I'm going to bet that has everything to do with your home being a constitutionally protected zone. Work computers and school computers aren't protected the same way.
In most european countries, if an employer tries to video the workers working, and there is any union presence in the sector, this will start a labor dispute and the employer will lose it. The work environment also has some protections, thanks to a couple hundred years of labor unions.
I reserve the right to tap all phones which I own and for which I pay all associated costs.
Except in many countries it is illegal to record people without their consent... And in any country, if you record all private conversations with your friends I don't think I would want to be your friend.
I've never given Yahoo or Google a dime for the use of their services. They have worked quite well and I appreciate Yahoo notifying me before changing the privacy policy.
Yahoo has worked quite well? Pah! their web interface is crap-infested, periodically stops working or pesters me to update to the latest IE version (I am using firefox on linux) and they don't give imap access! That's the very opposite of working well. I am phasing out all usage of yahoo mail, nowadays I check it maybe once a week for those few people who might still have that old address. Yahoo must rot in hell.
I love how we as geeks sometimes want it both ways. "Keep it secure! Add encryption". "Wait wait! That's DRM, I want it gone!"
It's not really that hard at all. Encryption is neither good nor bad, it's all about who has the keys. How about: you need a password to log into your cars automotive system. Default password is "admin". If you change your password, mechanic will not be able to repare your car unless you give him your password.
Exactly. This could well be about electric bikes. A lot of those are being sold here in austria at the moment (also with government subsidies I think) and they are advertised all over the place... so my guess is that electric bikes/scooters will be widespread well before electric cars.
This is/was the problem with instant messaging networks: Unless you were on the right network, along with your friends, you got nothing.
The solution that's quickly gaining ground is federated XMPP, where your identity is tied to a server, but the server can talk to other servers, so you're not stuck in one walled off garden.
Honestly, federated XMPP is nice, but i have been on half a dozen messaging networks transparently with a single chat client for ages, even if on some of them I only had 1-2 contacts. I think we need something similar in the social networking world. Of course the big players have little incentive to help this come about, but eventually it will happen, just like it did for chat.
But guess what - I don't put anything on Facebook which is (a) embarrassing (b) particularly personal (c) not already available with an internet search.
It's not necessarily what personal info you put on Facebook that's going to come back to bite you in the ass; it's your social network itself. Back in the 1950s, during the McCarthy witchhunt, you got into trouble not so much for what you did, but for who you associated with (or even were just seen talking to). At that point you had the choice of either denouncing that person or being blacklisted yourself. As an aspiring dictator, I drool profusely thinking about how easily I'll be able to cleanse the social landscape of it's undesirable elements. They're falling all over themselves trying to give me lists of all their friends, no housecalls or torture needed.
Of course, it can't happen here, falling on deaf ears, etc...
And the facebook privacy changes back in december have made your list of friends public information. Read those policies folks: you can remove the list of friends from your profile so they don't show (or restrict it to friends only, etc), but they're still considered public by facebook. This means they can give it to whomever they want, and already provide it to any application a friend of yours may be using.
This movie has been sitting at the top of my personal top-10 of worst movies I have seen in a movie theater. I only went because Forest Whitaker was in it.
I don't resent a very bad movie on tv now and then, but when they manage to con me into going to a theater for one I hate them for ever... For me, that movie is reason enough to ban scientology and travolta and exile them to the frozen oceans of ganymede.
As nice as the world might be if food was free and software had no patents, that isn't the world we live in.
You may want to distinguish between the country you live in and "the world". Most european countries, for instance, still do not allow software patents at all.
We do actually have that option in the content filter on our firewall. When I enabled it before I got complaints from one of the directors because they actually click on ads -.-
Wow... so these are the guys that actually pay for all of our free internet services? By all means do not ad-block them or the internet will collapse!
oh well... you're right.. except on the part about me being an asshat and having to work on reading comprehensions skills... this is slashdot... we don't read TFA, or even TFS, do you expect us to properly read the comments?
