Firstly, your implication is simply wrong. Several of the PCs where I've seen this behaviour are used professionally, and we keep a careful log of any software and updates that are actively installed right from day one, in case we want to set up more machines later and need to know exactly where that useful utility/plugin/whatever came from. We therefore know that the plug-in in question appeared shortly after installing Google Chrome.
Secondly, even if there had ever been any Google plug-in installed in Firefox, that's never an excuse for reactivating a plug-in that the user has explicitly chosen to disable anyway.
I've had at least half a dozen different plug-ins reactivate under those circumstances. I'm pretty sure that's a different screw-up and attributable to Firefox, not the fault of all those different plug-ins.
Yes, it can, though at least those only install when you install some related software and they don't reactivate themselves if you actively disable them.
That nasty bug is apparently present on every machine I currently have access to, exactly none of which have (or, to my knowledge, ever have had) any Google software installed within Firefox beyond the default search bar stuff.
The plug-ins have certainly been reactivated after being explicitly disabled on all of those machines, at times when there was no Google stuff installed for Firefox beyond the default search bar stuff.
I realise you were going for humour, but Google does a lot of very shady things involving auto-updates and integrating with unnecessary parts of a system. Why does my Firefox installation need a Google Update plug-in I never asked for, and why does it keep getting reactivated even though I've explicitly turned it off?
The reaction might not have been deliberate on this occasion, but I am utterly lacking in sympathy if Google's shady code starts getting treated like malware. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's still a duck, even though sometimes it can taste good.
There are a few bits of software in the world with a much lower bug count than the industry average, to be sure. And there are interesting papers about how much it costs (or, in some cases, doesn't cost) to buy that reliability.
But even the software running space shuttles and medical equipment and nuclear power stations and weapons control systems has bugs. Heck, even TeX had a bug in it once, allegedly.
The fact is, no-one in the world knows how to make truly bug-free software of arbitrary scale, never mind how to do so in a commercially and socially viable way. And even if you could somehow guarantee to implement specs with 100% accuracy, a huge number of real world bugs start with a problem in the requirements rather than the code that implements them, which means human error will always be a factor.
Only when I get the same absolute power of veto on shipping a product I'm not happy with for any reason that a real engineer has, and all my coworkers on the project are vetted and qualified to a high standard like real engineers, and (this one's the kicker) the software industry has established robust, reliable mechanisms to build safe software like a real engineering discipline.
Approximately none of those things is going to happen for a long time within the world of general software development.
Just how does someone get "very rich" by making a better version of a free product and giving it away for free?
Exactly the same way Mozilla did: by establishing a significant market share, and then taking advantage of your semi-captive audience.
Mozilla have done this very successfully with their Google deal. Despite the fact that anyone is theoretically free to create an alternative version of Firefox that doesn't default to using Google and generate revenue for Mozilla, in practice hardly anyone tries because it's not worth the effort.
It helps that the search bar is a useful feature and Google would be a lot of people's default choice of search engine anyway, so that the integrated source of revenue is not as in-your-face and "anti-user" as, say, displaying an ad in part of the browser window each time it launches. However, I can see that if someone made a good enough browser, a lot users might tolerate a default home page that contained a relevant ad, for example. Loads of people fire up a browser and then immediately search for something or open a bookmark anyway, and probably wouldn't much care what was displayed in the meantime (as long as it wasn't a security risk, perhaps), but surely that kind of exposure would be worth a fortune to advertisers.
No doubt there are zillions of variations on this theme that could be viable on a large enough scale to make funding browser development a realistic possibility, even if Google didn't want a similar deal with a new kid on the block to what they have with Mozilla.
It's painful like seeing a great book being turned into a terrible film by focus-group driven studio executives.
I genuinely wonder how long this will last before enough geeks get annoyed enough to start a credible fork and push it into the mainstream as the presumptive replacement for Firefox. The backlash has been obvious, public, and intensifying with every version since the silly numbering fiasco started (and all the other problems that have come along with the runaway release process began, since the numbering itself is mostly an unimportant distraction).
Firefox is open source, and major open source projects typically don't fork on a whim, but there is now a flashing neon sign inviting a few geeks with the time to do it properly to get very rich by making a Firefox clone with the good stuff kept, a lot of the not-ready-yet stuff dropped until it can be done properly, a more gentle UI evolution that is driven by actual usability testing and not the whim of whoever is in charge these days, and a PR guy who can eat Dotzler for breakfast in front of the business audience. I'm sure many people have considered this, and if a group with not only geek credentials but also good marketing and business savvy does it before Mozilla gets its house in order, then Mozilla is a dead company walking.
