As I understand it, Akamai peers with ISPs and backbone hubs, so the problem could be within your ISP's network or their upstream provider. If you did a couple of traceroutes, I'd bet that you would see fewer hops to the CDN node than to facebook.com or any other random address.
What you call a crutch, most developers call an enormous time saver. The web moves so fast that you simply cannot afford to take forever developing it just so that the code executes efficiently. Sure, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby are slower than C or C++. But for at least the last decade, hardware has been cheap enough that it makes a lot more business sense to just throw more servers at the problem than it does to delay your product launch for a year and/or double your programming staff while you make everything "perfect" in a lower-level language. Most of the problems around making web apps scalable to millions of concurrent users have been solved or will be in the near future. (CDNs, memcache, load balancers, etc.) When you find bottlenecks, you rewrite those specific parts using a better design or a lower-level language. If your developers are any good, they will have modularized the code, making such upgrades relatively painless. Trying to optimize the entire codebase for performance before it's even out in the wild ensures that it will never get there.
I know this is like super-secret insider knowledge in the IT consulting circles, but it's something that I just have to make public no matter what the consequences are.
If you have computers in the same room that need to talk to each other, there's actually a really easy solution that is almost 100% reliable, doesn't require fiddling around with transmitters and sensors, and best of all only costs a cool $2 for the whole solution.
If you read TFA, you'd know that the article summary is almost entirely incorrect.
California has a law requiring people to report (not intervene) observed physical violence against persons aged 14 and under. The new law just removes the age requirement. Not only does this make perfect sense, but there was no way it wasn't going to pass when the impetus of the bill was the widely-reported gang rape of a 16 year old girl in public.
When brute-forcing a key, you have to have some idea of what the decrypted data looks like. If you're cracking a hard drive, for example, you'd check for a valid partition table. If you're cracking a text file, you'd check it for natural language words. An HTTPS packet probably has HTML tags somewhere inside, etc. In order to crack a packet of encrypted data, you need to know these things:
* The encryption algorithm * The properties of its implementation (key length, any key derivation functions, the kind of padding used, etc) * Context regarding the packet's purpose and origin (where it came from, what generated it, what it likely contains, etc)
And that's assuming that the encryption is weak enough to be cracked in the first place. (E.g., if it's AES-256, forget about it.) It would be a rather rare case that you had a chunk of data, knew exactly how it was encrypted, but didn't have any other context to go with it.
While I've no doubt about Charlie Miller's qualifications, jailbreaking an iphone, on its own, does nothing to reduce its security. All jailbreaking allows you to do is install and run software not specifically approved by Apple. It doesn't open up random ports or install services. The applications that you install afterward introduce the vulnerabilities, but this is true whether or not you jailbreak your phone because Apple's App Store reviews do NOT cover security. Even if they claim they do, it's not possible to thoroughly audit any chunk of code and say for certain, "yep, there are no vulnerabilities here." Correct me if I'm wrong, but Apple doesn't even have access to the source code of the apps they review. The review process is only to check to make sure that the application adheres to Apple's restrictions on what an app is or is not allowed to do.
I'm not sure how much faith I have in this guy as a "security expert" when this is the second paragraph in TFA:
Well I knew I would not likely be able to break any encryption algorithms such as 256-bit AES which seemed to be the standard among the vendors. Although based on some research studies, distributed computing is making it more feasible to break encryption.
He comes within a whisker of implying that AES-256 will be breakable by distributed computing at some point.
There have been a few times where I've seriously considered plunking down some cash and getting a Mac Mini to use as my primary desktop at home, for the sole reason of having a nice fluid well-engineered interface and set of tools for my increasing interest in web development.
But if this is the direction that OS X is headed down, I don't want any part of it. I suspect that Apple is trying to get to the point where the desktop version of OS X (as we know it) will eventually be available only to developers while the locked-down iPhone/iPod/iPad OS will be the standard on all of Apple's consumer-level hardware like laptops and desktops.
Hmmm. The thing about the iPod is that the killer features is the integration of iPod/iTunes/iTunes store. The devices are nice of course, but each part of this triangle has significant limitations.
The key is that they all work together to support use cases that consumers find convenient and valuable. That's why "iPod Killers" never kill. You have to get all three pieces, and that is hard especially the store end of things.
