"Silence gives consent" is how all search engines operate on the net
Well, yes and no. I suspect search engines for web pages would do better to argue that their behaviour constitutes fair use because, among other factors, the original material is readily available on-line from the original source anyway. In that case, it's not "silence gives consent", it's "consent is not required" or perhaps "consent is implicit in the rightsholder's other actions". There is nothing in copyright law in any country I know about that says silence is sufficient for consent in the general case, and indeed that would be a very dangerous principle to adopt, since it places the burden on copyright holders to notify everyone in the universe that they wish to enforce the rights the law gives them or they lose those rights.
Google has already prevailed on all of these points. Only the abandoned works issue is still at issue.
[citation needed]
It seems to me that Judge Chin has been less than supportive of Google's case so far. In fact, the original settlement in 2008 was thrown out after extensive review as being unfair, largely on the basis of the kinds of objections many people are suggesting in this very Slashdot discussion.
Moreover, it seems the current state of the case very much still includes deciding fundamental questions such as whether the mass-copying of works onto Google's own servers without permission is fair use. This is straight from TFA, so you're going to need more than wishful thinking and proof-by-intimidation as counter-arguments.
Are you seriously claiming that Google are doing this other than for commercial purposes, and that they are not going to make money by bringing eyeballs to their site to view other people's work?
As has often been observed, Google's users aren't their customers, they are their products. Advertisers are their customers, and their advertising operations are most definitely profitable.
What you can and cannot do with a book is determined by copyright, not by those notices.
So you keep saying, and of course you're right. What you seem to keep conveniently missing out is how mass-copying works as Google are doing is actually legal under fair use or any similar provision.
Perhaps you could make a start by explaining how Google are entitled to copy all of these works into their own database without at the very least paying for a legal copy of each and every one of them.
Then you can explain how republishing the work on-line qualifies.
In theory, yes. In practice, hardly ever. And that's under US law, which has by far the most generous fair use provisions of pretty much any first world country, a source of some controversy given that the US is a signatory to the major international agreements on IP and is quite happy to try to push heavier enforcement of its own rightsholders' interests abroad.
I agree that the UK economy hardly smells of roses, but there is one major difference in that if it's currently private-sector debt we're talking about, there is always another option, even if it has side effects that may not be desirable: you can let the big financial players who made bad investments lose their money and, if necessary, fail.
I don't understand enough serious economics and international politics to know why the big economic powers didn't do this right from the start, and whether there is a genuine economic justification for the bail-outs or it really was down to politics and backroom deals. It's obviously not as simple as the hang-the-bankers brigade tend to see it, but it seems to me that they are correct about one fundamental thing: by bailing out (some of) the banks, governments have effectively undermined the basic premise of capitalism by leaving private interests with much of the reward but the public with much of the risk.
Now we seem to have taken things a step further, so we're expecting wealthy Eurozone nations (Germany, for example) to bail out not only the banks based in their own countries but also the banks based in other countries (not necessarily within the Eurozone), because those other banks were foolish enough to lend money to another Eurozone country still (Greece, for example) that was unlikely to pay it back. This effectively leaves the German (for example) taxpayer subsidising foreign investors who have been doing quite nicely off the high interest rates on Greek (for example) government debt for a while but should now be paying the piper, all because Germany and Greece share a common currency in the Euro so if the Greek economy fails then Germany gets hurt too.
Now, the UK is outside the Euro, and is refusing to directly fund any Eurozone government bail-outs. Moreover, the financial giants in the City seem to have relatively limited exposure to the most risky Eurozone government debt, so the government can probably let them take their licks and eat their humble pie without risking serious long-term damage to the UK economy. In that context, there really are big differences between the UK's financial strength and that of several other G20 nations who are more closely tied up with the whole Euro mess.
Sorry, I think perhaps you misunderstood me. My point is that total debt isn't really very interesting. Whether debt is effectively owed by the tax-paying public or by private financial institutions matters, for example. Obviously these things aren't completely independent, as all the bail-outs and rescue funds prove, but they're not the same thing either, which means an unlabelled chart of some aggregate figure has very little value.
This is an action by one local council, probably trying to make some sort of political statement. Councils of this level are very low-powered in this country and frequently full of jumped up jobsworths who want to be important.
It is highly unlikely this will come to anything: notice the comment in TFA by the Information Commissioner's Office that the plans are "highly intrusive and unlikely to be justified". (For those outside the UK: The ICO is our central, national-level oversight body for things like data protection and freedom of information.)
So something even more unpleasant than being virtually strip-searched, like the US "enhanced pat-downs", can be expected shortly in the UK then?
I'm afraid I'm not optimistic about this as far as the UK goes. I'm in the "doesn't fly because it's so unpleasant these days" camp, and I'm also in the "annoyed that they are spending lots of taxpayers' money on security theatre" camp. I've heard one too many rumours about people who refused the body scanner winding up on a terrorist watch list and one too many reported excuses about how "almost everyone is happy to go through" to have any faith that our authorities are going to behave in what I consider an acceptable fashion on this one.
