But the blockcade won't do anything. You'd just force 100% adoption of Baidu by 1.3 billion people so that everything they see would be through the filtered eyes of the government.
At the very least, now that Google is forced to comply with the laws they are still the only ones who plainly put on the page that the search results were censored. They're informing the public that the government is keeping things from them.
Google actively fought censorship in China more than any company on the planet. They put servers in Hong Kong that weren't required to censor results, and any page that was censored, Google made sure to state explicitly on the page that the content was censored so that people knew it.
In the end, China changed their laws and forced Google to comply. At that point they either had to pull out of China completely, or comply with laws. While some would contend that the high road is to pull out of China, but at the same time, you can't make in roads and try to effect change if you're not in the country at all.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. When everyone in the video game industry is used to 80 hour weeks (or worse) during crunch, then you've got a systemic issue or poor management. They haven't found a working business model where they can adequately staff and make budget. And given that consumers constantly expect more for less, and expect AAA titles to compete price wise with iPhone games. So management does need a better strategy for how their run their departments/businesses.
However, I question your claims of 3,600 engineers and never requiring unplanned overtime. It is impossible to plan for every single contingency. Things break and go wrong all the time in the universe. If you never, ever need unplanned overtime, then you must be severely overstaffed.
I oppose these bills and I hate the MPAA/RIAA, but suggesting that increased piracy is helping movie ticket sales is a bit silly. Hollywood has record revenue every year due to inflation and rising ticket costs. Add in the expansion of IMAX and 3D screens (with their inflated ticket costs) and you're just going to see more revenue.
I think it might be fair to say that piracy hasn't not been shown to significantly hurt the movie industry to date, I don't think there is sufficient evidence to suggest piracy is helping the movie industry.
The only servers we have that don't have IE installed are headless Server 2008 R2 boxes running in headless mode. IE is too ingrained in the OS to remove it, especially if you're running.NET apps.
Modern games run in Windows 7 with UAC just fine, but not in Vista.
No, the article said there were 75 anecdotal claims over the years, and the report stated that there was no direct correlation between wireless devices and malfunctions. Did you opt not to read that part of the article?
Did the choose to ignore the word anecdotal? Even better, one of the cited examples that happened between 2005 and 2009 was a phone and 3 iPods being used during a flight. An iPod pre-2009 was likely not to have a wireless connection at all. But since something malfunctioned on the plane, the first reaction was to tell people to shut off their iPods because people are want to repeat FUD rather than focus on facts. Stating facts might get you sued.
And in your theory that 300 devices would cause problems, you forget that those 300 devices are active mid-flight. If they caused problems it would be documented.
God, I just read your article. I can't believe you offered that up.
The article says there is no direct correlation between wireless devices and malfunctions. It said in mid-flight when there were malfunctions, people blamed wireless devices and had the crew tell people to turn them off. There are 75 incidents over the years that could be linked to wireless devices.
But again, what you won't find is a single case where someone investigated it and found it to be reproducible.
The whole scare started with one incident that Boeing couldn't reproduce and declared to be a non-issue. But since the media made it a big deal, people attribute issues to wireless devices. There is a difference between anecdotal evidence, and verified evidence. No one has ever reproduced or verified a claim successfully.
And several experts told the Congressional study that they believe it to be impossible. But we live in an overly litigious society where we fear telling anyone that something is safe, because you can be sued for it. That is why the EU doesn't feel comfortable telling people that drinking water helps combat dehydration.
When it comes to life-saving issues, we shouldn't scare people into unconfirmed panics over assumptions that have no basis in reality. The same type of overreactions from a single report led to millions of parents keeping their kids away from vaccines.
You suggest the burden of proof is now to definitively prove that something that doesn't exist, which can not be done. I ask you to provide a verified case, because Congress couldn't find a single one.
They mentioned that they couldn't find a single recorded verifiable claim of interference occurring. Zero examples in the history of recorded flight is pretty statistically significant.
A Congressional study ended up with the same conclusion.
The article I linked to above mentions that Boeing had one incident where flight equipment wasn't working. They suspected a laptop using wireless internet might have been related, so they purchased that laptop and tried to reproduce the condition but were unable to do so.
It should be noted that GoGo in-flight wireless is broadcasting before, during and after take-off with zero problems. But the FAA won't let you use a Kindle in wireless mode, because it might crash the plane even though there is precisely zero evidence to suggest it can cause problems.