I got an iPod Touch right after Christmas (to replace my Nokia N800) and the iTunes integration is the thing that drives me the most crazy about it. I bought the device under the assumption that I would be able to use it to easily download, manage, and listen to podcasts. This was my first real Apple product and after having heard how cool the iPhone was and how easy Apple makes everything, I figured I couldn't go wrong.
To listen to podcasts on the N800, all I had to do was run gPodder. It automatically checked for new episodes, downloaded them, and kept track of which ones were new, which ones were downloaded, which ones I've already listened to, and which ones have been deleted. Very slick. Too bad the N800 kinda sucked for just about anything else.
After I got my iPod Touch, and after I had fiddled with the pinch zooming, inertial interface widgets, and slick web browser, I eventually discover that there's no podcast manager at all. And further investigation revealed that Apple won't allow a third-party one because they claimed it would compete with iTunes. The problem is, iTunes on the iPhone OS really, really sucks for listening to podcasts. You can only download podcasts that happen to be in the iTunes store. There's no way to just enter an RSS feed. There are no automatic updates and no automatic downloads, you're forced to memorize which episodes you've listened to and you have to download each episode one at a time. The only way to listen to podcasts that aren't in the iTunes store is to sync the device with a desktop computer running the full-blown version of iTunes. The iPod Touch is a portable wifi-enabled computer in its own right, I shouldn't have to sync it with fucking anything just to get content onto it. I have no computers that iTunes will run on, and of course, Apple encrypts communications to and from the device so no open-source software can connect to it either.
Non-compete agreements are the devil. When you're working for someone and your attempts for a better wage, better working conditions, career advancement, and so on have failed, you should always be able to fall back on leaving and looking for a better employer. Unless you've signed an NCA. Then you're pretty much fucked.
That said, I don't think I would ever support a law against NCA's. After all, anyone who has ever signed one has always had the option not to. But still, you'd be a crazy person to work for an employer that wanted to control your career well after your fiduciary obligations to them are over.
Except for those rare few who are lucky enough to be born unto a metric assload of money, there is no guarantee to a job and comfy lifestyle. Not even in the good old U.S.A. If you want it, you have to work for it. And that includes job satisfaction. It seems everyone has forgotten this.
Regardless of what you may think, there are good employers out there who treat their employees like the precious resources they are. Good salary, plenty of benefits, vacation time, camaraderie, room for advancement, etc. They're just hard to come by. You have to look for them by applying everywhere you can and networking your ass off. It seems to me all the people who piss and moan about how badly "everyone" in the workforce is treated is just really tired and bored of their own job yet are too lazy to move out of their comfort zone to try to find something better.
First, personifying the Internet is just stupid. The second you have to give a system as complex as the Internet human-like qualities to make your point, the metaphor loses any credibility it might have had. The Internet is comprised of humans and human technology, but bears no resemblance at all to a human, so the premise falls completely flat.
Second, routing around censorship is becoming very difficult. "Just use a proxy," everyone says. The fact is, it's not as simple as that. The Great Firewall of China is the shining example because it is surprisingly thorough and effective. Not much "forbidden" material gets through it anymore. They add known proxies to the list all the time and block any content to do with proxies. A middle-class individual might have the cash to buy a U.S.-based VPS or something to tunnel their traffic through, but not everyone is going to have the means for that.
Third, the quote advocates an attitude of, "sure, go ahead, censor all you want, we'll just figure out a way around it." The correct response to someone infringing on your rights is to stand up and say, "No, you will not take this from me without a fight." Those countries with mandatory censorship are those whose majority of citizens are okay with it. And that's fine by me. It's their country, it's their business how they govern themselves. What I fear most is that when (not if, when) law makers start talking about Internet censorship in my country, there will be people like you sitting there with a huge grin on your face smugly accepting it because you very wrongly believe nothing will change for the worse because hey, I know how to use proxies! And this Internet thing is so great that it will just magically route around censorship for me anyway. I don't wish to belabor the point any further than necessary, so let me just say this as clearly as I possibly can: NO IT FUCKING WON'T.
For all of their side projects and initiatives and ideas, Google seems to be little more than the most successful (so far) advertising resource on the internet.
You say that like it's some trifling, nearly inconsequential thing. The Web literally runs on almost nothing but advertising alone. Saying, "that's all they have going for them" is like saying that being the world's leading economic superpower is the only thing that the U.S. has going for it.
