Well, CoreText isn't in kernel, it's a library, and the exploit just allows crashes in userspace, not actual "rooting." Your account of the computer science involved is pretty terrible, in particular your conflation of any runtime environment and a privileged execution environment, and your confusion on the meaning of information-theoretic compactness. Your blanket condemnation of 30 years of desktop printing technology, the implementers of PostScript, and Donald Knuth(!) is also somewhat concerning.
But aside from that I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Desktop publishing has used embedded, Turing-complete languages for decades -- TeX is Turing-complete, as is XSLT. It's the best and most compact way of specifying an abstract image for a generic rasterizing displays of arbitrary resolution.
" Still, this won't have anything to do with their ability to repay the loan."
Sounds like a falsifiable hypothesis to me, it's not self-evidently true, it's something that could be researched.
... That is, until it hurts your credit to NOT have a Facebook account. It hurts your credit to not have credit cards, it only stands to reason that, if this sort of information is fruitful, it'll cost you to not provide it.
I keep some of my savings at Lending Club, which originally started out as a Facebook-based microlending platform -- the idea was that if you knew the people you were lending to, or at least understood their social graph, that you'd make better lending decisions. They dropped the concept a few years ago, my guess is that it didn't scale and there were practical difficulties. (I could see issues arising from sockpuppetry and slander, among other things...)
They do still loan to individuals, and when you lend you read their application, you can see where they live, their FICO, and what they plan to do with the money. And, guilty as charged, I never lend to people to do their application in ALL CAPS:)
Just speaking as somebody that works in the film industry, it's really hard to buy quality, it just sorta happens, and the release schedules are so compressed that a movie is usually out of theaters before it has the word of mouth a "good" movie gets its audience from. I think this is why cable TV is where the "good" stuff is, for the definition of "good" I think you're using.
It's also difficult to make a "good" movie when we're worried about 50% of our box office coming from the Chinese dub. Chinese people aren't stupid, but their idea of a dramatic conflict, or a joke, or a conventional love scene is very different, and making the film work for such a broad audience has its effect.
The somewhat more teleological answer is that movie theaters only get a very small percentage of a film's first two weeks box office revenue, and as theatrical-PPV-home video release schedules have compressed, the amount of profit theaters actually take from exhibiting movies has gotten quite small. They get to keep 100% of the concession money, however.
It's about deliberately delivering bad service to services you don't like, usually competitors. It harms your customers, and has no useful reason to exist.
It's about charging what the market will bear for a given service.
So Comcast should be able to identify and throttle NetFlix, Hulu, ESPN streaming, and the like to drive people to their hosted services?
If it's more profitable, of course they should! It's their cable!
I'm not saying your monthly bill can't cover the cost of internet service, I'm saying your monthly bill doesn't morally entitle you to any kind of connection. You don't "own" your connection to Hulu, you (at best) "rent" your connection to the nearest concentration point. You give your money to the ISP and they are the ones that pay for the connectivity, not you, and they have a right to spend their money on whatever they please as long as you keep paying, even if it pleases them to block your torrents. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Wether you can access the "core," and to what extent, is strictly a business decision on the part of the ISP.
If you want neutrality you should fight for more last-mile ISPs, let them compete, and see what eventually subscribers are willing to pay for. Artificially handicapping all packets tilts the playing field heavily in the favor of application providers and pretty much guarantees their future rentier status.
The ISP is filtering access to Google's Youtube, Google is filtering access to Google's Youtube.
Well, you could just rephrase that "the ISP is blocking access to its router," obviously Youtube is Google's property and they can do with it as they please. I would also say it follows that an ISP's networking equipment is their property and they can do with it as they please. A router is no different than a server, it really is just a server that lets you see other servers. It does this in a way that makes the communication appear like a transparent, unmediated tunnel beween hosts, but this is just an abstraction; in the same way, Youtube can sometimes give the impression that you're watching "Youtube's" content, when in fact, 99% of the time, you're accessing content which is actually owned by the people who upload it, and Youtube is just a pipe or conveyance for them to show their content to you.
Google surely can discriminate connections based on wether they're part of a registered user session, wether someone is a subscriber, stuff like that. But it's a very different thing to block an interoperating platform or application, on the naked basis of a user agent string or platform identifier -- that just holds content and platforms hostage. By this reasoning, it'd be perfectly alright for Hulu to try to detect when it's running on a television and to demand you pay more money for the privilege, or for Spotify to try to detect when you're recording the feed.