Exactly. Paying contractors 1.5-2x the equivalent salaried staffer is probably breaking even or better for most organisations. The overheads of employing someone are far higher than most employees realise: providing a suitable place to work, all equipment and software required for the job, paid vacation and sick time, whatever pension/health cover/benefits go with the territory, training expenses, people to handle management and administrative overheads... A freelancer has to eat all of that before they even start making any useful money.
There are a lot of advantages to being a freelancer in IT, if you are willing and able to wear all the extra hats that go with it as well as getting the day job done. But when people have a dig at me because I get "tax breaks" here in the UK, I tend to laugh, and ask how they'd feel if they only got paid for 2/3 of their working hours, didn't get paid at all for any non-working hours, had to spend perhaps 20% of the income they do get on overheads of one kind or another, etc. Usually they've got bored and conceded defeat before I run out of things I have to do personally that their employer does for them.:-)
You are effectively arguing that Google is Too Big To Fail and has become above the law. If this is true, the correct response to such a situation in a civil society is to destroy it, swiftly and decisively. We are all familiar with the results of not doing so and kowtowing to big business for too long instead.
Of course, the situation isn't really that extreme, and therefore such extreme countermeasures are not required either. It is far more beneficial for both sides to co-operate in some reasonable way on these issues. Frankly, what is being discussed here is not unreasonable. I don't think we can sustain the current trend for so-called safe harbour arrangements, where a large organisation that is supporting people who break the law and is well aware of the fact that this goes on is allowed to continue to do so with impunity as long as they promise to stop when someone tells them they're being naughty. The same technology that permits this sort of law-breaking on a massive scale can also be used to mitigate it, and it isn't absurd to expect the service providers to help with that.
So what's the answer to ratbag's question, then? What system do you propose instead of copyright to encourage the creation and distribution of new works?
To give one obvious example from this week, the Libyan rebels have found prison facilities in Tripoli where hundreds of political prisoners have apparently been executed before or during the uprising. There is no doubt that compromising the identity of people who oppose the ruling classes in many nations is a life-threatening activity.
On the other hand, successive administrations in various Western nations have carried on with their drone strikes and numerous other military activities despite open opposition to military action by many of their citizens and widespread reporting of the consequences. What has Wikileaks ever produced that is more damning than that?
people said wikileaks would cause casualties. well, its been a year+ since alot of this stuff was released. who has died?
It's hasn't been a year since the release of the uncensored data, and even if the authorities in hostile states had gotten hold it of seven months ago, the sheer volume of it would limit how quickly they could react. It is far too soon to even claim that no harm has been done, leaving aside the fact that given the nature of those involved, any friendly casualties would probably be kept very quiet.
However, as of the past couple of days we already know that many people considered at risk and marked for protection have had their identities compromised. How can there ever be any public interest justification for that?
why should i be more concerned over something that theoretically, might happen, (and i have been waiting a year for it to happen) versus something that happens every other week, in reality?
Well aside from my argument above, how about because the two things you describe are not mutually exclusive? I doubt any Wikileaks releases have prevented any drone strikes. On the other hand, time will (or won't) tell whether the high level Al-Qaeda operatives who have been captured or killed in recent months would have escaped if those who ultimately betrayed their positions had been compromised before our forces could act.
In the US, our elected officials are one step shy of openly taking bribes, and in the last few months, two of the three branches have been mired in what boils down to little more than a dick waving contest. We have spent a decade occupying two countries we invaded without the slightest bit of reliable intel that would give us reason to do so. Our economy was raped by Wall Street parasites that subsequently got written a big check and left without so much as a slap on the wrist.
And yet all of this has happened out in the wide open, without your population doing anything to remove those elected officials. What sort of difference is telling a few citizens who might actually care about a few more minor infractions (relatively speaking) going to make, when affronts like the above are carried on with apparent impunity?
Meanwhile, this year has seen the biggest forcible assertion of democratic values in generations. How much of the result is down to a few nameless heroes who fought from within, we will probably never fully know. However, I think it is a safe bet that had the authoritarian regimes in question known who they were, they would not be alive today and some or all of the rebellions in the Arab Spring would have failed.
