Really, I still don't see why I'd have to switch from FF3 to this new browser, free or not
Well I don't think anyone is saying you "have to switch". But like you say, a browser is a browser. So long as browsers and implementing standards, we should all be able to look at the same pages on our own browser of choice, and not worry about it.
And after all, different strokes and all that. You may like Firefox, someone else might like something else.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
I wonder if Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple and others could get together to declare a User-agent flag day when, on the first of January 2009, all User-agent strings would remove the historic cruft and just tell you the browser and version.
I think that first, you'd need to get web developers to quit detecting user-agent strings, and that won't happen until they can trust that their users are using standards-compliant browsers.
That's where the gremlins sneak in to this whole mess. The same page renders differently and works differently in different browsers, so developers user the user-agent flag as a hack to give different code to different browsers. And then the browser developers have to hack their browsers to make sure they give a user-agent that will get the developers to give them a good page. If IE starts supporting standards better then maybe web developers can just make standards-compliant pages, and then everything will render properly in every browser, and we can be done with this mess.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
I'm under the impression that it's not *that* unusual for game developers to bring testers in. I seem to remember mention of it in the Portal commentary. Getting an audience to test you game seems easy and obvious. It seems like the hard thing would be knowing what to do when your audience tells you the game isn't fun.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but it is brutally hypocritical to just point to the issue in China, when the US has been, and still is, the leading polluting nation on Earth.
You keep asserting that, but what kind of pollutants are you talking about, anyway? Because last time they had the Olympics in America, they weren't trying to seed clouds to wash the toxic chemicals out of the air.
You people should learn from us and keep being poor, while we, well, will just keep being rich...
Yeah, so what's your solution here? What, America is so evil for ruining the planet that we're just supposed to hope that everyone else joins in and tries to speed up the destruction? Because yeah, that's just what those nasty Americans deserve. But I bet if I stop driving a car (I don't drive a car, by the way), then suddenly the Chinese will just clean up their act. Right?
It's at least somewhat hypocritical, but it also might be recognizing the reality that, as bad as the US is, we won't survive for long everyone is doing the same thing. You could view the whole thing as the US prodding developing nations to learn from the US's mistakes.
Part of the problem the US has right now is that it grew and developed without any sense of cleanliness or efficiency. Now our infrastructure is pretty well screwed, and it's hampering our ability to go green. You need to build up a lot of political will to dismantle the almost mythological attachment to the disposable suburban lifestyle, which is the cause of a lot of problems.
Either way, I'm inclined to say, "Two wrongs don't make a right." However bad the US is, that shouldn't be an excuse for other countries to act recklessly.
In related news, IT admins have done a survey of security firms and have found that 95% of them will provide you with useless and even harmful advice and services if it will make them any money.
My question would be, once they discover the cause, can we use that information? First application that comes to mind that I'd love to see is, if we can shorten something's half-life, can that be used to help dispose of radioactive nuclear waste, thereby removing the main objection to nuclear power?
She told them they had no need for it -- she was going to pay in cash for her treatment and that no insurance claim was involved, so they didn't need it.
So I guess that's all you have to do to avoid these things-- pay cash for everything? Great, I'll get cancel my insurance right now.
Oh, and of course, you said your friend gave the information out to "damn near no one", which I assume isn't the same as "no one". That means there are still people who have access to that information other than herself, so it's still not secure. All her attempts to keep in a secret are admirable, I guess, but it doesn't change my opinion on the matter. Whether or not your social security number is used as an identifier, knowing a person's social security number should *not* be considered authentication of that identity by anyone.
I'm not following - why are inline PDF's or SVG's insufficient? Because IE doesn't have native SVG support?
I think she was just trying to point out that on the one end, you have PDF which allows pixel-perfect design at the cost of complexity and HTML which is simpler, but tends to be difficult to create design for. It's really not that controversial an idea-- that HTML+CSS (especially given the current implementations across browsers) makes design more difficult than it needs to be. That's why all the major browsers have been working on implementing features to improve design control (including the font issue we're talking about now).
The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US.