I content myself with the fact that the airline industry appears to be dying a slow, painful death at the hands of consumer wallets. They can spin reaction to one intrusive/unpleasant security idea after another all they like, but I don't really believe anyone is choosing to fly because of those checks who wouldn't otherwise. However, I'm quite sure that some people are not flying, or flying only when they absolutely have to, as a result. Sooner or later, that's going to hit them where it hurts the most -- their bottom line -- and it will hit businesses and tourism too.
The UK actually have the second highest total-debt-to-gdp ratios in the world.
Your source appears to be nearly two years out of date. A lot has happened in that time, so I don't think we can read too much into those figures today.
Back then, a large chunk of that UK debt was down to the financial institutions in the City; the government debt level was towards the lower end on the chart. However, we can't see how much impact the various bail-outs have made from that data.
6 million premises. 3 million households. Some of the premises are business ones.
I was speaking rather tongue-in-cheek, of course: as you mentioned, the list is publicly available, and I've checked several times with my own ISP to see whether there is any update for my own number. If you plotted the exchanges on a map along with their coverage in terms of premises, it seems like you'd find that there are heavy concentrations in certain areas. If it's not an even spread across the whole UK and available to a representative sample of the population, then figures about x% out of y households aren't very meaningful.
Unless you do lots of, um, downloading "Linux ISOs" off Bittorrent or something, or for professional reasons, most people don't need faster.
But for the kind of people who are aware of what faster options are potentially available and likely to sign up for them, I'd guess there's a higher than average chance that they do work in technology industries and that they do work from home at times, so that argument feels somehow circular.
Agreed. If we want to use all these funky cloud-based services and run automated off-site back-ups, we can't keep pretending that the asymmetry in ADSL can stay at a 10:1 ratio.
Of course, many places will offer you SDSL, as long as you're prepared to pay an order of magnitude more to have it.
What you're getting in the US is irrelevant to the UK market. Over here, people are (as TFA does mention) paying about 1/3 of that price for "regular" broadband, i.e., what is laughably described as "up to 8Mb/s" or "up to 20Mb/s" in ISP advertising.
Also, to use fibre you need new hardware to connect to the network, which you also have to pay for, whereas quite a few ADSL2 (up to 8Mb/s) routers also support with ADSL2+ (up to 20Mb/s) so that upgrade is almost entirely done ISP-side.
Finally, I'd really like to know where all these 3 million fibre-enabled households are, because we sure as heck aren't one of them and would love to have it, and we're fairly close to an exchange and in the middle of Cambridge, which is one of the most technology-focussed cities in the UK. If what they really mean is that they've fibre-enabled most of London (which contrary to perceptions about the City is mostly not full of millionaires) then of course it's not surprising that they've had a low take-up.
However, you are in a tiny minority and I am in a small minority.
I'm not sure it is that small a minority, it's just that ironically most of the people who feel the same way about DRM are willing to pirate the games instead and I'm not.:-(
And yes, I was a bit disturbed that when I found myself looking into Firefox alternatives a month or so ago, IE was clearly at the head of the pack.
Scary, isn't it? And I write that not only as a user fed up with Firefox/Chrome messing things around every few weeks but as a guy who makes money writing web stuff, which apparently means I'm supposed to love these fast release schedules because I get all the cool new toys straight away. The trouble is that I'd rather have them not break the tried and tested tools that I actually use to build real products, and I don't care much about new toys that make cute demos on some designer's blog but I'm not going to use on a real customer's project for years...
People keep Windows on their home PC because they and/or their kids use it for games.
A few years ago, I would have agreed with you, but personally I haven't bought (or ripped) a big name Windows game for several years now. All the non-game stuff like activations/DRM/spyware/always-online checks became too painful. Given the games studios' repeatedly demonstrated willingness to install stuff behind my back that goes way beyond what is necessary to run the games and may compromise the reliability or security of my PC, not to mention disabling the games I have paid for, I simply don't trust them any more. I won't install the subscription-like services either, for similar reasons, plus the fact that they could screw up my subscription one way or another as an extra risk.
It's a shame, because I do enjoy gaming, and would happily have paid for and played AAA titles more recently if they'd just let me download a crap-free version that I could both install and burn to a DVD for back-up. But there are other things I can do with my entertainment time and budget, and rather like the cinema with their noisy kids, uncomfortable chairs, and overpriced food and drink, the games companies simply don't make an attractive offer any more with Windows gaming.
On the other hand, I do still stick to Windows because the available applications are simply much better than what you can get on Linux. OpenOffice is not a substitute for MS Office. GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus are not substitutes for Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign. Blender is not a substitute for Autodesk's stuff. At current rates, I will have ditched Firefox/Chrome and gone back to IE9 before long too, because the constant breakage of Firefox and trying to turn Chrome into some kind of app store are getting old. And besides, for the things that OSS does well -- server software, programming tools, that kind of thing -- there is almost always a Windows version available anyway.