But screwing over a whole bunch of other people who are trying to make the world a better place just because you can isn't going to bring the dead back.
Destabilising sensitive negotiations and compromising sources will almost certainly result in more deaths, though, not just for the sources and their families but because the work they were doing was undermined.
Most of the Wikileaks stuff that came out before wasn't particularly damning, in the sense of exposing great wrong-doings by government agents that we didn't already know about or at least strongly suspect. If there are further cases that need to be exposes in the interests of justice then sure, expose them. I'm all for government getting called on it when they're behaving improperly, and I'm all for punishing those involved so that justice is seen to be done. However, the bottom line is that there was no real public interest in forcing most of the earlier Wikileaks releases I saw, redacted or otherwise. This sort of unrestricted disclosure isn't going to help anyone, except people you don't want to be helping.
They accepted the risks when they engaged in the covert operations to begin with.
OK, here's a new plan.
Firstly, we must stop using human intelligence sources to anticipate and try to prevent criminal acts, because the sources are often inherently at risk and you don't want to protect them.
Because the public will not stand for the damaging acts that are likely to result, we need a new source of information to help prevent them. Let's make disclosure of all communications to the state mandatory, declare any use of encryption in communications or storage reasonable grounds to suspect criminal intent, and treat anyone who does it as a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise. If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear, so obviously this won't have any chilling effects.
Also, we should stop conducting quiet diplomacy behind closed doors, because not everyone knows what their government is doing under those circumstances, and that is just wrong. Everyone needs to know everything that goes on in government immediately or the very fabric of society is at risk.
Instead of making deals with the devil, we must ensure that we fight any opposing philosophy to the bitter end, no matter the cost and no matter how long it takes. We have, after all, been highly successful in places like the Middle East using that strategy. Meanwhile, it's not as if developments like the Northern Irish peace process started with a few brave individuals on both sides meeting secretly to see if decades of bloodshed could be brought to an end or anything. That probably didn't save anyone's life or improve the quality of life across a whole country anyway.
While we're at it, we should probably also ban witness protection programmes. Courts must be open and impartial, and there is no risk to their effectiveness in cases relating to gang violence, sexual assaults, and corruption if everything is always heard with the press present.
Finally, we should definitely televise all official government meetings in real time. Politics can be kept at bay, and we are bound to wind up with more sensible policies if decisions are made based on which sound-bite will sound best on the evening news rather than the considered opinions of experts who are familiar with more subtle arguments than "Five minutes ago you agreed with part of something I almost said in another discussion, so if you don't back me up now that's a U-turn!!!!111!eleven!"
OK, here's another plan.
First, we could use just the tiniest bit of common sense. Some things are secret for good reasons, and whatever the conspiracy theorists like to say, I'm betting that most people in government, in the police, in the security services, and in the armed forces in my country are basically decent people doing their best to protect the rest of us from not-so-decent people. Those who abuse authority should be dealt with appropriately, but we could consider a less black-and-white view and not throw out the whole fridge because a bit of cheese got mouldy.
Transparency is important, and checks and balances are important, and oversight is important, and respect for democratic roots is important, and secrets should only be kept from the general public for legitimate reasons and for as long as absolutely necessary. However, I don't think we would like to live in a world where only the bad guys kept secrets at all, and I don't think we would like to live in a world where no-one was brave enough to stand up for what is right for fear of the repercussions when they were inevitably compromised.
I gave up on triaging bugs for OSS projects with absurdly overcomplicated bug systems a few years ago. It was too much work and rarely got results.
A few weeks ago I decided I'd try to help out again, by tracking down when an obvious bug appeared in Firefox. So, I went to their site to download an installer for the last version to see if was a recent regression, and... couldn't. Nope, sorry, it's been unmade, it was never there, it never existed.
But things are looking up: I can probably still pull a nightly from source! All I need to do is set up a complete Firefox build system, install a whole bunch of tools, and run an executable that comes with a large neon sign saying "This is not production software and may reboot your universe unexpectedly." Yep, I'm definitely going to do that on the PC I use to earn a living. Absolutely.
OK, so back on planet Earth, they do still support 3.6 and I can at least get an installer for that. Downloaded. Installed. Got a harmless-looking message asking me about whether I want to install various add-ons. Said no, because I just wanted a clean profile to test with. All those add-ons got uninstalled from Firefox 5. Took me half an hour to set everything I use routinely back up again.