Oh, and seriously... if they are up to no good, do you really think deleting your account is going to make a difference? We're talking about the Internet; once you put something in, you can't take it back out.
Up to no good? just because somebody doesn't want to have loads of his personal information sold to the highest bidder, you assume he is "up to no good"?
Ok, I get it, this has to be a troll... and I just bit..
I expect the correlation between campaign contributions and policy decisions is as strong in Europe as it is in the United States.
Actually, in many european countries there is no such things as campaign contributions from private corporations. They are called bribes. (example: france, italy). I'm not saying this automagically solves the problem, just pointing out that what the anglo-saxon world calls lobbying is illegal in many other large democracies.
You can set the flash settings here for any browser.
I put my flash settings to paranoid mode using that thingy, and since then, even though I have reset the settings to the default values, re-installed flash, removed all flash-related files from my system, and basically did all I could to ensure a clean start, flash still works only partially in this browser (firefox on linux) because all the flash cookies are rejected. I would advise everyone to stay away from the adobe-provided settings and instead install the firefox betterprivacy plugin, setting it to delete everything on browser exit (included the default cookie that keeps a log of all visited flash sites!).
No, GP is right. The reason we have stupid laws is because we have stupid and/or corrupt politicians. The judge in this case isn't necessarily either stupid or corrupt - quite often an astute judge who recognises a stupid law will set up a trial case (preferably by finding against someone big enough to take care of themselves like Google) which they know will almost certainly go to appeal. Once it goes to appeal, any precedent set is more binding on the lower courts...
...Except that italy's judiciary (as the judiciary of most of the world, except the former british empire) does not operate under common law, but civil law. Under civil law, precedents do not matter, only the law (as written by the legislative branch) and its interpretation matter.
The first distribution destroys the exclusivity, and most of the value is in the exclusivity. Therefore, the first unlicensed distribution destroys most of the value of the property.
Then they should sue themselves for selling thousands of CDs with that song on them. This argument does not hold any water, except perhaps for pre-release piracy (and I mean before the very first release, not before the release in a given market)
but he did encourage "unlawful" behavior, such as making your own salt to avoid paying the british tax... So under this law he would have to register, since he was planning to overthrow the government, and used unlawful means.
There are strict regulations on wire transfers in the US under the UCC, but little regulating the fees banks can charge. US domestic wires often cost from $10-$25 depending on whether you're receiving or sending the money. Wire transfers in europe are a lot more popular and negotiations through the EU have led to very low or completely absent wire transfer fees.
I can directly transfer money from my account (in europe) to any account in another EU country at no cost... unless it's a non-euro country, then there may be hidden costs in the exchange rate. Also there is a (negligible) hidden cost in that they back-date the outgoing transaction by a few days, effectively "stealing" minuscule amounts of interest from the account holder.
And, I can do all this with reasonably robust two-factor authentication. This means that I need a one-time password of some sort to actually send money, and I get this one time password either from a hardware device, or an SMS, or a little sheet of one-time-passwords that the bank periodically mails you by snail mail. I spoke to a guy who runs the security for some US bank at blackhat DC last week, and asked him if they have two-factor authentication for transactions. He said that when someone wants to browse his online account, he only needs a password, but when he tries to do more stuff, like sending money, a second layer of security kicks in. And the user gets asked something like his mother's maiden name... because users don't want to be bothered remembering a second password. Way to go!..
Please note that the Palm Pre and Pixi (WebOS) already has "free" navigation. The base Sprint dataplan (unlike Verizon) for those phones includes turn-by-turn Sprint navigation at no extra cost (Verizon is $10/mo more, I believe for that feature and that is on top of the service plan already $20 beings per month than Sprint when you include unlimited text messaging. Sprint also has free mobile to ANY mobile communication, and better nights/weekends.)
Navigation that only works when you are not in roaming is mostly useless for anyone who travels internationally. Or does your sprint thing work if you are on another continent?
it's a simple matter of time when reading the comments before one compares whatever the privacy violation of the day is to 1984. Which generally makes it hard to take seriously.
