Flash needs to die. It's incredibly insecure, unstable and a total resource hog. It has no place in 2015.
People keep saying this, and yet...
To my knowledge, there is no actual evidence to show that browsers are significantly better on security. The major ones all fix critical vulnerabilities regularly, it just doesn't get as widely publicised. (Don't believe me? Go check the changelogs for recent releases of your browser of choice.) Moreover, if browsers do start to offer all the same functionality as Flash but natively, they'll also increase their attack surface accordingly. Of course if you compare a browser against the same browser with a plugin then the second combination has a larger attack surface, but right now that is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I see little evidence of Flash being unstable, and haven't for years. It's much harder than it used to be to hang or crash browsers generally these days, too, but when it does happen it's almost invariably a glitch in the browser itself. (This assessment is based on building various web applications for a living, and the reasonable assumption that consistent trends shown across long-term bug tracking for a variety of otherwise unrelated projects is probably quite accurate. YMMV.)
Finally, as for resource hogging, since sites like YouTube went to HTML5 video, I see my graphics card core speed, and consequently its temperature and eventually fan speed, ramp way up just from watching a video. Since web sites started using funky browser-accelerated tricks with modern JS, same result, and often CPU cores ramping up as well. Older sites that use Flash for similar video or graphics demo tricks sit there quite happily, barely troubling either the CPU or GPU for anything it seems. (Again, this is just based on long-term monitoring and performance testing with objective tools. YMMV, but it's hard data from the machines I use for web development work.)
And Flash still has cross-platform consistency and portability that things like HTML5 video are sorely lacking, and still offers some features that the browser-native tools don't.
The dogma that Flash needs to die needs to die. Flash can die when the browser-native alternatives are actually better.
If you want a chilling prospect, consider that with the current state of British politics it is entirely possible that our PM after the next general election in 2020 will be Boris Johnson. If you think the last "special relationship" between Blair and Bush was scary...
Unfortunately, the other major desktop operating systems are almost as bad, just maybe in slightly different ways. Typical Linux distros provide no security or robustness at all when it comes to installing/upgrading/uninstalling anything that isn't part of the distro itself -- they can drop their junk anywhere, and many packages do -- and upgrading your distro is a brave thing to do on any system you rely on. OS X has similar problems. As long as these *nix systems are still based on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and traditional user/group/others access control model, and as long as programs can dump their executables and configuration and documents wherever they feel like, and as long as those programs can freely access each other's data, all these platforms will be limited in how much they can improve on today's standards.
I have 10 on none of my computers, but 7 on one, and the Windows Updates today took that one out convincingly as well, requiring an hour of hassle to get back to a working system again.
But at least I could choose not to retry the same failed security updates as soon as I was up and running again before I've had chance to investigate what went wrong or Microsoft have chance to issue a fix for their fix.
Boycotting stuff doesn't work when your friends and other nearby people have shiny things that are recording the ambient audio etc.
Neither do privacy policies and terms following someone's preferred standards that are only agreed between the supplier and the immediate user. That's why, though these discussions are welcome, protecting privacy needs real laws with real teeth to be effective.
Boycotting stuff also gets harder when there are no cars on sale (in reasonable price range) which don't include such devices. And it gets harder again when houses go that way.
Precisely. If insurance companies are willing to pay a lot of hard cash for information from spyware-enabled vehicles, there is a big commercial incentive for every manufacturer of vehicles to go down that path. Since motor insurance is legally required in a lot of places, that means literally your only other option is not to drive at all, and there is nothing remotely competitive about the market. When you have a market for essential products or services that is not competitive, the answer is a proportionate level of regulation to ensure fair play.
Very few, because usually there are two significant safeguards against that kind of imbalance. Firstly, there is usually some sort of small claims procedure, perhaps heard in a less formal environment and without either side bringing a lawyer (or expecting to get their legal fees covered if they do). Secondly, judges often have discretion in awarding costs, particularly where the situation is obviously imbalanced, so if a private individual brings a reasonable action against a large corporation but ultimately loses after the corporation spent ten times that individual's annual salary paying lawyers to drag out the case unnecessarily, the court is not compelled to award the corporation its full legal costs even though it won the case in the end.
