Rooting an iPhone does not give you full control over the device. At best, you get to run your code with the highest privilege, but you are still stuck with an opaque proprietary OS that will spy on you around the clock. No amount of rooting will help you to get rid of malicious "features" programmed by Apple itself.
Hey that's fine, let's just turn this into an advantage by taking every opportunity to point out what is wrong with Apple's software environment. I'll start.
The biggest piece of malware running on your iPhone is the OS itself. You cannot remove it, you cannot disable it, you cannot cut out the parts you don't need. iPhone is, at best, a play-toy: nothing serious should be done with that device. Apple can see everything you are doing with your iPhone at will. Apple is literally looking over your shoulder when you bank, browse porn, text your friends, or do anything else. How do I know they do it? Elementary, Watson. Spying is cheap, it is legal, and they have every incentive to do it. If ever shit hits the fan and there is a big news story about Apple spying out and misusing personal data, Apple will just counter with a BS campaign about how they use your personal information to serve your needs better (they don't) and how this incident is a chance mishap (it's not: it is very much an integral part of their marketing strategy). Will they get in trouble? Not really. The worst thing that could happen to them is a slap on the wrist, a la Sony rootkit fiasco, so they'll give away a dozen of free apps to every wronged customer, and, to add insult to injury, the same apps will happily continue to spy on their users.
No, I mean, anonymity on such a grand scale would be really awesome, but, again, I just don't see the urgency. It's not like we ever had any cheap ways to be anonymous. Internet with darknets seems like a definite step forward compared to the time just before Internet. As you shrewdly pointed out, there is now a very nice, cheap way to be very anonymous as long as you don't mind being a petty criminal. Infectious botnets live and evolve mainly for that reason. Your example of a political witch hunt (which I know is very real) does not really help, as the hunters are crazy psychos who like making it a very close and personal affair. That is, if someone has already the power and the desire to hunt witches, they will get right on it and will be extremely successful, anonymous Internet or not. Because every-fucking-one of us is a witch. Every one of us is lighter than a duck, so we muct be a witch. Just like a man of God said: If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
I just wonder, is this that big of a problem? Connection anonymity, I mean? I don't think it was in the Internet's design, but I could easily be wrong. IMHO, being able to use free hardware/software to encrypt our calls point-to-point is way more important, as that would make the audio tap very expensive, just as it should be. They would literally have to outlaw connecting to the Internet with a free device, or go back to the good old ways.
I see what you are saying. I do use Comcast, so this issue affects me personally. I still hope that any major ISP that tries to pull something like network non-neutrality will go down the way of AOL. It would be too easy to show that they are not what we call ISP anymore.
At a fundamental level they're very much related. You have large, entrenched organizations that own content and, in some cases run broadband networks
Like who? News Corp? They run a broad band network with cables and routers that supplies tcp/ip to its subscribers? Which big content provider are you talking about? The only blur here is the one created by the Big Content. If I run a bunch of apache servers, then I am a content provider and free to self-censor however I like. If I sell internet (tcp/ip) access, then I am an ISP and should route packets in the spirit of net neutrality.
The line should be drawn between ISPs and everyone else. If I serve content via apache from by home cable internet connection, it should be the duty of my ISP to make the best effort to route my packets efficiently regardless of their source and destination. I am not an ISP, however, so I may opt to censor myself in certain areas, and this has nothing to do with NN. There really aren't any big issues with NN. You are an ISP. If a portion of the network close to you goes crazy and starts DDOSing or do something as retarded, throttle it down and then unplug it until it is sane. Otherwise, just route the damn packets.
I agree. What TFS describes is just an instance of self-censorship. And if I run my own content servers, I can elect to block China, or 173.194.255.255, or that one guy in the basement, or everyone, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with the NN, since I am not an ISP. As long as we have the actual NN and people are allowed to employ P2P applications, my blocks (counter to intuition) will become less relevant as my content becomes more popular. So really: nothing of value was lost.
The clock is ticking, too. Without Net Neutrality laws very soon, the Internet is going to become a dystopic mutation of what we thought it might become a decade or two ago. It will become the Bizarro-world, opposite of an open forum where anyone can reach a wide audience without having to pass through the gates of money and power. It will do for the free exchange of ideas and information what Fox News has done for news.
I like being an optimist about this one. Everyone who makes internet work is completely hooked on it, especially on the freedom of expression bit. It looks like most people who actually develop and maintain internet are some of our biggest allies. Anyway, it's too late. Majority of people here in the US already know what wealth of information and interaction they can buy from a good ISP, and they know how much it costs. The consumer base is moving on, and there is absolutely nothing TV can do to reverse this process.
