Despite some well-publicized departures, I'm still bullish on Mozilla. As javascript becomes more capable, Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable. Public awareness of widespread government surveillance increases the demand for trustworthy communication tools. Concretely, FirefoxOS is quietly reaching maturity, and Servo has a great deal of promise.
I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.
> Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable
That's their mission (allegedly), but things like Pocket integrations, or the Telefonica chat thing (Hello?) really make me think it's not where the manpower is going.
Most of the effort behind Hello was independent of Hello. Hello is based on WebRTC, which is something Firefox needed to support anyway. Hello is just a neat way to use it, and I doubt that it required a lot of effort. ICBW, though.
I can't figure out what you mean here. WebRTC's implementation is totally open source. The only thing aside from accounts in Hello is the STUN/TURN servers, and I think OSS projects exist for running those.
In other words, everything is reusable and is being used by tons of new startups and projects doing video conferencing.
The whole thing will even use free codecs if both sides support it.
You are very optimistic, unless Mozilla gets really innovative, I don't see how Mozilla will survive in the long run, or at least be relevant enough to put pressure on competitors. I don't think your two reasons are good enough, most users don't care or know about the surveillance issues, and while servo maybe prove to be a technically superior browser, that's not enough.
Technically superior = faster/less bloat, and that could mean a lot.
People moved to firefox because IE was slow and sucky. They moved to Chrome because Firefox was bloated. Now some are even moving back to Firefox because Chrome guzzles RAM. Servo would be an ideal next step; a large architectural change like that is perfect for gaining lots of traction.
Firefox beat IE on features like tab browsing and popup blocking, not really on speed. Servo should be better than gecko, but there's so much more to a browser than the runtime that it's hard to do a fair comparison yet.
Nah, that's a sign of an organization going in the wrong direction to me. When you reach the C*O level, you should pretty much be there for life unless you have serious doubts about the sustainability of the place/get kicked out/have a major life event that takes precedence (eg sick spouse).
This. I think most Mozilla employees approach stuff this way. I've seen folks leave to form a startup other times too, and that's not because Mozilla is bad at keeping them.
I (non employee; student+volunteer) certainly do this. I've drifted between open source projects and communities, reducing participation drastically when I find something I learn from more. Im pretty involved in a couple projects and I really want to stay because they're awesome, but it's quite possible that in a few years I'll be somewhere completely different. At the moment, I hope not. But only time will tell.
Yeah, you're not disagreeing with what I just said. If he couldn't effect the change he wanted to as CTO, then Mozilla is probably in a very poor position.
I think you're right that UX and good security are often at odds, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they _must_.
I view the current state of security in applications a a result of two forces:
1) The human dynamics of the roles involved: The disciplines of security and user interface design overlap very infrequently, and very rarely done alongside one another, collaboratively; one always tends to drive the other. For user-friendly and secure communication software to be written in an open source environment, too many stars have to align.
2) The market value of data: Software which can be monitored, and data of its users aggregated, analyzed, acted upon, and sold is more lucrative than making something which is truly secure, even from the authors.
I believe usable encryption is possible, but I don't expect it to come from grassroots open source efforts, nor from the big market players. If anyone, I expect to see it come a collaboration between large non-profits (such as Mozilla, EFF), and universities. In the current environment, they're one of the few with sufficient resources, organization, and motivation to get it done.
Have been using dokku on DigitalOcean since the 0.2.0, for personal projects. After bumping up against the poor quality of database plugins, I found "dokku-alt", which comes with pre-packaged well-functioning plugins for common use-cases, and seems to be good enough for my needs.
When evaluating the ecosystem, I got the impression Flynn has stalled out, and Deis looks to be too large for my modest requirements.
What I'd really like is ElasticBeanstalk or Heroku, but the per-app pricing quickly breaks the bank. My kingdom for a graceful way to host many tiny, low-traffic apps for cheap!
What is omitted from the article is the difference in the _size_ of the tech industry during the last 20 years. In 1995, the year the author romances, he emphasizes that doing anything in tech was hard. Two decades later, the hard problems have not gone away; the industry has broadened such that there are more opportunities across the entire spectrum of "noble challenge". There are more opportunities in making fluff, and more opportunities for even more difficult, admirable, and impactful undertakings than were ever possible before.
The industry has not been overtaken by the get-rich-quick charlatans, it has expanded enough that they can find a place.
It did seem like everyone plus dog had a startup in 1995 and most were working on the absolutely stupidest ideas possible just that they were more B2B focused than B2C in that era.
You say that, but at least it was an actual technological product. These days you get Buzzfeed whose product is "lists" and Upworthy whose product is "misleading headlines".
Buzzfeed is an outlet that performs real journalism. If you cannot see what their product is and what they are doing, perhaps you need to open your eyes.
My opinion on BuzzFeed isn't relevant. I was asking if it was sarcasm or not because I was interested in looking into it myself if it wasn't. Wasn't going to waste my time if you were trying to make a joke.
Yeah when I read the post, I kept thinking about the fact that there are a number of areas in which the just plain interested individual could focus their efforts to achieve the same general feeling of depth the author had back then. And this can also transfer across technical domains in unexpected ways. For example, in-depth knowledge of how the Linux Kernel's network stack works could transfer to a large eventual cost savings when some BGP implementation is improved based on that knowledge. And maybe that improvement turns out to be mostly 'algorithmic' and maybe that algorithm was devised by someone working in JavaScript.
