Well of course Apple's making profit from the iPhone. You thought they were doing it for free? The point is that, if Apple were selling the 32GB iPhone 3GS on the open market, they'd be charging $699. If you buy it from AT&T with a 2 year contract, you get it for $299. If those numbers are right, then it means AT&T is basically paying you $400 to sign up for a 2 year contract. If you're already in a 2 year contract, what makes you think you should be allowed to sign up again for those same 2 years and get another $400?
Yeah, I don't really get the complaint here. I've complained before when cell phone carriers wouldn't give me the same deal as "new customers" even after I've completed my contract-- not so much because I think that they're obligated to offer me those deals, but more because I think it's stupid and it's caused me to switch from a carrier I was otherwise happy with in order to get a better "free" phone.
However, the $199/$299 prices for the iPhones are their subsidized prices. The real prices are $200 more, but you're essentially getting $200 cash-back for locking yourself into a t 2 year deal. If you're already in your 2 year deal, then you're not in a position to sign on for another 2 years.
Most people are going to respond to you saying "an iPhone isn't an investment." However, even if you consider it an investment, dropping 5% in 4 months isn't so bad when you think about it. If you put the same $2k in the stock market back in September, and after 4 months your investment had only dropped 5%, you'd be considered incredibly lucky.
On the other hand, try to explain to my grandmother why 64-bit computing is a good thing at all. Eventually you'll come down to some kind of statement as inaccurate as "it's faster" or "it lets you deal with more stuff at the same time."
I never really understood how they withhold these deals from existing customers, even when their contracts are up. I remember back when they were Cingular, they were offering a fancy high-end phone for free when you sign up, but even though I hadn't been under contract for over a year, they wouldn't offer me the same deal. Instead, I had to switch to T-Mobile, because they were offering a different high-end phone for free for new customers, and then a year later I switched back to AT&T to get a different high-end free phone.
Doesn't customer loyalty get you anything? Don't they want to keep my business?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, but it doesn't seem like you've actually read the source material. My impression is you've listened to someone else describe the source material, and maybe that person only read some other writer who was complaining about the source material.
Trying to change your mind? Fat lot of luck that will do me. You're not even offering support for your arguments, and you're making things up out of thin air. I'm not trying to convince you because you're not actually listening. I'm trying to convince anyone else who might bother to read this thread of arguments. And all I'm trying to convince them of is that it might actually be worth reading Aristotle and Plato before making up your mind that they're stupid, superstitious idiots who didn't think. I'm arguing that you might want to seek to understand something before dismissing it. I'm arguing that, if you're going to dismiss someone for making things up, not arguing things properly, and ignoring evidence, then it doesn't make sense to do so while making things up, failing to argue things properly, and ignoring evidence.
But honestly, I addressed your complaints. I gave you answers to a lot of the things you've failed to understand. I've made suggestions where you can find more comprehensive answers than mine. I've done more than my share. You've more or less responded with "nah uh!" and expected that it would be enough to intimidate me since you didn't actually have an argument to support your claims. Sorry to disappoint, but you don't scare me. If you want to convince me, you're going to have to offer some kind of actual evidence that you at least have a firm grasp of the subject matter we're talking about.
In a nutshell, "Oh, but we came from there so they're important".
Nope. Read again if you want to understand it. Or ignore me and go read a lot of philosophy. You'll understand it better if you're actually educated in the topic rather than taking my word for it. Plato and Aristotle are a good place to start, but you probably won't get it until you've read a lot more.
But here I see you're actually wanting to get into actually talking about philosophy:
Assuming there's an objective truth, what assumptions am I making that can be somehow shown to be part of that objective truth?
Nope, sorry. The concept of objectivity as such is relatively modern. The Greeks didn't seem to think about things that way at all, and what's more they were probably more right.
Kicking away the arbitrary values of humanity, the universe stops being a place where Aristotle's prime mover can exist -- the world becomes a place where it's understood that the concept exists only in Aristotle's mind, as a by-product of how he thinks as a human.
Yeah, this is where modern thoughts about the "objective" kind of screw up: in thinking that the "objective" is a very real and better view of the universe, but unfortunately unattainable. The problem is that you're saying the moderns are better because they understand that you can't be objective, and yet the way in which you think they're better is that they're able to be more objective. It's a contradiction. If you're really disregarding the possibility of being objective, then your goal can't be "to be as objective as possible."
