I have yet to see where any of the entities involved with trusted computing want to password protect everything... they seem to want to give users the option to protect their own data, and allow content providers to protect their files. (emphasis mine)
Exactly. Giving content owners the ability to protect their files in that manner means the public is cheated. Remember, copyright is a temporary license from society to a creator.
If content "owners" want the economic advantage of a near-monopoly on their work, they have to abide by their end of the deal. They have to give up their monopoly in the future to ensure society progresses, and they have to allow fair use of their work today for educational and criticism purposes. If they are not willing to do that, they are not a party to the contract that gives them the monopoly rights in the first place.
If you allow the media companies to lock down their products and keep the key, what guarantee does society have that they can unlock the vault in the future?
Not sure if you're aware of this or not, but freecreditreports.com is not annualcreditreport.com. The former is trying to sell worthless credit monitoring service, using the promise of a free credit report as a hook.
They thought wrong. Their hardware-led initiative has led me away from their hardware. Apple may screw up by introducing Trusted Computing, but as long as they don't, they have a market of me and other knowledgable people switching to them.
Fair enough. If they changed the front page to what's on http://search.yahoo.com/ now, would you be satisfied?
2. Search results are too cluttered. Put your advertisements on the side in a single color. No image advertisements ever. It should be easy to tell the difference between paid search results, and real results...
When was the last time you used Yahoo! Search? I just checked today, and I couldn't make a popup or image ad come up. Sponsored results are clearly separated on the right side (just like Google) and on the bottom of the page.
They do have a "Content Acquisition Program" that mixes paid and unpaid results in the main results, so I can see your point there. However, they state that the paid results don't get an algorithm boost, only guaranteed inclusion in the index and refreshes every 48 hours.
3. Don't be a whore. Yahoo tends to stick advertising everywhere. If I do a search, I want real results first, no sponsored ads. Put the ads to the side...
They do have too many ads, but not on the search page. Google and Yahoo are very comparable in that aspect.
4. Don't make people register to see things like tv listings and what not. Basic features should be free to all to see...
I had no problem getting the TV listings without signing in. All I needed to provide is my ZIP code, which seems more than reasonable since they use it to pick the local cable company. I also read news articles, checked the stock price of GOOG (they're down 2.81 today), checked my local weather, got driving directions to the local supermarket (with the start and end address), looked up the photos of a friend (and printed it for free on my printer), got the movie showtimes for my local theater (again, only my ZIP code), listened to LAUNCH radio (county music - yuck), and looked at the default My Yahoo! page. What did I miss that's important to you, and they don't have a legitimate reason to require a login for? The only things Yahoo! forces you to log in for are things that are obviously private (e-mail, calendar, financial transactions) or that customize the presentation of existing services.
Don't make registration a requirement, make it worth my while. Maybe for registration offer to send people an email alterting them when a favorite show is on. (with no ads or tags or anything in the email).
You mean like this? That particular Yahoo! site apparently doesn't support alerts for television, but that's no problem; you can easily add any link from Yahoo! Television to Yahoo! Calendar using the convenient "Add to My Calendar" link. Calendar will automatically send you up to three e-mails prior to the time of the new event.
5. Follow google's motto, of "Don't be evil." because yahoo right now is soooooo freaking corporate and willing to whore itself out... I won't use it. Just look at yahoo.com its all been sold as real estate, look at google.com, its simple, clean, and effective.
I think Yahoo! is trying in that regard. (Perhaps too hard - I think they're starting to look too much like Google. Things like their nearly identical search page, release of service APIs, and desktop search seem to be direct rips of Google's ideas.) Heck, I couldn't even get a single popup on any of the properties I searched while writing this rebuttal.
there, how to turn yahoo around in 5 easy steps.
I don't think you have five steps any more. Sorry about that.
That may be the intent (I actually believe it is); however, that is not what they said in the TOS. If they want that to be the intent, they should have their lawyers re-write the contract, as Yahoo did.
Perhaps you could clarify something for me, since I've done some research on Wikipedia policies and can't come up with a valid answer.
Are all submissions to Wikipedia required to be licensed under GFDL? (The submission page says so, the download page says not.) If that's the case, why can images be tagged with other licenses? Is that like dual-licensing, and if so, can't Wikipedia mirrors like answers.com follow the GFDL and ignore the other license?