The outlines aren't. As you note, the expression of those outlines in a specific digital format might be, and a professional TrueType file -- which literally contains a computer program that is executed to produce hinted outlines -- certainly is.
So, in the USA you can print out a font, trace the outlines, and do pretty much anything you like with them, but you'd be unwise to copy a font file directly.
Would the fact that it's really digital matter? I mean, I could understand maybe some argument that says a particular expression of a font is copyrightable, but the font isn't. Now that may be a stupid sentence, but it seems like lawyerly thinking. What it might mean is that you couldn't take a font, trace every letter exactly, and resell the result (or something to that effect), but you could produce your own that was a visual rough copy.
Because it seems to me hard to think about what happens if you copyright fonts and treat them like other copyrighted material. I mean, am I allowed to look at your font, decide I like it, and produce a similar font? How close does it have to be before it's a "derivative work"?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Enough people will lose their private keys or have them stolen that fraud will still be a problem. I just don't have enough confidence that the average people will take the required precautions.
At least it will require that your private keys are lost or stolen before you start having some of these problems. Right now, they're doing identity verification against information that's out in the open by default, without it ever being lost or stolen. That's why identity theft is such a problem.
Plus, at least you can set up a good system to revoke a lost/stolen private key and transparently issue a new one. Hell, they can even expire occasionally by default. There's currently not a good system set up to do that with social security numbers, specifically because it's intended to be a unique identifier that follows you through life.
As long as companies and governments insist upon tracking personae instead of people, fraud will continue.
So what's the solution you're suggesting here? That credit companies and governments actually follow you around and snoop on your behavior? Or perhaps that they get to know you as a person?
It's not that the SSN is used as a password, it's used as a unique id and no password at all!.
That was my point. It's an identifier, but it gets used as a password. There are many cases where simply knowing my own social security number is used a means of verifying my identity, even though it's completely inappropriate for that purpose. That's *exactly* my point.
Giving everyone SSL certs wouldn't be any different from giving everyone social security numbers, except that it would be more appropriate given how SSNs are used.
I agree that anything like a national ID raises some security/privacy questions, but I'm not so paranoid that I refuse to use my SSN or get a passport.
although implementing it would cost billions of dollars to the government, banking, and insurance industries (among many others) that use SSNs to identify clients
Sure, it would cost money. Then again, how much money is lost to identity theft, including the money spent on identity theft protection and money spent on investigating identity theft claims. Given a long enough timeline of dealing with these issues, building a better solution might just save money.
Do you really think that Mom & Pop Bank in rural North Dakota has any ability to modify their banking systems to work with such a scheme when they can't even make a web site? I don't.
So give small banks a tax break on hiring an IT guy trained to deal with this stuff. I don't really know the best solution there, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.
Yeah, I understand there was a program in the 70s to explore using psychics against the commies but is there a form of dementia that causes one to hallucinate that they are serving a higher power? You know like John Nash or Tom Cruise [youtube.com] style? I'm sorry, that wasn't really fair to Doctor Nash.
No, it's probably very fair to Dr. Nash. There are mental illnesses that cause the sufferer to believe he or she is very important, either by themselves or because of some role they play. Have you heard the phrase "delusions of grandeur"? It's a symptom of paranoid disorders, such as paranoid schizophrenia, which is the disease John Nash suffered from.
Delusions of grandeur are often accompanies by delusions of persecution. Essentially, if I believe myself to be really great and important, then whenever something goes wrong for me, I'm likely to assume it's because someone is out to get me. That's where the "paranoid" part comes in.
I suppose, but it doesn't seem to me like the problem is that people use one identifier as an identifier for something else. For example, there are plenty of sites that will use your e-mail address as their username. It might not be your preference, but there's no inherent security risk (at least not any that are immediately apparent to me).
If everyone wants to use SSN as some sort of universal ID number, it doesn't seem to me like it's a big problem. The problem arises when they want to use it as some kind of secure password, even though it's effectively out in the open.
How about we just stop using social security numbers as though they're some sort of magical security token? It was never designed for that purpose, and if you put the slightest bit of thought into it, you immediately realize that it's not secure at all. People act like it's some sort of super-secure password that authenticates who you are, but then you're basically required to give out that password to random people on a semi-regular basis.