The thing is, most places in the world don't care about the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Whether that also includes significant parts of the Federal Government in the United States of America these days is left as an exercise for the reader. As I said, I don't like this reality, but if the US population is willing to put up with a choice between a strip search and a groping in the name of "security" just to fly on a plane, I doubt you're going to see the NRA rising up to defend people's right to rip off the latest CD on-line.
Just to be clear, I don't like the situation I described. I just think that given the way things are going, people around here are naive to think it can't happen.
The legal departments in Hollywood did declare war on the rest of the world, a long time ago. And so far, they are very successfully buying laws that increase the scope of copyright beyond the point of absurdity, mandate (at international level, so governments have a convenient cop-out for introducing unpopular law) draconian measures like three-strikes, introduce statutory damages that are enough to destroy someone's life, and allow for extorting thousands of dollars by abusing the US legal system to threaten people at least some of whom are probably completely innocent.
You suggest that other major technology companies might have opposing interests, but the reality is that Google don't want to fall on the wrong side of constant low-level lawsuits so they have been only too happy to implement a safe harbour/takedown notice system. Microsoft and Apple have been quite happy to introduce DRM'd formats for their media files and to support the very kind of closed path hardware I am talking about via HDCP and the like.
Being a robust distribution channel for Big Media, which these days includes Big Gaming and Big Sports, is a huge part of their future in an age of ubiquitous high-speed Internet access where on-demand everything will become the norm. The more the content providers can lock down their content to pay-per-view rather than recording it on a VCR or buying a DVD that you can lend to friends, the happier a lot of them are going to be. The alternative, where everyone pays a constant subscription fee for an all-you-can-consume buffet that is locked to each individual personally, is almost as appealing for them. They have serious money to throw around, and enough influence that they could seriously damage a platform provider like Microsoft or Apple if they decided to openly favour a competing platform.
Once again, let me stress that I don't like this situation. But it is delusional to think that organisations that are quite happy to openly abuse legislative and judicial processes on several continents in the name of perceived higher profits are going to roll over and let the freeloading continue, and in the security-theatre-obsessed world of media politics today, governments are all too ready to support the kinds of lock-down mechanisms, monitoring tools and censorship that Big Media are demanding.
For the record, I also think that to a certain extent the freeloaders have brought this upon themselves. It does cost a staggering amount to produce these games that the teenies can't live without and the blockbuster movies everyone wants to download from TPB, so if people want to continue enjoying such things, they need to contribute a fair share to the cost of producing them. You can debate whether copyright, either as it stands today or even as a basic idea, is the right way to handle that funding in the Internet age, but you can't change the underlying economic reality. As a guy who's sat on the other side of the fence, but very much as Small Media rather than Big Media, it is painful to watch people openly discussing ripping off your hard work and failing to realise that starting up a new business in this market and producing something the market really wants took a lot of personal sacrifices that most people weren't willing or able to make. I don't want to see a locked down Internet, and I'm surely never going to be filthy rich because of this work, but I would like to see the self-entitlement generation grow a pair and accept that if you want good stuff then at some point you have to support the people who make it.
That is the future we have to design copyright around. A future in which zero-cost redistribution is widespread and undetectable. That doesn't mean we should give up the idea of creating a government incentive for authorship, but it does mean that we probably have to give up trying to prohibit the thing we can't effectively prohibit.
The troubling thing is that we (general "we", the technology workers of the 21st century) are quite capable of effectively preventing almost all copyright infringement. The average Slashdotter just doesn't want to live with the consequences: it would mean locking down the IT infrastructure you can buy in a store; removing anonymity on the Internet; distributing content only via approved, controlled channels; and probably criminalising the possession of open, unrestricted equipment and the use of encryption technologies that could hide illegal behaviour from the auto-censors.
The nerds would be up in arms (both of them) but the average punter wouldn't know any better. On the evidence to date, they would probably play along, in much the same way that they accept Facebook invading their privacy on an unprecedented scale, all kinds of DRM in modern games, and little better than a free CD as compensation in class action suits against the kind of business that employs the same technologies used by virus writers to install covert anti-copying software on their PCs.
If you think it couldn't be done because there would be some kind of popular revolution, I think you're in a lovely world but not the same one as me.
If you think it couldn't be done because it isn't technically possible, I think you haven't thought through the fact that the average punter cannot manufacture complex equipment like CPUs and hard drives themselves, nor set up an effective covert undernet. The authorities will always be able to go after the technology at source, and any black market resistance is never going to achieve the kind of critical mass required to help the average punter continue doing what they're doing.
Firstly, you think Chip and PIN -- a technology widely reported to reduce in-person card fraud by up to 80% around the time of its adoption in my country -- is a theoretical benefit drummed up by academics.
