Our Prime Minister is close personal friends with Rebecca Brooks. He gave a job (despite a lot of advice to stay clear, and backed him even after the original allegations came out) to Andy Coulson, former editor of NoW who was arrested last week. You say corruption in the UK isn't blatant, and maybe this is all just innocent coincidence, but I tend to think if it looks like corruption and it smells like corruption, it's probably not a huge leap to assume it's corruption.
On the Rebecca Brooks front - she's been a convenient buffer between the public's desire for justice and James Murdoch, they kept her on long enough that the public were screaming for her blood and then threw her to the wolves in the hopes that it would sate their hunger. All of this is being orchestrated so that the people at the top can walk away unharmed, but who created the culture in which these crimes were rewarded if not the people at the top? If the Murdochs aren't criminals then they're at least criminally negligent (I refuse to attribute all of this to mere incompetence - Murdoch has proved for many years he's a shrewd operator).
This is the digital equivalent of throwing eggs at a corrupt politician - people realise it's wrong, but given the context and the silliness of the "crime" in relation to the wrongdoings of the target people can't help but feel a measure of schadenfreude. That's not the same as condoning their actions.
NotW is already closed down, its servers already in police possession. This attack was against The Sun, a sister newspaper, so it's unlikely to pollute the evidence. On top of that, the police have done little to nothing about this for several years now when they had the evidence and could have acted much earlier. They have admitted as much in the official enquiry (and had a couple of senior officers resign already) - so this is not a case of the authorities taking time to do their job and we just need to be patient, it's a case of the police involved in the investigation being at best negligent and at worst corrupt.
Exactly - in the UK we've already seen this goes to the top of both the government (Cameron being close friends with Brooks et al) and the police (who at the very least failed to properly investigate a crime, even if you rule out outright suppression of facts). When the police, the media and the government all appear to be colluding, what expectation of justice can the people realistically have?
It's also definitely worth noting that the police had all of the relevant information to uncover this whole scandal at least two years ago (and they knew some of it over five years ago) and yet they did nothing. They even admitted in the official enquiry that their response was severely lacking. If the police aren't doing their job then surely that's precisely the time for vigilantism - they're meant to be protecting us from this kind of crap.
Except it's not theft, since there is no intention to permanently deny another ownership of his property - calling it theft is as ridiculous as calling it murder. It's nothing more than a calculated use of chilling terminology to demonise something. If IP infringement is as bad as the labels claim, why are they scared to call it what it is? Could it be that most people see IP infringement as acceptable? In any event there is no permanent denial of ownership - the original owner still has his copy of the music. The moral is, when data is so easily duplicated that people have been able to trivially get it for free for well over a decade, the fact that there are still plenty of people willing to pay for it at all should be seen as a godsend - what the labels should be doing is playing with the price point to find the sweet spot instead of trying to impose artificial restrictions which are just a waste of everyone's time and money.
I'm not sure about almost trivial. So many websites occupy shared servers these days, blocking dozens of legitimate sites every time there's an accusation of infringement is going to raise a lot of complaints. It will also shift a huge burden onto hosting companies, who either face losing customers or having to strictly police all their hosted sites for anything the court might deem infringing. Of course, IPv6 would solve a lot of this - maybe we'll see a sudden rise in demand for the new protocol.
I'm no security expert, but my understanding is any time one of your accepted devices attempts to connect to your network, it happily sends its MAC address over the air in plaintext and anyone with a free sniffer can grab the legitimate address, spoof it on their device and connect. Good for keeping out casual traffic, but anyone determined to get access won't see this as a barrier, I guess it depends what your aim is though (maybe you're happy to share with people who are techie enough to bypass the MAC authorisation but not with the world at large).
