> I expected much more description of what the concept meant and how it worked.
Totally spit-balling but maybe it works like differential electrical signals. In short two signals inverted from each other, if there is any background noise it is canceled out when you subtract one signal from the other to get the desired waveform.
I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve
No, if we are going to go to usage based pricing we need a tiny basic cost for minimal usage, that way the poor can still afford to be connected for essentials. Google's got something like that, basically their lowest tier is free after installation costs (which can be spread out over a year or two).
Even if you take them at their word, bandwidth is not the highest cost component of an ISP's business. It is all in the infrastructure and that is basically fixed whether you use one 1 byte or 10 terabytes.
Over the last few years, wholesale IP transit costs have dropped 50% per year. Nowadays big ISPs are probably paying roughly $6 per terabyte. With pricing so cheap it is obvious that usage is not the driving cost.
Just like a nutjob to post links that say NOTHING about his claims. Neither of those articles even mention the Carlyle Group. Even worse the second article is just blogspam for the first article.
L:ol, I re-read what you wrote and you are an idiot.
You are complaining that "a number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history." But the only one you cited, Beschloss, did not. How do I know that? I used the link on her view history page that says, Revision history search to search for the word "Carlyle" and it was never in the article to be excised.
So, in a story about PR firms screwing with wikipedia you post a bunch of stupid blather about your own personal issues and then hang it all on a lack of evidence. That's classic conspiracy-theory schizophrenia.
I became suspicious about this and noticed an extraordinary number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history.
Just how did you determine that they were former "Carlyle Groupers?" Is there some special IP address block allocated to former employees of the Carlyle group?
The end result of all this ad targeting is the same thing, maybe even worse than, paywalls.
If they could, advertisers would only pay for ads that hit their target market. RIght now some kid living on the street in Manila can get a hotmail account because hotmail doesn't really know if that kid has any money to spend or not. But if we ever achieve advertising nirvana that kid's access will be snuffed out like the light of a candle.
By releasing it, there would be a non-zero danger that it would be used for harm with little to no positive gain.
If it isn't public that severely limits the number of people who can work on finding an antidote. Even if they are making the information available to "qualified professionals" it still substantially increases the barrier to finding a fix. Hell, for all we know, someone else has already seen the same strain and been working on a cure but they only speak chinese and this extra friction to figuring out if they even have the same strain is enough to keep the two groups from collaborating.
Whether you agree or disagree with their decision, surely you must see the merit in this kind of evaluation?
When the day comes that we start seeing terrorists attacking people with obscure scientific journal data instead of simple bombs then the question might be a reasonable one to ask. Until then the question itself is hype and paranoia.
It is like NoScript for all cross-site requests, not just javascript.
Install the beta of 1.0 direct from the website. It is stable and the GUI is better, I've been running it for months, just make sure you change the default from black-listing to white-listing.
it certainly feels pretty unethical for me to block the only way they have to recoup that money.
Except it is not the only way they have to recoup that money. It is just the way they have chosen to try. There are other ways. Penny Arcade raised half a million on kickstarter to go ad-free for a year. They also sell merchandise. Linux Weekly News embargoes some articles for a week so that they are only available to subscribers. Phoronix has subscriptions for ad-free and single-page articles.
Bigger picture, advertisement based funding killed the development of micro-payment functionality. If advertising becomes less lucrative, we will see alternatives come about. By letting those ads through you aren't just helping to fund your favorite websites, you are also enabling an industry that has the potential to do real harm to society through misuse of all the profiling information they collect.
As to his comment about turning over the master key, it would have made no difference if they had protections on their master key
If they had designed the system to not have a master key, such that each user had their own keypair and each user had sole possession of their specific decryption key then they would have been immune to the insiders - cartels or DoJ.
For the low investment cost of, say, $250,000, you can own a machine that laser-sinters metal into something that will allow you to make most parts of a gun with the possible exception of the springs. Or, you could ya know, buy a gun on the black market
Today, $250,000. Ten years down the road, $2,500 and then you can churn out each gun for a marginal cost of $10 with absolutely no worries that the guy who sold you the materials is actually an undercover cop working an illegal weapons sting.
It still contrasts the "bit are bits" argument, but my pragmatic side is willing to accept that we may need an artificial tier in there to keep prices low for non-business users.