If you think, given the above, you should be able to dictate how your (very beautiful IMHO) image is used, what should the mirrors do to comply with all the different licenses when doing automated imports of dumps?
I noticed the answers.com page of your image doesn't provide the obligatory GFDL credit of Wikipedia. Would that suffice for you?
It seems to me that automated dumps of Wikimedia aren't that easy after all if you have to wade through a dozen different licenses instead of one. What balance do you suggest to make sure everybody's happy?
Assuming you're using Windows (Mac may have it, but I'm not sure) it's just plain old Trebuchet MS. I think the design is really pretty, too. Maybe that's part of the reason Google picked them.
Come to think of it, XMLHTTP is the correct spelling for Internet Explorer, whereas XmlHttpRequest is correct for Mozilla and Safari. I apologize for that. The admonishment about doing a simple web search before posting still applies, however.
*starts stopwatch*
*searches Google in a new window for "XMLHTTP"*
*stops stopwatch*
If you had taken 10.37 seconds out of your busy schedule to search Google (yes, I did time it), you would have found that the THIRD result for XMLHTTP is an Apple developer web site. Further, if you used the correct spelling of XmlHttpRequest (I didn't ding you for this), it would be the FIRST result.
I'd also like to see whether Harvard Business School or ApplyYourself have taken responsibility for the bug that made this possible. If they haven't, they are being more unethical and hypocritical in my mind than these students (assuming all they did was hit a trivial URL like that).
You trust obscurity. I'll take a system that is easy to setup properly; is built on tried, true, tested, and stable technology (windows meets none of these critera embedded or not); and requires a bad guy to get past someone with a gun to get to the wire.
I merely trust obscurity backed by sound security practices over the sound security practices alone.
Seriously. Mozilla's obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to their trademarks is above and beyond any other open source project's, and I think it's probably turning a lot of people off toward helping them.
Point taken. Isn't there some value in [partial] security by obscurity, though? I would bet most of the crackers who read Slashdot understand HTML and TCP/IP, but how many know what internal ATM protocols are called, let alone their vulnerabilities? I have a feeling the answer is "some, but not many." Also, it seems that having only a few people who know how to program the ATMs is better than any teller who happens to be a Computer Science undergraduate.
I don't know what my bank's ATMs run as their operating system, and that's a good thing because it means the bad guys may not, either.
(I'm not trying to troll, and I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this.)
TFA says these ATMs are web-based and Windows-based. That means they are almost certainly running the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer.
I wouldn't trust Firefox in an ATM, let alone Internet Explorer. If my bank of choice starts deploying these in large quantities (they're around, but less prevalent than the old kind), I will run, not walk, to the competition.
I am a firm believe that we should fix systems that are broken rather than trying to apply round-about patches.
Agreed. That's why I think the suggestion of another poster (that spamming be covered by existing computer crime laws) is sheer genious. IMHO, that's exactly what spamming is - theft of service - and it should be treated as such.
That said, the spammers are not stealing any bandwidth, they are using what they're ISP's allow them.
While some (maybe even most) spammers are sanctioned by their ISPs, many are not. Also, many spammers are now relaying their messages through hijacked computers whose owners are unaware of, let alone approving, that use of their computer.
They are also taking up a negligable amount of my bandwidth,
That's true for you and me. However, what about the people on dialup who are forced to download 300 spam messages with embedded JPEGs to get to the one e-mail from family they're waiting for?
A real solution would involve blocking the spam as early as possible (my ISP could reject it based on some magic header strings)
Your ISP is still downloading the message (and using the bandwidth) to read the magic header string. We've also already established that spam-friendly ISPs aren't going to cooperate on their end.
drastically reducing the bandwidth
Interesting. How? Compression? How do you intend to get the spammers and their ISP henchmen to cooperate?
coming up with email standards (there are many proposals, i just can't find a link right now) and denying any email from a non-standards-compliant ISP
No one is denying that a technical solution is great; however, many people believe the existing proposals are inadequate for one reason or other. There's even a "joke" template floating around that can be applied to most every solution proposed for spam thus far.
These industry-centric solutions can practically eliminate spam, and are far superior to government involvement.