I'm just very wary of bringing criminal law and (I'm assuming) the need for public prosecutors to become involved into a field that I think is usually best left to civil action between the parties involved originally. Perhaps it makes more sense in the US, if the law would otherwise have no weight because within the legal framework there it's impractical for a small-time victim to sue a Big Media organisation and win a meaningful victory given the overheads.
It's not even that big a deal, though. Some of the options can be disabled during install by answering questions correctly, and the rest can at least be disabled with a switch
Until they change their privacy policy and push out an update you can't refuse to install that turns them all back on again.:-(
But yes, objectively and as things stand right now, it does seem as though some of the privacy intrusions are being overstated in some reports.
All we need is another part that specifies that the issuer of the notice makes a statement under penalty of perjury that they have performed due diligence in ascertaining the correctness of their good faith belief.
Yes, something along those lines seems quite reasonable to me, though in this context I'm not sure the perjury aspect adds anything other than complexity to simply requiring a claimant to perform due diligence or face a proportionate penalty. Something to compensate both the hosting service and the original provider of the hosted material that was taken down seems in order. Depending on the circumstances, that might reasonably vary from a modest fee to cover their time and trouble (negligent takedown but no real harm down) to more serious compensation (hosting service decides to cancel the original uploader's account, which had attracted a substantial and potentially valuable following the uploader then loses) to business-crippling compensation (maliciously execute takedowns on competing products, effectively secure market/niche while competitor is off-line for substantial commercial gain).
Plenty of other jurisdictions have some variation of loser-pays-by-default system. Would you like to guess how many of those jurisdictions have the same problems with dubious threats and offers to settle as the US?
The actual infringement needs only a good faith belief.
Or it doesn't, if there is no actionable penalty for issuing a takedown notice without such belief.
That seems to be the fundamental problem here. Legislating that no-one can make an honest mistake in this kind of field seems unconstructive, given the inherent uncertainty of fair use and the like. However, legislating that someone can maliciously or negligently make a claim that they should reasonably have known to be false is a different thing entirely, and that seems closer to what actually happened.
We would like to make clear on behalf of our client, Anonymous Coward, that the mistranscription of "Colombia" as "Columbia" was purely an inadvertent administrative error, which was subsequently acted upon by computer without further human interaction. Therefore as Anonymous Coward is in fact the copyright holder of the work "first ten word draft of script for documentary 'Colombia'", the perjury penalties under the DMCA do not apply. Have a nice day.
A lot of laptops aren't "insert CD and go" for Windows.
That's true. In reality, most laptops are just "go" for Windows, because it comes preinstalled and Just Works(TM).
And that is why Microsoft win, and why despite the valid concerns about Windows 10 most people are still going to use it eventually unless (a) a massive campaign of average-user education takes places, and (b) average users then care enough about things like not controlling their system or having their privacy eroded to make an other choice, and (c) another viable choice exists.
For better or worse, there is little evidence that any of those three things is going to happen any time soon, never mind all of them.
But their eyesight was much better then. Everyone receives less useful light through their eyes due to changes as they get older (very much less by the time we're talking about an average 80-year-old) and older eyes also tend to suffer more from glare at night as caused by, for example, relying more on brighter headlights and even using main beam on normal roads to compensate for the missing ambient lighting.
You're not technically forced to upgrade, but I think many people would consider ceasing to provide effective security updates as the end of an operating system's general useful lifecycle if it's running on a networked computer.
Most Linux distributions don't provide long-term support, even for security fixes, for very long. As one of the better examples, long-term support for Debian Squeeze -- a stable release of a major Linux distro widely deployed on servers -- is scheduled to end in February 2016. Debian Squeeze was released in February 2011, making that a respectable 5 year window (certainly better than a lot of other platforms).
