You cannot have a good OS if there isn't someone who organizes and runs things, and that includes providing updates to older phones.
So who is pushing out the updates for GNU/Linux then? You know, the OS that is widely used (at least in servers, supercomputers, and other demanding computing environments) and whose core components are maintained by dozens of different organizations? Yeah, you can have a good OS without having one entity controlling everything; there are numerous Linux distros out that there help keep packages up-to-date on their users' systems, and they each have different ideas on how to do that.
In the real world no one actually cares if the mobile OS is open source or not
They certainly do, they just do not use the terms "open source" or "free software." People do generally care about the fact that their phones will not allow them to do the things they want to do, just not enough to become experts on how to hack a phone and avoid the restriction systems.
for majority of people using a proprietary OS isn't "taking a step backward".
Probably because the majority of people are already using a locked-down cell phone that restricts what they are able to do. Go take someone's jailbroken phone and exchange it for one that is locked down and cannot be jailbroken, and I am pretty sure you will hear them complaining about it.
The solution to that is not "let Google control things instead!" The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves. People should not be forbidden from upgrading their phone's software any more than they should be forced to do so -- just like nobody is forced to upgrade the software on their PC if they do not want to (and plenty of people have reasons for not wanting to upgrade). Instead of talking about how to give Google control over everyone's Android phone, we should be talking about ways to give the users themselves control.
Android already is licensed from Google. That makes Android proprietary software too.
No, it means that it is not in the public domain. Proprietary does not mean "licensed," it means "licensed under proprietary terms." If we are going to have a free/libre cell phone OS, then we cannot promote proprietary licensing, and that includes licenses that forbid forking or that require upgrading.
Ultimately, the goal should be to open cell phones, so that your cell phone gives you as much freedom as a typical laptop can. Opening the source of Android was a step in the right direction; this is not the time to take a step backward.
Why do you think Steve Jobs pushed to hard with AT&T and demanded full control over the OS?...Money grubbing cell carriers would rather have your device locked down,
The fanboism is strong with this one.
Are you seriously trying to push the argument that the iPhone is not locked down? Really?
Indeed, and this trend was foreseen years ago, which is why anonymity systems were designed to thwart such efforts under the assumption that records might be kept for a person's entire lifetime.
More importantly, why focus on China? I have no doubt that the Chinese are doing this sort of thing, but so is every other major world power. Have people really forgotten ECHELON?
TLDR: English-speaking nations around the world have conspired to use their signals intelligence capability (ECHELON) to engage in industrial espionage and pass trade secrets on to their own corporations.
I'm concerned about the fledgling writers who operate their own blog and have no capital or experience to handle advertising on their own.
Are these writers currently receiving large amounts of income from advertising revenue, and are they dependent on the sort of advertising that ABP was designed to fight? Somehow, I was under the impression that fledgling writers were not seeing much income from their blogs and generally had to keep their day jobs; am I wrong?
So your answer to being beholden to mobile carriers is to remain beholden to ISPs? The same ISP's that run all the mobile services? How is a wireline going to make any difference if the provider is the same?
Did your ISP install a rootkit on your PC?
The answer, as always, is to 1) secure your shit.
You mean when the software is being hidden from you, and when you cannot disable it without hacking your own phone? "Secure your shit" in that context means "don't use a cell phone."
Is that you have an implicit assumption that we pick and choose which websites we will allow advertising when we use a program to block advertisements. You can't have this assumption while advocating the total blocking of advertisements nor while punishing all websites for the abuses done by a few.
My point was that website operators and advertising companies are not even trying to regain the users' trust. When websites start display simple, static advertisements that are distributed directly from their own servers, we can start talking about trusting them again. Until then, yes, there will be a total block of advertisements. Trust is an easy thing to lose but a hard thing to regain, and website operators are not even trying to regain our trust.
I think you confused the cost of creating content with the cost of distributing it. I think the cost of creation is much greater than the cost of current distribution methods, so I don't know what problem you are trying to solve here.
Perhaps we were thinking of different problems; when I think of websites struggling to "pay the bills," I think of the situation that 4chan is in: tens of thousands of dollars in debt just from bandwidth fees. You seem to be more concerned with the problem of paying writers to produce articles, the "old media" style websites like the New York Times.
