and I can fully expect them to do the worst possible at all times in the name of their single-minded pursuit of the Almighty Profit. The government, on the other hand, in principle, is intended to protect and serve the people. It doesn't always work out that way, but it does do so often enough for me to feel pretty comfortable in giving it a chance to make the corporations do the right thing when they have zero incentive to do so otherwise.
As s
That, or you read/watch nothing else.
There are TONS of "arguments against his message" all OVER the place. Start off with "arguments against Glenn Beck" in Google, and go from there.
I would simply say that Glenn Beck is a grandstanding pseudoreligious douchebag, but the man is a frickin' GENIUS the way he has so completely suckered the gullible masses of the conservative right with his so-called "message".
I bet you bought his book, too!
They always are when it comes to "those people".
With apologies to the rest of us for using the word "people" to describe them... .
Simple. When you provide your website as a service to others to display their own content, you have only a limited amount of responsibility for what is displayed, simply because you AREN'T responsible for what the users upload; THEY are. It is technologically and humanly infeasible to accurately determine what is and is not legitimate content.
That is why the law (correctly) puts the onus on copyright holders to protect their own content. Simply because it is significantly infeasible to do it any other way.
You get it right in your last sentence.. your ISP wouldn't be responsible for uploading random videos to your personal website, YOU would be. Youtube falls under the auspices of the "common carrier" legal distinction, precisely because it NEVER has any ownership in the content uploaded to its site that it displays to everyone.
That said, they DO have a responsibility to stop being a secondary (known in legal vernacular as a "vicarious" and "contributory") party to displaying content not owned or licensed by the person uploading it. That's where the DMCA comes in, and where even big copyright holders have to step up to the plate to defend their works, just like everyone else.
It is also why copyrights are super-cheap to obtain. If we really want the government or big industry to police them for us, someone has to pay for it. So, which would you rather have: 1) Cheap copyrights that you have to police yourself, or 2) Expensive (talking thousands of dollars each) copyrights that some other big bureaucracy polices for you?
Given the odious nature of copyrights in the natural order of things to begin with, I know which one *I* would choose.
It isn't feasible, and it isn't the direction or intention of Linden Lab to host such content going forward.
For many years now, they have been approaching their viewer design as a "browser", potentially adding the ability to pull assets (textures, sounds, animations, etc) via http from any source. That's sort of what their newest feature "html-on-a-prim" or "media-on-a-prim" is all about; the beginning of a move towards that. It is a good idea, as it allows for the same decentralization of asset services which allows for a more robust set of capabilities for content creation and sharing, as well as taking some of the load off of their backs.
The vulnerability isn't theirs (and it also has been fixed for a long time now), so there really isn't a whole lot they can do about it.
It is just a URL that you enter into a field in the in-world parcel data. The simulator hands it to the viewer (client/browser) and tells it to play that and put it onto a texture that is drawn on a 3D surface. The viewer hands the URL to Quickslime, which then plays it. SL's backend never sees the video file/data, as it is directly downloaded from the target host specified in the URL.
I supposed you could argue why don't they run some kind of scanner on the URL before allowing it to be posted. Of course, that is pointless for any number of reasons, including:
1) There is no scanner to check all possible video formats that Quickslime plays, nor one which is foolproof in terms of detecting vulnerabilities.
2) Since the file/data is not hosted by Linden Lab, a single scan would be useless, as an attacker could put up a valid file, run the scan, then replace the file with a malicious one anytime afterwards.
That's oversimplifying the case a bit, I think.
In Iran, the state has draconian control over the press as well as any "companies" which act as communication feeds. Not so in the US, where communications companies are (for the most part) autonomous and protected like a sacred cow (thanks to the First Amendment).
I think a better analogy would be blocking porn (child or otherwise) in Iran. I don't live there, and I don't directly know anyone who does, but the known/published government actions and policies are VERY strict, so I would expect there would be a LOT less ability to access porn of *any* kind in Iran.
In contrast, in the US, there is very little to no active efforts to filter anything, but rather to detect actual access to illegal porn and prosecute at the individual lawbreaker level. However, even that is a spotty and half-hearted effort at best.
In Iran, you have to register your website with the government, and they can and do block access country-wide to popular internet sites as they deem unfit (YouTube, for example).
As a result, while it is not impossible to get access to internet content deemed verboten by the state there, the bar has been significantly raised to do so. Thus, any claims to circumvent it without some really revolutionary technology to back them up have to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I am glad the guy made the effort, and happy for what little freedom it may provide to someone in Iran looking for hope outside their dismal state of being there, but I also don't want people to get snookered into a false hope that this is something far more than what it claims. Over there, people are jailed/murdered by the state for violating their insanely draconian laws.
Yeah, I think there is a bit of hype involved. It sounds basically like an obfuscating proxy server. Requests and data are encrypted and obfuscated in normal requests to innocuous websites like weather.com.