It isn't hard to imagine Google holding onto their lead in search, and that will continue to generate revenue for them. Beyond that, what are they really going to do that justifies their $500+ per share stock price? Cellphones, netbooks, tablets? Google Apps?
You nearly answered your own question. Almost every single one of the technologies that you view as Google's side-projects are designed to strengthen and enhance their advertising business. GMail, for example, is free because they want to show you the customized advertisements inside the applications. Chromium makes their web applications faster and tracks more of what you do online, so they can show you more advertisements. Their netbook OS encourages you to do more of your daily computing in the cloud, so that they can show you advertisements inside those online applications. Same for their phone OS. Same for just about every other venture they're engaged in. It's all engineered to put more eyeballs on the web, and by extension, their ads.
I have a lot of complaints about Google. (Especially about the sheer amount of personal data that they collect and refuse to disclose or discuss. I wouldn't bet against Google having an extremely accurate personal profile of everyone that's been alive since the year 2000.) But I do give them credit for having the foresight to advance technology for the benefit of everyone, because they know that the investment will eventually come back to them tenfold. They know that what's good for the Web is good for Google.
Trouble in China followed by the two principals cashing in stock? Something's going down.
Not likely. The thing in China is all posturing. Google is not leaving China. China's not likely to kick Google out. And if either happened, it wouldn't be a huge loss since Google doesn't dominate there, Baidu does, and Google has been unable to make any serious headway into the market.
The golden rule to following insider trading is: corporate executives sell their own company's stock for all sorts of reasons. But they only buy for one. So if you see an executives buying their company's stock, it could be because they something good is about to happen to the company, or that they feel secure about the company's long-term outlook. (The SEC keeps a close eye on insider trading, so if someone buys a boatload of stock based on non-public information and the stock price shoots up, chances are someone's going to jail. But its not at all illegal to buy stock in your own company just because its doing well and you know for certain that it will continue to do so in the future.)
On the other hand, there can be any number of reasons that an exec sells his/her shares of the company for cash. Maybe they want some money to invest elsewhere. Maybe their bank account is tapped out and they need some real income to continue living their high-roller lifestyle. Sergey, Larry, and Eric all have a $1 salary with trifling annual bonuses. Google stock doesn't pay dividends, so their spending money has to come from somewhere. Perhaps they simply got drunk and decided to buy an island next to Bill Gates' just to taunt him.
do we respect the idea that the church of scientology has a copyright on its sacred texts?
I can't speak for you or anyone else, but my answer is yes: I do respect the idea that the CoS has a copyright on whatever publishes. Because no matter how batshit insane/corrupt/immoral the organization is, Free Software would not exist without copyright and Free Software is pretty important to me. The CoS needs to be fought for the things that they are truly guilty of.
of course this is bullshit, just as much as it is bullshit that the RIAA attempts to control the flow of bits,
Not sure exactly what you mean by "control the flow of bits," but if you're talking about DRM then I'd have to say that you're always free to vote with your money and not buy content or devices which are encumbered by DRM.
or that the chinese autocracy attempts to control the flow of information: the entirety of the phylosophical concept of putting roadblocks on the flow of ideas is a form weakness, failure. it leads to a less rich society
I'm not supportive of the Chinese government's policies and actions, but good luck with that "less rich society" line when China's economy has boomed over the last few decades and a significant percentage of their citizens are just now getting a taste of what we Americans have considered a middle-class lifestyle for almost a century. If their economic growth continues as is, (and our continues to stagnate) then China could easily overtake the U.S. as the world's leading superpower within my lifetime.
ip law must be actively fought
No, the bad parts of IP law must be actively fought. How would you feel if some big shot in Hollywood took your low-budget horror flick, softened the dialogue a bit, refilmed it with CGI special effects, gave the starring role to Brenden Fraser, made hundreds of millions in merchandise agreements alone, and didn't even bother to say thanks? I guess you'd be okay with that. I sure wouldn't.
The tax filing and preparation industry, of which Intuit is a part, has long been an obstacle to any change in the tax code that would serve to simplify and reduce the need for their services. However, they are far from the only special interest group with an incentive to keep the US Tax code as complex, opaque, and unintuitive as possible.
I don't know that I fully agree. YouTube has been struggling to make money since its inception, and renting movies is quite simply the most obvious way for them to get profitable. They have all of the technology to do this, all they need to do is put it together.
Besides, it's not like they're going to stop letting people upload their own content.