It is far easier to get an actual virus installed by some idiot firing up a web browser on a server to do troubleshooting than through a remote access exploit and then an elevation exploit. You suggested a virus is useless against a server. You can explicitly target servers with user agent strings. Given that you think there are no viruses to target servers, and that a virus is completely useless against servers, I recommend you remove anti-virus from all your servers and see how well that goes over.
I practically never see an elevation prompt
I have no idea what your set-up is like, but Windows rarely if every does elevation prompts in the first place. I work for a corporation that takes security very seriously. All of our vendors (who in turn work with most of the Fortune 500 companies) state that we take sandboxing farther than anyone else they ever work with. And even in our environment, you don't get elevation prompts because everything is already given the precise rights it needs. And if it doesn't, then it simply fails until we fix it. Windows isn't really designed to detect when there should be a valid prompt to elevate rights.
Can you give some example of a more or less recent game that has a problem with UAC?
Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2 are all recent games I've played where I've noticed tons of reports on the game forums where users couldn't get the games running in Vista without disabling UAC. In fact, I can't recall the last game I purchased where I didn't hear reports of that.
The Windows kernel does need AV-type protection built in.
Data Execution Protection (DEP), stack protection, ASLR, etc. are all key features to protect the OS. The Linux kernel has similar features built in as well.
Does the kernel need a huge virus scanner built in? No, but Windows won't be doing this either. They're just going to ship Microsoft Security Essentials, which isn't a part of the kernel.
Mythbusters did research trying to find one recorded incident of a single piece of wireless electronics causing an incident and couldn't find one.
And they went out of their way to try and cause interference, going so far as to send signals at unshielded, exposed wires and couldn't get anything. And a Congressional study couldn't find a single verifiable claim of interference. Please tell me that you have verifiable evidence that it is occurring.
Seriously? I'm not even sure where to begin with such a statement.
Most Linux distros don't sandbox apps
Novell's SLES/SLED/openSUSE line shipped with AppArmor and AppArmor profiles for popular apps. I believe they have since changed to SELinux. Red Hat/Fedora ships with a configured SELinux out of the box. Given that I was talking about Linux servers, that is the bulk of the server market. Ubuntu server doesn't have it out of the box, but that is just one of many reasons not to run Ubuntu on an enterprise server.
I've been using Vista since 2008, and Win7 since it came out. I have a lot of applications on my system, but none of them require full admin rights.
I take it you don't work in IT, or an enterprise environment. Proprietary apps in the enterprise sector often require extensive rights. And even in the consumer/desktop sector, tons of game need the ability to write to C:\Program Files\ and have issues with UAC. Google up any major Windows game and Vista, and you'll find issues where people can't get the games to run in Vista without disabling UAC. This is less of a problem in Windows 7, but it still exists.
And if we're concerned about the possibility of crashing/shutting down an engine, then that should be enough of a concern not to allow wireless electronic devices, period. But as soon as you're up in the air, it is no longer a concern. I'm not doubting your claim, but I'm not aware of the incident you're referring to. And I believe Mythbusters said their research couldn't come up with a single incident of wireless electronic devices ever interfering with a plane.
The FCC does extensive testing of communication devices before consumers get to touch them. If we need to add resonance frequency testing, so be it. But allowing one freak accident to forever inconvenience billions of air travelers is just plain stupid.
The reason I started using it on Windows desktops is I saw a fairly comprehensive review of 19 different popular anti-virus products.
Security Essentials had the second lowest footprint, and the second best detection engine. And given the price (free and doesn't harass you to upgrade to a paid product) and I think it is hands down the best solution for the average user.
You can blast Microsoft for a lot of products, but Security Essentials is pretty solid.
A large chunk of the enterprise sector uses Linux, as do a large chunk of web servers.
There is a large and interesting attack target. Usually when they do find exploits for a LAMP stack, it is within PHP or Apache, and not the Linux kernel. So both parties are correct in that Linux does have vulnerabilities as well, but even when people are targeting Linux, it proves to be more secure on the whole than Windows.
A big part of the problem is that Unix and Unix variants have been designed for security from the beginning. They've been designed to sandbox apps, and not run everything with full rights.
Windows was designed for users to have admin rights from day 1. Even when Windows started to introduce UAC, they did so in a manner that just annoys most people into turning it off. And so many Windows applications need full rights (because of the Windows mindset that they always could before) that it is difficult to properly sandbox everything.
Windows has made great strides in security over the past 10 years, but that doesn't make it a secure OS.