Over here (UK) you can't even get a modem from an ISP that isn't defaulted to have WPA2 on (if you follow their wizard to set it up - and I have to assume anyone savvy enough to set it up without the wizard probably understands the risks or at least is making a conscious choice to go sans security). I'm more surprised that AUS ISPs don't have the same policy - the cynical side of me wonders if it's linked to the fact that they have data limits and sell extra data bundles, you're less likely to care about burning through data if your neighbour is paying (and most people don't know what X amount of GB equates to in page views/music downloads/video views etc), but more likely it's a support thing maybe, that modems with security enabled cost more to provide tech support when people set them up then forget their login details or something?
And do you think Apple would be where it is if Nokia had been allowed to lock everyone out of the mobile technologies they created? I'm sorry, no matter how great a product is right now, locking out competition always ends up bad news for the customer eventually. Why stifle innovation? If Apple are so good at it they should be going toe to toe with the competition and demonstrating how great they are, not trying to lock people out of the market so they can rest on their laurels. Lack of competition in the technology sector always causes stagnation, after all, it's expensive and difficult to constantly innovate, if you can just block anyone from competing it's much easier to make money so companies always gravitate in that direction once they're big enough to buy their own laws.
Indeed - this is nothing to do with recouping R&D costs. Apple have surely already done that many times over with sales of their own products, without requiring licensing fees. This is purely about the guys at the top trying their damndest to keep out their competitors, and none of these companies seems to be any better than another in that regard - they all scream for freedom when it's their neck in the noose while happily lobbying for protectionism when the roles are reversed.
But they're not -- they're replacing them in part with coal/gas plants, according to TFA. This ought to be regarded by non-paranoid people as a step backward.
It is. All 12 non-paranoid people left in the human race consider it exactly that.
A record earthquake followed by a tsunami would junk most buildings - more people died in their offices than as a direct result of Fukushima. By the same logic the German government is applying here we should tear down office blocks because some other event could conceivably cause them to fall down (and again, more office blocks have fallen down than nuclear plants have melted down).
The people who work there are going to lose out, but the owners won't. They're already planning to start up the Sun on Sunday (or something similar), what's the betting they'll use this as an opportunity to get rid of the people they don't like and hire back the ones they do at a reduced rate? And the whole Rebekah Brooks thing is a smokescreen. They know if they'd kicked her out last week it wouldn't have been enough to sate the public and James Murdoch would have been next on the hit list. What they'll do instead is keep her dangling in front of the public while everyone bays for her blood and when it gets to fever pitch they'll cut her loose and claim they've done everything that was asked of them. Ultimately the Murdoch empire won't suffer one jot over this whole mess.
Maybe on a big tablet, but Civilization on a touchscreen phone would be painful - who wants to micromanage units and production while stabbing away with a finger and dealing with screen smudges etc? A stylus interface might make it more attractive, and I have to admit when I'm buying mobile games (for the NDS) this is the type I prefer (Might and Magic, 40k Squad Command, Civ, etc), but given the choice of a big screen and a better control interface I'll always go for a PC/console version over the mobile (case in point, this week I've played Might and Magic Clash of Heroes and Civ Rev on the 360 and Dawn of War 2 on the PC even though I own the mobile equivalent of all three).
That's making the same assumption that the people playing casual games want the same things as the people playing "gamer" games - the same assumption that all these commenters keep making. I'm not saying that's necessarily untrue, but I have to wonder why all these casual gamers don't already own home consoles if that's the case. There must be some need that's fulfilled by the mobile format, and I suspect it's "playing something when you're bored" rather than "specifically having a gaming setup at home as a full time hobby". I'm not saying there's not money to be made in the former, but you'll never outpace a dedicated home machine with a mobile device (as others have said, by the time mobiles outpace the PS3 it won't matter because hardcore gamers will be buying PS4s).
While ever it couldn't be used to secure the hardware against you, we'd never see the end of botnets - so no, TCP is not the answer if you want the squishy meatbag behind the keyboard to be able to override it. The second you give the user autonomy, no matter how secure your system is, you've lost. The malware writers will focus their energies on "socially engineering" the user into installing stuff for them, instead. Personally I'd rather live in an imperfect world where we have botnets but aren't lumbered with TCP than an imperfect world where we have TCP and we still have botnets.
