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Comment Re:Section 230 was a trap all along (Score 1) 247

You have Section 230 precisely backwards. This is not unusual. Most people are confused by it.

The purpose, and effect, of Section 230 was to ALLOW platforms to moderate content WITHOUT losing the status that you call "common carrier."

The Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy decision left platforms in a position in which they had to choose between "common carrier" protection and "publisher" liability. It held that by moderating some content, Prodigy became liable for all content.

Section 230 made it possible for platforms to clean up ugly messes without inheriting responsibility for the actions taken by the third parties who made them.

The failure of Facebook and Twitter to take action against abusers is not a consequence of Section 230. It's a consequence of laziness and greed.

Comment You kids .... (Score 3, Insightful) 85

Most of you kids aren't old enough to know what Rasmus was talking about.

In 1994 there was no guarantee of Perl being installed on a server. There weren't a thousand ISPs with point-and-click credit card interfaces to spin up a webserver. If you had a webserver, it probably was running Solaris or AIX or Sys V. It almost certainly had a C compiler csh, ksh or (if you were really lucky) bash. So you downloaded and compiled Steven Grimm's uncgi tool:
http://www.midwinter.com/~kore...

It grabbed CGI args, cooked them nicely and stuck them in the environment. Suddenly any Unix tool could be used to crunch and spit out HTML.

I wrote half a dozen tools as shell scripts -- a microblogging tool (before blogs existed) for weathercaster Paul Douglas, a photo caption contest, various other data-submission microtools.

Yeah, it probably wasn't secure by modern standards, but the 1995 Internet wasn't totally infested with assholes.

PHP everywhere was a blessing, and it enabled the explosive growth of the Internet.

Comment Content management systems, of course (Score 4, Informative) 119

I do this for a living, so my answer is somewhat detailed.

Newspapers were using content management systems for this purpose beginning around 1970, before PCs. Previous to that, stories were transmitted electronically, stored on punch tape in a 6-bit format, but edited on paper and re-keyboarded as necessary.

If you wanted to use a story as-is, without editing, you could have a copyboy go find the right punch tape and hand-carry it to the typesetting department.

Computerizing the editing process/approval process allowed written material to be stored, edited on screens, and output directly to electronic typesetters (which were already computerized; a major use of the PDP-8 was automated hyphenation and justification). The story "files" were typically organized in "queues" or "baskets."

The earliest CMS were bespoke, but they quickly became standardized -- "off the shelf" with potentially a great deal of customization, produced by about a dozen companies around the world that often designed and built their own hardware components.

Electronic page layout was pioneered on these systems. One of the first was at the Minneapolis Star and Tribune; the project leader later created founded Aldus, created Pagemaker, and the desktop publishing revolution followed.

As desktop publishing emerged, it displaced bespoke layout systems, and networked PCs displaced proprietary terminals, and SQL databases displaced proprietary storage, but the putting them together into a usable workflow system remained a specialty. In general, the CMS companies got out of the hardware business entirely and focused on software and services.

Photos came later. Keep in mind that the JPEG standard didn't even exist until the 1990s. The first wirephoto storage-and-editing systems were big bespoke monsters that looked like something from a 1950s sci-fi serial, but they were quickly replaced by Mac-based tools, and then the core CMS systems embraced photo management.

Broadcasting trailed all of this in many ways. TV stations actually produce fairly little information in the common sense of the word, and have lighter requirements for handling text, but huge amounts of data in the form of video. When I first worked in TV, video was shot on film, then videotape. As video became digitized and companies like Avid created digital video editors, managing the data became a requirement there as well, and a specialty.

It's now possible to put together a text/image/video workflow system with open source tools. For a single publication, I could do it in a few days with Drupal, and if the Web is the target, it's all pretty straightforward. But the news CMS field is still dominated by specialty vendors.

Print is still a huge driver of revenue, and that means interfacing with advertising workflow and print page layout tools. Adobe InDesign is pretty much the standard there, although I know of one or two systems that have proprietary layout. As a result, a small (and shrinking) number of specialty vendors dominate. They integrate off-the-shelf components, including open source tools and commercial software.

Where I work, writers are using CKEditor, but it's implemented in a proprietary Web-based workflow system that publishes to multiple Drupal sites on the Web and integrates with InDesign for print. Wire service information, agency photos, etc., all come into the CMS.

Because most of the older legacy systems are utterly print-focused, they can be extremely frustrating in a digital world. Some news companies have assemble parallel production systems for the Web, stitching together any number of off-the-shelf components, or writing proprietary code. If you use Django, you should know that it was created at a newspaper company. The Washington Post has created its own system called Arc that it is peddling to other news companies.

Comment Seriously, who uses Skype these days? (Score 3, Insightful) 66

Skype was a big deal back in the day. I can remember holding my laptop up to a window in Paris to steal an unsecured wifi signal and phone home. Wowza! But that was ten years ago. I have dozens of VoIP and video conferencing choices. The world has moved on and Microsoft is the backwater, not the mainstream.

I spent a week in Ukraine a few months ago and wound up on a three-hour conference call with work back in the US, using Google Voice. (Whether that's progress or not is open to debate.) But I was not concerned about losing the 10-euro credit on my Skype account when I got an expiration notice from the Borg.

Like the VHS tapes I just hauled off to Goodwill ... I just don't need it any more.

Comment How do they handle security/identity? (Score 1) 46

When I was in India several years ago, it was not possible to get onto the Internet without proof of identity. In order to use a computer at a cyber cafe, I had to provide my passport, whose number was duly recorded in a register along with the beginning and ending times of my session. Considering the terrorism attacks since then, I would expect that practice to continue.

So how is the Google/RailTel access handled? Do people have to provide proof of identity to establish an account? Is it actually open? Encrypted?

Comment Amazon already goes beyond this (Score 1) 83

The current tablet FireOS predicts what you might want to watch and, if you have plenty of space on your SD card, preloads video content when you're on wifi. You don't have to manage the downloads (they are purged if the space is needed). The external SD integration is actually better than that of Android Marshmallow.

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