When you screw things up this badly for people who are actively trying to help you, the failure of your project is not a question of if, but when.
Then again, I would have made the same observation about the marketing people at Mozilla, who appear to have decided that "Ooooh, shiny" trumps any kind of stability or quality control, based on some irrational argument about how web developers need these new, not-yet-standardised, not-yet-portable, not-yet-fully-implemented features today for the Web to improve. That makes no sense if you consider the positions of most people who actually make web sites, but they don't seem to have thought it through even that far.
Right now, Mozilla is the one stock I would be shorting faster than HP, if the opportunity were there. It would be guaranteed money from the stock market.
I think you're misunderstanding the concern. If I build my code using GCC, then GCC itself may be open source under whatever licence, but my code is mine to license as I wish. If you follow the link I gave above, you'll find that the Opa guys think that not only Opa itself but also anything you write with it should be forced open (by their definition of open, which is different to almost anyone else's). That's the kind of policy that gets abrupt from corporate lawyers saying "Put this within 50 miles of our network and you're fired". It's also incompatible with many other popular OSS licence policies.
The claimed alternative is to buy a commercial licence for Opa, which lifts the open source conditions, but costs an as-yet-unconfirmed amount of money.
To my knowledge, there is no programming language that is even moderately successful today that does not have a good quality, free-as-in-beer, no-strings-attached tool chain readily available.
I suspect Opa is about to become a textbook example of a project that was be stillborn because its developers were too greedy; they're just demanding too much control over other people's work instead of too much cash.
I was a bit surprised as well. This story has hit several of the social news sites, and from the headlines I was expecting some sort of freak underground tunnel caused by some interesting historical phenomenon. Then I saw the flow rate and tried to figure out how that made sense. Then I learned that it might not really be a river at all, at least not as a layman like me thinks of one.
Aside: Also, thanks for linking to a site that isn't covered in Facebook-related junk. It seems like social networking links are becoming the new banner ads, cluttering up web pages everywhere, but at least most pages have the courtesy to stick them all in one place, and not put a banner here, a like button there, and a feed somewhere else. It's completely wasted on me anyway since I don't use Facebook/Twitter/etc. [/goes to update AdBlock and wonders if anyone has a list of filters that get rid of at least most of this junk...]
Is there any good reason why one would want to use HTML5 at all? I mean, as a user?
That's a very fair question, but it's a slightly loaded one. As a user, there is little benefit to any particular web technology, whether it's HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash or anything else. As a user, what you care about is results. However, those results depend on what developers can build, typically within a certain amount of time and budget.
If you have new technologies that allow developers to do new things, and those things benefit the user, then the user wins. However, if you have new technologies that allow developers to do old things in newer, easier, faster ways, and those things benefit the user, then the user also wins, particularly if it becomes viable for developers to make something useful in a cost-effective way when they could have done it before but didn't because it was too expensive in some respect.
And from that point of view, HTML5 tools like canvas and media tags are a big step up for some jobs over using something like Flash or Java applets.
That said, I strongly agree that browsers shouldn't be ceding any sovereignty over their users' systems to remote code by default.
And that said, the most devious tracking mechanism I have yet encountered didn't rely on any sort of cookie/local storage technology. It was essentially based on how various web-related protocols handle caching, it's hard to defeat without getting rid of caching, and you really don't want to get rid of caching. It is possible for browsers to avoid falling into the trap, and now that the attack vector has been identified I expect they'll do something about it.
Then again, as you read this your browser is probably advertising an almost unique fingerprint that could track you anywhere on the Web without storing anything on your machine at all, every time it sends request headers, and despite this being a well-known problem for quite some time, the browser developers haven't done much about it yet. Until they do, fighting against tricky little local storage vectors is hitting the 1% problem, not the 99% problem...
f) Their customers get to visit local stores, examine the books there to decide which they want to buy entirely at the local store's expense, and then go buy it from Amazon anyway because it's cheaper.
Personally, I buy books I care about (presents, for example) from a good local store precisely because I value the customer service they offer and being able to browse. But every time I go in these days, it seems like someone is standing holding their iWhatever and ordering off Amazon right there in the middle of the bookshop floor.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use GMail, and never have.
Firstly, your implication is simply wrong. Several of the PCs where I've seen this behaviour are used professionally, and we keep a careful log of any software and updates that are actively installed right from day one, in case we want to set up more machines later and need to know exactly where that useful utility/plugin/whatever came from. We therefore know that the plug-in in question appeared shortly after installing Google Chrome.