Industry solutions work best when all parties are in agreement. Spamming, by definition, will never reach that consensus because you won't get the cooperation of the people you need most - the spammers.
I have to pay a trash fee. Shouldn't I be able to fine companies that send out junk mail?
I don't understand your reasoning, but under the assumption you should, how do you plan to do so without the government's help?
What we need is industry solutions with government-backed teeth. Working on the premise that spamming is equivilent to fax spamming - theft of resources - I think government involvment at some level is justified. I do see your point about keeping the government out of it - they do meddle in quite a bit as it is - but I think if we're careful, they could be useful to solve the spamming epidemic.
If you have a technical or industrial solution nobody's thought of, by all means, spread the word. You'll be my hero. Seriously.
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought?
Absolutely. No question about it.
However, if you stole the paper that your pamphlet is printed on, you may still have a first amendment right to your message, but you're delivering it with stolen property. The problem with spammers is not that they have a message, and not that they're beating you over the head with it. The problem is that they are using your money to give it.
You can be forgiven for not realizing this, because in an effort to keep you as a customer, your ISP is eating the costs of each spam they receive instead of passing it on to you. However, each spam they carry is costing them a lot of money in the form of bandwidth, legal costs (spammers often sue ISPs for the exact reasons you cite), hardware upgrades, and charges to subscribe to filtering services, if they choose to do so. You don't see the grand total, but you are paying your share of those bills.
TFA (and presumably, TFEULA) forgot to mention that you'll need to hire a lawyer and sue them to get that $5. Most lawyers charge slightly more than $5 for their services.
(I am not a lawyer, for $5 or any other amount of money.)
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but isn't tcsh OS X's default shell?
IANAL, but putting up a site criticizing Hasbro should be an acceptable use of the trademark. See http://www.paypalsucks.com/, for example.
I have yet to see where any of the entities involved with trusted computing want to password protect everything... they seem to want to give users the option to protect their own data, and allow content providers to protect their files. (emphasis mine)
Exactly. Giving content owners the ability to protect their files in that manner means the public is cheated. Remember, copyright is a temporary license from society to a creator.
If content "owners" want the economic advantage of a near-monopoly on their work, they have to abide by their end of the deal. They have to give up their monopoly in the future to ensure society progresses, and they have to allow fair use of their work today for educational and criticism purposes. If they are not willing to do that, they are not a party to the contract that gives them the monopoly rights in the first place.
If you allow the media companies to lock down their products and keep the key, what guarantee does society have that they can unlock the vault in the future?
Bay Area Research Center (BARC).
Woof!
Not sure if you're aware of this or not, but freecreditreports.com is not annualcreditreport.com. The former is trying to sell worthless credit monitoring service, using the promise of a free credit report as a hook.
They thought wrong. Their hardware-led initiative has led me away from their hardware. Apple may screw up by introducing Trusted Computing, but as long as they don't, they have a market of me and other knowledgable people switching to them.
I was so right. I always, ALWAYS knew the customers wanted two buttons.
I don't know. I didn't get that feeling from him when he showed off the Mac Mini. It sounded more like a disappointed, "Okay, fine" attitude to me.
Looks like somebody needs to enroll in a language course -- English Homophones.
:P)
(Yes, I did get the joke
1. Ditch the portal look...
Fair enough. If they changed the front page to what's on http://search.yahoo.com/ now, would you be satisfied?
2. Search results are too cluttered. Put your advertisements on the side in a single color. No image advertisements ever. It should be easy to tell the difference between paid search results, and real results...
When was the last time you used Yahoo! Search? I just checked today, and I couldn't make a popup or image ad come up. Sponsored results are clearly separated on the right side (just like Google) and on the bottom of the page.
They do have a "Content Acquisition Program" that mixes paid and unpaid results in the main results, so I can see your point there. However, they state that the paid results don't get an algorithm boost, only guaranteed inclusion in the index and refreshes every 48 hours.
3. Don't be a whore. Yahoo tends to stick advertising everywhere. If I do a search, I want real results first, no sponsored ads. Put the ads to the side...
They do have too many ads, but not on the search page. Google and Yahoo are very comparable in that aspect.
4. Don't make people register to see things like tv listings and what not. Basic features should be free to all to see...
