359 karma · joined March 17, 2011
Firefox warns users if they are authenticating to a site with a small message and asks them to confirm. This prevents pretty much all of the phishing attacks that people have been talking about without removing a potentially useful feature.
As people have been saying, Physicists probably won't get truly excited about this discovery until 5 sigma, or a 99.9999% confidence interval.
Articles with titles like this mislead the public and in my opinion do more harm than good because they stop people from thinking critically about whether there are flaws in the process, instead leading them to take things for given.
Notable examples of this include the Facebook "Show more comments" link, g-mail's email links and "Add to Cart" buttons which redirect away from the product page.
This opinion neglects to mention the fact that we as consumers have the right to expect behavior along certain guidelines for companies (i.e. battery hens are legal, but a lot of people are now expecting companies to provide alternatives and switch away), and this expectation is rooted in the fact that Google is incredibly influential in a number of circles. While we are currently discussing SOPA, if Google says it can censor content at will, then what does that say to the US Government. As much as we say that we should switch to another service, if large corporations continue to do the wrong thing then it becomes much harder for small companies to do the right thing and it becomes acceptable for more people to do the wrong thing. It is unacceptable that we should allow Google to screw over users because they can, PARTICULARLY because they are representing the standards of the internet to governments globally.
The second major point is that it is not simply a matter of switching to another service or making your own. Particularly when networking socially, you need a large user base or the service is essentially worthless. If you have a blog, you advertise your posts on your Facebook and Google+. Should Google then remove posted links to what it deems to be offensive content too? What's the point of writing a blog post if you can't advertise it to your readers?
In an ideal world, if there is a better service, people will switch to it, but experience tells us this isn't the case. Consider diaspora, which promised us distributed free social networking, and yet the service languishes because people do not want to go to the effort. To start up a social network needs more than just a better product, and even a better product needs more than just a few weekends.
Google+ was supposed to save us from Facebook, yet it seems we are getting more of the same....
If this is indeed true, then it seems namecheap are trying to score cheap PR points, although they have responded saying they attempted to reach out to GoDaddy.[2]
I'm inclined to believe that namecheap did try to reach them, although I'm not sure that they are above trying to slam more bad press onto GoDaddy....
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/26/godaddy-responds-to-nameche...
[2] http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...
My personal opinion is that university is not a place to learn tools (i.e. programming), but to learn to apply knowledge to form solutions to complex problems. We learn about algorithms, data structures and techniques because that is what we need to know to learn to solve hard problems. Programming, while not separate from this (i.e. you can hardly build anything without knowing how to use a screwdriver) is something that is assumed knowledge. Teaching it at university would waste valuable time in courses that are already too packed to give rigorous treatment of all topics covered.
However, there is an issue which I believe is being overlooked here, and that is that the internet is an INTERNATIONAL resource. Content on the internet comes from all corners or the globe, and overseas the issue that most people have with SOPA is that it allows the US government to play enforcer on a global platform!
When one considers international law, whether material infringes on copyright becomes much less clear. The definition of 'fair use' is really only codified in the American legal system, with infringements determined on a case by case basis in most EU countries. What about content created internationally? In the current US system certain protections kick in to any created work, meaning that a work distributed freely overseas may become infringing if distributed in the US. Should content be censored in this case? This is without even considering the myriad of different cultural issues which come into play. Should Lese-Majesty cases be considered here? Should libel and slander be considered here?
To allow the body to be internationally representative, then it must be powerless, as no system could possibly encapsulate the laws of all sovereign nations. If it is to be effective, it must choose the laws of one nation over another, in this case, probably the US.
I end with this final plea, to both the implementers of the SOPA legislation, and to the author: If you must implement legislation like this, keep it TO YOURSELVES. The US does not represent all countries using the internet, and certainly does not represent the laws of all countries on the internet.
Time and again, people have proven that if there is a SIMPLE EASY alternative, then we will use it. Take a look at Steam, Spotify, Amazon etc. All of these people provide a service that is easy to use, and despite there being a simple way to pirate the content provided on most of those services (and btw, this here is the big secret), MOST PEOPLE DON'T.
Most of the time, if there is a valuable product out there, then consumers have no problem paying for it. Yes, there will still be piracy for a variety of reasons just as there will always be physical theft, e.g. too high a cost, people are too poor etc..., most people support artists and content creators and are willing to pay for their use of those products.
