An X.509 certificate with multiple subjectAltName entries, sometimes called a UCC, works in all browsers but has two drawbacks. First, a multi-SAN certificate may be more expensive to obtain from a commercial certificate authority. Second, a multi-SAN certificate is designed for multiple sites operated by one entity, not a shared hosting environment with a bunch of unrelated sites behind one IP.
Using multiple certificates on port 443 of one IP address needs Server Name Indication (SNI). This works on both major third-party browsers (Firefox 2 and later and Chrome 6 and later) and all supported pack-in browsers (Safari 4 and later, IE on Windows Vista and later, and Android Browser/Android System WebView on Android 4 and later). The most commonly used browsers without SNI support are IE on Windows XP and Android Browser on Android 2.x, but those have no more than 1% usage share nowadays. I switched my own site away from GoDaddy to a different shared host in the fourth quarter of 2012 for two reasons: GoDaddy openly supported the PROTECTIP bill, and GoDaddy didn't offer SNI at the time.
When you type "slashdot.org" into your browser it goes to the HTTP site first and gets redirected to the HTTPS version.
This will work only until Slashdot starts sending Strict-Transport-Security headers or gets included in the ruleset for EFF's HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. Then you'll have to resort to what I do: http://example.com/
I had in fact been wondering for quite some time how come a technology oriented site isn't securing traffic with TLS.
Because until relatively recently (September 2013), ad networks did not support HTTPS. Thus browsers would block ads as mixed content. So in order to make the ads appear, Slashdot would redirect HTTPS visits from non-subscribers to HTTP.
People who are choosing independent products and services
But are there actually a substantial number of people choosing, say, Android phones with clip-on gamepads rather than PlayStation Vita or Nintendo 3DS?
I usually write code hat check to see if the ad content was pushed out to the client. If not disables the site for that web browser and IP address for an hour.
Do BingBot and Googlebot retrieve ads? If not, enjoy being hard to find in search engines.
Besides, in the era of IPv4 address exhaustion, ISPs are using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to put a hundred or a thousand users behind one IPv4 address. If one of them doesn't load your ads, for reasons such as a transient network failure or not having the proprietary Adobe Flash Player installed or even being blind (and thus unable to view images), do you block access to the site for all of them? If so, enjoy your reputation for operating an unreliable server.
Where do you think the money for the connection, server's and bandwidth come from "MARS".
A lot of Slashdot users such as bingoUV would prefer that people operate sites as a hobby, not a business, and pay for connection, server, and bandwidth out of pocket. They prefer the pre-dot-com-boom Internet that was dominated by enthusiasts, not marketers. In bingoUV's opinion, site operators that cannot accept those terms ought to change to a different industry entirely, such as meat butchering.
Most people don't have a home server, for one or more of the following reasons:
The only wired home ISP in the area bans home servers and threatens to enforce that ban with a 12-month disconnection.
The only wired home ISP in the area uses carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to fit more customers into fewer public IPv4 addresses. Devices behind CGNAT do not receive connections from the public Internet.
The person publishing the video lacks knowledge or permission to configure DHCP reservation and port forwarding on his home Internet gateway, which are needed to make a server behind a home NAT visible to the public.
The person publishing the video doesn't have a spare machine that can be left on at home at all times.
In each of these cases, it is often less hassle to use YouTube than to transcode a video into a dozen formats yourself and put them all in an S3 bucket. It's also far less hassle to leave ad sales to YouTube than to try to find sponsors to cover the cost of hosting your individual videos.
I already know that you can't be independent and even offer your app for iPhone. You have to join their proprietary blahblah just to ask permission to distribute!
Any developer with a Mac, an iOS device, and $99 per year can "join their proprietary blahblah" and submit apps for review. It's not like the consoles where you need to show evidence of things like "relevant industry experience", "financial stability", and "dedicated office", and it was considered a big event in 2012 when console makers eased up on "dedicated office". It's possible for someone new to the industry to build an iOS app business on bootstrap financing out of a home office.
