Yup. Exactly how it happened in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, we have these license plate scanners around all big cities. They were installed after politicians promised they would never store license plates that weren't linked to serious crimes. Just a few years later, ALL license plates are stored for a longer period.
And know what the good part is? Real criminals don't fear the camera's at all. Last week a report on this subject was published: http://goo.gl/W8OF8 . The total of 230 camera's placed on just 40km of highway around Rotterdam generate more than 10.000 notifications every single day. About 60% of these notifications were discarded. If any action was taken, it was mostly people who had outstanding tickets, a tax debt, or whose license was revoked.
the Internet is not just the new "media". It is also a channel for private communication. Up to a few years back, private peer-to-peer communication (paper letters) was really private. (At least in The Netherlands we have strict laws on secrecy of correspondence.) Nowadays, chats, emails and everything else is being monitored.
I agree, the 14 years was pretty generous. When XP was originally released, I was running some SuSE 7.x version. The first 7.x version was released in september 2000. The last 7.x version went end-of-life in december 2003, meaning a support span of 3 years and 3 months. Fedora has something like a thirteen month support span, depending on the release date of version x+2. Only RHEL appears to be supported for 10 years.
There is one big difference: all Linux distros release a new version every 1-2 years. The next windows release took 6 years, but the next windows release that was really usable in companies took a few years more.
Or thermostats controllable by your electric monopoly.
In fact, that was proposed in the netherlands. The proposed bill suggested that refusing to have a "smart" meter installed could get you 6 months of prison AND a fine of up to € 17.000 (± $22.500). Luckily this bill didn't pass.
That may be true for some lists, but definitely not all. I'm running a confirmed opt-in list that sends out 40.000 mails every day. Every NDR is processed automatically and sets a flag. If an user gets 4 flags within 10 days, the email-adress is unsubscribed automatically.
If legitimate lists have too much invalid addresses on them, the lists value decreases. It may even affect sending mail to the addresses that are still valid as spamfilters may think that my mailserver is just bruteforcing those addresses.
Indeed. The car's location will be known to the authorities 24x7. Combine that with the fact that all your movements with public transportation are soon tracked with the chip-card, and it means that the government knows where you are any time of the day unless you're walking.
But how the hell do you accidentally vote on a piece of legislation? They were running down a list. "Who agrees to point 1, please raise your hands. Okay. Who agrees to point 2, please raise your hands." Somewhere around item 8, the labour party mistakenly thought they were agreeing to another point. And just one second after the chairwoman had counted, the party corrected. But then it was too late, because "rules are rules".
However, the article above is a little misleading. The law proposed does not allow every single ISP to block whatever THEY like for "network maintenance reasons". It allows people with certain beliefs to use specialized providers like www.filternet.nl to keep them away from pornography and other things that their religious beliefs forbid. So it's not a type of censorship that this law could allow, but this law is supposed to enable end users to say "please filter my internet to keep my conscience clear". The choice of the end user him-/herself.
If I am deliberately sharing my internet connection, I AM a defacto service provider. Tell that to the SWAT guy that's pointing his Heckler & Koch MP5 to your head in your own bedroom at 4am.
A Car GPS system like TomTom is used by a small fraction of the population as compared to iPhones or other smart phones. I know about 4 people with an iPhone and dozens with car GPS.
A lot of those people use TomTom because they don't know where they are, implying that they just moved or are on a trip. I even turn my Garmin on every single day when I drive to work. I known damn well where I am, and I know 10 alternative routes. But I can't look over hills and around corners to see if there's a traffic jam. That's why the traffic information supplied by my GPS is more than welcome.
Well it does say can be required to, that doesn't mean they can't be convinced, paid, or otherwise motivated to filter the Internet.
Indeed.
Falkvinge.net says the exact opposite of what I read dozens of times today. All articles I read today say that that very same advocate general, mister Cruz Villalón, said that if individual countries make laws requiring ISPs to filter the web, there's nothing the EU can/will do. Only without those local laws, it would be illegal.
I could already block experts exchange... using greasemonkey to remove all entries that link EE. I recently unblocked EEm because using the google "in cache" function usually shows some useful hints. Just wondering why google doesn't punish EE for serving other data to googlebot than what users get.
So, about 50% of the IE6 users worldwide are chinese... Actually, the top 10 countries with the highest IE6 usage are non-english... and they didn't think of approaching IE6-users in their own language? *sigh*
Indeed. Years ago the address bar was even re-introducted on popup windows to make it harder for badguys. I hate that it takes the space, but it is neccesary to protect users. TFA suggests it'll be optional to hide the address bar, I think it's just foolish.
