So people fiddle with the settings and the browser "breaks?" Is there some reason it wasn't possible to create a button reading, "Restore Factory Settings," in large, friendly letters? Or was that too hard?
The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications.
Please try to remember whose machine you're running on. You're a guest under my roof, and guests that behave badly do not get invited back. So no, you don't get to run code in my browser until you've earned a certain level of trust, and you certainly don't get to invite in your friends' code. (I mean, just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, anyway?)
For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways [... ]
The technical term for sites that behave this way is, "Broken."
Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites.
Firefox already works on a lot of Web sites. Is someone shipping FF with JavaScript turned off by default? What exactly is the alleged problem here?
Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."
These programmers are called, "Wrong."
Back in the 1990's -- in the days of sneaker-net, recall -- macros in Microsoft Word documents, originally thought to be oh so terribly clever, proved to be a monumental nightmare for their ability to spread viruses and generally wreak havoc. It was so bad that even Microsoft was forced to admit it fscked up, and no longer executed macros in a loaded document by default, but would ask first. So you'd think the lesson on embedding executable content in what was fundamentally a document would have been learned.
Then some allegedly clever person kluges together JavaScript in an afternoon, and suddenly executable content embedded in documents -- over a genuine network, mind -- becomes a fantabulous idea again.
Uh, no, it didn't. JavaScript was a stupid idea, and should never have been allowed to happen. Unless your site is trustworthy and useful, you DO NOT GET TO RUN JAVASCRIPT.
Let's look at another example. Suppose there were a billionaire who made his money making crappy products and pushing those products on people. Suppose that man decided to then dedicate his life to wiping out a series of specific species completely from their native environments. Sounds like a supervillain, right? Well, that man is Bill Gates, and the species in question are the four species of malaria.
This is a tautology; everyone already knows Bill Gates is a super-villain.
And like most power-mad super-villains, I'm quite certain Gates hasn't bothered to consider the possible long-term downsides to putting his fumbling thumb on the scale of evolution and genociding several species of pathogen.
It seems like, in order to get these nosy little snoops to stop snooping on you, you have to explicitly visit their site, provide them with even more info, and hope they keep their word that they won't compile data on you.
For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?
The problem is not laying down fiber or building infrastructure: The problem is that nobody else can because of contractual agreements. [... ]
Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.
For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.
Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?
So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.
A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?
Build out a city or two using long ago subsidized infrastructure, add some updated equipment, get kick backs from the city, put a couple of thousand on the internet all for under 200 million [... ]
That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.
For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric. Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.
When I was using a FreeBSD box as the gateway to my home network, the crushing majority of the spam relay and SSH brute-forcing attempts came from machines inside hinet.net. I ended up black-holeing as many of their subnets as I could in the firewall.
Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...
Or, conversely, maybe it has a chance to thrive if it's being maintained by people who have an idea of what to do with it?
That was supposed to be the whole point of spinning off WebOS in the first place.
Barely two years ago, HP gave WebOS a modest nest egg and spun them off into its own independent entity (which, from the point of view of WebOS, was a good move, given how badly HP has been mismanaged over the last decade). They shared/leased some of HP's organizational infrastructure, but WebOS has been pretty much on its own since then. They definitely had/have a vision, and they've definitely been executing on it.
I'm not sure what value LG's ownership brings to WebOS -- or indeed what value WebOS brings to LG. But at least now the WebOS guys will be able to get employee discounts on nice flat panels:-).
Also: Storming the Magic Kingdom. Wonderful book -- informative and engaging. The Walt Disney Company was very nearly destroyed by private equity/LBO vultures.
We've seen this script before. The private equity firm forces the company to take out huge loans, which are then paid to the equity firm as consulting and management fees, and bonuses. Dell's largest operating cost becomes servicing the debt, which means everything else gets cut -- product research, product quality, staff, salaries. The market quickly realizes that Dell products have become shit(tier), and customers flee.
Four years later, the equity firm is several hundred million dollars richer, Dell goes bankrupt and is liquidated, and thousands of former Dell employees are out of work.
If you were a bank considering a loan to Dell (and not already in collusion with the private equity firm), you should be very very skeptical you will ever see your money again.
Just because you're buying "hardware" doesn't mean you're getting the privilege of installing whatever the hell you want on the device.
Incorrect.
When I buy a Chevy Volt, I am not forced to fill up with only one vendor's gas. I am not forced to charge up with electricity from a particular utility.
When I buy a Sony TV, I am not forced to watch content only from Sony/Columbia/VEVO.
