In my last several engagements, I purchased (on behalf of the clients) version of standalone Photoshop and CS specifically not to be tied to the CC model. Sure, the CC can tout constant updates, but what if I don’t need the updates? Who said that in 10 years the documents I create now can be opened with whatever CC updates get accumulated over the years? Those advocating newer is better, consider your Win7 machine gets automatically updated to Win8 when the company ships it and you’re in the middle of the project and a few things stop working. For critical tasks I want to preserve files, programs, not to be tied to some third party to hand me the critical tools.

The licensing contract that was not signed by the photographer will be null and void. Puff! This suggestion is equivalent of printing a t-shirt that says "anyone who looks at it owns me $100". Right, try enforcing that in court.

Detection of the camera pointed in the unknown direction on the bus will be impossible.

Nearly all SLRs are insensitive to IR light when recording. And almost no camera today (still or video) is using IR to autofocus. Illuminating the area with a powerful IR light is damaging to the eyes -- yes it is like regular light except in the dark when the pupils are be dilated any powerful light can cause a damage. I was working on a device that had 3W IR LEDs and after a few minutes the eyes begin to hurt even when I was not looking at the lights directly.

And my owners want the traffic to clear in front of the limousine as the bus rolls into a congested area, but they are ok to have the traffic pile up behind the bus. We've done some testing with really loud honking but it proved ineffective. We don’t want to destroy other cars either, so no shooting torpedoes, please!

This is very true. Recording and editing the music with the decent quality used to be very expensive. The analog consoles used to be hundreds of thousands of dollars producing similar quality what a thousand dollar computer with a decent audio card can do today. The studios nonetheless demand copyright ownership for offering studios (cheap now) and distribution service (also became cheap).

Similar state existed in photography where the equipment had astronomical cost and companies could offer equipment, hire photographers "for hire" and keep the copyright. Nowadays, is is nearly impossible to see contracts where the photographer does not retain the copyright on his/her images. Still, plenty of services are available that remove all the "negotiation" part when selling and advertising the images. The photographer is free to offer images for sale with multiple brokers and some have agreements where if an images available for sale on one service will be offered for sale on the other too. There's no reason the music industry cannot follow the same model. The musician will be in charge of the recordings.

What really is killing the development of this market is the fact that one can sell "the ownership" under the current copyright laws. Once the labels buy the "ownership" of the recording they haven't produced, they can also buy the laws that benefit them and no so much help the musicians or the music industry in general. Kill the labels and let the artists to be the deciders of where the music to be played and it will increase the competition among services too -- bringing the new and innovative distribution channels.

Restore Net Neutrality By Directing the FCC to Classify Internet Providers as "Common Carriers".

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/restore-net-neutrality-directing-fcc-classify-internet-providers-common-carriers/5CWS1M4P

When Microsoft and other companies try to fight copyright infringement, they essentially made the law that "making the product available" constitutes the infringement. It doesn't matter if anyone has actually downloaded the copyrighted material or used it in any way that might be illegal, the fact that the product was "made available" is a violation of the law and implies under hefty statutory damages without the owner needing to prove any damages. The corporations were successful at crafting the law that punishes such the behavior of sharing and essentially makes an individual who shares go bankrupt.

How would the same principle of overzealous punishing for "making available" work in the proposed case of personal data and DRM? Actually very simply. Only in this case the health care provider is the one who potentially "makes available" the personal data. Just as it doesn't matter whether the downloaded copyrighted material has ever been played/installed/used, the fact that it was made available is punishable. With personal data, once anyone's data is "made available" it would be irrelevant if it was used or misused, the mere fact of making it available should be punishable. And I don't mean a small fine. I mean jail time for those who approved the decision, the architecture, or made errors in code. As it is difficult to impose the same severity punishment that individuals face for sharing onto a corporation, it should be either a corporation to go bankrupt or responsible people going to jail. What will happen if such law gets passed? Since many executives will not like to end up in jail for proposing a stupid solution, the silly ideas will die out. So, if some provider decides to implement Microsoft's solution with DRM and an error in Microsoft DRM causes the data to be leaked, the Microsoft executives would face felony charges for not providing the appropriate safeguards and making the data available. Yes, I mean, you, Craig Mundie would become a felon! I completely support such a reciprocal implementation of the law.

Absolutely not true. When the number of players in a game is limited, then to reach the people outside of the game would require the "conversion" to some more accepted form of payment that is used by the outside group. Once more people start playing the same game, the conversion becomes less and less necessary. That is true for any type of monetary exchange.

Think of this as people in Europe are playing their game and exchanging Euros, but once a European comes to the US, using the same Euros is significantly more difficult without exchanging them to the US Dollars. However, if you find a person at the garage sale who frequently travels to Europe, he might be happy to accept your Euros without converting to dollars. The same becomes true of the Bitcoin, the more people join the "game" the easier it becomes to use it as real currency without doing any conversion.