Sorry, I don't agree with that. MSIE may be insecure, but as long as it's updated through WSUS it's definitely more secure than the firefox some random user installed and forgot to update for about 2 years. So unless centrally managed, I agree that other browsers should not be installed. (This goes for any part of software, not only browsers.)
it crosses the line to hacking and that's criminal to in most jurisdictions. Nope, it's not. It would be if you or I backdoored someone elses hardware, but multibillion dollar organisations can pull this off.
That's not so bad. You're only missing the first few letters. I've been reading slashdot on my thunderbird 2 rss for years. With the new design, the sidebar is positioned across the middle of the text. (I'm running Centos 5.5 with the newest Thunderbird 2 release. And no, i'm not switching to TB3)
It's not all FUD... open source is actually a security risk... for mr. Chang's wallet. Remember the lawsuit against clamav? And of course, there's the fact that if everyone ditched windows for an open source OS, trend micro wouldn't have many customers anymore.
I don't think they will bring it over to the US by default. Or at least not voluntarily. The main reason why cellphone manufacturers switch to connectors that are 0.05mm smaller than the previous version, is to sell more spare adapters. This practice makes them a lot of money.
I think that they will only switch to one common standard if (a) having two production lines for european and other phones gets more expensive than having one (b) the government forces cellphone manufacturers to do so.
It's mandatory. I'm not sure if it was actually a law or "if you cellphone manufacturers don't work this out, we'll make it a law"-kinda situation. But I do remember that they were left not much of a choice.
Normally, I would agree with you: let demand meet supply. But somehow, this hasn't worked in the cellphone industry. In my company we have about 50 cellphones, all of them Nokia's. For some reason, these phones have 4 different types of charger connectors. With a simple converter cable ( http://tinyurl.com/39xhy98 ), we don't have to replace chargers that are built in cars.
If an 8-year old adapter can be used on any nokia phone as long as you use the right converter cable, I can't think of a reason to switch connectors except for selling more spare adapters. Sure, they can improve the cable once in a few years, if they actually improve it. But I wouldn't call switching from a 2.50mm connector to a 2.45mm connector an improvement, but rather making it incompatible on purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably because assure and ensure both translate to "verzekeren" in Dutch.
Yup. Exactly how it happened in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, we have these license plate scanners around all big cities. They were installed after politicians promised they would never store license plates that weren't linked to serious crimes. Just a few years later, ALL license plates are stored for a longer period.
And know what the good part is? Real criminals don't fear the camera's at all. Last week a report on this subject was published: http://goo.gl/W8OF8 . The total of 230 camera's placed on just 40km of highway around Rotterdam generate more than 10.000 notifications every single day. About 60% of these notifications were discarded. If any action was taken, it was mostly people who had outstanding tickets, a tax debt, or whose license was revoked.
the Internet is not just the new "media". It is also a channel for private communication.
Up to a few years back, private peer-to-peer communication (paper letters) was really private. (At least in The Netherlands we have strict laws on secrecy of correspondence.) Nowadays, chats, emails and everything else is being monitored.
If that is the whole problem, why not rename the https protocol to "secure"?
I personally don't think it's a bad idea to make secure:// an alias of https://./ The only problem would be that just using https does not tell anything about the connections actual security.
I agree, the 14 years was pretty generous.
When XP was originally released, I was running some SuSE 7.x version. The first 7.x version was released in september 2000. The last 7.x version went end-of-life in december 2003, meaning a support span of 3 years and 3 months. Fedora has something like a thirteen month support span, depending on the release date of version x+2. Only RHEL appears to be supported for 10 years.
There is one big difference: all Linux distros release a new version every 1-2 years. The next windows release took 6 years, but the next windows release that was really usable in companies took a few years more.
Or thermostats controllable by your electric monopoly.
In fact, that was proposed in the netherlands. The proposed bill suggested that refusing to have a "smart" meter installed could get you 6 months of prison AND a fine of up to € 17.000 (± $22.500). Luckily this bill didn't pass.
You wouldn't.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cops+plant+drugs+on+suspect
One word: Diginotar.
That may be true for some lists, but definitely not all.
I'm running a confirmed opt-in list that sends out 40.000 mails every day. Every NDR is processed automatically and sets a flag. If an user gets 4 flags within 10 days, the email-adress is unsubscribed automatically.
If legitimate lists have too much invalid addresses on them, the lists value decreases. It may even affect sending mail to the addresses that are still valid as spamfilters may think that my mailserver is just bruteforcing those addresses.
Indeed. The car's location will be known to the authorities 24x7. Combine that with the fact that all your movements with public transportation are soon tracked with the chip-card, and it means that the government knows where you are any time of the day unless you're walking.
But how the hell do you accidentally vote on a piece of legislation?
They were running down a list.