However, that is far short of the extended support period of more than a decade that Microsoft has committed to for Windows 7 (around 9 years if you consider that they do require SP1, which was released about 16 months after the original, but which didn't add the kind of monkey business we've been seeing with various "upgrades" to software in recent years).
You don't have to upgrade OS X either, but last year when Apple declined to issue a security patch for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) less than five years after it launched and when it was still reportedly in use by around 20% of people on OS X, they also put an upper bound on their viable support lifetime under 5 years.
Sorry, I don't know anything about BitLocker. But if we're talking about getting Windows 7 with a new PC, I think it's fair to say that's a relatively minor limitation compared to everything you'd get stuck with moving up to 8/8.1/10, and you can still get Win 7 Enterprise on your new PC if it's an absolute must-have for your particular needs.
** Microsoft will provide one year of notice prior to the end of sale date.
The consumer Win 7 Home line isn't generally shipped preinstalled any more, but the Win 7 Pro line used by power users, small businesses and the like is still available in the normal way, with many suppliers offering it if you ask.
We can only hope. For a long time, Microsoft has been the business you turned to when you wanted to get stuff done. They were notable for not having the effectively enforced upgrade cycles of Apple, Google, and most of the major Linux distributions, and instead provided systems you could count on using, with support for essential bug/security fixes, for periods measured in years or decades, not months if you were lucky. I want that Microsoft back, and they would surely get more money from me and my companies than the Microsoft we have today is going to.
In densely populated areas, the logical endgame is for devices to create their own mesh networks, independent of any active networking you might provide to them. Then all it takes is any path from your device to the mothership for your data to leak.
Homes with built-in Faraday cages and their own internal repeaters with firewalls for signals you actually want to let through is one possible technological response, but obviously worthless the moment someone creates a path outside the cage, for example by ever leaving the house.
A more practical alternative would be finally passing laws to regulate this area and protect privacy in meaningful ways in the context of 21st century technology, while still allowing beneficial applications of these technologies for those who don't want to be digital hermits. Given the modern reality that even if you opt out of everything those around you might not, the most reliable ways to prevent abuse of data by corporations are to ensure that it is not profitable to do so and/or the executives responsible for setting the policies will go to jail as a result.
I hope that what you're missing is the businesses that supply professional laptops will continue to offer them with Windows 7 and no junkware for the foreseeable future. They'll cost more than all the consumer junk that is subsidised by pre-installed promo junk and spyware and so on, but if you want a system that actually works in your interests, someone will probably sell you one at a viable price unless some sort of legal agreement actively prevents it.
I also hope that this is finally the must-get-worse-before-it-gets-better moment for all the nasty recent trends of never-finished software, built-in spyware in everything, and subscription everything. Something as big as Windows screwing as many people as it's presumably going to screw might actually bring enough people to their senses that the industry reconsiders the path it's been following lately.
As I've commented before, I don't see Microsoft themselves changing course again as long as Nadella is at the top. He is exactly the guy the board hires if this is what they want to happen. However, given that Win10 is already looking less appealing than Win8 and people are still only just finding out all the ways it's a mess, the current generation of leadership at Microsoft may be short-lived if they can't turn avert the impending train wreck very quickly.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect cyclists to have adequate lighting on their bikes at night.
Neither do I. Then again, until the streetlights were turned off in the places I've been talking about, most of them already did.
It's very rare that an entire journey would have street lighting at any time of night.
Around here, it's completely expected. The local authorities have put huge emphasis on promoting cycling in Cambridge over the past decades, and both the streets and the major cycle/pedestrian paths are normally lit during the dark hours, making cycling one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to get around the city. Turning off significant amounts of lighting is a surprisingly cycle-hostile and retrograde step, until you realise it's a different level of local council responsible for making that decision.
Then again, I live in a village with green fields on all sides.
I suspect both the priorities and the expectations in rural areas are quite different to those in densely populated cities or suburbs. I probably wouldn't buy a small hatchback if I lived in the middle of nowhere or a huge 4x4 for driving around the city either.