The thing is that it still will require use of a proxy server, and it most certainly can be EASILY detected with a number of methods, ranging from diff-ing to statistical analysis of data being transferred. I have no doubts that the Iranian government has the ability to get a copy of the software and determining what proxy servers it connects to, then blocking them. It then goes back to the same level of effort as with current proxies like Tor -- a game of Whack-A-Mole.
Awesome tag, dude. :D
Doolittle rocks, but Pinback pwns. :)
"'Governments will demand it,' he says, referring to full accountability and a 'name service for people,' possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports."
I don't care about "governments"; I only care about MY government. If they want to try and shove that through the meat grinder called Congress, best of luck to them. I will hold out until the very last minute, then it will be time to call it quits.
"The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go"
No, you can't, because you can't GET enough of "my messaging" that tells you squat about where I am and where I might be going. Since I don't use ANY of the "social web" crapplications, it's going to be VERY tough getting either where I am or where I am going.
" ... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"
There are VERY few photos of me online and, of the ones that are, there is no identification that can be traced back to me. I sure as fuck do NOT have any goddamn Farcebook photos, nor will I EVER have such.
Yet more doom'n'gloom prognostication from someone who has become increasingly out-of-touch with reality. Here, let me adjust that tinfoil hat for you, Mr. Schmidt.
The only reason it is possible for anyone to be "easily identifiable" on the 'net is because that person actively and consciously GAVE the 'net enough personally identifiable information to make that possible. If that person then realizes "hey, maybe sharing all that deep personal info was a bad idea after all", well, too fucking late.
We don't need to have power over the ENTIRE planet. We have to have just enough power over just enough of the planet to change it just enough to make our lives miserable beyond compare.
You can test this theory easily at home. Your house is MUCH bigger than you are. Go to the garage, put a hose on your car's tailpipe and run it into the house. Start the car before you go to bed. If you survive until the morning, you can tell us that you didn't have enough power over your environment to make a difference.
Add to that fact that humans are tool-users, and we've made some pretty awesome and LARGE tools to help us do things, like clear millions of acres of land, and burning trillions of pounds/gallons of natural carbon-based fuels (which took the planet MILLIONS of YEARS to sequester down there). No, individual humans don't have a significant, measurable effect on the world environment, but it is conceivable that BILLIONS of us, along with all our tools, machines, and activities over hundreds of years ARE having a significant measurable effect on it. The world environment is still a closed, finite system, just like your house is. It DOES have its own remediation capability, but even that has limits in the short term.
ASCAP.. synonymous with buttplug, and about as nice smelling as a used one.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion" or whether it is "prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
Disallowing prayer in schools *IS* "prohibiting the free exercise thereof". REQUIRING prayer, or even LEADING prayer constitutes an "establishment of religion". Both are similarly odious, and both must be denied / stopped / prevented under the law.
Simply put, if the kids want to pray, let them pray, and to whomever and about whatever they please. However, the teachers, administrators, counselors, etc, should not be leading said prayer, nor should the school policies require it in any way, shape, or form.
Besides, to whom, for whom, or for what reason are the kids going to be required to pray / led to pray? That's where this gets sticky. Muslims and Jews aren't going to pray to Jesus. Atheists aren't going to pray to anyone. Buddhists and Hindus are going to be looking at each other going "wtf?".
That's why the whole notion of challenging the foundational concept of the separation of church and state is, to put it very mildly, so wrong.
We've been going at this for over two centuries, and we're still debating this? It's settled. It's done. It is just and correct. Leave it the hell alone. (I know I am mostly preaching to the choir here; it is just a mini-rant directed at the "conservatives" in Texas rehashing this stupidity).
It won't follow the existing model of Guild Wars 1.. a few short months of "experiencing the story", followed by years of title grinding for a bronze wall plaque in the sequel.
Not at all. Ogg is patented, yet open.
Ogg is NOT patented. Come on, dude. Don't post bullshit.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
Perhaps, but it isn't a justification for patenting something that you want to remain open.
Patenting it allows time for this standard to become adopted on a widespread basis before it can be hijacked.
Ummm.. could you explain how you "hijack" an OPEN standard. I am a little fuzzy on that one.
In fact, after reading the spec, I don't see anything patent-worthy about it at all.
It's basically nothing more than an externally-driven meta-scenegraph, and a VERY generic one at that. One that would encompass a GREAT DEAL of content already in existence in virtual worlds, even in Second Life. It is WAY WAY WAY too broad.
You do know that similar functionality is already in use in SL by a number of different projects, right? Object backup/copying solutions, web-driven interfaces, etc.
I mean, this smacks so much of something like patenting a business method that has been used for many years, just because it is "over the internet". "HTTP for virtual worlds", indeed.
Why are you bothering to patent it? Doesn't that kinda contravene the point of making it "open" and "free for all"?
I mean, once you publish it and implementations using it, it becomes prior art and no one else can patent it, either.
Besides my general distaste for process, software, and business-method patents, I have to ask:
Is it really worthy of patent protection? Is it really that new and novel to deserve 20 years of government-mandated monopolistic protection? Do the development costs justify it?
