Disney has become the kind of company that Walt would have abhorred. The company clearly employs too many lawyers who apparently have too little to do. Dropping a rock on a roadrunner was funny; dropping a DMCA on some online fun that costs Disney nothing is just (honk, honk) bullying.
Re: This is a deployment report, not a happiness report.
The answer is the first of the relevant questions is NO. The report is constructed in such a way as to create a very false impression. Compared to much of the rest of the world, the U.S. has terrible deployment coverage. The pandemic has just made that more obvious by demonstrating how many people cannot work from home and how many kids cannot attend school from home.
Numerous Federal government agencies are no longer functional or performing any of the tasks related to their mission. Why should the FCC be any different. Long-time employees are disheartened by how their mission has become a political weapon.
Based on conversations with former colleagues who are employed by our government, I've learned that pretty much everyone in many of the civilian-facing agencies is in a holding pattern; their leadership is in hiding, afraid to draw scrutiny from the Emperor.
Some organizations are notably dysfunctional, e.g., FEMA, which is taking orders from the arrogant but incompetent son-in-law.
The components of the DoD keep doing what they're supposed to do, although their mission is increasingly confused. My friends in the Intel community are discouraged; their top boss is a political hack and their efforts to alert the leadership to potential threats have been, and continue to be, ignored.
Bottomline: it's no longer our government. He who has the gold makes the rules.
Just one more blip of the list of U.S. government failures...
I have the uncomfortable feeling that the 244-year "clinical trial" for democracy has failed. Our federal government has been taken over by people and corporations with big money. The people we elect to represent us no longer do; they need huge funding just to get elected and are then beholden to those who provide that funding. Over the past many months we've seen repeated failures across the entire government: while millions are suffering from disease and unemployment, the government wants to make it more difficult to get food stamps; the CDC has moved too slowly an ineptly to counter COVID-19; the so-called bailout funds aren't being disbursed to small employers, but huge amounts are going to unknown companies without any oversight (leaving us suspicious that those companies are owned by very large campaign contributors); a huge tax cut, touted as encouraging companies to expand and create new jobs, instead allowed a large number of companies to buy back shares of their own stock; now those same companies are demanding government help to stay in business.
Alexis de Tocqueville got it slightly wrong. The revised quote should read, "The American Republic will endure until the day large corporations and campaign donors discover that they can bribe Congress with the public's money."
Determining what merchandise is infringing will require incredibly painful analysis. An Amazon search for "unicorn merchandise" yields over 1,000 hits. A similar Google search produces too many hits to be worth counting. The artist's trademark isn't exactly crisp (neither are her images) and it's unclear what, exactly, she copyrighted. References to unicorns seem to date back to the 4th century B.C. and subsequent descriptions and illustrations cover pretty much every imaginable variant of a four-legged animal with a single horn. This feels just as shady as some of the music copyright disputes ("sorta sounds like" == "sorta looks like"). The judge has exhibited far more patience that the "damn fool" attorney deserved.
That it's never obvious what a patent actually covers and there are a huge number of patents that can readily be reinterpreted to cover an idea never specifically mentioned. The U.S. Patent Office has been incompetent for decades, regularly allowing patents on the obvious, on mathematical tautologies, and on ideas that are total nonsense. It is almost impossible to write a computer program that doesn't trample on someone's copyright or patent, but there's no way the programmer can find that out. I learned this long ago, when I wrote a program for a character-based display. To identify the cursor position, the program logic applied an exclusive OR (XOR) to the bits under the cursor. XOR simply reverses all the bits, which results in highlighting the character on a screen; another XOR reverses the operation. This is a property of the definition of XOR, which has been part of basic logic "forever." However, there's a patent on using it to flip the bits to make a cursor. Huh? Worse, it's a hardware patent, even though the implementation is in software.
None of these lawsuits are supposed to result in an actual trial. They are just more contributors to the disinformation campaign. Now that they are in legal documents, they will be repeated, blindly, as truths. By November we will know whether a well-managed campaign based on lies, half-truths, rumors, and random nonsense will win over supposedly rational people. If so, now would be a good time to revisit the decline and fall of ancient Athens, before all the history books are revised to only reflect the emperor's truth.