"Who agrees to point 1, please raise your hands. Okay. Who agrees to point 2, please raise your hands." Somewhere around item 8, the labour party mistakenly thought they were agreeing to another point. And just one second after the chairwoman had counted, the party corrected. But then it was too late, because "rules are rules".
However, the article above is a little misleading. The law proposed does not allow every single ISP to block whatever THEY like for "network maintenance reasons". It allows people with certain beliefs to use specialized providers like www.filternet.nl to keep them away from pornography and other things that their religious beliefs forbid. So it's not a type of censorship that this law could allow, but this law is supposed to enable end users to say "please filter my internet to keep my conscience clear". The choice of the end user him-/herself.
No, they're jealous that it's not livre des faces and twitteur
If I am deliberately sharing my internet connection, I AM a defacto service provider.
Tell that to the SWAT guy that's pointing his Heckler & Koch MP5 to your head in your own bedroom at 4am.
A Car GPS system like TomTom is used by a small fraction of the population as compared to iPhones or other smart phones.
I know about 4 people with an iPhone and dozens with car GPS.
A lot of those people use TomTom because they don't know where they are, implying that they just moved or are on a trip.
I even turn my Garmin on every single day when I drive to work. I known damn well where I am, and I know 10 alternative routes. But I can't look over hills and around corners to see if there's a traffic jam. That's why the traffic information supplied by my GPS is more than welcome.
Got one that doesn't call home, btw.
Indeed.
Falkvinge.net says the exact opposite of what I read dozens of times today. All articles I read today say that that very same advocate general, mister Cruz Villalón, said that if individual countries make laws requiring ISPs to filter the web, there's nothing the EU can/will do. Only without those local laws, it would be illegal.
Some of my sources:
Translation of tweakers.net
Translation of nu.nl
I could already block experts exchange... using greasemonkey to remove all entries that link EE. I recently unblocked EEm because using the google "in cache" function usually shows some useful hints.
Just wondering why google doesn't punish EE for serving other data to googlebot than what users get.
So, about 50% of the IE6 users worldwide are chinese... Actually, the top 10 countries with the highest IE6 usage are non-english... and they didn't think of approaching IE6-users in their own language? *sigh*
Indeed. Years ago the address bar was even re-introducted on popup windows to make it harder for badguys. I hate that it takes the space, but it is neccesary to protect users. TFA suggests it'll be optional to hide the address bar, I think it's just foolish.
Sorry, I don't agree with that. MSIE may be insecure, but as long as it's updated through WSUS it's definitely more secure than the firefox some random user installed and forgot to update for about 2 years. So unless centrally managed, I agree that other browsers should not be installed. (This goes for any part of software, not only browsers.)
it crosses the line to hacking and that's criminal to in most jurisdictions.
Nope, it's not. It would be if you or I backdoored someone elses hardware, but multibillion dollar organisations can pull this off.
That's not so bad. You're only missing the first few letters. I've been reading slashdot on my thunderbird 2 rss for years. With the new design, the sidebar is positioned across the middle of the text. (I'm running Centos 5.5 with the newest Thunderbird 2 release. And no, i'm not switching to TB3)
It's not all FUD... open source is actually a security risk... for mr. Chang's wallet.
Remember the lawsuit against clamav? And of course, there's the fact that if everyone ditched windows for an open source OS, trend micro wouldn't have many customers anymore.
It is your mother if the manufacturer programmed it to go off every day at 7.00, even if you don't have school/work.
Your alarm clock goes off because YOU instructed it to. Not because someone else is enforcing their habits and/or rules on you.
I don't think they will bring it over to the US by default. Or at least not voluntarily. The main reason why cellphone manufacturers switch to connectors that are 0.05mm smaller than the previous version, is to sell more spare adapters. This practice makes them a lot of money.
I think that they will only switch to one common standard if (a) having two production lines for european and other phones gets more expensive than having one (b) the government forces cellphone manufacturers to do so.
It's mandatory. I'm not sure if it was actually a law or "if you cellphone manufacturers don't work this out, we'll make it a law"-kinda situation. But I do remember that they were left not much of a choice.
Normally, I would agree with you: let demand meet supply. But somehow, this hasn't worked in the cellphone industry. In my company we have about 50 cellphones, all of them Nokia's. For some reason, these phones have 4 different types of charger connectors. With a simple converter cable ( http://tinyurl.com/39xhy98 ), we don't have to replace chargers that are built in cars.
If an 8-year old adapter can be used on any nokia phone as long as you use the right converter cable, I can't think of a reason to switch connectors except for selling more spare adapters. Sure, they can improve the cable once in a few years, if they actually improve it. But I wouldn't call switching from a 2.50mm connector to a 2.45mm connector an improvement, but rather making it incompatible on purpose.