In modern times, with ubiquitous computing, it seems like there must be a better way. Hell, issue every man, woman, and child something comparable to an SSL certificate and have the government (or credit agencies) run the analog of the root servers. It may not be a perfect idea, but it'd be better than this.
Ok, you seem to know what the hell is going on, so I'll ask you.
The summary talks about it being a huge boost to network efficiency and how it cuts overhead, but it seems like that wouldn't necessarily make a huge difference for most people's network use unless overhead is large and networks are hugely inefficient. I mean, if overhead is.0001%, then cutting it in half isn't going to give you too much of a boost in your ability to transmit data unless you're pushing around huge amounts of data and really need to squeeze every last bit of bandwidth. Right?
So I trust I'll get yelled at by someone if that logic is wrong, but just let me ask, what kind of benefit would this improvement actually yield? Do I get much better bandwidth, much lower latency, both? Or is it the sort of improvement than only a real network guru could love?
For BBS style sites a straightforward nntp type protocol straight from the source (e.g. that isn't copied around the internet) would be ideal.
Yeah, I wouldn't pretend to know what the correct protocol would be, but it seems to me like the smart thing to do would be to create some kind of a standard discussion protocol that would be easy to query and post from either a desktop client or a web client. Like lots of weblog software allows posting through XML-RPC and reading through RSS.
I guess that's where the web is heading, but it doesn't seem to be getting there in any coherent/systematic way.
Yeah, I suppose that's part of what prompted my posts here. There seems to be an attempt here to bypass the websites' interfaces in favor of getting to the bare functionality, but for me this just raises a lot of other questions and ideas.
The basic weirdness it raises is, if you're setting up your web browser to bypass HTML and CSS and access/manipulate the data more directly, using HTML as only semantic markup and not a display markup, then it seems like the web browser has transitioned into a different sort of application. It's not clear to me what happens to the Internet at that point.
But it seems like, ideally, there would be some sort of standardization on how those services are exposed to this sort of browser. As it is, it appears like someone has to write a little plugin for every website that you want to access its services.
I don't see why they couldn't, technically. Of course, it's not really worth it to them to bother, and it doesn't seem like any kind of intentional pattern of behavior.
It's like if I burn you a copy of a CD I bought, that's copyright infringement, and I suppose the RIAA could come after me. It's innocuous and small enough that I don't really think it's warranted, and it's probably not worth their time and money to pursue it. On the other hand, if I set up a CD pressing plant making counterfeit CDs of popular albums and try to sell them through Amazon, then of course I'm going to get sued. And there's no reason why, according to current copyright law, I shouldn't be sued.
Sure, and I understand that. There's also an issue of accessibility-- not in terms of accessibility for disabled people, but if I'm using some random computer, I can point the browser to something more easily and readily than I can set up a news reader. Maybe that's not "accessibility" but rather "portability". Whatever you want to call it, it does seem to be an advantage of web applications. They're also inherently cross-platform.
But it keeps striking me that I really don't like web applications. Regardless of what protocols are actually passing the information around, I want access to the information. I don't don't want to see the website's ads, and often enough I don't even want to see their website's chosen presentation. I don't particularly like most web applications feature sets. Lots of them are buggy and overloaded, and take too long to load with all of their little graphical widgets.
Even right now, discussing this on Slashdot, it occurs to me that I might prefer it if I could move this whole discussion into a newsgroup or something. It'd be nice if I could save drafts and track replies, if I had my choice of interfaces and the interface could look and operate like part of my OS. Don't get me wrong, the AJAX commenting system works pretty well and I appreciate the effort put into it, but it's not my ideal situation. I'd rather have a good newsgroup-type application that I could use to track loads of different discussions on different websites, and dispense with the HTML/CSS/graphics/AJAX entirely. Just threaded text messages with moderation would be awesome. I'd prefer if the features were built into the client end, so that I don't lose good functionality when I switch from one site to another.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, I still don't see why I'd have to switch from FF3 to this new browser, free or not
Well I don't think anyone is saying you "have to switch". But like you say, a browser is a browser. So long as browsers and implementing standards, we should all be able to look at the same pages on our own browser of choice, and not worry about it.
