Re: A Heavenly Santa Comes Early ...... :-)
s6-svc -r blather
20 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2012
I guess it isn't just London that froze over, hell must be freezing too, because I find myself in agreement with Mr Orlowski.
Just because the record companies are making a living shafting the artists and holding music to ransom doesn't excuse Spotify et al doing the same thing - two wrongs don't make a right.
Here are three simple ideas:
* No Flash, No Javascript. This is non-negotiable, these represent a substantial security risk. Content providers expecting their readers to compromise their security posture are without ethics or moral standing.
* Keep Ads out of the way of the content. This is a bugbear when browsing on a mobile device for the number of times when just scrolling down I've tapped on an ad instead is frustrating, more so when these ads redirect you to fake "Virus Warnings". Ironic that you have to break the security on a modern smart-phone in order to improve it.
* Nothing Obnoxious and seizure-inducing. I don't care that these pay more, they're the very ones that will drive me to competing content providers or just block them outright.
Would it be too much for me to draw a conclusion about the ease by which you can filter out unwanted content with Firefox, while the alternatives don't provide you that option? This functionality should be baked into the user agent to provide some sanity and security controls in an increasingly hostile Internet enabled by the MVVM junkies.
"...NoScript. It'll turn off 80% of HTML5 and break 99% of websites, and it's not exactly easy to selectively unblock scripts. Yep, it's 1999 all over again."
If you have to unblock Javascript just to view the page content, then they're doing it wrong. The good thing about 1999-2009 was that a good website just needed HTML for markup and CSS for styling, everything worked in virtually all browsers and building sites that adapted to different displays was simple.
Then some hipster had the idea of using Javascript to turn websites into ~applications~ so you get served a blank page if you don't enable JS. The trouble with that is you go all-or-nothing and enabling it on example.com allows scripts loaded from example.com to pull in everything from spyware to malvertising.
I'm not convinced that Angular.JS is all that much different from Angler Exploit Kit, these days a modern website has all the hallmarks of a malware slinger with obfuscated JS included.
"The stupidity is domains with SCRIPTS", there FTFY
We spend time trying to educate users into not installing every little piece of software they encounter and then we turn around and tell these users it is ~perfectly safe~ to allow every website they visit run [obfuscated] third party code that in itself is an attack vector as well as malware conduit.
We finally started extricating Flash off of our systems. We consigned Silverlight to /dev/null. We don't have to keep Java [plugin] around. But yet we don't want to address the elephant in the room: JavaScript.
Many browsers only allow you to disable Javascript entirely, with per-domain exceptions which would be fine except whole classes of developers have decided that we should use (obfuscated) JavaScript to generate the page content so if you disable JS you get served an inappropriately blank page.
Besides being a real inconvenience, even whitelisting sites like these (or even the nicer ones just to get the menus to work) still allows the embedded scripts to call home to a third party domain, downloading code and injecting it into a dynamically added SCRIPT tag on the page.
Supposedly this is just the risk we take for browsing the modern web, but for me the risk of some piece of third party code leading to a malware infection is an unacceptable risk and I castigate the modern web developers that enable this bad behaviour.
Traditionally the satellite pay-tv market was far more open so if you wanted to subscribe to Sky Multichannels you just needed a cheap 80-100cm dish pointed at 19.2E. Any receiver-decoder that supported VideoCrypt, of which there were dozens of suppliers available, just worked.
Subscribe to Sky today and you can only get a box sold by them, even though you own it, many of the features depend upon an active subscription and you simply can't use a third party box.
Cable services here are equally hobbled, you rent the box and modem for your TV and broadband and using a third party box is even illegal in some cases, so for us this has been par for the course for nearly twenty years.
Our friends in the US are not forced to rent a cable box, they do have the option to use CableCARD which just slots into a third party receiver, or TV, and decrypts the channels you've paid for. Likewise you can pop into Target and buy your own cable modem, and often a better one.
Only in the US could you buy an HD HomeRun, get a CableCARD and then velcro a Raspberry Pi to the back of every TV in the house to watch whatever channels you desired.
Isn't that standard business practice? Brand someone that embarrasses your company by exposing critical security holes "a dirty rotten hacker" and throw the book at them.
It worked for AT&T (weev) and Sony (geohotz) after all. There is certainly no shortage of white-knight commentards to defend this either.
"...EU wasn't trying to make US film studios sell rights for the whole continent, but it still needed to ensure that customers weren't being unfairly treated."
Okay so when they are done addressing pay-tv can they kindly turn their attention to the other Copyright 'scams' going on vis-a-vis regional pricing and selective unavailability of digital content in different EU states along with the wholesale ban on inter-EU trading for these services.
"I want to be clear on one point: we are not calling into question the possibility to grant licences on a territorial basis, or trying to oblige studios to sell rights on a pan-European basis," he said.
And why the bloody hell not? Is the EU a single market for all or only a single market when it suits companies a tax^W bill^W profit margin.
You have Lovefilm which is not available to non-UK residents. Google Play only making devices and the content stores selectively available to specific EU states. To say nothing of things like car insurance.
And were there not discussions on scrapping inter-EU mobile roaming?
They sure can pick and choose can't they. All this piping from the EU will mean nothing until they grow a fucking pair and sort out these companies, some competition would only be a good thing.