I don't. Google's wholesale cost for ip transit is probably around $6 per terabyte - wholesale cost was about $12 a year ago and its been falling by 50% for the last 4-5 years.
If they are worried about losing money, then set a threshold like 5TB/month and then start charging wholesale plus minimum necessary mark-up for anything over that.
Mencken notwithstanding, it is not defending freedom to claim that phone conversations with foreign terrorists are free speech, or deserve privacy.
False dichotomy. What we as a country deserve is due process for ALL. No breaking the rules just because you believe somebody's a criminal. If that's the way we want to run our legal system then we might as well just throw out rule of law altogether.
Make that "out of the ordinary" - if cross-referencing for different personas is not the normal use of these databases, then the decision to try to cross-reference is going to be an extra-ordinary situation which will require an extra-ordinary amount of effort.
Of course, the more people who do adopt personas, the more likely it is that Big Data will come up with standard tools to accomplish that cross-referencing.
On the other hand, if it gets to the point where so many people are doing that sort of thing, that means the problems have become so well-known that there is probably enough political will to change the system through law.
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics.
I've come to the conclusion that the best way (as an individual) to handle this sort of thing is to create personas for different contexts. You'll need fake ids, but you won't be using them for anything technically illegal (no fraud, no underage drinking). You just show them to people/systems that want the info to track you - like loyalty cards (that you then only use with cash).
That way you end up with a handful of distinct personas that all have data trails but only have data trails in specific contexts so that cross-referencing is impossible.
I haven't had a landline in well over a decade, so all I can do is wonder - do the telcos still charge a monthly fee for touch-tone service? That used to be the standard despite the fact that maintaining rotary functionality was the more costly option for most telcos.
Part of the reasoning for letting Nazi Germany host the olympics was that every medal won by a black athlete would be a slap in the face to Hitler. I'm sure the IOC only cared about their bribes, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the political reasoning used to sell it to the public.
If any gay athletes go to Moscow, I hope they will wear some obvious gay pride symbols on the medal box to give Putin a slap in the face too.
It looks like I'll have to start keeping track of the lies.
Or get a new bank. I've heard of similar things - like BofA asking what color your first car was. The thing is that the low quality of information in these databases is well known. If a bank doesn't have a way to deal with their pseudo-authentication data being bad then they are just negligent - maybe ignorant, maybe sold snake-oil by the data 'proprietor' but either way it is a level of failure that should cause you to question how competent they are in other areas.
No, I didn't know that, which is exactly my point. Now I do know, but what you've written is literally all I know about it.
Actually you knew it after reading my first post. You chose to ignore it and then to go on speculating in exactly the manner you castigated me for, except I actually knew a lot more than you did. The irony is palpable.
Not if the other scenarios have never happened either,
With the millions of people who visit the area every year, it is absolutely guaranteed that there have been confrontations of all kinds.
The next stage of the process is that the poor now buy their food on open market and govt directly deposits all the subsidies available diectly to their adhar linked bank account.
There must be more to it than that. How does the welfare recipient authenticate to the merchant? What's to stop a clerk at a merchant from duplicating the information the customer provides to authenticate? Seems like a point in the system where one individual could quite easily scoop up thousands of authenticators that could be used for all kinds of fraud.
Who is responsible for fraudulent debits? The bank or the account owner? I'll bet 10:1 it is the owner, these no-frills accounts don't have enough margin to cover any significant amount of fraud, which means it won't take much to discourage people from opening accounts if they think it means they are just going to lose their money anyway.
The problem here is that you guys are all taking the approach of builders rather than seeing it through the eyes of criminals. That's a terribly naive (and altogether too common) approach towards systems like these. You assume things will work as you want them to work whereas the criminals work extremely hard to make sure it won't.
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> I expected much more description of what the concept meant and how it worked.
Totally spit-balling but maybe it works like differential electrical signals. In short two signals inverted from each other, if there is any background noise it is canceled out when you subtract one signal from the other to get the desired waveform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_signaling
I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve
No, if we are going to go to usage based pricing we need a tiny basic cost for minimal usage, that way the poor can still afford to be connected for essentials. Google's got something like that, basically their lowest tier is free after installation costs (which can be spread out over a year or two).
Even if you take them at their word, bandwidth is not the highest cost component of an ISP's business. It is all in the infrastructure and that is basically fixed whether you use one 1 byte or 10 terabytes.
