I can only remember one prof who "required" their own textbook when I was in school. Best/worst part was they didn't actually use it. They explained on the first day that they had tried to list no textbooks, because it was a Java programming class and he thought the online documentation was good enough...but the administration told him he was required to list a mandatory textbook, so he put his own since he obviously thought it was worthwhile at least. But he did tell us all on the first day that it wasn't necessary and we should try to return it if we'd already bought a copy xD
Even if the DRM is magically unbreakable (LOL) you can still OCR the thing as long as you can read it yourself. Even better if they still offer rentals. When I was in college there would usually be at least one kid in every class who would use the library book scanners to create ebooks. They'd take names on the first day of class and split the cost of the book between them. I think they usually bought a copy and sold it at the end of the semester, but that could work just as well with a rental...although I never actually saw the scanners they used so I don't know if it required damaging the book or something. But even then I figure they'd probably just do it anyway and pay whatever the replacement cost was...
I'm also wondering if this applies to "International Editions" though, because that's what I always bought. Same content at about a tenth of the price...
Part of what this fine does is discourage harvesting so much data in the first place. That is good. And they should be fined -- massively and repeatedly -- for any data that leaks out, particularly when they didn't necessarily need that data in the first place.
Any data collection and retention is a risk. The way to solve that risk is NOT to allow everyone to spread that data far and wide to anyone who wants it. The way to solve that risk is to make collection and retention of data so expensive that companies won't do it unless absolutely necessary. What we want is for companies to be saying "How can we do this without the data ever leaving the user's device so that we don't end up being liable if that data leaks?"
Also, how the heck are you conflating an end user retrieving their own data with companies sharing massive marketing portfolios of other peoples' information? Are you TRYING to spread misinformation or are you just not thinking?
Yeah, seems like at least once a month I'm reading some journalist talking about how we really need a more privacy-focused social network. But there's plenty of those, some of which have been actively developed for more than five years already. There's diaspora* and GNUSocial and Mastadon, then there was that thing "Anonymous" announced a while back, there's centralized but "private" ones like Vero and MeWe, and there was one I read about a couple weeks ago that was going for 100% locally stored data, but I can't even find a reference to that thing anymore. "Privacy-centric social networks" are a dime a dozen these days; that's not the solution.
Everyone keeps talking about the need to build a new network, as though this is one of those situations where "if you build it, they will come." But it's not. We've already built it, and nobody is there. Keep in mind that even Google couldn't figure out how to pry people away from Facebook and privacy is certainly not the feature that's most likely to bring in users. Most people don't care. Even most software devs don't care. Certainly none of the ones I work for have even mentioned any of these settlements. Most of them still think Facebook is the greatest website ever made. And if you can't get grandma, can't get your musician friend, can't even get software engineers to see the value of your network...then the value is zero, because a social network is useless if you don't have a sufficient mass of users.
We have a number of proposals for how a privacy-focused social network can work. But what else can we do with that technology? We need more than just "a safer (but probably slower) way to do the thing you're already doing that you've never had a problem with." Here's one easy (but probably insufficient) example -- Facebook cannot possibly maintain connectivity in any kind of disaster situation. The network is going to be dead or overloaded and you won't get through. A well-designed distributed system could potentially avoid this issue entirely, although you'd probably need to couple it with some kind of distributed network access. What else can a more distributed social network do that Facebook can never hope to match? Because if it's just a matter of developer time...they'll not only implement the same feature, they might get it first. We need a "killer app" that is more than just "better privacy", and it needs to be something that requires a privacy-focused design to work in the first place.
But there's also the second problem, the network access problem. The entire infrastructure is not designed for distributed systems. We can't build a true distributed social network when we haven't even build a distributed communications network. We may need to implement that infrastructure first before those "killer apps" that require a distributed network will even be feasible. One way of doing that is to build on top of other platforms -- something like Tor or Freenet perhaps, where we can build the application today and change the network infrastructure later. But those are also slow, and people aren't going to use "Facebook, but slower".