If it is truly the case that the choice is between using invasive, annoying advertisements to pay writers, or hiding behind paywalls, then I would say that paywalls are the only logical way to solve the problem. I doubt that the choice is really between invasive advertisements and paywalls. For high-quality writing, simple advertisements that do not annoy people and do not get in the way of reading articles could generate a lot of income. What stops the New York Times from putting static images hosted on the New York Times' own servers on the top or sides of its article pages? What stops them from charging a lot of money for those advertisements (remember that this is a famous, widely read, and well-established source of news)? I imagine that this sort of thing would work pretty well in a P2P distribution system -- the readers would be propagating the advertisements at no cost to the original publisher. If the advertisements are not too annoying nobody will spend the effort needed to develop software to distinguish the ads from legitimate images.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is a push in the opposite direction: advertisers are becoming more aggressive, and advertisements are becoming more invasive and more annoying.
Freedom of speech does come with responsibilities. Many people seem to want to forget that these days and interpret 'freedom of speech' as 'freedom to insult, harass, annoy and otherwise bother people.'
Freedom of speech does include the freedom to insult or annoy people, and certainly the freedom to bother them. Advertisers routinely annoy and bother people, yet their activities are covered by freedom of speech. I have been insulted many times in my life, both personally and by people who are insulting my ethnic group, but I cannot go to a judge and demand that those people be deprived of their rights.
You might argue that harassment is a threat to a person, and people are entitled to defend themselves or be defended against threats to their health or safety. Yet even then, why does a person's speech need to be restrained, as opposed to simply forbidding them from coming to close to the target of their threats?
First thing this new year, I'm migrating my phone over to cyanogenmod
Or, you could use your phone less, and use other devices more. The more dependent we become on our cell phones, the more power the cell phone companies will have over us.
If it was "total blocked" by default a very small percentage of the users (if any) will feel compelled to allow white-listed advertisements
That should tell you something about users' feelings on advertisements and why they are using ABP in the first place. How can whitelisting advertisements even begin to make sense if you begin with the premise that nobody will deliberately enable the whitelist?
people who work on those free websites depend on the advertisement revenue to stay free
Perhaps they should have refused to do business with advertisers that fail to respect their users? There is a reason that people block ads on the web, and it is the same reason they use spam filters for email: advertisers are a nuisance and they passed the threshold of tolerance long ago.
indiscriminately blocking all advertisement will cause the good quality websites to either shutdown or go paywall
Oh well, they should not have shot themselves in the foot with advertisements. If the ads were just banner ads, if the ads did not try to cover the text of the pages themselves, if the ads did not use flash and burn through CPU cycles, and if the ads were not used as a vehicle for privacy violations, we would not be in this situation. People who allowed these advertisements on their websites have no business crying foul now, and if they want to use a paywall then fine -- if they are important enough for me to spend money on, I will (not that any such websites come to mind).
This would cause a larger number of low quality web sites to show up on google searches, since they don't put much effort in the content anyway and they make their revenue by gaming the SOE to lure people who don't block the advertisements.
Then eventually everyone will block advertisements, and we will start seeing software that tries to thwart SEO (e.g. by filtering the results returned by Google).
These web sites can not exist as a charity, so we must decide which is the best way to support them.
How about the websites start standing with their users against abusive advertisers, and not doing business with advertisers who violate privacy rights or who use annoying techniques? If these websites do not care about their users, why should their users care about them?
Or, if the web cannot be paid for without annoying, invasive advertisements, then it is time to move back to a more distributed system. We had some cool ideas going with peer-to-peer networking a few years ago, perhaps it is time to revisit those ideas -- distribute the cost of accessing information among the users, who can all contribute some of their bandwidth and CPU time. Sure, there will still be problems, but at least smaller publications will not have to worry about being unable to pay for distribution.
I would say that "total block" should be the default, and "allow the ads that the ABP developers think you should see" should be opt-in. Again, this is an extension that is supposed to block ads, not an extension that acts as a sieve for ads that the ABP developers happen to like.