What you have to understand about Aristotle is he's not really saying, "There is, objectively, a prime mover in existence," but rather something like, "From any human understanding of the universe, it will ultimately be necessary to assume a 'prime mover'. Without such a concept, humans won't be able to reason about their own world." Even in Plato, there are basically refutations of any ideas about objective access to the universe. It's not a very deep and protracted refutation because the idea didn't have the traction that it does today, but it's in there.
But anyway, time and again, throughout the history of philosophy and science, you'll see that no one is able to create a model of our world without having some kind of stand-in for the prime mover. They might call it something a else, but it's still there. People still use the concept as the foundation for their understanding, but they understand it poorly, and therefore reach inaccurate or sometimes silly conclusions. If people understood old philosophers like Aristotle and Plato better, they'd make fewer of the sorts of mistakes you're making.
Well I can't say for sure, but my guess would be that they're looking at how much revenue they're losing to online torrents and asking themselves, "Is there any way we can get that business?"
As for the alternatives, they don't care about cannibalizing DVD rentals, because they don't really make money from them. They could license the same content to HBO, but then they basically have to take the cut of profits that HBO gives them. Why not just start your own channel and keep all the profits for yourself? They might hurt DVD sales, but they might believe that DVD sales are already on the way out.
Ultimately they're faced with a problem. Their old business model depended on having complete control over distribution, so if you wanted to see a movie just out in theaters, you had to rush to see in in theaters or else wait a year for it to come out on video. If you wanted to see the movie during the time between theatrical release and video release, well... tough. These days, if you really want to see a movie, you can often get it online before the theatrical release, most likely before it comes out on video, and certainly once it's been released to video. The movie studio has to make it a little more pleasant and convenient for people to see the movies they want to see, when they want to see it, and how they want to see it, or risk having their current business model fall apart.
Right. Ask a computer to count 1 million records and stop exactly on the millionth, and then ask a person to count 1 million cards and stop on the millionth. If you had to bet your life on it, who would you think would be more precise? Obviously computers have value.
On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in the idea that the source code should be available for review to make sure there are no weird bugs that could multiply votes, and there should be a paper trail so that the computer can be checked for voter fraud. Computers are more efficient, but not only are they more efficient at doing the right thing, and they're more efficient at doing the wrong thing. If the code tells them to count votes incorrectly (whether it's fraud or an inadvertent bug) they will very efficiently count the votes incorrectly.
Yeah, I thought that was a joke. It seems strange to try to make it about not-being Google when people use Google because it works well and people like it. They may as well call it "Bing does not work well and you won't like it", but I guess "Bdnwwaywli" is a little harder to pronounce.
Oh, and SSL certificate authorities do something to help the situation I laid out. Imagine the trick I described with DNS where it reroutes my traffic from citibank.com to some other web server pretending to be citibank.com. But instead of using http, I used https. Now what's going to happen?
Well the first thing is that the server is going to give me an SSL certificate that says, "I really am citibank.com, and you can check with Verisign to prove it." So now my browser sends that certificate to Verisign and asks, "Citibank.com says that this certificate is proof that they're really citibank.com. Is this legit?" Now because the fake server can't generate a bogus certificate that will fool Verisign, Verisign looks at it and says, "No, this isn't legit." The browser throws up a big warning, and if the user is savvy at all, they'll know not to put in their login credentials.
Now if you're clever, you might think, "Well wait a second, if my browser doesn't know which certificates are valid without checking with Verisign, then why doesn't the hacker just reroute the traffic to Verisign to his own server? Couldn't he then have his own server just say that every certificate is valid?" That would work, except that your browser is distributed with a certificate for Verisign. Because of that, unless the hacker can compromise your browser locally (in which case you're screwed no matter what), your browser can't be fooled into thinking it's talking to Verisign.
So all in all, that's a pretty good system. There's only one piece where it's likely to fall apart, and that's if the certificate authority (Verisign in this case) can be tricked into issuing a valid certificate to someone who doesn't own the domain. Putting SSL certs in DNS could help this problem.
But ignoring that little problem, SSL certificates prove pretty well that when I go to visit "citibank.com" that I'm actually connecting to "citibank.com". Knowing that "citibank.com" is actually owned by Citibank whereas "citibanking.com" isn't... well, that's another problem, but a far less dangerous one.
