I mentioned my frustration at having to learn a new way to manage my systems along with my acceptance that times change and knowing my skills have to be updated in turn. I mentioned this to someone who admins a system we use and he said that he appreciates systemd.
I replied, "oh, so you're the one!"
I don't feel like I have the expertise to judge the fundamental issues for or against systemd. I do feel like it's in the best interest of an admin to learn how to use the systems likely to be encountered, regardless of personal preference.
Phones have PINs or passwords or fingerprint access protections
A phone may have several, even dozens, of financial institutions as sources to pay from (I have a half dozen cards, most of which I'm not usually carrying)
Phone based payment systems can add multiple layers of authentication cards can't
A picture of both sides of your card are sufficient for internet fraud, but not with phones
While this is true, the problem is that it's still often normal to hand your card to a clerk rather than inserting it for a chip transaction. Even where that's not the case, it wouldn't take much for someone to use cameras to gather the information necessary to use EMV cards fraudulently online.
It's surprising how effective trolls like this are. I present a logical perspective with supporting information and they reply "nah" with no support for their stated stance. It shouldn't bother me, but somehow it still does manage to irk me slightly.
Disclaimer: While educated speculation, the following is still speculation and therefore this is not libel.
Do you know why the new Windows phones won't work on Verizon despite having all the necessary hardware? It's because Verizon has decided to not authenticate those phones, in essence blocking a completely capable phone from their network. They get away with it because nobody cares about Windows phones. I mention that to highlight the power the carriers have over the manufacturers and OS companies.
You wouldn't believe how much of a pain it is to get Cyganomod on my phone, and it's because my carrier is one of the ones that included everything they could to prevent customers from having the ability to really control their phone. Other people with the same phone I have, but with a different carrier, have no trouble at all.
Apple can dictate terms to the carriers, because people will switch carriers to get an iPhone. That's the only company that has ever succeeded in dictating terms. The carriers have a lock-in by controlling the phone and they don't want to lose that. The only exception is Apple and Apple is just as bad, if not worse, about locking you out of controlling your phone.
Google does not have the muscle to force carriers to go along with built in OS updating capability and it's hurt them time and time again.
I heard a suggestion the other day. Someone speculated that content providers should distribute the desirable content through the same systems that distribute the advertisements. Personally I'd be more inclined as an content provider or an advertising distributor to incorporate an advertising module directly on the content server. Adblockers use pattern recognition and source recognition to determine which content components are advertising. Both strategies are defeated when the advertising patterns are randomized and coming from the same sources.
In order to block advertising in either of those situations, adblockers will have to evolve to be able to interpret the desired content and process and interpret the content displayed well enough to figure out which parts aren't related to the same subject matter. There isn't AI advanced enough to do that consistently anywhere yet, let alone in software you could run in your computer and it is a long, long way from being something you can put in a browser add-on. There are a couple things holding advertisers back from implementing more unavoidable schemes, but when they find their revenue dying due to widespread adblocking, they'll have the motivation.
Everybody wins if we can reach a consensus on what constitutes acceptable advertising. That's a big if, but I'm glad to see Mozilla making the attempt.
Another alternative I'm on-board with is a per-visitor micropayment system. Google's already offering that but until there is a common consensus, and some way to get payments exchanged between different middle companies, it's a partial measure only. It's been tried before and failed, but I but I still hold hope since that was before adblocking became commonplace.
Pretending I'm an advertiser for a moment: If you go to a page where I want you to see my ads, you'll see my ads, at least the first time you load the page, and probably ever time thereafter. Why? Because I understand how ad-blockers work and they're not hard to outsmart. Have you ever built an adblocker? I ask because you'd have to build your own, rather complex, adblocker to keep me from being able to show you undesired ads.
The computer user doesn't determine what displays, the programs running to display desired content determine what displays. Programs to force unwanted advertising don't have to be nearly as sophisticated as the ones that are designed to block them. Right now, advertisers and programmers haven't cared enough to change the way most ads are delivered, but that's changing. Eventually, the end user can win because they have the potential to control the computer that does the actual display but they won't anytime soon. The programming skills to accomplish that goal are tremendously sophisticated. No current adblocker is even remotely close to being that sophisticated.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have the programmers capable of writing adblockers that sophisticated, but none of them has the incentive.
I was blocking advertising and other junk before adblockers became something you could just add to a browser. I needed to learn how in order to effectively use the terrible bandwidth I had in those days, so I had to learn a lot about what can and can't be done. If advertisers get determined enough to outsmart the adblockers available today, my experience assures me that we'll start getting bombarded with crap again no matter what adblocker we try. I'm still hoping for an ecosystem change rather than that outcome, because if it goes that far, the money it will take to build a successful adblocker against that scenario will mean we'll have to pay out of pocket to fund it.
I don't mind some advertising, but I do mind scripting and video and bandwidth consumption. The state of the ad-supported web as it exists currently is a battle between the consumers who don't want to see advertising and businesses who want the consumers to see it anyway. What we have today is companies who insert their programming into pages coming from their own servers with little or zero oversight to make sure that what consumers get is safe or desirable, even tolerable. Consumers use Ad-Blocking software to filter out things that come from sites outside of the content desired. Advertisers can still get their advertisements to show, and I'm surprised more aren't by having the ads injected directly by content directors and by using URLs within the desired content providers' resources which are indistinguishable from the desired content. I'm surprised more aren't; it isn't that hard.
What we really want isn't the battle we have today. We want the benefits of cheap content, and we're willing to view safe and unobtrusive advertising or pay micro amounts to support our desired content but the way the ad-supported web is built today doesn't allow us to do that simply and reliably, so it's far easier to just block stuff and far easier to load web pages with crap. The problem with what we have today is that it isn't a long term sustainable solution.
There are two solutions that I think we're headed toward. The first is direct support. Google and others are recognizing there is money to be made in suppressing advertising, and the natural development of that is either paying consumers to allow ads or to consolidate enough advertisers who are willing to take payment in lieu of actual advertising. The other is building advertising systems that make it impossible to avoid and building better adblocking software to avoid what was previously impossible. One is a war, the other is a cooperative system. I don't know which will win, but I'm rooting for cooperation.
