Just curious... why doesn't wikipedia create a new hostname (e.g., "safe.wikipedia.org"), and then create a process (it's good at that, right?) for promoting content into it?
Then, schools / parents / etc. could blacklist the "main" site as much as they like, and whitelist the "safe" one, WITHOUT altering the main site at all?
""" The goal of this protocol is to allow a user to express their personal preference regarding tracking to each server and web application that they communicate with via HTTP, thereby allowing each service to either adjust their behavior to meet the user's expectations or reach a separate agreement with the user to satisfy all parties.
Key to that notion of expression is that it must reflect the user's preference, not the preference of some institutional or network-imposed mechanism outside the user's control. Although some controlled network environments, such as public access terminals or managed corporate intranets, might impose restrictions on the use or configuration of installed user agents, such that a user might only have access to user agents with a predetermined preference enabled, the user is at least able to choose whether to make use of those user agents. In contrast, if a user brings their own Web-enabled device to a library or cafe with wireless Internet access, the expectation will be that their chosen user agent and personal preferences regarding Web site behavior will not be altered by the network environment, aside from blanket limitations on what sites can or cannot be accessed through that network. """
Considering the furious debates within Australia's technology communities...
I think you mean among the teen-boys-with-too-much-time-and-Internet-access community. Australia's technology communities have bigger collective fish to fry.
Jellyfish heaven In the big blue sea Where it's too cold to surf And it's too warm to ski Jellyfish Heaven Is full of dead Jellyfish
People always saying "I won't eat jellyfish 'Cause they ain't got no bones And you can't make a wish" People always shouting "Don't go swimming near those things!" But when they're close to dying You can hear them sing
Jellyfish heaven Is not like Japan Jellyfish heaven Is not like Thailand Jellyfish heaven Is a lot Like LA
Additionally, ISPs like Internode, which are the nerds choice of ISP, who also own a significant amount of infrastructure, and were active in dissenting against the prior censorship plans, have been told flat out that they will not be offered such favourable contracts for their infrastructure, in the same week these were awarded.
Uh, I loves the Internode, but they don't own the kind of infrastructure that's important here -- last-mile.
While Google is certainly involved, it's a lot more than them, with folks from many companies (including Skype, at least pre-MSFT) participating; see: http://rtc-web.alvestrand.com/home/participants
Fanboy? check. Paranoid delusional? check. Assert lots of absurdities with no basis? check. Good to see the Slashdot editors are maintaining their standards high here.
This is kind of interesting, because robots.txt isn't a standard, in the de jure sense, and neither is it issued by a recognised organisation like the IETF or W3C; it's just a thing that people do, really. As such, it may be easier to claim that it
On the other side, RFC2616 says that GET shouldn't have any side effects from the perspective of the client, and entering a contract is certainly a side effect!
As we get more litigious, it seems like protocols in the technical sense will also be protocols in the legal sense. P3P and content ratings systems come to mind as well.
"an honest attempt to create a standard Web interface for everyone, no matter what browser is used."
Standardising the trappings of the browser isn't what the Web is about. It's about common protocols and formats, not UIs, and trying to lock people into kind of viewport onto the Web will just lead to more browser wars and disenfranchised users (e.g., mobile, screen readers, etc.) that the Web -- and indeed RSS (!) -- were intended to avoid.
After spending a week in Melbourne, I found myself scouring the net back in San Francisco for episodes of John Safran vs. God -- probably the best television I've ever seen, although it doesn't have much of a chance of ever playing in Bush's America.
And yes, I bought the DVD (AFTER watching everything on BT; the quality was better, and I wanted to support John), even though I had to ship it overseas. So did a friend I introduced to it.
There have been small steps in this direction, most notably the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. Unfortunately P3P, as it's known, is limited to relatively simple matters of online privacy, ignoring other kinds of online contracts like software license agreements, ISP policies, and terms of service contracts.