If you want a poster child for an internet business that snubbed the little guy for big-business profits, look at eBay. At the height of their popularity, the fees were restructured to make it lucrative to be a high-volume, low-margin seller while low-volume, high-margin sellers (people selling rare or custom-made products as a hobby or side-business) got the shaft. It's not profitable to be the latter on eBay anymore because shipping, eBay fees, and PayPal fees totally negate the markup they were counting on.
Slashdot Mirror
I just have to say, even on the more "mature" channels, IRC is really more likely to damage one's understanding of a language than help it.
You'll take note that Artist and Webmaster are #1 and #2 respectively on their "help wanted" list. Perhaps you could volunteer instead of complaining?
As I understand it, Akamai peers with ISPs and backbone hubs, so the problem could be within your ISP's network or their upstream provider. If you did a couple of traceroutes, I'd bet that you would see fewer hops to the CDN node than to facebook.com or any other random address.
What you call a crutch, most developers call an enormous time saver. The web moves so fast that you simply cannot afford to take forever developing it just so that the code executes efficiently. Sure, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby are slower than C or C++. But for at least the last decade, hardware has been cheap enough that it makes a lot more business sense to just throw more servers at the problem than it does to delay your product launch for a year and/or double your programming staff while you make everything "perfect" in a lower-level language. Most of the problems around making web apps scalable to millions of concurrent users have been solved or will be in the near future. (CDNs, memcache, load balancers, etc.) When you find bottlenecks, you rewrite those specific parts using a better design or a lower-level language. If your developers are any good, they will have modularized the code, making such upgrades relatively painless. Trying to optimize the entire codebase for performance before it's even out in the wild ensures that it will never get there.
fixed that for you
I know this is like super-secret insider knowledge in the IT consulting circles, but it's something that I just have to make public no matter what the consequences are.
If you have computers in the same room that need to talk to each other, there's actually a really easy solution that is almost 100% reliable, doesn't require fiddling around with transmitters and sensors, and best of all only costs a cool $2 for the whole solution.
Just remember, you didn't hear this from me.
If you read TFA, you'd know that the article summary is almost entirely incorrect.
California has a law requiring people to report (not intervene) observed physical violence against persons aged 14 and under. The new law just removes the age requirement. Not only does this make perfect sense, but there was no way it wasn't going to pass when the impetus of the bill was the widely-reported gang rape of a 16 year old girl in public.
When brute-forcing a key, you have to have some idea of what the decrypted data looks like. If you're cracking a hard drive, for example, you'd check for a valid partition table. If you're cracking a text file, you'd check it for natural language words. An HTTPS packet probably has HTML tags somewhere inside, etc. In order to crack a packet of encrypted data, you need to know these things:
* The encryption algorithm
* The properties of its implementation (key length, any key derivation functions, the kind of padding used, etc)
* Context regarding the packet's purpose and origin (where it came from, what generated it, what it likely contains, etc)
And that's assuming that the encryption is weak enough to be cracked in the first place. (E.g., if it's AES-256, forget about it.) It would be a rather rare case that you had a chunk of data, knew exactly how it was encrypted, but didn't have any other context to go with it.
Not a problem if it rained the night before.
Don't forget:
I need a terminal emulator
While I've no doubt about Charlie Miller's qualifications, jailbreaking an iphone, on its own, does nothing to reduce its security. All jailbreaking allows you to do is install and run software not specifically approved by Apple. It doesn't open up random ports or install services. The applications that you install afterward introduce the vulnerabilities, but this is true whether or not you jailbreak your phone because Apple's App Store reviews do NOT cover security. Even if they claim they do, it's not possible to thoroughly audit any chunk of code and say for certain, "yep, there are no vulnerabilities here." Correct me if I'm wrong, but Apple doesn't even have access to the source code of the apps they review. The review process is only to check to make sure that the application adheres to Apple's restrictions on what an app is or is not allowed to do.
I'm not sure how much faith I have in this guy as a "security expert" when this is the second paragraph in TFA:
He comes within a whisker of implying that AES-256 will be breakable by distributed computing at some point.
There have been a few times where I've seriously considered plunking down some cash and getting a Mac Mini to use as my primary desktop at home, for the sole reason of having a nice fluid well-engineered interface and set of tools for my increasing interest in web development.
But if this is the direction that OS X is headed down, I don't want any part of it. I suspect that Apple is trying to get to the point where the desktop version of OS X (as we know it) will eventually be available only to developers while the locked-down iPhone/iPod/iPad OS will be the standard on all of Apple's consumer-level hardware like laptops and desktops.
