Of course the real trouble is that legally and practically speaking, these people can make decisions about technology.
They just happen to be very bad decisions, with potentially horrible consequences for everyone those politicians and governments are supposedly there to serve.
Reducing the functionality of a purchased product post-purchase is sleazy and probably should be considered illegal on some level.
I agree, but a more practical question might soon be: if upgrading to firmware that removes this feature is necessary in order to fix some other defect with the original product as purchased (broken functionality, security vulnerability, etc.) then would that already be illegal? Consumer protection laws are quite strong in some places, Europe for example, and even the biggest of tech firms can find themselves called out and penalised if they don't meet the required standards.
I've been looking through TFA and related material, but I'm still trying to figure out what this actually means in practice. What data, on an e-book reader, is usefully encrypted anyway? This is a genuine question, as I don't have any sort of Kindle. Perhaps there is integration with payment services or personal accounts of some kind? If so, does this mean anyone who installs this "upgrade" and then has their device stolen would have some significant credentials compromised?
As I said, it's difficult to have a constructive discussion if you don't understand how international agreements or legal systems work. Evidently you also don't understand either what the relevant European court ruling actually said or what the European data protection rules actually are, nor do you seem to have any interest in either developing your understanding or discussing useful alternative ways to deal with the problem, so I think we're done here.
Yes, it is. A lot of people are fearful of threats like terrorism, and support their governments in taking these kinds of measures. Most countries' data protection rules, in Europe as well as the US, admit various exceptions in relation to national security and the like. You don't have to like it. For that matter, neither do I. But the issue is not nearly as one-sided as you're making out.
These treaties are ILLEGAL.
It's difficult to have a constructive discussion if you don't understand how international agreements or legal systems work. Assuming you're the same AC I replied to before, how specifically is a treaty illegal, as you keep saying? And even if something here is illegal, why do you think politicians who have been empowered to legislate can't change that?
If you don't like the way politicians are handling this issue, the best things you can do are to make sure your representatives know your views on the subject and to try to convince other people to do the same. Ultimately the quickest and most reliable way to change the amount of power and trust that governments and their agencies receive is to vote out the ones you don't want and replace them with someone better.
So we're supposed to ignore our laws just so you can use American businesses to handle your customers' data instead of creating demand for similar but legal services in the EU?
There has been demand for similar services in Europe for as long as in the US. They built them. We didn't.
These illegal treaties, "Safe Harbor" and now "Privacy Shield", make sure that there never will be alternatives to the privacy invading companies you use to make a buck while selling out your customers.
European businesses weren't offering alternatives anyway.
EU businesses still need to obey the law that US businesses get to shirk, so they are at a competitive disadvantage.
This is fundamentally wrong on two counts.
Firstly, the whole point of these schemes is to require US companies to comply with the same data protection standards as EU companies, and thus allow trade between them without compromising personal data. Aside from the governmental intrusion issue, the system has been reasonably successful in this respect.
Secondly, if you think EU companies aren't subject to similar influence from their own governments and national security organisations, I know a Nigerian prince with a great deal of money he'd like to invest with you.
What would put EU companies at a competitive disadvantage, by which I mean put a lot of them out of business, is forcing them to jump through artificial hoops that offer no extra protection in real terms where their competitors in other countries don't have to.
If the solution to that were lowering our standards, then why don't we lower our environmental and worker protection standards as well?
The solution isn't to lower our standards, it's to promote higher standards elsewhere. And that is what these rules do, in significant and useful ways, in the US. They just don't go as far as you'd like, and for some reason you seem determined to discard any useful progress at all if it doesn't immediately achieve 100% of what you want, while at the same time offering no actual solution to the real world problems yourself.
For example: as soon as someone yells "terrorist" all rules and limitations go overboard.
The trouble is, that is a cultural problem, and it's common to both the US and the EU. The average MP or MEP or US Representative has little power to affect it directly, and probably in reality neither do European courts. A trade agreement just isn't big enough to change the now-established rules of the game, so you might as well write the trade agreements to do as much good as you can. In this context, that probably means preventing commercial exploitation of European citizens' data to the same standards as in Europe even if the data is exported to the US.
By all means advocate for stronger privacy protections or more limited government powers as well if that's what you believe in. But in the current political climate, I think you'll need a lot more than an argument about data sharing between allied nations to convince the Powers That Be to stop their mass surveillance programmes, and for better or worse, that's probably true regardless of anything the law actually says on either side of the Atlantic.
