What you describe sounds a lot like the patent system. There for an administrative fee of some thousand dollar per country you can patent your idea, somebody will do a check to see if it's original and innovative and then grand you a patent.
So as I said before, I don't believe the government can do anything for $1/year, the administration alone of recording the request would easily be a hundredfold more expensive. Let alone validate that the request is original and deserves copyright.
Secondly, if I have to request copyright globally, because my website is global, then it's not $1/year but with 200 countries worldwide a lot more. If any country decides that copyright has to be requested in person, or it costs $1000,-, or it's only accessable by locals, then it becomes impossible for consumers to get worldwide copyright.
If I make a digital creation and somebody pirates it in for instance Congo, I'm probably not loosing a potential customer and missing money. However if that same person uploads my creation online then anyone worldwide can download this. They are downloading a creation from a Congo-lean which is not copyrighted in any country worldwide. That this person would not have been entitled to create this if he would have lived in a country with copyright is regardless, he did nothing illegal in his country and you download an unprotected work.
That means that downloading and sharing of every single creation, protected or not, is completely legal as long as somebody in an uncopyrighted country copied it at some point.
Your idea would basically make it impossible to create copyrighted content and protect it, given that we live a global economy.
Same thing here. If a work is worthless to you, so be it; that's your decision to make. But I see no reason to help you attack someone else who was willing to take a chance. Especially since there'd be no copyright, which means that anyone, including you, could still directly compete with them.
I'm not saying a work is worthless to me, it's just not worth to pay thousands of dollars a year to protect it globally. And without it, if you succeeded with your idea locally you have no ability to go global because somebody else has very likely already copied it there. It also means that if I make a significant investment to create something, be it money or time, if I don't instantly copyright it globally people can freely copy my work into that nation, saturate the market and make it impossible to sell my idea there.
I fully agree with you that the current system is flawed, but you are converting it to the patent system which in my opinion is way more flawed then the copyright system at this point. I personally think the proper solution should be in reasonable terms after which copyright ends together with clear and useful fair use legislation. And also add clear and appropriate punishment for copyright violation. I'm from the Netherlands and I find the current law here that downloading is not illegal but uploading is quite reasonable.
However as soon as you start putting tax in this on a per country basis you break the entire worldwide market of digital and easily copy-able goods. That makes it near impossible for consumers to earn money online and would break the whole economy of websites, ebooks, movies, music and anything else that is effortless to copy.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control?
My website is my portfolio, and because of the games and resources I have created I have gotten several jobs. So this is important to me. This consists in part out of a few dozen games I've created but also out of hundreds of tutorials and articles I've written, most of which are shared under a creative commons attribution license.
While it is important for me to protect my portfolio, at $1/piece/year this would be in the neighborhood of $200/year. Currently I have some sparsely spread advertisement on my website that just covers the hosting cost. This means that hosting tutorials and resources to help the community is costing me money. That would likely result in me taking most of them down and hiding them from public.
In the past I have gotten regular complaints and negative press that I'm stealing other people's idea and re-hosting them under my own name, while in fact it was reverse. In those cases I have managed to rectify the situation by using the copyright law to get the offending items taken down, or if that creater did read the license, point people to the relevant credits page.
Without copyright law I will get a lot more bad press and negative feedback for helping others. So I do not wish to share my creations unprotected and I find a Create Commons Attribution license is a very fair deal to help these people.
I started this website as a student, and at the time did not have a lot of income that I could give $200/year as loose change for copyright. So then end result would be that I would not have shared these items and kept them private.
... a dollar, annually,
I do not believe that any government will be able to protect my copyright worldwide for a mere $1. The administrative cost alone to handle would easily be a hundredfold of this value in any government system. Which also means you are not asking a student like I was for $200/year but $20000/year which I would surely have declined.
it's to protect the citizens
But you aren't being hurt!
True, if someone steals my work and becomes very rich with it, I'm not directly hurt. But I've did quite a bit of the work to create the resource and I'm not paid for that because I don't have the money and the marketing drive to protect myself. I could afterwards even risk lawsuit for sharing my own creation if the company in question did copyright my creation. Corporations that are getting rich over the backs of unknowing citizens is something I feel the laws should protect me against.