When I buy a Sansa MP3 player, I am not forced to buy and load only music from Sansa's "content partners." Hell, on many of their players, I can kick out their clunky UI and replace it with an entirely different clunky UI:-)
There is no technological reason that a "Surface" tablet can't run Android or generic Linux. The only obstacle standing in the way is entirely gratuitous, malicious, and childish. To the extent SecureBoot improves platform security (it doesn't) or the integrity of the user's data (it doesn't), there is absolutely no reason that the root keys to such a regime be held by Microsoft, especially given their track record. SecureBoot is there solely as a very deliberate and calculated "Fsck you" to competing operating systems. Therefore, it is entirely correct and proper to call Microsoft out on it.
In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, [Dodd] said that Hollywood and the technology industry 'need to come to an understanding' about new copyright legislation.
Here's the understanding, Chris: Computers copy data. Period. End of novel; no sequel coming. It is a fact of the landscape that is not going to change.
And that, as far as any clear-thinking technologist is concerned, is the end of the discussion. Business models must be constructed around this reality. (And if your business model is not based on reality, but instead on a la-la fairy land where every computer is under MPAA/RIAA/SPAA control, unsanctioned copies never happen, every view is metered, and directors and actors work for naught but "exposure"... Well, they have anti-psychotics that can help with that now.)
BTW, anyone hoping to debate the merits of copyright policy is REQUIRED to read this speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay -- it will easily be among the most enlightening forty-odd minutes of your life.
How terribly convenient that, in December of last year, Microsoft jammed a new Xbox service "agreement" down everyone's throat where you "agree" to never sue Microsoft, either as an individual or as a member of a class, and instead "agree" to resolve all disputes via "neutral" arbitration.
It seems they saw Sony get its pants yanked down to its ankles, and all the consequent lawsuits, and thought to themselves, "We could apply the stunning engineering talent we've always claimed to have in this company to audit our systems, network architecture, and customer info handling processes to ensure such a thing never happens to us or our users... Or, we could forbid our customers from suing us."
Hmm... You could set her up with the moral equivalent of a "Live CD," i.e. the core OS files are read-only, with maybe a UnionFS-type of writeable store overlaid on top. All her data files would be on normal read-write partitions. Thus, if she infects her machine, all that's required is a reboot. Naturally, installing new software would require administrative intervention, but honestly, other than OS updates, how many times does she need to install something?
You could also put her machine in a DMZ on the company's network so her machine doesn't reach out and contaminate others.
...And I imagine you've probably already thought of most of this...
About a year ago, when I was trying to figure out why notices from BofA were crashing my Moto RAZR, I did a little reading up on DKIM, and found it rather interesting. What I found even more interesting is that all the DKIM support I could locate operated at the MTA level (sendmail, postfix, etc.). I couldn't find any client-side tools that would verify DKIM signatures.
Has this situation changed (or did I miss something)? Are there any tools I could plug in to, say, 'mutt' to verify DKIM signatures?
...Or it's me, who long ago told WinUpdate to never attempt to "upgrade" IE, for the simple fact that I was never ever going to use IE (except to download FIrefox).
Every time Micros~1 updates IE, they fsck around with the defaults -- incorrectly, of course -- and I have to dive through half a dozen panes of preferences settings to bludgeon the thing back into submission. So, no, Micros~1, leave the damned thing alone.
(I also long ago uninstalled MSIE which, for some inane reason, is distinct from IE.)
I have two TIVO boxes, one is high definition, both recording constantly.
I have one system with 8TB of storage to sort/organize the incoming TIVO recording...
How are you able to get the hi-def programs off the TiVo and on to external file storage? Our TiVo sniffs derisively at us if we try to do that (depending on the show). Also, that must be achingly slow, since TiVo throttles network transfer rates.
I may need to double check, but I'm 98% certain the author is lying. To my knowledge (and I have a fair amount on this subject), Amiga never had an autorun-style feature.
Amiga had a "disk inserted" event, which would often trigger programs looking for the event, such as Workbench, to look at the just-inserted disk to see what was on it. But except for initially booting the system, Amiga would never load and run code off a disk merely because you inserted it.
Autorun was one of the main reasons Amiga was the darling of the virus writers and Windows just carried on the tradition.
It's obvious why you're an AC -- you have no smegging idea what you're talking about.
Amiga had autorun to the same extent DOS did. There was a bootblock that contained a small snippet of binary code to get the machine booted and running. This bootblock was not accessible via the filesystem, and only specialized tools could write there.
In other words, it was exactly analogous to the bootblock/partition table that's on the hard disk you have today.
Yes, virus writers exploited this feature on Amiga, exactly as they exploited it on DOS and Windows.
I was given a Barnes&Noble Nook Color for Christmas, an Android-based ebook reader that is trivially rootable. After having done so and briefly browsed the Android Market, it seems evident that there's not a lot of focused development on the platform.