On charter flights, they don't force people to turn off electronics because they don't interfere with anything.
Mythbusters also definitively busted the myth that signals from electronics would disrupt any system on the airplane. They ripped open the plane, removed the shielding and put electronic devices next to unshielded cables and still couldn't cause a problem.
On top of that, many of these devices that we're forced to turn off either don't have wireless signals, or can be put into "Airplane mode" where are wireless signals are killed. The government has decided that stupid fear-mongering should overrule facts and reality.
Porn will exist on the internet whether you want it to or not. Using a.xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
1. You're assuming people aren't lazy. People are lazy and pay a hefty premium on convenience. 2. How do convince all auto manufacturers to design internal combustion engines around a certain range of octane/compression ratios? 3. In the United States, small cars are looked down upon. I realize this isn't the case in the rest of the world, but Americans in particular like larger cars. They want the freedom to drive longer distances.
You also overlook long-term cost. Charging at home will be expensive. People who buy energy in bulk do so at a discount. It will be cheaper to swap batteries.
Cheaper, more convenient, and allows you to drive farther?
You honestly think no one would be interested in that?
I'm not sure they'd be opposed to allowing someone to purchase a battery outright, except it is a large investment. And then comes the question of whether or not it is fair to swap another battery for the one you own, when the swapped battery might be older and less valuable.
You can purchase an EV from another company that you completely own if you wish. But I think the majority of people will prefer the cheaper model of a cheaper car, and a low lease payment on the battery.
Except for the fact that Agassi is in charge of the business. And he is running it with the mind set of ending the dependency on oil more than maximizing profits. He has the fuck-you money to do precisely that. He went to Israel first, because they absolutely don't want to depend on oil from their enemies, so it is in their vested interest to put government dollars behind this as well.
Denmark and Hawaii invested dollars because they're concerned about the environment. If you get the right people on board, it doesn't always have to be about profit first.
Slashdot Mirror
But the blockcade won't do anything. You'd just force 100% adoption of Baidu by 1.3 billion people so that everything they see would be through the filtered eyes of the government.
At the very least, now that Google is forced to comply with the laws they are still the only ones who plainly put on the page that the search results were censored. They're informing the public that the government is keeping things from them.
Google actively fought censorship in China more than any company on the planet. They put servers in Hong Kong that weren't required to censor results, and any page that was censored, Google made sure to state explicitly on the page that the content was censored so that people knew it.
In the end, China changed their laws and forced Google to comply. At that point they either had to pull out of China completely, or comply with laws. While some would contend that the high road is to pull out of China, but at the same time, you can't make in roads and try to effect change if you're not in the country at all.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. When everyone in the video game industry is used to 80 hour weeks (or worse) during crunch, then you've got a systemic issue or poor management. They haven't found a working business model where they can adequately staff and make budget. And given that consumers constantly expect more for less, and expect AAA titles to compete price wise with iPhone games. So management does need a better strategy for how their run their departments/businesses.
However, I question your claims of 3,600 engineers and never requiring unplanned overtime. It is impossible to plan for every single contingency. Things break and go wrong all the time in the universe. If you never, ever need unplanned overtime, then you must be severely overstaffed.
Correlation is not causation.
I oppose these bills and I hate the MPAA/RIAA, but suggesting that increased piracy is helping movie ticket sales is a bit silly. Hollywood has record revenue every year due to inflation and rising ticket costs. Add in the expansion of IMAX and 3D screens (with their inflated ticket costs) and you're just going to see more revenue.
I think it might be fair to say that piracy hasn't not been shown to significantly hurt the movie industry to date, I don't think there is sufficient evidence to suggest piracy is helping the movie industry.
The only servers we have that don't have IE installed are headless Server 2008 R2 boxes running in headless mode. IE is too ingrained in the OS to remove it, especially if you're running .NET apps.
Modern games run in Windows 7 with UAC just fine, but not in Vista.
I've noted that Steam versions do differ in other ways when trying to install mods for games.
MSE prompts from me from time to time if it can report to Microsoft on files it doesn't recognize. I just say no.
No, the article said there were 75 anecdotal claims over the years, and the report stated that there was no direct correlation between wireless devices and malfunctions. Did you opt not to read that part of the article?
Did the choose to ignore the word anecdotal? Even better, one of the cited examples that happened between 2005 and 2009 was a phone and 3 iPods being used during a flight. An iPod pre-2009 was likely not to have a wireless connection at all. But since something malfunctioned on the plane, the first reaction was to tell people to shut off their iPods because people are want to repeat FUD rather than focus on facts. Stating facts might get you sued.