Thanks for the offer. I think our local councillor here is already taking them on, and we'll certainly be offering to help. We've probably already got enough resources for this if they're interested in actually reading evidence.
As for the other place where my family and some old friends are, unfortunately I'm told their local council have made it pretty clear that they have no interest in reviewing the situation or changing policy in the near future, so it seems for now that battle has been lost. Until something tragic happens, presumably.:-(
Unfortunately, things are unlikely to change unless there is a drastic event that makes them change back to keeping the lights on. You're going to have to have someone fall and break a hip, get drastically beaten in a robbery, or just get worked over by thugs.
And that is exactly what a lot of us are afraid of.
It is notable that a couple of the local authorities who first tried these changes have since reverted. It's hard to know the real reasons for that decision given all the factors involved, but allegedly the safety implications turned out not to be as favourable as expected.
The trouble is these decisions at local authority level are always partly motivated by political concerns (often with a NIMBY element) and always have one eye on the money jar.
The actual study this is all based on has quite a few significant limitations, many of which the original authors did acknowledge right on page 1. I set out a some of them in another post in this discussion. Unfortunately, newspaper headlines and biased councillors both have a way of only highlighting the over-simplified conclusion and not all the caveats that go with it.
Of course you should slow down if you can't see properly. No-one is suggesting otherwise.
On the other hand, forcing people to do so makes formerly cycle-friendly streets cycle-hostile, so now people who might have to come home late are driving instead, undoing years of work to promote cycling as an alternative mode of transport.
Or, we could just have sensible, cycle-friendly levels of street lighting to encourage the sustainable, environmentally tolerable, high capacity modes of transport that we actually need.
Sure, you can get dramatically more powerful cycle lights, but most bike shops don't routinely carry them around here and hardly anyone actually has them. So at a minimum, this adjustment for changing street lighting seems to require everyone to buy much more expensive bike lights. At a time when people not buying bike lights at all is a significant safety problem that comes up every year here, I'm not sure that policy is realistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash needs to die. It's incredibly insecure, unstable and a total resource hog. It has no place in 2015.
People keep saying this, and yet...
To my knowledge, there is no actual evidence to show that browsers are significantly better on security. The major ones all fix critical vulnerabilities regularly, it just doesn't get as widely publicised. (Don't believe me? Go check the changelogs for recent releases of your browser of choice.) Moreover, if browsers do start to offer all the same functionality as Flash but natively, they'll also increase their attack surface accordingly. Of course if you compare a browser against the same browser with a plugin then the second combination has a larger attack surface, but right now that is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I see little evidence of Flash being unstable, and haven't for years. It's much harder than it used to be to hang or crash browsers generally these days, too, but when it does happen it's almost invariably a glitch in the browser itself. (This assessment is based on building various web applications for a living, and the reasonable assumption that consistent trends shown across long-term bug tracking for a variety of otherwise unrelated projects is probably quite accurate. YMMV.)
Finally, as for resource hogging, since sites like YouTube went to HTML5 video, I see my graphics card core speed, and consequently its temperature and eventually fan speed, ramp way up just from watching a video. Since web sites started using funky browser-accelerated tricks with modern JS, same result, and often CPU cores ramping up as well. Older sites that use Flash for similar video or graphics demo tricks sit there quite happily, barely troubling either the CPU or GPU for anything it seems. (Again, this is just based on long-term monitoring and performance testing with objective tools. YMMV, but it's hard data from the machines I use for web development work.)
And Flash still has cross-platform consistency and portability that things like HTML5 video are sorely lacking, and still offers some features that the browser-native tools don't.
The dogma that Flash needs to die needs to die. Flash can die when the browser-native alternatives are actually better.
If you want a chilling prospect, consider that with the current state of British politics it is entirely possible that our PM after the next general election in 2020 will be Boris Johnson. If you think the last "special relationship" between Blair and Bush was scary...