A philosophical question is, by definition, one that is considered because of love of knowledge. If you consider it because of practical implications, then it's not philosophical.
Well first, I'm not sure that makes sense. "Knowledge" has lots of practical implications. But also you have your translation slightly wrong-- "philo-sophia" = "love of wisdom". Wisdom is very practical.
And besides all that, "philosophy" over the years has taken on an alternative meaning, as "the study of the foundations of human study and knowledge." Now this typically leads people to put studies like epistemology, ontology, and even ethics/politics into the realm of philosophy, but also many people would say that laying the foundations for any field of study is a philosophic endeavor. It's only once the foundations are laid and the famework is set that the field of study starts to become "science".
It gets to be a fine line, but just to give some contrast, the "scientist" who's designing a method to search for extra-terrestrial life is a scientist, but the "scientist" who's trying to figure out what it means to be "alive" is a natural philosopher. A physicist who's designing a particle accelerator is acting really more as an engineer. When the particle accelerator is built and a physicist is running experiments to try to find evidence of a particle he's theorized, that physicist is acting as a scientist. When a physicist looks at the outcome of those experiments, steps back and asks, "But what is a particle when it's that small? Is it still right to think of it as matter?" then he's acting as a philosopher.
So you may be a political scientist looking at a situation and ask, "According to the framework my studies are bound in, what is the most peaceable solution to a problem like this?" And that's just political science. But when you start asking, "Is that solution just or unjust?" you've strayed into philosophy, practical or impractical as it is.
As a guess, I'd speculate it would be easier to hijack a domain from the registrar than it would be to intercept TCP connections to a web server.
You'd guess wrong. Without any kind of DNS signing or SSL certificate authorities, any router or DNS server that's being used in the transmission can basically be hacked to redirect traffic to an arbitrary server.
So here's a trivial example: I could set up an open wireless network next door to a coffee shop and assume some of the coffee shop patrons will stumble on it. Since I control the DHCP, I get to tell them which DNS server to use (or I can automatically reroute any traffic on the DNS ports to my DNS server). So once I control the DNS responses, when they type "citibank.com" into their browsers, their system does a DNS query to find the IP address and my DNS server gives them the IP address of the server I've made up to look like citibank.com. However, my site just takes whatever password information they type in and then gives them an error message, "Sorry, our site is down right now. Please try again later." The user goes on about his business, and meanwhile I have access to his bank account.
But even ignoring this simple little DNS trick, it's entirely possible to just have the router itself reroute traffic. I could set my router so that any traffic directed to 74.125.127.100 (google.com) instead gets sent to 207.46.104.147 (bing.com). It's really not difficult. That's way easier than hacking Google's registrar and changing the real DNS records.
What strikes me is the lack of discipline in your arguments. You reiterated without substance, then once again accuse me of not knowing the subject.
I don't think you understand how this works. You claim things without any real evidence and showing ignorance of a subject, and I respond with actual evidence showing that you're wrong. If you respond with the same unsupported ignorant claims, then yes, I'll pretty much repeat myself.
As for my other point, it wasn't until relatively recently that philosophers started looking at first principles of different areas of thought in earnest
See, like this gem. What support do you have for this? Or this one:
Aristotle tossed out a first principle with very little thought
On what basis are you making this claim? I can't imagine anyone who's well educated on the subject would claim that Aristotle failed to put much thought into things. Have you actually read Aristotle?
Just as you don't need to know the etymology of a word to know how to use the word, and you don't need to know about al-Khwarizmi to use mathematics, old philosophy is interesting in the historical sense of understanding how thought became what it is today.
However, imagine this: imagine you studied geometry, and everything you learned took Euclid's geometry for granted. Imagine all your text books always just assumed what it meant for two lines to be parallel, assumed the Pythagorean theorem was true, etc, and you never saw any kind of proof for these things. Imagine modern mathematicians frequently made mistakes because they took those geometric principles for granted without fully understanding them. Wouldn't it then be worthwhile to go back and read some Euclid?
Greeks rubbing amber with different substances(Hence electricity being named after the latin word for "amber-like"), but no engineer in the world actually has a use for that information beyond knowing where the much more refined and complicated study came from.
I suppose you're right, except that the "refined and complicated study" doesn't replace knowing that you can generate electricity by rubbing different substances together. Your electrical engineer can't afford to forget about it, and people formulating new theories about electricity would do well to know the history of what we know about electricity and how we came to know it.