Isn't that what science fiction is for? (among other things). To give you a new perspective from which to look at things happening in the present... I'm not surprised 1984 has changed enough people's worldview (assuming they RTFB, which may be optimistic here on slashdot) that they sometimes look at the world through 1984 lenses. That's why it's a good book.
I don't want physical copies either. When I get a CD I insert in my laptop and it opens sound juicer and rips it to mp3 so I can play it everywhere. At this point, I have no use for the plastic anymore. But I want DRM even less.
Now in order to get lynched I'm going to start with a statement
I don't care if they put these restrictions on
But I'll add a caveat...
As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment
And what about re-sale? can you sell it to me? can you leave it to your grandchildren? How about:
As long as it can be played on any device I or anyone else owns or may own in the future that supports an open standard?
That pretty much rules out DRM. An open standard is a standard that anyone can implement, with no (significant) barriers to entry. Otherwise the word "open" is just newspeak for closed.
Not quite sure this story got filed right. Nothing to do with our online rights... this has more to do with all our rights.
How is this insightful? for the umpteenth time, YRO means "your rights, discussed online". It is in no now way restricted to protecting your right to download porn (sacred as that right may be).
NO, there is a bigger chance to be hit by an asteroid than to win a lottery.
Is there really? Estimates of this based on historical data would have us hit by an asteroid big enough to make dinosaurs go extinct once every... 70 million years (or so, look it up if you want correct numbers). So it is perhaps about as likely to be hit by one in a given year as a given ticket winning the lottery (depending on how big a lottery). However, if we assume that such an asteroid would kill 7 billion people if it did hit, we can also say that catastrophic asteroid impact kills on average 100 people a year... not a highly impressive number, probably less people than are killed by flying debris http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0EY86At7qs each year, but still pretty high considering that there is hardly any historical record of a man being killed by an asteroid impact.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to bet that has everything to do with your home being a constitutionally protected zone. Work computers and school computers aren't protected the same way.
In most european countries, if an employer tries to video the workers working, and there is any union presence in the sector, this will start a labor dispute and the employer will lose it. The work environment also has some protections, thanks to a couple hundred years of labor unions.
I reserve the right to tap all phones which I own and for which I pay all associated costs.
Except in many countries it is illegal to record people without their consent... And in any country, if you record all private conversations with your friends I don't think I would want to be your friend.
I've never given Yahoo or Google a dime for the use of their services. They have worked quite well and I appreciate Yahoo notifying me before changing the privacy policy.
Yahoo has worked quite well? Pah! their web interface is crap-infested, periodically stops working or pesters me to update to the latest IE version (I am using firefox on linux) and they don't give imap access! That's the very opposite of working well. I am phasing out all usage of yahoo mail, nowadays I check it maybe once a week for those few people who might still have that old address. Yahoo must rot in hell.
I love how we as geeks sometimes want it both ways. "Keep it secure! Add encryption". "Wait wait! That's DRM, I want it gone!"
It's not really that hard at all. Encryption is neither good nor bad, it's all about who has the keys. How about: you need a password to log into your cars automotive system. Default password is "admin". If you change your password, mechanic will not be able to repare your car unless you give him your password.
Exactly. This could well be about electric bikes. A lot of those are being sold here in austria at the moment (also with government subsidies I think) and they are advertised all over the place... so my guess is that electric bikes/scooters will be widespread well before electric cars.
This is/was the problem with instant messaging networks: Unless you were on the right network, along with your friends, you got nothing.
The solution that's quickly gaining ground is federated XMPP, where your identity is tied to a server, but the server can talk to other servers, so you're not stuck in one walled off garden.
Honestly, federated XMPP is nice, but i have been on half a dozen messaging networks transparently with a single chat client for ages, even if on some of them I only had 1-2 contacts. I think we need something similar in the social networking world. Of course the big players have little incentive to help this come about, but eventually it will happen, just like it did for chat.
But guess what - I don't put anything on Facebook which is (a) embarrassing (b) particularly personal (c) not already available with an internet search.