Secondly, you believe that 3-D Secure doesn't work either, despite the fact that the card industry (whose only interest here is in effectively reducing fraud) have been pushing it heavily for several years, so much that in some cases they will accept responsibility for fraudulent transactions themselves instead of dumping it on the merchant if 3D-Secure verification is used.
And finally, you believe that not only do panic PINs exist, but that they are set up to result in the police being called any time someone mistypes their PIN by a digit, even though the people they are supposed to protect don't even know about them.
I can only assume that you're deliberately trolling at this point. The last one in particular is an old wives' tale that has been debunked numerous times over the years. I imagine Snopes has it if you really do believe it.
I certainly wouldn't argue for no protection whatsoever. However, security is a means to an end, and it only worth anything if there is something valuable to secure. If you impose such a burden on whatever that valuable thing might be that it becomes impractical, you've already lost. That goes for everything from inane security policies for office networks that stop staff actually doing their jobs right through to disproportionate obligations on someone running an e-commerce site such that running the web site at all is no longer commercially viable.
On the other hand, there is nothing to stop a fraudster from setting up a completely fake web site in the first place without anyone from any legitimate merchant or card service provider even knowing about it, so any protection PCI-DSS supposedly offers against that particular kind of attack is dubious at best.
The law, unless I'm very mistaken, simply requires that you implement "reasonable" security measures and register with the authorities.
The law in which jurisdiction? Although, having said that, most of the major ones are similar in this respect these days.
The problem is what happens if "reasonable" security measures from a technical and commercial point of view conflict with the measures indicated by PCI-DSS.
The banks, paypal, credit card processors, even ATM centrals may give you the "OK" on a transaction, and register it, and *still* refuse to pay you the money afterwards, claiming fraudulent use of the card. There's no way to protect yourself 100% against this.
Actually, these days there seems to be, at least with the providers we're looking at here: on-line transactions that have been verified using 3-D Secure are considered fraud-proof and immune to chargebacks on that basis.
This is the thing that really gets me about the whole industry: they know very well that the most effective single way to combat card fraud is two-factor authentication of the cardholder, hence Chip & Pin (or whatever you call it where you are) and 3-D Secure (for cardholder not present transactions over the Internet). The latter causes a certain amount of hassle during on-line payments, which is why some big retailers like Amazon don't require you to do it and prefer to "self-insure" against fraud, but if the card companies mandated it universally then they could solve their own fraud problem to a large extent and customers would get used to the fact that it's a normal way of making a card payment on-line even if they don't like the hassle of doing it.
However, they haven't done this, and instead they continue to dump the fraud problem on retailers, even after confirming a card payment has been authorised. IMNSHO, the only time the retailer should be responsible for having a payment withdrawn after the fact is if they have failed to properly provide the product/service that was being paid for, which of course is fair enough whatever the method of payment.
If yo're not compliant and something goes wrong get ready for some huge law suits. If you are compliant, get ready for some minor penalties.
And if the card industry were responsible for writing the laws, that might be true. Fortunately, even they aren't yet granted the power to legislate. In my country (England), if you screw up and leak the data, no amount of protesting that you were PCI compliant is going to get you off the hook. Moreover, if you suffer from credit card fraud, no amount of complaining to the card companies about how you followed their recommended procedures is going to force them to pay you back when they point at the small print that makes it your problem anyway.
Basically, PCI-DSS is such a poor proposition in terms of benefits that it's no surprise many small businesses make no attempt to bother complying. Sure, if they find out you aren't compliant then your business is toast, but the reality is that if they have found out then you were probably already toast because of whatever brought it to their attention anyway.
This isn't to say that businesses shouldn't provide good security, of course, and in doing so many would be most of the way to PCI-DSS compliance anyway and the extra audits etc. aren't the end of the world. We are planning this sort of system for one of my companies right now, not only because of the legal requirements in our jurisdiction but because it's simply the responsible thing to do and the right way to treat customers. I'm just observing that the card industry offer us little or nothing of real value in return for complying with PCI-DSS, which is hardly the way to encourage less responsible (or simply less technically knowledgable) management to do the right thing.
It forces small companies to buy products which do most of that for them. It's a cost of doing business.
The trouble is (and I'm writing this as a guy who runs small companies, some of which need to do card processing) that most of those services suck. They are expensive, of course, but worse than that, they are horribly limited in what functionality they offer compared to a direct integration with a payment gateway. Moreover, as I mentioned in another post, they tend to come with contracts so one-sided they actually make dealing directly with the banks an appealing prospect. If you're responsible for a small business and you care even slightly about running it in a professional manner and complying with actual legal requirements (not just whatever the card industry want you to do, but what the law requires) then it's difficult to use those services even in the US where most of them are based, and next to impossible in many places with more stringent rules.