I had no problem getting the TV listings without signing in. All I needed to provide is my ZIP code, which seems more than reasonable since they use it to pick the local cable company. I also read news articles, checked the stock price of GOOG (they're down 2.81 today), checked my local weather, got driving directions to the local supermarket (with the start and end address), looked up the photos of a friend (and printed it for free on my printer), got the movie showtimes for my local theater (again, only my ZIP code), listened to LAUNCH radio (county music - yuck), and looked at the default My Yahoo! page. What did I miss that's important to you, and they don't have a legitimate reason to require a login for? The only things Yahoo! forces you to log in for are things that are obviously private (e-mail, calendar, financial transactions) or that customize the presentation of existing services.
Don't make registration a requirement, make it worth my while. Maybe for registration offer to send people an email alterting them when a favorite show is on. (with no ads or tags or anything in the email).
You mean like this? That particular Yahoo! site apparently doesn't support alerts for television, but that's no problem; you can easily add any link from Yahoo! Television to Yahoo! Calendar using the convenient "Add to My Calendar" link. Calendar will automatically send you up to three e-mails prior to the time of the new event.
5. Follow google's motto, of "Don't be evil." because yahoo right now is soooooo freaking corporate and willing to whore itself out... I won't use it. Just look at yahoo.com its all been sold as real estate, look at google.com, its simple, clean, and effective.
I think Yahoo! is trying in that regard. (Perhaps too hard - I think they're starting to look too much like Google. Things like their nearly identical search page, release of service APIs, and desktop search seem to be direct rips of Google's ideas.) Heck, I couldn't even get a single popup on any of the properties I searched while writing this rebuttal.
there, how to turn yahoo around in 5 easy steps.
I don't think you have five steps any more. Sorry about that.
No, I don't work for Yahoo! In fact, I do
That may be the intent (I actually believe it is); however, that is not what they said in the TOS. If they want that to be the intent, they should have their lawyers re-write the contract, as Yahoo did.
Perhaps you could clarify something for me, since I've done some research on Wikipedia policies and can't come up with a valid answer.
Are all submissions to Wikipedia required to be licensed under GFDL? (The submission page says so, the download page says not.) If that's the case, why can images be tagged with other licenses? Is that like dual-licensing, and if so, can't Wikipedia mirrors like answers.com follow the GFDL and ignore the other license?
If you think, given the above, you should be able to dictate how your (very beautiful IMHO) image is used, what should the mirrors do to comply with all the different licenses when doing automated imports of dumps?
I noticed the answers.com page of your image doesn't provide the obligatory GFDL credit of Wikipedia. Would that suffice for you?
It seems to me that automated dumps of Wikimedia aren't that easy after all if you have to wade through a dozen different licenses instead of one. What balance do you suggest to make sure everybody's happy?
Assuming you're using Windows (Mac may have it, but I'm not sure) it's just plain old Trebuchet MS. I think the design is really pretty, too. Maybe that's part of the reason Google picked them.
Point taken :)
Sorry about that. It was a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing on my part.
Come to think of it, XMLHTTP is the correct spelling for Internet Explorer, whereas XmlHttpRequest is correct for Mozilla and Safari. I apologize for that. The admonishment about doing a simple web search before posting still applies, however.
*starts stopwatch*
*searches Google in a new window for "XMLHTTP"*
*stops stopwatch*
If you had taken 10.37 seconds out of your busy schedule to search Google (yes, I did time it), you would have found that the THIRD result for XMLHTTP is an Apple developer web site. Further, if you used the correct spelling of XmlHttpRequest (I didn't ding you for this), it would be the FIRST result.
I agree.
I'd also like to see whether Harvard Business School or ApplyYourself have taken responsibility for the bug that made this possible. If they haven't, they are being more unethical and hypocritical in my mind than these students (assuming all they did was hit a trivial URL like that).
A lot of people say that companies and government "want somebody to sue." I don't know what their reasoning is.
However, I'm curious if Sun submitted a bid to provide StarOffice. The costs go as low as $25 a seat for government, according to their site.
You trust obscurity. I'll take a system that is easy to setup properly; is built on tried, true, tested, and stable technology (windows meets none of these critera embedded or not); and requires a bad guy to get past someone with a gun to get to the wire.