The genie is out of the bottle. Now consumers are realizing that they don't have to see things they don't want to. In the old days the browser did whatever the site owner wanted, so we got pop-ups and java advertisements and auto playing flash. The internet started out being a place where ideas were conveyed mostly by text because putting a double handful of advertisements would make the page take several minutes to load with a 2400 baud modem. Those websites that tried to put a lot of advertising failed because nobody was willing to wait for them to load. Then Phoenix (look up the history of Firefox if you don't remember it) came out and it didn't run javascript or Flash and it blocked pop-ups and it loaded everything in tabs in a single window and it freakin' took off. As internet connection speed increased across the board for the average consumer, more and more advertising could be loaded in the few seconds it took the page to load. As a result, ads started taking up more bandwidth than content and loading more pop-ups than any consumer was willing to swallow, which in turn made pop-up blocking ever so much more desirable, so much so that eventually all the browsers started supporting it, and then eventually by default.
So the consumers won, as they always do, because whatever gets them the content they want without the stuff they don't gains popularity until it becomes the standard. But consumers wanted javascript and java and Flash and it became standard even in the new Phoenix, next called Firebird, now Firefox. Bandwidth and processing speed continued to rise, allowing yet more advertising to be loaded and new techniques to cause pop-unders and interstitial ads. Add-ons came along to block all advertising as a direct result and Firefox continued to rise, then the same came out for Chrome and even Internet Explorer because with a broadband connection there was no other way to limit the flood of advertising that could be loaded in time consumers were willing to wait for content.
Decent people didn't want to block advertising because they wanted to screw over content providers, but they didn't want to deal with the crap. The technology to force people to see something they didn't want was obliterated because the consumers always win. In a war between people wanting content and advertisers wanting to force unwanted ads, the tides turned so much that every advertiser is being blocked regardless of how respectful or unobnoxious they behave.
We've come the point where advertising has to be insanely pushy to get past the average adblocker. The only ads that work are the ones that are going to be blocked in a few months because they're trying so hard to force themselves on the consumer. The consumer will, eventually, always win anyway. Advertising as the standard way to provide funding for content is dying and the war has gone on too long for the tide to turn now.
I still see and feel sympathy for the indignant content providers who just wanted a fair business trade where some reasonable amount of advertising is acceptable by the consumer. It's too late because the consumer won't ever go back to allowing the obnoxious advertising or incidentally the reasonable content providers. I know, it sucks, because good content is dying as a result.
Eventually, there will be another balance. Some way to fund websites will succeed. Here's hoping it isn't every site requiring its own app.
I always liked portable edition because I would prefer not to have someone point to an installed program as proof I have something to hide. Portable TrueCrypt didn't require admin privileges so there wouldn't be a potential privilege escalation issue. The ability to run as an unprivileged user was the biggest thing I missed when I switched over to bitlocker.
Yup. I've explained before how law makers could have access, and how much I distrust them. The facts are that they could get what they say they want, and get it securely, but what they really want is illegal.
Legal access could be managed securely, but not without limiting government and law enforcement to a legal process. They don't want that, and that's the reason they dropped this. So they say.
The problem we have is that we already know we've been repeatedly lied to by our government, and even government agencies lie to each other about what they're doing. No rational person accepts that our government will tell us when they're spying on us illegally. If they've decided to go ahead and do it, odds are that we won't know until the next Snowden if we're lucky, but more likely we'll never know.
The basic question I am asking is whether intellectual property should be property. I'm not asking whether it is defined (by law) as property. If the law changes or I move beyond it's jurisdiction, then it ceases to be property. (Sorry if I mislead with my attempt at humor.) Under current law, copying illegally deprives you of the opportunity to profit due to governmental created and enforced scarcity. You're also deprived of the opportunity to buy and sell people, but it wasn't always that way. Maybe it shouldn't be that way for intellectual property either.
What I make is mine and I have ownership of it. You're not free to make a copy unless I give you that right
What you make is yours and you have ownership of it, but if you allow me to observe it, I have a right to make a copy unless somebody takes that right away.
I know, it looks like semantics, but in this case, where the governments create and enforce an artificial scarcity of constructs that exist as ideas rather than physical things, it's really more accurate to say that.
If you refuse to speculate on how a society would work if we transitioned to law without copyright, then your argument boils down to "this is the best way because it is working" and mine boils down to "imagine it working differently, it would be better." The world was different when copyright was invented in 1710. Importing slaves was still legal in the US in 1710. Society's values, norms and laws change. You say intellectual property is property. I agree. I say it shouldn't be and you ignored that issue.
We both know the reasons people use to argue both sides, so I'll turn your previous challenge back on you. I've yet to see a viable, reasoned, argument that supports the idea that copyright is good for humanity in the long run.
I've yet to see a viable, reasoned, argument that supports the idea that my constructs, be they as minimal as an idea, become someone else's property.
Now there's a challenge. How about "property is theft." That has a nice ring to it, can't believe I just made that up, maybe I can get a copyright or trademark on it.
I've deliberately avoided the term natural law, even though the idea of inalienable rights are tied so closely to it because I think it's so fuzzy to define. I'm inclined a little toward stoicism so maybe I should work harder at learning to defend the idea. But I'm lazy, so not today. I bring it up only to ask if you're quite solidly against the idea that natural law exists, cause it sounds that way and I'm reconsidering whether I can support the idea of any inalienable right without that common ground. If natural law is common, then I can argue that depriving mankind of the right to copy and share is against it. Our society and laws have created a construct to protect information as property where none should rationally or naturally exist because, like fiat money, it makes progress easier. Laws that run counter to natural law are bad, not because they have no good effect, but rather because they will always be broken by the majority. Heck, performing happy birthday in public was a big frigging deal to me, but most people had no idea it was illegal; most still don't even after all the news stories about it.