Slashdot Mirror
"Silence gives consent" is how all search engines operate on the net
Well, yes and no. I suspect search engines for web pages would do better to argue that their behaviour constitutes fair use because, among other factors, the original material is readily available on-line from the original source anyway. In that case, it's not "silence gives consent", it's "consent is not required" or perhaps "consent is implicit in the rightsholder's other actions". There is nothing in copyright law in any country I know about that says silence is sufficient for consent in the general case, and indeed that would be a very dangerous principle to adopt, since it places the burden on copyright holders to notify everyone in the universe that they wish to enforce the rights the law gives them or they lose those rights.
Google has already prevailed on all of these points. Only the abandoned works issue is still at issue.
[citation needed]
It seems to me that Judge Chin has been less than supportive of Google's case so far. In fact, the original settlement in 2008 was thrown out after extensive review as being unfair, largely on the basis of the kinds of objections many people are suggesting in this very Slashdot discussion.
Moreover, it seems the current state of the case very much still includes deciding fundamental questions such as whether the mass-copying of works onto Google's own servers without permission is fair use. This is straight from TFA, so you're going to need more than wishful thinking and proof-by-intimidation as counter-arguments.
Are you seriously claiming that Google are doing this other than for commercial purposes, and that they are not going to make money by bringing eyeballs to their site to view other people's work?
As has often been observed, Google's users aren't their customers, they are their products. Advertisers are their customers, and their advertising operations are most definitely profitable.
What you can and cannot do with a book is determined by copyright, not by those notices.
So you keep saying, and of course you're right. What you seem to keep conveniently missing out is how mass-copying works as Google are doing is actually legal under fair use or any similar provision.
Perhaps you could make a start by explaining how Google are entitled to copy all of these works into their own database without at the very least paying for a legal copy of each and every one of them.
Then you can explain how republishing the work on-line qualifies.
A full reproduction can be fair use.
In theory, yes. In practice, hardly ever. And that's under US law, which has by far the most generous fair use provisions of pretty much any first world country, a source of some controversy given that the US is a signatory to the major international agreements on IP and is quite happy to try to push heavier enforcement of its own rightsholders' interests abroad.
I agree that the UK economy hardly smells of roses, but there is one major difference in that if it's currently private-sector debt we're talking about, there is always another option, even if it has side effects that may not be desirable: you can let the big financial players who made bad investments lose their money and, if necessary, fail.
I don't understand enough serious economics and international politics to know why the big economic powers didn't do this right from the start, and whether there is a genuine economic justification for the bail-outs or it really was down to politics and backroom deals. It's obviously not as simple as the hang-the-bankers brigade tend to see it, but it seems to me that they are correct about one fundamental thing: by bailing out (some of) the banks, governments have effectively undermined the basic premise of capitalism by leaving private interests with much of the reward but the public with much of the risk.
Now we seem to have taken things a step further, so we're expecting wealthy Eurozone nations (Germany, for example) to bail out not only the banks based in their own countries but also the banks based in other countries (not necessarily within the Eurozone), because those other banks were foolish enough to lend money to another Eurozone country still (Greece, for example) that was unlikely to pay it back. This effectively leaves the German (for example) taxpayer subsidising foreign investors who have been doing quite nicely off the high interest rates on Greek (for example) government debt for a while but should now be paying the piper, all because Germany and Greece share a common currency in the Euro so if the Greek economy fails then Germany gets hurt too.
Now, the UK is outside the Euro, and is refusing to directly fund any Eurozone government bail-outs. Moreover, the financial giants in the City seem to have relatively limited exposure to the most risky Eurozone government debt, so the government can probably let them take their licks and eat their humble pie without risking serious long-term damage to the UK economy. In that context, there really are big differences between the UK's financial strength and that of several other G20 nations who are more closely tied up with the whole Euro mess.
Sorry, I think perhaps you misunderstood me. My point is that total debt isn't really very interesting. Whether debt is effectively owed by the tax-paying public or by private financial institutions matters, for example. Obviously these things aren't completely independent, as all the bail-outs and rescue funds prove, but they're not the same thing either, which means an unlabelled chart of some aggregate figure has very little value.
This is an action by one local council, probably trying to make some sort of political statement. Councils of this level are very low-powered in this country and frequently full of jumped up jobsworths who want to be important.
It is highly unlikely this will come to anything: notice the comment in TFA by the Information Commissioner's Office that the plans are "highly intrusive and unlikely to be justified". (For those outside the UK: The ICO is our central, national-level oversight body for things like data protection and freedom of information.)
So something even more unpleasant than being virtually strip-searched, like the US "enhanced pat-downs", can be expected shortly in the UK then?
I'm afraid I'm not optimistic about this as far as the UK goes. I'm in the "doesn't fly because it's so unpleasant these days" camp, and I'm also in the "annoyed that they are spending lots of taxpayers' money on security theatre" camp. I've heard one too many rumours about people who refused the body scanner winding up on a terrorist watch list and one too many reported excuses about how "almost everyone is happy to go through" to have any faith that our authorities are going to behave in what I consider an acceptable fashion on this one.