Unfortunately, the other major desktop operating systems are almost as bad, just maybe in slightly different ways. Typical Linux distros provide no security or robustness at all when it comes to installing/upgrading/uninstalling anything that isn't part of the distro itself -- they can drop their junk anywhere, and many packages do -- and upgrading your distro is a brave thing to do on any system you rely on. OS X has similar problems. As long as these *nix systems are still based on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and traditional user/group/others access control model, and as long as programs can dump their executables and configuration and documents wherever they feel like, and as long as those programs can freely access each other's data, all these platforms will be limited in how much they can improve on today's standards.
I have 10 on none of my computers, but 7 on one, and the Windows Updates today took that one out convincingly as well, requiring an hour of hassle to get back to a working system again.
But at least I could choose not to retry the same failed security updates as soon as I was up and running again before I've had chance to investigate what went wrong or Microsoft have chance to issue a fix for their fix.
Boycotting stuff doesn't work when your friends and other nearby people have shiny things that are recording the ambient audio etc.
Neither do privacy policies and terms following someone's preferred standards that are only agreed between the supplier and the immediate user. That's why, though these discussions are welcome, protecting privacy needs real laws with real teeth to be effective.
Boycotting stuff also gets harder when there are no cars on sale (in reasonable price range) which don't include such devices. And it gets harder again when houses go that way.
Precisely. If insurance companies are willing to pay a lot of hard cash for information from spyware-enabled vehicles, there is a big commercial incentive for every manufacturer of vehicles to go down that path. Since motor insurance is legally required in a lot of places, that means literally your only other option is not to drive at all, and there is nothing remotely competitive about the market. When you have a market for essential products or services that is not competitive, the answer is a proportionate level of regulation to ensure fair play.
Very few, because usually there are two significant safeguards against that kind of imbalance. Firstly, there is usually some sort of small claims procedure, perhaps heard in a less formal environment and without either side bringing a lawyer (or expecting to get their legal fees covered if they do). Secondly, judges often have discretion in awarding costs, particularly where the situation is obviously imbalanced, so if a private individual brings a reasonable action against a large corporation but ultimately loses after the corporation spent ten times that individual's annual salary paying lawyers to drag out the case unnecessarily, the court is not compelled to award the corporation its full legal costs even though it won the case in the end.
I'm just very wary of bringing criminal law and (I'm assuming) the need for public prosecutors to become involved into a field that I think is usually best left to civil action between the parties involved originally. Perhaps it makes more sense in the US, if the law would otherwise have no weight because within the legal framework there it's impractical for a small-time victim to sue a Big Media organisation and win a meaningful victory given the overheads.
It's not even that big a deal, though. Some of the options can be disabled during install by answering questions correctly, and the rest can at least be disabled with a switch
Until they change their privacy policy and push out an update you can't refuse to install that turns them all back on again. :-(
But yes, objectively and as things stand right now, it does seem as though some of the privacy intrusions are being overstated in some reports.
All we need is another part that specifies that the issuer of the notice makes a statement under penalty of perjury that they have performed due diligence in ascertaining the correctness of their good faith belief.
Yes, something along those lines seems quite reasonable to me, though in this context I'm not sure the perjury aspect adds anything other than complexity to simply requiring a claimant to perform due diligence or face a proportionate penalty. Something to compensate both the hosting service and the original provider of the hosted material that was taken down seems in order. Depending on the circumstances, that might reasonably vary from a modest fee to cover their time and trouble (negligent takedown but no real harm down) to more serious compensation (hosting service decides to cancel the original uploader's account, which had attracted a substantial and potentially valuable following the uploader then loses) to business-crippling compensation (maliciously execute takedowns on competing products, effectively secure market/niche while competitor is off-line for substantial commercial gain).
*in the United States.
Plenty of other jurisdictions have some variation of loser-pays-by-default system. Would you like to guess how many of those jurisdictions have the same problems with dubious threats and offers to settle as the US?
The actual infringement needs only a good faith belief.
Or it doesn't, if there is no actionable penalty for issuing a takedown notice without such belief.