We don't have native European versions of these services because tech investment in places like Silicon Valley is orders of magnitude greater than in comparable start-ups almost anywhere in Europe. This is a well-known problem, with implications far wider than just privacy.
The fact remains that some of those US businesses, having established themselves at home first, have then spent years dealing with regulations in other places including the EU so they can operate here as well. Again, this often covers areas like financial or health regulation, not just privacy.
Now those services are here, and in some cases there is no indication that anyone closer to home is even trying to enter those spaces, so any native European alternative solution is surely several years away at a minimum. In the meantime, should we just stop things like selling anything to Europeans on the Internet, and close down the many thousands of smaller businesses across Europe that depend on some of these services?
I admire your principled stand, really, but politics and regulation are pragmatic fields. You can't win the war overnight, but that doesn't mean you stop fighting the battles you can win in the meantime, and it doesn't mean you adopt a scorched earth policy.
This kind of arrangement also means that small European businesses can legally use US-based services to do useful things where there aren't any equivalent EU-based services. As someone running small European businesses, I can tell you first hand that this is the situation all too often. I'd be happy to use equivalent home-grown services instead, but sometimes we just don't have them.
For example, I have a business that sells stuff online. It probably wouldn't have been commercially viable to get it up and running without US-based payment processing services. Imagine what would happen if every small business in a similar position had to close, how many people would lose their jobs, how many products and services wouldn't be delivered to customers who want them.
I'm all for making sensible long-term policy, I'm all for promoting European entrepreneurship, and I'm all for protecting privacy and personal data. These are all good things, and concerns about how national governments and security services use that data are reasonable. But there are a lot of other people trying to get at that data as well, and allowing international services while still protecting EU citizens from having advertisers and insurers and credit agencies and all the rest getting hold of data on them just because some European business they dealt with happened to use US services is a good thing too.
I assume the point the AC was trying to make was that if you'd visited certain parts of Europe a few years ago, what was happening might not have been war in the tanks and RPGs sense, but the aftermath looked disturbingly similar. We literally had rioting in the streets, and not just in Greece. In some places law and order lost effective control for a while, and in some places the people lost effective control of their governments for a while.
The fact that these things could happen in supposedly civilised first-world democracies is quite scary if you think about it. Many of us don't think our governments or political systems or electoral mechanics are perfect, often with good cause, but we tend to take a lot for granted and those days were a very clear reminder of how fast things could fall apart if we switched effective government off.
I remember a lot of those things, because I was there.
You seem to be cherry picking a few cases that support your position, while ignoring all the resources Microsoft did put into maintaining backward compatibility from one OS version to the next, even for applications that were using undocumented features they should not have been.
OK, sorry for the misunderstanding. Given the potential for confusion, I'm a little surprised that Adobe haven't objected to Microsoft co-opting the name of Adobe's well known PDF display software, particularly if the Microsoft version has such serious problems, but so it goes.
The thing is, the earliest these guys are really going to be in trouble is Win7 EOL, and that's not for almost 4 more years. Win8 is even later.
Until that time, Microsoft have committed to supporting these platforms, which means if there really are essential security fixes then they ought to be provided. Even if they aren't, most of the customers and clients these guys work with have sensible defence in depth arrangements and don't rely primarily on OS updates for security anyway.
As for compatibility, Win7 is still the most popular OS on the planet and Win10 adoption in business seems almost non-existent so far. No-one in that group was even slightly concerned about any software or hardware they rely on stopping working in the near future. If anything, there was more concern about whether essential software and hardware might stop working in the future with Win10 than whether it would continue to be supported on Win7 or Win8.
Obviously everyone was also wondering how long current platforms would really remain viable for, particularly for Win7 machines, but the consensus was that Microsoft would almost certainly have made significant changes and could well be under new management by the time any real pressure was mounting. No-one expected OS-as-a-service to become standard practice in business environments, whatever Microsoft might like to happen. A few did think it might become established with home users unless a significant competitor appears, and there were some comparisons made with Apple's mobile devices and the iOS upgrade treadmill as a possible indicator of how much consumer markets will tolerate things changing/breaking in ways they don't like.