Can you name a period of time where people have been happy with their government? In a democracy, politics is about compromise, which means that nobody really gets what they want, and in non-democratic systems of government there is a large group of people who never get what they want. It is fairly rare for people to be satisfied with their government.
The Volusia county error looks more like a botched attack on a voting machine than an actual error -- especially in light of the fact that there was a real attack on those machines that involved making one candidate's vote total negative prior to the election. Also, show me in my post where I said anything was "OK" -- my point was that the United States has some serious issues with its own voting process, not that somehow the Russians are justified in what they do.
Nor does everyone think that having police forces that tote automatic weapons, drive tactical vehicles, engage in vast signals intelligence operations, and recycle seized assets into their own budgets would be a good thing for society in general. Yet that is exactly what the war on drugs has resulted in, and now the United States has more prisoners than any country in the world. We have even granted the executive branch of government the power to make drug laws, and then to enforce those laws.
Sure, drug abuse is a problem, but the war on drugs is not leading us to any sort of reasonable solution to that problem. The irony in your statement is that two of the drugs you listed can be prescribed by doctors -- cocaine and methamphetamine can be prescribed by doctors, and methamphetamine is sometimes prescribed to children. There is scant evidence that ending the war on drugs would increase the number of drug abusers in America.
I guess what this really boils down to is this: do you prefer democracy and democratic solutions to problems, or tyranny and tyrannical solutions?
Remember back in the day when you could trust ads to be unobtrusive? Then the Internet came along and suddenly advertisers decided that they had free reign to ruin websites and invade our privacy. At this point, I do not trust any advertisers to respectfully show ads; they all either track everything I do or try to get in the way of what I am trying to read, or both. When advertisers regain my trust, I will stop blocking their ads.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot have a good OS if there isn't someone who organizes and runs things, and that includes providing updates to older phones.
So who is pushing out the updates for GNU/Linux then? You know, the OS that is widely used (at least in servers, supercomputers, and other demanding computing environments) and whose core components are maintained by dozens of different organizations? Yeah, you can have a good OS without having one entity controlling everything; there are numerous Linux distros out that there help keep packages up-to-date on their users' systems, and they each have different ideas on how to do that.
In the real world no one actually cares if the mobile OS is open source or not
They certainly do, they just do not use the terms "open source" or "free software." People do generally care about the fact that their phones will not allow them to do the things they want to do, just not enough to become experts on how to hack a phone and avoid the restriction systems.
for majority of people using a proprietary OS isn't "taking a step backward".
Probably because the majority of people are already using a locked-down cell phone that restricts what they are able to do. Go take someone's jailbroken phone and exchange it for one that is locked down and cannot be jailbroken, and I am pretty sure you will hear them complaining about it.
The solution to that is not "let Google control things instead!" The solution is to start freeing cell phones from restrictions, so that people can upgrade the OS themselves. People should not be forbidden from upgrading their phone's software any more than they should be forced to do so -- just like nobody is forced to upgrade the software on their PC if they do not want to (and plenty of people have reasons for not wanting to upgrade). Instead of talking about how to give Google control over everyone's Android phone, we should be talking about ways to give the users themselves control.
Android already is licensed from Google. That makes Android proprietary software too.
No, it means that it is not in the public domain. Proprietary does not mean "licensed," it means "licensed under proprietary terms." If we are going to have a free/libre cell phone OS, then we cannot promote proprietary licensing, and that includes licenses that forbid forking or that require upgrading.
Ultimately, the goal should be to open cell phones, so that your cell phone gives you as much freedom as a typical laptop can. Opening the source of Android was a step in the right direction; this is not the time to take a step backward.
Why do you think Steve Jobs pushed to hard with AT&T and demanded full control over the OS?...Money grubbing cell carriers would rather have your device locked down,
The fanboism is strong with this one.
Are you seriously trying to push the argument that the iPhone is not locked down? Really?
Google needs to set certain rules regarding using Android on mobiles, and that includes updating your phones
Yeah, except then Android would just be another proprietary cell phone OS.
You can even leave the source open, just demand that companies respect those rules if they want to use the trademark Android.
Then they won't use the trademark. So what?
Indeed, and this trend was foreseen years ago, which is why anonymity systems were designed to thwart such efforts under the assumption that records might be kept for a person's entire lifetime.