Game manufacturers are starting to catch on, so are software producers with the emergence of app stores (the restrictions on those platforms are another matter entirely and I won't judge them here), but despite the fact that the music industry is older than either of those industries, it is aiming to shut down the only platform in modern society that can push their profits incredibly high if they do it right.
Yes, to do this right (and I am not saying Spotify or ITunes have this down), they would have to invest, A lot, but given how much they are investing in lobbying for SOPA, it is a joke to think they couldn't devote a tiny bit of their über profits to developing a platform that actually works.
P.S. earbitscom - Here is an alternative. One that your site goes some way towards providing.
People need to be particularly careful about exaggerations particularly when talking about science, because if the public finds out that they exaggerated, even if it was for completely noble purposes, it diminishes the credibility of the field, something we saw in particular in the field of climate change.
First of all, the article is suggesting that simply dealing with companies with a certain amount of moral ambiguity makes you yourself somewhat inferior. By this logic, one cannot deal with any large company, because as soon as a company becomes multinational, it becomes so diverse that it is inevitable that it will step on someone's toes.
If we look at any large company, Apple with its manufacturing practices, Microsoft with its antitrust case, Intel with it's widespread claims of environmental damage from its manufacturing process, then we must conclude from what this article suggests, that no start-ups should deal with large firms. No firm can claim to be on a moral highground. Even organizations such as green peace, WWF or Sea Shephard, have caused damage to a certain amount of people but our own internal biases (such as a fear of GM or whatever else), and how the company position's themselves reflects how 'good' we think they are.
If anything, Monsanto was better at managing its disastrous PR, then we may have a better opinion of them. We need only look at companies like Apple and Intel to see how effective distraction can be in hiding a companies moral ambiguity. Therefore, I reject the premise of the article that small business should pick and choose its clients based on their 'image'.
Secondly, I think that the suggestion that Cloudant should not have publicized their contact is way off. What gaining a contract like this shows is that you are competent enough to deal with a huge infrastructure. That you are trusted with millions of dollars worth of equipment, whose malfunction may cause huge losses to a large number of people.
As far as I am aware, for cloudant at lease, they have a big win on their hands, gaining an image of reliability as well as a huge revenue stream, something which start-ups are hard-pressed to find.
We can only hold cloudant responsible for it's own actions. In no way is Cloudant supporting the actions of Monsanto. Farmers will not buy seed because cloudant manages their cloud. But other companies, ones we classify as 'good' may use cloudant because of their affiliation with Monsanto.
Since the private key never left your computer, it is impossible to compromise the private key on the server side.
If the hack is genuine, it reflects one of the biggest problems Apple has, in that while they may be able to handle individual complaints quite well, they fail completely at handling overarching issues that affect a large number of people, which just permeates the impression that you sometimes get that Apple is a completely closed culture, not subject to outside scrutiny. This is not a good thing.
At any rate, I am certainly intrigued, and I hope very much that if Apple does nail the issue, they release details. Which may be optimistic...
In addition, the article highlights a move in indie film making to crowd funding, and distribution through social media.
A further bonus was that the film was quite good too. If you want to see it, which I quite recommend, it is still available as a LEGAL torrent...
If this is a genuine threat, I suggest you don't use such an alarmist tone.
A bit of regulation may, in fact, be a good thing, and could be used to make bitcoins an attractive mainstream investment and a well used transaction technology...
I'm an android/linux user, and it is quite clear that a lot of the IT community who don't use Microsoft products have a fair amount of contempt for the Microsoft OS, and their products.
The products really should be judged on their merits and innovations rather than the history/marketing of the company. In that respect, for once, Microsoft seems to have done a good job, with a new interface which genuinely seems to be trying to do something new.
It is unfair to immediately dismiss anything, without seeing how it pans out, which I saw a hell of a lot of both when Nokia sided with Microsoft and when Microsoft acquired Skype. The bias is clearly there, and it is not justified.
IF, and I stress if, there is a better option, for users then I suggest use it. But arguments such as it was bought by Microsoft therefore it must be bad do not make sense. To be more specific, Skype had all the valid issues it had (such as proprietary format, advertising etc.) before it was acquired by Microsoft. The only new factor is its acquisition.
The fact that certain companies, Microsoft, IBM etc. have an 'evil', 'corporate' air about them, whereas companies (and this is a generalization for the sake of example) such as Google and Apple are the good guys don't make sense. I would like to see free software promoted for its merits, and to see bogus arguments based around who makes the product to disappear from the IT world.
No company is less evil than any other, and whether products should be used or not should not depend on who owns them, but how the products operate.