What if they scan his brain and 70 years from now this data will be uploaded into an artificial brain. And at that point Murdoch II will uncover an old hidden will that will transfer the corporation back to him, and then he will resume normal operations for the rest of human existence.
What is that supposed to mean? I do know the difference: I think that all created works should belong to the public domain, and I don't use this term in any kind of legal sense. Legally, public domain is a different animal in different jurisdictions, but that should not prevent us from talking about the public domain: the body of work that we can, as a matter of fact, freely share in and improve upon.
This is where the FSF, along with much of the network community, has gotten off on the wrong foot with some of these hardware technologies, in particular Trusted Computing. These technologies allow you to make credible commitments to limit your own freedom. You can promise to run only certain software to handle certain data, and failure to honor your promise can be detected.
FSF has no beef with hypervisors or signed binaries, they just want the users to have the keys to the engine. Please explain how not being able to sign your own binaries on your own hardware is benefiting you, the user. You could say: "I would not be able to get the software I need because no one would distribute it on these conditions", but that argument falls flat on its face the very moment you look at the actual software and hardware market. You are going to pay for the software being written, right? So you could as well pay for free software being written. Besides having full access to your hardware, you will almost certainly cut the development costs, if only due to your programmers being able to see the entire code base they are supposed to maintain.
If those few bricks make the structure actually work, then yes, I will claim it as my own. What? I can't profit off of it? Oh well, I'll just keep my ideas to myself.
Please, do. With millions of people connected to the internet, we won't miss you. There will always be enterprising companies and individuals who will invent new useful things: enough incentive for that is provided by the first mover advantage, not to mention many people's natural desire to be recognized as experts in their field. Years will run by while competitors are struggling to reverse-engineer and understand original inventions, and during that time inventors will have a de facto monopoly, with none of the terrible economic consequences of copyright and patent laws.
Saying one is standing on the shoulders of others and therefore has no right to lay claim to their work is just an excuse to leach off of others hard work.
Stop using English, stop using Mathematics. As you say, you have no excuse. Get off your ass and come up with your own languages.
And seeing others get the recognition and rewards that come from claiming one's work is inspiring: whether it's seeing become a billionaire or going down in history as the person that made the breakthrough.
Of course, it is entirely possible to get recognition for and to monetize free software and free art, and we see it happening everywhere these days. This argument is completely misplaced.
The iPhone is a perfect example of what he actually said because the locked-down platform is seen by many of the users as an advantage of something more open like Android.
Many iPhone users don't even know what "locked-down" means, so whatever advantage the masses see in iPhones, it's not the fact that they cannot control them or know what they do. This is not a strawman: you just have nothing else to say. "In fact, many people see locked-down hardware, and software too, as an advantage" Again, what is this advantage? Would it disappear if the platform was open?
It's a spectrum, but there is a definite difference (in how your computer treats these files) between a correct elf binary with execution bit set and a plain text file. People who know the difference know not to download *.exe while looking for music, for example.
In fact, many people see locked-down hardware, and software too, as an advantage
Give us examples. Give us an example of a platform where the very fact that the owner is locked out is beneficial to the owner. It is true that some proprietary software may be seen as better on technical grounds, or even be cheaper to maintain, but name one instance where opening up the code and the hardware specs would be detrimental to the device's owner.
People do understand the difference, they just overwhelming don't care.
No they don't. By and large, people don't understand what "software" is, or how "data" is different from "executable code", much less the difference between open and proprietary solutions and the way it affects them as consumers and users. Go talk to just about anyone out of the field. They all carry around smartphones: general purpose computers with internet access, but they have NO idea how or why they work. At the very best, they've learned that they can download "apps" from a "store".
Stop pirating English. You didn't help to create it in any significant way, so why do you feel entitled to use it in communication? The idea that you alone labored to create a piece of software or work of art is just a fiction in your head. You are merely adding a few bricks on top of a gigantic skyscraper, but then you want to claim all floors above them as your property? Nice try.
IMHO, this is good news. Now more than ever before, we need people to understand the difference between open and locked-down hardware, and to help them make rational choices while shopping. To me, it is unthinkable that my personal computers should be remote-controlled by a third party, but the crowds are only beginning to wake up to the pain that proprietary platforms are causing them.
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Rooting an iPhone does not give you full control over the device. At best, you get to run your code with the highest privilege, but you are still stuck with an opaque proprietary OS that will spy on you around the clock. No amount of rooting will help you to get rid of malicious "features" programmed by Apple itself.
