The internet is not a broadcast medium.
This.
But alas, turning the internet into a broadcast medium is exactly what ISPs want to do.
I hope that someday net neutrality also means bandwidth into your home equals bandwidth out of it. Check your service: we don't live in that world today.
The issue is not open and unfettered internet vs. evil corporate control. It is one set of bureaucrats and corporations against another set of bureaucrats and corporations. Just because they use the words "net neutrality" doesn't mean there is anything neutrality related involved. Remember, the same national politicians got together to give us the Republic-led bipartisan "USA PATRIOT Act", which had absolutely nothing to do with patriotism.
False equivalence. Just because the Patriot Act was newspeak doesn't mean Net Neutrality is.
"free and open internet" as we knew it is not an option on the table. The discussion at hand is about how much power Washington will have to pick winners and losers in corporate fights. And who in Washington will wield that power.
Net Neutrality is not about giving Washington the power to pick winners and losers. It's about keeping that power out of the hands of service-providers.
Oh, and a few new fees and tacked-on unrelated regulations "just because".
Citation please?
The launch was scrubbed due to attached-anvil clouds and lightning risk.
For the curious, attached-anvil clouds are also known as cumulonimbus clouds.
Weather doesn't want to cooperate. Anvil clouds within 10 miles of launch site.
Tune in tomorrow for next attempt.
Next lift-off attempt is tomorrow at around 4:10 PM EDT, if I heard correctly.
Solar is also doomed because eventually it will have to scale up to the point where enclosing the entire sun simply isn't enough.
Good lord, are you on crack? How do you think Planet Earth handled its energy needs before Homo Sapiens got here?
In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman overlord garden ornaments with hot grits poured down their pants welcomes you!
[Soviet Russia is sounding good right about now...]
I remember when most of the Slashdot stories revolved around fire and the wheel.
Eh? Speak up, sonny..
These climate models that this is based on are complete rubbish. There are so many variables that you can make them reach any conclusion you want simply by changing the values you input. We can't even predict an accurate weather forecast more than 10 days in the future. How could we possibly predict what the weather is going to be like in 100 years? Or 50 years? Or 1 year? Or even next month.
Climate != Weather.
If you are reporting about a protest, you should, at the very minimum say WHY they are protesting.
This article totally fails to do that.
From TFS and TFA:
Thirty Meter Telescope is constructing the telescope on land that is held sacred to some Native Hawaiians.
Genuine question as I have no expertise in this whatsoever...would crafted contact lenses help out here?
Excellent question. I was wondering the same thing.
I'd assume a technology that could read irises could be designed to detect contact lenses as well, and alert a human screener to their presence.
Also, I'd assume the contacts could not be entirely opaque for various reasons, so perhaps a technology could still read the irises beneath them?
a future black market in human irises.
"Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the Gap."
the GPL and going to BSD, MIT, others.
I think you're confused about what "the issue" is.
Ubiquiti Networks modified GPL code and released binaries, and in the process, created a security problem with their product that they have yet to fix themselves. Under the GPL, they are obliged to release their modifications to the GPL code, but they refuse to do so. If they released the changes, then their customers could find and fix the problem without having to wait for Ubiquity Networks to do it.
Now, if Ubiquity Networks had used BSD or MIT code, they would be under no obligation to reveal the changes they made. Therefore, they could continue to ignore the problem, and the customers would be unable to find and fix the problem themselves. In short, a BSD/MIT license would benefit Ubiquity Networks, but obviously not its customers.
The GPL is rape in license form. Viral infection of the GPL sounds like an STD left behind by a rapist.
The GPL may be viral, but to correct your metaphor, the only way to catch it is via consensual intercourse with GPL source. There's no rape going on.
The linked site in TFS is suffering from (possibly slashdot-induced) overload. Here's the text from the linked page:
Four ways Ubiquiti Networks is creatively violating the GPL
Ubiquiti Networks is a company which makes long-range wireless equipment. Admittedly, you can do some pretty amazing stuff with it, but the company has a dark history of securities fraud, violation of U.S. sanctions, trademark and copyright lawsuits and software patents, which isn't as amazing.