That's a pretty short term view. People are always patients eventually. The thing with cancer is that it often kills (relatively) quickly compared to the raft of illnesses and disabilities that plague old age. If big pharma could keep people alive for another 30 years on average (not unfeasible in the absence of cancer) they could milk them for all kinds of other ailments. And besides all that - how much do you think people would pay for that one time cure? They could pretty much make up a price, triple it and still have people lining up to buy.
Going back to GP's point, there is a fundamental difference between comparing security blackhats vs whitehats to comparing human medical knowledge to cancer. The real problem with cancer is that we're only just beginning to understand what it is, what causes it, how it works (how all the other complex systems of the body that it interacts with work) - we're pretty much fighting an unknown. In the blackhat vs whitehat debate we're talking about groups of people with relatively similar skillsets, the only real variable is how many there are on each side and how much money they have backing them. In that scenario it's much simpler to fight botnets than it is to fight cancer, you just throw money at the problem until it's unprofitable for the blackhats - the real issue is that nobody wants to spend that kind of money on security.
Exactly this. The botnet makers don't care what some lawyer says, but you can bet your last dollar that they're already trying to make their botnets as bullet proof as possible. Why wouldn't they? It's their source of revenue and the longer a botnet can evade takedown the more money it generates. The real issue the "good guys" face is that a lot of the time they're having to be reactive instead of proactive (and this is where better OS security, better education of users and good, free, easy to use security tools can help) so of course it feels like they're always a step behind.
Hear hear. The whole point of PSN was meant to be that it's free - if developers are now introducing hidden costs to cover the online play features, that's completely missing the point. Besides which, I'd be interested to know what these running costs are - apart from match-making servers, I was under the impression most console games were peer hosted (i.e. one of the players is also the server) specifically to minimise running costs. If it really costs so much to run a server to match player A to players B, C and D, then outsource it to a third party and let them show ads or something - multiplayer has been free forever in the world of the PC and that's still profitable enough that games get made - imposing a hidden tax on every resale is nothing to do with covering costs, it's just about wanting a slice of a market that's nothing to do with them. I'd have less of a problem if the industry were forced to put a big, clear message on the front of every box explaining why it had dminished resale value so at least customers can make an informed choice.
It's also an incredibly blinkered approach that could well backfire. A lot of people only buy new games because they know they can resell them. A lot of people only buy used because they can't afford new. This scheme might have the desire effect of giving them a slice of all used games, but it might just as likely kill the used game market (because people who can't afford the new game definitely aren't going to want to pay the same price for a used game plus access) and eat into their new game sales (as people become more picky about what they buy in the knowledge there's no resale value since the used market just got gutted). It's a very risky strategy playing with a complex ecology like that, especially when it's one that generally works and this whole thing is just about greed and wanting to sell the same content more than once.
"He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone." What about this sentence implies that he "hurried off"? Inventing suspicious behaviour after the event doesn't make the initial act suspicious. As GP said, there was nothing stopping anyone asking this guy what he was up to - if they had, he'd probably have explained the game and saved a good deal of time and public money.
A few people do this at work. I've never tried but from what I gather it's a bit more high tech than that these days - instead of adding your name to a list, you can upload a message and a photograph of yourself at the cache site to the web. It seems like it's actually quite a social pursuit for a lot of people, there are geocaching conventions and planned events (a bit like a treasure hunt I guess). A bit like Facebook + the great outdoors - which I know is a combination scary enough to put a lot of/.ers off for life:)
There are currently almost 12,000 registered caches on the main geocaching website alone for the UK. If the police aren't going to take a relaxed approach then either geocaching will get banned or the police will be very busy blowing up lunchboxes...