The NYPD has considered itself above the law for many years. This is just one more example. The really egregious actions are hidden so deep they will never surface.
Ericsson, a Swedish company, has a dominant role in U.S. telecom networks and wants more. (Ericsson owns or controls companies that run the number portability database and the location database for all U.S. switching facilities. Its switches are used extensively by the big telcos.)
Small telcos, of which there are more than 2,000, can't afford Ericsson (or Nokia) switching equipment. They can afford Huawei.
Good factual statement, but omits one factor -- take a look at all the recent stock grants (at 0$) to Sprint insiders and consider the bonuses that have undoubtedly been promised to Sprint execs.
It's Ericsson that's taking over the U.S. telecom network (with plenty of assistance from the FCC). They operate the two databases that make the telecom network function: one for number portability and one that has the location of every switching facility and they operate the networks for Sprint and T-Mobile. They are the big winner in a Huawei ban. (As are the big telcos, because the 2,000+ small telcos will be forced out of business.)
Meanwhile, the far bigger issue is that there are so many insecure devices in operation that worrying about backdoors in the switches is a diversion.
...and the DNS provider is CloudFlare, which promises not to sell your browsing history. Google might (!!!) become the predominant DNS lookup supplier, but only if the rest of the industry doesn't step up an implement DOH, which isn't difficult. But, you've captured the essence of the concern for the big ISPs -- there won't be able to eavesdrop on your DNS queries as they pass through their network. Of course, anyone using a VPN already has, effectively, DOH. Bigger issue is that the big ISPs are simply asking their paid servants to do what they are told...
The two other providers of telephone switching equipment...
Are foreign-owned companies, too. A careful examination of their executive rosters by someone with the appropriate (intell) skills would be rather revealing. Ericsson, the primary vendor of switching equipment in the U.S., operator of the Sprint and T-Mobile networks, and operator of two databases critical to telco operations, previously raised some suspicion in the intelligence community (second hand information, but from a knowledgeable source). We could just ban them all, close down the Internet, abandon cell phones, and return to...writing letters or meeting for lunch. While we're at it, we also need to worry about who's putting logic in automobiles, so perhaps we should outlaw those and return to horse-drawn carriages. Political boundaries don't make any sense in a world built on the Internet. It would, of course, make much more sense to actually deal with the security issues directly, e.g., make those networks secure. Not any easy task, as any network engineer will explain, but what's obviously necessary.
The underlying problem is that technology is far ahead of the knowledge and level of comprehension of too many people in decision-making positions, specifically including legislators and judges, but also including many corporate executives. Unfortunately, this isn't likely to improve in the foreseeable future and will probably get worse. Equally concerning is that ignorance is now in favor and actual facts are considered "fake news." If we had the current people in charge 560 years ago, movable type would certainly have been outlawed.
Unfortunately, the imbeciles in Congress believe this nonsense
That was the entire perspective of the Congressional hearings this week, and there was no one to dispute this twisted interpretation of history. "Big Tech" gave us what we wanted, and we kept asking for more, so they gave us that, too. They also gave us "live" news, as it's happening, and from multiple perspectives. Yes, we paid for this by revealing our interests and our connections, and we did that willingly (although, perhaps, naively). I get today's news today, not tomorrow morning, I don't have to hunt in the bushes for the newspaper, and I can hit one key and skip the stuff I don't care about. I do have a concern about the loss of local investigative reporting, but the con jobs have become so big and complex that a local reporter would be unlikely to unwind them. (Think FCC+Verizon+AT&T+Comcast, who each represent a particularly noxious form of "Big Tech" but don't seem to be in the spotlight.) Amazon and Google represent successful business strategies that produced sufficient products to expand into other lines of business. Facebook may have crossed a line when they promised privacy and didn't deliver, but the popularity of Facebook demonstrates a demand for the service.
[The Congressional inquiries remind me of a similar witch hunt back in the dark ages, when Congress went after A.C. Nielsen for cancelling someone's favorite TV show. Nielsen only counted viewers; advertisers and networks cancelled shows, but Congress couldn't understand that. If anything, Congresscritters are even less knowledgeable today, and that should scare all of us.]