Knowing nothing about iPhone/iOS, I can't say with any certainty why this might be the case. At a guess, I'd say it might be due to the wildly differing platforms out there -- different display sizes, different connectivity (3G vs. 4G vs. WiFi, vs. USB), different available mass storage, different UI elements (buttons vs. soft keys), etc. etc. etc. Writing software that copes with this vast array of capabilities isn't easy.
Another possibility is the childish restrictions carriers place on their various handsets. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you have access to the Apple App store. If you're on an Android, you may have access to the Android Market, or you might instead have access to a walled garden jealously guarded by the carrier. And the version of Android you're running might be laughably out of date (*cough*MOTOBLUR*cough*).
I'm also rather suspicious about their insistence on the use of Java. Google has does yeoman work to make their Java-compatible runtime tolerably quick, but you're never going to get performance-oriented apps out of Java, period. That means no new audio or video codecs unless they arrive from on-high, and games will always lag behind their native counterparts.
I installed Eclipse and the Android 2.1 SDK, and got the "Hello, Android!" app to run, but nothing beyond that yet. Maybe I'll play with it some more.
One thing Google could do immediately is figure out why developer.android.com won't display properly on Android-based browsers. You can't scroll down to view the entire page; you can only see one screen's worth. This is the case on both the built-in browser and on the alpha release of Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
Please try to remember whose machine you're running on. You're a guest under my roof, and guests that behave badly do not get invited back. So no, you don't get to run code in my browser until you've earned a certain level of trust, and you certainly don't get to invite in your friends' code. (I mean, just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, anyway?)
The technical term for sites that behave this way is, "Broken."
Firefox already works on a lot of Web sites. Is someone shipping FF with JavaScript turned off by default? What exactly is the alleged problem here?
These programmers are called, "Wrong."
Back in the 1990's -- in the days of sneaker-net, recall -- macros in Microsoft Word documents, originally thought to be oh so terribly clever, proved to be a monumental nightmare for their ability to spread viruses and generally wreak havoc. It was so bad that even Microsoft was forced to admit it fscked up, and no longer executed macros in a loaded document by default, but would ask first. So you'd think the lesson on embedding executable content in what was fundamentally a document would have been learned.
Then some allegedly clever person kluges together JavaScript in an afternoon, and suddenly executable content embedded in documents -- over a genuine network, mind -- becomes a fantabulous idea again.
Uh, no, it didn't. JavaScript was a stupid idea, and should never have been allowed to happen. Unless your site is trustworthy and useful, you DO NOT GET TO RUN JAVASCRIPT.
This is a tautology; everyone already knows Bill Gates is a super-villain.
And like most power-mad super-villains, I'm quite certain Gates hasn't bothered to consider the possible long-term downsides to putting his fumbling thumb on the scale of evolution and genociding several species of pathogen.
Pursuant to your comments reported on 27 June 2013 on ZDNet.com:
You're fired, for cause, effective immediately. Please collect your personal belongings and vacate W3C premises no later than 17:00 local time today.
Regards,
The Web
No.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Simpleton Edition.
Schwab
For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?
Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.
For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.
Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?
So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?
That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.
For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric . Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.
Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...
Schwab
That was supposed to be the whole point of spinning off WebOS in the first place.
Barely two years ago, HP gave WebOS a modest nest egg and spun them off into its own independent entity (which, from the point of view of WebOS, was a good move, given how badly HP has been mismanaged over the last decade). They shared/leased some of HP's organizational infrastructure, but WebOS has been pretty much on its own since then. They definitely had/have a vision, and they've definitely been executing on it.
I'm not sure what value LG's ownership brings to WebOS -- or indeed what value WebOS brings to LG. But at least now the WebOS guys will be able to get employee discounts on nice flat panels :-).
Also: Storming the Magic Kingdom. Wonderful book -- informative and engaging. The Walt Disney Company was very nearly destroyed by private equity/LBO vultures.
Four years later, the equity firm is several hundred million dollars richer, Dell goes bankrupt and is liquidated, and thousands of former Dell employees are out of work.
If you were a bank considering a loan to Dell (and not already in collusion with the private equity firm), you should be very very skeptical you will ever see your money again.
Incorrect.
When I buy a Chevy Volt, I am not forced to fill up with only one vendor's gas. I am not forced to charge up with electricity from a particular utility.
When I buy a Sony TV, I am not forced to watch content only from Sony/Columbia/VEVO.
When I buy a Sansa MP3 player, I am not forced to buy and load only music from Sansa's "content partners." Hell, on many of their players, I can kick out their clunky UI and replace it with an entirely different clunky UI :-)
There is no technological reason that a "Surface" tablet can't run Android or generic Linux. The only obstacle standing in the way is entirely gratuitous, malicious, and childish. To the extent SecureBoot improves platform security (it doesn't) or the integrity of the user's data (it doesn't), there is absolutely no reason that the root keys to such a regime be held by Microsoft, especially given their track record. SecureBoot is there solely as a very deliberate and calculated "Fsck you" to competing operating systems. Therefore, it is entirely correct and proper to call Microsoft out on it.