But the consoles do have a cartel on handheld games with buttons. Though some game genres adapt well to touch screens, others do not. Good luck playing something like Mega Man on a touch screen, for instance. The iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have no buttons for apps to use. (The buttons they do have are reserved for use by the system: Quit, Sleep, Volume Up, and Volume Down.) A few Android tablets have buttons, but they aren't easy to find in stores, and phones with buttons (such as Xperia Play) are long discontinued. Though it is possible to connect a gamepad to an Android or iOS device through Bluetooth, it's hard to find sales figures for controllers that clip onto phones, and developers are reluctant to spend their time==money on porting their games to a platform (namely iOS-with-buttons or Android-with-buttons) without evidence that people actually have said platform.
open it up so that I don't have to have permission from their dictator just to have access to the tools. [...] Even if I had a friend with an iPhone, I can't just install and test.
When did you come to that conclusion? Apple's rules have changed, and it may have been since then. As of Xcode 7, you no longer have to pay $99 per year to install iOS apps from source code on your own device. Nowadays, so long as you own a Mac and an iOS device on the same Apple ID, you can just build and deploy the app for testing without any recurring fee. Apple charges the fee only when you submit the app to the App Store for review for the first time.
I like making games, too. But there's no way in hell I'd work in a game company.
If you want to make games focused on couch multiplayer, or handheld games that rely on buttons instead of a touch screen, the platforms designed for those use cases are consoles. Console makers demand "financial stability" and "relevant experience" from developers, and other Slashdot users have told me that working in an established game company is the most reliable way to show "relevant experience".
And watch developers and publishers of free software get sued for patent infringement or copyright infringement for having reimplemented elements essential to interoperating with instances of the incumbent proprietary product or service operated by users who have not yet embraced free software. Though Replicant OS is free software, Google (developer of the Android Open Source Project that forms the basis of Replicant OS) still lost to Oracle.
Then how would the server know where to fetch the ads? I can think of two ways:
The publisher's server acts as a proxy to the ad network
I'm not aware of any ad networks that allow such proxying. Ad networks would need to change their terms of use.
Advertisers buy ad space directly from publishers
That doesn't scale well: O(n^2) vs. O(n). If you have 30 publishers and 30 advertisers, use of an ad network results in 60 contracts, each between one publisher or advertiser and the network. Direct contact between advertisers and publishers, on the other hand, would require 900 contracts. Ain't nobody got time for that. In fact, ability to reach a large audience with one click is one reason that nationwide advertisers moved away from small-town newspapers.
Because, as opposed to physical property that can be held in hand, intellectual property is immaterial and is held in the mind.
A lot of things cannot be held in hand, but that doesn't make them "intellectual property".
Referring to those combined as intellectual property is more accurate than focusing only on copyright.
How long does "intellectual property" last? Under intellectual property, what uses are reserved for the copyright owner and what uses are subject to a limitation on exclusive rights (such as fair use or exhaustion after first sale)? The answer is not the same for these disparate areas of law. It's clearer to pick the most pertinent area of law and talk about that. And in the case of fan games, copyright is likely to be the most pertinent.
I fail to see how dog-in-the-manger tactics promote any progress.
The ideal of copyright allows the owner to profit from their own work, and said profits were intended to allow the creator to continue being employed as a creator.
If the owner of copyright in a given work is not selling copies of that work, where exactly does this "profit" come from? I ask in order to open discussion about whether this sort of profit is in society's interest.
For that matter, patents should never have been allowed to receive extensions.
Patent term extensions are very limited in scope, granted only when the patent office or the drug regulator has caused an undue delay in issuing a patent. And they still expire after about a generation. This difference in philosophy is why I take care to separate discussion of copyright from discussion of patent.
None of that, however, means that copyright by itself is insane. Only the degree to which companies have gone to make it into the current insanity.
The insanity of copyright derives ultimately from the insanity of voters' continued tolerance of elected officials who put the interest of entertainment industry PACs over those of their constituents outside the industry. How can that be fixed?
Konami own the rights to Metal Gear Solid, but they do not own the rights to "everything that looks a bit like Metal Gear Solid".