Assuming I can't find that common ground, then I think I'd revert to the societal good argument. Sharing information benefits society but depriving people of the freedom to make copies of work benefits society too. They have different benefits, but one of them is being handled by laws designed to handle papers and movable type. For societal benefit, the laws need to be changed. Not rapidly, that way lies pain and anarchy, but with great forethought. I do free programming to build a reputation, which gets me a job with a paycheck. Redhat makes money in essentially the same way. It's obvious that innovation and good can come with free information, but less obvious what the world would look like without copyright.
I'm thinking it is an inevitable thing, obviously not everyone agrees, but if you were in charge of changing the laws to make it happen (eventually, like say by 2200,) how would you go about it?
That, by the way, I think is my best answer to the challenge, the constructs that belong to you only belong to you so long as you don't share them with anyone, unless the law creates an artificial restriction. There is no logical argument against that because the law is the definition of what you can own (see slavery discussion.) If there is no law to prohibit copying your work, every copy belongs to the person who has it.
Interesting questions. Let me fire up my crystal ball and peer a couple hundred years in the future to get some answers.
If everyone gets to see the movie for free if it gets made, why would anyone pay money up front?
They pay for the same reason people vote now. It doesn't cost much to be a contributor to something you hope will happen. They'll contribute what we'd think of as our movie budget now in the hopes it will be created.
Most seriously, how would you encourage more experimental or controversial movies if they were dependent on pre-funding based on people's pre-conceived ideas of what they want to see?
I expect it won't be that much different than it is now. A producer gets to produce something if he can convince people it's a good idea or has the money to do it himself. Few experimental or controversial movies get a big budget now, and when they do it's because they've built a reputation for success with the people who have the money to invest. The big changes will really be in how the middle men work. Private funding won't disappear, but it will be overtaken by public funding. Kickstarter will be looked back on as the cute simplistic precursor. They're already producing movies but in the future there will be many other organizations doing it on a massively larger scale with a whole different set of laws supporting them.
When we say we've not stolen anything, we have. We've stolen the potential sale when we share it, enable sharing, or make a copy without paying it. The potential has been reduced.
Totally agree and couldn't have said it better. I would add however, that intellectual property only exists as a construct of society and government as opposed to physical property which exists naturally. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, and indeed a lot of the society I appreciate depends on it now. I am saying that it's unnatural and is contrary to human nature.
You don't have an inalienable right to it because we, as a society, have determined that such doesn't exist.
That's where we diverge. I don't think society gets to determine what inalienable rights are, just freedoms, restrictions and protected rights.
Maybe.
Whether or not it was your intent, I'm thinking through the idea that maybe what determines man's natural state and inalienable rights are malleable and determined by society. A child born into slavery in 1600 had no expectation of a right to liberty. I'd like to say that it is the natural state of that child and every such slave child to expect liberty as a natural right and rebel against having it denied. I'd like to say that, but I don't think history supports that view. Maybe that child didn't actually have a right to liberty. It doesn't sit well with me to accept the idea, but there could be truth there I just don't like to admit. I really wish I could sit down with Jefferson and have him explain what he really thought and then maybe ask Sally Hemings what she thought about his views.
In the future, regardless of attempts to prevent it, free sharing of information is inevitable.
That's not a statement of preference, it's an observation of what I think is an irreversible trend. I doubt I'll be alive to see that time but I hope that law evolves ways to handle it. You seem to be in the majority in thinking I was advocating piracy and I can see how it can come across that way, but really I don't, just like I don't advocate setting all prisoners free just because liberty is an inalienable right.
The internet would be illegal according to the original reading of copyright laws because the act of viewing content on your own computer makes a copy, usually several, on your computer. The laws and their interpretations have evolved to consider making a copy, even many copies, as a part of the normal and intended use, legal. It wasn't and still isn't without conflict. People have been sued for linking to someone else's page and had that protected, but sharing links to files, even without ever copying the file is often illegal. As noted by someone else, the law cares about intent. Eventually, I expect the law will evolve to handle free sharing of information, but I recognize that I don't really know what that society will look like or how the law will evolve.
The point about intent is a good one. I'm also not arguing that the laws, even copyright laws, are without merit. I enjoy the fruits of those laws too and wouldn't suggest they should be unilaterally repealed. Despite the apparent common consensus by people responding to my original post, I don't even advocate piracy. I do think that there is room for improvement in the law and I do advocate for that, but that's not the topic I intended to discuss.
Speaking of math though, I keep being bothered by an idea. There is a number that could be used to represent an ISO of The Little Mermaid. I suspect any irrational number would contain it, but lets use Pi for this thought experiment. Somewhere in Pi, there is a number which can be easily translated to a binary description of that ISO, lets call that number Pi-TLM. If I have the computing power to find Pi-TLM, and I distribute the necessary description in order to allow others to use Pi-TLM to reproduce ISOs, then I'm clearly in breach of the intent of copyright laws. Most numbers can be reduced and referenced by a shorter notation, so I'd expect Pi-TLM would be the same, probably by factorization, exponents or a formula. Communicating that formula would probably also violate the intent of copyright laws. But what if you didn't communicate the whole representation, leaving a couple hundred thousand possible interpretations out, which would be trivial for a computer to go through in order to identify the actual candidate. I have no idea what Pi-TLM would be, but pretend it's 42â'â'â'â'^237+650^10^23994-4. (Those ugly characters are entered as up arrows, to denote Knuth's up-arrow notation, but the slashcode mangled version works just as well for this discussion.) Obviously I can say "there is a number Pi-TLM" without breaching copyright and I can say that I found it and I can even say it's in the range greater than 42â'â'â'â'^237.
The idea that bothers me is this: Is it possible to define the point at which I give too much information?
I'd agree that freedoms and rights aren't the same thing. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all things that can be taken from someone, but the fact that they can be taken doesn't keep them from being rights. Freedom is a right, an inalienable right, that can be taken away. The natural state of man is to expect freedom and to rebel if deprived of it. Sure, you're free to kill me, but it's not a right, but then neither is it the natural state of man to expect that right or to rebel if deprived of it.