Secondly, even if there had ever been any Google plug-in installed in Firefox, that's never an excuse for reactivating a plug-in that the user has explicitly chosen to disable anyway.
I've had at least half a dozen different plug-ins reactivate under those circumstances. I'm pretty sure that's a different screw-up and attributable to Firefox, not the fault of all those different plug-ins.
Yes, it can, though at least those only install when you install some related software and they don't reactivate themselves if you actively disable them.
That nasty bug is apparently present on every machine I currently have access to, exactly none of which have (or, to my knowledge, ever have had) any Google software installed within Firefox beyond the default search bar stuff.
The plug-ins have certainly been reactivated after being explicitly disabled on all of those machines, at times when there was no Google stuff installed for Firefox beyond the default search bar stuff.
I realise you were going for humour, but Google does a lot of very shady things involving auto-updates and integrating with unnecessary parts of a system. Why does my Firefox installation need a Google Update plug-in I never asked for, and why does it keep getting reactivated even though I've explicitly turned it off?
The reaction might not have been deliberate on this occasion, but I am utterly lacking in sympathy if Google's shady code starts getting treated like malware. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's still a duck, even though sometimes it can taste good.
It's just a number.
No, it's not. It's also a mostly-automatic change in the software that people are running, and that is a much more significant concern.
The "nearly" in your post matters.
There are a few bits of software in the world with a much lower bug count than the industry average, to be sure. And there are interesting papers about how much it costs (or, in some cases, doesn't cost) to buy that reliability.
But even the software running space shuttles and medical equipment and nuclear power stations and weapons control systems has bugs. Heck, even TeX had a bug in it once, allegedly.
The fact is, no-one in the world knows how to make truly bug-free software of arbitrary scale, never mind how to do so in a commercially and socially viable way. And even if you could somehow guarantee to implement specs with 100% accuracy, a huge number of real world bugs start with a problem in the requirements rather than the code that implements them, which means human error will always be a factor.
Stand behind your work like an engineer...
Only when I get the same absolute power of veto on shipping a product I'm not happy with for any reason that a real engineer has, and all my coworkers on the project are vetted and qualified to a high standard like real engineers, and (this one's the kicker) the software industry has established robust, reliable mechanisms to build safe software like a real engineering discipline.
Approximately none of those things is going to happen for a long time within the world of general software development.
Just how does someone get "very rich" by making a better version of a free product and giving it away for free?
Exactly the same way Mozilla did: by establishing a significant market share, and then taking advantage of your semi-captive audience.
Mozilla have done this very successfully with their Google deal. Despite the fact that anyone is theoretically free to create an alternative version of Firefox that doesn't default to using Google and generate revenue for Mozilla, in practice hardly anyone tries because it's not worth the effort.
It helps that the search bar is a useful feature and Google would be a lot of people's default choice of search engine anyway, so that the integrated source of revenue is not as in-your-face and "anti-user" as, say, displaying an ad in part of the browser window each time it launches. However, I can see that if someone made a good enough browser, a lot users might tolerate a default home page that contained a relevant ad, for example. Loads of people fire up a browser and then immediately search for something or open a bookmark anyway, and probably wouldn't much care what was displayed in the meantime (as long as it wasn't a security risk, perhaps), but surely that kind of exposure would be worth a fortune to advertisers.
No doubt there are zillions of variations on this theme that could be viable on a large enough scale to make funding browser development a realistic possibility, even if Google didn't want a similar deal with a new kid on the block to what they have with Mozilla.
It's painful like seeing a great book being turned into a terrible film by focus-group driven studio executives.
I genuinely wonder how long this will last before enough geeks get annoyed enough to start a credible fork and push it into the mainstream as the presumptive replacement for Firefox. The backlash has been obvious, public, and intensifying with every version since the silly numbering fiasco started (and all the other problems that have come along with the runaway release process began, since the numbering itself is mostly an unimportant distraction).
Firefox is open source, and major open source projects typically don't fork on a whim, but there is now a flashing neon sign inviting a few geeks with the time to do it properly to get very rich by making a Firefox clone with the good stuff kept, a lot of the not-ready-yet stuff dropped until it can be done properly, a more gentle UI evolution that is driven by actual usability testing and not the whim of whoever is in charge these days, and a PR guy who can eat Dotzler for breakfast in front of the business audience. I'm sure many people have considered this, and if a group with not only geek credentials but also good marketing and business savvy does it before Mozilla gets its house in order, then Mozilla is a dead company walking.