That's really not fair. This is nothing like the house that Gates built. Microsoft of the 1990s and early 2000s went to extraordinary lengths to ensure stability and backward compatibility on the Windows platform, far beyond what most in the industry have ever done before or since. They did start to shift their stance on that a few years ago, with for example less effort to support other people's software and devices/drivers that relied on undocumented features, but that should never really have been their responsibility in the first place so personally I don't hold that against them.
However, this "update any time we feel like it and break whatever" attitude is relatively recent and seems to be squarely on Nadella and his senior management team, who can't get the boot fast enough as far as I'm concerned. Microsoft of 2016 is actively customer-hostile in numerous ways, and as both a private individual and a business person I want the old MS back so I can get on with using computers to help me do interesting and useful things instead of fighting with them.
I was in a meeting just this past week with a bunch of other local consultants and freelancers, and at lunch time this subject happened to come up because someone had been looking for a new PC and checking out the latest status with Windows 10. It turned out that nearly half the people in the room -- and these were all clued-up people when it comes to IT, who would not make decisions about infrastructure or security policy lightly -- no longer install any Windows updates on their Win7/8 machines by default now, even security updates unless a specific threat was identified. Literally no-one there was installing more than security updates as standard policy any more. Also literally no-one was using Windows 10, nor had worked with any customer or client who was using Windows 10 outside of evaluation/lab settings yet. The general sentiment seemed to be that a lot of places are deferring major purchasing decisions until at least the dust has settled, or in a few cases actively switching to alternatives (almost invariably Linux on the server side and Apple for laptops).
For an organisation that famously had "Developers, developers, developers!" as its battle cry under previous management, that is a potentially catastrophic shift in attitude from a group that would almost certainly have favoured a Microsoft platform for a wide range of projects just a few years ago.
Are you sure it hasn't just opened the new file as a second tab and switched to it, or something along those lines? FWIW, I've never seen the behaviour you described with Adobe Reader. In fact, I don't really get the Adobe bashing on this one, because Reader has consistently been better than all the half-baked in-browser alternatives that keep popping up, which apparently struggle with such complex viewing operations as showing two pages side by side or rotating a landscape figure page in an otherwise portrait document so you can read it. Reader isn't perfect, but it's still way better than any of the in-browser viewers I've seen, and has significant advantages over some of the free-standing alternatives like Sumatra too.
In reality we know they can't have it both ways no matter how much they legislate, because neither maths nor inanimate objects care about the whims of politicians or lawmakers. I wonder how much the candidates truly understand this as they say these things: are they aware that what they are saying is not and can not ever be realistic and just playing to the crowd on the campaign trail, or are they still too ignorant of this area to realise?
To me, as someone outside the US with no particular axe to grind in US politics, the interesting question is which of the candidates (if any) would most likely act reasonably and responsibly when they do learn enough about the subject to have a more informed opinion.
It's also interesting that they say these things so openly with an international audience. For sure every time they play the patriotism card by talking about protecting the "American constitution" or "US citizens' rights" or the ability of "US intelligence agencies" to intercept communications they are also antagonising everyone else in the world, and as at least some of them do seem to realise, the rest of the world isn't necessarily going to give up encryption nor co-operate with US authorities even if they do go down this legislative path back home.
I can see why the big tech firms are resisting this, because already here in the UK I know some of them are viewed with deep suspicion just for being US-based. Surely losing the trust of international markets is going to make a noticeable difference to their revenues sooner or later. If this goes on for too long then there must also be a real risk of rival businesses becoming established in places like Europe and Asia, in which case the US dominance of parts of the tech industry might never fully recover.
I'm a little surprised that even with the whole "security first" angle there isn't more vocal concern about the effect on big US tech firms if the US government interferes too much. I figured at least the Republican side of the field would probably be more pro-business than that, but presumably everyone's pollsters are telling them they have to back security as the top priority with a majority of their target voters right now.
What result are we striving for? And, most importantly, how will achieving that result affect our scientific output?
It's not just about scientific output; it's also about the ability to act usefully based on the science.
As an obvious example, far too many decisions in government get their public support from rhetoric, short term greed, or fear. Far too few get supported by the public based on evidence and critical thinking. This can and does lead to objectively harmful actions becoming official policy.
The chilling part of the problem is that it's also a vicious circle. When few in power even understand basic STEM issues themselves, and government is responsible for areas like education and a lot of large-scale funding, you risk a creeping decline in education and awareness that in turn makes other problems worse.