If you do not know what SOPA is at this point, then you must not read /. very often. It is kind of like not knowing what the DMCA is...
CIA spying on Toyota to give trade secrets to Ford? I'd call that unlikely
Then you should take some time to read about ECHELON being used for industrial espionage (see section on industrial espionage):
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf
More importantly, why focus on China? I have no doubt that the Chinese are doing this sort of thing, but so is every other major world power. Have people really forgotten ECHELON?
Good thing the money was "lost" the same way that the RIAA "lost" money from copyright infringement.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
TLDR: English-speaking nations around the world have conspired to use their signals intelligence capability (ECHELON) to engage in industrial espionage and pass trade secrets on to their own corporations.
It is not just the Chinese, most major world powers are engaging in corporate espionage.
I'm concerned about the fledgling writers who operate their own blog and have no capital or experience to handle advertising on their own.
Are these writers currently receiving large amounts of income from advertising revenue, and are they dependent on the sort of advertising that ABP was designed to fight? Somehow, I was under the impression that fledgling writers were not seeing much income from their blogs and generally had to keep their day jobs; am I wrong?
You don't seem to know a lot about history. In WWI, people volunteered to give their life for their government
Right now we have an all-volunteer army -- so I guess people are happy with the US government in 2011?
So your answer to being beholden to mobile carriers is to remain beholden to ISPs? The same ISP's that run all the mobile services? How is a wireline going to make any difference if the provider is the same?
Did your ISP install a rootkit on your PC?
The answer, as always, is to 1) secure your shit.
You mean when the software is being hidden from you, and when you cannot disable it without hacking your own phone? "Secure your shit" in that context means "don't use a cell phone."
Is that you have an implicit assumption that we pick and choose which websites we will allow advertising when we use a program to block advertisements. You can't have this assumption while advocating the total blocking of advertisements nor while punishing all websites for the abuses done by a few.
My point was that website operators and advertising companies are not even trying to regain the users' trust. When websites start display simple, static advertisements that are distributed directly from their own servers, we can start talking about trusting them again. Until then, yes, there will be a total block of advertisements. Trust is an easy thing to lose but a hard thing to regain, and website operators are not even trying to regain our trust.
I think you confused the cost of creating content with the cost of distributing it. I think the cost of creation is much greater than the cost of current distribution methods, so I don't know what problem you are trying to solve here.
Perhaps we were thinking of different problems; when I think of websites struggling to "pay the bills," I think of the situation that 4chan is in: tens of thousands of dollars in debt just from bandwidth fees. You seem to be more concerned with the problem of paying writers to produce articles, the "old media" style websites like the New York Times.
If it is truly the case that the choice is between using invasive, annoying advertisements to pay writers, or hiding behind paywalls, then I would say that paywalls are the only logical way to solve the problem. I doubt that the choice is really between invasive advertisements and paywalls. For high-quality writing, simple advertisements that do not annoy people and do not get in the way of reading articles could generate a lot of income. What stops the New York Times from putting static images hosted on the New York Times' own servers on the top or sides of its article pages? What stops them from charging a lot of money for those advertisements (remember that this is a famous, widely read, and well-established source of news)? I imagine that this sort of thing would work pretty well in a P2P distribution system -- the readers would be propagating the advertisements at no cost to the original publisher. If the advertisements are not too annoying nobody will spend the effort needed to develop software to distinguish the ads from legitimate images.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is a push in the opposite direction: advertisers are becoming more aggressive, and advertisements are becoming more invasive and more annoying.
Freedom of speech does come with responsibilities. Many people seem to want to forget that these days and interpret 'freedom of speech' as 'freedom to insult, harass, annoy and otherwise bother people.'
Freedom of speech does include the freedom to insult or annoy people, and certainly the freedom to bother them. Advertisers routinely annoy and bother people, yet their activities are covered by freedom of speech. I have been insulted many times in my life, both personally and by people who are insulting my ethnic group, but I cannot go to a judge and demand that those people be deprived of their rights.
You might argue that harassment is a threat to a person, and people are entitled to defend themselves or be defended against threats to their health or safety. Yet even then, why does a person's speech need to be restrained, as opposed to simply forbidding them from coming to close to the target of their threats?
