|
|
What good is a browser that makes you use about:config to undo all the "improvements"?
It's better than a browser that doesn't give you a way to undo all the "improvements".
I don't expect any browser to ever match exactly what I want, short of rolling my own. However, it's rare to find something with Firefox that can't be changed via a simple plugin or even just a setting in about:config. While Firefox may not be exactly what I want right out of the box, its configuration options allow me to turn it into exactly what I want (or pretty darn close).
This is what enthusiasts refer to as using positive pressure. Fans force air into the case, creating slightly higher than atmospheric pressure inside. The excess air then escapes out whatever holes and cracks it can find in the case. With negative pressure, the fan sucks warm air out of the case and creates lower pressure inside. Air comes in through the tiny holes and cracks in the case.
There's not a whole lot of performance difference between the two overall, but with positive pressure you have a small number of obvious entry points for air, which are easy to filter. With negative pressure, the air enters from a bunch of random spots that are nearly impossible to filter. While there's not much performance difference, one way makes it a whole lot easier to keep dust out of your system.
A number of comments here have mentioned it, but nobody has flat out said it. The big problem from dust is that it acts as an insulator, trapping heat in the components. It also inhibits airflow, which makes the insulation that much worse. I've not heard of any dusty PC components suffering from electrostatic problems, but there are tons of PCs and components that run hotter than they need to due to tons of dust clogging up fans and heatsink fins.
If you bought a phone on a two year contract with a wireless company, I'd argue that you don't actually own the phone until you complete the contract and pay off the "mortgage." By unlocking the phone you are undermining the contract you made. You are defaulting on the interest-free loan that you used to transform your $600 iPhone into a $200 iPhone. If you don't like that and don't hyave $600 handy, pay full price for the iPhone through a credit card loan instead.
There's no reason the phone hardware has to be tied to the service contract. As long as I keep paying AT&T my $X/mo, why should they care if I also want to pay T-Mobile $Y/mo to use my phone with their service instead? The Early Termination Fee is designed to cover the cost of subsidized hardware in the event that you cancel your contract. Why should AT&T care if I buy the $200 contract phone, then pay a $400 ETF to break the contract vs. just buying the $600 phone to begin with?
Secondly, this law makes no distinction between having your contract phone one day or if you've already completed your full contract term. Circumventing the carrier lock is now illegal once again, period.
The only justification I can see for the carrier lock on the hardware itself is that it helps to make the phone less useful if you try to break the contract without paying the ETF. Think of it as a lien on the hardware, but in that case it should automatically be removed once the contract obligations have been met.
Yes, you've completely misunderstood unlocking. This refers only to the lock tying the phone to a specific carrier. This doesn't having anything to do with jailbreaking or rooting (unlocking the phone's software to run unauthorized programs).
Last August, Google indicated that it would start lowering the search-result rankings of Websites with high numbers of 'valid' copyright removal notices. 'This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed on Spotify,' Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of Engineering, wrote in a corporate blog posting at the time.
Maybe it's just that even after demotion, the pirate sites are still the best possible result, ranking above the sites that the RIAA would like to see at the top...
Right - based on the opinion of a non-elected buearucrat.
There's something inherently wrong with that in a country that, supposedly, has democratically elected representation.
If you don't like that your elected officials are delegating powers to non-elected people, let them know and/or vote them out. There are a whole bunch of government employees who aren't elected, but still have power over citizens. The first example that comes to mind are the cops who enforce (or not) the laws. The point is that this is a specific duty outlined in a law that was passed by elected representatives, and there are similar duties and powers delegated to other non-elected positions. Should we have a popular vote for every single thing the entire government does?
And in case you missed it, these exemptions are open for public opinion before the decision is made. How come nobody threw a fit and made sure unlocking remained exempt last year, rather than waiting until the extension ran out (1/26) after the initial expiration (10/28)?
Agreed. There's really no need for a technical lock on the phone when you're already bound by the contract. As long as you're still following your contract and paying the monthly charge or ETF, why should the carrier care if you also want to pay someone else for service too?
Everyone seems to realize the petition itself isn't worth the imaginary paper it's printed on. Even if you get a response, it could be as simple as, "That's nice. You're wrong. The decision stands."
As TheSpoom stated above, there's no reason you can't have a binding contract to make sure the carrier doesn't lose money subsidizing the phone (in fact, you're probably under one of these contracts now) completely unrelated to a carrier lock on the phone. As long as you're in a legally binding contract to pay them the money, they shouldn't really care if you can use your phone on another network. If you want to keep paying AT&T $80/month for the subsidized phone and also pay T-Mobile another $50/month for service on the same phone, why should AT&T care? They're still getting their money that you agreed to pay.
On the other hand, due to the dismal state of cell phone technology in the US, most people don't really need an unlocked phone. The major carriers are on completely different technologies and bands - a Verizon CDMA phone simply won't work on AT&T's GSM network (and they use different LTE bands too). T-Mobile is also GSM, but they use different bands, so (currently) you won't get 4G and maybe even 3G depending on the phone's hardware. Hooray for buying a brand new $700 iPhone 5 to get 2G data speeds on it. Even if you could make a satisfactory switch from one carrier to another, would you want to keep paying AT&T the $80 monthly fee (or the large ETF) under your contract while also paying T-Mobile $50/month for the actual service? In the not-so-extensive looking I've done, there doesn't really seem to be much discount for having a non-subsidized phone anyway; if you're going to be paying the same $X per month, you might as well have the carrier throw in a subsidized phone. Most people are going to keep the phone and service they have for the full duration of the contract, making unlocking completely irrelevant.