Also, lets say your local photo print shop copies all your photos and sells them to a marketing firm. And the marketing firm decides to start a new ad campaign, picks a photo of your dog at random because of its looks, and uses it as the model for their new ad campaign against rabies.
Copyright law prevents them from doing this, without it you'd have a famous dog and nobody would ever visit you again if they found your dog has rabies.
Copyright law is very broadly defined and protects basically any original creation. This has a lot of uses and not all are bad. While the current system certainly has flaws I don't think an extra layer of bureaucracy solves it, this merely makes it hard to do for ordinary citizens while hardly influences big corporations.
I make computer games in my spare time. I put them for free on my website as a portfolio and because I'm a generally nice guy.
In your case I'm required to pay extra taxes because I've created something that I want to share for free under my own terms. Mainly some advertisement to pay the hosting, credits and the ability to get feedback.
I do actively control that people don't copy the executable and mirror it without credit, because then I miss those advantages. However I'm not willing to pay higher tax on free games I create to prevent people from claiming then as their own.
Copyright is a very broad law that anything anyone creates is protected. If I write a poem on a birthday card that is protected and Hallmark can't copy that, just like if I create a multi million dollar movie it's protected so someone at home can't share it for free.
While the idea for taxes is nice, it's not a practical solution given the broadness of copyright law.
It turns out that the people who like to hack the copy protection and share the game aren't the real gamers.
I've read a success story about a game in which the finish of the first level wasn't there when the DRM check failed. It was cracked multiple times & uploaded but none of the pirates notices the game could not be finished. It took 2+ months for a real crack to be made while lots of gamers got frustrated with the cracked version and the game had higher sales then normal in the first 2 months.
So making sure that an illegal version has a worse game experience then the genuine article will make people pay for it. If the copy protection is totally obvious then crackers won't upload buggy cracks and thus the illegal version will have a better game experience.
I've given several classes in programming games in the Netherlands. Most recently for a group of 11 year olds at IMC Weekend-School. For this I use the off the shelf tool, Game Maker.
What surprises me is that an 11 year old kid, with a 10 minute training, can create a fun and interesting game in just 2 hours. They can analyse there game concept and add a layer of abstraction to it to program it. They can convert the idea, the cat needs to move to his basket while luring the dog away to the concept, the object with the sprite cat needs to collide with the object 'bone' to make the object 'dog' disappear after which it needs to collide with the object 'basket'.
With almost no training they can create a large variety of games (Windows only). And admittedly, they vary greatly but there are some very fun games with them.
Using an off the shelf program might not teach them to become perfect programmers but it does teach them to think up a game concept, analyze it and convert it to a system of rules. Being able to critically analyze a concept and convert it to it's basic is a very useful skill to learn, one which will also help them if they decide to go programming.
I'm an administrator of a variety of game communities and I see many young kids passionately working on there creation and I fully agree with this study. Already, many schools in the Netherlands but also worldwide teach game creation with tools like Game Maker and I've seen many kids who learned a great deal off it, myself included. While an off the shelf tool might not teach them to become programmers, they learn a great deal more, have a more fun experience and thus an easier learning curve. While starting from scratch might be it for some talented kids, you can interest a great deal more kids with an off the shelf product.
I've also given classes in Game Maker. For IMC Weekendschool for 11 year olds I teached then Game Maker and with about 4 hours behind the computer and no previous experience they created some wonderful games. Gallery of games from IMC Weekendschool
I regularly give Game Maker classes and run several Game Maker online communities and as such I meet lots of young users. What always surprises me is the wonderful creations and ideas they come with and how far they manage to go by themselves with trial and error. The real power of Game Maker is the easy to use interface and yet the flexible programming language allowing you to extend your game to very high levels. I know of several game design companies who use Game Maker internally for prototyping just because of it's ease of use and it's very quick result.
Why not schedule a custom program at shutdown that has a cancel button for a minute but afterwards runs a full virusscan and backup if this was more then a week ago. Afterwards the shut down continues and the PC is off. If you just need to restart you can cancel the scan but otherwise all PC's run a virusscan and backup once a week and otherwise the PC's are off.
If the users have no inconvenience from shutting down there PC then you just need to educate the users.