And after all, different strokes and all that. You may like Firefox, someone else might like something else.
I wonder if Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple and others could get together to declare a User-agent flag day when, on the first of January 2009, all User-agent strings would remove the historic cruft and just tell you the browser and version.
I think that first, you'd need to get web developers to quit detecting user-agent strings, and that won't happen until they can trust that their users are using standards-compliant browsers.
That's where the gremlins sneak in to this whole mess. The same page renders differently and works differently in different browsers, so developers user the user-agent flag as a hack to give different code to different browsers. And then the browser developers have to hack their browsers to make sure they give a user-agent that will get the developers to give them a good page. If IE starts supporting standards better then maybe web developers can just make standards-compliant pages, and then everything will render properly in every browser, and we can be done with this mess.
And look where that gets them.
I'm under the impression that it's not *that* unusual for game developers to bring testers in. I seem to remember mention of it in the Portal commentary. Getting an audience to test you game seems easy and obvious. It seems like the hard thing would be knowing what to do when your audience tells you the game isn't fun.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but it is brutally hypocritical to just point to the issue in China, when the US has been, and still is, the leading polluting nation on Earth.
You keep asserting that, but what kind of pollutants are you talking about, anyway? Because last time they had the Olympics in America, they weren't trying to seed clouds to wash the toxic chemicals out of the air.
You people should learn from us and keep being poor, while we, well, will just keep being rich...
Yeah, so what's your solution here? What, America is so evil for ruining the planet that we're just supposed to hope that everyone else joins in and tries to speed up the destruction? Because yeah, that's just what those nasty Americans deserve. But I bet if I stop driving a car (I don't drive a car, by the way), then suddenly the Chinese will just clean up their act. Right?
It's at least somewhat hypocritical, but it also might be recognizing the reality that, as bad as the US is, we won't survive for long everyone is doing the same thing. You could view the whole thing as the US prodding developing nations to learn from the US's mistakes.
Part of the problem the US has right now is that it grew and developed without any sense of cleanliness or efficiency. Now our infrastructure is pretty well screwed, and it's hampering our ability to go green. You need to build up a lot of political will to dismantle the almost mythological attachment to the disposable suburban lifestyle, which is the cause of a lot of problems.
Either way, I'm inclined to say, "Two wrongs don't make a right." However bad the US is, that shouldn't be an excuse for other countries to act recklessly.
In related news, IT admins have done a survey of security firms and have found that 95% of them will provide you with useless and even harmful advice and services if it will make them any money.
My question would be, once they discover the cause, can we use that information? First application that comes to mind that I'd love to see is, if we can shorten something's half-life, can that be used to help dispose of radioactive nuclear waste, thereby removing the main objection to nuclear power?
She told them they had no need for it -- she was going to pay in cash for her treatment and that no insurance claim was involved, so they didn't need it.
So I guess that's all you have to do to avoid these things-- pay cash for everything? Great, I'll get cancel my insurance right now.
Oh, and of course, you said your friend gave the information out to "damn near no one", which I assume isn't the same as "no one". That means there are still people who have access to that information other than herself, so it's still not secure. All her attempts to keep in a secret are admirable, I guess, but it doesn't change my opinion on the matter. Whether or not your social security number is used as an identifier, knowing a person's social security number should *not* be considered authentication of that identity by anyone.
I'm not following - why are inline PDF's or SVG's insufficient? Because IE doesn't have native SVG support?
I think she was just trying to point out that on the one end, you have PDF which allows pixel-perfect design at the cost of complexity and HTML which is simpler, but tends to be difficult to create design for. It's really not that controversial an idea-- that HTML+CSS (especially given the current implementations across browsers) makes design more difficult than it needs to be. That's why all the major browsers have been working on implementing features to improve design control (including the font issue we're talking about now).
The outlines aren't. As you note, the expression of those outlines in a specific digital format might be, and a professional TrueType file -- which literally contains a computer program that is executed to produce hinted outlines -- certainly is.
