These guys are out to lunch
It's painfully obvious what's wrong with Facebook. Talking with Zuckerberg is neither going to reveal nor change anything.
2726 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
"What if the details that we are most worried about identifying us aren’t needed to identify us at all?"
I believe that is generally the case. You can identify me by my birth name, my Social Security Number, or my browsing footprint. From a privacy point of view, it really doesn't matter what you call me.
While I agree that Apple is being deceptive and deserves no respect in regard to their way of doing business, I still think that the gentleman in question is also being deceptive in his story. If I go to a store to buy something, I make sure to take it home with me. I don't leave it there and expect it to be there every time I want to go back and use it. The store could go out of business, for that matter. This gentleman is being naive if he thinks that the Apple store works differently from any brick and mortar store.
Personally, I won't have anything to do with Apple on any level. Hopefully this gentleman will adopt this same stance from now on.
"And the first company to give in to the 3 letter agencies signs it's own death warrant, no-one will touch their products again."
That hasn't actually been the case in the past. Some people are concerned about this sort of thing and will act, but I don't think the majority of Facebook users would quit if they were spied upon. *coughcough*
@ Dave559 You seem to assume that only businesses use the internet. Lots of private people, hobbyists and even kids run servers and use the internet freely for enjoyment and general communications. Perhaps you're not a server guy (obviously) and perhaps you only use the net for corporate or business purposes, but please don't ignore the general public's right to basic internet freedoms.
"If the company which hosts your website doesn't already offer automated https certs via LetsEncrypt, get a new (and better) hosting company."
You're not talking about servers, you're talking about shared hosting. Not everybody buys that kind of package which is mostly (though not totally) aimed at beginners. Some of us prefer to run servers and enjoy the freedom of using the internet without paying somebody else to do the administration and telling us how to host a site. Perhaps the best way to explain it is to liken it to cooking at home. Some people like to just get the ingredients and cook for themselves whereas shared hosting is like eating at a restaurant.
Regarding moving to another hosting provider, people with dozens of sites aren't going to find moving all that easy. That said, hosting providers have a problem here too. No doubt they'll be able to do some fancy scripting to provide LetsEncrypt to each of their customers in some transparent way, but it's going to take a while for them to get it done.
Easy is a matter of perspective. Some of us like to just put up a page or two on random servers for people to see something and it's not appropriate to be doing certs for everything like that. Not everybody has one server that has everything they do on it. Some people have lots of servers that are just part of their personal net environment. Why is it that there is always the assumption that a site is some big deal that's "developed" and lots of time and effort is spent on it? Frankly, working on assumption is not a wise perspective.
"No email, no online shopping, no job resource access, no school resources that require you to go online to retrieve/interact with, no tv set top box/Netflix/Hulu/AmazonPrime/etc, no Youtube nor Porntube, no Wiki, no online mapping for directions, no online translations, no Alexa/Curtana/Siri/etc, nothing that requires "the cloud"... "
Also, no phone. Since they took out much of the copper it's all VoIP even if it's not always obvious. So essentially he likely will have no 911 emergency capability either. That's harsh.
The proposal would see all companies that "store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works" obliged to "prevent the availability… of works… identified by rightholders."
With the explosion of cheap servers available these days, a lot of people run things that are very similar to what the, so called, large companies are doing. At what point do I, as an individual, come under attack? Words like "large amounts" don't exactly define my limits in any legally useful way. It seems like these legislators are only able to see part of the internet. I don't personally make copyrighted material available other than my own, but a lot of people do.
@tip pc We were doing it like dn42 but by using an IPv6 VPN to our own servers it's possible to use the whole IPv4 address space. Of course this means that one cannot at that point access the ICANN IPv4 address space, but that's also one of the reasons for doing this - to create a whole separate world. This idea of a separate network is not unlike what people do with Tor. But yes, it is often very difficult for people to grasp that there can be different networks that are unable to communicate with one another. (What, no Facebook!) I think the difficult thing for them is that they can see no reason for them doing that themselves - which is fair enough.
"It would be possible to use VPNs across the current Internet proper to tunnel a private address space, but you could not really call that an alternative Internet. At best, you would regard it as a parasitic network. relying on the thing you want to replace for it's existence."
Some of us have done that, and it does work. But yes, I'd have to agree that it does rely on the existing infrastructure and is somewhat parasitic. However it does manage to make ICANN totally irrelevant and it routes just fine. We did need the use of an IPv6 tunnel, but then we also ended up with a full duplicate IPv4 space of our own.
In any case I just wanted to point out that there are options worth playing with, at least for the small percentage of technical users. We're not completely out of ideas yet, and greater minds than mine no doubt have more suggestions, but being able to do these things represents some freedom.
We already have lots of options. There is nothing stopping you from using an alternate root, or tunnelling to a whole separate IP tree. The problem is getting consensus and finding ways to include the great masses - assuming that's part of your goal. We, as individuals can function quite well outside of the established system.
"something accumulates on mine until performance slumps. And a reboot fixes it. "
It sounds like you're using some crap software there. You might like to try something better. What you're describing is exactly the kind of thing which happens with proprietary software when they just want to push stuff out the door. Get something where the writers actually care.
And yes, I understand that only serious computer people like you and I will do that kind of thing. Hence my comment that I think that most people won't even hear about this and reboot their routers, let alone take some measure of control of their software.
So I think you might be a little bit optimistic.
Well I certainly don't think I'm immune to malware or attacks of any kind. Things are pretty tight here - but never say never. :)
Probably not a bad idea, but I'm one of those people who looks at uptime and doesn't step on a crack. Not gonna happen. Besides I don't run proprietary code on my router and I have a feeling that the majority of those that do (barring professional installations) are not going to get this news nor care.
There seems to be a double standard here. If this was a matter of interest to the MPAA or other Holywood rights organisation, then the router makers would soon be found complicit and blocked from the market. I'm not suggesting they should be, but do think they have more responsibility than they're willing to accept.
There are indeed some simple issues with IPv6 such as they're difficult to deal with in the same simple manner as we've gotten used to with IPv4. But there are other problems for the end user. Because of the current state of adoption and sometimes broken implementation, IPv6 can cause troubles.
My ISP doesn't offer IPv6 so I need to use a tunnel, which in my case will mean that I'll be seen as coming from the US instead of Canada. That means that some Canadian shows will not let me watch unless I turn off IPv6. Note that Firefox defaults to IPv6 for sites where it is available - which also makes some misconfigured sites not load when they otherwise would. This sort of thing just makes me say, the *ell with it. I'll wait until this all gets sorted out. I'm probably not the only one who's starting to develop that attitude. If so, then we can indeed expect a downswing in IPv6 usage at this point.
The link to the attorney's office document does give a little more:
Scan4you differed from legitimate antivirus scanning services in multiple ways. For example, while legitimate scanning services share data about uploaded files with the antivirus community and notify their users that they will do so, Scan4you instead informed its users that they could upload files anonymously and promised not to share information about the uploaded files with the antivirus community.
I personally don't think that is good enough, but the prosecutors obviously did. Does that show intent? There are lots of reasons for favouring anonymity, for example when working on proprietary software.
Clamping down on what people say does not sit well with me. My solution is to not pay attention to the "vapid and the vile". Anybody who feels obliged to read that crap either likes it or is plain stupid. Mass censorship is not an acceptable solution.