I wouldn't be so sure. Konami once convinced the judge in Konami v. Roxor that its patent on Dance Dance Revolution extends to "everything that looks a bit like Dance Dance Revolution".
and pretty much nobody actually bothers filing patents for them.
Except Konami, which prevailed in a claim construction hearing in Konami v. Roxor that its patents for Dance Dance Revolution covered a competitor's game. Other games have patents, such as Dr. Mario (US Patent 5,265,888, since expired), the cylinder mode of Pokemon Puzzle League, Crazy Taxi (enforced in Sega v. Fox), and plenty of other rhythm games.
The IP holder does not want the content to go out. Why should they not do with what is theirs?
First, why say "intellectual property" instead of "copyright"? The term "intellectual property" lumps together copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and right of publicity. These areas of law have different origins, different scopes, and different reasons for existing. Conflating them just confuses readers.
Second, Konami's IP is 133.221.216.6. When you abbreviate "intellectual property" to "IP", you're making restrictions associated with copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and right of publicity sound as natural as the use of Internet Protocol.
Third, what purpose does legal recognition of copyright serve? In the U.S. legal framework, copyright theoretically exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const., Article I, Section 8). I fail to see how dog-in-the-manger tactics promote any progress.
All that just shows how insane the current duration is. Go back to a copyright of 14 years (or less) and this would not even come up.
And the difference between the copyright term and the patent term just shows how insane the term "intellectual property" is. If exclusive rights under one area of law expire 20 years after application, and exclusive rights under another area of law expire 70 years after the death of the last surviving author, how can "intellectual property" be considered a cohesive field of law?
Say Billy has micropenis. How would he learn that micropenis is treatable, rather than just being something that he has to live with, other than through an advertisement?
20% is forums like Something Awful and Slashdot which would effectively function fine as free newsgroups.
Who would sponsor the forum's NNTP server now that most home ISPs no longer provide Usenet access as a standard feature? And how could Slash-style crowd moderation be implemented on top of NNTP?
20% is sports scores/gambling stuff which would be online regardless of ads. The gambling sites have a real product to sell, and the sports scores sites exist to promote a real physical product.
You posted this comment to Slashdot. Slashdot is ad-supported. Without ads, Slashdot would not have the money to continue taking posts such as yours. Therefore it is your problem. Or would you prefer that Slashdot instead be paywalled?
Would you find it a substantial loss if more than 90 percent of the sites you visited in a typical week chose not to serve you the content until you pony up $20 for a year's subscription?
Provide enough value I'm willing to pay for it directly.
That'd be fine if we had micropayments. But with the per-transaction fees of the payment processors we have right now, both credit cards and Bitcoin, it would more likely end up the case that each site would want a separate $10 per month or $20 per year subscription to the whole site in order to read past the abstract of even a single page. That'd make it often cost-prohibitive to search for multiple opinions about a particular topic, as reading all of the top ten results from a search engine would require a year's subscription to each of ten sites.
Then you have to violate anti-circumvention law (17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts)
Only if i live under jurisdiction of that law. [...] In my country I ma allowed
First, where do you live that has not implemented the WIPO Copyright Treaty? Second, what should the average Slashdot user in the United States do to improve his own lot, especially when up against the power of DisneyPAC?
If you do have a monopoly I am not likely to buy your product at all because of the lack of competition.
Say your local power company places public service announcements about avoiding power lines or advertises a heat pump, or your local high-speed Internet monopoly advertises about upgrading Internet speed or bundling the same company's land line or pay TV. Is that an excuse to, say, leave Slashdot and join the Amish?
Provide enough value I'm willing to pay for it directly. I do that with several websites I frequent.
Say you visit 100 websites in a month, and on many of them, you view one or two pages. How willing are you to pay $20 for a year's subscription to view only one or two pages?
Slashdot Mirror
An X.509 certificate with multiple subjectAltName entries, sometimes called a UCC, works in all browsers but has two drawbacks. First, a multi-SAN certificate may be more expensive to obtain from a commercial certificate authority. Second, a multi-SAN certificate is designed for multiple sites operated by one entity, not a shared hosting environment with a bunch of unrelated sites behind one IP.