So, in the USA you can print out a font, trace the outlines, and do pretty much anything you like with them, but you'd be unwise to copy a font file directly.
Would the fact that it's really digital matter? I mean, I could understand maybe some argument that says a particular expression of a font is copyrightable, but the font isn't. Now that may be a stupid sentence, but it seems like lawyerly thinking. What it might mean is that you couldn't take a font, trace every letter exactly, and resell the result (or something to that effect), but you could produce your own that was a visual rough copy.
Because it seems to me hard to think about what happens if you copyright fonts and treat them like other copyrighted material. I mean, am I allowed to look at your font, decide I like it, and produce a similar font? How close does it have to be before it's a "derivative work"?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Enough people will lose their private keys or have them stolen that fraud will still be a problem. I just don't have enough confidence that the average people will take the required precautions.
At least it will require that your private keys are lost or stolen before you start having some of these problems. Right now, they're doing identity verification against information that's out in the open by default, without it ever being lost or stolen. That's why identity theft is such a problem.
Plus, at least you can set up a good system to revoke a lost/stolen private key and transparently issue a new one. Hell, they can even expire occasionally by default. There's currently not a good system set up to do that with social security numbers, specifically because it's intended to be a unique identifier that follows you through life.
As long as companies and governments insist upon tracking personae instead of people, fraud will continue.
So what's the solution you're suggesting here? That credit companies and governments actually follow you around and snoop on your behavior? Or perhaps that they get to know you as a person?
Oh, and...
It's not that the SSN is used as a password, it's used as a unique id and no password at all!.
That was my point. It's an identifier, but it gets used as a password. There are many cases where simply knowing my own social security number is used a means of verifying my identity, even though it's completely inappropriate for that purpose. That's *exactly* my point.
Do you know how SSL works? I don't have to give you my private key in order to verify my identity.
Giving everyone SSL certs wouldn't be any different from giving everyone social security numbers, except that it would be more appropriate given how SSNs are used.
I agree that anything like a national ID raises some security/privacy questions, but I'm not so paranoid that I refuse to use my SSN or get a passport.
although implementing it would cost billions of dollars to the government, banking, and insurance industries (among many others) that use SSNs to identify clients
Sure, it would cost money. Then again, how much money is lost to identity theft, including the money spent on identity theft protection and money spent on investigating identity theft claims. Given a long enough timeline of dealing with these issues, building a better solution might just save money.
Do you really think that Mom & Pop Bank in rural North Dakota has any ability to modify their banking systems to work with such a scheme when they can't even make a web site? I don't.
So give small banks a tax break on hiring an IT guy trained to deal with this stuff. I don't really know the best solution there, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.
Yeah, I understand there was a program in the 70s to explore using psychics against the commies but is there a form of dementia that causes one to hallucinate that they are serving a higher power? You know like John Nash or Tom Cruise [youtube.com] style? I'm sorry, that wasn't really fair to Doctor Nash.
No, it's probably very fair to Dr. Nash. There are mental illnesses that cause the sufferer to believe he or she is very important, either by themselves or because of some role they play. Have you heard the phrase "delusions of grandeur"? It's a symptom of paranoid disorders, such as paranoid schizophrenia, which is the disease John Nash suffered from.
Delusions of grandeur are often accompanies by delusions of persecution. Essentially, if I believe myself to be really great and important, then whenever something goes wrong for me, I'm likely to assume it's because someone is out to get me. That's where the "paranoid" part comes in.
I suppose, but it doesn't seem to me like the problem is that people use one identifier as an identifier for something else. For example, there are plenty of sites that will use your e-mail address as their username. It might not be your preference, but there's no inherent security risk (at least not any that are immediately apparent to me).
If everyone wants to use SSN as some sort of universal ID number, it doesn't seem to me like it's a big problem. The problem arises when they want to use it as some kind of secure password, even though it's effectively out in the open.
How about we just stop using social security numbers as though they're some sort of magical security token? It was never designed for that purpose, and if you put the slightest bit of thought into it, you immediately realize that it's not secure at all. People act like it's some sort of super-secure password that authenticates who you are, but then you're basically required to give out that password to random people on a semi-regular basis.