In addition to this, they have been violating the GPL. However, because they did it creatively, most people don't know about it, and Ubiquiti still hasn't come into compliance.
Here are four ways that they have succeeded in making the violations hard to notice, and even harder to act upon.
1. Giving the appearance of compliance
'You can find the complete and corresponding source in the GPL archive.'
Ubiquiti had a website set up where you can download tarballs purportedly containing all GPL source for each and every firmware release. (I can't find it any more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't still there.) When you look through these tarballs, they appear to be complete, and there are build instructions which allow you to make your own custom firmware.
It's only when you look closer that you start to notice problems, such as...
2. Refusing to provide the source to their modified bootloader, even though they made changes that introduced security vulnerabilities
Security keys
Up until version 5.5.4 of Ubiquiti's airOS, the locally-modified u-boot bootloader contained a security issue - It was possible to extract the plain-text config from devices running the firmware, without leaving a trace. And the plain-text config contains unencrypted WPA/WPA2/RADIUS passwords.
Even worse than this security issue, was Ubiquiti's response to it. Namely, they:
Refused to provide the source code, even though u-boot is under the GPL
Didn't fix the security issue for a long time after it was publicly disclosed
To this day, Ubiquiti still has not provided the u-boot source code.
3. Providing source code to a version of Linux, just not the one that they actually ship, and hoping that nobody notices
Ubiquiti Source Ubiquiti Binaries
It would be natural to think that the binaries that Ubiquiti provides were compiled from the source code that Ubiquti provides. As it turns out, for a large number of their releases, the kernel source given does not correspond to the kernel in the official firmware images.
As evidence, consider that in version 5.5.4 of the AirMax firmware, the kernel was modified such that the MTD partitions would be read only, however this change cannot be found in the corresponding kernel patches or source.
Such practices make finding violations extremely difficult, and we can't know for certain that they haven't done this with anything else in the GPL tarball. It's possible that this was just a mistake, but remember that people have complained about this without much of a response.
And speaking of complaining...
4. Dragging out GPL code requests for months on end, then inexplicably going silent
Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary
In case you think that I am being mean to Ubiquiti by going public, please note that I have been trying to contact Ubiquiti for the past year about the issue of the u-boot source code. You can see my attempts here, here and here.
In fact, I even got a copyright holder of u-boot to ask for the source, and they still haven't provided it.
From my conversations with Ubiquiti, I have found that they claimed that it's alright to refuse to provide source code to GPL-licensed software if "This decision was taken with the security of the users in mind". Furthermore, my conversations were endlessly delayed by the supposed necessity to forward my query to another, unnamed, team.
And ultimately, the relevant team never responded, hoping that I would simply forget about it or give up.
However, if we want the GPL to retain its power, this is precisely what we cannot do. If you can spare a minute, please do any or all of the following so that we can retain the GPL's power to help the community:
Raise awareness - upvote it, send it to friends or write a blog post about it
Write to Ubiquiti requesting the source - their email addresses are support@ubnt.com and info@ubnt.com. You should try both.
Send me an email telling me what you've done. My email address is riley@openmailbox.org
The image of the keys is Copyright Cantaloupe2 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The image of Tux without glasses is Copyright Larry Ewing, Simon Budig and Anja Gerwinski, and can be used provided that attribution is given.
The image of Tux with glasses is Copyright Subcommandante at Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The bureaucracy quote photo is Copyright Ben Woosley, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The text was written by Riley Baird (me). I, Riley Baird, the copyright holder of the text on this webpage, hereby release this text into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
So you are saying that corporations don't trust the GPL because they do not comply with the GPL? Seems like an easy fix isn't it?
This.
It isn't the GPL that has earned distrust here. It's Ubiquiti Networks.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
