Comment Re:Annoying. (Score 1) 347
Just because I say I love my ISP you assume it is Xmission? You would be right, they are fantastic!
Just because I say I love my ISP you assume it is Xmission? You would be right, they are fantastic!
Being someone who is in a city who built a municipal fiber network, that is nowhere near the actual cost per resident. The network was paid for with bonds and the bonds have been serviced by a portion of sales tax revenue in member cities as well as subscriber revenue. Residents are not paying $2000 per year for it. I get internet over the network and it is much faster and much cheaper than when I used Comcast. Yes, I pay sales tax in my city so I am also indirectly paying for it elsewhere but it is nowhere near as expensive as you think it is to build a very fast network, especially if you don't have to pay your shareholders every quarter.
Fiber has enough bandwidth that you don't need fiber for every company that provides services. My city's fiber network terminates in a central NOC in which all the service providers on the network have a peering presence. When my packet hits the NOC it routes it to my ISP who contracts with tier 1/2 providers for transit across the internet. Why would I need multiple fibers to my house when any company can provide services across the existing network by peering at the central NOC? Municipal networks are the way to go, the people should own the network.
This is because Comcast is in the business of selling access to their customers. Their cable TV business charges the customer for access then they sell the customer's eyeballs to advertisers. They are used to getting paid twice for the same thing so they were mystified by the Internet because they were only getting paid by their subscribers. Fortunately, they have figured out they can start extorting money from companies providing services to their customers "It would be a shame if anything happened to that packet, Netflix". Since the FCC is packed with cable and telco insiders they certainly aren't going to do anything about it. In the end, the costs will get passed on to the consumer and Comcast stockholders will get to upgrade their yachts.
they will act like any other local utility and tell you to wait 5 years until they gather enough data that there is a demand for it, then take another few years to study the problem, then spend another 5 years begging for money in the budget and finally upgrading the network
Actually, go check out Wilson, North Carolina. They embarrassed Time Warner so badly, Time Warner strongarmed the state into making municipal broadband illegal. It creates a lot of cognitive dissonance with the "government can't do anything right" crowd.
Which is hilarious considering the current system is just government-granted monopoly anyway, yet they defend it voraciously because, uh...privatization!
That's what is happening in my state, only it is Comcast that is buying off the state legislature to try to kill Utopia. I'm so glad that these 2 companies are going to merge so that they can more efficiently purchase our elected officials.
Um after the healthcare.gov disaster you want a government organization to provide your local internet. I will pass on the bright idea.
Just because the government owns the network doesn't mean that it runs it. My city has a municipal fiber network and I couldn't be happier. Fast speeds, low price and good service from my (local) ISP. Any ISP/Phone/TV provider is welcome to provide service on it.
Right now, the network is run by the Utah Infrastructure Agency which is a quasi-government company, but the cities are currently considering a proposal by a private company to manage the network and complete the buildout to every home in the member cities. The proposal sounds like a pretty good one -- everyone in the city gets a 3 MB symmetrical connection for free (included in taxes, anyway), a little extra will get you whatever speed you want. My current connection is 30 Mb symmetrical but you can get 1 Gb if you want. So the government (which technically is the people) own the network but a private company will operate and market it. Open access, any company can provide services and they seem to be able to pull it off for less money than Comcast charges so what's the problem?
Your imagination tells you a government-owned network would be a bad thing but I am actually experiencing it and it is good. I don't want the feds to own my network but I am just fine with my city government owning it, at least there is a LITTLE accountability there. (BTW if anyone is in a Utopia city watch for public meetings for the proposed Macquarie Capital deal, Orem, Murray and Centerville are having them tomorrow. Let your voice be heard!)
The core issue is whether a government should be providing a service. But that should not be an issue.
The government should provide the pipes (fibre or copper or whatever) to the houses that it covers. Paid for by taxes.
The pipes terminate at a government facility that the government leases space at to ANY AND ALL companies that want to provide ISP services over those pipes. As cheap as possible but without allowing one company to lease ALL the space.
Then switching between ISP's should be as simple as moving a patch cord.
Your taxes pay for the pipes and their maintenance and the facility and its maintenance (minus the lease revenue).
This is how my fiber network is operated. The 15 member cities contributed to the network and their residents are seeing the benefits. I can choose what ISP I want (but I would probably never change because I LOVE my ISP) and any ISP, telephone or TV provider can provide service over the network. If my ISP starts any Comcast-style extortion shenanigans with service providers then I can simply switch, there aren't constraints on who owns the wire like private cable/telco networks.
If course Comcast and US West/Qwest/Century Link fought tooth and nail against the network and they are fighting it still. I think the last tactic was getting a bill introduced in the state legislature to prohibit the Utopia network from selling any network service in cities that border Utopia cities. This is just a long line in bills written by the cable lobbyists but so far the cities have resisted [crosses fingers].
So if 15 cities can get something like this done in Republican dominated, pro-business Utah then what's your city's excuse? It's not that hard to get something done on a city level if you can get a few voters on board. The Internet has quickly become an almost indispensible part of life and a majority of a person's day-to-day business (paying bills, communicating with friends, scheduling appointments, etc.) is conducted over the network. It has become important enough that cities should treat it like the utility that it is. Put pressure on your local elected officials to get your own network and bypass the attempted takeover of the Internet by Comcast.
