A little from column A, a little from column B? Media companies love reality TV, it writes itself and costs peanuts to produce, but if there was no audience for it in the first place it would quickly go away. If people were starving for something more intellectually stimulating on TV, someone would produce it and corner the market, I can only assume the current mix roughly equates to what people want. Besides, TV has always been passive "dumb" entertainment, if people want more engagement in their homes there are games and the internet to fill that niche, not everyone wants to slob in front of the TV after a hard day and feel they're back in school (although there's a large demographic here who do tend towards more educational shows and personally I can't tolerate reality TV).
Besides, I doubt the intelligence of the populace is China's concern here. If there's one thing a totalitarian state doesn't want it's a well educated populace, they tend to be much harder to control, a dumbed down populace is much more likely to do what you tell them and not get involved in pesky protests. The concern here is either people getting ideas "above their station" and wanting more than their current lot, or a posturing exercise by the state to show who is boss.
You can't necessarily believe even "undercover" video shot in a state with such a police state regime. That could still be faked grief for the benefit of snooping neighbours or secret police. And does anyone really believe China is still on board with communism? Authoritarian I get, but the two don't necessarily go hand in hand - they're very market driven these days, they may pay lip service to communism but they're actually about as communist as we are democratic (i.e. broadly so but happy to ignore the fundamental principles whenever it suits them).
I'm guessing this sort of port will only be found on a smart TV - so, really, where's the market for a device designed to "convert ordinary TVs into smart TVs" that requires that port?
I guess it's possible that someone could come up with a converter for MHDL to HDMI. Perhaps they already exist and they just didn't include it in the Roku for price considerations. Even so it's going to be an increasingly shrinking market of people who already have a TV that's good enough quality they don't want to replace it, not so good that it doesn't already have any of these features, and don't mind spending $100 for the Roku plus whatever the converter might cost to keep an old set functional.
It's already next to impossible to buy a reasonably good TV now that doesn't have some kind of smart streaming facility - I know, having just had to go through the pain of replacing my old set. Mind you, I also got a "smart" BluRay player thrown in for free so I assume these are also available cheap enough to effectively price the Roku out of the market before it's even started.
Are these incredible lengths to go to? Yes. Do criminals go to them? Sometimes. The point is, better safe than sorry. I refuse to give out any information about my cards or accounts to a phone call out of the blue. If someone is calling from my bank's fraud department, they won't mind if I suggest I terminate the call and dial the bank back directly, just to be sure, that doesn't mean it wouldn't work on some people. I still don't think it's a major issue given you'd need to get the details from the phone in the first place, but if it's a simple loophole to close, why not just close it to be safe?
No, they're talking about obtaining the details from the cardholder, not the institution. In other words someone calls you saying they're from your credit card company, they read back to you your name, the last four digits of your card and, say, the amount and date of a recent transaction (all info stored in plain text) to prove who they are, and to confirm they are speaking to the right person they ask you to confirm just your credit card number and CVV. Now the average slashdotter is probably savvy enough to question this, but a lot of people would fall for a scam when the person perpetrating it appeared so well informed.
Of course, they still need to be able to access the data from the device in the first place (and things like MitM attacks didn't work so they'd either need to get hold of your phone or get malware onto the phone to retrieve that information) so it's not a "run into the streets screaming in panic" issue, but it is an issue. Full disclaimer: my shiny new Galaxy Nexus arrived Wednesday (although Google Wallet isn't available in the UK yet) so I say this from a place of some mild concern, although I'd be surprised if this wasn't fixed pretty quickly.
Unless your site has a lot of traffic, it's still unlikely to cover the expense of your lost time in fighting the decision. For the hobbyist that would be bad news.
I'm all for fair use and indeed, I have often commented on the horribly broken copyright laws and the abuse of them by big media. Youtube is not publicly owned, though. It's Google's decision what they allow or don't allow. If they pulled the report because they only care about the quiet life, that's their choice (it's a bad choice in my view and it diminishes Google in my eyes, especially given their arguments over fair use and their book scanning project, but that doesn't automatically make it wrong). On the other hand if the labels have some power to force Google to pull the video without consulting the publisher when it's clearly fair use (seriously, who listens to the news so that they can get down to random snippets of music?), then that's a wholly different matter. I'd like to hear some more of the facts before I decide what to think about this.
Not to mention you need a more sensible system for adding content to multiple boxes. I have three boxen (one in the living room, one in the bedroom and one I leave at my parents for long holiday visits). Carrying disks from one box to another is already a hassle, having to download the same game to three independent devices (two of which are on the same network and could easily share content) just seems like I'm being punished for buying their stuff. I've already done this a few times with "games on demand" and it's a pain every time - especially on the box at my parents since they only use the internet for light browsing and it's sloooow.