I got an iPod Touch right after Christmas (to replace my Nokia N800) and the iTunes integration is the thing that drives me the most crazy about it. I bought the device under the assumption that I would be able to use it to easily download, manage, and listen to podcasts. This was my first real Apple product and after having heard how cool the iPhone was and how easy Apple makes everything, I figured I couldn't go wrong.
To listen to podcasts on the N800, all I had to do was run gPodder. It automatically checked for new episodes, downloaded them, and kept track of which ones were new, which ones were downloaded, which ones I've already listened to, and which ones have been deleted. Very slick. Too bad the N800 kinda sucked for just about anything else.
After I got my iPod Touch, and after I had fiddled with the pinch zooming, inertial interface widgets, and slick web browser, I eventually discover that there's no podcast manager at all. And further investigation revealed that Apple won't allow a third-party one because they claimed it would compete with iTunes. The problem is, iTunes on the iPhone OS really, really sucks for listening to podcasts. You can only download podcasts that happen to be in the iTunes store. There's no way to just enter an RSS feed. There are no automatic updates and no automatic downloads, you're forced to memorize which episodes you've listened to and you have to download each episode one at a time. The only way to listen to podcasts that aren't in the iTunes store is to sync the device with a desktop computer running the full-blown version of iTunes. The iPod Touch is a portable wifi-enabled computer in its own right, I shouldn't have to sync it with fucking anything just to get content onto it. I have no computers that iTunes will run on, and of course, Apple encrypts communications to and from the device so no open-source software can connect to it either.
Convenient and valuable? Feh, I say.
Non-compete agreements are the devil. When you're working for someone and your attempts for a better wage, better working conditions, career advancement, and so on have failed, you should always be able to fall back on leaving and looking for a better employer. Unless you've signed an NCA. Then you're pretty much fucked.
That said, I don't think I would ever support a law against NCA's. After all, anyone who has ever signed one has always had the option not to. But still, you'd be a crazy person to work for an employer that wanted to control your career well after your fiduciary obligations to them are over.
Well, this is how it's supposed to work, no?
Except for those rare few who are lucky enough to be born unto a metric assload of money, there is no guarantee to a job and comfy lifestyle. Not even in the good old U.S.A. If you want it, you have to work for it. And that includes job satisfaction. It seems everyone has forgotten this.
Regardless of what you may think, there are good employers out there who treat their employees like the precious resources they are. Good salary, plenty of benefits, vacation time, camaraderie, room for advancement, etc. They're just hard to come by. You have to look for them by applying everywhere you can and networking your ass off. It seems to me all the people who piss and moan about how badly "everyone" in the workforce is treated is just really tired and bored of their own job yet are too lazy to move out of their comfort zone to try to find something better.
If you mean a union, I promise to devise a technology for the singular purpose of allowing me to reach through the fabric of Slashdot to strangle you.
If you do indeed just mean a professional society for computing professionals, look no further:
I am really, really starting to hate this quote.
First, personifying the Internet is just stupid. The second you have to give a system as complex as the Internet human-like qualities to make your point, the metaphor loses any credibility it might have had. The Internet is comprised of humans and human technology, but bears no resemblance at all to a human, so the premise falls completely flat.
Second, routing around censorship is becoming very difficult. "Just use a proxy," everyone says. The fact is, it's not as simple as that. The Great Firewall of China is the shining example because it is surprisingly thorough and effective. Not much "forbidden" material gets through it anymore. They add known proxies to the list all the time and block any content to do with proxies. A middle-class individual might have the cash to buy a U.S.-based VPS or something to tunnel their traffic through, but not everyone is going to have the means for that.
Third, the quote advocates an attitude of, "sure, go ahead, censor all you want, we'll just figure out a way around it." The correct response to someone infringing on your rights is to stand up and say, "No, you will not take this from me without a fight." Those countries with mandatory censorship are those whose majority of citizens are okay with it. And that's fine by me. It's their country, it's their business how they govern themselves. What I fear most is that when (not if, when) law makers start talking about Internet censorship in my country, there will be people like you sitting there with a huge grin on your face smugly accepting it because you very wrongly believe nothing will change for the worse because hey, I know how to use proxies! And this Internet thing is so great that it will just magically route around censorship for me anyway. I don't wish to belabor the point any further than necessary, so let me just say this as clearly as I possibly can: NO IT FUCKING WON'T.