I content myself with the fact that the airline industry appears to be dying a slow, painful death at the hands of consumer wallets. They can spin reaction to one intrusive/unpleasant security idea after another all they like, but I don't really believe anyone is choosing to fly because of those checks who wouldn't otherwise. However, I'm quite sure that some people are not flying, or flying only when they absolutely have to, as a result. Sooner or later, that's going to hit them where it hurts the most -- their bottom line -- and it will hit businesses and tourism too.
The UK actually have the second highest total-debt-to-gdp ratios in the world.
Your source appears to be nearly two years out of date. A lot has happened in that time, so I don't think we can read too much into those figures today.
Back then, a large chunk of that UK debt was down to the financial institutions in the City; the government debt level was towards the lower end on the chart. However, we can't see how much impact the various bail-outs have made from that data.
6 million premises. 3 million households. Some of the premises are business ones.
I was speaking rather tongue-in-cheek, of course: as you mentioned, the list is publicly available, and I've checked several times with my own ISP to see whether there is any update for my own number. If you plotted the exchanges on a map along with their coverage in terms of premises, it seems like you'd find that there are heavy concentrations in certain areas. If it's not an even spread across the whole UK and available to a representative sample of the population, then figures about x% out of y households aren't very meaningful.
Unless you do lots of, um, downloading "Linux ISOs" off Bittorrent or something, or for professional reasons, most people don't need faster.
But for the kind of people who are aware of what faster options are potentially available and likely to sign up for them, I'd guess there's a higher than average chance that they do work in technology industries and that they do work from home at times, so that argument feels somehow circular.
Agreed. If we want to use all these funky cloud-based services and run automated off-site back-ups, we can't keep pretending that the asymmetry in ADSL can stay at a 10:1 ratio.
Of course, many places will offer you SDSL, as long as you're prepared to pay an order of magnitude more to have it.
What you're getting in the US is irrelevant to the UK market. Over here, people are (as TFA does mention) paying about 1/3 of that price for "regular" broadband, i.e., what is laughably described as "up to 8Mb/s" or "up to 20Mb/s" in ISP advertising.
Also, to use fibre you need new hardware to connect to the network, which you also have to pay for, whereas quite a few ADSL2 (up to 8Mb/s) routers also support with ADSL2+ (up to 20Mb/s) so that upgrade is almost entirely done ISP-side.
Finally, I'd really like to know where all these 3 million fibre-enabled households are, because we sure as heck aren't one of them and would love to have it, and we're fairly close to an exchange and in the middle of Cambridge, which is one of the most technology-focussed cities in the UK. If what they really mean is that they've fibre-enabled most of London (which contrary to perceptions about the City is mostly not full of millionaires) then of course it's not surprising that they've had a low take-up.
However, you are in a tiny minority and I am in a small minority.
I'm not sure it is that small a minority, it's just that ironically most of the people who feel the same way about DRM are willing to pirate the games instead and I'm not. :-(
And yes, I was a bit disturbed that when I found myself looking into Firefox alternatives a month or so ago, IE was clearly at the head of the pack.
Scary, isn't it? And I write that not only as a user fed up with Firefox/Chrome messing things around every few weeks but as a guy who makes money writing web stuff, which apparently means I'm supposed to love these fast release schedules because I get all the cool new toys straight away. The trouble is that I'd rather have them not break the tried and tested tools that I actually use to build real products, and I don't care much about new toys that make cute demos on some designer's blog but I'm not going to use on a real customer's project for years...
People keep Windows on their home PC because they and/or their kids use it for games.
A few years ago, I would have agreed with you, but personally I haven't bought (or ripped) a big name Windows game for several years now. All the non-game stuff like activations/DRM/spyware/always-online checks became too painful. Given the games studios' repeatedly demonstrated willingness to install stuff behind my back that goes way beyond what is necessary to run the games and may compromise the reliability or security of my PC, not to mention disabling the games I have paid for, I simply don't trust them any more. I won't install the subscription-like services either, for similar reasons, plus the fact that they could screw up my subscription one way or another as an extra risk.
It's a shame, because I do enjoy gaming, and would happily have paid for and played AAA titles more recently if they'd just let me download a crap-free version that I could both install and burn to a DVD for back-up. But there are other things I can do with my entertainment time and budget, and rather like the cinema with their noisy kids, uncomfortable chairs, and overpriced food and drink, the games companies simply don't make an attractive offer any more with Windows gaming.
On the other hand, I do still stick to Windows because the available applications are simply much better than what you can get on Linux. OpenOffice is not a substitute for MS Office. GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus are not substitutes for Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign. Blender is not a substitute for Autodesk's stuff. At current rates, I will have ditched Firefox/Chrome and gone back to IE9 before long too, because the constant breakage of Firefox and trying to turn Chrome into some kind of app store are getting old. And besides, for the things that OSS does well -- server software, programming tools, that kind of thing -- there is almost always a Windows version available anyway.