That seems to be the fundamental problem here. Legislating that no-one can make an honest mistake in this kind of field seems unconstructive, given the inherent uncertainty of fair use and the like. However, legislating that someone can maliciously or negligently make a claim that they should reasonably have known to be false is a different thing entirely, and that seems closer to what actually happened.
We would like to make clear on behalf of our client, Anonymous Coward, that the mistranscription of "Colombia" as "Columbia" was purely an inadvertent administrative error, which was subsequently acted upon by computer without further human interaction. Therefore as Anonymous Coward is in fact the copyright holder of the work "first ten word draft of script for documentary 'Colombia'", the perjury penalties under the DMCA do not apply. Have a nice day.
With best regards,
The Lawyers
A lot of laptops aren't "insert CD and go" for Windows.
That's true. In reality, most laptops are just "go" for Windows, because it comes preinstalled and Just Works(TM).
And that is why Microsoft win, and why despite the valid concerns about Windows 10 most people are still going to use it eventually unless (a) a massive campaign of average-user education takes places, and (b) average users then care enough about things like not controlling their system or having their privacy eroded to make an other choice, and (c) another viable choice exists.
For better or worse, there is little evidence that any of those three things is going to happen any time soon, never mind all of them.
But their eyesight was much better then. Everyone receives less useful light through their eyes due to changes as they get older (very much less by the time we're talking about an average 80-year-old) and older eyes also tend to suffer more from glare at night as caused by, for example, relying more on brighter headlights and even using main beam on normal roads to compensate for the missing ambient lighting.
You're not technically forced to upgrade, but I think many people would consider ceasing to provide effective security updates as the end of an operating system's general useful lifecycle if it's running on a networked computer.
Most Linux distributions don't provide long-term support, even for security fixes, for very long. As one of the better examples, long-term support for Debian Squeeze -- a stable release of a major Linux distro widely deployed on servers -- is scheduled to end in February 2016. Debian Squeeze was released in February 2011, making that a respectable 5 year window (certainly better than a lot of other platforms).
However, that is far short of the extended support period of more than a decade that Microsoft has committed to for Windows 7 (around 9 years if you consider that they do require SP1, which was released about 16 months after the original, but which didn't add the kind of monkey business we've been seeing with various "upgrades" to software in recent years).
You don't have to upgrade OS X either, but last year when Apple declined to issue a security patch for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) less than five years after it launched and when it was still reportedly in use by around 20% of people on OS X, they also put an upper bound on their viable support lifetime under 5 years.
Sorry, I don't know anything about BitLocker. But if we're talking about getting Windows 7 with a new PC, I think it's fair to say that's a relatively minor limitation compared to everything you'd get stuck with moving up to 8/8.1/10, and you can still get Win 7 Enterprise on your new PC if it's an absolute must-have for your particular needs.
From your own source:
Windows 7 Professional ... Not yet established **
** Microsoft will provide one year of notice prior to the end of sale date.
The consumer Win 7 Home line isn't generally shipped preinstalled any more, but the Win 7 Pro line used by power users, small businesses and the like is still available in the normal way, with many suppliers offering it if you ask.
We can only hope. For a long time, Microsoft has been the business you turned to when you wanted to get stuff done. They were notable for not having the effectively enforced upgrade cycles of Apple, Google, and most of the major Linux distributions, and instead provided systems you could count on using, with support for essential bug/security fixes, for periods measured in years or decades, not months if you were lucky. I want that Microsoft back, and they would surely get more money from me and my companies than the Microsoft we have today is going to.
In densely populated areas, the logical endgame is for devices to create their own mesh networks, independent of any active networking you might provide to them. Then all it takes is any path from your device to the mothership for your data to leak.
Homes with built-in Faraday cages and their own internal repeaters with firewalls for signals you actually want to let through is one possible technological response, but obviously worthless the moment someone creates a path outside the cage, for example by ever leaving the house.