I have enabled the master password and the proof of concept fails. It launches a window asking me for my master password before filling in any passwords.
Note that the master password on it's own still is not secure because you only need to type it in once until you restart your browser but combined with the add-on Master Password Timeout you are relatively safe. Just don't browse dodgy websites minutes after logging in.
Do note that Netherlands has a far higher broadband penetration. From the first result in Google Netherlands has 22.5 broadband connections per 100 inhabitants ranking #2, Germany ranks #18 with 10.2%. Belgium, partly Dutch ranks #8. Full stats.
Also in the Netherlands online video is very popular, the public broadcast puts all self created shows on the internet, other providers also have online offerings. The VPRO already has a Youtube channel, so has the Public broadcasters in general and the institute for Beeld en Geluid.
While population wise the Netherlands is small, with the high broadband we have many active internetusers. Microsoft Live mail for instance was launched in the Netherlands even before any other country because we have a high broadband penetration and a population eager to test new things.
Google has the technique to add subtitles available for Google Video. It likely won't take them to much work to apply this technique in Youtube as well. With all Google Video users being able to add subtitles there's a grand total of 27 videos with subtitles. Making subtitles is expensive, the audience for it is simply to small to actually make this affordable. Perhaps Google could give broadcasters easy means and an incentive to upload subtitles for shows which they already subtitled for TV distribution but practically no commercial company will spend time subtitling video's just for Youtube.
I would like to have some Wikipedia like community based subtitling system though. There are some sites which offer it but they don't offer many interesting video's and there are plenty of people with to much spare time.
Maybe when Steve Jobs showed a pie chart of the browsermarket and his vision in his presentation it was an indication of Apple's motivation.
John Lilly, Mozilla's chief operating officer, focused on the part of the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote where Jobs spelled out existing browser shares of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari -- 78%, 15% and 2%, respectively -- before displaying another pie chart that showed Safari with about a quarter of the market, IE with the remainder.
So Steve wants to claim 25% marketshare in the browsermarket and kill Firefox, Opera and the rest in the process. When they release a version that will work for me I'll be happy as that means I can test websites for compatibility without having to buy a Mac. However if they are trying to gain a 25% marketshare they have a very long way to go and I very much doubt they can squash Firefox out of the picture so easily.
Why is it that my spamfilter has big difficulty detecting clearly readable images with stock messages yet they can't find a good captcha. I'd say spend some more time reading your viagra offers.
I used to get quite a few clearly readable images which where split randomly in smaller images and put back together as a whole. Also these images where animated gif files which once every 10 seconds shortly blink to make the image file more complex to simply analyse.
What if you take a simple captcha, split the image into smaller images, take the actually cross browser working parts of the Acid2 test and render an image that way.
This could probably still be solved by running a recent browser, opening the page, waiting for it to be rendered, then taking a screendump and running the captcha software but doing so will at least slow people down a lot while users with a recent browser don't notice a single thing.
While reading through various articles about Captchas on the web to pick one for my site I saw one had a feature to add as text in the image 'This captcha is from www.your website.com' to solve this. According to the documentation several adult websites force users to fill in other sites there captcha and such a string could alert users of illegal activities.
Apparently your idea is already used. On the other hand, I've seen no site containing such a message so I guess it's not really a big problem just yet.
I'm guessing it would really help out if all browsers work together and take the following steps:
-.bank domains must always use HTTPS with a trusted certificate
- When visiting a.bank domain the browser contacts a trusted third party about the domain for more info and displays an information bar with 'You are know connecting to bank XYZ from ABC'. Place it clearly visible, away from the site content and make sure all browsers do this roughly the same way. Possibly change the toolbar background color everywhere from grey to yellow.
If you combine these two steps with an information push to end users, we could finally get somewhere. Let Banks send out newsletters about security, let TV shows warn people, get the banks to buy some page sized advertisements together in all the papers to tell the story how they are really secure. If all major browsers work together on this as well as the banks and the media this could work out.
Having a seperate.bank domain helps browsers to detect that a page is from a bank to employ all the extra security features. Displaying the identity of the bank clearly and possibly making the.bank domain expensive would stop phishers from registering a domain. In time people will come to accept these secure pages and will find it strange that a phisher doesn't use them. It won't happen overnight but it can happen.