That's true, and it's because it took P3P about five years to figure out the appropriate terminology and concepts relating to online privacy. The technology is pretty simple; its the range of possibilities (the ontology, if you will) that's so hard.
This is just like coming up with a universal scheme for addresses and other common business structures; it's possible, but getting enough people to agree on the details to get momentum takes a lot of time and effort (see UBL).
Good question; lots of people have answered that it's easy to turn it off in the event of a failure, but what happens when you suddenly lose your cheap, plentiful source of power?
One of the effects of this plan is that we'll become more dependent on power, and therefore will be less able to cope without it. Presumedly, there would be some redundancy in the system, but it would still require shipping massive amounts of power around terrestrially. If those systems weren't tested often, you'd have to wonder how reliable they'd be.
Actually, the pattent specifically and repeatedly says "World Wide Web". Contrary to popular belief, the WWW is NOT the Internet. The WWW is a subset of the Internet. DHCP would not apply, since it's not part of the WWW. FTP would not apply. NNTP, SCP, UUCP, RCP, SMTP, or any protocol other than HTTP would be outside the scope of this patent.
The Web is NOT just HTTP; a much better yardstick of whether something's on the Web is whether it has a URI. There are three major components to the Web; Identifiers (URIs), Formats (HTML) and Protocols (HTTP). Of the three, Protocols and Formats can be switched in and out, but the general consensus is that if it doesn't have a URI, it's not "on the Web."
The TAG is noodling on these issues as we speak. The Web has also been described as an "information space," which is nice and vague (nice for the purposes of fighting patents, that is).
Yes, it does. Once you're used to Quark, you can never, never go back; it is the god of its particular niche. It defines the niche.
Unfortunately, it's produced by one of the most greedy, stupid, self-defeating companies existant; they go out of their way to piss their own customers off. It's a real testament to the quality of the Quark the product that people will put up with Quark the company, despite there being reasonable alternatives available.
[X] is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as online control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of [X] could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.
There's a reason for this language... these systems (Aircraft control systems are the best example) are engineered on a totally different level; what we mean by "reliable" in this community is laughable in comparison.
Unfortunately, researchers without this background will be using Windows and Linux for these applications more and more, and will be inevitably surprised when they kill someone. Either that, or they decide it's a calculated risk.
I'm extremely wary about the new prefetching feature in Mozilla. The Web caching community has tried this from about every angle, but the general consensus of professionals (with one notable exception) is that prefetching is a bad approach.
For one thing, it assumes free bandwidth; not such a hot idea in a lot of places (e.g., Australia, where you pay per Mb).
I've also had network and server administrators calling me in a panic because they're being flooded with requests from a single machine - whoops.
Prefetching is generally pretty antisocial; it says "my browsing experience is so important, damn your network, damn your servers, I'm getting it all!"
This doesn't mean that it isn't of great interest to the research community, of course; go to any caching-related conference and you'll see earnest proposals for prefetching (along with yet more hyper-optimised replacement algorithms... *sigh*).
Specifically, I'm concerned that the Mozilla implementation won't fare any better; in one way, it's better that it uses explicit prefetching hints (rather than some "optimized" algortithm... I hate heuristics), but OTOH it's horrible; this is ripe for abuse by over-zealous webmasters. I wonder how long it'll be before we see a demo of a DOS attack based on this...
Also, not providing a preference UI to control this isn't so bright; Mozilla has matured past the "world is my debugger" stage, at least in this respect. There are legitimate reasons for turning this off; in fact, I think there's a strong argument for turning this off by default.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious... why doesn't wikipedia create a new hostname (e.g., "safe.wikipedia.org"), and then create a process (it's good at that, right?) for promoting content into it?
Then, schools / parents / etc. could blacklist the "main" site as much as they like, and whitelist the "safe" one, WITHOUT altering the main site at all?
As Roy pointed out to them on Twitter, this is a blatant violation of the spec; DNT is designed to reflect the USER's preference, not a default.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-tracking-dnt-20120313/#determining
"""
The goal of this protocol is to allow a user to express their personal preference regarding tracking to each server and web application that they communicate with via HTTP, thereby allowing each service to either adjust their behavior to meet the user's expectations or reach a separate agreement with the user to satisfy all parties.
Key to that notion of expression is that it must reflect the user's preference, not the preference of some institutional or network-imposed mechanism outside the user's control. Although some controlled network environments, such as public access terminals or managed corporate intranets, might impose restrictions on the use or configuration of installed user agents, such that a user might only have access to user agents with a predetermined preference enabled, the user is at least able to choose whether to make use of those user agents. In contrast, if a user brings their own Web-enabled device to a library or cafe with wireless Internet access, the expectation will be that their chosen user agent and personal preferences regarding Web site behavior will not be altered by the network environment, aside from blanket limitations on what sites can or cannot be accessed through that network.
"""
Actually, Jim Gettys has called for the adoption of SPDY (alongside the wider deployment of HTTP pipelining) to help mitigate bufferbloat.
Considering the furious debates within Australia's technology communities...
I think you mean among the teen-boys-with-too-much-time-and-Internet-access community. Australia's technology communities have bigger collective fish to fry.
Jellyfish heaven
In the big blue sea
Where it's too cold to surf
And it's too warm to ski
Jellyfish Heaven
Is full of dead
Jellyfish
People always saying
"I won't eat jellyfish
'Cause they ain't got no bones
And you can't make a wish"
People always shouting
"Don't go swimming near those things!"
But when they're close to dying
You can hear them sing
Jellyfish heaven
Is not like Japan
Jellyfish heaven
Is not like Thailand
Jellyfish heaven
Is a lot
Like LA
You *do* realise that the Intertubes go further than the US border, don't you?
Additionally, ISPs like Internode, which are the nerds choice of ISP, who also own a significant amount of infrastructure, and were active in dissenting against the prior censorship plans, have been told flat out that they will not be offered such favourable contracts for their infrastructure, in the same week these were awarded.
Uh, I loves the Internode, but they don't own the kind of infrastructure that's important here -- last-mile.
This is a standards effort coordinated between the IETF and W3C; see:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/charter/
http://www.w3.org/2010/12/webrtc-charter.html
While Google is certainly involved, it's a lot more than them, with folks from many companies (including Skype, at least pre-MSFT) participating; see:
http://rtc-web.alvestrand.com/home/participants
"However, as the article explains, Google sees enough value in WebP to add it as a supported image format for Picasa."
s/Google/Microsoft/
s/Picasa/Windows/
Nobody's calculated the terminal velocity of an iPhone 4 yet?
Slashdot, you're getting sad in your old age...
Because the Web is more than a browser.
Fanboy? check. Paranoid delusional? check. Assert lots of absurdities with no basis? check. Good to see the Slashdot editors are maintaining their standards high here.
Speaking of high...
Typical developers, using a program where a config file would do. I bet God used a consultant.
...be easier to claim that it doesn't count.
Must... use... preview...
This is kind of interesting, because robots.txt isn't a standard, in the de jure sense, and neither is it issued by a recognised organisation like the IETF or W3C; it's just a thing that people do, really. As such, it may be easier to claim that it
On the other side, RFC2616 says that GET shouldn't have any side effects from the perspective of the client, and entering a contract is certainly a side effect!
As we get more litigious, it seems like protocols in the technical sense will also be protocols in the legal sense. P3P and content ratings systems come to mind as well.
"an honest attempt to create a standard Web interface for everyone, no matter what browser is used."
Standardising the trappings of the browser isn't what the Web is about. It's about common protocols and formats, not UIs, and trying to lock people into kind of viewport onto the Web will just lead to more browser wars and disenfranchised users (e.g., mobile, screen readers, etc.) that the Web -- and indeed RSS (!) -- were intended to avoid.
e.g., Apple's Keychain. Of course, Microsoft has taken steps towards this, but no one trusts them.
