Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the EU Parliament has just put an end to the open internet.
Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the open internet now has to put an end to the EU Parliament. (Or at least the members thereof that sold the open internet down the river.)
Make a list of all the people who voted yes to this abomination, and implement a special geoblocking where all anyone from Europe can see of your site is "this content is not available in your country because of Articles 11 and 13 of the Copyright Directive. These are the people who voted for it. Until they are gone and the law is fixed, we are unable to offer service in your region."
See how long they last if a few key sites pick up on that idea.
That the Rule of Law is beneficial is not being debated here.
Well, I'd certainly hope not, but seeing the notion that rules enable greater freedom labeled as "Orwellian" provides enough of a seed of doubt that some clarification becomes worthwhile...
Also, what's with the Orwellian "there is no freedom without rules" line in there?
That's not Orwellian at all, really. Their application of it to this specific scenario is pretty atrocious, but the statement that "there is no freedom without rules! Otherwise, only the strongest will prevail" is right on the money. What they're describing is the principle of the rule of law, where placing restrictions on the use of various kinds of power and force allows civilization and freedom to flourish at higher levels.
I've heard the analogy made to flying a kite. At first glance, you might think that the kite's string is keeping it down, which is technically true. It won't fly any higher than the length of string permits. But at the same time, the tension on the string is also what is holding it up, and if you cut the string, it will be at the mercy of the wind, with no restrictions to keep it stable, and immediately come crashing down.
I can't help but wonder. We keep hearing about how bad Articles 11 and 13 are. This implies that there are at least 11 other Copyright Directive Articles that we're never hearing about. How many are there total and why is no one talking about the rest of them, since it's difficult to believe that the same people who came up with these two stinkers would make the rest of the package boring and innocuous...
Umm... it isn't. Encryption is reversible, while hashing is not. The use of the term "public key" implies the existence of a private key, but there is no private key with a hash.
With the way hashes work, reducing an input of arbitrary size to an output of a fixed size, (the input is usually larger than the output, though of course with passwords this isn't always the case,) it can be trivially shown via the Pigeonhole Principle that there exist an infinite number of inputs that will hash to the same output. While it's true that the purpose of cryptographic hash design is making it as difficult as possible to find such "colliding" inputs, they are mathematically required to exist. And therefore, if there are infinite different inputs that can yield the same hash output, it is impossible to "decrypt" a hash and say "this is the (singular) input that it came from."
Hashing is not in any way "another word for encryption," and claiming that it is makes people who actually understand the principles involved cringe at your ignorance.
The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text
"Obviously we don’t store them in plaintext ‘normally,’" the employee, who has a technical role, told Motherboard.
How many people are on Facebook? Google says around 1 billion. That's 1,000 million, of which between 20-60 percent had this happen to them. That sure sounds like "normally" to me. (Especially when you consider the first rule of data breaches: it's always bigger than they realize at first!)
My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.
And yet Facebook officially claims that:
We have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them.
War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength!
Just going by the names, there are a few of those you'd really be better off not looking at. Particularly while at work or in the company of other people.
Re: Re: Re: What if wrecking the internet is exactly the point?
The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not "a gentleman" you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - "Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?" They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man "a gentleman" in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A 'nice' meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.
I can remember being at E3 in 2000 and being pitched on the idea of a sort of "dumb terminal" for gaming. As in, you wouldn't need a computer or game console in your home, since all of the actual game processing would be accomplished in the cloud then streamed to your TV via broadband. Most of these early pitches never materialized. Initially because cloud computing simply wasn't fully baked yet, but also thanks to America' shoddy broadband.
And because even with good broadband, there would still be latency, which ruins the gaming experience in many games. And because dumb terminals have always offered horrible usability and we've historically always fled away from them and to a local computing model as soon as technology makes it feasible, which makes it a bit mystifying to see companies being dumb enough to try and force the trend to run in reverse!
This is something that's never happened because it's a terrible idea, and hopefully will never happen because it's still a terrible idea.
However, it most certainly does call into question the industry claims that piracy is by and large harming the wider film industry. If that were true, then these industry insiders uploading cam-footage and other films of recent releases would be committing self-inflicted wounds.
From a certain point of view, yes. "Self-inflicted" upon the industry as a whole, but they're (presumably) looking at it not from a holistic perspective, but from the perspective of dirty-tricks competition.
This does, however, dovetail nicely with the Google report of several years back that a significant percentage of DMCA takedown requests it receives were not legitimate copyright claims, but rather attempts to sabotage competitors. It seems that there are a lot of people out there who, for whatever reason, prefer sabotage and pulling the competition down to actually working to out-compete them by producing a superior product.
On the post: EU Puts An End To The Open Internet: Link Taxes And Filters Approved By Just 5 Votes
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Hey, you never know! Maybe this one might actually be valuable!
On the post: New Zealand Censors Declare Christchurch Shooting Footage Illegal; Start Rounding Up Violators
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Umm... maybe because you can't have a war crime when no state of war exists?
On the post: New Zealand Censors Declare Christchurch Shooting Footage Illegal; Start Rounding Up Violators
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Sometimes you don't find out they're "a genuine nutjob" until after you've managed to do something to get on their bad side. Don't ask me how I know.
On the post: EU Puts An End To The Open Internet: Link Taxes And Filters Approved By Just 5 Votes
Well, it was a nice run while it lasted, but the open internet now has to put an end to the EU Parliament. (Or at least the members thereof that sold the open internet down the river.)