In modern times, with ubiquitous computing, it seems like there must be a better way. Hell, issue every man, woman, and child something comparable to an SSL certificate and have the government (or credit agencies) run the analog of the root servers. It may not be a perfect idea, but it'd be better than this.
To the end user, this would mean that the internet would respond faster to outages, and better route around congestion on any one link.
Thank you. That's the statement that I came in here for.
Ok, you seem to know what the hell is going on, so I'll ask you.
The summary talks about it being a huge boost to network efficiency and how it cuts overhead, but it seems like that wouldn't necessarily make a huge difference for most people's network use unless overhead is large and networks are hugely inefficient. I mean, if overhead is .0001%, then cutting it in half isn't going to give you too much of a boost in your ability to transmit data unless you're pushing around huge amounts of data and really need to squeeze every last bit of bandwidth. Right?
So I trust I'll get yelled at by someone if that logic is wrong, but just let me ask, what kind of benefit would this improvement actually yield? Do I get much better bandwidth, much lower latency, both? Or is it the sort of improvement than only a real network guru could love?
For BBS style sites a straightforward nntp type protocol straight from the source (e.g. that isn't copied around the internet) would be ideal.
Yeah, I wouldn't pretend to know what the correct protocol would be, but it seems to me like the smart thing to do would be to create some kind of a standard discussion protocol that would be easy to query and post from either a desktop client or a web client. Like lots of weblog software allows posting through XML-RPC and reading through RSS.
I guess that's where the web is heading, but it doesn't seem to be getting there in any coherent/systematic way.
Yeah, I suppose that's part of what prompted my posts here. There seems to be an attempt here to bypass the websites' interfaces in favor of getting to the bare functionality, but for me this just raises a lot of other questions and ideas.
The basic weirdness it raises is, if you're setting up your web browser to bypass HTML and CSS and access/manipulate the data more directly, using HTML as only semantic markup and not a display markup, then it seems like the web browser has transitioned into a different sort of application. It's not clear to me what happens to the Internet at that point.
But it seems like, ideally, there would be some sort of standardization on how those services are exposed to this sort of browser. As it is, it appears like someone has to write a little plugin for every website that you want to access its services.
Is Apple justified in suing me now, too?
I don't see why they couldn't, technically. Of course, it's not really worth it to them to bother, and it doesn't seem like any kind of intentional pattern of behavior.
It's like if I burn you a copy of a CD I bought, that's copyright infringement, and I suppose the RIAA could come after me. It's innocuous and small enough that I don't really think it's warranted, and it's probably not worth their time and money to pursue it. On the other hand, if I set up a CD pressing plant making counterfeit CDs of popular albums and try to sell them through Amazon, then of course I'm going to get sued. And there's no reason why, according to current copyright law, I shouldn't be sued.
Sure, and I understand that. There's also an issue of accessibility-- not in terms of accessibility for disabled people, but if I'm using some random computer, I can point the browser to something more easily and readily than I can set up a news reader. Maybe that's not "accessibility" but rather "portability". Whatever you want to call it, it does seem to be an advantage of web applications. They're also inherently cross-platform.
But it keeps striking me that I really don't like web applications. Regardless of what protocols are actually passing the information around, I want access to the information. I don't don't want to see the website's ads, and often enough I don't even want to see their website's chosen presentation. I don't particularly like most web applications feature sets. Lots of them are buggy and overloaded, and take too long to load with all of their little graphical widgets.
Even right now, discussing this on Slashdot, it occurs to me that I might prefer it if I could move this whole discussion into a newsgroup or something. It'd be nice if I could save drafts and track replies, if I had my choice of interfaces and the interface could look and operate like part of my OS. Don't get me wrong, the AJAX commenting system works pretty well and I appreciate the effort put into it, but it's not my ideal situation. I'd rather have a good newsgroup-type application that I could use to track loads of different discussions on different websites, and dispense with the HTML/CSS/graphics/AJAX entirely. Just threaded text messages with moderation would be awesome. I'd prefer if the features were built into the client end, so that I don't lose good functionality when I switch from one site to another.
But I'm rambling again with no particular point.