I actually read quite a bit about freedoms and rights and what it is that makes those we consider inalienable different from those we impose and restrict for the good of society. Obviously people (I'm a little shocked how many) will take the time to disagree. I welcome disagreement because it's often the best opportunity I have to learn something new.
I'm going to need a little more from you in order to change my mind. You're marked as a friend because I've found your opinions insightful in the past, so perhaps you can manage it.
There is a conflict between the natural and inalienable rights of people and the attempts of governments to curtail the resulting actions. It's neither novel nor resolvable.
Ones and zeros. Any series of ones and zeros can be represented as a number, understandable by human minds. It is the natural and inalienable right of humans to communicate, thereby sharing, numbers. Humanity, throughout history, has attempted to suppress the ability of others to communicate freely. Every attempt to curtail communication is a battle against the natural state of humanity's need to communicate. Attempting to suppress a natural right always, always, always results in greater suppression of rights or failure.
Most of us appreciate the outcome of limiting sharing in order to concentrate value. We like multi-million dollar movies. What we don't like are the inevitable outcomes where people are punished in ways that seem unreasonable. The problem is that the two issues are inextricably linked.
Possession of a number, and sharing of that number should never logically be illegal. Making sharing a number illegal goes against natural human nature. Thus we have a conflict with the historical approach to encouraging innovation and creativity and the natural law that humans must be free to share information. Technology hasn't created this problem, but has made it more obvious. Human nature is also to acquire power so we're pitting two natural human activities against either. Of course the natural right to communicate will eventually prevail over the power acquisition impulse, but not without conflict. Right now the impulse to acquire power is grounded in government enforcement, but the natural right to communicate will always find an expression, thus government censorship (copyright enforcement) is destined to fail.
In the future, regardless of attempts to prevent it, free sharing of information is inevitable. Acquisition of power will adjust. Movies will be paid for by trailers created in order to generate pre-creation funding. You'll see trailers for movies that haven't been created yet, based on subjects you're interested in and directors you trust. If you like the trailer you see, you'll pledge money taken in escrow. If all goes well, you'll get to see the movie, but otherwise you'll get your money back with a trivial amount of interest. Everyone will get to see the movie for free if it gets made, nobody will make movies that flop and nobody will be punished for sharing numbers.
It won't happen soon. It won't happen without conflict. Laws will come and go. People will be unfairly punished, movies will fail. Inalienable rights will eventually prevail because law cannot suppress human nature.
Unchecking "Post Anonymously" because I've had just enough beer to stop caring if people are upset by the truth.
In many cases, I think that's the only way certain websites can survive, so yes. Ideally though, I should be able to send my monthly ad-free payment to one organization, like a bank, which will in return give my browser identity to all the sites on the web who offer both an ad-supported interface and a supporter interface.
Slashdot, Google, Pandora and Hulu have all already realized that people are willing to pay for an minimal advertising experience and offer both ad-supported sites and consumer supported sites. In my house we're already paying for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Pandora and three out of four of us put money in Google Wallet, and I've paid for Slashdot in the past. There is a lot of room to wrangle over the costs per visitor but those sites make a lot more from my family than any ad-supported sites do.
With Adblock Browser being accepted on both Android and iOS and the default browser in Windows now offering a Reading View (which pretty much eliminates ads), the future is clear: ad-supported websites are going to be forced to change the way they do things if they want to survive. The first thing I'd do if I were depending on income from advertising is move to a native-ad model, so that my advertising wouldn't be blocked as often but that's only going to last so long. Check out https://boingboing.net/2015/07... in Microsoft Edge browser. Right now the page shows what appears to be a scantily clad woman in the the upper right of the page, and an Intel banner, and a Boing Boing ad mid-right and a bunch of chlickbait junk at the bottom, and now I hit the Reading View button built into Edge and all that disappears.
I know which view I'd rather my boss see when he walks by.
Well maybe, but the prosecutors of Aaron Swartz disagreed.
CREATING THE DAMN SITE GIVES THEM RIGHTS.
Yes, it gives them copyright rights. Some of those rights they immediately forfeit when they post it since doing so gives anyone interested a right to make a copy for personal use. (Arguable in rare circumstances, but generally true.) That's how the web works. I can't see it until my computer retrieves a copy of it, which is it's intended use and thus why they give up the right to prevent making a copy for personal use.
You, as a visitor, can choose not to visit.
Or do anything you like with the copy you receive, so long as you don't do anything not for personal use. So sure, rewrite it to suit your preferred reading style, or add your own words, change formatting, add pictures, and this is the important thing, you can take out bits you don't like. Heck, if they don't prevent their server from offering it, just don't download the parts you don't want.
They are just creating their site in such a way it works differently depending on what your browser tells the site when it asks for data.
Correct again, and they're doing it in a way they hope will keep you from doing what you like for personal use with the copy you receive. Once it's on someone else's computer, however, it's pretty much impossible to prevent them from doing whatever they want via technical means.
Since when are they explicitly forced to serve you exactly the way you want?
Since always. Or at least since the invention of the web browser. All they can do is serve me content which I can view or not view any way I want. Or was that meant as humor and I didn't catch the joke?
Or I can ad-block and visit the site without ads. It's not a moral stance I'm suggesting, it's just an observation of fact.
Or better still, the business model of trying and failing to force people to do something avoidable could evolve into something that has a better long term chance of success. If nobody changes the way things are headed, the advertising is going to get harder and harder to avoid while the consumers who would have accepted advertising are going to be more and more motivated to avoid it. Nobody wins that way.
The only way to avoid an end game where consumers just stop visiting sites dependant on views is to change how the sites get their funding. Well, that or take complete control over what people can and can't do with the hardware and software they purchase which is just a different, faster and more painful end to the internet we've come to love.