I think your repsonse reveals the inherent bias of the idea, against people who own infrastructure, and for people who own servers and applications. Under most people's definition of NN, applications are allowed to practice just about any restriction on access in order to shore up their business model and protect their revenue stream, while network operators should be denied even the most basic packet discrimination, because a host's communication is sacrosanct. You would never tolerate someone's data link restricting access in the way that Youtube's server does in this case, even though the data link is just as necessary a component to the whole transaction as the server.
Who, incidentally, pay for their access to the Internet.
The Internet isn't a single thing, which you right a check for and have "access." It's a geographically-distributed system owned by a lot of different people. Netflix pays to get its packets onto their ISPs frame relays, what happens after that is up to the people that own stuff up and down the backbone. ISPs negotiate peering agreements to get their traffic passed along, and in the US almost all of this traffic is carried on private, non-"Internet" trunks which ISPs pay top dollar to access, particularly when their traffic is lopsided in one direction.
Just to lay it out, I think Net Neutrality, at least as it pertains to equipment, is a crock, mainly because it destroys the ability for price signalling to build the network efficiently. I'm willing to support the basic idea of neutrality for applications and protocols -- streaming video shouldn't be throttled because it's streaming video -- but it's completely nuts to to demand that your ISP handle and bill Amazon's colo'd CDN traffic on the same fee schedule they charge you to Tx from your apartment in LA to a hundred 3G radios in western Wyoming. It simply doesn't reflect the price of infrastructure and bandwidth, in fact its just a way of clapping our hands really hard and pretending such things don't exist, because Freedom.
When you say you're "paying" for the cable to your house, of course you're not. The costs of the physical link have been amortized over years and multiple subscribers, and your practical network performance is only a tiny sliver of your cable's bandwidth/latency/aggregate throughput up or down. Further, that cable only goes to the ISP, you have not explicitly paid for the cable that goes from your ISP to the tier 2 provider, or the tier 1 provider, the regional exchanges, nor could your flat monthly fee possibly be made to account for the IP transit fees many of those parties have to pay each other. And you certainly didn't negotiate (nor do you even have the right to read) the terms of service or acceptable use policies of these arrangements, which have a direct effect on the ISPs cost independent of your monthly charge.
none of the online sites are willing to deal with this kind of structure
Erm, Netflix, Youtube and Amazon make deals for content all the time. Kevin Spacey has a deal with Media Rights Capital, that company has a specific (exclusive) distribution deal with Netflix for House of Cards. The web companies are adopting business tactics networks have used for decades, while demanding free access to the cable to your house, while the cable networks have to negotiate with cable providers for access.
And speculation in Bitcoins should be equally forbidden.
That sounds a lot like regulation to me. Well-regulated, transparent speculation is an important part of maintaining liquidity and stable prices. Self-dealing, pump-and-dump, and churning are not, but they are a kind of speculation too.
You mean interstate financial transactions, of course.
Wickard v. Filburn is still a prevailing judicial ruling, just about any economic activity in the US is "interstate." The Feds would probably claim that, for example, an intrastate party-to-party BTC/Dollar trade was still their jurisdiction, because such transactions can still affect the global BTC price, and they'd have a good point.
The Feds respect state borders only insofar as commerce does, and commerce doesn't at all.
There is no civil rights violation the SCOTUS couldn't get away with, their power is only limited only by the cases brought before them.
FISA's an inferior court in that it has specific jurisdiction over cases involving foreign agents and espionage, and since 9/11, international "terrorism." FISA cannot rule your house eminent domain, and cannot try you for a federal crime, and you cannot appeal your case to FISA. All it does it write warrants.
+1
Nothing has really changed post-Snowden, we've all always known that emails have the privacy expectation of a postcard-- how many of use were putting "Echelon Food" on out emails a decade ago. It's just, like the Nazis and Enigma, we always assumed the government would never put the brute force resources into collecting everything, so emails were basically "safe."
And you're right, in that once you share information with any commercial entity, and there's no bailment, contract or NDA, you've got not privacy. Just accept it, and fight for change-- don't get hung up on some kind of phony "betrayal" narrative that just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
We need privacy on the Internet, strong legal protection. It has not existed up until this point, it will require new laws, the existing ones simply do not work, they're based on assumptions which no longer hold. Fight for new laws, not stupid rearguard actions over what the Constitution Really Means(tm). Courts interpret that, not us, and courts follow laws, not blogs.