Make a list of all the people who voted yes to this abomination, and implement a special geoblocking where all anyone from Europe can see of your site is "this content is not available in your country because of Articles 11 and 13 of the Copyright Directive. These are the people who voted for it. Until they are gone and the law is fixed, we are unable to offer service in your region."
See how long they last if a few key sites pick up on that idea.
On the post: Cable Industry Embarrassed By The Word 'Cable,' Stops Using It
And even "fiber" is just a shortened version of the proper term: fiber-optic cable.
On the post: Supporters Of Article 13, After Denying It's About Filters, Now Say It's About Regulating Filters Which They Admit Don't Work
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Well, I'd certainly hope not, but seeing the notion that rules enable greater freedom labeled as "Orwellian" provides enough of a seed of doubt that some clarification becomes worthwhile...
On the post: Supporters Of Article 13, After Denying It's About Filters, Now Say It's About Regulating Filters Which They Admit Don't Work
That's not Orwellian at all, really. Their application of it to this specific scenario is pretty atrocious, but the statement that "there is no freedom without rules! Otherwise, only the strongest will prevail" is right on the money. What they're describing is the principle of the rule of law, where placing restrictions on the use of various kinds of power and force allows civilization and freedom to flourish at higher levels.
I've heard the analogy made to flying a kite. At first glance, you might think that the kite's string is keeping it down, which is technically true. It won't fly any higher than the length of string permits. But at the same time, the tension on the string is also what is holding it up, and if you cut the string, it will be at the mercy of the wind, with no restrictions to keep it stable, and immediately come crashing down.
On the post: Facebook Screws Up Again
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Yes, this is also true. But I meant it the way I wrote it: it's very common for the damage to be larger than they actually realize at first.
On the post: MEPs Realizing How Bad Article 13 Could Be, Begin To Back Away From EU Copyright Directive
I can't help but wonder. We keep hearing about how bad Articles 11 and 13 are. This implies that there are at least 11 other Copyright Directive Articles that we're never hearing about. How many are there total and why is no one talking about the rest of them, since it's difficult to believe that the same people who came up with these two stinkers would make the rest of the package boring and innocuous...
On the post: Facebook Screws Up Again
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"antisocial network's latest Zuck-up"
I love it!
On the post: Facebook Screws Up Again
Re: Re: Password encryption vs. hashing
Umm... it isn't. Encryption is reversible, while hashing is not. The use of the term "public key" implies the existence of a private key, but there is no private key with a hash.
With the way hashes work, reducing an input of arbitrary size to an output of a fixed size, (the input is usually larger than the output, though of course with passwords this isn't always the case,) it can be trivially shown via the Pigeonhole Principle that there exist an infinite number of inputs that will hash to the same output. While it's true that the purpose of cryptographic hash design is making it as difficult as possible to find such "colliding" inputs, they are mathematically required to exist. And therefore, if there are infinite different inputs that can yield the same hash output, it is impossible to "decrypt" a hash and say "this is the (singular) input that it came from."
Hashing is not in any way "another word for encryption," and claiming that it is makes people who actually understand the principles involved cringe at your ignorance.
On the post: PACER, Or Your First Amendment Right To Go Fuck Yourself For $0.10/Page
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Other than bogging down an already-clogged court system with a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about, you mean?
On the post: Facebook Screws Up Again
Hmm... let's see.
How many people are on Facebook? Google says around 1 billion. That's 1,000 million, of which between 20-60 percent had this happen to them. That sure sounds like "normally" to me. (Especially when you consider the first rule of data breaches: it's always bigger than they realize at first!)
And yet Facebook officially claims that:
War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength!
On the post: Tell The EU Not To Wreck The Internet
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Just going by the names, there are a few of those you'd really be better off not looking at. Particularly while at work or in the company of other people.
On the post: Tell The EU Not To Wreck The Internet
Re: Re: Re: What if wrecking the internet is exactly the point?
On the post: Tell The EU Not To Wreck The Internet
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A red-haired giant named Ralph with massive fists?
On the post: Slow Broadband, Usage Caps Could Mar Google Stadia's Game Streaming Ambitions
And because even with good broadband, there would still be latency, which ruins the gaming experience in many games. And because dumb terminals have always offered horrible usability and we've historically always fled away from them and to a local computing model as soon as technology makes it feasible, which makes it a bit mystifying to see companies being dumb enough to try and force the trend to run in reverse!
This is something that's never happened because it's a terrible idea, and hopefully will never happen because it's still a terrible idea.
On the post: California Becomes 20th State To Push 'Right to Repair' Legislation
Nice! But 20 out of 50 isn't anywhere near enough; let's keep adding states to that number!
On the post: Report: In Bollywood, Movie Piracy Is Largely Carried Out By Rival Publishing Houses
From a certain point of view, yes. "Self-inflicted" upon the industry as a whole, but they're (presumably) looking at it not from a holistic perspective, but from the perspective of dirty-tricks competition.
This does, however, dovetail nicely with the Google report of several years back that a significant percentage of DMCA takedown requests it receives were not legitimate copyright claims, but rather attempts to sabotage competitors. It seems that there are a lot of people out there who, for whatever reason, prefer sabotage and pulling the competition down to actually working to out-compete them by producing a superior product.
On the post: As Recording Industry Announces Massive Growth, Why Do We Need Article 13 Again?
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Maybe, but who wants to listen to the sound of silence?
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