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Education

Teachers Union: Computers Can Negatively Impact Children's Ability To Learn 310

Posted by samzenpus from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children? dept.
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "A teacher's union in Northern Ireland is asserting that children spending too much time on computers are impairing their ability to learn. The asserted excessive computer use is being blamed for an inability to concentrate or socialize. As one teacher puts it, '... these gadgets are really destroying their ability to learn.'" This has been a topic of debate for as long as kids have had computers.
Youtube

Google Using YouTube Threat As Leverage For Cheaper Streaming Rights 197

Posted by Soulskill from the not-playing-fair dept.
Sockatume writes: "According to a press release issued by WIN, a group representing independent musicians, Google is threatening to de-list musicians' videos from YouTube if they do not agree to the terms for its unannounced streaming music service. The template contracts issued to musicians are described as 'undervalued' relative to other streaming services, and are not open for negotiation. The press release was issued by WIN but rescinded when Google agreed to further discussions; The Associated Free Press and The Guardian have published stories based on that original release."

Comment Re:Users make the final decision ... (Score 1) 406

by peppepz (#47036363) Attached to: Did Mozilla Have No Choice But To Add DRM To Firefox?

So by restricting what people can use their browser for, you think its more free?

Yes. In the same way as restricting what people can take away from other people's houses makes everyone more free.

You can choose not to use DRM content or you can choose not to

You can't choose not to use DRM once it's required to access most content of the Internet thanks to the fact that Mozilla, too, made it possible.

but if the browser doesn't support it, there is no freedom of choice, is there?

This is an injustice that is to be ascribed by the perpetrators of DRM: Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft. Now Mozilla have joined the club of the culprits.

Comment Re:I don't like DRM either (Score 1) 361

by peppepz (#47003843) Attached to: How Firefox Will Handle DRM In HTML
When a relevant portion of the Internet requires DRM, compiling out DRM support from your browser will only lock you out of the Internet. It's just like Flash. Sites will require it for the silliest reasons and people who can't run it won't be able to access them. Except that now it's worse, because unlike Flash, EME backends cannot be implemented on open source platforms and they will never be made obsolete by some standard technology as HTML5 did with Flash. Basically, Mozilla caved in to the pressure from Google and the other servants of Hollywood to split the web into two unreachable halves. So much for Mozilla's mission of "an open web".

Comment Re:Isn't hard drive access desirable? (Score 1) 361

by peppepz (#47003655) Attached to: How Firefox Will Handle DRM In HTML

DRM being crackable is not actually that important, what matters is how difficult it is for the average user. You only have to make it slightly tricky or add some slight perceived risk to downloading pirated stuff and they will choose to pay for it instead.

No, skilled users will pirate the contents and serve them to the average users in a form that is even more convenient to consume than the DRM-ridden one.

Refusing to support this part of the standard would have robbed Firefox of more users than they will lose by supporting it.

The EME non-standard cannot be supported by open source platforms. It's not a matter of Mozilla "refusing" to support it, it's mathematically impossible for them to support it in a meaningful way. A EME-enabled site implicitly refuses any user running Firefox on Linux. So it's EME itself that robs Firefox of its users, not Mozilla's decision to support it or not.

The reality is that people who view piracy as some sort of moral duty and right like you do are in the minority, that is why most of the public quite happily go along with more stringent copyright laws being drafted by the politicians they elect.

Even if that were true, it doesn't make those laws any more just. In some places of the world, the vast majority of people believe that gay people should be hanged from a crane in the public square.
Books

Game of Thrones Author George R R Martin Writes with WordStar on DOS 522

Posted by Soulskill from the change-is-scary dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. 'I actually like it,' says Martin. 'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.' 'I actually have two computers,' Martin continued. 'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.'"
Firefox

How Firefox Will Handle DRM In HTML 361

Posted by Soulskill from the backed-into-a-corner dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last year the W3C approved the inclusion of DRM in future HTML revisions. It's called Encrypted Media Extensions, and it was not well received by the web community. Nevertheless, it had the support of several major browser makers, and now Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal has a post explaining how Firefox will be implementing EME. He says, 'This is a difficult and uncomfortable step for us given our vision of a completely open Web, but it also gives us the opportunity to actually shape the DRM space and be an advocate for our users and their rights in this debate. ... From the security perspective, for Mozilla it is essential that all code in the browser is open so that users and security researchers can see and audit the code. DRM systems explicitly rely on the source code not being available. In addition, DRM systems also often have unfavorable privacy properties. ... Firefox does not load this module directly. Instead, we wrap it into an open-source sandbox. In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user's hard drive or the network. Instead, the sandbox will provide the CDM only with communication mechanism with Firefox for receiving encrypted data and for displaying the results.'"
Security