And that's another place where your line of thinking falls apart. A philosopher is not analogous to an electrical engineer, but instead the person trying to develop a new theory about electricity. A philosopher is not the guy using the current understanding of physics to build things, but instead more analogous to the theoretical physicist who's trying to develop a new TOE. If you're trying to create a new TOE, you should want to know how our current theories were formulated, and where the ideas and concepts originated.
What philosophers found was simple: Logically, it can be shown that there are no provably axiomatic first principles for many areas of thought. From there, new trains of thought must be explored to justify thinking -- or in fact, any venture of any kind.
When are you saying they discovered that? Because as I said earlier, the idea of "first principles" is a Greek one, and they would say that first principles cannot be proven, by definition. If you're able to prove your first principles, then you should do so, and so those aren't your real first principles. The Greeks put a lot of debate into how you can arrive at first principles, and how you could try to keep bias and false ideas out of those principles. You can witness this in Plato, that being part of the purpose of writing the dialogs in debate form.
Just like the house that disappeared, the Greeks, and Nietzsche, had many interesting and insightful pieces of architecture,
That works so long as you can still play the content. What if the DRM requires regular authentication to some kind of server, and that just suddenly stops working before you hear anything about the company going under?
But I agree about games. Preserving games are worrisome for all sorts of other reasons, too, like the fact that they're more hardware-dependent. It's much easier to format-shift some music than a video game.
Look if their business model makes them enough money to stay afloat more power to them.
Is that really what you want to say? If something makes money, more power to them? There are all sorts of business models that we make illegal, and for good reason: slave trading, hitman for hire, loan sharking, etc.
Part of the problem is that all of these business models from record companies and movie studios are built on laws that we've put in place just to prop them up. And you know what? Fine. That's what society is about. We prop people up who are doing things we like. But let's not pretend that they're entitled to profit, and we're required to prop them up.
Well, anyway, the GP post wasn't talking about businesses that are making money. SilverHatHacker was specifically talking about the businesses that have gone under. The topic at hand is "The Perils of DRM -- When Content Providers Die" after all.
That's legally true. And for that reason, I think we should be able to sue these companies for false advertising. I don't care what the terms of use say, their ads say you can "buy music" and "purchase songs". When I go to their online storefronts, there's a button next to the song that says "Buy".
If they're just selling a limited revokable-at-any-time license, then they should have to say that in their ads. The ads should say, "buy licenses to music where we can deny you access at any time" and "purchase licenses to songs that we can revoke for any reason". The button next to the song should say "Rent: for as long as we decide we want to let you have it".
Just an idea that crossed my mind right now: perhaps we should do torrenting and send money directly to artists, even though they don't request it. They'd be far happier that way, don't you think?
I agree. As consumer protection, anyone selling DRM-encumbered content should have to put the means to crack that DRM into some kind of escrow which becomes publicly available on the event that they can no longer provide support for that DRM to their customers.
Anyone failing to abide by these terms should not be allowed to use the word "buy" in their storefront or marketing. If you don't get to keep it, you aren't "buying" it. It's false advertising.
I know someone here will take an even more hard-line attitude and say DRM itself should be illegal, which is fine. I'm not going to argue with you.
Well, yeah. I would expect part of the rules to be that the hackers have to disclose their methods. And if you caused that sort of security breach, whether connected to a contest or not, I would imagine that would be a firing offense.
There are people who believe that-- that corporations just pass their costs onto consumers, but it really doesn't work that way. That's just the political talking point someone came up with to get people on the side of corporations. The reality is, corporations spend lots of money lobbying to keep their taxes low.
Why shouldn't bribing a janitor count? If I'm paying someone to call me every time I want to log into my email, then I'm probably pretty paranoid about security and don't want other people gaining access to my email. If security is so bad that random employees (including the janitor) can read my email, and those employees are so untrustworthy that they can be easily bribed, then that's just as real of a security problem as if their software were flawed.
Security is often only as strong as its weakest point. If the point of this prize was to prove that your email is secure on their servers, then gaining unauthorized access to other people's email on their servers should be enough to claim the prize.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course Apple's making profit from the iPhone. You thought they were doing it for free? The point is that, if Apple were selling the 32GB iPhone 3GS on the open market, they'd be charging $699. If you buy it from AT&T with a 2 year contract, you get it for $299. If those numbers are right, then it means AT&T is basically paying you $400 to sign up for a 2 year contract. If you're already in a 2 year contract, what makes you think you should be allowed to sign up again for those same 2 years and get another $400?