It's not necessarily what personal info you put on Facebook that's going to come back to bite you in the ass; it's your social network itself. Back in the 1950s, during the McCarthy witchhunt, you got into trouble not so much for what you did, but for who you associated with (or even were just seen talking to). At that point you had the choice of either denouncing that person or being blacklisted yourself. As an aspiring dictator, I drool profusely thinking about how easily I'll be able to cleanse the social landscape of it's undesirable elements. They're falling all over themselves trying to give me lists of all their friends, no housecalls or torture needed.
Of course, it can't happen here, falling on deaf ears, etc...
And the facebook privacy changes back in december have made your list of friends public information. Read those policies folks: you can remove the list of friends from your profile so they don't show (or restrict it to friends only, etc), but they're still considered public by facebook. This means they can give it to whomever they want, and already provide it to any application a friend of yours may be using.
Worst PICTURE of the Decade - Battlefield Earth accepted by J.D. Shapiro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKlEE18R5d8
This movie has been sitting at the top of my personal top-10 of worst movies I have seen in a movie theater. I only went because Forest Whitaker was in it. I don't resent a very bad movie on tv now and then, but when they manage to con me into going to a theater for one I hate them for ever... For me, that movie is reason enough to ban scientology and travolta and exile them to the frozen oceans of ganymede.
As nice as the world might be if food was free and software had no patents, that isn't the world we live in.
You may want to distinguish between the country you live in and "the world". Most european countries, for instance, still do not allow software patents at all.
We do actually have that option in the content filter on our firewall. When I enabled it before I got complaints from one of the directors because they actually click on ads -.-
Wow... so these are the guys that actually pay for all of our free internet services? By all means do not ad-block them or the internet will collapse!
That's a whole lot of data without very much actionable information.
Do you seriously read slashdot looking for "actionable information"?
Man! and I thought that reading throught the ENTIRE summary was badass!
oh well... you're right.. except on the part about me being an asshat and having to work on reading comprehensions skills... this is slashdot... we don't read TFA, or even TFS, do you expect us to properly read the comments?
Oh, and seriously... if they are up to no good, do you really think deleting your account is going to make a difference? We're talking about the Internet; once you put something in, you can't take it back out.
Up to no good? just because somebody doesn't want to have loads of his personal information sold to the highest bidder, you assume he is "up to no good"?
Ok, I get it, this has to be a troll... and I just bit..
Citation needed.
I expect the correlation between campaign contributions and policy decisions is as strong in Europe as it is in the United States.
Actually, in many european countries there is no such things as campaign contributions from private corporations. They are called bribes. (example: france, italy). I'm not saying this automagically solves the problem, just pointing out that what the anglo-saxon world calls lobbying is illegal in many other large democracies.
You can set the flash settings here for any browser.
I put my flash settings to paranoid mode using that thingy, and since then, even though I have reset the settings to the default values, re-installed flash, removed all flash-related files from my system, and basically did all I could to ensure a clean start, flash still works only partially in this browser (firefox on linux) because all the flash cookies are rejected. I would advise everyone to stay away from the adobe-provided settings and instead install the firefox betterprivacy plugin, setting it to delete everything on browser exit (included the default cookie that keeps a log of all visited flash sites!).
No, GP is right. The reason we have stupid laws is because we have stupid and/or corrupt politicians. The judge in this case isn't necessarily either stupid or corrupt - quite often an astute judge who recognises a stupid law will set up a trial case (preferably by finding against someone big enough to take care of themselves like Google) which they know will almost certainly go to appeal. Once it goes to appeal, any precedent set is more binding on the lower courts...
...Except that italy's judiciary (as the judiciary of most of the world, except the former british empire) does not operate under common law, but civil law. Under civil law, precedents do not matter, only the law (as written by the legislative branch) and its interpretation matter.
The first distribution destroys the exclusivity, and most of the value is in the exclusivity. Therefore, the first unlicensed distribution destroys most of the value of the property.