Do Embedded Systems Need a Time To Die? 187

Posted by Soulskill from the upgrade-or-perish dept.
chicksdaddy writes: "Dan Geer, the CISO of In-Q-Tel, has proposed giving embedded devices such as industrial control and SCADA systems a scheduled end-of-life in order to manage a future in which hundreds of billions of them will populate every corner of our personal, professional and lived environments. Individually, these devices may not be particularly valuable. But, together, IoT systems are tremendously powerful and capable of causing tremendous social disruption. 'Is all the technologic dependency, and the data that fuels it, making us more resilient or more fragile?' he wondered. Geer noted the appearance of malware like TheMoon, which spreads between vulnerable home routers, as one example of how a population of vulnerable, unpatchable embedded devices might be cobbled into a force of mass disruption. Geer proposes a novel solution: embedded systems that do not have a means of being (securely) managed and updated remotely should be configured with some kind of 'end of life,' past which they will cease to operate. Allowing embedded systems to 'die' will remove a population of remote and insecure devices from the Internet ecosystem and prevent those devices from falling into the hands of cyber criminals or other malicious actors, Geer argued."
Google

Google Looked Into Space Elevator, Hoverboards, and Teleportation 98

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home-on-your-hoverboard dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google has a huge research budget and an apparent willingness to take on huge projects. They've gotten themselves into autonomous cars, fiber optic internet, robotics, and Wi-Fi balloons. But that raises a question: if they're willing to commit to projects as difficult and risk as those, what projects have they explored but rejected? Several of the scientists working at Google's 'innovation lab' have spilled the beans: '[Mag-lev] systems have a stabilizing structure that keeps trains in place as they hover and move forward in only one direction. That couldn't quite translate into an open floor plan of magnets that keep a hoverboard steadily aloft and free to move in any direction. One problem, as Piponi explains, is that magnets tend to keep shifting polarities, so your hoverboard would constantly flip over as you floated around moving from a state of repulsion to attraction with the magnets. Any skateboarder could tell you what that means: Your hoverboard would suck. ... If scaling problems are what brought hoverboards down to earth, material-science issues crashed the space elevator. The team knew the cable would have to be exceptionally strong-- "at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have," by Piponi's calculations. He found one material that could do this: carbon nanotubes. But no one has manufactured a perfectly formed carbon nanotube strand longer than a meter. And so elevators "were put in a deep freeze," as Heinrich says, and the team decided to keep tabs on any advances in the carbon nanotube field.'"
United States

Study Finds US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy 818

Posted by Soulskill from the cats-and-dogs-governing-together dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"
Open Source

How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion? 582

Posted by Soulskill from the or-at-least-marginally-less-unsafe dept.
jammag writes: "Heartbleed has dealt a blow to the image of free and open source software. In the self-mythology of FOSS, bugs like Heartbleed aren't supposed to happen when the source code is freely available and being worked with daily. As Eric Raymond famously said, 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.' Many users of proprietary software, tired of FOSS's continual claims of superior security, welcome the idea that Heartbleed has punctured FOSS's pretensions. But is that what has happened?"

Comment Re:google has no choice, like many others before t (Score 1) 128

Basically you have to pay them money in order to be allowed to do things that are already ethical, perhaps even legal to do. If you already can do these things, then you often have to put up lobbying efforts to make sure that you can continue doing them.

Paying for extortion is unethical and illegal too. Laws punish both the extorter and who omits to denounce.

For example, recall how after Google introduced gmail, California senator Liz Figueroa wanted to ban it.

Presumably she was afraid of the fact that the average Gmail user wouldn''t be aware that Google (and Google's unfaithful employees, and hackers, and the NSA, ...) would be able to read his email, and continue to be able to do so for an unspecified amount of time after that mail was "deleted". Which is what actually happens today, but to a much wider extent, with people using the services of Google (Facebook, Bing, ...) without being aware of the massive and uncontrollable espionage that supports them, because the terms of service are explained in EULAs which are effectively not understandable by those users. Banning Gmail would have been unuseful and unjust, I'd have regulated them to explain this policy to the users by using the same font size that they use when they advertise the size of the storage space they're offering, before the user signs the contract.

In that case, it took some heavy lobbying in order to keep gmail legal.

You mean that Google overrode the people's sovereign will, that they had expressed democratically by electing Liz Figueroa, by corrupting other politicians? If so, it's highly immoral and Google deserves to be punished for this. The government has the monopoly of coercion in modern democracies, and this privilege stems from the fact that it represents the will of the people. Altering this fact is one of the most serious crimes that an entity can stain itself with.

Before gmail they used to suck horribly, the good ones gave you a whopping 10MB of storage

In 2005 my ISP gave me 300 MB of storage which, in a time of 56K modem dialup connections, was plenty. The free offer from the same provider was 100MB, which is still ten times bigger than 10MB.

and each action you took required an entire page reload, making them slow as fuck.

Did your webmail work like that? The one of my ISP looked like MS Outlook and wasn't bad. Why, AJAX was invented by Microsoft for that exact purpose.

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