Firefox warns the site doesn't require authentication. It would be very easy to get somedomain.ru to ask for authentication and accept the given username/password combo. That bypasses the security warning in Firefox.
I'm signed up to Microsoft's beta mailing list which occasionally invites me in beta's. Some time ago I got a mailing which looked suspicious to me, it linked to go.microsoft.com but redirected to liveint.com and other odd looking domains. It gave me security warnings about incorrect certificates and resulted in a website with the product name and a download button and no graphics or anything.
I reported this to Microsoft's abuse department who said this was a phishing email. A closer look showed that all domains where from Microsoft, the security certificate was recognised by IE, not FF, the layout only loads correctly with Javascript enabled and the download was digitally signed by Microsoft. Still, it broke every rule in how to detect a phishing email and looked so terrible it even fooled Microsoft's own abuse department.
When you send out mailings then take the rules of detecting phishing into account, especially if you have a warning page on your site telling users how to detect phishing emails. The average person who knows about phishing will mark this email as spam.
Google noticed the fuss everywhere and has since then changed the page. A very interesting post about this is made by Matt Cutts (Google employee) on his private blog explaining how annoying it is if somebody steals your layout. Very interesting read. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ie7-promo-page/
Personally I don't mind if Google delists websites which list tricks to fool them. I also don't want Google to give a list to these people which of the hacks on the site where detected by Google. As in, a note which hack still work in Google. People who try to trick Google into promoting there website don't get my sympathy. I understand that this website has been changed because of lacking security rather then an actually evil webmaster but how is Google to know the difference?
I'm happy to have a search engine that works and because it's algorithms are unknown also has a good ranking system with little to no spam websites in there.
If you compare Firefox to Opera I feel that Opera does a lot of things out of the box nicely while Firefox does these even better after I've spend a few hours installing extensions. Are there any plans on including extensions within Firefox so that the browser becomes great out of the box for everyone and that the non geeky people can enjoy Firefox without spending lots of time fiddling with extensions? Perhaps create a lightweight installer for the geeky people and a more complete installer with some of the best extensions already included as extension.
and it is a feature that SHOULD be part of an operating system
I fully agree, however it would be an entirely different situation I find when Microsoft would make a commercial product which you can buy a subscription for besides the cost of your OS to get secure.
1: You make a buggy OS
2: You create a new OS which still is buggy but which locks out programs to fix these bugs
3: Knowing your own product you write the only program that can correctly work together with your new OS to fix your own bugs and ask a subscription fee to do so.
4:...
5: profit.
In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 3 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.
Interesting, they link to Chilling Effects which has on the page
At times, search engines remove different results from country-specific searches.
Gmail is my favourite email client as well. I use Google's personalised homepage with all my RSS feeds and stuff because I have Gmail on it as well. If not, I can very easily find another personalised homepage who will be more then happy to include a google adsense search block on it.
By getting me to have Google as my homepage they keep all the revenue of ad clicks and they make sure I search Google and not whatever happens to be on my start page. Just by offering Gmail as a service. Google is doing a very good job with there extra services. Plus, lets not forget, that there 20% system will very likely work like a charm on staff motivation to work at Google.
If I pay a subscription fee for a 360 I certainly wont let it stand collect dust but I will feel obliged to play it and thus buy new games regulary.
While I'm certainly going to buy a Wii, especially because of this I won't buy extra games because I pay no subscription. I will buy extra games because they are great games and probably cheap.
I'm an indie developer and I'd love to loose that subscription fee as well. While I being a student don't mind paying $100/year for this I do mind that anyone that wants to play games I make has to pay $100/year. That means my target audience is virtually non existent. Without any system to get your games out to for instance Xbox live arcade I'm not switching development tools.
True, releasing lots of terrible and a few good games to Xbox live arcade for free will mean sales will crash on the arcade and Microsoft will loose a lot of money but they will gain a lot of happy customers. I don't mind either selling games on Xbox live arcade with a part going to Microsoft. However Microsoft is trying to keep Xbox live arcade rather empty to not overwhelm the users with choice and even big companies have difficulty getting on arcade.
The idea is very nice but without a system for developers to distribute there games I don't see this as becoming very successful. True, I can get noticed by developers and MS can choose to sell the game on arcade with my consent with a share for me but both are very unlikely. I currently develop indie games for the PC and after my last big game I got 4 job offers and lots of happy users.
While I will keep a close eye on this service I won't move development tools just yet and I don't expect most other people to do so either.
Slashdot Mirror
So as I said before, I don't believe the government can do anything for $1/year, the administration alone of recording the request would easily be a hundredfold more expensive. Let alone validate that the request is original and deserves copyright.
Secondly, if I have to request copyright globally, because my website is global, then it's not $1/year but with 200 countries worldwide a lot more. If any country decides that copyright has to be requested in person, or it costs $1000,-, or it's only accessable by locals, then it becomes impossible for consumers to get worldwide copyright.
If I make a digital creation and somebody pirates it in for instance Congo, I'm probably not loosing a potential customer and missing money. However if that same person uploads my creation online then anyone worldwide can download this. They are downloading a creation from a Congo-lean which is not copyrighted in any country worldwide. That this person would not have been entitled to create this if he would have lived in a country with copyright is regardless, he did nothing illegal in his country and you download an unprotected work.
That means that downloading and sharing of every single creation, protected or not, is completely legal as long as somebody in an uncopyrighted country copied it at some point.
Your idea would basically make it impossible to create copyrighted content and protect it, given that we live a global economy.
Same thing here. If a work is worthless to you, so be it; that's your decision to make. But I see no reason to help you attack someone else who was willing to take a chance. Especially since there'd be no copyright, which means that anyone, including you, could still directly compete with them.
I'm not saying a work is worthless to me, it's just not worth to pay thousands of dollars a year to protect it globally. And without it, if you succeeded with your idea locally you have no ability to go global because somebody else has very likely already copied it there. It also means that if I make a significant investment to create something, be it money or time, if I don't instantly copyright it globally people can freely copy my work into that nation, saturate the market and make it impossible to sell my idea there.
I fully agree with you that the current system is flawed, but you are converting it to the patent system which in my opinion is way more flawed then the copyright system at this point. I personally think the proper solution should be in reasonable terms after which copyright ends together with clear and useful fair use legislation. And also add clear and appropriate punishment for copyright violation. I'm from the Netherlands and I find the current law here that downloading is not illegal but uploading is quite reasonable.
However as soon as you start putting tax in this on a per country basis you break the entire worldwide market of digital and easily copy-able goods. That makes it near impossible for consumers to earn money online and would break the whole economy of websites, ebooks, movies, music and anything else that is effortless to copy.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control?
My website is my portfolio, and because of the games and resources I have created I have gotten several jobs. So this is important to me. This consists in part out of a few dozen games I've created but also out of hundreds of tutorials and articles I've written, most of which are shared under a creative commons attribution license.
While it is important for me to protect my portfolio, at $1/piece/year this would be in the neighborhood of $200/year. Currently I have some sparsely spread advertisement on my website that just covers the hosting cost. This means that hosting tutorials and resources to help the community is costing me money. That would likely result in me taking most of them down and hiding them from public.
In the past I have gotten regular complaints and negative press that I'm stealing other people's idea and re-hosting them under my own name, while in fact it was reverse. In those cases I have managed to rectify the situation by using the copyright law to get the offending items taken down, or if that creater did read the license, point people to the relevant credits page.
Without copyright law I will get a lot more bad press and negative feedback for helping others. So I do not wish to share my creations unprotected and I find a Create Commons Attribution license is a very fair deal to help these people.
I started this website as a student, and at the time did not have a lot of income that I could give $200/year as loose change for copyright. So then end result would be that I would not have shared these items and kept them private.
... a dollar, annually,
I do not believe that any government will be able to protect my copyright worldwide for a mere $1. The administrative cost alone to handle would easily be a hundredfold of this value in any government system. Which also means you are not asking a student like I was for $200/year but $20000/year which I would surely have declined.
it's to protect the citizens
But you aren't being hurt!
True, if someone steals my work and becomes very rich with it, I'm not directly hurt. But I've did quite a bit of the work to create the resource and I'm not paid for that because I don't have the money and the marketing drive to protect myself. I could afterwards even risk lawsuit for sharing my own creation if the company in question did copyright my creation. Corporations that are getting rich over the backs of unknowing citizens is something I feel the laws should protect me against.