I'm sure the anti-science crowd will try to point to this as an example of corruption in science but this is really an example of science working the way that it is supposed to. Scientist reports results, other scientists try to reproduce the results and if they can't then they start crying foul.
Actually:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCQQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bls.gov%2Fcps%2Fminwage2011.htm&ei=SsyNU4m-H8e-sQSEy4GIAg&usg=AFQjCNGhmyPob_eopcXz8n3WS6t3aqWgZw&bvm=bv.68191837,d.cWc
In 2011, 73.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
1.7 million is not almost nobody, unless you have a really strange definition of the word almost.
In a country with 300 million people, 1.7 million people is almost nobody. If you don't make enough money then provide more value to the economy.
And then the unemployed are forced to do voluntary work as one of the requirements to receive government payments. This is the way it works in Australia. Converting low-paid work to slave labour.
How are they slaves if they are receiving payments (from the government) for their work? If you don't like the deal, don't accept the welfare.
It's truly sad how many of this sort of ignorant comments a story like this brings out.
The main thing to take note of is that many people who work for minimum wage don't work full-time. So, you can't just extrapolate from an hourly wage to an annual salary. And most part-time workers are subject to the whims of their employer in terms of work schedule. If you're not getting enough hours from one job, it's often difficult to add on another part-time job, because many employers demand flexibility in your schedule. You can't come in a few times? Fine -- they'll start calling someone else.
No it won't be a posh lifestyle but it's certainly enough to get by and it will be in 6.5 years too baring economic catastrophe.
If you're (1) a single person (2) with no kids (3) in good health (4) with no dependents (5) in an area where rents and cost of living aren't outrageous, yeah, it's almost "certainly enough to get by." You might even be able to live reasonably well, if you are budget-conscious. If any of those is not true, it can be harder. If you have a number of these "conditions," even assuming a full-time job and a $30,000 income, it may not be easy.
Why does it have to be easy? If you made poor decisions in your life (no skills, children you can't afford, living in an area you can't afford) why is it my responsibility (or the government's responsibility, or a private company's responsibility) to provide for you? The only item I agree with on your list is health, often health problems are not under a person's control. For things that ARE under a person's control, they made their choices, they should be the one to pay the piper. If your skills do not command a high enough salary it is your failing, not your employer's. If you provide more value for your employer and your job isn't so easy that they can hire a 16-year-old off the street to replace you then you have bargaining power when it comes to salary negotiations. If you don't educate yourself and your only skills are what your employer teaches you after being hired then you shouldn't expect to make a ton of money.
RSA is a purposefully weak cipher? Citation needed!
I wasn't talking about RSA the cipher, I was talking about RSA the company, which used a weak SSL cipher in their product after being paid $10 million by the NSA. link
"Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs."
As a former softie, all I can say is that i would trust bitlocker over pretty much any solution on the market and here are the reasons why:
1. Microsoft would not knowingly backdoor bitlocker. The NSA pressured the team leads, but management was adamantly opposed and declined to acquiesce.
That was then. Nowadays we have (unconstitutional) things like a National Security Letter where they can force you to put in a backdoor and prohibit you from telling anybody about it under penalty of imprisonment. If you are a little guy like Lavabit you can just go out of business rather than comply but if you are Microsoft you put the backdoor in, telling only the actual people that need to know and informing them they are going to federal PMITA prison if they tell anyone. Unless you were the guy who put the code in you wouldn't know anything about it.
2. Suppose bitlocker was knowingly backdoored, the amount of reputational harm that Microsoft would endure would literally be crippling. Crippling not with the OSS crowd, but enterprise customers. The only loser would be Microsoft and they would not recover.
With only binaries to analyze it is certainly possible that a NSA backdoor could go undetected in bitlocker. Particularly if the backdoor was in the form of an intentional error in an algorithm or a purposefully weak cipher (hello RSA!).
3. There simply not enough people involved in the Truecrypt project at the moment to make it a truly secure solution. This isn't the Linux Kernel. For FDE, I wouldn't trust an FOSS until more audits and testing has been done. The reason is not because of technicalities, but because of legal liability reasons. For an FDE solution I either would want a private company to back the product or I would want a strong and active community truly backing the continuing development of the FOSS.
That said, I'm really hoping the audits come back positive and that development continues.
I hope that development continues as well. More developers would be nice but on a mature project usually there is only low-glory bugfixing going on so a) less developers want to participate because there is less glory and bugfixes are boring and b) there doesn't need to be a lot of developers as there is less workload. Obviously an independant audit would be ideal but that generally means money and somebody has to pay.
FTFA:
Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good. They are not.
My rebuttal: Yes they are.
It's not about Google - they just happen to be named in this case. This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.
Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.
Indeed, this isn't just limited to Google. On that note, does anybody know if (physical) newspaper archives are affected by this ruling? There has never been a "right to be forgotten" before, if you did something newsworthy it ended up in the archives for anyone to peruse. Same with arrest records or court records. Does this ruling give somebody the right to demand that the courts destroy any documents that mention them?
Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.