The thing is, most places in the world don't care about the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Whether that also includes significant parts of the Federal Government in the United States of America these days is left as an exercise for the reader. As I said, I don't like this reality, but if the US population is willing to put up with a choice between a strip search and a groping in the name of "security" just to fly on a plane, I doubt you're going to see the NRA rising up to defend people's right to rip off the latest CD on-line.
Just to be clear, I don't like the situation I described. I just think that given the way things are going, people around here are naive to think it can't happen.
The legal departments in Hollywood did declare war on the rest of the world, a long time ago. And so far, they are very successfully buying laws that increase the scope of copyright beyond the point of absurdity, mandate (at international level, so governments have a convenient cop-out for introducing unpopular law) draconian measures like three-strikes, introduce statutory damages that are enough to destroy someone's life, and allow for extorting thousands of dollars by abusing the US legal system to threaten people at least some of whom are probably completely innocent.
You suggest that other major technology companies might have opposing interests, but the reality is that Google don't want to fall on the wrong side of constant low-level lawsuits so they have been only too happy to implement a safe harbour/takedown notice system. Microsoft and Apple have been quite happy to introduce DRM'd formats for their media files and to support the very kind of closed path hardware I am talking about via HDCP and the like.
Being a robust distribution channel for Big Media, which these days includes Big Gaming and Big Sports, is a huge part of their future in an age of ubiquitous high-speed Internet access where on-demand everything will become the norm. The more the content providers can lock down their content to pay-per-view rather than recording it on a VCR or buying a DVD that you can lend to friends, the happier a lot of them are going to be. The alternative, where everyone pays a constant subscription fee for an all-you-can-consume buffet that is locked to each individual personally, is almost as appealing for them. They have serious money to throw around, and enough influence that they could seriously damage a platform provider like Microsoft or Apple if they decided to openly favour a competing platform.
Once again, let me stress that I don't like this situation. But it is delusional to think that organisations that are quite happy to openly abuse legislative and judicial processes on several continents in the name of perceived higher profits are going to roll over and let the freeloading continue, and in the security-theatre-obsessed world of media politics today, governments are all too ready to support the kinds of lock-down mechanisms, monitoring tools and censorship that Big Media are demanding.
For the record, I also think that to a certain extent the freeloaders have brought this upon themselves. It does cost a staggering amount to produce these games that the teenies can't live without and the blockbuster movies everyone wants to download from TPB, so if people want to continue enjoying such things, they need to contribute a fair share to the cost of producing them. You can debate whether copyright, either as it stands today or even as a basic idea, is the right way to handle that funding in the Internet age, but you can't change the underlying economic reality. As a guy who's sat on the other side of the fence, but very much as Small Media rather than Big Media, it is painful to watch people openly discussing ripping off your hard work and failing to realise that starting up a new business in this market and producing something the market really wants took a lot of personal sacrifices that most people weren't willing or able to make. I don't want to see a locked down Internet, and I'm surely never going to be filthy rich because of this work, but I would like to see the self-entitlement generation grow a pair and accept that if you want good stuff then at some point you have to support the people who make it.
That is the future we have to design copyright around. A future in which zero-cost redistribution is widespread and undetectable. That doesn't mean we should give up the idea of creating a government incentive for authorship, but it does mean that we probably have to give up trying to prohibit the thing we can't effectively prohibit.
The troubling thing is that we (general "we", the technology workers of the 21st century) are quite capable of effectively preventing almost all copyright infringement. The average Slashdotter just doesn't want to live with the consequences: it would mean locking down the IT infrastructure you can buy in a store; removing anonymity on the Internet; distributing content only via approved, controlled channels; and probably criminalising the possession of open, unrestricted equipment and the use of encryption technologies that could hide illegal behaviour from the auto-censors.
The nerds would be up in arms (both of them) but the average punter wouldn't know any better. On the evidence to date, they would probably play along, in much the same way that they accept Facebook invading their privacy on an unprecedented scale, all kinds of DRM in modern games, and little better than a free CD as compensation in class action suits against the kind of business that employs the same technologies used by virus writers to install covert anti-copying software on their PCs.
If you think it couldn't be done because there would be some kind of popular revolution, I think you're in a lovely world but not the same one as me.
If you think it couldn't be done because it isn't technically possible, I think you haven't thought through the fact that the average punter cannot manufacture complex equipment like CPUs and hard drives themselves, nor set up an effective covert undernet. The authorities will always be able to go after the technology at source, and any black market resistance is never going to achieve the kind of critical mass required to help the average punter continue doing what they're doing.
So let me get this straight.