Step 1: Kim Dotcom starts Mega Crypto, which is promptly adopted by the world's political dissidents and leakers.
Step 2: All pending government litigation against Mega suspiciously disappears and his assets are unfrozen.
The guy's accustomed to his ill-gotten gains -- even setting aside the rampant piracy of Megaupload, he's a convicted fraudster and embezzler, and has bribed public officials for protection before.
I suspect that if offered the choice between losing his $20 million house, his 12 cars, his yacht, and becoming a partner of the US government, it wouldn't take him much to crack.
Right, and who had possession of the card before you? These sorts of schemes are perfectly fine for government communication, signing contracts, banking, whatever, but they don't provide "4th Amendment Compliant" privacy for things like personal correspondence or use within private and commercial organizations.
Because artists actually make money under the current system. Without copyright there's no obligation for a Google to pay artists anything, even while they might make significant revenues on the ads associated with music; further there's no obligation for, say, Proctor and Gamble to pay a musician anything for using their song in a douche ad.
Eliminating copyright does not significantly eliminate rents in the system. It shifts the rents in the system away from creators and on to middlemen.
Right, all the power will just be in different hands, but the situation from the artist's perspective will be identical. There will still be a distribution system, it will still control the vast bulk of organic referrals, and artists have to be on the right side of it if they want their music to be heard at all, let alone be remunerative.
Search aggregators would control music distribution in a copyright-free world. iTunes and Pandora would be the new labels. Artists would host their music wherever they pleased, but you'd only know it existed if Google suggested it.
Right, but to kill is inhumane regardless of the modality.
The entire process leading up to the slaughter of animals, or even up to the egg collection, is generally quite inhumane, unless you get all your food from pets. If you're a Benthamite utilitarian it'd be difficult to deny the immorality of the process, given what we know about animal behavior, neurology, and physiological stress.
If you're a preference libertarian it's a little easier, unless you believe animals display the volition to survive, as opposed to the mere instinct, which I don't think can be denied for many classes of creatures.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, CoreText isn't in kernel, it's a library, and the exploit just allows crashes in userspace, not actual "rooting." Your account of the computer science involved is pretty terrible, in particular your conflation of any runtime environment and a privileged execution environment, and your confusion on the meaning of information-theoretic compactness. Your blanket condemnation of 30 years of desktop printing technology, the implementers of PostScript, and Donald Knuth(!) is also somewhat concerning.
But aside from that I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Desktop publishing has used embedded, Turing-complete languages for decades -- TeX is Turing-complete, as is XSLT. It's the best and most compact way of specifying an abstract image for a generic rasterizing displays of arbitrary resolution.
Relatedly:
Isaac Asimov, Manhattanite that he was, clearly never paid a Mexican to cut his lawn for $7 an hour.
" Still, this won't have anything to do with their ability to repay the loan." Sounds like a falsifiable hypothesis to me, it's not self-evidently true, it's something that could be researched.
... That is, until it hurts your credit to NOT have a Facebook account. It hurts your credit to not have credit cards, it only stands to reason that, if this sort of information is fruitful, it'll cost you to not provide it.
Right but this is a study that tests the Facebook hypothesis, if there's evidence it works why wouldn't you use it?
I keep some of my savings at Lending Club, which originally started out as a Facebook-based microlending platform -- the idea was that if you knew the people you were lending to, or at least understood their social graph, that you'd make better lending decisions. They dropped the concept a few years ago, my guess is that it didn't scale and there were practical difficulties. (I could see issues arising from sockpuppetry and slander, among other things...)
They do still loan to individuals, and when you lend you read their application, you can see where they live, their FICO, and what they plan to do with the money. And, guilty as charged, I never lend to people to do their application in ALL CAPS :)
Just speaking as somebody that works in the film industry, it's really hard to buy quality, it just sorta happens, and the release schedules are so compressed that a movie is usually out of theaters before it has the word of mouth a "good" movie gets its audience from. I think this is why cable TV is where the "good" stuff is, for the definition of "good" I think you're using.