Yeah, I don't really get the complaint here. I've complained before when cell phone carriers wouldn't give me the same deal as "new customers" even after I've completed my contract-- not so much because I think that they're obligated to offer me those deals, but more because I think it's stupid and it's caused me to switch from a carrier I was otherwise happy with in order to get a better "free" phone.
However, the $199/$299 prices for the iPhones are their subsidized prices. The real prices are $200 more, but you're essentially getting $200 cash-back for locking yourself into a t 2 year deal. If you're already in your 2 year deal, then you're not in a position to sign on for another 2 years.
Most people are going to respond to you saying "an iPhone isn't an investment." However, even if you consider it an investment, dropping 5% in 4 months isn't so bad when you think about it. If you put the same $2k in the stock market back in September, and after 4 months your investment had only dropped 5%, you'd be considered incredibly lucky.
On the other hand, try to explain to my grandmother why 64-bit computing is a good thing at all. Eventually you'll come down to some kind of statement as inaccurate as "it's faster" or "it lets you deal with more stuff at the same time."
I never really understood how they withhold these deals from existing customers, even when their contracts are up. I remember back when they were Cingular, they were offering a fancy high-end phone for free when you sign up, but even though I hadn't been under contract for over a year, they wouldn't offer me the same deal. Instead, I had to switch to T-Mobile, because they were offering a different high-end phone for free for new customers, and then a year later I switched back to AT&T to get a different high-end free phone.
Doesn't customer loyalty get you anything? Don't they want to keep my business?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, but it doesn't seem like you've actually read the source material. My impression is you've listened to someone else describe the source material, and maybe that person only read some other writer who was complaining about the source material.
Trying to change your mind? Fat lot of luck that will do me. You're not even offering support for your arguments, and you're making things up out of thin air. I'm not trying to convince you because you're not actually listening. I'm trying to convince anyone else who might bother to read this thread of arguments. And all I'm trying to convince them of is that it might actually be worth reading Aristotle and Plato before making up your mind that they're stupid, superstitious idiots who didn't think. I'm arguing that you might want to seek to understand something before dismissing it. I'm arguing that, if you're going to dismiss someone for making things up, not arguing things properly, and ignoring evidence, then it doesn't make sense to do so while making things up, failing to argue things properly, and ignoring evidence.
But honestly, I addressed your complaints. I gave you answers to a lot of the things you've failed to understand. I've made suggestions where you can find more comprehensive answers than mine. I've done more than my share. You've more or less responded with "nah uh!" and expected that it would be enough to intimidate me since you didn't actually have an argument to support your claims. Sorry to disappoint, but you don't scare me. If you want to convince me, you're going to have to offer some kind of actual evidence that you at least have a firm grasp of the subject matter we're talking about.
In a nutshell, "Oh, but we came from there so they're important".
Nope. Read again if you want to understand it. Or ignore me and go read a lot of philosophy. You'll understand it better if you're actually educated in the topic rather than taking my word for it. Plato and Aristotle are a good place to start, but you probably won't get it until you've read a lot more.
But here I see you're actually wanting to get into actually talking about philosophy:
Assuming there's an objective truth, what assumptions am I making that can be somehow shown to be part of that objective truth?
Nope, sorry. The concept of objectivity as such is relatively modern. The Greeks didn't seem to think about things that way at all, and what's more they were probably more right.
Kicking away the arbitrary values of humanity, the universe stops being a place where Aristotle's prime mover can exist -- the world becomes a place where it's understood that the concept exists only in Aristotle's mind, as a by-product of how he thinks as a human.
Yeah, this is where modern thoughts about the "objective" kind of screw up: in thinking that the "objective" is a very real and better view of the universe, but unfortunately unattainable. The problem is that you're saying the moderns are better because they understand that you can't be objective, and yet the way in which you think they're better is that they're able to be more objective. It's a contradiction. If you're really disregarding the possibility of being objective, then your goal can't be "to be as objective as possible."