Pai was a well-paid lobbyist for Verizon. You can bet he'll be returning to Verizon when his stint as commissioner is done. He'll almost certainly be well-rewarded for delivering everything his employer could imagine. This is an incredibly corrupt administration and Pai's behavior is as expected. Unfortunately, this administration has set a new lower bound for "public servants" and we should expect future administrations to do no better. Historians will, eventually, trace the decline and fall of the United States to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which handed control of the government to corporate money. Get used to it.
On the post: Disney: If We Can't Run Club Penguin, No One Can Run Club Penguin [Updated]
Cute mouse; ugly company...
Disney has become the kind of company that Walt would have abhorred. The company clearly employs too many lawyers who apparently have too little to do. Dropping a rock on a roadrunner was funny; dropping a DMCA on some online fun that costs Disney nothing is just (honk, honk) bullying.
On the post: As Pandemic Exposes US Broadband Failures, FCC Report Declares Everything Is Fine
Re: This is a deployment report, not a happiness report.
The answer is the first of the relevant questions is NO. The report is constructed in such a way as to create a very false impression. Compared to much of the rest of the world, the U.S. has terrible deployment coverage. The pandemic has just made that more obvious by demonstrating how many people cannot work from home and how many kids cannot attend school from home.
On the post: As Pandemic Exposes US Broadband Failures, FCC Report Declares Everything Is Fine
Just one piece of a much larger problem...
Numerous Federal government agencies are no longer functional or performing any of the tasks related to their mission. Why should the FCC be any different. Long-time employees are disheartened by how their mission has become a political weapon.
Based on conversations with former colleagues who are employed by our government, I've learned that pretty much everyone in many of the civilian-facing agencies is in a holding pattern; their leadership is in hiding, afraid to draw scrutiny from the Emperor.
Some organizations are notably dysfunctional, e.g., FEMA, which is taking orders from the arrogant but incompetent son-in-law.
The components of the DoD keep doing what they're supposed to do, although their mission is increasingly confused. My friends in the Intel community are discouraged; their top boss is a political hack and their efforts to alert the leadership to potential threats have been, and continue to be, ignored.
Bottomline: it's no longer our government. He who has the gold makes the rules.
On the post: Senator Tillis Angry At The Internet Archive For Helping People Read During A Pandemic; Archive Explains Why That's Wrong
Maybe Sen. Tillis' constituents don't know how to read...
Or he doesn't want them to, because then they might understand that he doesn't represent the voters.
"Lapdog in Congress" is redundant. Since Citizen's United, they've all (almost all) become lapdogs to one or more special interests.
On the post: It Shouldn't Have Taken A Pandemic To Make Us Care About Crappy U.S. Broadband
Just one more blip of the list of U.S. government failures...
I have the uncomfortable feeling that the 244-year "clinical trial" for democracy has failed. Our federal government has been taken over by people and corporations with big money. The people we elect to represent us no longer do; they need huge funding just to get elected and are then beholden to those who provide that funding. Over the past many months we've seen repeated failures across the entire government: while millions are suffering from disease and unemployment, the government wants to make it more difficult to get food stamps; the CDC has moved too slowly an ineptly to counter COVID-19; the so-called bailout funds aren't being disbursed to small employers, but huge amounts are going to unknown companies without any oversight (leaving us suspicious that those companies are owned by very large campaign contributors); a huge tax cut, touted as encouraging companies to expand and create new jobs, instead allowed a large number of companies to buy back shares of their own stock; now those same companies are demanding government help to stay in business.
Alexis de Tocqueville got it slightly wrong. The revised quote should read, "The American Republic will endure until the day large corporations and campaign donors discover that they can bribe Congress with the public's money."
On the post: Judge To Art Licensing Agency: No, Your Stupid Unicorn Is Not More Important Than COVID-19 Right Now, Shut Up
This case is likely to be a fantasy, too
Determining what merchandise is infringing will require incredibly painful analysis. An Amazon search for "unicorn merchandise" yields over 1,000 hits. A similar Google search produces too many hits to be worth counting. The artist's trademark isn't exactly crisp (neither are her images) and it's unclear what, exactly, she copyrighted. References to unicorns seem to date back to the 4th century B.C. and subsequent descriptions and illustrations cover pretty much every imaginable variant of a four-legged animal with a single horn. This feels just as shady as some of the music copyright disputes ("sorta sounds like" == "sorta looks like"). The judge has exhibited far more patience that the "damn fool" attorney deserved.