Granted, there are some exceptions (relocating unexpectedly, international travel, etc.). I'm used to the iPhone world (it's supplied by my employer), so maybe Androids are very different. But from what I've seen, it's a non-issue for most people in the US. Verizon will unlock the GSM portion of an iPhone for international use (it didn't work for me on AT&T's domestic network, but I didn't end up using it internationally, so the unlock might not have actually been in effect yet) and AT&T unlocked my old off-contract iPhone by simply filling out a web form. In my experience, the carriers seem fairly willing to allow you to do things if it's actually for a legitimate use, as opposed to you simply wanting your phone completely unlocked for no good reason.
Ideally, I'd like to see service and hardware priced separately, with or without contracts. Plan A is $80/month with your own phone, $75 if you agree to a X-month contract (think of it as a bulk discount since the carrier knows you won't ). If you want a new $600 SuperPhone with your Plan A, it costs you $150 plus an extra $20/month with a 2-year contract. You end up paying a little more for the phone ($630 total), but you don't have to drop $600 right now on something you're used to getting for free. If you want to cancel the contract early, you're responsible for whatever the remainder of the amount owed is. If you have your own phone that you already bought with your own money, you know that you're saving $20/month on it. The carriers don't need locks because you're signing a contract to pay them enough to cover the cost of whatever you're getting, regardless of whether or not you get service through some other carrier. And to make those unlocked phones actually useful, let's see the carriers standardize (along with the rest of the world) on a network, so you can use your (paid-for) phone with the service of your choice.
This could result in some price increases if the carriers know that whatever contract they come up with for subsidizing the phone (monthly cost + ETF) needs to cover their actual cost, since they're not necessarily roping you into two years of overpriced service as well. I've seen a few deals where it's actually cheaper to sign up for a contract and pay the ETF than to just buy the no-contract option, so they'd need to make sure they closed all those loopholes. On the flip side, if they know the hardware contract is guaranteed to cover their costs on the phone, they should be able to lower the service price some since they're not including the hardware-subsidy compensation. It removes some of the black-box mystery from their pricing schemes (it's currently just a monthly phone bill, so most people don't realize the costs associated with each component), so I doubt the carriers would actually go for this.
What this petition is doing is asking the White House to get Congress to repeal a law they passed to make the act illegal.
Except, this isn't a law Congress passed - it's a mandate from the Librarian of Congress, who is not an elected legislator.
Hey, maybe that's what we need to make illegal: unelected bureaucrats creating laws by proxy.
Except, this is a law passed by Congress (the DMCA).
Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of on-line services for copyright infringement by their users.
Per 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1), the LoC is in charge of reviewing related items on a regular schedule and deciding if "fair use" exemptions need to be made. One of these exemptions was made in '06 to cover phone unlocking, and was not renewed this time.
This type of unlocking has been illegal since '98, with an exemption being granted from '06 - '12. It's not that it's suddenly illegal, it's now just no longer not-illegal (again).
This is incorrect, it *is* illegal to unlock your phone regardless of contract. This issue is not about breach of contract, it's about a DMCA exemption which has expired.
No, it's illegal to violate the DMCA in "cracking" the protection around the carrier lock in your phone's software. Under the recently-expired exemption, you were allowed to violate the DMCA for the purpose of unlocking your phone (via software hack of the carrier lock). The simple act of unlocking your phone is not illegal, only the act of cracking the software used for the carrier lock; there are other ways to unlock your phone, which are completely unaffected by this DMCA exemption.
So if I am working from home, how do you propose I send mail using my corporate address? With strict SPF, the old Best Practice, handing it over to my ISP relay, breaks.
If your answer is to set up a VPN to work, I say fuck that shit. SPF is a broken solution searching for a problem.
Send it through your work mail server. Depending on exactly how it's set up, that could be as simple as changing your mail client's settings from "mail.isp.net" to "mail.work.com". It's possible that it's much more complicated than that, but it could be nearly painless.
Keep in mind that your method of sending "me@work.com" emails from mail.isp.net would also fail the old reverse MX lookup that people used to use to block spam. When receiving an email from me@work.com, it would look up work.com and see that it uses mail.work.com as its MX. It would compare that to the sending mail.isp.net server and decide that it was spoofed mail, and reject it.
SPF is reverse MX lookups, but able to be configured by the mail server admin. Instead of tying only the MX records to the domain name, the admin can put whatever he wants in the SPF record.
I don't really have a suggestion, other than a standardized process for detecting events like this and reporting them to the sending organization. But it's hard to notify a company to let them know that their website has been hacked; I imagine it must be horrendously hard to find whomever is in charge of their mail infrastructure to point out to him that he's doing SPF wrong.
DMARC (which I just learned about from another comment) seems to be the answer to this problem. It's another layer to install and configure, but it allows senders and receivers to communicate about mail authentication.
Q: What do you say to a Puerto Rican in a three-piece suit? A: Will the defendant please rise?