What you have to understand about Aristotle is he's not really saying, "There is, objectively, a prime mover in existence," but rather something like, "From any human understanding of the universe, it will ultimately be necessary to assume a 'prime mover'. Without such a concept, humans won't be able to reason about their own world." Even in Plato, there are basically refutations of any ideas about objective access to the universe. It's not a very deep and protracted refutation because the idea didn't have the traction that it does today, but it's in there.
But anyway, time and again, throughout the history of philosophy and science, you'll see that no one is able to create a model of our world without having some kind of stand-in for the prime mover. They might call it something a else, but it's still there. People still use the concept as the foundation for their understanding, but they understand it poorly, and therefore reach inaccurate or sometimes silly conclusions. If people understood old philosophers like Aristotle and Plato better, they'd make fewer of the sorts of mistakes you're making.
It translates to "We're no strangers to love You know the rules, and so do I"
Really? Then is this all some kind of late April Fools joke?
Why would they be rick-rolling us?
Well I can't say for sure, but my guess would be that they're looking at how much revenue they're losing to online torrents and asking themselves, "Is there any way we can get that business?"
As for the alternatives, they don't care about cannibalizing DVD rentals, because they don't really make money from them. They could license the same content to HBO, but then they basically have to take the cut of profits that HBO gives them. Why not just start your own channel and keep all the profits for yourself? They might hurt DVD sales, but they might believe that DVD sales are already on the way out.
Ultimately they're faced with a problem. Their old business model depended on having complete control over distribution, so if you wanted to see a movie just out in theaters, you had to rush to see in in theaters or else wait a year for it to come out on video. If you wanted to see the movie during the time between theatrical release and video release, well... tough. These days, if you really want to see a movie, you can often get it online before the theatrical release, most likely before it comes out on video, and certainly once it's been released to video. The movie studio has to make it a little more pleasant and convenient for people to see the movies they want to see, when they want to see it, and how they want to see it, or risk having their current business model fall apart.
Right. Ask a computer to count 1 million records and stop exactly on the millionth, and then ask a person to count 1 million cards and stop on the millionth. If you had to bet your life on it, who would you think would be more precise? Obviously computers have value.
On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in the idea that the source code should be available for review to make sure there are no weird bugs that could multiply votes, and there should be a paper trail so that the computer can be checked for voter fraud. Computers are more efficient, but not only are they more efficient at doing the right thing, and they're more efficient at doing the wrong thing. If the code tells them to count votes incorrectly (whether it's fraud or an inadvertent bug) they will very efficiently count the votes incorrectly.
Maybe you should go back and read some of my posts. It doesn't seem as though you actually read them the first time.
Yeah, I thought that was a joke. It seems strange to try to make it about not-being Google when people use Google because it works well and people like it. They may as well call it "Bing does not work well and you won't like it", but I guess "Bdnwwaywli" is a little harder to pronounce.
Oh, and SSL certificate authorities do something to help the situation I laid out. Imagine the trick I described with DNS where it reroutes my traffic from citibank.com to some other web server pretending to be citibank.com. But instead of using http, I used https. Now what's going to happen?
Well the first thing is that the server is going to give me an SSL certificate that says, "I really am citibank.com, and you can check with Verisign to prove it." So now my browser sends that certificate to Verisign and asks, "Citibank.com says that this certificate is proof that they're really citibank.com. Is this legit?" Now because the fake server can't generate a bogus certificate that will fool Verisign, Verisign looks at it and says, "No, this isn't legit." The browser throws up a big warning, and if the user is savvy at all, they'll know not to put in their login credentials.
Now if you're clever, you might think, "Well wait a second, if my browser doesn't know which certificates are valid without checking with Verisign, then why doesn't the hacker just reroute the traffic to Verisign to his own server? Couldn't he then have his own server just say that every certificate is valid?" That would work, except that your browser is distributed with a certificate for Verisign. Because of that, unless the hacker can compromise your browser locally (in which case you're screwed no matter what), your browser can't be fooled into thinking it's talking to Verisign.
So all in all, that's a pretty good system. There's only one piece where it's likely to fall apart, and that's if the certificate authority (Verisign in this case) can be tricked into issuing a valid certificate to someone who doesn't own the domain. Putting SSL certs in DNS could help this problem.
But ignoring that little problem, SSL certificates prove pretty well that when I go to visit "citibank.com" that I'm actually connecting to "citibank.com". Knowing that "citibank.com" is actually owned by Citibank whereas "citibanking.com" isn't... well, that's another problem, but a far less dangerous one.
