Comment as I said, 90% (Score 1) 248
raymorris said:
> a few hundred citizens and a few thousand foreign nationals not allowed to fly into or out of the country.
raymorris said:
> a few hundred citizens and a few thousand foreign nationals not allowed to fly into or out of the country.
If you are the IT director of a big corporation, you have no option but to MITM SSL traffic. The alternative is providing a perfect way for malicious insiders to steal corporate secrets (like a whole pile of credit card numbers or the blueprints/source code for the companies latest products). And providing a vector for malware or attacks to bypass all the edge-level intrusion detection systems.
And providing a way for the people on the inside to access things that they shouldn't (whether its pornography, pirated content, or anything else). That last one is even more important in, say, a school or educational environment or library than in a corporate network.
Its not just Japan, France and many other countries seem to have laws that limit discounting of books or fix their prices. Why do governments continue to maintain these restrictions?
Smallpox is not "easily created".
Maybe not 'easily', but it can be created. The entire genetic sequence of Variola Major is known and has been published, so the virus could be synthesized artificially by reproducing the sequence.
Islam requires non-Muslims to convert or pay tax
Non-Muslims have to pay tax (jizya). Muslims have to pay tax too; it just goes by a different name (zakat). Which non-failed state doesn't enforce laws against tax evasion?
I wonder if, in time, we will see a regression back to city-states once urban populations get big enough. Tokyo is basically its own country, and the same goes for SF, LA, and NYC.
I believe the limiting factor on country size is 1) communication ability, and 2) transportation (force projection) ability.
Roads were a major factor in the size of the Roman Empire, for example. City-states were common when there was no force regionally large enough to conquer the city. City states also needed to maintain farmland surrounding them, so they could remain fed.
All another company has to do is make distribution deals with all the major publishers
Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant from the perspective of a publisher seeking to distribute its own works.
get people to give up their e-ink readers
How closely are e-ink readers coupled to their respective stores? Can they not read epub or mobi format?
and make apps for every major platform
Which major platform doesn't already have a reader for epub or mobi format?
I believe the article is saying that you don't just blindly allow the use of URLs without verifying that the caller is within an authenticated session. This has nothing to do with changing passwords.
A newly installed web application has to create a first authenticated session that lets the founder set his own password (or set his own e-mail address in order to recover his password) and grant himself founder privileges. The URL of this first session is effectively a password (or more properly a substitute for a password), though I'll grant that it should be disabled through other means most of the time.
But if you don't want any app to do anything, why do you have a device capable of running apps?
I see at least two problems.
The first is that Android's permissions are far too coarse-grained. SD card permissions don't have separate settings for "read and write the app's own folder and folders explicitly chosen by the user" and "read and write the whole damn thing". Internet permissions don't have separate settings for "communicate only with a specific set of hostnames" and "communicate with everything". Phone state permissions don't have separate settings for "read whether the phone is ringing as a cue to pause the game or video and save the user's work immediately" and "read the identity of the cellular subscriber whose SIM is in this device".
The other problem is that unlike (say) Bitfrost in OLPC Sugar, Android's model isn't designed for users to be able to turn permissions on and off. A user must either grant all privileges that an application requests or not install the application at all. For example, a keyboard app might be able to read the user's location and contacts, ostensibly for adding nearby landmarks and friends' names to the autocorrect. But a privacy-conscious user has no technical means of preventing the application from misusing those permissions. Android 4.3 experimented with "App Ops", an app on Google Play Store to disable individual permissions of individual applications, but Google did away with that in Android 4.4 because it caused too many applications to crash on an uncaught SecurityException.
Those users who are "too sophisticated" may need to write their own software
Until the device blocks sophisticated users from running their own software. This is where the walled garden concept comes in.
Or it could be correctly interpreted as "use digital signatures to verify senders and that the message has not been tampered with."
I understand how you might see a non sequitur, so let me connect the dots. Verifying a sender is only authentication. According to the article, authentication should always be followed by authorization, a decision as to whether or not the system should trust software from a particular sender. A platform owner could play up its strong authentication and gloss over the inflexible authorization policy that follows it. And "inflexible authorization policy" is another word for a walled garden.
What happens if you try shouting "xyzzy" ?
A hollow voice says "PLUGH".
Moderation is the regulation of speech: "You can talk about Oranges, just not here. Go over there to talk about Oranges."
It becomes censorship when the moderation authority continues: "You can't talk about over there, it is evil!"
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