Using multiple certificates on port 443 of one IP address needs Server Name Indication (SNI). This works on both major third-party browsers (Firefox 2 and later and Chrome 6 and later) and all supported pack-in browsers (Safari 4 and later, IE on Windows Vista and later, and Android Browser/Android System WebView on Android 4 and later). The most commonly used browsers without SNI support are IE on Windows XP and Android Browser on Android 2.x, but those have no more than 1% usage share nowadays. I switched my own site away from GoDaddy to a different shared host in the fourth quarter of 2012 for two reasons: GoDaddy openly supported the PROTECTIP bill, and GoDaddy didn't offer SNI at the time.
When you type "slashdot.org" into your browser it goes to the HTTP site first and gets redirected to the HTTPS version.
This will work only until Slashdot starts sending Strict-Transport-Security headers or gets included in the ruleset for EFF's HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. Then you'll have to resort to what I do: http://example.com/
I had in fact been wondering for quite some time how come a technology oriented site isn't securing traffic with TLS.
Because until relatively recently (September 2013), ad networks did not support HTTPS. Thus browsers would block ads as mixed content. So in order to make the ads appear, Slashdot would redirect HTTPS visits from non-subscribers to HTTP.
People who are choosing independent products and services
But are there actually a substantial number of people choosing, say, Android phones with clip-on gamepads rather than PlayStation Vita or Nintendo 3DS?
I usually write code hat check to see if the ad content was pushed out to the client. If not disables the site for that web browser and IP address for an hour.
Do BingBot and Googlebot retrieve ads? If not, enjoy being hard to find in search engines.
Besides, in the era of IPv4 address exhaustion, ISPs are using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to put a hundred or a thousand users behind one IPv4 address. If one of them doesn't load your ads, for reasons such as a transient network failure or not having the proprietary Adobe Flash Player installed or even being blind (and thus unable to view images), do you block access to the site for all of them? If so, enjoy your reputation for operating an unreliable server.
Where do you think the money for the connection, server's and bandwidth come from "MARS".
A lot of Slashdot users such as bingoUV would prefer that people operate sites as a hobby, not a business, and pay for connection, server, and bandwidth out of pocket. They prefer the pre-dot-com-boom Internet that was dominated by enthusiasts, not marketers. In bingoUV's opinion, site operators that cannot accept those terms ought to change to a different industry entirely, such as meat butchering.
on my home server
Most people don't have a home server, for one or more of the following reasons:
In each of these cases, it is often less hassle to use YouTube than to transcode a video into a dozen formats yourself and put them all in an S3 bucket. It's also far less hassle to leave ad sales to YouTube than to try to find sponsors to cover the cost of hosting your individual videos.
I already know that you can't be independent and even offer your app for iPhone. You have to join their proprietary blahblah just to ask permission to distribute!
Any developer with a Mac, an iOS device, and $99 per year can "join their proprietary blahblah" and submit apps for review. It's not like the consoles where you need to show evidence of things like "relevant industry experience", "financial stability", and "dedicated office", and it was considered a big event in 2012 when console makers eased up on "dedicated office". It's possible for someone new to the industry to build an iOS app business on bootstrap financing out of a home office.
But the consoles do have a cartel on handheld games with buttons. Though some game genres adapt well to touch screens, others do not. Good luck playing something like Mega Man on a touch screen, for instance. The iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have no buttons for apps to use. (The buttons they do have are reserved for use by the system: Quit, Sleep, Volume Up, and Volume Down.) A few Android tablets have buttons, but they aren't easy to find in stores, and phones with buttons (such as Xperia Play) are long discontinued. Though it is possible to connect a gamepad to an Android or iOS device through Bluetooth, it's hard to find sales figures for controllers that clip onto phones, and developers are reluctant to spend their time==money on porting their games to a platform (namely iOS-with-buttons or Android-with-buttons) without evidence that people actually have said platform.
open it up so that I don't have to have permission from their dictator just to have access to the tools. [...] Even if I had a friend with an iPhone, I can't just install and test.