And in your theory that 300 devices would cause problems, you forget that those 300 devices are active mid-flight. If they caused problems it would be documented.
Anecdotal reports or Congressional study?
God, I just read your article. I can't believe you offered that up.
The article says there is no direct correlation between wireless devices and malfunctions. It said in mid-flight when there were malfunctions, people blamed wireless devices and had the crew tell people to turn them off. There are 75 incidents over the years that could be linked to wireless devices.
But again, what you won't find is a single case where someone investigated it and found it to be reproducible.
The whole scare started with one incident that Boeing couldn't reproduce and declared to be a non-issue. But since the media made it a big deal, people attribute issues to wireless devices. There is a difference between anecdotal evidence, and verified evidence. No one has ever reproduced or verified a claim successfully.
And several experts told the Congressional study that they believe it to be impossible. But we live in an overly litigious society where we fear telling anyone that something is safe, because you can be sued for it. That is why the EU doesn't feel comfortable telling people that drinking water helps combat dehydration.
When it comes to life-saving issues, we shouldn't scare people into unconfirmed panics over assumptions that have no basis in reality. The same type of overreactions from a single report led to millions of parents keeping their kids away from vaccines.
You suggest the burden of proof is now to definitively prove that something that doesn't exist, which can not be done. I ask you to provide a verified case, because Congress couldn't find a single one.
They mentioned that they couldn't find a single recorded verifiable claim of interference occurring. Zero examples in the history of recorded flight is pretty statistically significant.
A Congressional study ended up with the same conclusion.
The article I linked to above mentions that Boeing had one incident where flight equipment wasn't working. They suspected a laptop using wireless internet might have been related, so they purchased that laptop and tried to reproduce the condition but were unable to do so.
It should be noted that GoGo in-flight wireless is broadcasting before, during and after take-off with zero problems. But the FAA won't let you use a Kindle in wireless mode, because it might crash the plane even though there is precisely zero evidence to suggest it can cause problems.
Why would you even need a virus?
It is far easier to get an actual virus installed by some idiot firing up a web browser on a server to do troubleshooting than through a remote access exploit and then an elevation exploit. You suggested a virus is useless against a server. You can explicitly target servers with user agent strings. Given that you think there are no viruses to target servers, and that a virus is completely useless against servers, I recommend you remove anti-virus from all your servers and see how well that goes over.
I practically never see an elevation prompt
I have no idea what your set-up is like, but Windows rarely if every does elevation prompts in the first place. I work for a corporation that takes security very seriously. All of our vendors (who in turn work with most of the Fortune 500 companies) state that we take sandboxing farther than anyone else they ever work with. And even in our environment, you don't get elevation prompts because everything is already given the precise rights it needs. And if it doesn't, then it simply fails until we fix it. Windows isn't really designed to detect when there should be a valid prompt to elevate rights.
Can you give some example of a more or less recent game that has a problem with UAC?
Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2 are all recent games I've played where I've noticed tons of reports on the game forums where users couldn't get the games running in Vista without disabling UAC. In fact, I can't recall the last game I purchased where I didn't hear reports of that.
The Windows kernel does need AV-type protection built in.
Data Execution Protection (DEP), stack protection, ASLR, etc. are all key features to protect the OS. The Linux kernel has similar features built in as well.
Does the kernel need a huge virus scanner built in? No, but Windows won't be doing this either. They're just going to ship Microsoft Security Essentials, which isn't a part of the kernel.
If Microsoft is aware of an actual hole/exploit that they would scan for, they patch it.
The problem is that you can't patch users. People will always click on things they shouldn't.
Mythbusters did research trying to find one recorded incident of a single piece of wireless electronics causing an incident and couldn't find one.
And they went out of their way to try and cause interference, going so far as to send signals at unshielded, exposed wires and couldn't get anything. And a Congressional study couldn't find a single verifiable claim of interference. Please tell me that you have verifiable evidence that it is occurring.
http://travel.usatoday.com/experts/cox/story/2011-10-03/Ask-the-Captain-A-reader-challenges-in-flight-electronics-rules/50634340/1
Viruses are useless against servers
Seriously? I'm not even sure where to begin with such a statement.