On the post: The Death Of Ownership: Educational Publishing Giant Pearson To Do Away With Print Textbooks (That Can Be Resold)
Re: Re:
I can only remember one prof who "required" their own textbook when I was in school. Best/worst part was they didn't actually use it. They explained on the first day that they had tried to list no textbooks, because it was a Java programming class and he thought the online documentation was good enough...but the administration told him he was required to list a mandatory textbook, so he put his own since he obviously thought it was worthwhile at least. But he did tell us all on the first day that it wasn't necessary and we should try to return it if we'd already bought a copy xD
On the post: The Death Of Ownership: Educational Publishing Giant Pearson To Do Away With Print Textbooks (That Can Be Resold)
Re: Re:
Even if the DRM is magically unbreakable (LOL) you can still OCR the thing as long as you can read it yourself. Even better if they still offer rentals. When I was in college there would usually be at least one kid in every class who would use the library book scanners to create ebooks. They'd take names on the first day of class and split the cost of the book between them. I think they usually bought a copy and sold it at the end of the semester, but that could work just as well with a rental...although I never actually saw the scanners they used so I don't know if it required damaging the book or something. But even then I figure they'd probably just do it anyway and pay whatever the replacement cost was...
I'm also wondering if this applies to "International Editions" though, because that's what I always bought. Same content at about a tenth of the price...
On the post: FTC's Privacy Settlement With Facebook Gets Pretty Much Everything Backwards; Probably Helps Facebook
Backwards...
I think you've got your logic a bit backwards.
Part of what this fine does is discourage harvesting so much data in the first place. That is good. And they should be fined -- massively and repeatedly -- for any data that leaks out, particularly when they didn't necessarily need that data in the first place.
Any data collection and retention is a risk. The way to solve that risk is NOT to allow everyone to spread that data far and wide to anyone who wants it. The way to solve that risk is to make collection and retention of data so expensive that companies won't do it unless absolutely necessary. What we want is for companies to be saying "How can we do this without the data ever leaving the user's device so that we don't end up being liable if that data leaks?"
Also, how the heck are you conflating an end user retrieving their own data with companies sharing massive marketing portfolios of other peoples' information? Are you TRYING to spread misinformation or are you just not thinking?
On the post: FTC's YouTube Privacy Settlement Pisses Everyone Off; Perhaps We're Doing Privacy Wrong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, seems like at least once a month I'm reading some journalist talking about how we really need a more privacy-focused social network. But there's plenty of those, some of which have been actively developed for more than five years already. There's diaspora* and GNUSocial and Mastadon, then there was that thing "Anonymous" announced a while back, there's centralized but "private" ones like Vero and MeWe, and there was one I read about a couple weeks ago that was going for 100% locally stored data, but I can't even find a reference to that thing anymore. "Privacy-centric social networks" are a dime a dozen these days; that's not the solution.
Everyone keeps talking about the need to build a new network, as though this is one of those situations where "if you build it, they will come." But it's not. We've already built it, and nobody is there. Keep in mind that even Google couldn't figure out how to pry people away from Facebook and privacy is certainly not the feature that's most likely to bring in users. Most people don't care. Even most software devs don't care. Certainly none of the ones I work for have even mentioned any of these settlements. Most of them still think Facebook is the greatest website ever made. And if you can't get grandma, can't get your musician friend, can't even get software engineers to see the value of your network...then the value is zero, because a social network is useless if you don't have a sufficient mass of users.
We have a number of proposals for how a privacy-focused social network can work. But what else can we do with that technology? We need more than just "a safer (but probably slower) way to do the thing you're already doing that you've never had a problem with." Here's one easy (but probably insufficient) example -- Facebook cannot possibly maintain connectivity in any kind of disaster situation. The network is going to be dead or overloaded and you won't get through. A well-designed distributed system could potentially avoid this issue entirely, although you'd probably need to couple it with some kind of distributed network access. What else can a more distributed social network do that Facebook can never hope to match? Because if it's just a matter of developer time...they'll not only implement the same feature, they might get it first. We need a "killer app" that is more than just "better privacy", and it needs to be something that requires a privacy-focused design to work in the first place.
But there's also the second problem, the network access problem. The entire infrastructure is not designed for distributed systems. We can't build a true distributed social network when we haven't even build a distributed communications network. We may need to implement that infrastructure first before those "killer apps" that require a distributed network will even be feasible. One way of doing that is to build on top of other platforms -- something like Tor or Freenet perhaps, where we can build the application today and change the network infrastructure later. But those are also slow, and people aren't going to use "Facebook, but slower".
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