Over the last few years, wholesale IP transit costs have dropped 50% per year. Nowadays big ISPs are probably paying roughly $6 per terabyte. With pricing so cheap it is obvious that usage is not the driving cost.
Source: http://www.dslprime.com/dslprime/42-d/4830-internet-transit-costs-down-50-in-last-year
(I realize that ip transit is priced by data rate not total bytes, but all of these usage-based billing schemes are priced in bytes per month, so I did a rough conversion of the units in the source to the units comcast would use for pricing.)
Just like a nutjob to post links that say NOTHING about his claims. Neither of those articles even mention the Carlyle Group. Even worse the second article is just blogspam for the first article.
Face it, your grip on reality is tenuous at best.
L:ol, I re-read what you wrote and you are an idiot.
You are complaining that "a number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history." But the only one you cited, Beschloss, did not. How do I know that? I used the link on her view history page that says, Revision history search to search for the word "Carlyle" and it was never in the article to be excised.
So, in a story about PR firms screwing with wikipedia you post a bunch of stupid blather about your own personal issues and then hang it all on a lack of evidence. That's classic conspiracy-theory schizophrenia.
I became suspicious about this and noticed an extraordinary number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history.
Just how did you determine that they were former "Carlyle Groupers?" Is there some special IP address block allocated to former employees of the Carlyle group?
> I'd rather have ads than paywalls.
The end result of all this ad targeting is the same thing, maybe even worse than, paywalls.
If they could, advertisers would only pay for ads that hit their target market. RIght now some kid living on the street in Manila can get a hotmail account because hotmail doesn't really know if that kid has any money to spend or not. But if we ever achieve advertising nirvana that kid's access will be snuffed out like the light of a candle.
By releasing it, there would be a non-zero danger that it would be used for harm with little to no positive gain.
If it isn't public that severely limits the number of people who can work on finding an antidote. Even if they are making the information available to "qualified professionals" it still substantially increases the barrier to finding a fix. Hell, for all we know, someone else has already seen the same strain and been working on a cure but they only speak chinese and this extra friction to figuring out if they even have the same strain is enough to keep the two groups from collaborating.
Whether you agree or disagree with their decision, surely you must see the merit in this kind of evaluation?
When the day comes that we start seeing terrorists attacking people with obscure scientific journal data instead of simple bombs then the question might be a reasonable one to ask. Until then the question itself is hype and paranoia.
> Right, cause "TheMiddleRoad" is the name your parents gave you.
They named him after the place he was conceived.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM02WcvlKn0
I'll see your Adblock and raise you a NoScript and block all cookies. Still imperfect, but it seems to work very well.
Go all in with RequestPolicy.
It is like NoScript for all cross-site requests, not just javascript.
Install the beta of 1.0 direct from the website. It is stable and the GUI is better, I've been running it for months, just make sure you change the default from black-listing to white-listing.
it certainly feels pretty unethical for me to block the only way they have to recoup that money.
Except it is not the only way they have to recoup that money. It is just the way they have chosen to try. There are other ways. Penny Arcade raised half a million on kickstarter to go ad-free for a year. They also sell merchandise. Linux Weekly News embargoes some articles for a week so that they are only available to subscribers. Phoronix has subscriptions for ad-free and single-page articles.
Bigger picture, advertisement based funding killed the development of micro-payment functionality. If advertising becomes less lucrative, we will see alternatives come about. By letting those ads through you aren't just helping to fund your favorite websites, you are also enabling an industry that has the potential to do real harm to society through misuse of all the profiling information they collect.
As to his comment about turning over the master key, it would have made no difference if they had protections on their master key
If they had designed the system to not have a master key, such that each user had their own keypair and each user had sole possession of their specific decryption key then they would have been immune to the insiders - cartels or DoJ.
For the low investment cost of, say, $250,000, you can own a machine that laser-sinters metal into something that will allow you to make most parts of a gun with the possible exception of the springs. Or, you could ya know, buy a gun on the black market
Today, $250,000. Ten years down the road, $2,500 and then you can churn out each gun for a marginal cost of $10 with absolutely no worries that the guy who sold you the materials is actually an undercover cop working an illegal weapons sting.