I've yet to see anything protocol-related that is nothing more than an inductively-developed solution to a problem , or a variation on a existing one, that anyone with ordinary skill in the industry could come up with.
You can't uninstall evil
"It is all well and good to say "they should have known" but that is clearly "high insight" where if they did really know they would have never fell for the scam."
Well, I think that is kinda the point. Most people don't even bother to TRY to find out; they just blithely accept whatever they see or are told at face value and jump off of that particular cliff because some bad person told them they wouldn't get hurt doing so. Most people just don't have any points spent in their Critical Thinking skill. I personally think that some amount of Social Darwinism is a good thing. It's kinda like the "live a clean lifestyle" argument all over again. You don't expose yourself to risk, your body doesn't get a chance to learn to fight certain kinds of infection, then all of a sudden, you get something rather inoccuous, and it nearly kills you. I especially like it happening in games rather than in RL, because it is mostly a "play" environment, where the real risk is incredibly minimal.
I do support going after serious predators in RL, but I support even more people educating themselves and protecting themselves, because, in the end, they are the most responsible party for the safety of themselves and their possessions. When it comes to virtual worlds, though, I would rather the developers focus on making a more fun, stable world than wasting time becoming nanny to take care of the users. We CAN easily learn to protect ourselves, and the lessons we learn from making "virtual mistakes" are valuable in helping us develop the necessary critical thinking skills that can help us in RL. Yeah, it sucks to lose that US$150.00 to a scam, but I think that is a rather cheap price to pay for a lesson well-learned that could one day save our entire life savings in RL.
"Make contracts enforceable in second life. Write up a simple description language for them, with in-world actions as clauses."
Contracts in SL are already enforceable, if you get the real person behind the avatar to sign it with their real name. A contract is a contract; it doesn't matter if it is over something in a virtual world or the real one.
The problem is that there was NO contract between Ginko and its customers. NP called his organization a "bank", and at some point, started handing out notecards to his new customers that said something to the effect of "funds availability is not guaranteed; investments may lose value", et cetera. It still doesn't make what he did right, but there was definitely nothing a contract would have solved in that case anyway. People gave him money on his avatar's virtual word and nothing else. Worse, supposedly, the guy is a Brazilian national. Good luck suing, even if you had a contract.
Lastly, the problem with contracts for most things in Second Life is the value of what the contract is meant to protect. In most cases, you're talking US$100 or less, maybe MAYBE up to US$1000. It's not worth the cost of going to court over it, let alone getting a lawyer involved.
I'm an avid SL resident, and have been vocal about the Ginko subject in the SL community forums on numerous occasions.
Basically, as many have said there and elsewhere, when you participate in one of these "banks", you give your money to someone. That's how LL sees it. You are GIVING your money to someone. Whether they give it back or not, let alone pay you any extra for the privilege, is gratis, and they have no intention of doing anything about it if the owner of bank X up and disappears with the money. ANYone can set up ATM machines anywhere and do what Ginko did. Well, they can't any more, as people have already been burned and are wary, but there are still many naive people out there who will blithely go up to an ATM, see flowery words and fabulous interest rates, and deposit every L$ in their account, never suspecting that it isn't a "real" bank.
Yes, it is only "virtual money". Any real world value it holds is subject to change at any time. Most cases, it isn't a lot of money that is lost in these scams. It's an expensive lesson to learn, but it is far from life-breaking for anyone.
What is kind of telling is that LL does stop pyramid schemes and other such money scams, but does nothing to stop Ponzi schemes, like Ginko's (not-so-affectionately called the "Porto-Ponzi" in the SL forums). Ponzi schemes are a variation on pyramid schemes and, if one is regulated, the other should be as well. It is left as an exercise to the reader why LL can't seem to fathom this concept and put an end to SL "banks".
In the end, though, it is and should remain caveat emptor. In some ways, I think it is a good training ground for RL. The money involved is often nothing more than discretionary income for most folks, so losing it shouldn't hurt any more than losing it in a poker game. There's more than enough wisdom out there for people to obtain and investigate before giving their money to anyone. Whether they choose to ignore it falls squarely on their shoulders and no one else's.
People could ALREADY play each other online. It didn't enable anything that they already didn't have. You could already play other people online via one of several methods. The only thing you got from battle.net was a lousy MATCHMAKER service as well as a way to store characters.
I severely doubt you can back up the assertion that the primary users of bnetd were people who pirated their games. I bought and paid for every copy of Blizzard games I had in my possession (multiple copies, even). The people I played with ALSO had purchased their copies. So, as far as *I* am concerned, that assetion is pure grade A bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't share your rose-colored-glasses view of Blizzard. Evil is as evil does.
I understand perfectly the situation they were in; it didn't justify their actions in the least.
Lastly, while I don't expect you to believe anything I say (and I really don't care), I've been in the corporate software development world for 30 years now, so I understand the issues of piracy intimately.