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Our Prime Minister is close personal friends with Rebecca Brooks. He gave a job (despite a lot of advice to stay clear, and backed him even after the original allegations came out) to Andy Coulson, former editor of NoW who was arrested last week. You say corruption in the UK isn't blatant, and maybe this is all just innocent coincidence, but I tend to think if it looks like corruption and it smells like corruption, it's probably not a huge leap to assume it's corruption.
On the Rebecca Brooks front - she's been a convenient buffer between the public's desire for justice and James Murdoch, they kept her on long enough that the public were screaming for her blood and then threw her to the wolves in the hopes that it would sate their hunger. All of this is being orchestrated so that the people at the top can walk away unharmed, but who created the culture in which these crimes were rewarded if not the people at the top? If the Murdochs aren't criminals then they're at least criminally negligent (I refuse to attribute all of this to mere incompetence - Murdoch has proved for many years he's a shrewd operator).
This is the digital equivalent of throwing eggs at a corrupt politician - people realise it's wrong, but given the context and the silliness of the "crime" in relation to the wrongdoings of the target people can't help but feel a measure of schadenfreude. That's not the same as condoning their actions.
NotW is already closed down, its servers already in police possession. This attack was against The Sun, a sister newspaper, so it's unlikely to pollute the evidence. On top of that, the police have done little to nothing about this for several years now when they had the evidence and could have acted much earlier. They have admitted as much in the official enquiry (and had a couple of senior officers resign already) - so this is not a case of the authorities taking time to do their job and we just need to be patient, it's a case of the police involved in the investigation being at best negligent and at worst corrupt.
Exactly - in the UK we've already seen this goes to the top of both the government (Cameron being close friends with Brooks et al) and the police (who at the very least failed to properly investigate a crime, even if you rule out outright suppression of facts). When the police, the media and the government all appear to be colluding, what expectation of justice can the people realistically have?
It's also definitely worth noting that the police had all of the relevant information to uncover this whole scandal at least two years ago (and they knew some of it over five years ago) and yet they did nothing. They even admitted in the official enquiry that their response was severely lacking. If the police aren't doing their job then surely that's precisely the time for vigilantism - they're meant to be protecting us from this kind of crap.
Except it's not theft, since there is no intention to permanently deny another ownership of his property - calling it theft is as ridiculous as calling it murder. It's nothing more than a calculated use of chilling terminology to demonise something. If IP infringement is as bad as the labels claim, why are they scared to call it what it is? Could it be that most people see IP infringement as acceptable? In any event there is no permanent denial of ownership - the original owner still has his copy of the music. The moral is, when data is so easily duplicated that people have been able to trivially get it for free for well over a decade, the fact that there are still plenty of people willing to pay for it at all should be seen as a godsend - what the labels should be doing is playing with the price point to find the sweet spot instead of trying to impose artificial restrictions which are just a waste of everyone's time and money.
I'm not sure about almost trivial. So many websites occupy shared servers these days, blocking dozens of legitimate sites every time there's an accusation of infringement is going to raise a lot of complaints. It will also shift a huge burden onto hosting companies, who either face losing customers or having to strictly police all their hosted sites for anything the court might deem infringing. Of course, IPv6 would solve a lot of this - maybe we'll see a sudden rise in demand for the new protocol.
I'm no security expert, but my understanding is any time one of your accepted devices attempts to connect to your network, it happily sends its MAC address over the air in plaintext and anyone with a free sniffer can grab the legitimate address, spoof it on their device and connect. Good for keeping out casual traffic, but anyone determined to get access won't see this as a barrier, I guess it depends what your aim is though (maybe you're happy to share with people who are techie enough to bypass the MAC authorisation but not with the world at large).