A more practical alternative would be finally passing laws to regulate this area and protect privacy in meaningful ways in the context of 21st century technology, while still allowing beneficial applications of these technologies for those who don't want to be digital hermits. Given the modern reality that even if you opt out of everything those around you might not, the most reliable ways to prevent abuse of data by corporations are to ensure that it is not profitable to do so and/or the executives responsible for setting the policies will go to jail as a result.
I hope that what you're missing is the businesses that supply professional laptops will continue to offer them with Windows 7 and no junkware for the foreseeable future. They'll cost more than all the consumer junk that is subsidised by pre-installed promo junk and spyware and so on, but if you want a system that actually works in your interests, someone will probably sell you one at a viable price unless some sort of legal agreement actively prevents it.
I also hope that this is finally the must-get-worse-before-it-gets-better moment for all the nasty recent trends of never-finished software, built-in spyware in everything, and subscription everything. Something as big as Windows screwing as many people as it's presumably going to screw might actually bring enough people to their senses that the industry reconsiders the path it's been following lately.
As I've commented before, I don't see Microsoft themselves changing course again as long as Nadella is at the top. He is exactly the guy the board hires if this is what they want to happen. However, given that Win10 is already looking less appealing than Win8 and people are still only just finding out all the ways it's a mess, the current generation of leadership at Microsoft may be short-lived if they can't turn avert the impending train wreck very quickly.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect cyclists to have adequate lighting on their bikes at night.
Neither do I. Then again, until the streetlights were turned off in the places I've been talking about, most of them already did.
It's very rare that an entire journey would have street lighting at any time of night.
Around here, it's completely expected. The local authorities have put huge emphasis on promoting cycling in Cambridge over the past decades, and both the streets and the major cycle/pedestrian paths are normally lit during the dark hours, making cycling one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to get around the city. Turning off significant amounts of lighting is a surprisingly cycle-hostile and retrograde step, until you realise it's a different level of local council responsible for making that decision.
Then again, I live in a village with green fields on all sides.
I suspect both the priorities and the expectations in rural areas are quite different to those in densely populated cities or suburbs. I probably wouldn't buy a small hatchback if I lived in the middle of nowhere or a huge 4x4 for driving around the city either.
Thanks for the offer. I think our local councillor here is already taking them on, and we'll certainly be offering to help. We've probably already got enough resources for this if they're interested in actually reading evidence.
As for the other place where my family and some old friends are, unfortunately I'm told their local council have made it pretty clear that they have no interest in reviewing the situation or changing policy in the near future, so it seems for now that battle has been lost. Until something tragic happens, presumably. :-(
Unfortunately, things are unlikely to change unless there is a drastic event that makes them change back to keeping the lights on. You're going to have to have someone fall and break a hip, get drastically beaten in a robbery, or just get worked over by thugs.
And that is exactly what a lot of us are afraid of.
It is notable that a couple of the local authorities who first tried these changes have since reverted. It's hard to know the real reasons for that decision given all the factors involved, but allegedly the safety implications turned out not to be as favourable as expected.
The trouble is these decisions at local authority level are always partly motivated by political concerns (often with a NIMBY element) and always have one eye on the money jar.
The actual study this is all based on has quite a few significant limitations, many of which the original authors did acknowledge right on page 1. I set out a some of them in another post in this discussion. Unfortunately, newspaper headlines and biased councillors both have a way of only highlighting the over-simplified conclusion and not all the caveats that go with it.
Of course you should slow down if you can't see properly. No-one is suggesting otherwise.
On the other hand, forcing people to do so makes formerly cycle-friendly streets cycle-hostile, so now people who might have to come home late are driving instead, undoing years of work to promote cycling as an alternative mode of transport.
Or, we could just have sensible, cycle-friendly levels of street lighting to encourage the sustainable, environmentally tolerable, high capacity modes of transport that we actually need.
Sure, you can get dramatically more powerful cycle lights, but most bike shops don't routinely carry them around here and hardly anyone actually has them. So at a minimum, this adjustment for changing street lighting seems to require everyone to buy much more expensive bike lights. At a time when people not buying bike lights at all is a significant safety problem that comes up every year here, I'm not sure that policy is realistic.