A philosophical question is, by definition, one that is considered because of love of knowledge. If you consider it because of practical implications, then it's not philosophical.
Well first, I'm not sure that makes sense. "Knowledge" has lots of practical implications. But also you have your translation slightly wrong-- "philo-sophia" = "love of wisdom". Wisdom is very practical.
And besides all that, "philosophy" over the years has taken on an alternative meaning, as "the study of the foundations of human study and knowledge." Now this typically leads people to put studies like epistemology, ontology, and even ethics/politics into the realm of philosophy, but also many people would say that laying the foundations for any field of study is a philosophic endeavor. It's only once the foundations are laid and the famework is set that the field of study starts to become "science".
It gets to be a fine line, but just to give some contrast, the "scientist" who's designing a method to search for extra-terrestrial life is a scientist, but the "scientist" who's trying to figure out what it means to be "alive" is a natural philosopher. A physicist who's designing a particle accelerator is acting really more as an engineer. When the particle accelerator is built and a physicist is running experiments to try to find evidence of a particle he's theorized, that physicist is acting as a scientist. When a physicist looks at the outcome of those experiments, steps back and asks, "But what is a particle when it's that small? Is it still right to think of it as matter?" then he's acting as a philosopher.
So you may be a political scientist looking at a situation and ask, "According to the framework my studies are bound in, what is the most peaceable solution to a problem like this?" And that's just political science. But when you start asking, "Is that solution just or unjust?" you've strayed into philosophy, practical or impractical as it is.
As a guess, I'd speculate it would be easier to hijack a domain from the registrar than it would be to intercept TCP connections to a web server.
You'd guess wrong. Without any kind of DNS signing or SSL certificate authorities, any router or DNS server that's being used in the transmission can basically be hacked to redirect traffic to an arbitrary server.
So here's a trivial example: I could set up an open wireless network next door to a coffee shop and assume some of the coffee shop patrons will stumble on it. Since I control the DHCP, I get to tell them which DNS server to use (or I can automatically reroute any traffic on the DNS ports to my DNS server). So once I control the DNS responses, when they type "citibank.com" into their browsers, their system does a DNS query to find the IP address and my DNS server gives them the IP address of the server I've made up to look like citibank.com. However, my site just takes whatever password information they type in and then gives them an error message, "Sorry, our site is down right now. Please try again later." The user goes on about his business, and meanwhile I have access to his bank account.
But even ignoring this simple little DNS trick, it's entirely possible to just have the router itself reroute traffic. I could set my router so that any traffic directed to 74.125.127.100 (google.com) instead gets sent to 207.46.104.147 (bing.com). It's really not difficult. That's way easier than hacking Google's registrar and changing the real DNS records.
So would I.
What strikes me is the lack of discipline in your arguments. You reiterated without substance, then once again accuse me of not knowing the subject.
I don't think you understand how this works. You claim things without any real evidence and showing ignorance of a subject, and I respond with actual evidence showing that you're wrong. If you respond with the same unsupported ignorant claims, then yes, I'll pretty much repeat myself.
As for my other point, it wasn't until relatively recently that philosophers started looking at first principles of different areas of thought in earnest
See, like this gem. What support do you have for this? Or this one:
Aristotle tossed out a first principle with very little thought
On what basis are you making this claim? I can't imagine anyone who's well educated on the subject would claim that Aristotle failed to put much thought into things. Have you actually read Aristotle?
Just as you don't need to know the etymology of a word to know how to use the word, and you don't need to know about al-Khwarizmi to use mathematics, old philosophy is interesting in the historical sense of understanding how thought became what it is today.
However, imagine this: imagine you studied geometry, and everything you learned took Euclid's geometry for granted. Imagine all your text books always just assumed what it meant for two lines to be parallel, assumed the Pythagorean theorem was true, etc, and you never saw any kind of proof for these things. Imagine modern mathematicians frequently made mistakes because they took those geometric principles for granted without fully understanding them. Wouldn't it then be worthwhile to go back and read some Euclid?
Greeks rubbing amber with different substances(Hence electricity being named after the latin word for "amber-like"), but no engineer in the world actually has a use for that information beyond knowing where the much more refined and complicated study came from.