The summary of the book seems to focus too much on the “criminals” and claims that the end of the internet is in the “unregulation” of the internet. While it is a factor, let’s not forget that the growth of the internet was also attributed mainly to the same factors. Internet gave power to ordinary citizens and it’s not possible to have that power and not to have anonymity. But with anonymity comes the criminal side as well.

The web is changing now. With every day we have less and less privacy. Large companies got to be very good at tracking everyone’s move on the web. Practically nothing remains anonymous on the web any longer. Getting an internet service in the US requires presenting a government-issued ID and SSN (wasn’t the case a few years ago). The ISP now start the deep packet inspection where everything becomes monitored and certain undesired connections are dropped. Welcome to the world of censorship where no lists will be provided of what exactly is censored. And that, not the “wild west,” will be one of the causes for the death of the internet.

There was an interesting article in Wired magazine on the topic: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/ It provides insights about how we, as users, choose the closed platforms (e.g. google, facebook). And the more we turn away from the true open and anonymous internet, the more irrelevant the internet becomes.

Just have a /. comment voting system where readers/writers can "vote" on the articles. Very quickly there will be a select group of readers providing valid ratings, so give them more mod points. The good articles will bubble up to the top having higher rating. The "prestige" factor will be in having a high rating on such a site. And the karma will improve!

I have a dashboard camera and had similar thoughts about the encryption. I don’t care to stream the video somewhere else -- this is not my concern, I just don’t want the video to end up in the hands that I didn’t approve. Current cameras store several hours of most recent footage and even if I decide to share the last 5 minutes, who knows what could be there during previous hours if my card is copied in full.

Even if the camera manufacturers are not making the camera with built-in encryption, having a public-key encryption can be achieved on a separate tiny device. With current technology the device could have a form-factor of an SD-card. Imagine you have an SD card to which you record a public-key. Every following write to the card will be done through a built-in encryption using that key. All reads will return the encrypted content and it will appear as garbage. But for the purpose of most cameras (that only need to be able to read directories and file names) this will work. If the device is not as small as the SD card, I’d be ok to have wires sticking out of the SD slot that go to my “encryptor”. I can totally see such card to be useful for general photography too.

A better analogy: A bank has a web server that takes person's name and returns that person's SSN. A "hacker" sends your username and gets your SSN. He does that for several people from the phone directory. Hacker goes to prison for the BANK'S FAULT of exposing SSNs.

I assume you try to increase the convenience of browsing and not to restrict anyone of the information (the latter I don’t think is possible). Any blocking will have some unintended effect. Router dns poisoning works relatively well. I had it for a long time and enjoy it. I like that all my machines, including any mobile clients connected to my wi-fi, have less ads displayed. My main purpose is to block tracking sites, rather than disable the ads. I also like the fact that the page content does not change, no scripts get inserted or modified, only the third party sites are blocked.

But... There were cases when I had to disable or modify the blocking. Hulu detects that the ads are blocked and takes a couple of minutes for a timeout to happen. It might be OK to allow a 30 second ad to show in that instance. A checkout in a few online shops may not work at all if the tracking is blocked. Yes, it is the problem with the sites, but I had to enable tracking a couple of times so that I could complete the checkout. Many of the referral sites stop working by clicking the products directly, as the case with goodgle shopping.

While doing some investigation I was shocked to see how much data is shared with third parties even by the big name stores. Every single product you view on a shopping site may generate notifications to facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc. Everything that gets placed in a shopping card may generate “likes” behind the scenes if you have another instance of the browser with logged in profile open. The amount of tracking is phenomenal, and it is my right to restrict it.

I still think that having two somewhat insecure systems is better than one insecure system + biometrics. A card+pin is a perfect example and the dual piece authentication is better than a single piece. What would be better though: a card+RFID or card+biometrics? RFID is inherently insecure, it can be cloned relatively easily. Even then, I would argue that a card+RFID is more secure than a card+biometrics. Why? Because if the biometrics is hacked, your NEXT card will be vulnerable and other places that use your biometrics will be vulnerable and you will not be able to do anything about it. Where is in case of card+RFID, both can be cancelled if any is hacked, so RFID, even if it is a joke of security, in combination is more secure than biometrics.

It surprises me that many debate the “security” of the fingerprint scanners while omitting the major flaw of any biometric system – it is not revocable. You cannot simply reset someone’s fingertips if the system for that instance has been compromised. With pretty much all other authentication there’s some mechanism to delete the bad entry: a password can be reset, a certificate can be revoked, a compromised key can end up in the black list, etc. None of this is possible with any biometric system. Even if it takes an elaborate trickery and a lot of resources to duplicate a finger, a hand, or a mockup of the retina scan, once it’s done, it cannot be “cancelled” at the biometric system level.