You say that like it's some trifling, nearly inconsequential thing. The Web literally runs on almost nothing but advertising alone. Saying, "that's all they have going for them" is like saying that being the world's leading economic superpower is the only thing that the U.S. has going for it.
You nearly answered your own question. Almost every single one of the technologies that you view as Google's side-projects are designed to strengthen and enhance their advertising business. GMail, for example, is free because they want to show you the customized advertisements inside the applications. Chromium makes their web applications faster and tracks more of what you do online, so they can show you more advertisements. Their netbook OS encourages you to do more of your daily computing in the cloud, so that they can show you advertisements inside those online applications. Same for their phone OS. Same for just about every other venture they're engaged in. It's all engineered to put more eyeballs on the web, and by extension, their ads.
I have a lot of complaints about Google. (Especially about the sheer amount of personal data that they collect and refuse to disclose or discuss. I wouldn't bet against Google having an extremely accurate personal profile of everyone that's been alive since the year 2000.) But I do give them credit for having the foresight to advance technology for the benefit of everyone, because they know that the investment will eventually come back to them tenfold. They know that what's good for the Web is good for Google.
Not likely. The thing in China is all posturing. Google is not leaving China. China's not likely to kick Google out. And if either happened, it wouldn't be a huge loss since Google doesn't dominate there, Baidu does, and Google has been unable to make any serious headway into the market.
The golden rule to following insider trading is: corporate executives sell their own company's stock for all sorts of reasons. But they only buy for one. So if you see an executives buying their company's stock, it could be because they something good is about to happen to the company, or that they feel secure about the company's long-term outlook. (The SEC keeps a close eye on insider trading, so if someone buys a boatload of stock based on non-public information and the stock price shoots up, chances are someone's going to jail. But its not at all illegal to buy stock in your own company just because its doing well and you know for certain that it will continue to do so in the future.)
On the other hand, there can be any number of reasons that an exec sells his/her shares of the company for cash. Maybe they want some money to invest elsewhere. Maybe their bank account is tapped out and they need some real income to continue living their high-roller lifestyle. Sergey, Larry, and Eric all have a $1 salary with trifling annual bonuses. Google stock doesn't pay dividends, so their spending money has to come from somewhere. Perhaps they simply got drunk and decided to buy an island next to Bill Gates' just to taunt him.
I can't speak for you or anyone else, but my answer is yes: I do respect the idea that the CoS has a copyright on whatever publishes. Because no matter how batshit insane/corrupt/immoral the organization is, Free Software would not exist without copyright and Free Software is pretty important to me. The CoS needs to be fought for the things that they are truly guilty of.
Not sure exactly what you mean by "control the flow of bits," but if you're talking about DRM then I'd have to say that you're always free to vote with your money and not buy content or devices which are encumbered by DRM.
I'm not supportive of the Chinese government's policies and actions, but good luck with that "less rich society" line when China's economy has boomed over the last few decades and a significant percentage of their citizens are just now getting a taste of what we Americans have considered a middle-class lifestyle for almost a century. If their economic growth continues as is, (and our continues to stagnate) then China could easily overtake the U.S. as the world's leading superpower within my lifetime.
No, the bad parts of IP law must be actively fought. How would you feel if some big shot in Hollywood took your low-budget horror flick, softened the dialogue a bit, refilmed it with CGI special effects, gave the starring role to Brenden Fraser, made hundreds of millions in merchandise agreements alone, and didn't even bother to say thanks? I guess you'd be okay with that. I sure wouldn't.
Umm, heh. You do realize that the Mozilla Corporation is a U.S. company, right?
I see what you did there.
I don't know that I fully agree. YouTube has been struggling to make money since its inception, and renting movies is quite simply the most obvious way for them to get profitable. They have all of the technology to do this, all they need to do is put it together.
Besides, it's not like they're going to stop letting people upload their own content.
If you want a poster child for an internet business that snubbed the little guy for big-business profits, look at eBay. At the height of their popularity, the fees were restructured to make it lucrative to be a high-volume, low-margin seller while low-volume, high-margin sellers (people selling rare or custom-made products as a hobby or side-business) got the shaft. It's not profitable to be the latter on eBay anymore because shipping, eBay fees, and PayPal fees totally negate the markup they were counting on.
You forgot: