The only thing Apple's preannounced several months ahead of time in recent years was the original iPhone. For a reason - that froze the smartphone market for almost six months until the first one shipped.
What effect do you think most product pre-announcements, including all the tablet pre-announcements you complain about, are intended to have in the existing market that the pre-announced product is intended to enter?
This is completely bizarre. Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products. And they decide to dive in with an Android tablet?
This isn't a consumer grade product. Its a business tool whose target market is businesses. Its core selling point is as a portable video conferencing device. That it is an "Android tablet" is not how it is conceived as a product, anymore than being an locked down Android tablet with a small LCD and a large e-Ink screen is how Barnes & Noble's Nook is conceived as a product (though that's really what the Nook is, and apparently its relatively trivial to jailbreak it and run general Android apps on it.)
Protecting information isn't an all-or-nothing thing.
That's true. For instance, SSL with authentication has a number of known weaknesses (some of the common algorithms have known cryptographic weaknesses, and the way CA certs are pre-installed and the ability of certain agencies, particularly governments, to get fake certs from CAs whose signing certificates are broadly distributed as trusted-by-default presents a structural, non-cryptographic weakness.) So SSL with encryption, while it provides a reasonable degree of protection for many uses, is by no means complete protection.
OTOH, without authentication, its not even meaningful protection.
I don't know about that. Never underestimate the power of the Apple marketing department
Assuming that Verizon iPhone would make a big difference would be assuming that the Apple marketing department was insufficient to draw people to Apple + AT&T from Verizon.
So, which side is underestimating Apple marketing?
I am certainly NOT an Apple fanboy, but it's silly to claim that this isn't news, *assuming* it turns out to be true.
If a Verizon iPhone actually occurs, or is announced, that will be news.
That there are reports from anonymous sources that a Verizon iPhone will happen in the near future is not news, its s pretty regular occurrence.
As an analogy:
While it would be significant news if Judgement Day occurred, it would not be significant news that there was a man with a hand-lettered sign on a sidewalk in a major city announcing that Judgement Day was imminent.
There are no serious Libertarian candidates. That's the nature of Libertarianism. No serious, thoughtful person takes that ideology seriously.
No, that's the nature of third parties in the US electoral system. There are plenty of people (leaving out the "No true Scotsman" problem in your statement) who take libertarian ideology seriously, but most of them that want to have the effect of advancing the ideology they believe in end up, at least in terms of voting behavior, as nose-holding Democrats or nose-holding Republicans.
Might it be a tad dangerous that the media can influence people that severely? Who do you blame...the media for its influence, or the people that allow themselves to be influenced by it?
Sounds like Google may be putting their ethical commitments (not filtering) ahead of their desire for profit.
I think Google is putting their long-term ability to make money under the vision that their founders (who also, IIRC, retain disproportionate voting rights) established ahead of short-term returns.
I think ethics may play a part, here, but I don't think its as simple as ethics vs. profits. I think that ethics shaped their basic business model, which shape their long-term approach to profits, which guides the decision here.
Encryption without authentication is not pointless.
Yes, it is.
Encryption stops passive third parties from listening in.
No, it doesn't, without authentication. If the other party cannot be trusted to expose the content of the communication to passive third parties, encrypting communications with them cannot be relied on to prevent passive third parties from acquiring the information transferred over the link.
I don't think this kind of connection should be represented by the lock or the colored bar or anything like that, but it's foolish to say there are no advantages over totally unencrypted traffic in these days when our ISPs sell our personal data and governments are increasingly monitoring Internet traffic.
Since either your ISP, the government, or any number of other parties could be MITMing your connections, collecting the information, and using it or selling to third parties if you encrypting without authentication, I would maintain that the problems you cite are exactly part of why encryption without authentication is useless.
So you want defense against snooping but don't care about defense against MITM attacks. Fair enough, I'm all for raising the bar, but don't be lured into thinking your communication is secure.
Even against snooping, since that's exactly what an MITM attack is.
Two reasons for SSL: verification and encryption. Sure, if the domains don't match you don't have verification, but the communication is still encrypted, and if you happen to control both ends of the exchange, that's all you need.
If you don't control the whole path between (in which case, you probably don't need encryption), the absence of verification renders encryption pointless.
If you control both ends, there is no reason not use valid certificates (both matching the domain and signed by a CA -- your own, if nothing else).
Invalid certificates of the type at issue (not matching the domain) usually mean you've bought a certificate from a commercial CA, and are using it on a domain other than the one you've bought it for, possibly because you have different domains that resolve to the same address (domains with and without "www." prefix where both use the same certificate that is intended to have the "www." prefix are the most common ones I've personally encountered on the web.)
I am not an Obama hater, but why is Obama doing this or at least getting credit for this?
Because its an administration plan.
When I first read this story I thought "Isn't the legislative branch responsible for guiding what happens with the wireless spectrum?".
The legislative branch is responsible for virtually everything that the Federal government has the power to do; often, it exercises its authority by setting broad policy goals and letting executive branch agencies (including so-called "independent" agencies) handle the details. Even where it doesn't, the Executive Branch often proposes plans to Congress.
Does Obama even have the authority to double the available broadband wireless spectrum?
Obama certainly has the power to announce a plan, that builds on a plan previously announced by the FCC.
If you RTFA, you will note that it discusses the Administration's plans to work with Congress to implement the plan it has announced.
And what about releasing things into the public domain?
US law doesn't actually support real contributions of existing copyright-protected work into the public domain. At best, statements dedicating works to the public domain would work as a bar to copyright action by the copyright owner under a promissory estoppel theory, with all the factors and limitations that normally apply to promissory estoppel.
No more free stock photography, no more public domain images from NASA, no more podcasts...
Images from NASA, insofar as they are government works, are not within the scope of copyright, and therefore don't rely on either a dedication to the public domain or a gratuitous copyright license, and so aren't affected at all.
Eliminating "free stock photography", insofar as that is people giving away their work for others to use for free, is exactly what the point of the discussion was about.
Podcasts are like webpages, which are discussed in my response to GP.
So right now if I have a website and someone visits it such that their browser downloads my intellectual property (the images, content, etc.), is there not some kind of implied license that allows them to view the content? And if so, wouldn't the above put an end to all websites?
No license is necessary to view copyright-protected content (viewing is not an exclusive right protected by copyright.)
There is copying involved in that but certainly its at least as easily defensible as within the scope of statutory fair use as other things (e.g., timeshifting) that have been found by the courts to be fair use, so even if its usually been viewed as allowed under an implicit license theory, it would probably be allowed even if implicit license wasn't an available justification.
Well that's easy enough to circumvent. Just have anyone downloading a Creative Commons licensed file do a "click here to accept" on the download page.
That's mutual acceptance, not consideration. Consideration means exchange of value. Most licenses described as Free (libre), open source (in the OSI sense), or "copyleft" licenses are gratuitous, free-as-in-beer licenses, not contracts supported by mutual consideration.
If you require a valid contract, including mutual consideration, for a legally effective copyright license (including sublicenses), "copyleft"-style licenses, while still theoretically possible, would be generally impractical and far less attractive to licensors.
Hell, even the bad lawyers would fight having that for a precedent. Harder than the good guys I'd guess - tricky contracts are where a good bit of their bread and butter comes from. If the law began placing restrictions on what sorts of contracts you could make...
The law already does do that, and has for quite some time.
There are many things that it is legal to freely give that it suddenly becomes illegal to agree to exchange in a contractual arrangement.
Not to mention that the fact that they are starting this is proof that CC, EFF etc. are a serious threat to their way of business.
No, its proof that CC, EFF, etc., are boogeyman that they think they can use to scare up money to use to lobby Congress to put into place laws which will provide support for their business.
This isn't proof that CC, EFF, etc. are actual threats to their business. The fact that an organization is used to scare people into giving money to a lobbying organization is not evidence that the organization is the source of any actual problem for the constituency of the lobbying group (or even that any actual problem exists.)
That something is useful for propaganda purposes doesn't mean that it is true.
Uh, they apparently want to lobby Congress to pass a law which will prevent 'artists' from giving away things they've created.
I don't think that will ever happen. IANAL, but I don't see how you could make it illegal to license your IP under one license while making it legal to use a different license.
Copyleft License Anti-Proliferation (CLAP) Act of 2011:
Section 1. No copyright license shall have any effect unless in the form of a contract supported by mutual consideration. Section 2. Section 3. Profit!
If they marketed an open product they should provide an open product. Installing a remote control device, even if Google never uses it with evil intent, makes it not open.
The Android operating system, which Google and its partners market, in part, for its openness for users, is not the same thing as the Android Marketplace. The latter is one of many choices of sources for applications to use on the former.
The features of the latter may not match the marketing for the former, since they are different products.
My point is that it's wrong of Google to require you to sign such contract if you wish to use the Store.
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Since you don't have to use the Android Market to get third-party apps onto an Android device, if you think its wrong that they make you agree to that to use the Android Market, the simple solution is don't use the Android Market.
Oh, wait... The Postal Service don't do it from the grace in their fairy slave hearts, they expect to get paid to deliver the goods, even on a Saturday?! Unless they pay the staff extra on a Saturday, then I can't see what USPS's problem is.
USPS's problem is that the additional day of delivery doesn't increase the money they bring in delivering goods (they don't get paid extra for it), and it costs more to spread out the delivery of the same goods over 6-days than it would over 5.
Another reason it's irrelevant: corporations don't pay taxes, they just pass them on to consumers and investors.
That both right and wrong, in exactly the same sense as saying "individuals don't pay taxes, they just pass them on to their employers" is both right and wrong.
And, for Netflix, it benefits them by slowing down the rate that they receive videos (though it means Monday's will be heavier than they were before).
Eliminating Saturday delivery (unless it causes people to drop Netflix entirely or use it less) doesn't reduce the rate at which Netflix receives videos very much (and mostly, it does so by making the service less attractive to the customers that would be the only source of the reduced frequency, which isn't exactly an upside for Netflix), and it makes the day-to-day variability greater. Generally, for a business, this would be undesirable overall.
OTOH, if the perceived alternative is 6-day delivery with less staff and higher delivery error rates, that could be significantly worse for Netflix than the 5-day delivery.
There are conditions on which they are willing to offer you the software.
If I want to have *my* device tell the app there's no internet connection even when there is, why on Earth should the app developer be able to stop me?
There's a conceptual difference between telling the systems internet layer to pretend that the internet is unavailable and denying an app permissions to use internet facilities.
I would agree that it might be a useful user convenience to have features in the OS that allow an easily-configured way of faking certain conditions to apps, including "internet connection not available". I don't, OTOH, think that this is an essential security feature.
Slashdot Mirror
What effect do you think most product pre-announcements, including all the tablet pre-announcements you complain about, are intended to have in the existing market that the pre-announced product is intended to enter?
This isn't a consumer grade product. Its a business tool whose target market is businesses. Its core selling point is as a portable video conferencing device. That it is an "Android tablet" is not how it is conceived as a product, anymore than being an locked down Android tablet with a small LCD and a large e-Ink screen is how Barnes & Noble's Nook is conceived as a product (though that's really what the Nook is, and apparently its relatively trivial to jailbreak it and run general Android apps on it.)
That's true. For instance, SSL with authentication has a number of known weaknesses (some of the common algorithms have known cryptographic weaknesses, and the way CA certs are pre-installed and the ability of certain agencies, particularly governments, to get fake certs from CAs whose signing certificates are broadly distributed as trusted-by-default presents a structural, non-cryptographic weakness.) So SSL with encryption, while it provides a reasonable degree of protection for many uses, is by no means complete protection.
OTOH, without authentication, its not even meaningful protection.
Assuming that Verizon iPhone would make a big difference would be assuming that the Apple marketing department was insufficient to draw people to Apple + AT&T from Verizon.
So, which side is underestimating Apple marketing?
If a Verizon iPhone actually occurs, or is announced, that will be news.
That there are reports from anonymous sources that a Verizon iPhone will happen in the near future is not news, its s pretty regular occurrence.
As an analogy:
While it would be significant news if Judgement Day occurred, it would not be significant news that there was a man with a hand-lettered sign on a sidewalk in a major city announcing that Judgement Day was imminent.
No, that's the nature of third parties in the US electoral system. There are plenty of people (leaving out the "No true Scotsman" problem in your statement) who take libertarian ideology seriously, but most of them that want to have the effect of advancing the ideology they believe in end up, at least in terms of voting behavior, as nose-holding Democrats or nose-holding Republicans.
Since when is blame exclusive?
I think Google is putting their long-term ability to make money under the vision that their founders (who also, IIRC, retain disproportionate voting rights) established ahead of short-term returns.
I think ethics may play a part, here, but I don't think its as simple as ethics vs. profits. I think that ethics shaped their basic business model, which shape their long-term approach to profits, which guides the decision here.
I'm pretty sure you mean "deprecated", not "depreciated".
Yes, it is.
No, it doesn't, without authentication. If the other party cannot be trusted to expose the content of the communication to passive third parties, encrypting communications with them cannot be relied on to prevent passive third parties from acquiring the information transferred over the link.
Since either your ISP, the government, or any number of other parties could be MITMing your connections, collecting the information, and using it or selling to third parties if you encrypting without authentication, I would maintain that the problems you cite are exactly part of why encryption without authentication is useless.
Even against snooping, since that's exactly what an MITM attack is.
If you don't control the whole path between (in which case, you probably don't need encryption), the absence of verification renders encryption pointless.
If you control both ends, there is no reason not use valid certificates (both matching the domain and signed by a CA -- your own, if nothing else).
Invalid certificates of the type at issue (not matching the domain) usually mean you've bought a certificate from a commercial CA, and are using it on a domain other than the one you've bought it for, possibly because you have different domains that resolve to the same address (domains with and without "www." prefix where both use the same certificate that is intended to have the "www." prefix are the most common ones I've personally encountered on the web.)
Because its an administration plan.
The legislative branch is responsible for virtually everything that the Federal government has the power to do; often, it exercises its authority by setting broad policy goals and letting executive branch agencies (including so-called "independent" agencies) handle the details. Even where it doesn't, the Executive Branch often proposes plans to Congress.
Obama certainly has the power to announce a plan, that builds on a plan previously announced by the FCC.
If you RTFA, you will note that it discusses the Administration's plans to work with Congress to implement the plan it has announced.
US law doesn't actually support real contributions of existing copyright-protected work into the public domain. At best, statements dedicating works to the public domain would work as a bar to copyright action by the copyright owner under a promissory estoppel theory, with all the factors and limitations that normally apply to promissory estoppel.
Images from NASA, insofar as they are government works, are not within the scope of copyright, and therefore don't rely on either a dedication to the public domain or a gratuitous copyright license, and so aren't affected at all.
Eliminating "free stock photography", insofar as that is people giving away their work for others to use for free, is exactly what the point of the discussion was about.
Podcasts are like webpages, which are discussed in my response to GP.
No license is necessary to view copyright-protected content (viewing is not an exclusive right protected by copyright.)
There is copying involved in that but certainly its at least as easily defensible as within the scope of statutory fair use as other things (e.g., timeshifting) that have been found by the courts to be fair use, so even if its usually been viewed as allowed under an implicit license theory, it would probably be allowed even if implicit license wasn't an available justification.
That's mutual acceptance, not consideration. Consideration means exchange of value. Most licenses described as Free (libre), open source (in the OSI sense), or "copyleft" licenses are gratuitous, free-as-in-beer licenses, not contracts supported by mutual consideration.
If you require a valid contract, including mutual consideration, for a legally effective copyright license (including sublicenses), "copyleft"-style licenses, while still theoretically possible, would be generally impractical and far less attractive to licensors.
The law already does do that, and has for quite some time.
There are many things that it is legal to freely give that it suddenly becomes illegal to agree to exchange in a contractual arrangement.
No, its proof that CC, EFF, etc., are boogeyman that they think they can use to scare up money to use to lobby Congress to put into place laws which will provide support for their business.
This isn't proof that CC, EFF, etc. are actual threats to their business. The fact that an organization is used to scare people into giving money to a lobbying organization is not evidence that the organization is the source of any actual problem for the constituency of the lobbying group (or even that any actual problem exists.)
That something is useful for propaganda purposes doesn't mean that it is true.
Copyleft License Anti-Proliferation (CLAP) Act of 2011:
Section 1. No copyright license shall have any effect unless in the form of a contract supported by mutual consideration.
Section 2.
Section 3. Profit!
The Android operating system, which Google and its partners market, in part, for its openness for users, is not the same thing as the Android Marketplace. The latter is one of many choices of sources for applications to use on the former.
The features of the latter may not match the marketing for the former, since they are different products.
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Since you don't have to use the Android Market to get third-party apps onto an Android device, if you think its wrong that they make you agree to that to use the Android Market, the simple solution is don't use the Android Market.
USPS's problem is that the additional day of delivery doesn't increase the money they bring in delivering goods (they don't get paid extra for it), and it costs more to spread out the delivery of the same goods over 6-days than it would over 5.
That both right and wrong, in exactly the same sense as saying "individuals don't pay taxes, they just pass them on to their employers" is both right and wrong.
Eliminating Saturday delivery (unless it causes people to drop Netflix entirely or use it less) doesn't reduce the rate at which Netflix receives videos very much (and mostly, it does so by making the service less attractive to the customers that would be the only source of the reduced frequency, which isn't exactly an upside for Netflix), and it makes the day-to-day variability greater. Generally, for a business, this would be undesirable overall.
OTOH, if the perceived alternative is 6-day delivery with less staff and higher delivery error rates, that could be significantly worse for Netflix than the 5-day delivery.
No, they own the software.
There are conditions on which they are willing to offer you the software.
There's a conceptual difference between telling the systems internet layer to pretend that the internet is unavailable and denying an app permissions to use internet facilities.
I would agree that it might be a useful user convenience to have features in the OS that allow an easily-configured way of faking certain conditions to apps, including "internet connection not available". I don't, OTOH, think that this is an essential security feature.