It seems like, in order to get these nosy little snoops to stop snooping on you, you have to explicitly visit their site, provide them with even more info, and hope they keep their word that they won't compile data on you.

For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?

The problem is not laying down fiber or building infrastructure: The problem is that nobody else can because of contractual agreements. [ ... ]

Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.

For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.

Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?

So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.

A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?

Build out a city or two using long ago subsidized infrastructure, add some updated equipment, get kick backs from the city, put a couple of thousand on the internet all for under 200 million [ ... ]

That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.

For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric . Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.

When I was using a FreeBSD box as the gateway to my home network, the crushing majority of the spam relay and SSH brute-forcing attempts came from machines inside hinet.net. I ended up black-holeing as many of their subnets as I could in the firewall.

Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...

Schwab

Or, conversely, maybe it has a chance to thrive if it's being maintained by people who have an idea of what to do with it?

That was supposed to be the whole point of spinning off WebOS in the first place.

Barely two years ago, HP gave WebOS a modest nest egg and spun them off into its own independent entity (which, from the point of view of WebOS, was a good move, given how badly HP has been mismanaged over the last decade). They shared/leased some of HP's organizational infrastructure, but WebOS has been pretty much on its own since then. They definitely had/have a vision, and they've definitely been executing on it.

I'm not sure what value LG's ownership brings to WebOS -- or indeed what value WebOS brings to LG. But at least now the WebOS guys will be able to get employee discounts on nice flat panels :-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predators'_Ball
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_gate
2012 Election coverage of Bain â" Mitt Romneyâ(TM)s old stomping ground.

Also: Storming the Magic Kingdom. Wonderful book -- informative and engaging. The Walt Disney Company was very nearly destroyed by private equity/LBO vultures.

• American Pad and Paper
• KB Toys
• Bealls Brothers / Palais Royal (merged into Stage Stores)

We've seen this script before. The private equity firm forces the company to take out huge loans, which are then paid to the equity firm as consulting and management fees, and bonuses. Dell's largest operating cost becomes servicing the debt, which means everything else gets cut -- product research, product quality, staff, salaries. The market quickly realizes that Dell products have become shit(tier), and customers flee.

Four years later, the equity firm is several hundred million dollars richer, Dell goes bankrupt and is liquidated, and thousands of former Dell employees are out of work.

If you were a bank considering a loan to Dell (and not already in collusion with the private equity firm), you should be very very skeptical you will ever see your money again.

Just because you're buying "hardware" doesn't mean you're getting the privilege of installing whatever the hell you want on the device.

Incorrect.

When I buy a Chevy Volt, I am not forced to fill up with only one vendor's gas. I am not forced to charge up with electricity from a particular utility.

When I buy a Sony TV, I am not forced to watch content only from Sony/Columbia/VEVO.

When I buy a Sansa MP3 player, I am not forced to buy and load only music from Sansa's "content partners." Hell, on many of their players, I can kick out their clunky UI and replace it with an entirely different clunky UI :-)

There is no technological reason that a "Surface" tablet can't run Android or generic Linux. The only obstacle standing in the way is entirely gratuitous, malicious, and childish. To the extent SecureBoot improves platform security (it doesn't) or the integrity of the user's data (it doesn't), there is absolutely no reason that the root keys to such a regime be held by Microsoft, especially given their track record. SecureBoot is there solely as a very deliberate and calculated "Fsck you" to competing operating systems. Therefore, it is entirely correct and proper to call Microsoft out on it.

In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, [Dodd] said that Hollywood and the technology industry 'need to come to an understanding' about new copyright legislation.

Here's the understanding, Chris: Computers copy data. Period. End of novel; no sequel coming. It is a fact of the landscape that is not going to change.

And that, as far as any clear-thinking technologist is concerned, is the end of the discussion. Business models must be constructed around this reality. (And if your business model is not based on reality, but instead on a la-la fairy land where every computer is under MPAA/RIAA/SPAA control, unsanctioned copies never happen, every view is metered, and directors and actors work for naught but "exposure"... Well, they have anti-psychotics that can help with that now.)

BTW, anyone hoping to debate the merits of copyright policy is REQUIRED to read this speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay -- it will easily be among the most enlightening forty-odd minutes of your life.

Schwab

How terribly convenient that, in December of last year, Microsoft jammed a new Xbox service "agreement" down everyone's throat where you "agree" to never sue Microsoft, either as an individual or as a member of a class, and instead "agree" to resolve all disputes via "neutral" arbitration.

It seems they saw Sony get its pants yanked down to its ankles, and all the consequent lawsuits, and thought to themselves, "We could apply the stunning engineering talent we've always claimed to have in this company to audit our systems, network architecture, and customer info handling processes to ensure such a thing never happens to us or our users... Or, we could forbid our customers from suing us."

Schwab

Chip Morningstar, call your office.

Schwab

Hmm... You could set her up with the moral equivalent of a "Live CD," i.e. the core OS files are read-only, with maybe a UnionFS-type of writeable store overlaid on top. All her data files would be on normal read-write partitions. Thus, if she infects her machine, all that's required is a reboot. Naturally, installing new software would require administrative intervention, but honestly, other than OS updates, how many times does she need to install something?

You could also put her machine in a DMZ on the company's network so her machine doesn't reach out and contaminate others.

...And I imagine you've probably already thought of most of this...

Schwab

About a year ago, when I was trying to figure out why notices from BofA were crashing my Moto RAZR, I did a little reading up on DKIM, and found it rather interesting. What I found even more interesting is that all the DKIM support I could locate operated at the MTA level (sendmail, postfix, etc.). I couldn't find any client-side tools that would verify DKIM signatures.

Has this situation changed (or did I miss something)? Are there any tools I could plug in to, say, 'mutt' to verify DKIM signatures?

Schwab