When did you come to that conclusion? Apple's rules have changed, and it may have been since then. As of Xcode 7, you no longer have to pay $99 per year to install iOS apps from source code on your own device. Nowadays, so long as you own a Mac and an iOS device on the same Apple ID, you can just build and deploy the app for testing without any recurring fee. Apple charges the fee only when you submit the app to the App Store for review for the first time.
I like making games, too. But there's no way in hell I'd work in a game company.
If you want to make games focused on couch multiplayer, or handheld games that rely on buttons instead of a touch screen, the platforms designed for those use cases are consoles. Console makers demand "financial stability" and "relevant experience" from developers, and other Slashdot users have told me that working in an established game company is the most reliable way to show "relevant experience".
And watch developers and publishers of free software get sued for patent infringement or copyright infringement for having reimplemented elements essential to interoperating with instances of the incumbent proprietary product or service operated by users who have not yet embraced free software. Though Replicant OS is free software, Google (developer of the Android Open Source Project that forms the basis of Replicant OS) still lost to Oracle.
Add the ads at the server.
Then how would the server know where to fetch the ads? I can think of two ways:
The publisher's server acts as a proxy to the ad network I'm not aware of any ad networks that allow such proxying. Ad networks would need to change their terms of use. Advertisers buy ad space directly from publishers That doesn't scale well: O(n^2) vs. O(n). If you have 30 publishers and 30 advertisers, use of an ad network results in 60 contracts, each between one publisher or advertiser and the network. Direct contact between advertisers and publishers, on the other hand, would require 900 contracts. Ain't nobody got time for that. In fact, ability to reach a large audience with one click is one reason that nationwide advertisers moved away from small-town newspapers.Because, as opposed to physical property that can be held in hand, intellectual property is immaterial and is held in the mind.
A lot of things cannot be held in hand, but that doesn't make them "intellectual property".
Referring to those combined as intellectual property is more accurate than focusing only on copyright.
How long does "intellectual property" last? Under intellectual property, what uses are reserved for the copyright owner and what uses are subject to a limitation on exclusive rights (such as fair use or exhaustion after first sale)? The answer is not the same for these disparate areas of law. It's clearer to pick the most pertinent area of law and talk about that. And in the case of fan games, copyright is likely to be the most pertinent.
I fail to see how dog-in-the-manger tactics promote any progress.
The ideal of copyright allows the owner to profit from their own work, and said profits were intended to allow the creator to continue being employed as a creator.
If the owner of copyright in a given work is not selling copies of that work, where exactly does this "profit" come from? I ask in order to open discussion about whether this sort of profit is in society's interest.
For that matter, patents should never have been allowed to receive extensions.
Patent term extensions are very limited in scope, granted only when the patent office or the drug regulator has caused an undue delay in issuing a patent. And they still expire after about a generation. This difference in philosophy is why I take care to separate discussion of copyright from discussion of patent.
None of that, however, means that copyright by itself is insane. Only the degree to which companies have gone to make it into the current insanity.
The insanity of copyright derives ultimately from the insanity of voters' continued tolerance of elected officials who put the interest of entertainment industry PACs over those of their constituents outside the industry. How can that be fixed?
God damn, how hard is it to make something new. Really hard, I guess!
Especially when the developers of The Simpsons: Road Rage got sued by Sega for copying Crazy Taxi.
Konami own the rights to Metal Gear Solid, but they do not own the rights to "everything that looks a bit like Metal Gear Solid".
I wouldn't be so sure. Konami once convinced the judge in Konami v. Roxor that its patent on Dance Dance Revolution extends to "everything that looks a bit like Dance Dance Revolution".
Game mechanics can't be copyrighted
Counterpoint: Tetris v. Xio .
and pretty much nobody actually bothers filing patents for them.
Except Konami, which prevailed in a claim construction hearing in Konami v. Roxor that its patents for Dance Dance Revolution covered a competitor's game. Other games have patents, such as Dr. Mario (US Patent 5,265,888, since expired), the cylinder mode of Pokemon Puzzle League, Crazy Taxi (enforced in Sega v. Fox), and plenty of other rhythm games.
The IP holder does not want the content to go out. Why should they not do with what is theirs?