Do you have reliable sources for that number?
http://www.dslprime.com/dslprime/42-d/4830-internet-transit-costs-down-50-in-last-year
I did the math to convert units from the way ip transit is priced to the way most isp users think about it.
It still contrasts the "bit are bits" argument, but my pragmatic side is willing to accept that we may need an artificial tier in there to keep prices low for non-business users.
I don't. Google's wholesale cost for ip transit is probably around $6 per terabyte - wholesale cost was about $12 a year ago and its been falling by 50% for the last 4-5 years.
If they are worried about losing money, then set a threshold like 5TB/month and then start charging wholesale plus minimum necessary mark-up for anything over that.
Mencken notwithstanding, it is not defending freedom to claim that phone conversations with foreign terrorists are free speech, or deserve privacy.
False dichotomy. What we as a country deserve is due process for ALL. No breaking the rules just because you believe somebody's a criminal. If that's the way we want to run our legal system then we might as well just throw out rule of law altogether.
Are you sure that cross checking is impossible?
Make that "out of the ordinary" - if cross-referencing for different personas is not the normal use of these databases, then the decision to try to cross-reference is going to be an extra-ordinary situation which will require an extra-ordinary amount of effort.
Of course, the more people who do adopt personas, the more likely it is that Big Data will come up with standard tools to accomplish that cross-referencing.
On the other hand, if it gets to the point where so many people are doing that sort of thing, that means the problems have become so well-known that there is probably enough political will to change the system through law.
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics.
I've come to the conclusion that the best way (as an individual) to handle this sort of thing is to create personas for different contexts. You'll need fake ids, but you won't be using them for anything technically illegal (no fraud, no underage drinking). You just show them to people/systems that want the info to track you - like loyalty cards (that you then only use with cash).
That way you end up with a handful of distinct personas that all have data trails but only have data trails in specific contexts so that cross-referencing is impossible.
I haven't had a landline in well over a decade, so all I can do is wonder - do the telcos still charge a monthly fee for touch-tone service? That used to be the standard despite the fact that maintaining rotary functionality was the more costly option for most telcos.
So who the fuck is Bennett Haselton?
He made a name for himself as a teen with Peacefire as an anti-filtering advocate.
Part of the reasoning for letting Nazi Germany host the olympics was that every medal won by a black athlete would be a slap in the face to Hitler. I'm sure the IOC only cared about their bribes, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the political reasoning used to sell it to the public.
If any gay athletes go to Moscow, I hope they will wear some obvious gay pride symbols on the medal box to give Putin a slap in the face too.
It looks like I'll have to start keeping track of the lies.
Or get a new bank. I've heard of similar things - like BofA asking what color your first car was. The thing is that the low quality of information in these databases is well known. If a bank doesn't have a way to deal with their pseudo-authentication data being bad then they are just negligent - maybe ignorant, maybe sold snake-oil by the data 'proprietor' but either way it is a level of failure that should cause you to question how competent they are in other areas.
> Is there a yiddish word for asshole?
Schmuck
(well, at least it is the neighbor of an asshole)
No, I didn't know that, which is exactly my point. Now I do know, but what you've written is literally all I know about it.
Actually you knew it after reading my first post. You chose to ignore it and then to go on speculating in exactly the manner you castigated me for, except I actually knew a lot more than you did. The irony is palpable.
Not if the other scenarios have never happened either,
With the millions of people who visit the area every year, it is absolutely guaranteed that there have been confrontations of all kinds.
The next stage of the process is that the poor now buy their food on open market and govt directly deposits all the subsidies available diectly to their adhar linked bank account.
There must be more to it than that. How does the welfare recipient authenticate to the merchant? What's to stop a clerk at a merchant from duplicating the information the customer provides to authenticate? Seems like a point in the system where one individual could quite easily scoop up thousands of authenticators that could be used for all kinds of fraud.
Who is responsible for fraudulent debits? The bank or the account owner? I'll bet 10:1 it is the owner, these no-frills accounts don't have enough margin to cover any significant amount of fraud, which means it won't take much to discourage people from opening accounts if they think it means they are just going to lose their money anyway.
The problem here is that you guys are all taking the approach of builders rather than seeing it through the eyes of criminals. That's a terribly naive (and altogether too common) approach towards systems like these. You assume things will work as you want them to work whereas the criminals work extremely hard to make sure it won't.