Slashdot Mirror
I mentioned my frustration at having to learn a new way to manage my systems along with my acceptance that times change and knowing my skills have to be updated in turn. I mentioned this to someone who admins a system we use and he said that he appreciates systemd.
I replied, "oh, so you're the one!"
I don't feel like I have the expertise to judge the fundamental issues for or against systemd. I do feel like it's in the best interest of an admin to learn how to use the systems likely to be encountered, regardless of personal preference.
Good points. I'd add these:
While this is true, the problem is that it's still often normal to hand your card to a clerk rather than inserting it for a chip transaction. Even where that's not the case, it wouldn't take much for someone to use cameras to gather the information necessary to use EMV cards fraudulently online.
I believe this described the tacit limit of your property rights as "within shotgun range."
It's surprising how effective trolls like this are. I present a logical perspective with supporting information and they reply "nah" with no support for their stated stance. It shouldn't bother me, but somehow it still does manage to irk me slightly.
Disclaimer: While educated speculation, the following is still speculation and therefore this is not libel.
Do you know why the new Windows phones won't work on Verizon despite having all the necessary hardware? It's because Verizon has decided to not authenticate those phones, in essence blocking a completely capable phone from their network. They get away with it because nobody cares about Windows phones. I mention that to highlight the power the carriers have over the manufacturers and OS companies.
You wouldn't believe how much of a pain it is to get Cyganomod on my phone, and it's because my carrier is one of the ones that included everything they could to prevent customers from having the ability to really control their phone. Other people with the same phone I have, but with a different carrier, have no trouble at all.
Apple can dictate terms to the carriers, because people will switch carriers to get an iPhone. That's the only company that has ever succeeded in dictating terms. The carriers have a lock-in by controlling the phone and they don't want to lose that. The only exception is Apple and Apple is just as bad, if not worse, about locking you out of controlling your phone.
Google does not have the muscle to force carriers to go along with built in OS updating capability and it's hurt them time and time again.
I heard a suggestion the other day. Someone speculated that content providers should distribute the desirable content through the same systems that distribute the advertisements. Personally I'd be more inclined as an content provider or an advertising distributor to incorporate an advertising module directly on the content server. Adblockers use pattern recognition and source recognition to determine which content components are advertising. Both strategies are defeated when the advertising patterns are randomized and coming from the same sources.
In order to block advertising in either of those situations, adblockers will have to evolve to be able to interpret the desired content and process and interpret the content displayed well enough to figure out which parts aren't related to the same subject matter. There isn't AI advanced enough to do that consistently anywhere yet, let alone in software you could run in your computer and it is a long, long way from being something you can put in a browser add-on. There are a couple things holding advertisers back from implementing more unavoidable schemes, but when they find their revenue dying due to widespread adblocking, they'll have the motivation.
Everybody wins if we can reach a consensus on what constitutes acceptable advertising. That's a big if, but I'm glad to see Mozilla making the attempt.
Another alternative I'm on-board with is a per-visitor micropayment system. Google's already offering that but until there is a common consensus, and some way to get payments exchanged between different middle companies, it's a partial measure only. It's been tried before and failed, but I but I still hold hope since that was before adblocking became commonplace.
Pretending I'm an advertiser for a moment: If you go to a page where I want you to see my ads, you'll see my ads, at least the first time you load the page, and probably ever time thereafter. Why? Because I understand how ad-blockers work and they're not hard to outsmart. Have you ever built an adblocker? I ask because you'd have to build your own, rather complex, adblocker to keep me from being able to show you undesired ads.
The computer user doesn't determine what displays, the programs running to display desired content determine what displays. Programs to force unwanted advertising don't have to be nearly as sophisticated as the ones that are designed to block them. Right now, advertisers and programmers haven't cared enough to change the way most ads are delivered, but that's changing. Eventually, the end user can win because they have the potential to control the computer that does the actual display but they won't anytime soon. The programming skills to accomplish that goal are tremendously sophisticated. No current adblocker is even remotely close to being that sophisticated.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have the programmers capable of writing adblockers that sophisticated, but none of them has the incentive.
I was blocking advertising and other junk before adblockers became something you could just add to a browser. I needed to learn how in order to effectively use the terrible bandwidth I had in those days, so I had to learn a lot about what can and can't be done. If advertisers get determined enough to outsmart the adblockers available today, my experience assures me that we'll start getting bombarded with crap again no matter what adblocker we try. I'm still hoping for an ecosystem change rather than that outcome, because if it goes that far, the money it will take to build a successful adblocker against that scenario will mean we'll have to pay out of pocket to fund it.
What's wrong with what we have today?
It's a battle rather than an agreement.
I don't mind some advertising, but I do mind scripting and video and bandwidth consumption. The state of the ad-supported web as it exists currently is a battle between the consumers who don't want to see advertising and businesses who want the consumers to see it anyway. What we have today is companies who insert their programming into pages coming from their own servers with little or zero oversight to make sure that what consumers get is safe or desirable, even tolerable. Consumers use Ad-Blocking software to filter out things that come from sites outside of the content desired. Advertisers can still get their advertisements to show, and I'm surprised more aren't by having the ads injected directly by content directors and by using URLs within the desired content providers' resources which are indistinguishable from the desired content. I'm surprised more aren't; it isn't that hard.
What we really want isn't the battle we have today. We want the benefits of cheap content, and we're willing to view safe and unobtrusive advertising or pay micro amounts to support our desired content but the way the ad-supported web is built today doesn't allow us to do that simply and reliably, so it's far easier to just block stuff and far easier to load web pages with crap. The problem with what we have today is that it isn't a long term sustainable solution.
There are two solutions that I think we're headed toward. The first is direct support. Google and others are recognizing there is money to be made in suppressing advertising, and the natural development of that is either paying consumers to allow ads or to consolidate enough advertisers who are willing to take payment in lieu of actual advertising. The other is building advertising systems that make it impossible to avoid and building better adblocking software to avoid what was previously impossible. One is a war, the other is a cooperative system. I don't know which will win, but I'm rooting for cooperation.
Too late.