Over here (UK) you can't even get a modem from an ISP that isn't defaulted to have WPA2 on (if you follow their wizard to set it up - and I have to assume anyone savvy enough to set it up without the wizard probably understands the risks or at least is making a conscious choice to go sans security). I'm more surprised that AUS ISPs don't have the same policy - the cynical side of me wonders if it's linked to the fact that they have data limits and sell extra data bundles, you're less likely to care about burning through data if your neighbour is paying (and most people don't know what X amount of GB equates to in page views/music downloads/video views etc), but more likely it's a support thing maybe, that modems with security enabled cost more to provide tech support when people set them up then forget their login details or something?
Depends if he's taking a plane out to the breeding grounds and how many he clubs while he's there.
And do you think Apple would be where it is if Nokia had been allowed to lock everyone out of the mobile technologies they created? I'm sorry, no matter how great a product is right now, locking out competition always ends up bad news for the customer eventually. Why stifle innovation? If Apple are so good at it they should be going toe to toe with the competition and demonstrating how great they are, not trying to lock people out of the market so they can rest on their laurels. Lack of competition in the technology sector always causes stagnation, after all, it's expensive and difficult to constantly innovate, if you can just block anyone from competing it's much easier to make money so companies always gravitate in that direction once they're big enough to buy their own laws.
Indeed - this is nothing to do with recouping R&D costs. Apple have surely already done that many times over with sales of their own products, without requiring licensing fees. This is purely about the guys at the top trying their damndest to keep out their competitors, and none of these companies seems to be any better than another in that regard - they all scream for freedom when it's their neck in the noose while happily lobbying for protectionism when the roles are reversed.
But they're not -- they're replacing them in part with coal/gas plants, according to TFA. This ought to be regarded by non-paranoid people as a step backward.
It is. All 12 non-paranoid people left in the human race consider it exactly that.
A record earthquake followed by a tsunami would junk most buildings - more people died in their offices than as a direct result of Fukushima. By the same logic the German government is applying here we should tear down office blocks because some other event could conceivably cause them to fall down (and again, more office blocks have fallen down than nuclear plants have melted down).
The people who work there are going to lose out, but the owners won't. They're already planning to start up the Sun on Sunday (or something similar), what's the betting they'll use this as an opportunity to get rid of the people they don't like and hire back the ones they do at a reduced rate? And the whole Rebekah Brooks thing is a smokescreen. They know if they'd kicked her out last week it wouldn't have been enough to sate the public and James Murdoch would have been next on the hit list. What they'll do instead is keep her dangling in front of the public while everyone bays for her blood and when it gets to fever pitch they'll cut her loose and claim they've done everything that was asked of them. Ultimately the Murdoch empire won't suffer one jot over this whole mess.
Maybe on a big tablet, but Civilization on a touchscreen phone would be painful - who wants to micromanage units and production while stabbing away with a finger and dealing with screen smudges etc? A stylus interface might make it more attractive, and I have to admit when I'm buying mobile games (for the NDS) this is the type I prefer (Might and Magic, 40k Squad Command, Civ, etc), but given the choice of a big screen and a better control interface I'll always go for a PC/console version over the mobile (case in point, this week I've played Might and Magic Clash of Heroes and Civ Rev on the 360 and Dawn of War 2 on the PC even though I own the mobile equivalent of all three).
That's making the same assumption that the people playing casual games want the same things as the people playing "gamer" games - the same assumption that all these commenters keep making. I'm not saying that's necessarily untrue, but I have to wonder why all these casual gamers don't already own home consoles if that's the case. There must be some need that's fulfilled by the mobile format, and I suspect it's "playing something when you're bored" rather than "specifically having a gaming setup at home as a full time hobby". I'm not saying there's not money to be made in the former, but you'll never outpace a dedicated home machine with a mobile device (as others have said, by the time mobiles outpace the PS3 it won't matter because hardcore gamers will be buying PS4s).