It's also difficult to make a "good" movie when we're worried about 50% of our box office coming from the Chinese dub. Chinese people aren't stupid, but their idea of a dramatic conflict, or a joke, or a conventional love scene is very different, and making the film work for such a broad audience has its effect.
The somewhat more teleological answer is that movie theaters only get a very small percentage of a film's first two weeks box office revenue, and as theatrical-PPV-home video release schedules have compressed, the amount of profit theaters actually take from exhibiting movies has gotten quite small. They get to keep 100% of the concession money, however.
It's about charging what the market will bear for a given service.
If it's more profitable, of course they should! It's their cable!
I'm not saying your monthly bill can't cover the cost of internet service, I'm saying your monthly bill doesn't morally entitle you to any kind of connection. You don't "own" your connection to Hulu, you (at best) "rent" your connection to the nearest concentration point. You give your money to the ISP and they are the ones that pay for the connectivity, not you, and they have a right to spend their money on whatever they please as long as you keep paying, even if it pleases them to block your torrents. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Wether you can access the "core," and to what extent, is strictly a business decision on the part of the ISP.
If you want neutrality you should fight for more last-mile ISPs, let them compete, and see what eventually subscribers are willing to pay for. Artificially handicapping all packets tilts the playing field heavily in the favor of application providers and pretty much guarantees their future rentier status.
Well, you could just rephrase that "the ISP is blocking access to its router," obviously Youtube is Google's property and they can do with it as they please. I would also say it follows that an ISP's networking equipment is their property and they can do with it as they please. A router is no different than a server, it really is just a server that lets you see other servers. It does this in a way that makes the communication appear like a transparent, unmediated tunnel beween hosts, but this is just an abstraction; in the same way, Youtube can sometimes give the impression that you're watching "Youtube's" content, when in fact, 99% of the time, you're accessing content which is actually owned by the people who upload it, and Youtube is just a pipe or conveyance for them to show their content to you.
Google surely can discriminate connections based on wether they're part of a registered user session, wether someone is a subscriber, stuff like that. But it's a very different thing to block an interoperating platform or application, on the naked basis of a user agent string or platform identifier -- that just holds content and platforms hostage. By this reasoning, it'd be perfectly alright for Hulu to try to detect when it's running on a television and to demand you pay more money for the privilege, or for Spotify to try to detect when you're recording the feed.
I think your repsonse reveals the inherent bias of the idea, against people who own infrastructure, and for people who own servers and applications. Under most people's definition of NN, applications are allowed to practice just about any restriction on access in order to shore up their business model and protect their revenue stream, while network operators should be denied even the most basic packet discrimination, because a host's communication is sacrosanct. You would never tolerate someone's data link restricting access in the way that Youtube's server does in this case, even though the data link is just as necessary a component to the whole transaction as the server.
If an ISP does this in its router, it's a breach of Network Neutrality. But if Google does it in a Python script, it's their right?
The Internet isn't a single thing, which you right a check for and have "access." It's a geographically-distributed system owned by a lot of different people. Netflix pays to get its packets onto their ISPs frame relays, what happens after that is up to the people that own stuff up and down the backbone. ISPs negotiate peering agreements to get their traffic passed along, and in the US almost all of this traffic is carried on private, non-"Internet" trunks which ISPs pay top dollar to access, particularly when their traffic is lopsided in one direction.
Just to lay it out, I think Net Neutrality, at least as it pertains to equipment, is a crock, mainly because it destroys the ability for price signalling to build the network efficiently. I'm willing to support the basic idea of neutrality for applications and protocols -- streaming video shouldn't be throttled because it's streaming video -- but it's completely nuts to to demand that your ISP handle and bill Amazon's colo'd CDN traffic on the same fee schedule they charge you to Tx from your apartment in LA to a hundred 3G radios in western Wyoming. It simply doesn't reflect the price of infrastructure and bandwidth, in fact its just a way of clapping our hands really hard and pretending such things don't exist, because Freedom.
When you say you're "paying" for the cable to your house, of course you're not. The costs of the physical link have been amortized over years and multiple subscribers, and your practical network performance is only a tiny sliver of your cable's bandwidth/latency/aggregate throughput up or down. Further, that cable only goes to the ISP, you have not explicitly paid for the cable that goes from your ISP to the tier 2 provider, or the tier 1 provider, the regional exchanges, nor could your flat monthly fee possibly be made to account for the IP transit fees many of those parties have to pay each other. And you certainly didn't negotiate (nor do you even have the right to read) the terms of service or acceptable use policies of these arrangements, which have a direct effect on the ISPs cost independent of your monthly charge.