First thing this new year, I'm migrating my phone over to cyanogenmod
Or, you could use your phone less, and use other devices more. The more dependent we become on our cell phones, the more power the cell phone companies will have over us.
If it was "total blocked" by default a very small percentage of the users (if any) will feel compelled to allow white-listed advertisements
That should tell you something about users' feelings on advertisements and why they are using ABP in the first place. How can whitelisting advertisements even begin to make sense if you begin with the premise that nobody will deliberately enable the whitelist?
people who work on those free websites depend on the advertisement revenue to stay free
Perhaps they should have refused to do business with advertisers that fail to respect their users? There is a reason that people block ads on the web, and it is the same reason they use spam filters for email: advertisers are a nuisance and they passed the threshold of tolerance long ago.
indiscriminately blocking all advertisement will cause the good quality websites to either shutdown or go paywall
Oh well, they should not have shot themselves in the foot with advertisements. If the ads were just banner ads, if the ads did not try to cover the text of the pages themselves, if the ads did not use flash and burn through CPU cycles, and if the ads were not used as a vehicle for privacy violations, we would not be in this situation. People who allowed these advertisements on their websites have no business crying foul now, and if they want to use a paywall then fine -- if they are important enough for me to spend money on, I will (not that any such websites come to mind).
This would cause a larger number of low quality web sites to show up on google searches, since they don't put much effort in the content anyway and they make their revenue by gaming the SOE to lure people who don't block the advertisements.
Then eventually everyone will block advertisements, and we will start seeing software that tries to thwart SEO (e.g. by filtering the results returned by Google).
These web sites can not exist as a charity, so we must decide which is the best way to support them.
How about the websites start standing with their users against abusive advertisers, and not doing business with advertisers who violate privacy rights or who use annoying techniques? If these websites do not care about their users, why should their users care about them?
Or, if the web cannot be paid for without annoying, invasive advertisements, then it is time to move back to a more distributed system. We had some cool ideas going with peer-to-peer networking a few years ago, perhaps it is time to revisit those ideas -- distribute the cost of accessing information among the users, who can all contribute some of their bandwidth and CPU time. Sure, there will still be problems, but at least smaller publications will not have to worry about being unable to pay for distribution.
I would say that "total block" should be the default, and "allow the ads that the ABP developers think you should see" should be opt-in. Again, this is an extension that is supposed to block ads, not an extension that acts as a sieve for ads that the ABP developers happen to like.
Can you name a period of time where people have been happy with their government? In a democracy, politics is about compromise, which means that nobody really gets what they want, and in non-democratic systems of government there is a large group of people who never get what they want. It is fairly rare for people to be satisfied with their government.
The Volusia county error looks more like a botched attack on a voting machine than an actual error -- especially in light of the fact that there was a real attack on those machines that involved making one candidate's vote total negative prior to the election. Also, show me in my post where I said anything was "OK" -- my point was that the United States has some serious issues with its own voting process, not that somehow the Russians are justified in what they do.
Nor does everyone think that having police forces that tote automatic weapons, drive tactical vehicles, engage in vast signals intelligence operations, and recycle seized assets into their own budgets would be a good thing for society in general. Yet that is exactly what the war on drugs has resulted in, and now the United States has more prisoners than any country in the world. We have even granted the executive branch of government the power to make drug laws, and then to enforce those laws.
Sure, drug abuse is a problem, but the war on drugs is not leading us to any sort of reasonable solution to that problem. The irony in your statement is that two of the drugs you listed can be prescribed by doctors -- cocaine and methamphetamine can be prescribed by doctors, and methamphetamine is sometimes prescribed to children. There is scant evidence that ending the war on drugs would increase the number of drug abusers in America.
I guess what this really boils down to is this: do you prefer democracy and democratic solutions to problems, or tyranny and tyrannical solutions?
Remember back in the day when you could trust ads to be unobtrusive? Then the Internet came along and suddenly advertisers decided that they had free reign to ruin websites and invade our privacy. At this point, I do not trust any advertisers to respectfully show ads; they all either track everything I do or try to get in the way of what I am trying to read, or both. When advertisers regain my trust, I will stop blocking their ads.