If all these companies played nicely I could have one device for playing DVD/BDR shared over the network that all the others could hook into. I wouldn't need to buy the same bit of kit whenever I bought a new associated bit of kit, and if it ever failed I'd be able to swap out a single component instead of sending the entire thing off for repair. That's the kind of utopia we could have but likely never will, because everyone's too busy trying to focus on being everything to the living room instead of doing one or two things really well.
Not to mention NOISY AS HELL. My old 360 sounds like a 747 on takeoff (admittedly that seems like the fan and the DVD drive trying to outdo each other). The new slim is a massive improvement but I still find I have to install the games to the hard drive to play as the DVD drive is the loudest component.
Not to mention big infrastructure projects come along once every few decades, so a lot of the more affluent early adopter Western countries are now seeing large parts of their backbone running over antiquated tech while the countries who have only recently started laying down cable are playing leap frog.
That's the whole point of this story - that by their own rules these IPs show they are downloading when we all know it's not that clear cut. As someone who doesn't download from these sites but who relies on net access for a living, it's a real concern to me that big media can basically extort money from people with nothing more than a number on a piece of paper and a threat of court hassle, but it's even more of a worry when we see ridiculous "three strikes" laws starting to appear which can ruin a career with what amounts to zero real evidence.
Well then at the very least this highlights that the studios need to clean their own house before they start witch hunts elsewhere. Why they wouldn't have blocked such sites/software is baffling - it's clearly a huge PR loss in the making when they're desperately trying to win the PR war in the eyes of a largely indifferent public. There are also all kinds of laws about agency and when one is acting as an agent of one's company which it's easy to fall foul of.
Yes, but ownership of the car alone is not sufficient evidence for a conviction, only to point the finger of suspicion. The police then go on to look for more evidence to build a case in court. With these civil cases often the IP is the only "evidence" that's being offered, and it's a lot harder to steal someone's car, use it to commit a murder and put it back without the owner realising than it is to let someone else use your computer, or to spoof an IP/piggyback off someone else's network, or for the logging software at the ISP to screw up.
Because this is about showing how shady the labels are, not about retaliating in kind. We all know it's trivial to find out who these people are, there's no need for TF to stoop to their level (you know the first thing that would happen if they did is some script kiddies would go for a DoS attack and TF would take flak over it or be accused of implicitly instigating it).
You're right that interpreting law should be easy, but it's not. If it was, we wouldn't need to spend several years in law school just to learn the very tip of the iceberg. There are thousands upon thousands of laws on the books, new laws overrule old laws without the old laws specifically being removed, sometimes two laws might appear to be in conflict, precedent comes down from other courts, judges have to often do their best to interpret how a vague law covers a specific situation, or how a law created in past years applies where new technology is involved. Generally criminal law is more black and white, but there are numerous shades of grey in every other area. No, I think the jury of your peers deciding your guilt and the trained experts deciding how that means the law applies to you given your specific set of circumstances is really the only workable solution (other than throwing out 99% of the laws on the books and mandatory law classes during school and refresher courses for the rest of your adult life).
If I said I was going to kill you for that comment you'd (hopefully) know that I was either joking or just blowing off steam and not serious. If I said the same thing to someone I already acknowledged had mental health issues or who otherwise already had reason to feel threatened by me (as evidenced by a restraining order) that's a whole different story. Generally the law on what constitutes assault takes into account the reaction of the reasonable man, but it also allows for special knowledge that you might have that would skew that reaction. If you know someone is going to react badly to a threat and you make the threat, you can't, in good conscience, rely on the defence that you weren't serious. You knew or ought to have known the reaction you'd get, you can't really complain about the consequences of that.
If you can't see the potential for physical consequences of mentally harassing someone who has mental health issues then I'm afraid you're not looking hard enough.
There's never been a general rule that all speech should be free. There has always been a rider that says free speech that causes harm to others is not blanket protected (i.e. the typical shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre example). The law has long established precedents on how to handle this within the bounds of the "reasonable man", there is nothing new here and no extension of governmental influence, it's merely that it's being applied to online harrasment.
Likely because the pay and infrastructure are better. It's difficult to relocate to a country where you don't know the language or the local customs. If there's a big military presence there, you have a handy home away from home environment built in (albeit with bullet dodging thrown into the mix); there will either be plenty of other contractors from your country there, or there will be support in the form of translators, etc that you wouldn't get elsewhere (not unless elsewhere was really serious about hiring in foreign contractors).
All reports I've seen suggest that there is a slightly higher percentage of users still on IE in the USA than in most of the rest of the world. If anything, that would seem to suggest the IE figures would be slightly skewed upwards since they're more likely to be seen by someone in a country where the answers are common knowledge. Of course, it's possible they tailor the questions to specific regions or only count US entries.