Most Linux distros don't sandbox apps
Novell's SLES/SLED/openSUSE line shipped with AppArmor and AppArmor profiles for popular apps. I believe they have since changed to SELinux. Red Hat/Fedora ships with a configured SELinux out of the box. Given that I was talking about Linux servers, that is the bulk of the server market. Ubuntu server doesn't have it out of the box, but that is just one of many reasons not to run Ubuntu on an enterprise server.
I've been using Vista since 2008, and Win7 since it came out. I have a lot of applications on my system, but none of them require full admin rights.
I take it you don't work in IT, or an enterprise environment. Proprietary apps in the enterprise sector often require extensive rights. And even in the consumer/desktop sector, tons of game need the ability to write to C:\Program Files\ and have issues with UAC. Google up any major Windows game and Vista, and you'll find issues where people can't get the games to run in Vista without disabling UAC. This is less of a problem in Windows 7, but it still exists.
Mythbusters did test with and without shielding.
And if we're concerned about the possibility of crashing/shutting down an engine, then that should be enough of a concern not to allow wireless electronic devices, period. But as soon as you're up in the air, it is no longer a concern. I'm not doubting your claim, but I'm not aware of the incident you're referring to. And I believe Mythbusters said their research couldn't come up with a single incident of wireless electronic devices ever interfering with a plane.
The FCC does extensive testing of communication devices before consumers get to touch them. If we need to add resonance frequency testing, so be it. But allowing one freak accident to forever inconvenience billions of air travelers is just plain stupid.
The reason I started using it on Windows desktops is I saw a fairly comprehensive review of 19 different popular anti-virus products.
Security Essentials had the second lowest footprint, and the second best detection engine. And given the price (free and doesn't harass you to upgrade to a paid product) and I think it is hands down the best solution for the average user.
You can blast Microsoft for a lot of products, but Security Essentials is pretty solid.
A large chunk of the enterprise sector uses Linux, as do a large chunk of web servers.
There is a large and interesting attack target. Usually when they do find exploits for a LAMP stack, it is within PHP or Apache, and not the Linux kernel. So both parties are correct in that Linux does have vulnerabilities as well, but even when people are targeting Linux, it proves to be more secure on the whole than Windows.
A big part of the problem is that Unix and Unix variants have been designed for security from the beginning. They've been designed to sandbox apps, and not run everything with full rights.
Windows was designed for users to have admin rights from day 1. Even when Windows started to introduce UAC, they did so in a manner that just annoys most people into turning it off. And so many Windows applications need full rights (because of the Windows mindset that they always could before) that it is difficult to properly sandbox everything.
Windows has made great strides in security over the past 10 years, but that doesn't make it a secure OS.
On charter flights, they don't force people to turn off electronics because they don't interfere with anything.
Mythbusters also definitively busted the myth that signals from electronics would disrupt any system on the airplane. They ripped open the plane, removed the shielding and put electronic devices next to unshielded cables and still couldn't cause a problem.
On top of that, many of these devices that we're forced to turn off either don't have wireless signals, or can be put into "Airplane mode" where are wireless signals are killed. The government has decided that stupid fear-mongering should overrule facts and reality.
Doesn't that get old after a while?
Porn will exist on the internet whether you want it to or not. Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
1. You're assuming people aren't lazy. People are lazy and pay a hefty premium on convenience.
2. How do convince all auto manufacturers to design internal combustion engines around a certain range of octane/compression ratios?
3. In the United States, small cars are looked down upon. I realize this isn't the case in the rest of the world, but Americans in particular like larger cars. They want the freedom to drive longer distances.
You also overlook long-term cost. Charging at home will be expensive. People who buy energy in bulk do so at a discount. It will be cheaper to swap batteries.
Cheaper, more convenient, and allows you to drive farther?
You honestly think no one would be interested in that?
I'm not sure they'd be opposed to allowing someone to purchase a battery outright, except it is a large investment. And then comes the question of whether or not it is fair to swap another battery for the one you own, when the swapped battery might be older and less valuable.
You can purchase an EV from another company that you completely own if you wish. But I think the majority of people will prefer the cheaper model of a cheaper car, and a low lease payment on the battery.
Except for the fact that Agassi is in charge of the business. And he is running it with the mind set of ending the dependency on oil more than maximizing profits. He has the fuck-you money to do precisely that. He went to Israel first, because they absolutely don't want to depend on oil from their enemies, so it is in their vested interest to put government dollars behind this as well.
Denmark and Hawaii invested dollars because they're concerned about the environment. If you get the right people on board, it doesn't always have to be about profit first.