On the post: Former Refrigerator Manufacturer Says Companies Using Open Source, Royalty-Free Video Technology Must Pay To License 2,000 Patents
The problem with the patent system is...
That it's never obvious what a patent actually covers and there are a huge number of patents that can readily be reinterpreted to cover an idea never specifically mentioned. The U.S. Patent Office has been incompetent for decades, regularly allowing patents on the obvious, on mathematical tautologies, and on ideas that are total nonsense. It is almost impossible to write a computer program that doesn't trample on someone's copyright or patent, but there's no way the programmer can find that out. I learned this long ago, when I wrote a program for a character-based display. To identify the cursor position, the program logic applied an exclusive OR (XOR) to the bits under the cursor. XOR simply reverses all the bits, which results in highlighting the character on a screen; another XOR reverses the operation. This is a property of the definition of XOR, which has been part of basic logic "forever." However, there's a patent on using it to flip the bits to make a cursor. Huh? Worse, it's a hardware patent, even though the implementation is in software.
On the post: Donald Trump And Charles Harder Continue Their Assault On The 1st Amendment, Suing The Washington Post
Just another leg in the disinformation campaign
None of these lawsuits are supposed to result in an actual trial. They are just more contributors to the disinformation campaign. Now that they are in legal documents, they will be repeated, blindly, as truths. By November we will know whether a well-managed campaign based on lies, half-truths, rumors, and random nonsense will win over supposedly rational people. If so, now would be a good time to revisit the decline and fall of ancient Athens, before all the history books are revised to only reflect the emperor's truth.
On the post: NYPD Lied About National Security During An Attempt To Obtain A Journalist's Records From Twitter
Why aren't we surprised?
The NYPD has considered itself above the law for many years. This is just one more example. The really egregious actions are hidden so deep they will never surface.
On the post: US Takes Baby Steps Toward Providing Actual Public Evidence Of Huawei Spying
Follow the money...
Ericsson, a Swedish company, has a dominant role in U.S. telecom networks and wants more. (Ericsson owns or controls companies that run the number portability database and the location database for all U.S. switching facilities. Its switches are used extensively by the big telcos.)
Small telcos, of which there are more than 2,000, can't afford Ericsson (or Nokia) switching equipment. They can afford Huawei.
Q.E.D.
On the post: US Antitrust Enforcement Clearly Broken As Court Rubber Stamps T-Mobile Merger
Schick doesn't need better lobbyists...
They need to purchase better Congresscritters and funnel more funds to Trump hotels.
On the post: DOJ Antitrust Boss Delrahim Ignored Hard Data As He Rubber Stamped T-Mobile Merger
Re: Re: Just to ask..
Good factual statement, but omits one factor -- take a look at all the recent stock grants (at 0$) to Sprint insiders and consider the bonuses that have undoubtedly been promised to Sprint execs.
On the post: FCC Freaks Out About Huawei, But Ignores The Internet Of Broken Things
You're not paying attention...
It's Ericsson that's taking over the U.S. telecom network (with plenty of assistance from the FCC). They operate the two databases that make the telecom network function: one for number portability and one that has the location of every switching facility and they operate the networks for Sprint and T-Mobile. They are the big winner in a Huawei ban. (As are the big telcos, because the 2,000+ small telcos will be forced out of business.)
Meanwhile, the far bigger issue is that there are so many insecure devices in operation that worrying about backdoors in the switches is a diversion.
On the post: Telcos And Rupert Murdoch Pushing Nonsense Story That Google Helping Keep Your Internet Activity More Private Is An Antitrust Violation
Firefox currently supports DoH...
...and the DNS provider is CloudFlare, which promises not to sell your browsing history. Google might (!!!) become the predominant DNS lookup supplier, but only if the rest of the industry doesn't step up an implement DOH, which isn't difficult. But, you've captured the essence of the concern for the big ISPs -- there won't be able to eavesdrop on your DNS queries as they pass through their network. Of course, anyone using a VPN already has, effectively, DOH. Bigger issue is that the big ISPs are simply asking their paid servants to do what they are told...