After spending a week in Melbourne, I found myself scouring the net back in San Francisco for episodes of John Safran vs. God -- probably the best television I've ever seen, although it doesn't have much of a chance of ever playing in Bush's America.
And yes, I bought the DVD (AFTER watching everything on BT; the quality was better, and I wanted to support John), even though I had to ship it overseas. So did a friend I introduced to it.
There have been small steps in this direction, most notably the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. Unfortunately P3P, as it's known, is limited to relatively simple matters of online privacy, ignoring other kinds of online contracts like software license agreements, ISP policies, and terms of service contracts.
That's true, and it's because it took P3P about five years to figure out the appropriate terminology and concepts relating to online privacy. The technology is pretty simple; its the range of possibilities (the ontology, if you will) that's so hard.
This is just like coming up with a universal scheme for addresses and other common business structures; it's possible, but getting enough people to agree on the details to get momentum takes a lot of time and effort (see UBL).
1. Notice flagging readership, reduced ad revenue
2. Write audacious, insupportable story that will anger people
3. Submit to Slashdot
4. Profit!
Good question; lots of people have answered that it's easy to turn it off in the event of a failure, but what happens when you suddenly lose your cheap, plentiful source of power?
One of the effects of this plan is that we'll become more dependent on power, and therefore will be less able to cope without it. Presumedly, there would be some redundancy in the system, but it would still require shipping massive amounts of power around terrestrially. If those systems weren't tested often, you'd have to wonder how reliable they'd be.
The Web is NOT just HTTP; a much better yardstick of whether something's on the Web is whether it has a URI. There are three major components to the Web; Identifiers (URIs), Formats (HTML) and Protocols (HTTP). Of the three, Protocols and Formats can be switched in and out, but the general consensus is that if it doesn't have a URI, it's not "on the Web."
The TAG is noodling on these issues as we speak. The Web has also been described as an "information space," which is nice and vague (nice for the purposes of fighting patents, that is).
Yes, it does. Once you're used to Quark, you can never, never go back; it is the god of its particular niche. It defines the niche.
Unfortunately, it's produced by one of the most greedy, stupid, self-defeating companies existant; they go out of their way to piss their own customers off. It's a real testament to the quality of the Quark the product that people will put up with Quark the company, despite there being reasonable alternatives available.
This is a fairly common disclaimer:
There's a reason for this language... these systems (Aircraft control systems are the best example) are engineered on a totally different level; what we mean by "reliable" in this community is laughable in comparison.
Unfortunately, researchers without this background will be using Windows and Linux for these applications more and more, and will be inevitably surprised when they kill someone. Either that, or they decide it's a calculated risk.
*sigh*
I'm extremely wary about the new prefetching feature in Mozilla. The Web caching community has tried this from about every angle, but the general consensus of professionals (with one notable exception) is that prefetching is a bad approach.
For one thing, it assumes free bandwidth; not such a hot idea in a lot of places (e.g., Australia, where you pay per Mb).
I've also had network and server administrators calling me in a panic because they're being flooded with requests from a single machine - whoops.
Prefetching is generally pretty antisocial; it says "my browsing experience is so important, damn your network, damn your servers, I'm getting it all!"
This doesn't mean that it isn't of great interest to the research community, of course; go to any caching-related conference and you'll see earnest proposals for prefetching (along with yet more hyper-optimised replacement algorithms... *sigh*).
Specifically, I'm concerned that the Mozilla implementation won't fare any better; in one way, it's better that it uses explicit prefetching hints (rather than some "optimized" algortithm... I hate heuristics), but OTOH it's horrible; this is ripe for abuse by over-zealous webmasters. I wonder how long it'll be before we see a demo of a DOS attack based on this...
Also, not providing a preference UI to control this isn't so bright; Mozilla has matured past the "world is my debugger" stage, at least in this respect. There are legitimate reasons for turning this off; in fact, I think there's a strong argument for turning this off by default.