This seems to be a particularly unfortunate situation in the US today, because its sheer scale and willingness to deploy its military power mean it's unrealistic for the rest of the world to challenge it effectively on issues like, say, wasteful use of natural resources or excessive use of antibiotics, where the consequences can go far beyond the national borders even if the accountability does not.
A router running at normal speed down and limited to about 256 bps up would go a long way toward taming it.
Except that in our brave new world, "smart" devices don't necessarily need you to give them an Internet connection before they can phone home. Some already have built-in wireless and arrangements with mobile data networks. Given sufficient market penetration, mesh-style networking also becomes a possibility. Unless we're all planning on living inside Faraday cages, we need more powerful solutions to this creeping invasion of privacy than merely controlling our standalone Internet connection(s).
That said, I think there is a fundamental difference between Apple's behaviour and Mozilla's here, for the simple reason that users of Apple gear paid for it and should therefore get what they bought, in proper working order. While it's certainly frustrating for many Firefox users that things keep changing and often not for the better recently, those users never paid Mozilla anything and so Mozilla owes them nothing in return.
Things get much more complicated when you bought the device from a vendor but the ultimate control rests with some third party, typically a software developer. This is where a lot of dubious things are going on right now, but in a lot of jurisdictions the consumer protection laws haven't yet adapted to the modern technology landscape and tend to place the original vendor with most or all of the responsibility when things go wrong, even though it's actually the software they're reselling that is the root cause of the customer's complaint. At some point we're going to have to deal with this, along with the various other third party issues like the legal basis (or otherwise) for an EULA or similar document, because clearly it's not realistic for every shop or web site that lets you buy a device or a copy of some software to fix technical issues they have no practical way to control.
Although this is a fair point, I also can't remember the last time I picked up a book I've read several times before off my shelf, and found it was suddenly now set in 6pt Comic Sans.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the real trouble is that legally and practically speaking, these people can make decisions about technology.
They just happen to be very bad decisions, with potentially horrible consequences for everyone those politicians and governments are supposedly there to serve.
That would be funnier if it weren't disturbingly close to the level of reality that a lot of laws relating to technology seem to be written at lately.
The games industry is strange. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
Reducing the functionality of a purchased product post-purchase is sleazy and probably should be considered illegal on some level.
I agree, but a more practical question might soon be: if upgrading to firmware that removes this feature is necessary in order to fix some other defect with the original product as purchased (broken functionality, security vulnerability, etc.) then would that already be illegal? Consumer protection laws are quite strong in some places, Europe for example, and even the biggest of tech firms can find themselves called out and penalised if they don't meet the required standards.
I've been looking through TFA and related material, but I'm still trying to figure out what this actually means in practice. What data, on an e-book reader, is usefully encrypted anyway? This is a genuine question, as I don't have any sort of Kindle. Perhaps there is integration with payment services or personal accounts of some kind? If so, does this mean anyone who installs this "upgrade" and then has their device stolen would have some significant credentials compromised?
As I said, it's difficult to have a constructive discussion if you don't understand how international agreements or legal systems work. Evidently you also don't understand either what the relevant European court ruling actually said or what the European data protection rules actually are, nor do you seem to have any interest in either developing your understanding or discussing useful alternative ways to deal with the problem, so I think we're done here.
It's not a matter of what I like.
Yes, it is. A lot of people are fearful of threats like terrorism, and support their governments in taking these kinds of measures. Most countries' data protection rules, in Europe as well as the US, admit various exceptions in relation to national security and the like. You don't have to like it. For that matter, neither do I. But the issue is not nearly as one-sided as you're making out.
These treaties are ILLEGAL.
It's difficult to have a constructive discussion if you don't understand how international agreements or legal systems work. Assuming you're the same AC I replied to before, how specifically is a treaty illegal, as you keep saying? And even if something here is illegal, why do you think politicians who have been empowered to legislate can't change that?
If you don't like the way politicians are handling this issue, the best things you can do are to make sure your representatives know your views on the subject and to try to convince other people to do the same. Ultimately the quickest and most reliable way to change the amount of power and trust that governments and their agencies receive is to vote out the ones you don't want and replace them with someone better.
So we're supposed to ignore our laws just so you can use American businesses to handle your customers' data instead of creating demand for similar but legal services in the EU?