Here's the understanding, Chris: Computers copy data. Period. End of novel; no sequel coming. It is a fact of the landscape that is not going to change.
And that, as far as any clear-thinking technologist is concerned, is the end of the discussion. Business models must be constructed around this reality. (And if your business model is not based on reality, but instead on a la-la fairy land where every computer is under MPAA/RIAA/SPAA control, unsanctioned copies never happen, every view is metered, and directors and actors work for naught but "exposure"... Well, they have anti-psychotics that can help with that now.)
BTW, anyone hoping to debate the merits of copyright policy is REQUIRED to read this speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay -- it will easily be among the most enlightening forty-odd minutes of your life.
Schwab
It seems they saw Sony get its pants yanked down to its ankles, and all the consequent lawsuits, and thought to themselves, "We could apply the stunning engineering talent we've always claimed to have in this company to audit our systems, network architecture, and customer info handling processes to ensure such a thing never happens to us or our users... Or, we could forbid our customers from suing us."
Schwab
Chip Morningstar, call your office.
Schwab
Hmm... You could set her up with the moral equivalent of a "Live CD," i.e. the core OS files are read-only, with maybe a UnionFS-type of writeable store overlaid on top. All her data files would be on normal read-write partitions. Thus, if she infects her machine, all that's required is a reboot. Naturally, installing new software would require administrative intervention, but honestly, other than OS updates, how many times does she need to install something?
You could also put her machine in a DMZ on the company's network so her machine doesn't reach out and contaminate others.
...And I imagine you've probably already thought of most of this...
Schwab
About a year ago, when I was trying to figure out why notices from BofA were crashing my Moto RAZR, I did a little reading up on DKIM, and found it rather interesting. What I found even more interesting is that all the DKIM support I could locate operated at the MTA level (sendmail, postfix, etc.). I couldn't find any client-side tools that would verify DKIM signatures.
Has this situation changed (or did I miss something)? Are there any tools I could plug in to, say, 'mutt' to verify DKIM signatures?
Schwab
Every time Micros~1 updates IE, they fsck around with the defaults -- incorrectly, of course -- and I have to dive through half a dozen panes of preferences settings to bludgeon the thing back into submission. So, no, Micros~1, leave the damned thing alone.
(I also long ago uninstalled MSIE which, for some inane reason, is distinct from IE.)
Schwab
Shaming? I thought it was a leaderboard...
How are you able to get the hi-def programs off the TiVo and on to external file storage? Our TiVo sniffs derisively at us if we try to do that (depending on the show). Also, that must be achingly slow, since TiVo throttles network transfer rates.
Amiga had a "disk inserted" event, which would often trigger programs looking for the event, such as Workbench, to look at the just-inserted disk to see what was on it. But except for initially booting the system, Amiga would never load and run code off a disk merely because you inserted it.
Schwab
It's obvious why you're an AC -- you have no smegging idea what you're talking about.
Amiga had autorun to the same extent DOS did. There was a bootblock that contained a small snippet of binary code to get the machine booted and running. This bootblock was not accessible via the filesystem, and only specialized tools could write there.
In other words, it was exactly analogous to the bootblock/partition table that's on the hard disk you have today.
Yes, virus writers exploited this feature on Amiga, exactly as they exploited it on DOS and Windows.
Schwab
Knowing nothing about iPhone/iOS, I can't say with any certainty why this might be the case. At a guess, I'd say it might be due to the wildly differing platforms out there -- different display sizes, different connectivity (3G vs. 4G vs. WiFi, vs. USB), different available mass storage, different UI elements (buttons vs. soft keys), etc. etc. etc. Writing software that copes with this vast array of capabilities isn't easy.
Another possibility is the childish restrictions carriers place on their various handsets. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you have access to the Apple App store. If you're on an Android, you may have access to the Android Market, or you might instead have access to a walled garden jealously guarded by the carrier. And the version of Android you're running might be laughably out of date (*cough*MOTOBLUR*cough*).
I'm also rather suspicious about their insistence on the use of Java. Google has does yeoman work to make their Java-compatible runtime tolerably quick, but you're never going to get performance-oriented apps out of Java, period. That means no new audio or video codecs unless they arrive from on-high, and games will always lag behind their native counterparts.
I installed Eclipse and the Android 2.1 SDK, and got the "Hello, Android!" app to run, but nothing beyond that yet. Maybe I'll play with it some more.
One thing Google could do immediately is figure out why developer.android.com won't display properly on Android-based browsers. You can't scroll down to view the entire page; you can only see one screen's worth. This is the case on both the built-in browser and on the alpha release of Firefox.
Schwab