Firstly, you think Chip and PIN -- a technology widely reported to reduce in-person card fraud by up to 80% around the time of its adoption in my country -- is a theoretical benefit drummed up by academics.
Secondly, you believe that 3-D Secure doesn't work either, despite the fact that the card industry (whose only interest here is in effectively reducing fraud) have been pushing it heavily for several years, so much that in some cases they will accept responsibility for fraudulent transactions themselves instead of dumping it on the merchant if 3D-Secure verification is used.
And finally, you believe that not only do panic PINs exist, but that they are set up to result in the police being called any time someone mistypes their PIN by a digit, even though the people they are supposed to protect don't even know about them.
I can only assume that you're deliberately trolling at this point. The last one in particular is an old wives' tale that has been debunked numerous times over the years. I imagine Snopes has it if you really do believe it.
I certainly wouldn't argue for no protection whatsoever. However, security is a means to an end, and it only worth anything if there is something valuable to secure. If you impose such a burden on whatever that valuable thing might be that it becomes impractical, you've already lost. That goes for everything from inane security policies for office networks that stop staff actually doing their jobs right through to disproportionate obligations on someone running an e-commerce site such that running the web site at all is no longer commercially viable.
On the other hand, there is nothing to stop a fraudster from setting up a completely fake web site in the first place without anyone from any legitimate merchant or card service provider even knowing about it, so any protection PCI-DSS supposedly offers against that particular kind of attack is dubious at best.
The law, unless I'm very mistaken, simply requires that you implement "reasonable" security measures and register with the authorities.
The law in which jurisdiction? Although, having said that, most of the major ones are similar in this respect these days.
The problem is what happens if "reasonable" security measures from a technical and commercial point of view conflict with the measures indicated by PCI-DSS.
The banks, paypal, credit card processors, even ATM centrals may give you the "OK" on a transaction, and register it, and *still* refuse to pay you the money afterwards, claiming fraudulent use of the card. There's no way to protect yourself 100% against this.
Actually, these days there seems to be, at least with the providers we're looking at here: on-line transactions that have been verified using 3-D Secure are considered fraud-proof and immune to chargebacks on that basis.
This is the thing that really gets me about the whole industry: they know very well that the most effective single way to combat card fraud is two-factor authentication of the cardholder, hence Chip & Pin (or whatever you call it where you are) and 3-D Secure (for cardholder not present transactions over the Internet). The latter causes a certain amount of hassle during on-line payments, which is why some big retailers like Amazon don't require you to do it and prefer to "self-insure" against fraud, but if the card companies mandated it universally then they could solve their own fraud problem to a large extent and customers would get used to the fact that it's a normal way of making a card payment on-line even if they don't like the hassle of doing it.
However, they haven't done this, and instead they continue to dump the fraud problem on retailers, even after confirming a card payment has been authorised. IMNSHO, the only time the retailer should be responsible for having a payment withdrawn after the fact is if they have failed to properly provide the product/service that was being paid for, which of course is fair enough whatever the method of payment.
If yo're not compliant and something goes wrong get ready for some huge law suits. If you are compliant, get ready for some minor penalties.
And if the card industry were responsible for writing the laws, that might be true. Fortunately, even they aren't yet granted the power to legislate. In my country (England), if you screw up and leak the data, no amount of protesting that you were PCI compliant is going to get you off the hook. Moreover, if you suffer from credit card fraud, no amount of complaining to the card companies about how you followed their recommended procedures is going to force them to pay you back when they point at the small print that makes it your problem anyway.
Basically, PCI-DSS is such a poor proposition in terms of benefits that it's no surprise many small businesses make no attempt to bother complying. Sure, if they find out you aren't compliant then your business is toast, but the reality is that if they have found out then you were probably already toast because of whatever brought it to their attention anyway.
This isn't to say that businesses shouldn't provide good security, of course, and in doing so many would be most of the way to PCI-DSS compliance anyway and the extra audits etc. aren't the end of the world. We are planning this sort of system for one of my companies right now, not only because of the legal requirements in our jurisdiction but because it's simply the responsible thing to do and the right way to treat customers. I'm just observing that the card industry offer us little or nothing of real value in return for complying with PCI-DSS, which is hardly the way to encourage less responsible (or simply less technically knowledgable) management to do the right thing.
It forces small companies to buy products which do most of that for them. It's a cost of doing business.
The trouble is (and I'm writing this as a guy who runs small companies, some of which need to do card processing) that most of those services suck. They are expensive, of course, but worse than that, they are horribly limited in what functionality they offer compared to a direct integration with a payment gateway. Moreover, as I mentioned in another post, they tend to come with contracts so one-sided they actually make dealing directly with the banks an appealing prospect. If you're responsible for a small business and you care even slightly about running it in a professional manner and complying with actual legal requirements (not just whatever the card industry want you to do, but what the law requires) then it's difficult to use those services even in the US where most of them are based, and next to impossible in many places with more stringent rules.