Also, lets say your local photo print shop copies all your photos and sells them to a marketing firm. And the marketing firm decides to start a new ad campaign, picks a photo of your dog at random because of its looks, and uses it as the model for their new ad campaign against rabies.
Copyright law prevents them from doing this, without it you'd have a famous dog and nobody would ever visit you again if they found your dog has rabies.
Copyright law is very broadly defined and protects basically any original creation. This has a lot of uses and not all are bad. While the current system certainly has flaws I don't think an extra layer of bureaucracy solves it, this merely makes it hard to do for ordinary citizens while hardly influences big corporations.
I make computer games in my spare time. I put them for free on my website as a portfolio and because I'm a generally nice guy.
In your case I'm required to pay extra taxes because I've created something that I want to share for free under my own terms. Mainly some advertisement to pay the hosting, credits and the ability to get feedback.
I do actively control that people don't copy the executable and mirror it without credit, because then I miss those advantages. However I'm not willing to pay higher tax on free games I create to prevent people from claiming then as their own.
Copyright is a very broad law that anything anyone creates is protected. If I write a poem on a birthday card that is protected and Hallmark can't copy that, just like if I create a multi million dollar movie it's protected so someone at home can't share it for free.
While the idea for taxes is nice, it's not a practical solution given the broadness of copyright law.
It turns out that the people who like to hack the copy protection and share the game aren't the real gamers.
I've read a success story about a game in which the finish of the first level wasn't there when the DRM check failed. It was cracked multiple times & uploaded but none of the pirates notices the game could not be finished. It took 2+ months for a real crack to be made while lots of gamers got frustrated with the cracked version and the game had higher sales then normal in the first 2 months.
So making sure that an illegal version has a worse game experience then the genuine article will make people pay for it. If the copy protection is totally obvious then crackers won't upload buggy cracks and thus the illegal version will have a better game experience.
I've given several classes in programming games in the Netherlands. Most recently for a group of 11 year olds at IMC Weekend-School. For this I use the off the shelf tool, Game Maker.
What surprises me is that an 11 year old kid, with a 10 minute training, can create a fun and interesting game in just 2 hours. They can analyse there game concept and add a layer of abstraction to it to program it. They can convert the idea, the cat needs to move to his basket while luring the dog away to the concept, the object with the sprite cat needs to collide with the object 'bone' to make the object 'dog' disappear after which it needs to collide with the object 'basket'.
With almost no training they can create a large variety of games (Windows only). And admittedly, they vary greatly but there are some very fun games with them.
Using an off the shelf program might not teach them to become perfect programmers but it does teach them to think up a game concept, analyze it and convert it to a system of rules. Being able to critically analyze a concept and convert it to it's basic is a very useful skill to learn, one which will also help them if they decide to go programming.
I'm an administrator of a variety of game communities and I see many young kids passionately working on there creation and I fully agree with this study. Already, many schools in the Netherlands but also worldwide teach game creation with tools like Game Maker and I've seen many kids who learned a great deal off it, myself included. While an off the shelf tool might not teach them to become programmers, they learn a great deal more, have a more fun experience and thus an easier learning curve. While starting from scratch might be it for some talented kids, you can interest a great deal more kids with an off the shelf product.
You don't need HTML email for that. Just write the parts that need extra focus in all caps and people can quickly skim over your email.
I've also given classes in Game Maker. For IMC Weekendschool for 11 year olds I teached then Game Maker and with about 4 hours behind the computer and no previous experience they created some wonderful games.
Gallery of games from IMC Weekendschool
I regularly give Game Maker classes and run several Game Maker online communities and as such I meet lots of young users. What always surprises me is the wonderful creations and ideas they come with and how far they manage to go by themselves with trial and error. The real power of Game Maker is the easy to use interface and yet the flexible programming language allowing you to extend your game to very high levels. I know of several game design companies who use Game Maker internally for prototyping just because of it's ease of use and it's very quick result.
Why not schedule a custom program at shutdown that has a cancel button for a minute but afterwards runs a full virusscan and backup if this was more then a week ago. Afterwards the shut down continues and the PC is off. If you just need to restart you can cancel the scan but otherwise all PC's run a virusscan and backup once a week and otherwise the PC's are off.