On the post: Reaping What They Sowed: Recording Industry Now Quite Upset About Copyright Run Amok
Analyze the metadata of every song...
Wonderful idea. Every piece of music ever! Be a good foundation for an AI composer application :-)
This is just as ridiculous as the Oracle lawsuit claiming copyright on an API. I'm surprised no one attempted to copyright the "for" loop...
On the post: Latest Huawei 'Smoking Gun' Still Doesn't Prove Global Blackball Effort's Primary Justification
The two other providers of telephone switching equipment...
Are foreign-owned companies, too. A careful examination of their executive rosters by someone with the appropriate (intell) skills would be rather revealing. Ericsson, the primary vendor of switching equipment in the U.S., operator of the Sprint and T-Mobile networks, and operator of two databases critical to telco operations, previously raised some suspicion in the intelligence community (second hand information, but from a knowledgeable source). We could just ban them all, close down the Internet, abandon cell phones, and return to...writing letters or meeting for lunch. While we're at it, we also need to worry about who's putting logic in automobiles, so perhaps we should outlaw those and return to horse-drawn carriages. Political boundaries don't make any sense in a world built on the Internet. It would, of course, make much more sense to actually deal with the security issues directly, e.g., make those networks secure. Not any easy task, as any network engineer will explain, but what's obviously necessary.
On the post: The Failure Of Courts/Regulators To Understand The Difference Between Infrastructure Providers And Edge Providers Is Going To Be A Problem
Just one aspect of a much bigger concern...
The underlying problem is that technology is far ahead of the knowledge and level of comprehension of too many people in decision-making positions, specifically including legislators and judges, but also including many corporate executives. Unfortunately, this isn't likely to improve in the foreseeable future and will probably get worse. Equally concerning is that ignorance is now in favor and actual facts are considered "fake news." If we had the current people in charge 560 years ago, movable type would certainly have been outlawed.
On the post: NY Times Publishes Laughable Propaganda To Argue Google Owes Newspapers Like Itself Free Money
Unfortunately, the imbeciles in Congress believe this nonsense
That was the entire perspective of the Congressional hearings this week, and there was no one to dispute this twisted interpretation of history. "Big Tech" gave us what we wanted, and we kept asking for more, so they gave us that, too. They also gave us "live" news, as it's happening, and from multiple perspectives. Yes, we paid for this by revealing our interests and our connections, and we did that willingly (although, perhaps, naively). I get today's news today, not tomorrow morning, I don't have to hunt in the bushes for the newspaper, and I can hit one key and skip the stuff I don't care about. I do have a concern about the loss of local investigative reporting, but the con jobs have become so big and complex that a local reporter would be unlikely to unwind them. (Think FCC+Verizon+AT&T+Comcast, who each represent a particularly noxious form of "Big Tech" but don't seem to be in the spotlight.) Amazon and Google represent successful business strategies that produced sufficient products to expand into other lines of business. Facebook may have crossed a line when they promised privacy and didn't deliver, but the popularity of Facebook demonstrates a demand for the service.
[The Congressional inquiries remind me of a similar witch hunt back in the dark ages, when Congress went after A.C. Nielsen for cancelling someone's favorite TV show. Nielsen only counted viewers; advertisers and networks cancelled shows, but Congress couldn't understand that. If anything, Congresscritters are even less knowledgeable today, and that should scare all of us.]
On the post: The FCC Hasn't Done A Damn Thing To Seriously Police Wireless Location Data Scandals
Not at all unexpected
Pai was a well-paid lobbyist for Verizon. You can bet he'll be returning to Verizon when his stint as commissioner is done. He'll almost certainly be well-rewarded for delivering everything his employer could imagine. This is an incredibly corrupt administration and Pai's behavior is as expected. Unfortunately, this administration has set a new lower bound for "public servants" and we should expect future administrations to do no better. Historians will, eventually, trace the decline and fall of the United States to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which handed control of the government to corporate money. Get used to it.
On the post: Mozilla Says Australia's Compelled Access Law Could Turn Staff There Into 'Insider Threats'
Is there a law in Australia...
that MPs have to be technically illiterate and unbelievably stupid?
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