I suppose you're right, except that the "refined and complicated study" doesn't replace knowing that you can generate electricity by rubbing different substances together. Your electrical engineer can't afford to forget about it, and people formulating new theories about electricity would do well to know the history of what we know about electricity and how we came to know it.
And that's another place where your line of thinking falls apart. A philosopher is not analogous to an electrical engineer, but instead the person trying to develop a new theory about electricity. A philosopher is not the guy using the current understanding of physics to build things, but instead more analogous to the theoretical physicist who's trying to develop a new TOE. If you're trying to create a new TOE, you should want to know how our current theories were formulated, and where the ideas and concepts originated.
What philosophers found was simple: Logically, it can be shown that there are no provably axiomatic first principles for many areas of thought. From there, new trains of thought must be explored to justify thinking -- or in fact, any venture of any kind.
When are you saying they discovered that? Because as I said earlier, the idea of "first principles" is a Greek one, and they would say that first principles cannot be proven, by definition. If you're able to prove your first principles, then you should do so, and so those aren't your real first principles. The Greeks put a lot of debate into how you can arrive at first principles, and how you could try to keep bias and false ideas out of those principles. You can witness this in Plato, that being part of the purpose of writing the dialogs in debate form.
Just like the house that disappeared, the Greeks, and Nietzsche, had many interesting and insightful pieces of architecture,
That works so long as you can still play the content. What if the DRM requires regular authentication to some kind of server, and that just suddenly stops working before you hear anything about the company going under?
But I agree about games. Preserving games are worrisome for all sorts of other reasons, too, like the fact that they're more hardware-dependent. It's much easier to format-shift some music than a video game.
Look if their business model makes them enough money to stay afloat more power to them.
Is that really what you want to say? If something makes money, more power to them? There are all sorts of business models that we make illegal, and for good reason: slave trading, hitman for hire, loan sharking, etc.
Part of the problem is that all of these business models from record companies and movie studios are built on laws that we've put in place just to prop them up. And you know what? Fine. That's what society is about. We prop people up who are doing things we like. But let's not pretend that they're entitled to profit, and we're required to prop them up.
Well, anyway, the GP post wasn't talking about businesses that are making money. SilverHatHacker was specifically talking about the businesses that have gone under. The topic at hand is "The Perils of DRM -- When Content Providers Die" after all.
That's legally true. And for that reason, I think we should be able to sue these companies for false advertising. I don't care what the terms of use say, their ads say you can "buy music" and "purchase songs". When I go to their online storefronts, there's a button next to the song that says "Buy".
If they're just selling a limited revokable-at-any-time license, then they should have to say that in their ads. The ads should say, "buy licenses to music where we can deny you access at any time" and "purchase licenses to songs that we can revoke for any reason". The button next to the song should say "Rent: for as long as we decide we want to let you have it".
Just an idea that crossed my mind right now: perhaps we should do torrenting and send money directly to artists, even though they don't request it. They'd be far happier that way, don't you think?
That's just now crossing your mind?
I agree. As consumer protection, anyone selling DRM-encumbered content should have to put the means to crack that DRM into some kind of escrow which becomes publicly available on the event that they can no longer provide support for that DRM to their customers.
Anyone failing to abide by these terms should not be allowed to use the word "buy" in their storefront or marketing. If you don't get to keep it, you aren't "buying" it. It's false advertising.
I know someone here will take an even more hard-line attitude and say DRM itself should be illegal, which is fine. I'm not going to argue with you.
Well, yeah. I would expect part of the rules to be that the hackers have to disclose their methods. And if you caused that sort of security breach, whether connected to a contest or not, I would imagine that would be a firing offense.
Are you being serious or sarcastic? I can't tell.
There are people who believe that-- that corporations just pass their costs onto consumers, but it really doesn't work that way. That's just the political talking point someone came up with to get people on the side of corporations. The reality is, corporations spend lots of money lobbying to keep their taxes low.
Why shouldn't bribing a janitor count? If I'm paying someone to call me every time I want to log into my email, then I'm probably pretty paranoid about security and don't want other people gaining access to my email. If security is so bad that random employees (including the janitor) can read my email, and those employees are so untrustworthy that they can be easily bribed, then that's just as real of a security problem as if their software were flawed.
Security is often only as strong as its weakest point. If the point of this prize was to prove that your email is secure on their servers, then gaining unauthorized access to other people's email on their servers should be enough to claim the prize.