The genie is out of the bottle. Now consumers are realizing that they don't have to see things they don't want to. In the old days the browser did whatever the site owner wanted, so we got pop-ups and java advertisements and auto playing flash. The internet started out being a place where ideas were conveyed mostly by text because putting a double handful of advertisements would make the page take several minutes to load with a 2400 baud modem. Those websites that tried to put a lot of advertising failed because nobody was willing to wait for them to load. Then Phoenix (look up the history of Firefox if you don't remember it) came out and it didn't run javascript or Flash and it blocked pop-ups and it loaded everything in tabs in a single window and it freakin' took off. As internet connection speed increased across the board for the average consumer, more and more advertising could be loaded in the few seconds it took the page to load. As a result, ads started taking up more bandwidth than content and loading more pop-ups than any consumer was willing to swallow, which in turn made pop-up blocking ever so much more desirable, so much so that eventually all the browsers started supporting it, and then eventually by default.
So the consumers won, as they always do, because whatever gets them the content they want without the stuff they don't gains popularity until it becomes the standard. But consumers wanted javascript and java and Flash and it became standard even in the new Phoenix, next called Firebird, now Firefox. Bandwidth and processing speed continued to rise, allowing yet more advertising to be loaded and new techniques to cause pop-unders and interstitial ads. Add-ons came along to block all advertising as a direct result and Firefox continued to rise, then the same came out for Chrome and even Internet Explorer because with a broadband connection there was no other way to limit the flood of advertising that could be loaded in time consumers were willing to wait for content.
Decent people didn't want to block advertising because they wanted to screw over content providers, but they didn't want to deal with the crap. The technology to force people to see something they didn't want was obliterated because the consumers always win. In a war between people wanting content and advertisers wanting to force unwanted ads, the tides turned so much that every advertiser is being blocked regardless of how respectful or unobnoxious they behave.
We've come the point where advertising has to be insanely pushy to get past the average adblocker. The only ads that work are the ones that are going to be blocked in a few months because they're trying so hard to force themselves on the consumer. The consumer will, eventually, always win anyway. Advertising as the standard way to provide funding for content is dying and the war has gone on too long for the tide to turn now.
I still see and feel sympathy for the indignant content providers who just wanted a fair business trade where some reasonable amount of advertising is acceptable by the consumer. It's too late because the consumer won't ever go back to allowing the obnoxious advertising or incidentally the reasonable content providers. I know, it sucks, because good content is dying as a result.
Eventually, there will be another balance. Some way to fund websites will succeed. Here's hoping it isn't every site requiring its own app.
I always liked portable edition because I would prefer not to have someone point to an installed program as proof I have something to hide. Portable TrueCrypt didn't require admin privileges so there wouldn't be a potential privilege escalation issue. The ability to run as an unprivileged user was the biggest thing I missed when I switched over to bitlocker.
Yup. I've explained before how law makers could have access, and how much I distrust them. The facts are that they could get what they say they want, and get it securely, but what they really want is illegal.
Legal access could be managed securely, but not without limiting government and law enforcement to a legal process. They don't want that, and that's the reason they dropped this. So they say.
The problem we have is that we already know we've been repeatedly lied to by our government, and even government agencies lie to each other about what they're doing. No rational person accepts that our government will tell us when they're spying on us illegally. If they've decided to go ahead and do it, odds are that we won't know until the next Snowden if we're lucky, but more likely we'll never know.
The ability to have your intellectual property protected with the force of law is akin to having your life protected by the full force of law.
But why? Nevermind. It's said clearly enough, and I don't have anything new to add, but thanks for presenting the other side.
The basic question I am asking is whether intellectual property should be property. I'm not asking whether it is defined (by law) as property. If the law changes or I move beyond it's jurisdiction, then it ceases to be property. (Sorry if I mislead with my attempt at humor.) Under current law, copying illegally deprives you of the opportunity to profit due to governmental created and enforced scarcity. You're also deprived of the opportunity to buy and sell people, but it wasn't always that way. Maybe it shouldn't be that way for intellectual property either.
What I make is mine and I have ownership of it. You're not free to make a copy unless I give you that right
What you make is yours and you have ownership of it, but if you allow me to observe it, I have a right to make a copy unless somebody takes that right away.
I know, it looks like semantics, but in this case, where the governments create and enforce an artificial scarcity of constructs that exist as ideas rather than physical things, it's really more accurate to say that.
If you refuse to speculate on how a society would work if we transitioned to law without copyright, then your argument boils down to "this is the best way because it is working" and mine boils down to "imagine it working differently, it would be better." The world was different when copyright was invented in 1710. Importing slaves was still legal in the US in 1710. Society's values, norms and laws change. You say intellectual property is property. I agree. I say it shouldn't be and you ignored that issue.
We both know the reasons people use to argue both sides, so I'll turn your previous challenge back on you. I've yet to see a viable, reasoned, argument that supports the idea that copyright is good for humanity in the long run.
I've yet to see a viable, reasoned, argument that supports the idea that my constructs, be they as minimal as an idea, become someone else's property.
Now there's a challenge. How about "property is theft." That has a nice ring to it, can't believe I just made that up, maybe I can get a copyright or trademark on it.
I've deliberately avoided the term natural law, even though the idea of inalienable rights are tied so closely to it because I think it's so fuzzy to define. I'm inclined a little toward stoicism so maybe I should work harder at learning to defend the idea. But I'm lazy, so not today. I bring it up only to ask if you're quite solidly against the idea that natural law exists, cause it sounds that way and I'm reconsidering whether I can support the idea of any inalienable right without that common ground. If natural law is common, then I can argue that depriving mankind of the right to copy and share is against it. Our society and laws have created a construct to protect information as property where none should rationally or naturally exist because, like fiat money, it makes progress easier. Laws that run counter to natural law are bad, not because they have no good effect, but rather because they will always be broken by the majority. Heck, performing happy birthday in public was a big frigging deal to me, but most people had no idea it was illegal; most still don't even after all the news stories about it.