I merely trust obscurity backed by sound security practices over the sound security practices alone.
Seriously. Mozilla's obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to their trademarks is above and beyond any other open source project's, and I think it's probably turning a lot of people off toward helping them.
So, to recap:
Sounds like a good business plan to me. How do we get the other corporations to sign on?
Point taken. Isn't there some value in [partial] security by obscurity, though? I would bet most of the crackers who read Slashdot understand HTML and TCP/IP, but how many know what internal ATM protocols are called, let alone their vulnerabilities? I have a feeling the answer is "some, but not many." Also, it seems that having only a few people who know how to program the ATMs is better than any teller who happens to be a Computer Science undergraduate.
I don't know what my bank's ATMs run as their operating system, and that's a good thing because it means the bad guys may not, either.
(I'm not trying to troll, and I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this.)
TFA says these ATMs are web-based and Windows-based. That means they are almost certainly running the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer.
I wouldn't trust Firefox in an ATM, let alone Internet Explorer. If my bank of choice starts deploying these in large quantities (they're around, but less prevalent than the old kind), I will run, not walk, to the competition.
I am a firm believe that we should fix systems that are broken rather than trying to apply round-about patches.
Agreed. That's why I think the suggestion of another poster (that spamming be covered by existing computer crime laws) is sheer genious. IMHO, that's exactly what spamming is - theft of service - and it should be treated as such.
That said, the spammers are not stealing any bandwidth, they are using what they're ISP's allow them.
While some (maybe even most) spammers are sanctioned by their ISPs, many are not. Also, many spammers are now relaying their messages through hijacked computers whose owners are unaware of, let alone approving, that use of their computer.
They are also taking up a negligable amount of my bandwidth,
That's true for you and me. However, what about the people on dialup who are forced to download 300 spam messages with embedded JPEGs to get to the one e-mail from family they're waiting for?
A real solution would involve blocking the spam as early as possible (my ISP could reject it based on some magic header strings)
Your ISP is still downloading the message (and using the bandwidth) to read the magic header string. We've also already established that spam-friendly ISPs aren't going to cooperate on their end.
drastically reducing the bandwidth
Interesting. How? Compression? How do you intend to get the spammers and their ISP henchmen to cooperate?
coming up with email standards (there are many proposals, i just can't find a link right now) and denying any email from a non-standards-compliant ISP
No one is denying that a technical solution is great; however, many people believe the existing proposals are inadequate for one reason or other. There's even a "joke" template floating around that can be applied to most every solution proposed for spam thus far.
These industry-centric solutions can practically eliminate spam, and are far superior to government involvement.
Industry solutions work best when all parties are in agreement. Spamming, by definition, will never reach that consensus because you won't get the cooperation of the people you need most - the spammers.
I have to pay a trash fee. Shouldn't I be able to fine companies that send out junk mail?
I don't understand your reasoning, but under the assumption you should, how do you plan to do so without the government's help?
What we need is industry solutions with government-backed teeth. Working on the premise that spamming is equivilent to fax spamming - theft of resources - I think government involvment at some level is justified. I do see your point about keeping the government out of it - they do meddle in quite a bit as it is - but I think if we're careful, they could be useful to solve the spamming epidemic.
If you have a technical or industrial solution nobody's thought of, by all means, spread the word. You'll be my hero. Seriously.
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought?
Absolutely. No question about it.
However, if you stole the paper that your pamphlet is printed on, you may still have a first amendment right to your message, but you're delivering it with stolen property. The problem with spammers is not that they have a message, and not that they're beating you over the head with it. The problem is that they are using your money to give it.
You can be forgiven for not realizing this, because in an effort to keep you as a customer, your ISP is eating the costs of each spam they receive instead of passing it on to you. However, each spam they carry is costing them a lot of money in the form of bandwidth, legal costs (spammers often sue ISPs for the exact reasons you cite), hardware upgrades, and charges to subscribe to filtering services, if they choose to do so. You don't see the grand total, but you are paying your share of those bills.
TFA (and presumably, TFEULA) forgot to mention that you'll need to hire a lawyer and sue them to get that $5. Most lawyers charge slightly more than $5 for their services.
(I am not a lawyer, for $5 or any other amount of money.)