Haven't people realized that the average user doesn't know how to insert special characters, thus making them less likely to search and thus care abou it?
While I understand what you're saying, this won't be the case for too long. Our greatest advantage is our ability to adapt quickly. If ways to circumvent the ad blocking in firefox get popular enough, the community will surely find a way to prevent them. Unlike propietary browsers who take too long to deploy updates, our agility will allow us to beat them.
All of this power comes from an ISP's ability to block packets based on content and/or port. Whether it be for "security" reasons, as many university network admins claiming, or outright preventing competition as these service providers are clearly begining to do, the restriction of network data is certainly an issue.
By restricting access to various services we will begin to break down key features of many systems and applications. For example, many gentoo users at universities are unable to utilize rsync mirrors due to port restrictions, thus creating more stress on the servers they get portage updates from. Other examples include blocking the CVS port (and other concurrent versioning systems), effectively cutting people from actively participating in software development.
What's the solution to this? Many people have begun trying to reroute traffic through other ports such as HTTP (80), FTP (21), AIM-OSCAR (5190), and other ports that their isps leave open. While this serves as a temporary method (and quite difficult in many circumstances), it ruins the entire concept of standardizing services for different ports. Furthermore, it creates many problems as the people who run servers for these commonly restricted servers now have to compromise their listening port selection (if you can only trust 2-3 ports to be available to everyone, then you can only theoretically host 2-3 services).
Due to these attrocities, it would seem to be quite important for network service providers to have some sort of regulation in regards to blocking data. Otherwise we will continue to be under the control of a dangerous oligopoly.
After all, just about every other utility has had anti-trust issues with it, it is too much to ask to work out this problem before it gets unruly?
Actually, the people of europe have the inherent right to decide the will of europe. If they believe blindly trusting a monopoly is disadvantagous to them, it is not only their right but also their duty to act on it.
Restricting trade, especially imports, has always been a natural act in a regulated market. Doing this with intellectual property is essentially the modern equivlent.
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They just had to use an 'ë' didn't they...
Haven't people realized that the average user doesn't know how to insert special characters, thus making them less likely to search and thus care abou it?
While I understand what you're saying, this won't be the case for too long. Our greatest advantage is our ability to adapt quickly. If ways to circumvent the ad blocking in firefox get popular enough, the community will surely find a way to prevent them. Unlike propietary browsers who take too long to deploy updates, our agility will allow us to beat them.
All of this power comes from an ISP's ability to block packets based on content and/or port. Whether it be for "security" reasons, as many university network admins claiming, or outright preventing competition as these service providers are clearly begining to do, the restriction of network data is certainly an issue.
By restricting access to various services we will begin to break down key features of many systems and applications. For example, many gentoo users at universities are unable to utilize rsync mirrors due to port restrictions, thus creating more stress on the servers they get portage updates from. Other examples include blocking the CVS port (and other concurrent versioning systems), effectively cutting people from actively participating in software development.
What's the solution to this? Many people have begun trying to reroute traffic through other ports such as HTTP (80), FTP (21), AIM-OSCAR (5190), and other ports that their isps leave open. While this serves as a temporary method (and quite difficult in many circumstances), it ruins the entire concept of standardizing services for different ports. Furthermore, it creates many problems as the people who run servers for these commonly restricted servers now have to compromise their listening port selection (if you can only trust 2-3 ports to be available to everyone, then you can only theoretically host 2-3 services).
Due to these attrocities, it would seem to be quite important for network service providers to have some sort of regulation in regards to blocking data. Otherwise we will continue to be under the control of a dangerous oligopoly.
After all, just about every other utility has had anti-trust issues with it, it is too much to ask to work out this problem before it gets unruly?
Actually, the people of europe have the inherent right to decide the will of europe. If they believe blindly trusting a monopoly is disadvantagous to them, it is not only their right but also their duty to act on it.
Restricting trade, especially imports, has always been a natural act in a regulated market. Doing this with intellectual property is essentially the modern equivlent.