There has been demand for similar services in Europe for as long as in the US. They built them. We didn't.
These illegal treaties, "Safe Harbor" and now "Privacy Shield", make sure that there never will be alternatives to the privacy invading companies you use to make a buck while selling out your customers.
European businesses weren't offering alternatives anyway.
EU businesses still need to obey the law that US businesses get to shirk, so they are at a competitive disadvantage.
This is fundamentally wrong on two counts.
Firstly, the whole point of these schemes is to require US companies to comply with the same data protection standards as EU companies, and thus allow trade between them without compromising personal data. Aside from the governmental intrusion issue, the system has been reasonably successful in this respect.
Secondly, if you think EU companies aren't subject to similar influence from their own governments and national security organisations, I know a Nigerian prince with a great deal of money he'd like to invest with you.
What would put EU companies at a competitive disadvantage, by which I mean put a lot of them out of business, is forcing them to jump through artificial hoops that offer no extra protection in real terms where their competitors in other countries don't have to.
If the solution to that were lowering our standards, then why don't we lower our environmental and worker protection standards as well?
The solution isn't to lower our standards, it's to promote higher standards elsewhere. And that is what these rules do, in significant and useful ways, in the US. They just don't go as far as you'd like, and for some reason you seem determined to discard any useful progress at all if it doesn't immediately achieve 100% of what you want, while at the same time offering no actual solution to the real world problems yourself.
For example: as soon as someone yells "terrorist" all rules and limitations go overboard.
The trouble is, that is a cultural problem, and it's common to both the US and the EU. The average MP or MEP or US Representative has little power to affect it directly, and probably in reality neither do European courts. A trade agreement just isn't big enough to change the now-established rules of the game, so you might as well write the trade agreements to do as much good as you can. In this context, that probably means preventing commercial exploitation of European citizens' data to the same standards as in Europe even if the data is exported to the US.
By all means advocate for stronger privacy protections or more limited government powers as well if that's what you believe in. But in the current political climate, I think you'll need a lot more than an argument about data sharing between allied nations to convince the Powers That Be to stop their mass surveillance programmes, and for better or worse, that's probably true regardless of anything the law actually says on either side of the Atlantic.
We don't have native European versions of these services because tech investment in places like Silicon Valley is orders of magnitude greater than in comparable start-ups almost anywhere in Europe. This is a well-known problem, with implications far wider than just privacy.
The fact remains that some of those US businesses, having established themselves at home first, have then spent years dealing with regulations in other places including the EU so they can operate here as well. Again, this often covers areas like financial or health regulation, not just privacy.
Now those services are here, and in some cases there is no indication that anyone closer to home is even trying to enter those spaces, so any native European alternative solution is surely several years away at a minimum. In the meantime, should we just stop things like selling anything to Europeans on the Internet, and close down the many thousands of smaller businesses across Europe that depend on some of these services?
I admire your principled stand, really, but politics and regulation are pragmatic fields. You can't win the war overnight, but that doesn't mean you stop fighting the battles you can win in the meantime, and it doesn't mean you adopt a scorched earth policy.
This kind of arrangement also means that small European businesses can legally use US-based services to do useful things where there aren't any equivalent EU-based services. As someone running small European businesses, I can tell you first hand that this is the situation all too often. I'd be happy to use equivalent home-grown services instead, but sometimes we just don't have them.
For example, I have a business that sells stuff online. It probably wouldn't have been commercially viable to get it up and running without US-based payment processing services. Imagine what would happen if every small business in a similar position had to close, how many people would lose their jobs, how many products and services wouldn't be delivered to customers who want them.
I'm all for making sensible long-term policy, I'm all for promoting European entrepreneurship, and I'm all for protecting privacy and personal data. These are all good things, and concerns about how national governments and security services use that data are reasonable. But there are a lot of other people trying to get at that data as well, and allowing international services while still protecting EU citizens from having advertisers and insurers and credit agencies and all the rest getting hold of data on them just because some European business they dealt with happened to use US services is a good thing too.
I assume the point the AC was trying to make was that if you'd visited certain parts of Europe a few years ago, what was happening might not have been war in the tanks and RPGs sense, but the aftermath looked disturbingly similar. We literally had rioting in the streets, and not just in Greece. In some places law and order lost effective control for a while, and in some places the people lost effective control of their governments for a while.