Exactly. Paying contractors 1.5-2x the equivalent salaried staffer is probably breaking even or better for most organisations. The overheads of employing someone are far higher than most employees realise: providing a suitable place to work, all equipment and software required for the job, paid vacation and sick time, whatever pension/health cover/benefits go with the territory, training expenses, people to handle management and administrative overheads... A freelancer has to eat all of that before they even start making any useful money.
There are a lot of advantages to being a freelancer in IT, if you are willing and able to wear all the extra hats that go with it as well as getting the day job done. But when people have a dig at me because I get "tax breaks" here in the UK, I tend to laugh, and ask how they'd feel if they only got paid for 2/3 of their working hours, didn't get paid at all for any non-working hours, had to spend perhaps 20% of the income they do get on overheads of one kind or another, etc. Usually they've got bored and conceded defeat before I run out of things I have to do personally that their employer does for them. :-)
You are effectively arguing that Google is Too Big To Fail and has become above the law. If this is true, the correct response to such a situation in a civil society is to destroy it, swiftly and decisively. We are all familiar with the results of not doing so and kowtowing to big business for too long instead.
Of course, the situation isn't really that extreme, and therefore such extreme countermeasures are not required either. It is far more beneficial for both sides to co-operate in some reasonable way on these issues. Frankly, what is being discussed here is not unreasonable. I don't think we can sustain the current trend for so-called safe harbour arrangements, where a large organisation that is supporting people who break the law and is well aware of the fact that this goes on is allowed to continue to do so with impunity as long as they promise to stop when someone tells them they're being naughty. The same technology that permits this sort of law-breaking on a massive scale can also be used to mitigate it, and it isn't absurd to expect the service providers to help with that.
So what's the answer to ratbag's question, then? What system do you propose instead of copyright to encourage the creation and distribution of new works?
Well, now it's obvious you're just trolling.
To give one obvious example from this week, the Libyan rebels have found prison facilities in Tripoli where hundreds of political prisoners have apparently been executed before or during the uprising. There is no doubt that compromising the identity of people who oppose the ruling classes in many nations is a life-threatening activity.
On the other hand, successive administrations in various Western nations have carried on with their drone strikes and numerous other military activities despite open opposition to military action by many of their citizens and widespread reporting of the consequences. What has Wikileaks ever produced that is more damning than that?
people said wikileaks would cause casualties. well, its been a year+ since alot of this stuff was released. who has died?
It's hasn't been a year since the release of the uncensored data, and even if the authorities in hostile states had gotten hold it of seven months ago, the sheer volume of it would limit how quickly they could react. It is far too soon to even claim that no harm has been done, leaving aside the fact that given the nature of those involved, any friendly casualties would probably be kept very quiet.
However, as of the past couple of days we already know that many people considered at risk and marked for protection have had their identities compromised. How can there ever be any public interest justification for that?
why should i be more concerned over something that theoretically, might happen, (and i have been waiting a year for it to happen) versus something that happens every other week, in reality?
Well aside from my argument above, how about because the two things you describe are not mutually exclusive? I doubt any Wikileaks releases have prevented any drone strikes. On the other hand, time will (or won't) tell whether the high level Al-Qaeda operatives who have been captured or killed in recent months would have escaped if those who ultimately betrayed their positions had been compromised before our forces could act.
In the US, our elected officials are one step shy of openly taking bribes, and in the last few months, two of the three branches have been mired in what boils down to little more than a dick waving contest. We have spent a decade occupying two countries we invaded without the slightest bit of reliable intel that would give us reason to do so. Our economy was raped by Wall Street parasites that subsequently got written a big check and left without so much as a slap on the wrist.
And yet all of this has happened out in the wide open, without your population doing anything to remove those elected officials. What sort of difference is telling a few citizens who might actually care about a few more minor infractions (relatively speaking) going to make, when affronts like the above are carried on with apparent impunity?
Meanwhile, this year has seen the biggest forcible assertion of democratic values in generations. How much of the result is down to a few nameless heroes who fought from within, we will probably never fully know. However, I think it is a safe bet that had the authoritarian regimes in question known who they were, they would not be alive today and some or all of the rebellions in the Arab Spring would have failed.