Assuming I can't find that common ground, then I think I'd revert to the societal good argument. Sharing information benefits society but depriving people of the freedom to make copies of work benefits society too. They have different benefits, but one of them is being handled by laws designed to handle papers and movable type. For societal benefit, the laws need to be changed. Not rapidly, that way lies pain and anarchy, but with great forethought. I do free programming to build a reputation, which gets me a job with a paycheck. Redhat makes money in essentially the same way. It's obvious that innovation and good can come with free information, but less obvious what the world would look like without copyright.
I'm thinking it is an inevitable thing, obviously not everyone agrees, but if you were in charge of changing the laws to make it happen (eventually, like say by 2200,) how would you go about it?
That, by the way, I think is my best answer to the challenge, the constructs that belong to you only belong to you so long as you don't share them with anyone, unless the law creates an artificial restriction. There is no logical argument against that because the law is the definition of what you can own (see slavery discussion.) If there is no law to prohibit copying your work, every copy belongs to the person who has it.
Interesting questions. Let me fire up my crystal ball and peer a couple hundred years in the future to get some answers.
If everyone gets to see the movie for free if it gets made, why would anyone pay money up front?
They pay for the same reason people vote now. It doesn't cost much to be a contributor to something you hope will happen. They'll contribute what we'd think of as our movie budget now in the hopes it will be created.
Most seriously, how would you encourage more experimental or controversial movies if they were dependent on pre-funding based on people's pre-conceived ideas of what they want to see?
I expect it won't be that much different than it is now. A producer gets to produce something if he can convince people it's a good idea or has the money to do it himself. Few experimental or controversial movies get a big budget now, and when they do it's because they've built a reputation for success with the people who have the money to invest. The big changes will really be in how the middle men work. Private funding won't disappear, but it will be overtaken by public funding. Kickstarter will be looked back on as the cute simplistic precursor. They're already producing movies but in the future there will be many other organizations doing it on a massively larger scale with a whole different set of laws supporting them.
When we say we've not stolen anything, we have. We've stolen the potential sale when we share it, enable sharing, or make a copy without paying it. The potential has been reduced.
Totally agree and couldn't have said it better. I would add however, that intellectual property only exists as a construct of society and government as opposed to physical property which exists naturally. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, and indeed a lot of the society I appreciate depends on it now. I am saying that it's unnatural and is contrary to human nature.
You don't have an inalienable right to it because we, as a society, have determined that such doesn't exist.
That's where we diverge. I don't think society gets to determine what inalienable rights are, just freedoms, restrictions and protected rights.
Maybe.
Whether or not it was your intent, I'm thinking through the idea that maybe what determines man's natural state and inalienable rights are malleable and determined by society. A child born into slavery in 1600 had no expectation of a right to liberty. I'd like to say that it is the natural state of that child and every such slave child to expect liberty as a natural right and rebel against having it denied. I'd like to say that, but I don't think history supports that view. Maybe that child didn't actually have a right to liberty. It doesn't sit well with me to accept the idea, but there could be truth there I just don't like to admit. I really wish I could sit down with Jefferson and have him explain what he really thought and then maybe ask Sally Hemings what she thought about his views.
In the future, regardless of attempts to prevent it, free sharing of information is inevitable.
That's not a statement of preference, it's an observation of what I think is an irreversible trend. I doubt I'll be alive to see that time but I hope that law evolves ways to handle it. You seem to be in the majority in thinking I was advocating piracy and I can see how it can come across that way, but really I don't, just like I don't advocate setting all prisoners free just because liberty is an inalienable right.
The internet would be illegal according to the original reading of copyright laws because the act of viewing content on your own computer makes a copy, usually several, on your computer. The laws and their interpretations have evolved to consider making a copy, even many copies, as a part of the normal and intended use, legal. It wasn't and still isn't without conflict. People have been sued for linking to someone else's page and had that protected, but sharing links to files, even without ever copying the file is often illegal. As noted by someone else, the law cares about intent. Eventually, I expect the law will evolve to handle free sharing of information, but I recognize that I don't really know what that society will look like or how the law will evolve.
The point about intent is a good one. I'm also not arguing that the laws, even copyright laws, are without merit. I enjoy the fruits of those laws too and wouldn't suggest they should be unilaterally repealed. Despite the apparent common consensus by people responding to my original post, I don't even advocate piracy. I do think that there is room for improvement in the law and I do advocate for that, but that's not the topic I intended to discuss.
Speaking of math though, I keep being bothered by an idea. There is a number that could be used to represent an ISO of The Little Mermaid. I suspect any irrational number would contain it, but lets use Pi for this thought experiment. Somewhere in Pi, there is a number which can be easily translated to a binary description of that ISO, lets call that number Pi-TLM. If I have the computing power to find Pi-TLM, and I distribute the necessary description in order to allow others to use Pi-TLM to reproduce ISOs, then I'm clearly in breach of the intent of copyright laws. Most numbers can be reduced and referenced by a shorter notation, so I'd expect Pi-TLM would be the same, probably by factorization, exponents or a formula. Communicating that formula would probably also violate the intent of copyright laws. But what if you didn't communicate the whole representation, leaving a couple hundred thousand possible interpretations out, which would be trivial for a computer to go through in order to identify the actual candidate. I have no idea what Pi-TLM would be, but pretend it's 42â'â'â'â'^237+650^10^23994-4. (Those ugly characters are entered as up arrows, to denote Knuth's up-arrow notation, but the slashcode mangled version works just as well for this discussion.) Obviously I can say "there is a number Pi-TLM" without breaching copyright and I can say that I found it and I can even say it's in the range greater than 42â'â'â'â'^237.
The idea that bothers me is this: Is it possible to define the point at which I give too much information?
I don't think I said rights and freedoms are the same thing.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Inalienable+rights
I'd agree that freedoms and rights aren't the same thing. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all things that can be taken from someone, but the fact that they can be taken doesn't keep them from being rights. Freedom is a right, an inalienable right, that can be taken away. The natural state of man is to expect freedom and to rebel if deprived of it. Sure, you're free to kill me, but it's not a right, but then neither is it the natural state of man to expect that right or to rebel if deprived of it.