The fact that these things could happen in supposedly civilised first-world democracies is quite scary if you think about it. Many of us don't think our governments or political systems or electoral mechanics are perfect, often with good cause, but we tend to take a lot for granted and those days were a very clear reminder of how fast things could fall apart if we switched effective government off.
I remember a lot of those things, because I was there.
You seem to be cherry picking a few cases that support your position, while ignoring all the resources Microsoft did put into maintaining backward compatibility from one OS version to the next, even for applications that were using undocumented features they should not have been.
OK, sorry for the misunderstanding. Given the potential for confusion, I'm a little surprised that Adobe haven't objected to Microsoft co-opting the name of Adobe's well known PDF display software, particularly if the Microsoft version has such serious problems, but so it goes.
The thing is, the earliest these guys are really going to be in trouble is Win7 EOL, and that's not for almost 4 more years. Win8 is even later.
Until that time, Microsoft have committed to supporting these platforms, which means if there really are essential security fixes then they ought to be provided. Even if they aren't, most of the customers and clients these guys work with have sensible defence in depth arrangements and don't rely primarily on OS updates for security anyway.
As for compatibility, Win7 is still the most popular OS on the planet and Win10 adoption in business seems almost non-existent so far. No-one in that group was even slightly concerned about any software or hardware they rely on stopping working in the near future. If anything, there was more concern about whether essential software and hardware might stop working in the future with Win10 than whether it would continue to be supported on Win7 or Win8.
Obviously everyone was also wondering how long current platforms would really remain viable for, particularly for Win7 machines, but the consensus was that Microsoft would almost certainly have made significant changes and could well be under new management by the time any real pressure was mounting. No-one expected OS-as-a-service to become standard practice in business environments, whatever Microsoft might like to happen. A few did think it might become established with home users unless a significant competitor appears, and there were some comparisons made with Apple's mobile devices and the iOS upgrade treadmill as a possible indicator of how much consumer markets will tolerate things changing/breaking in ways they don't like.
Too bad, I'd heard something about that. It's never been on any system I currently use anyway, but thanks for the warning.
I used FoxIT for a while, but found it buggy and occasionally vulnerable to even worse security problems than Adobe Reader. Has it improved recently?
That's really not fair. This is nothing like the house that Gates built. Microsoft of the 1990s and early 2000s went to extraordinary lengths to ensure stability and backward compatibility on the Windows platform, far beyond what most in the industry have ever done before or since. They did start to shift their stance on that a few years ago, with for example less effort to support other people's software and devices/drivers that relied on undocumented features, but that should never really have been their responsibility in the first place so personally I don't hold that against them.
However, this "update any time we feel like it and break whatever" attitude is relatively recent and seems to be squarely on Nadella and his senior management team, who can't get the boot fast enough as far as I'm concerned. Microsoft of 2016 is actively customer-hostile in numerous ways, and as both a private individual and a business person I want the old MS back so I can get on with using computers to help me do interesting and useful things instead of fighting with them.
I was in a meeting just this past week with a bunch of other local consultants and freelancers, and at lunch time this subject happened to come up because someone had been looking for a new PC and checking out the latest status with Windows 10. It turned out that nearly half the people in the room -- and these were all clued-up people when it comes to IT, who would not make decisions about infrastructure or security policy lightly -- no longer install any Windows updates on their Win7/8 machines by default now, even security updates unless a specific threat was identified. Literally no-one there was installing more than security updates as standard policy any more. Also literally no-one was using Windows 10, nor had worked with any customer or client who was using Windows 10 outside of evaluation/lab settings yet. The general sentiment seemed to be that a lot of places are deferring major purchasing decisions until at least the dust has settled, or in a few cases actively switching to alternatives (almost invariably Linux on the server side and Apple for laptops).
For an organisation that famously had "Developers, developers, developers!" as its battle cry under previous management, that is a potentially catastrophic shift in attitude from a group that would almost certainly have favoured a Microsoft platform for a wide range of projects just a few years ago.
OK, but what comes next? It looks like we need a few more...
