Look; I know that this is a touchy subject, but after working for 5 years (in Australia - things aren't quite as bad here as they are in the UK or the US) as a teacher with kids from the rough side of town, I can tell you there are some seriously fscked up families out there. That warrant some kind of intervention, yet too often the departments responsible for this sort of thing are too fearful of being seen as some Orwellian over-lords. Often it comes down to an issue of human rights, particularly with children involved. Why bother having laws against child abuse if you don't police them? Democracy isn't "do whatever the hell you want" - it involves responsibilities to our fellow people, and people who don't want to undertake those responsibilities need to be handled in some way. Putting cameras in their homes might be better than sending them to jail.

I'm not for a surveillance sort of a state, but when everyone complains of governments becoming "nanny states", I see a lot of people that need a nanny.

Makes sense, but I'd still bet that there are more radios than there are mobile phones in Cambodia. But both systems are useful, in tandem.

I don't buy it. How can you accidentally be infringing on the GPL? It's not like the patent system where you may or may not be infringing on a patent because there's so bloody many of them covering everything up to sliced bread. Its a license that is _clearly included_ in every file covered by it. It's not as if some source code magically appeared on some programmer's desktop, stripped of all license information. Someone went looking for some code that did X, found a (GPL) version, used it, modified it, released it under a different license.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they were.
Option 1: fight the GPL to court, probably lose, and give the GPL an even greater legal standing via the test case.
Option 2: Release the code as GPL, and nullify any previous (or future) arguments they have made about it being a 'viral' license, bad for capitalism etc etc.

Option 1 would have given them the moral high ground in terms of their philosophy - "We were against the GPL and fought it and lost", but at the cost of hardening the GPL legally.
Option 2 is spineless, but I'd be betting they are planning some 'comeback' about how the code evolution of the GPL version is less secure/buggier/slower than some alternative closed version they develop in-house.

A corporate network that intercepts HTTPS traffic breaks HTTPS. The whole point of HTTPS is that it is encrypted point-to-point. If that were the case the browser should be popping up warnings all over the place, since what you have described is the definition of a man-in-the-middle attack.

why not FTPS? A lot of clients (at least the popular filezilla, and cyberduck) support it; it's just FTP over an SSL connection, just like HTTPS is HTTP over an SSL connection.

Not sure what server support is like, but I'm sure there'd be a good few around...

I've been grappling with the same problem of late.

FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS) seems to be the answer.

WebDAV should in theory support resumable transfers (I think), but is dependent on the client to support this.

If your proxy supports https connections, you have ssh access. You might need to run an ssh server on port 443 depending on how tight the proxy is, but most ssh clients now support using an https proxy for connections - basically they just have to issue a 'CONNECT server:port' command to the proxy, and they have a clean line.

What is your basis for this? AFAIK the flight recorder hasn't been found.

And the pilots would have be able to slow the plane down (airbus has a full manual mode) unless the control system had failed as well. But even if could slow it down, what then? The plane stalls as it can't maintain lift at that pressure, and drops straight into a bad-ass storm.

Flights are getting more and more automated. It used to be up to the pilot to take off and land, and the autopilot would fly the bit in the middle in good conditions. Now the autopilot takes off and lands too. The pilot is there in case of emergencies. But I would still wager that a computer would statistically be better than a human overall, otherwise the airlines wouldn't deploy this.

This case is of a plane travelling at such high speed and altitude that it only has a tiny window of opportunity between breaking up, stalling, or falling into the tempest below. If the computer systems keeping it in that window fail, then the pilot has little chance of actually fixing things. The alternative is to fly a lot more conservatively, with bigger margins of error. That would mean flying slower, and at lower altitude. Which means longer flights, that burn more fuel, hence cost more.

Try less developed countries, but keep the focus on large ones. India and Indonesia spring to mind; basically large and anarchic enough that it will be difficult for a regime to control even if they wanted to. That in mind, corruption is always an issue, but without a huge respect for state enforced laws (due to lack of resources to enforce them), you will always get a large degree of freedom. Perhaps Mexico or parts of South America, but large and less developed will give you the freedom from the tyranny of the state you seek. That in mind, laws and customs in such countries tend to be much more localised and community enforced, which brings up another can of worms.

I'm not certain what the _actual_ situation is in China, which fits the bill somewhat, but they seem to have enough coercive power (in a large military) to be able to control a large population. This doesn't seem to be the general case, since keeping such a large police force/military is very expensive.

Perhaps the question shouldn't be so much about the laws themselves, but the state's ability to enforce them.

Thanks; I guess the issue is to make the playback as seamless and easy to the user as possible. We've looked at using cortado (the java theora app you speak of), but would need to investigate its speed etc and also penetration of java compared to flash.

The javascript shouldn't really necessary; the browser should gracefully drop _inside_ the video tag if it can't render the video, so by putting a java (or flash) object inside the video tag, other browsers should handle this well. Hopefully this also holds if the browser handles the video tag but not the particular video codec provided.

Actually, you could do a recaptcha-style trick with this to help digitize (more) books - create an image with the first part the (undigitized) book-word, then a unique code for that word, then @recaptchadomain.com. The spambot's advanced OCR would decipher the word, and send spam to word.abd27e423de@recaptcha.com, which would match the unique code to the word, and wait till a few of them match up.

Is that only in the US, or in other countries too? I run a video service hosted in Germany, the organisation is based in Australia, people from all over the world view the video, and am starting to get worried what happens next year. Where does jurisdiction for this start and end? How do software patents fit into the picture? We will be moving to theora, but will need a fallback for IE and Safari, which h.264 seems a natural fit, but now have to re-think...

Yes. Because the issue of licensing is not yet relevant. When users (or providers) start having to pay per view, then licensing becomes a lot more relevant and obvious to the user.