Slashdot Mirror
A little from column A, a little from column B? Media companies love reality TV, it writes itself and costs peanuts to produce, but if there was no audience for it in the first place it would quickly go away. If people were starving for something more intellectually stimulating on TV, someone would produce it and corner the market, I can only assume the current mix roughly equates to what people want. Besides, TV has always been passive "dumb" entertainment, if people want more engagement in their homes there are games and the internet to fill that niche, not everyone wants to slob in front of the TV after a hard day and feel they're back in school (although there's a large demographic here who do tend towards more educational shows and personally I can't tolerate reality TV).
That's amazing. It's like they lifted the story directly from the Onion. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Besides, I doubt the intelligence of the populace is China's concern here. If there's one thing a totalitarian state doesn't want it's a well educated populace, they tend to be much harder to control, a dumbed down populace is much more likely to do what you tell them and not get involved in pesky protests. The concern here is either people getting ideas "above their station" and wanting more than their current lot, or a posturing exercise by the state to show who is boss.
You can't necessarily believe even "undercover" video shot in a state with such a police state regime. That could still be faked grief for the benefit of snooping neighbours or secret police. And does anyone really believe China is still on board with communism? Authoritarian I get, but the two don't necessarily go hand in hand - they're very market driven these days, they may pay lip service to communism but they're actually about as communist as we are democratic (i.e. broadly so but happy to ignore the fundamental principles whenever it suits them).
I'm guessing this sort of port will only be found on a smart TV - so, really, where's the market for a device designed to "convert ordinary TVs into smart TVs" that requires that port?
I guess it's possible that someone could come up with a converter for MHDL to HDMI. Perhaps they already exist and they just didn't include it in the Roku for price considerations. Even so it's going to be an increasingly shrinking market of people who already have a TV that's good enough quality they don't want to replace it, not so good that it doesn't already have any of these features, and don't mind spending $100 for the Roku plus whatever the converter might cost to keep an old set functional.
It's already next to impossible to buy a reasonably good TV now that doesn't have some kind of smart streaming facility - I know, having just had to go through the pain of replacing my old set. Mind you, I also got a "smart" BluRay player thrown in for free so I assume these are also available cheap enough to effectively price the Roku out of the market before it's even started.
Are these incredible lengths to go to? Yes. Do criminals go to them? Sometimes. The point is, better safe than sorry. I refuse to give out any information about my cards or accounts to a phone call out of the blue. If someone is calling from my bank's fraud department, they won't mind if I suggest I terminate the call and dial the bank back directly, just to be sure, that doesn't mean it wouldn't work on some people. I still don't think it's a major issue given you'd need to get the details from the phone in the first place, but if it's a simple loophole to close, why not just close it to be safe?
No, they're talking about obtaining the details from the cardholder, not the institution. In other words someone calls you saying they're from your credit card company, they read back to you your name, the last four digits of your card and, say, the amount and date of a recent transaction (all info stored in plain text) to prove who they are, and to confirm they are speaking to the right person they ask you to confirm just your credit card number and CVV. Now the average slashdotter is probably savvy enough to question this, but a lot of people would fall for a scam when the person perpetrating it appeared so well informed.
Of course, they still need to be able to access the data from the device in the first place (and things like MitM attacks didn't work so they'd either need to get hold of your phone or get malware onto the phone to retrieve that information) so it's not a "run into the streets screaming in panic" issue, but it is an issue. Full disclaimer: my shiny new Galaxy Nexus arrived Wednesday (although Google Wallet isn't available in the UK yet) so I say this from a place of some mild concern, although I'd be surprised if this wasn't fixed pretty quickly.
Unless your site has a lot of traffic, it's still unlikely to cover the expense of your lost time in fighting the decision. For the hobbyist that would be bad news.
I'm all for fair use and indeed, I have often commented on the horribly broken copyright laws and the abuse of them by big media. Youtube is not publicly owned, though. It's Google's decision what they allow or don't allow. If they pulled the report because they only care about the quiet life, that's their choice (it's a bad choice in my view and it diminishes Google in my eyes, especially given their arguments over fair use and their book scanning project, but that doesn't automatically make it wrong). On the other hand if the labels have some power to force Google to pull the video without consulting the publisher when it's clearly fair use (seriously, who listens to the news so that they can get down to random snippets of music?), then that's a wholly different matter. I'd like to hear some more of the facts before I decide what to think about this.
Not to mention you need a more sensible system for adding content to multiple boxes. I have three boxen (one in the living room, one in the bedroom and one I leave at my parents for long holiday visits). Carrying disks from one box to another is already a hassle, having to download the same game to three independent devices (two of which are on the same network and could easily share content) just seems like I'm being punished for buying their stuff. I've already done this a few times with "games on demand" and it's a pain every time - especially on the box at my parents since they only use the internet for light browsing and it's sloooow.