Hey that's fine, let's just turn this into an advantage by taking every opportunity to point out what is wrong with Apple's software environment. I'll start.
The biggest piece of malware running on your iPhone is the OS itself. You cannot remove it, you cannot disable it, you cannot cut out the parts you don't need. iPhone is, at best, a play-toy: nothing serious should be done with that device. Apple can see everything you are doing with your iPhone at will. Apple is literally looking over your shoulder when you bank, browse porn, text your friends, or do anything else. How do I know they do it? Elementary, Watson. Spying is cheap, it is legal, and they have every incentive to do it. If ever shit hits the fan and there is a big news story about Apple spying out and misusing personal data, Apple will just counter with a BS campaign about how they use your personal information to serve your needs better (they don't) and how this incident is a chance mishap (it's not: it is very much an integral part of their marketing strategy). Will they get in trouble? Not really. The worst thing that could happen to them is a slap on the wrist, a la Sony rootkit fiasco, so they'll give away a dozen of free apps to every wronged customer, and, to add insult to injury, the same apps will happily continue to spy on their users.
I second Emacs and vim. You could also try R. Or you could just use less.
No, I mean, anonymity on such a grand scale would be really awesome, but, again, I just don't see the urgency. It's not like we ever had any cheap ways to be anonymous. Internet with darknets seems like a definite step forward compared to the time just before Internet. As you shrewdly pointed out, there is now a very nice, cheap way to be very anonymous as long as you don't mind being a petty criminal. Infectious botnets live and evolve mainly for that reason. Your example of a political witch hunt (which I know is very real) does not really help, as the hunters are crazy psychos who like making it a very close and personal affair. That is, if someone has already the power and the desire to hunt witches, they will get right on it and will be extremely successful, anonymous Internet or not. Because every-fucking-one of us is a witch. Every one of us is lighter than a duck, so we muct be a witch. Just like a man of God said: If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
I just wonder, is this that big of a problem? Connection anonymity, I mean? I don't think it was in the Internet's design, but I could easily be wrong. IMHO, being able to use free hardware/software to encrypt our calls point-to-point is way more important, as that would make the audio tap very expensive, just as it should be. They would literally have to outlaw connecting to the Internet with a free device, or go back to the good old ways.
I see what you are saying. I do use Comcast, so this issue affects me personally. I still hope that any major ISP that tries to pull something like network non-neutrality will go down the way of AOL. It would be too easy to show that they are not what we call ISP anymore.
Nicely said. It looks more and more like Windows and OS X are systems for people stupid and impulsive enough to just go with whatever is in the ads.
Some say, educating and liberating women also helps.
At a fundamental level they're very much related. You have large, entrenched organizations that own content and, in some cases run broadband networks
Like who? News Corp? They run a broad band network with cables and routers that supplies tcp/ip to its subscribers? Which big content provider are you talking about? The only blur here is the one created by the Big Content. If I run a bunch of apache servers, then I am a content provider and free to self-censor however I like. If I sell internet (tcp/ip) access, then I am an ISP and should route packets in the spirit of net neutrality.
The line should be drawn between ISPs and everyone else. If I serve content via apache from by home cable internet connection, it should be the duty of my ISP to make the best effort to route my packets efficiently regardless of their source and destination. I am not an ISP, however, so I may opt to censor myself in certain areas, and this has nothing to do with NN. There really aren't any big issues with NN. You are an ISP. If a portion of the network close to you goes crazy and starts DDOSing or do something as retarded, throttle it down and then unplug it until it is sane. Otherwise, just route the damn packets.
I agree. What TFS describes is just an instance of self-censorship. And if I run my own content servers, I can elect to block China, or 173.194.255.255, or that one guy in the basement, or everyone, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with the NN, since I am not an ISP. As long as we have the actual NN and people are allowed to employ P2P applications, my blocks (counter to intuition) will become less relevant as my content becomes more popular. So really: nothing of value was lost.
Another one for Gnofract. The customization options are crazy good.
If allowed to live long enough, every mathematician will hit his or her prime infinitely often.
The clock is ticking, too. Without Net Neutrality laws very soon, the Internet is going to become a dystopic mutation of what we thought it might become a decade or two ago. It will become the Bizarro-world, opposite of an open forum where anyone can reach a wide audience without having to pass through the gates of money and power. It will do for the free exchange of ideas and information what Fox News has done for news.