Another round of the same pathetic he-said-she-said bullshit all over again, enough already.
For the technically versed, you already know what device meets your needs and you're going to buy it anyway not giving a fuck what anyone thinks.
For the rest out there, this battle is won or lost on the simple things, does it work reliably? does it look nice? do my friends like it/have one? is it complicated? etc.
For as long as they can blame the evil hackers every time they get caught with their pants down because they leave the door open.
No one expects these companies to have air-tight security, clever people will find new attacks. We do expect them to learn from mistakes and not keep repeating them ad nauseam.
How about they try competing instead of bullying, make the stuff available to people that want it.
Not a problem in the US as you have large amounts of content* available to you on DVD/BluRay from more than one retail source, you have a good selection available to stream and you have it all available on the top-selling smartphone and tablet devices too from either Android or Apple country.
As an American, the inconvenience to you lies in the technical restrictions that lock you to specific ecosystems: Want to play that movie you bought on iTunes on an Android tablet? Tough, buy it again**. Want to copy your paid-for BluRay on your Apple iPad? Tough, buy it again.**
A bit of a problem in parts of Europe*** and other countries**** where the selections available are stunted, releases of new material delayed by months, streaming services are limited or non-existent, online bazaars for your tablet or smartphone are non-existent and then what content is available is more expensive than the same content in other locations. There is a greater incentive to pirate when the content you want is not available in your area for arbitrary reasons or is available at a ridiculous price in a format you have to break to use in the way you want (e.g. DVD -> Tablet).
If they cut the region-restriction bollocks: make content available to stream, to buy digitally and physically regardless of your device choice and make the pricing reasonable there would be less incentive for people to seek out alternative supply paths.
* There might actually be non-US originated content of interest but there is still more available to enjoy in the land of the free.
** There may be workarounds but they are technically illegal.
*** Supposed to be a single market but yet we live in a reality where a BluRay can come out everywhere at once but digital and streaming versions are released in some areas and not in others.
**** I feel bad for Australians that get routinely shafted.
Paris, because it's so simple even she understands.
Google seem to like SD cards about as much as FM Radio. I could suppose that they see them in some twisted sense as a competitor to 'Google Play Music'?
Would be nice if they were available from Google everywhere in the EU not just a single-digit number of countries (I guess 'one single market' is just marketing hype for eurocrats).
Mine's the one with the S3 in the pocket.
"This was doubly true for PC gaming which was an especially lucrative segment of the market back in the day. Gamers would spend vast sums on ever more powerful rigs to run the latest games which always seemed to need vastly more powerful hardware with each release. And while all this was happening more and more first time buyers were also joining this upgrade treadmill. They were halcyon days for PC makers that will never be seen again."
I believe this is what really drove the evolution in the PC market, your average corporate-targeted desktop could expect a 5-7 year lifespan before being replaced and with PCs being rather expensive in the Windows 95-98 days, I would expect average home users to hang onto theirs for about the same amount of time.
"In 2013 most people who can afford a computer already have one, and those that can't have access to older, second hand options, or bypass the PC altogether. The goldrush of first time buyers in the PC market is over. It's all about replacements these days."
In the 90s PCs were expensive and for those that could afford one there was "the family computer", internet access was (at least outside the US) expensive and slow pay-per-minute dial-up, forget about mobile.
In the early 00s PC prices dropped and laptops started becoming more affordable to the consumer, as was faster internet access and WiFi. Now it became much more convenient to have a smaller and portable laptop that didn't need to be tethered to the nearest telephone socket.
Mobile data services were still expensive, smartphones were geared to the corporate market (Symbian, Blackberry) and consumers by and large found them fiddly and complicated (power users are in a minority), in 2007 Apple launches the iPhone and in spite of the critics and cries from the power-user community about it's lack of features (some still absent) it was a huge hit with consumers.
Now where people would have to wait until they got home to update their Social Networks, look something up online, check their bank balance etc, suddenly they could have the internet in their pocket literally at their fingertips.
Is it really any surprise that the PC market is in decline and more to the point, is anyone really surprised given the direction things have been going up to this point?
"...For years they and their partners slopped out the uninspired and comparitvely [consumer] hostile Windows Mobile smartphone platform... with the only people showing any interest being large corporate [and power] users..."
And personally, I preferred a WinMo 6 device over the iPhone; I liked being able to chop and change things under the hood.
"Now we have reached the point that your typical household, who 5 years ago could be expected to have 2,3 or even 4 [computers], all loaded with MS software are now happy to reduce that down to a single PC and a fleet of phones and tablets, and none of them sporting Microsoft software."
And Apple saw this and acted on it aggressively leaving everyone else to play catch-up.
"Microsoft are suffering the consequences of their own success. I think they should consider the option of downsizing their business and expectations and focus on providing corporate and enterprise products into that market and cede the consumer market to those more able to succeed in it."
Microsoft don't need to cede the consumer market, there will always be a place for the Windows PC both for die-hard gamers, power users and even Mr Average who just wants to get some serious work done.
Anecdotal evidence holds this to be quite true, consider that tablets and smartphones have been available for years but never gained wide acceptance until the iPhone epoch. Apple for all their faults were successful because they gave the masses what they wanted.
I am not one of those consumers but the reality of it is I am in a minority.