Erm, Netflix, Youtube and Amazon make deals for content all the time. Kevin Spacey has a deal with Media Rights Capital, that company has a specific (exclusive) distribution deal with Netflix for House of Cards. The web companies are adopting business tactics networks have used for decades, while demanding free access to the cable to your house, while the cable networks have to negotiate with cable providers for access.
That sounds a lot like regulation to me. Well-regulated, transparent speculation is an important part of maintaining liquidity and stable prices. Self-dealing, pump-and-dump, and churning are not, but they are a kind of speculation too.
Wickard v. Filburn is still a prevailing judicial ruling, just about any economic activity in the US is "interstate." The Feds would probably claim that, for example, an intrastate party-to-party BTC/Dollar trade was still their jurisdiction, because such transactions can still affect the global BTC price, and they'd have a good point.
The Feds respect state borders only insofar as commerce does, and commerce doesn't at all.
There is no civil rights violation the SCOTUS couldn't get away with, their power is only limited only by the cases brought before them.
FISA's an inferior court in that it has specific jurisdiction over cases involving foreign agents and espionage, and since 9/11, international "terrorism." FISA cannot rule your house eminent domain, and cannot try you for a federal crime, and you cannot appeal your case to FISA. All it does it write warrants.
+1 Nothing has really changed post-Snowden, we've all always known that emails have the privacy expectation of a postcard-- how many of use were putting "Echelon Food" on out emails a decade ago. It's just, like the Nazis and Enigma, we always assumed the government would never put the brute force resources into collecting everything, so emails were basically "safe." And you're right, in that once you share information with any commercial entity, and there's no bailment, contract or NDA, you've got not privacy. Just accept it, and fight for change-- don't get hung up on some kind of phony "betrayal" narrative that just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. We need privacy on the Internet, strong legal protection. It has not existed up until this point, it will require new laws, the existing ones simply do not work, they're based on assumptions which no longer hold. Fight for new laws, not stupid rearguard actions over what the Constitution Really Means(tm). Courts interpret that, not us, and courts follow laws, not blogs.
Step 1: Kim Dotcom starts Mega Crypto, which is promptly adopted by the world's political dissidents and leakers.
Step 2: All pending government litigation against Mega suspiciously disappears and his assets are unfrozen.
The guy's accustomed to his ill-gotten gains -- even setting aside the rampant piracy of Megaupload, he's a convicted fraudster and embezzler, and has bribed public officials for protection before.
I suspect that if offered the choice between losing his $20 million house, his 12 cars, his yacht, and becoming a partner of the US government, it wouldn't take him much to crack.
Right, and who had possession of the card before you? These sorts of schemes are perfectly fine for government communication, signing contracts, banking, whatever, but they don't provide "4th Amendment Compliant" privacy for things like personal correspondence or use within private and commercial organizations.
Because artists actually make money under the current system. Without copyright there's no obligation for a Google to pay artists anything, even while they might make significant revenues on the ads associated with music; further there's no obligation for, say, Proctor and Gamble to pay a musician anything for using their song in a douche ad.
Eliminating copyright does not significantly eliminate rents in the system. It shifts the rents in the system away from creators and on to middlemen.
Right, all the power will just be in different hands, but the situation from the artist's perspective will be identical. There will still be a distribution system, it will still control the vast bulk of organic referrals, and artists have to be on the right side of it if they want their music to be heard at all, let alone be remunerative.
I think Android needs Qualcomm more than the other way around.
Search aggregators would control music distribution in a copyright-free world. iTunes and Pandora would be the new labels. Artists would host their music wherever they pleased, but you'd only know it existed if Google suggested it.
Right, but to kill is inhumane regardless of the modality.
The entire process leading up to the slaughter of animals, or even up to the egg collection, is generally quite inhumane, unless you get all your food from pets. If you're a Benthamite utilitarian it'd be difficult to deny the immorality of the process, given what we know about animal behavior, neurology, and physiological stress.
If you're a preference libertarian it's a little easier, unless you believe animals display the volition to survive, as opposed to the mere instinct, which I don't think can be denied for many classes of creatures.