Then they should sue themselves for selling thousands of CDs with that song on them. This argument does not hold any water, except perhaps for pre-release piracy (and I mean before the very first release, not before the release in a given market)
How so? Ghandi got the brits out peaceably.
but he did encourage "unlawful" behavior, such as making your own salt to avoid paying the british tax... So under this law he would have to register, since he was planning to overthrow the government, and used unlawful means.
There are strict regulations on wire transfers in the US under the UCC, but little regulating the fees banks can charge. US domestic wires often cost from $10-$25 depending on whether you're receiving or sending the money. Wire transfers in europe are a lot more popular and negotiations through the EU have led to very low or completely absent wire transfer fees.
I can directly transfer money from my account (in europe) to any account in another EU country at no cost... unless it's a non-euro country, then there may be hidden costs in the exchange rate. Also there is a (negligible) hidden cost in that they back-date the outgoing transaction by a few days, effectively "stealing" minuscule amounts of interest from the account holder.
And, I can do all this with reasonably robust two-factor authentication. This means that I need a one-time password of some sort to actually send money, and I get this one time password either from a hardware device, or an SMS, or a little sheet of one-time-passwords that the bank periodically mails you by snail mail. I spoke to a guy who runs the security for some US bank at blackhat DC last week, and asked him if they have two-factor authentication for transactions. He said that when someone wants to browse his online account, he only needs a password, but when he tries to do more stuff, like sending money, a second layer of security kicks in. And the user gets asked something like his mother's maiden name... because users don't want to be bothered remembering a second password. Way to go!..
Please note that the Palm Pre and Pixi (WebOS) already has "free" navigation. The base Sprint dataplan (unlike Verizon) for those phones includes turn-by-turn Sprint navigation at no extra cost (Verizon is $10/mo more, I believe for that feature and that is on top of the service plan already $20 beings per month than Sprint when you include unlimited text messaging. Sprint also has free mobile to ANY mobile communication, and better nights/weekends.)
Navigation that only works when you are not in roaming is mostly useless for anyone who travels internationally. Or does your sprint thing work if you are on another continent?
it's a simple matter of time when reading the comments before one compares whatever the privacy violation of the day is to 1984. Which generally makes it hard to take seriously.
Isn't that what science fiction is for? (among other things). To give you a new perspective from which to look at things happening in the present... I'm not surprised 1984 has changed enough people's worldview (assuming they RTFB, which may be optimistic here on slashdot) that they sometimes look at the world through 1984 lenses. That's why it's a good book.
Now in order to get lynched I'm going to start with a statement
I don't care if they put these restrictions on
But I'll add a caveat...
As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment
And what about re-sale? can you sell it to me? can you leave it to your grandchildren? How about:
As long as it can be played on any device I or anyone else owns or may own in the future that supports an open standard?
That pretty much rules out DRM. An open standard is a standard that anyone can implement, with no (significant) barriers to entry. Otherwise the word "open" is just newspeak for closed.
Not quite sure this story got filed right. Nothing to do with our online rights... this has more to do with all our rights.
How is this insightful? for the umpteenth time, YRO means "your rights, discussed online". It is in no now way restricted to protecting your right to download porn (sacred as that right may be).
NO, there is a bigger chance to be hit by an asteroid than to win a lottery.
Is there really? Estimates of this based on historical data would have us hit by an asteroid big enough to make dinosaurs go extinct once every... 70 million years (or so, look it up if you want correct numbers). So it is perhaps about as likely to be hit by one in a given year as a given ticket winning the lottery (depending on how big a lottery). However, if we assume that such an asteroid would kill 7 billion people if it did hit, we can also say that catastrophic asteroid impact kills on average 100 people a year... not a highly impressive number, probably less people than are killed by flying debris http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0EY86At7qs each year, but still pretty high considering that there is hardly any historical record of a man being killed by an asteroid impact.
ESA also has a mission concept for asteroid deflection from 2005, called Don Quijote...
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/NEO/SEMZRZNVGJE_0.html