First, why say "intellectual property" instead of "copyright"? The term "intellectual property" lumps together copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and right of publicity. These areas of law have different origins, different scopes, and different reasons for existing. Conflating them just confuses readers.
Second, Konami's IP is 133.221.216.6. When you abbreviate "intellectual property" to "IP", you're making restrictions associated with copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and right of publicity sound as natural as the use of Internet Protocol.
Third, what purpose does legal recognition of copyright serve? In the U.S. legal framework, copyright theoretically exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const., Article I, Section 8). I fail to see how dog-in-the-manger tactics promote any progress.
All that just shows how insane the current duration is. Go back to a copyright of 14 years (or less) and this would not even come up.
And the difference between the copyright term and the patent term just shows how insane the term "intellectual property" is. If exclusive rights under one area of law expire 20 years after application, and exclusive rights under another area of law expire 70 years after the death of the last surviving author, how can "intellectual property" be considered a cohesive field of law?
Ultimately, the rationale for the present copyright term is the life of those heirs who knew the author personally. But the entertainment industry is willing to budge on neither the scope nor the duration.
Hell, they could just make a game in the same style with a marginally modified story to avoid the copyright lawyers
Until they end up getting lawyers breathing down their necks anyway on a claim of "nonliteral copying".
Say Billy has micropenis. How would he learn that micropenis is treatable, rather than just being something that he has to live with, other than through an advertisement?
20% is forums like Something Awful and Slashdot which would effectively function fine as free newsgroups.
Who would sponsor the forum's NNTP server now that most home ISPs no longer provide Usenet access as a standard feature? And how could Slash-style crowd moderation be implemented on top of NNTP?
20% is sports scores/gambling stuff which would be online regardless of ads. The gambling sites have a real product to sell, and the sports scores sites exist to promote a real physical product.
Not being a user of either sort of site (nor pornography for that matter), all I can do is guess: Gambling sites are illegal in most of Slashdot's home country, and sites like DraftKings are specifically targeted. Sports score sites operated by cable television networks, such as CNN- and TBS-affiliated SI.com, might go paywalled to encourage users to subscribe to cable television. Sports score sites operated by leagues might go paywalled to encourage users to attend games in person or subscribe to the league's out-of-market cable package.
So yeah, I think if the news sites did real hard hitting journalism, I'd throw them my $20 for good reading. The rest pays for itself.
Until you discover that the articles you want to read are scattered across a dozen sites. Then it balloons from $20 to $240.
That sounds suspiciously like "not my problem".
You posted this comment to Slashdot. Slashdot is ad-supported. Without ads, Slashdot would not have the money to continue taking posts such as yours. Therefore it is your problem. Or would you prefer that Slashdot instead be paywalled?
Would you find it a substantial loss if more than 90 percent of the sites you visited in a typical week chose not to serve you the content until you pony up $20 for a year's subscription?
Provide enough value I'm willing to pay for it directly.
That'd be fine if we had micropayments. But with the per-transaction fees of the payment processors we have right now, both credit cards and Bitcoin, it would more likely end up the case that each site would want a separate $10 per month or $20 per year subscription to the whole site in order to read past the abstract of even a single page. That'd make it often cost-prohibitive to search for multiple opinions about a particular topic, as reading all of the top ten results from a search engine would require a year's subscription to each of ten sites.
Then you have to violate anti-circumvention law (17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts)
Only if i live under jurisdiction of that law. [...] In my country I ma allowed
First, where do you live that has not implemented the WIPO Copyright Treaty? Second, what should the average Slashdot user in the United States do to improve his own lot, especially when up against the power of DisneyPAC?
If you do have a monopoly I am not likely to buy your product at all because of the lack of competition.
Say your local power company places public service announcements about avoiding power lines or advertises a heat pump, or your local high-speed Internet monopoly advertises about upgrading Internet speed or bundling the same company's land line or pay TV. Is that an excuse to, say, leave Slashdot and join the Amish?
Provide enough value I'm willing to pay for it directly. I do that with several websites I frequent.
Say you visit 100 websites in a month, and on many of them, you view one or two pages. How willing are you to pay $20 for a year's subscription to view only one or two pages?