I like being an optimist about this one. Everyone who makes internet work is completely hooked on it, especially on the freedom of expression bit. It looks like most people who actually develop and maintain internet are some of our biggest allies. Anyway, it's too late. Majority of people here in the US already know what wealth of information and interaction they can buy from a good ISP, and they know how much it costs. The consumer base is moving on, and there is absolutely nothing TV can do to reverse this process.
What if they scan his brain and 70 years from now this data will be uploaded into an artificial brain. And at that point Murdoch II will uncover an old hidden will that will transfer the corporation back to him, and then he will resume normal operations for the rest of human existence.
What is that supposed to mean? I do know the difference: I think that all created works should belong to the public domain, and I don't use this term in any kind of legal sense. Legally, public domain is a different animal in different jurisdictions, but that should not prevent us from talking about the public domain: the body of work that we can, as a matter of fact, freely share in and improve upon.
This is where the FSF, along with much of the network community, has gotten off on the wrong foot with some of these hardware technologies, in particular Trusted Computing. These technologies allow you to make credible commitments to limit your own freedom. You can promise to run only certain software to handle certain data, and failure to honor your promise can be detected.
FSF has no beef with hypervisors or signed binaries, they just want the users to have the keys to the engine. Please explain how not being able to sign your own binaries on your own hardware is benefiting you, the user. You could say: "I would not be able to get the software I need because no one would distribute it on these conditions", but that argument falls flat on its face the very moment you look at the actual software and hardware market. You are going to pay for the software being written, right? So you could as well pay for free software being written. Besides having full access to your hardware, you will almost certainly cut the development costs, if only due to your programmers being able to see the entire code base they are supposed to maintain.
If those few bricks make the structure actually work, then yes, I will claim it as my own. What? I can't profit off of it? Oh well, I'll just keep my ideas to myself.
Please, do. With millions of people connected to the internet, we won't miss you. There will always be enterprising companies and individuals who will invent new useful things: enough incentive for that is provided by the first mover advantage, not to mention many people's natural desire to be recognized as experts in their field. Years will run by while competitors are struggling to reverse-engineer and understand original inventions, and during that time inventors will have a de facto monopoly, with none of the terrible economic consequences of copyright and patent laws.
Saying one is standing on the shoulders of others and therefore has no right to lay claim to their work is just an excuse to leach off of others hard work.
Stop using English, stop using Mathematics. As you say, you have no excuse. Get off your ass and come up with your own languages.
And seeing others get the recognition and rewards that come from claiming one's work is inspiring: whether it's seeing become a billionaire or going down in history as the person that made the breakthrough.
Of course, it is entirely possible to get recognition for and to monetize free software and free art, and we see it happening everywhere these days. This argument is completely misplaced.
The iPhone is a perfect example of what he actually said because the locked-down platform is seen by many of the users as an advantage of something more open like Android.
Many iPhone users don't even know what "locked-down" means, so whatever advantage the masses see in iPhones, it's not the fact that they cannot control them or know what they do. This is not a strawman: you just have nothing else to say. "In fact, many people see locked-down hardware, and software too, as an advantage" Again, what is this advantage? Would it disappear if the platform was open?
It's a spectrum, but there is a definite difference (in how your computer treats these files) between a correct elf binary with execution bit set and a plain text file. People who know the difference know not to download *.exe while looking for music, for example.
In fact, many people see locked-down hardware, and software too, as an advantage
Give us examples. Give us an example of a platform where the very fact that the owner is locked out is beneficial to the owner. It is true that some proprietary software may be seen as better on technical grounds, or even be cheaper to maintain, but name one instance where opening up the code and the hardware specs would be detrimental to the device's owner.
People do understand the difference, they just overwhelming don't care.
No they don't. By and large, people don't understand what "software" is, or how "data" is different from "executable code", much less the difference between open and proprietary solutions and the way it affects them as consumers and users. Go talk to just about anyone out of the field. They all carry around smartphones: general purpose computers with internet access, but they have NO idea how or why they work. At the very best, they've learned that they can download "apps" from a "store".
Stop pirating English. You didn't help to create it in any significant way, so why do you feel entitled to use it in communication? The idea that you alone labored to create a piece of software or work of art is just a fiction in your head. You are merely adding a few bricks on top of a gigantic skyscraper, but then you want to claim all floors above them as your property? Nice try.
IMHO, this is good news. Now more than ever before, we need people to understand the difference between open and locked-down hardware, and to help them make rational choices while shopping. To me, it is unthinkable that my personal computers should be remote-controlled by a third party, but the crowds are only beginning to wake up to the pain that proprietary platforms are causing them.
Who cares about robot babies? I am more concerned about robot babes.