If the users have no inconvenience from shutting down there PC then you just need to educate the users.
I have enabled the master password and the proof of concept fails. It launches a window asking me for my master password before filling in any passwords.
Note that the master password on it's own still is not secure because you only need to type it in once until you restart your browser but combined with the add-on Master Password Timeout you are relatively safe. Just don't browse dodgy websites minutes after logging in.
Do note that Netherlands has a far higher broadband penetration. From the first result in Google Netherlands has 22.5 broadband connections per 100 inhabitants ranking #2, Germany ranks #18 with 10.2%. Belgium, partly Dutch ranks #8. Full stats.
Also in the Netherlands online video is very popular, the public broadcast puts all self created shows on the internet, other providers also have online offerings. The VPRO already has a Youtube channel, so has the Public broadcasters in general and the institute for Beeld en Geluid.
While population wise the Netherlands is small, with the high broadband we have many active internetusers. Microsoft Live mail for instance was launched in the Netherlands even before any other country because we have a high broadband penetration and a population eager to test new things.
Google has the technique to add subtitles available for Google Video. It likely won't take them to much work to apply this technique in Youtube as well. With all Google Video users being able to add subtitles there's a grand total of 27 videos with subtitles. Making subtitles is expensive, the audience for it is simply to small to actually make this affordable. Perhaps Google could give broadcasters easy means and an incentive to upload subtitles for shows which they already subtitled for TV distribution but practically no commercial company will spend time subtitling video's just for Youtube.
I would like to have some Wikipedia like community based subtitling system though. There are some sites which offer it but they don't offer many interesting video's and there are plenty of people with to much spare time.
So Steve wants to claim 25% marketshare in the browsermarket and kill Firefox, Opera and the rest in the process. When they release a version that will work for me I'll be happy as that means I can test websites for compatibility without having to buy a Mac. However if they are trying to gain a 25% marketshare they have a very long way to go and I very much doubt they can squash Firefox out of the picture so easily.
Why is it that my spamfilter has big difficulty detecting clearly readable images with stock messages yet they can't find a good captcha. I'd say spend some more time reading your viagra offers.
I used to get quite a few clearly readable images which where split randomly in smaller images and put back together as a whole. Also these images where animated gif files which once every 10 seconds shortly blink to make the image file more complex to simply analyse.
What if you take a simple captcha, split the image into smaller images, take the actually cross browser working parts of the Acid2 test and render an image that way.
This could probably still be solved by running a recent browser, opening the page, waiting for it to be rendered, then taking a screendump and running the captcha software but doing so will at least slow people down a lot while users with a recent browser don't notice a single thing.
While reading through various articles about Captchas on the web to pick one for my site I saw one had a feature to add as text in the image 'This captcha is from www.your website.com' to solve this. According to the documentation several adult websites force users to fill in other sites there captcha and such a string could alert users of illegal activities.
Apparently your idea is already used. On the other hand, I've seen no site containing such a message so I guess it's not really a big problem just yet.
I'm guessing it would really help out if all browsers work together and take the following steps: .bank domains must always use HTTPS with a trusted certificate .bank domain the browser contacts a trusted third party about the domain for more info and displays an information bar with 'You are know connecting to bank XYZ from ABC'. Place it clearly visible, away from the site content and make sure all browsers do this roughly the same way. Possibly change the toolbar background color everywhere from grey to yellow.
.bank domain helps browsers to detect that a page is from a bank to employ all the extra security features. Displaying the identity of the bank clearly and possibly making the .bank domain expensive would stop phishers from registering a domain. In time people will come to accept these secure pages and will find it strange that a phisher doesn't use them. It won't happen overnight but it can happen.
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- When visiting a
If you combine these two steps with an information push to end users, we could finally get somewhere. Let Banks send out newsletters about security, let TV shows warn people, get the banks to buy some page sized advertisements together in all the papers to tell the story how they are really secure. If all major browsers work together on this as well as the banks and the media this could work out.
Having a seperate
Firefox warns the site doesn't require authentication. It would be very easy to get somedomain.ru to ask for authentication and accept the given username/password combo. That bypasses the security warning in Firefox.