Are you sure it hasn't just opened the new file as a second tab and switched to it, or something along those lines? FWIW, I've never seen the behaviour you described with Adobe Reader. In fact, I don't really get the Adobe bashing on this one, because Reader has consistently been better than all the half-baked in-browser alternatives that keep popping up, which apparently struggle with such complex viewing operations as showing two pages side by side or rotating a landscape figure page in an otherwise portrait document so you can read it. Reader isn't perfect, but it's still way better than any of the in-browser viewers I've seen, and has significant advantages over some of the free-standing alternatives like Sumatra too.
In reality we know they can't have it both ways no matter how much they legislate, because neither maths nor inanimate objects care about the whims of politicians or lawmakers. I wonder how much the candidates truly understand this as they say these things: are they aware that what they are saying is not and can not ever be realistic and just playing to the crowd on the campaign trail, or are they still too ignorant of this area to realise?
To me, as someone outside the US with no particular axe to grind in US politics, the interesting question is which of the candidates (if any) would most likely act reasonably and responsibly when they do learn enough about the subject to have a more informed opinion.
It's also interesting that they say these things so openly with an international audience. For sure every time they play the patriotism card by talking about protecting the "American constitution" or "US citizens' rights" or the ability of "US intelligence agencies" to intercept communications they are also antagonising everyone else in the world, and as at least some of them do seem to realise, the rest of the world isn't necessarily going to give up encryption nor co-operate with US authorities even if they do go down this legislative path back home.
I can see why the big tech firms are resisting this, because already here in the UK I know some of them are viewed with deep suspicion just for being US-based. Surely losing the trust of international markets is going to make a noticeable difference to their revenues sooner or later. If this goes on for too long then there must also be a real risk of rival businesses becoming established in places like Europe and Asia, in which case the US dominance of parts of the tech industry might never fully recover.
I'm a little surprised that even with the whole "security first" angle there isn't more vocal concern about the effect on big US tech firms if the US government interferes too much. I figured at least the Republican side of the field would probably be more pro-business than that, but presumably everyone's pollsters are telling them they have to back security as the top priority with a majority of their target voters right now.
What result are we striving for? And, most importantly, how will achieving that result affect our scientific output?
It's not just about scientific output; it's also about the ability to act usefully based on the science.
As an obvious example, far too many decisions in government get their public support from rhetoric, short term greed, or fear. Far too few get supported by the public based on evidence and critical thinking. This can and does lead to objectively harmful actions becoming official policy.
The chilling part of the problem is that it's also a vicious circle. When few in power even understand basic STEM issues themselves, and government is responsible for areas like education and a lot of large-scale funding, you risk a creeping decline in education and awareness that in turn makes other problems worse.
This seems to be a particularly unfortunate situation in the US today, because its sheer scale and willingness to deploy its military power mean it's unrealistic for the rest of the world to challenge it effectively on issues like, say, wasteful use of natural resources or excessive use of antibiotics, where the consequences can go far beyond the national borders even if the accountability does not.
A router running at normal speed down and limited to about 256 bps up would go a long way toward taming it.
Except that in our brave new world, "smart" devices don't necessarily need you to give them an Internet connection before they can phone home. Some already have built-in wireless and arrangements with mobile data networks. Given sufficient market penetration, mesh-style networking also becomes a possibility. Unless we're all planning on living inside Faraday cages, we need more powerful solutions to this creeping invasion of privacy than merely controlling our standalone Internet connection(s).
I agree.
That said, I think there is a fundamental difference between Apple's behaviour and Mozilla's here, for the simple reason that users of Apple gear paid for it and should therefore get what they bought, in proper working order. While it's certainly frustrating for many Firefox users that things keep changing and often not for the better recently, those users never paid Mozilla anything and so Mozilla owes them nothing in return.
Things get much more complicated when you bought the device from a vendor but the ultimate control rests with some third party, typically a software developer. This is where a lot of dubious things are going on right now, but in a lot of jurisdictions the consumer protection laws haven't yet adapted to the modern technology landscape and tend to place the original vendor with most or all of the responsibility when things go wrong, even though it's actually the software they're reselling that is the root cause of the customer's complaint. At some point we're going to have to deal with this, along with the various other third party issues like the legal basis (or otherwise) for an EULA or similar document, because clearly it's not realistic for every shop or web site that lets you buy a device or a copy of some software to fix technical issues they have no practical way to control.
Although this is a fair point, I also can't remember the last time I picked up a book I've read several times before off my shelf, and found it was suddenly now set in 6pt Comic Sans.