While ever it couldn't be used to secure the hardware against you, we'd never see the end of botnets - so no, TCP is not the answer if you want the squishy meatbag behind the keyboard to be able to override it. The second you give the user autonomy, no matter how secure your system is, you've lost. The malware writers will focus their energies on "socially engineering" the user into installing stuff for them, instead. Personally I'd rather live in an imperfect world where we have botnets but aren't lumbered with TCP than an imperfect world where we have TCP and we still have botnets.
That's a pretty short term view. People are always patients eventually. The thing with cancer is that it often kills (relatively) quickly compared to the raft of illnesses and disabilities that plague old age. If big pharma could keep people alive for another 30 years on average (not unfeasible in the absence of cancer) they could milk them for all kinds of other ailments. And besides all that - how much do you think people would pay for that one time cure? They could pretty much make up a price, triple it and still have people lining up to buy.
Going back to GP's point, there is a fundamental difference between comparing security blackhats vs whitehats to comparing human medical knowledge to cancer. The real problem with cancer is that we're only just beginning to understand what it is, what causes it, how it works (how all the other complex systems of the body that it interacts with work) - we're pretty much fighting an unknown. In the blackhat vs whitehat debate we're talking about groups of people with relatively similar skillsets, the only real variable is how many there are on each side and how much money they have backing them. In that scenario it's much simpler to fight botnets than it is to fight cancer, you just throw money at the problem until it's unprofitable for the blackhats - the real issue is that nobody wants to spend that kind of money on security.
Exactly this. The botnet makers don't care what some lawyer says, but you can bet your last dollar that they're already trying to make their botnets as bullet proof as possible. Why wouldn't they? It's their source of revenue and the longer a botnet can evade takedown the more money it generates. The real issue the "good guys" face is that a lot of the time they're having to be reactive instead of proactive (and this is where better OS security, better education of users and good, free, easy to use security tools can help) so of course it feels like they're always a step behind.
Hear hear. The whole point of PSN was meant to be that it's free - if developers are now introducing hidden costs to cover the online play features, that's completely missing the point. Besides which, I'd be interested to know what these running costs are - apart from match-making servers, I was under the impression most console games were peer hosted (i.e. one of the players is also the server) specifically to minimise running costs. If it really costs so much to run a server to match player A to players B, C and D, then outsource it to a third party and let them show ads or something - multiplayer has been free forever in the world of the PC and that's still profitable enough that games get made - imposing a hidden tax on every resale is nothing to do with covering costs, it's just about wanting a slice of a market that's nothing to do with them. I'd have less of a problem if the industry were forced to put a big, clear message on the front of every box explaining why it had dminished resale value so at least customers can make an informed choice.
It's also an incredibly blinkered approach that could well backfire. A lot of people only buy new games because they know they can resell them. A lot of people only buy used because they can't afford new. This scheme might have the desire effect of giving them a slice of all used games, but it might just as likely kill the used game market (because people who can't afford the new game definitely aren't going to want to pay the same price for a used game plus access) and eat into their new game sales (as people become more picky about what they buy in the knowledge there's no resale value since the used market just got gutted). It's a very risky strategy playing with a complex ecology like that, especially when it's one that generally works and this whole thing is just about greed and wanting to sell the same content more than once.
"He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone." What about this sentence implies that he "hurried off"? Inventing suspicious behaviour after the event doesn't make the initial act suspicious. As GP said, there was nothing stopping anyone asking this guy what he was up to - if they had, he'd probably have explained the game and saved a good deal of time and public money.
A few people do this at work. I've never tried but from what I gather it's a bit more high tech than that these days - instead of adding your name to a list, you can upload a message and a photograph of yourself at the cache site to the web. It seems like it's actually quite a social pursuit for a lot of people, there are geocaching conventions and planned events (a bit like a treasure hunt I guess). A bit like Facebook + the great outdoors - which I know is a combination scary enough to put a lot of /.ers off for life :)
There are currently almost 12,000 registered caches on the main geocaching website alone for the UK. If the police aren't going to take a relaxed approach then either geocaching will get banned or the police will be very busy blowing up lunchboxes...