Yes, they have.
But screwing over a whole bunch of other people who are trying to make the world a better place just because you can isn't going to bring the dead back.
Destabilising sensitive negotiations and compromising sources will almost certainly result in more deaths, though, not just for the sources and their families but because the work they were doing was undermined.
Most of the Wikileaks stuff that came out before wasn't particularly damning, in the sense of exposing great wrong-doings by government agents that we didn't already know about or at least strongly suspect. If there are further cases that need to be exposes in the interests of justice then sure, expose them. I'm all for government getting called on it when they're behaving improperly, and I'm all for punishing those involved so that justice is seen to be done. However, the bottom line is that there was no real public interest in forcing most of the earlier Wikileaks releases I saw, redacted or otherwise. This sort of unrestricted disclosure isn't going to help anyone, except people you don't want to be helping.
They accepted the risks when they engaged in the covert operations to begin with.
OK, here's a new plan.
Firstly, we must stop using human intelligence sources to anticipate and try to prevent criminal acts, because the sources are often inherently at risk and you don't want to protect them.
Because the public will not stand for the damaging acts that are likely to result, we need a new source of information to help prevent them. Let's make disclosure of all communications to the state mandatory, declare any use of encryption in communications or storage reasonable grounds to suspect criminal intent, and treat anyone who does it as a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise. If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear, so obviously this won't have any chilling effects.
Also, we should stop conducting quiet diplomacy behind closed doors, because not everyone knows what their government is doing under those circumstances, and that is just wrong. Everyone needs to know everything that goes on in government immediately or the very fabric of society is at risk.
Instead of making deals with the devil, we must ensure that we fight any opposing philosophy to the bitter end, no matter the cost and no matter how long it takes. We have, after all, been highly successful in places like the Middle East using that strategy. Meanwhile, it's not as if developments like the Northern Irish peace process started with a few brave individuals on both sides meeting secretly to see if decades of bloodshed could be brought to an end or anything. That probably didn't save anyone's life or improve the quality of life across a whole country anyway.
While we're at it, we should probably also ban witness protection programmes. Courts must be open and impartial, and there is no risk to their effectiveness in cases relating to gang violence, sexual assaults, and corruption if everything is always heard with the press present.
Finally, we should definitely televise all official government meetings in real time. Politics can be kept at bay, and we are bound to wind up with more sensible policies if decisions are made based on which sound-bite will sound best on the evening news rather than the considered opinions of experts who are familiar with more subtle arguments than "Five minutes ago you agreed with part of something I almost said in another discussion, so if you don't back me up now that's a U-turn!!!!111!eleven!"
OK, here's another plan.
First, we could use just the tiniest bit of common sense. Some things are secret for good reasons, and whatever the conspiracy theorists like to say, I'm betting that most people in government, in the police, in the security services, and in the armed forces in my country are basically decent people doing their best to protect the rest of us from not-so-decent people. Those who abuse authority should be dealt with appropriately, but we could consider a less black-and-white view and not throw out the whole fridge because a bit of cheese got mouldy.
Transparency is important, and checks and balances are important, and oversight is important, and respect for democratic roots is important, and secrets should only be kept from the general public for legitimate reasons and for as long as absolutely necessary. However, I don't think we would like to live in a world where only the bad guys kept secrets at all, and I don't think we would like to live in a world where no-one was brave enough to stand up for what is right for fear of the repercussions when they were inevitably compromised.
I gave up on triaging bugs for OSS projects with absurdly overcomplicated bug systems a few years ago. It was too much work and rarely got results.
A few weeks ago I decided I'd try to help out again, by tracking down when an obvious bug appeared in Firefox. So, I went to their site to download an installer for the last version to see if was a recent regression, and... couldn't. Nope, sorry, it's been unmade, it was never there, it never existed.
But things are looking up: I can probably still pull a nightly from source! All I need to do is set up a complete Firefox build system, install a whole bunch of tools, and run an executable that comes with a large neon sign saying "This is not production software and may reboot your universe unexpectedly." Yep, I'm definitely going to do that on the PC I use to earn a living. Absolutely.
OK, so back on planet Earth, they do still support 3.6 and I can at least get an installer for that. Downloaded. Installed. Got a harmless-looking message asking me about whether I want to install various add-ons. Said no, because I just wanted a clean profile to test with. All those add-ons got uninstalled from Firefox 5. Took me half an hour to set everything I use routinely back up again.