I'm signed up to Microsoft's beta mailing list which occasionally invites me in beta's. Some time ago I got a mailing which looked suspicious to me, it linked to go.microsoft.com but redirected to liveint.com and other odd looking domains. It gave me security warnings about incorrect certificates and resulted in a website with the product name and a download button and no graphics or anything.
I reported this to Microsoft's abuse department who said this was a phishing email. A closer look showed that all domains where from Microsoft, the security certificate was recognised by IE, not FF, the layout only loads correctly with Javascript enabled and the download was digitally signed by Microsoft. Still, it broke every rule in how to detect a phishing email and looked so terrible it even fooled Microsoft's own abuse department.
When you send out mailings then take the rules of detecting phishing into account, especially if you have a warning page on your site telling users how to detect phishing emails. The average person who knows about phishing will mark this email as spam.
Google noticed the fuss everywhere and has since then changed the page. A very interesting post about this is made by Matt Cutts (Google employee) on his private blog explaining how annoying it is if somebody steals your layout. Very interesting read.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ie7-promo-page/
Personally I don't mind if Google delists websites which list tricks to fool them. I also don't want Google to give a list to these people which of the hacks on the site where detected by Google. As in, a note which hack still work in Google. People who try to trick Google into promoting there website don't get my sympathy. I understand that this website has been changed because of lacking security rather then an actually evil webmaster but how is Google to know the difference?
I'm happy to have a search engine that works and because it's algorithms are unknown also has a good ranking system with little to no spam websites in there.
If you compare Firefox to Opera I feel that Opera does a lot of things out of the box nicely while Firefox does these even better after I've spend a few hours installing extensions. Are there any plans on including extensions within Firefox so that the browser becomes great out of the box for everyone and that the non geeky people can enjoy Firefox without spending lots of time fiddling with extensions? Perhaps create a lightweight installer for the geeky people and a more complete installer with some of the best extensions already included as extension.
1: You make a buggy OS
2: You create a new OS which still is buggy but which locks out programs to fix these bugs
3: Knowing your own product you write the only program that can correctly work together with your new OS to fix your own bugs and ask a subscription fee to do so.
4:
5: profit.
Shows Le Soir
http://www.google.be/search?hl=en&q=le+soir&btnG=
Interesting, they link to Chilling Effects which has on the page
Nice of Google to clearly show that if they just use the
Gmail is my favourite email client as well. I use Google's personalised homepage with all my RSS feeds and stuff because I have Gmail on it as well. If not, I can very easily find another personalised homepage who will be more then happy to include a google adsense search block on it.
By getting me to have Google as my homepage they keep all the revenue of ad clicks and they make sure I search Google and not whatever happens to be on my start page. Just by offering Gmail as a service. Google is doing a very good job with there extra services. Plus, lets not forget, that there 20% system will very likely work like a charm on staff motivation to work at Google.
If I pay a subscription fee for a 360 I certainly wont let it stand collect dust but I will feel obliged to play it and thus buy new games regulary.
While I'm certainly going to buy a Wii, especially because of this I won't buy extra games because I pay no subscription. I will buy extra games because they are great games and probably cheap.
I'm an indie developer and I'd love to loose that subscription fee as well. While I being a student don't mind paying $100/year for this I do mind that anyone that wants to play games I make has to pay $100/year. That means my target audience is virtually non existent. Without any system to get your games out to for instance Xbox live arcade I'm not switching development tools.
True, releasing lots of terrible and a few good games to Xbox live arcade for free will mean sales will crash on the arcade and Microsoft will loose a lot of money but they will gain a lot of happy customers. I don't mind either selling games on Xbox live arcade with a part going to Microsoft. However Microsoft is trying to keep Xbox live arcade rather empty to not overwhelm the users with choice and even big companies have difficulty getting on arcade.
The idea is very nice but without a system for developers to distribute there games I don't see this as becoming very successful. True, I can get noticed by developers and MS can choose to sell the game on arcade with my consent with a share for me but both are very unlikely. I currently develop indie games for the PC and after my last big game I got 4 job offers and lots of happy users.
While I will keep a close eye on this service I won't move development tools just yet and I don't expect most other people to do so either.