If all these companies played nicely I could have one device for playing DVD/BDR shared over the network that all the others could hook into. I wouldn't need to buy the same bit of kit whenever I bought a new associated bit of kit, and if it ever failed I'd be able to swap out a single component instead of sending the entire thing off for repair. That's the kind of utopia we could have but likely never will, because everyone's too busy trying to focus on being everything to the living room instead of doing one or two things really well.
Oh proprietary. I thought he was aiming for priapistic - some people do get overly excited by these things, after all.
Not to mention NOISY AS HELL. My old 360 sounds like a 747 on takeoff (admittedly that seems like the fan and the DVD drive trying to outdo each other). The new slim is a massive improvement but I still find I have to install the games to the hard drive to play as the DVD drive is the loudest component.
Not to mention big infrastructure projects come along once every few decades, so a lot of the more affluent early adopter Western countries are now seeing large parts of their backbone running over antiquated tech while the countries who have only recently started laying down cable are playing leap frog.
That's the whole point of this story - that by their own rules these IPs show they are downloading when we all know it's not that clear cut. As someone who doesn't download from these sites but who relies on net access for a living, it's a real concern to me that big media can basically extort money from people with nothing more than a number on a piece of paper and a threat of court hassle, but it's even more of a worry when we see ridiculous "three strikes" laws starting to appear which can ruin a career with what amounts to zero real evidence.
Well then at the very least this highlights that the studios need to clean their own house before they start witch hunts elsewhere. Why they wouldn't have blocked such sites/software is baffling - it's clearly a huge PR loss in the making when they're desperately trying to win the PR war in the eyes of a largely indifferent public. There are also all kinds of laws about agency and when one is acting as an agent of one's company which it's easy to fall foul of.
Yes, but ownership of the car alone is not sufficient evidence for a conviction, only to point the finger of suspicion. The police then go on to look for more evidence to build a case in court. With these civil cases often the IP is the only "evidence" that's being offered, and it's a lot harder to steal someone's car, use it to commit a murder and put it back without the owner realising than it is to let someone else use your computer, or to spoof an IP/piggyback off someone else's network, or for the logging software at the ISP to screw up.
Because this is about showing how shady the labels are, not about retaliating in kind. We all know it's trivial to find out who these people are, there's no need for TF to stoop to their level (you know the first thing that would happen if they did is some script kiddies would go for a DoS attack and TF would take flak over it or be accused of implicitly instigating it).
You're right that interpreting law should be easy, but it's not. If it was, we wouldn't need to spend several years in law school just to learn the very tip of the iceberg. There are thousands upon thousands of laws on the books, new laws overrule old laws without the old laws specifically being removed, sometimes two laws might appear to be in conflict, precedent comes down from other courts, judges have to often do their best to interpret how a vague law covers a specific situation, or how a law created in past years applies where new technology is involved. Generally criminal law is more black and white, but there are numerous shades of grey in every other area. No, I think the jury of your peers deciding your guilt and the trained experts deciding how that means the law applies to you given your specific set of circumstances is really the only workable solution (other than throwing out 99% of the laws on the books and mandatory law classes during school and refresher courses for the rest of your adult life).
If I said I was going to kill you for that comment you'd (hopefully) know that I was either joking or just blowing off steam and not serious. If I said the same thing to someone I already acknowledged had mental health issues or who otherwise already had reason to feel threatened by me (as evidenced by a restraining order) that's a whole different story. Generally the law on what constitutes assault takes into account the reaction of the reasonable man, but it also allows for special knowledge that you might have that would skew that reaction. If you know someone is going to react badly to a threat and you make the threat, you can't, in good conscience, rely on the defence that you weren't serious. You knew or ought to have known the reaction you'd get, you can't really complain about the consequences of that.
If you can't see the potential for physical consequences of mentally harassing someone who has mental health issues then I'm afraid you're not looking hard enough.
There's never been a general rule that all speech should be free. There has always been a rider that says free speech that causes harm to others is not blanket protected (i.e. the typical shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre example). The law has long established precedents on how to handle this within the bounds of the "reasonable man", there is nothing new here and no extension of governmental influence, it's merely that it's being applied to online harrasment.
Weirdly the dev team never get any bug reports about the bug reporting tool not working.
Likely because the pay and infrastructure are better. It's difficult to relocate to a country where you don't know the language or the local customs. If there's a big military presence there, you have a handy home away from home environment built in (albeit with bullet dodging thrown into the mix); there will either be plenty of other contractors from your country there, or there will be support in the form of translators, etc that you wouldn't get elsewhere (not unless elsewhere was really serious about hiring in foreign contractors).
All reports I've seen suggest that there is a slightly higher percentage of users still on IE in the USA than in most of the rest of the world. If anything, that would seem to suggest the IE figures would be slightly skewed upwards since they're more likely to be seen by someone in a country where the answers are common knowledge. Of course, it's possible they tailor the questions to specific regions or only count US entries.