When you screw things up this badly for people who are actively trying to help you, the failure of your project is not a question of if, but when.
Then again, I would have made the same observation about the marketing people at Mozilla, who appear to have decided that "Ooooh, shiny" trumps any kind of stability or quality control, based on some irrational argument about how web developers need these new, not-yet-standardised, not-yet-portable, not-yet-fully-implemented features today for the Web to improve. That makes no sense if you consider the positions of most people who actually make web sites, but they don't seem to have thought it through even that far.
Right now, Mozilla is the one stock I would be shorting faster than HP, if the opportunity were there. It would be guaranteed money from the stock market.
I think you're misunderstanding the concern. If I build my code using GCC, then GCC itself may be open source under whatever licence, but my code is mine to license as I wish. If you follow the link I gave above, you'll find that the Opa guys think that not only Opa itself but also anything you write with it should be forced open (by their definition of open, which is different to almost anyone else's). That's the kind of policy that gets abrupt from corporate lawyers saying "Put this within 50 miles of our network and you're fired". It's also incompatible with many other popular OSS licence policies.
The developers are strongly backing a particularly virulent licence, Affero GPL. That requires that not only are the Opa tools open source, but any software you write using Opa is infected as well .
The claimed alternative is to buy a commercial licence for Opa, which lifts the open source conditions, but costs an as-yet-unconfirmed amount of money.
To my knowledge, there is no programming language that is even moderately successful today that does not have a good quality, free-as-in-beer, no-strings-attached tool chain readily available.
I suspect Opa is about to become a textbook example of a project that was be stillborn because its developers were too greedy; they're just demanding too much control over other people's work instead of too much cash.
I was a bit surprised as well. This story has hit several of the social news sites, and from the headlines I was expecting some sort of freak underground tunnel caused by some interesting historical phenomenon. Then I saw the flow rate and tried to figure out how that made sense. Then I learned that it might not really be a river at all, at least not as a layman like me thinks of one.
Aside: Also, thanks for linking to a site that isn't covered in Facebook-related junk. It seems like social networking links are becoming the new banner ads, cluttering up web pages everywhere, but at least most pages have the courtesy to stick them all in one place, and not put a banner here, a like button there, and a feed somewhere else. It's completely wasted on me anyway since I don't use Facebook/Twitter/etc. [/goes to update AdBlock and wonders if anyone has a list of filters that get rid of at least most of this junk...]
Is there any good reason why one would want to use HTML5 at all? I mean, as a user?
That's a very fair question, but it's a slightly loaded one. As a user, there is little benefit to any particular web technology, whether it's HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash or anything else. As a user, what you care about is results. However, those results depend on what developers can build, typically within a certain amount of time and budget.
If you have new technologies that allow developers to do new things, and those things benefit the user, then the user wins. However, if you have new technologies that allow developers to do old things in newer, easier, faster ways, and those things benefit the user, then the user also wins, particularly if it becomes viable for developers to make something useful in a cost-effective way when they could have done it before but didn't because it was too expensive in some respect.
And from that point of view, HTML5 tools like canvas and media tags are a big step up for some jobs over using something like Flash or Java applets.
That said, I strongly agree that browsers shouldn't be ceding any sovereignty over their users' systems to remote code by default.
And that said, the most devious tracking mechanism I have yet encountered didn't rely on any sort of cookie/local storage technology. It was essentially based on how various web-related protocols handle caching, it's hard to defeat without getting rid of caching, and you really don't want to get rid of caching. It is possible for browsers to avoid falling into the trap, and now that the attack vector has been identified I expect they'll do something about it.
Then again, as you read this your browser is probably advertising an almost unique fingerprint that could track you anywhere on the Web without storing anything on your machine at all, every time it sends request headers, and despite this being a well-known problem for quite some time, the browser developers haven't done much about it yet. Until they do, fighting against tricky little local storage vectors is hitting the 1% problem, not the 99% problem...
You forgot one:
f) Their customers get to visit local stores, examine the books there to decide which they want to buy entirely at the local store's expense, and then go buy it from Amazon anyway because it's cheaper.
Personally, I buy books I care about (presents, for example) from a good local store precisely because I value the customer service they offer and being able to browse. But every time I go in these days, it seems like someone is standing holding their iWhatever and ordering off Amazon right there in the middle of the bookshop floor.