I actually read quite a bit about freedoms and rights and what it is that makes those we consider inalienable different from those we impose and restrict for the good of society. Obviously people (I'm a little shocked how many) will take the time to disagree. I welcome disagreement because it's often the best opportunity I have to learn something new.
I'm going to need a little more from you in order to change my mind. You're marked as a friend because I've found your opinions insightful in the past, so perhaps you can manage it.
There is a conflict between the natural and inalienable rights of people and the attempts of governments to curtail the resulting actions. It's neither novel nor resolvable.
Ones and zeros. Any series of ones and zeros can be represented as a number, understandable by human minds. It is the natural and inalienable right of humans to communicate, thereby sharing, numbers. Humanity, throughout history, has attempted to suppress the ability of others to communicate freely. Every attempt to curtail communication is a battle against the natural state of humanity's need to communicate. Attempting to suppress a natural right always, always, always results in greater suppression of rights or failure.
Most of us appreciate the outcome of limiting sharing in order to concentrate value. We like multi-million dollar movies. What we don't like are the inevitable outcomes where people are punished in ways that seem unreasonable. The problem is that the two issues are inextricably linked.
Possession of a number, and sharing of that number should never logically be illegal. Making sharing a number illegal goes against natural human nature. Thus we have a conflict with the historical approach to encouraging innovation and creativity and the natural law that humans must be free to share information. Technology hasn't created this problem, but has made it more obvious. Human nature is also to acquire power so we're pitting two natural human activities against either. Of course the natural right to communicate will eventually prevail over the power acquisition impulse, but not without conflict. Right now the impulse to acquire power is grounded in government enforcement, but the natural right to communicate will always find an expression, thus government censorship (copyright enforcement) is destined to fail.
In the future, regardless of attempts to prevent it, free sharing of information is inevitable. Acquisition of power will adjust. Movies will be paid for by trailers created in order to generate pre-creation funding. You'll see trailers for movies that haven't been created yet, based on subjects you're interested in and directors you trust. If you like the trailer you see, you'll pledge money taken in escrow. If all goes well, you'll get to see the movie, but otherwise you'll get your money back with a trivial amount of interest. Everyone will get to see the movie for free if it gets made, nobody will make movies that flop and nobody will be punished for sharing numbers.
It won't happen soon. It won't happen without conflict. Laws will come and go. People will be unfairly punished, movies will fail. Inalienable rights will eventually prevail because law cannot suppress human nature.
Unchecking "Post Anonymously" because I've had just enough beer to stop caring if people are upset by the truth.
In many cases, I think that's the only way certain websites can survive, so yes. Ideally though, I should be able to send my monthly ad-free payment to one organization, like a bank, which will in return give my browser identity to all the sites on the web who offer both an ad-supported interface and a supporter interface.
Slashdot, Google, Pandora and Hulu have all already realized that people are willing to pay for an minimal advertising experience and offer both ad-supported sites and consumer supported sites. In my house we're already paying for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Pandora and three out of four of us put money in Google Wallet, and I've paid for Slashdot in the past. There is a lot of room to wrangle over the costs per visitor but those sites make a lot more from my family than any ad-supported sites do.
With Adblock Browser being accepted on both Android and iOS and the default browser in Windows now offering a Reading View (which pretty much eliminates ads), the future is clear: ad-supported websites are going to be forced to change the way they do things if they want to survive. The first thing I'd do if I were depending on income from advertising is move to a native-ad model, so that my advertising wouldn't be blocked as often but that's only going to last so long. Check out https://boingboing.net/2015/07... in Microsoft Edge browser. Right now the page shows what appears to be a scantily clad woman in the the upper right of the page, and an Intel banner, and a Boing Boing ad mid-right and a bunch of chlickbait junk at the bottom, and now I hit the Reading View button built into Edge and all that disappears.
I know which view I'd rather my boss see when he walks by.
Visiting their site gives them no rights.
Well maybe, but the prosecutors of Aaron Swartz disagreed.
CREATING THE DAMN SITE GIVES THEM RIGHTS.
Yes, it gives them copyright rights. Some of those rights they immediately forfeit when they post it since doing so gives anyone interested a right to make a copy for personal use. (Arguable in rare circumstances, but generally true.) That's how the web works. I can't see it until my computer retrieves a copy of it, which is it's intended use and thus why they give up the right to prevent making a copy for personal use.
You, as a visitor, can choose not to visit.
Or do anything you like with the copy you receive, so long as you don't do anything not for personal use. So sure, rewrite it to suit your preferred reading style, or add your own words, change formatting, add pictures, and this is the important thing, you can take out bits you don't like. Heck, if they don't prevent their server from offering it, just don't download the parts you don't want.
They are just creating their site in such a way it works differently depending on what your browser tells the site when it asks for data.
Correct again, and they're doing it in a way they hope will keep you from doing what you like for personal use with the copy you receive. Once it's on someone else's computer, however, it's pretty much impossible to prevent them from doing whatever they want via technical means.
Since when are they explicitly forced to serve you exactly the way you want?
Since always. Or at least since the invention of the web browser. All they can do is serve me content which I can view or not view any way I want. Or was that meant as humor and I didn't catch the joke?
Or I can ad-block and visit the site without ads. It's not a moral stance I'm suggesting, it's just an observation of fact.
Or better still, the business model of trying and failing to force people to do something avoidable could evolve into something that has a better long term chance of success. If nobody changes the way things are headed, the advertising is going to get harder and harder to avoid while the consumers who would have accepted advertising are going to be more and more motivated to avoid it. Nobody wins that way.
The only way to avoid an end game where consumers just stop visiting sites dependant on views is to change how the sites get their funding. Well, that or take complete control over what people can and can't do with the hardware and software they purchase which is just a different, faster and more painful end to the internet we've come to love.