I think the network hardware issue alone is a good example of where the complexity in the stack has probably increased exponentially since the 90s.
When I see videos like this, or read other experiences of LSD, I wonder if I'm not missing out on something. LSD, uniquely amongst mainstream recreational drugs, seems to have the promise of an outright transcendental upside, with supposedly little downside.
It saddens me that there is no safe and legal way for me to try it.
It's not that you're missing out on something... more like you've been too distracted your whole life to see what's been in front of you all along. There's no way to describe what you will experience because what you are experiencing is merely the present moment, not in the abstract form you experience it now, but in a real way. If you are near a mirror maybe you'll become focused on the shallowness of appearances, or if you are near trash you will commune with the molecules making up that trash and realize that you and the trash are really the same thing.. usually the revelations you make will sound obvious or nonsensical to a stranger, because what you're describing is /what/ you experienced when what is really amazing is /how/ you experienced it.
It is really a shame that there is no legal avenue to experience this, unless you are very good at meditating or happen to have a near death experience.
Safety is not much of a concern...
There are chemical tests you can use to determine if something is LSD or not. They are available on amazon for a few dollars. Beyond that, all you need is a sober person who knows what you're going through, that you trust to keep up with you for 6 hours.
Of the people I have met who have "acid-head", they have uniformly tripped many dozens of times, sometimes for 48+ hour periods on 10+ doses, and all of them had also used hard drugs.
It is beautiful at the time, to see the world without your own bias. but after the fact it can be a bit depressing when you later find yourself caring about things which you've already realized don't actually matter... running the same rat race whose mere existence earlier made you erupt in a hysterical fit of laughter.
I know i rambled. It's hard to speak in technicolor.
If you're getting pure LSD, safety is not much of a concern. I would love to do acid again (did it by mistake once), but my concern is that because it's illegal, there's no way to know what you're getting is pure LSD. Sketchy dealers or bad chemists can result in a product that gives you a bad trip.
Well people won't cut LSD, they would just sell blotter with a smaller dose on it. And since LSD doses are very small to begin with, any byproduct would be such a small amount that it hardly could have any effect.
What you might get though is NBOMe (and less common DOB) instead of LSD. They don't feel as profound and have more risks associated with them, but that can be alleviated by buying from a trusted dark net vendor/buying a test kit.
This used to be true but is not anymore, look at the following warning erowid has added on its LSD vault and LSD FAQ.
NOTE: Some blotter and liquid LSD being sold in 2013 in the Americas and Europe actually contained NBOMe compounds such as 25I-NBOMe. These chemicals are active under one milligram, but can cause strong effects even on a single 1/4" (6mm) square. The blotter or liquid with NBOMe compounds is usually identifiably bitter, where LSD-containing liquid or blotter has a very mild metallic flavor or no flavor at all.
ADULTERANTS:
[Erowid Note 2014: Note that the following section is no longer accurate as of 2010. Please see Spotlight on NBOMes: Potent Psychedelic Issues for a little discussion of other substances now commonly sold on blotter. The Erowid Crew now estimates that there are over a dozen different chemicals sold on blotter the same size and styles as "acid-style blotters" of the past. These include NBOMes, NBOHs, etizolam, phenazepam, AL-LAD, LSZ, Bromo-Dragonfly, DOM, DOC, DOI, and others.]
But that's the very thing I have written. Those blotter with NBOMe will have no LSD on them and I haven't heard of any that has NBOMe in addition to the LSD either.
So if you buy from a trusted source (a product with lots of reviews on a dark net market) you can be rather sure that you are getting what you ordered.
My parents are religious, and I was raised religious. When I took LSD, I was agnostic, but I had a conversation with God. I'm still agnostic, by the way.
You're missing an experience for sure, but you shouldn't approach it thinking it's just a fun drug. Do your research first, understand how to fight off bad trips, be in the correct set and setting, and don't take more than 100 micrograms the first time you do it. LSD will open up doors you didn't even know existed, and then you'll walk through those doors and find out even more. Until you actually do that, you'll never understand what it's like.
Oh yeah, stay away from mirrors too.
"Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child." - Albert Hofmann
Is there "little downside"? Not necessarily. Compared to other drugs, sure. You're not going to become addicted and it's not going to make your teeth fall out. But let's be real. This is the most potent psychoactive substance ever made by many orders of magnitude. It can connect you to parts of yourself that are deeply buried in your subconscious. This is what brings about the blissful feelings of transcendence, wholeness, oneness, etc. It can also be absolutely terrifying to confront your subconscious, especially if 1) you're not in a good place psychologically and 2) you're not in the presence of someone you trust. What happens is you start to experience fear as the scary things come up or as you start to experience ego death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death). You don't realize that the fear is all in your head and you start to project it out onto the external world with paranoid thoughts. Kind of like you're having a nightmare, except that it's happening while you're conscious. This is known as a bad trip. It can leave lasting psychological damage if you don't know how to process the experience.
Another potential downside is that an LSD trip could trigger a midlife (or quarter-life) crisis. You might come back from the transcendental experience and realize that your life is meaningless, that all of your friends are assholes who don't really know you, etc. You might be inspired to make some big changes. From the perspective of your asshole friends, you will have changed "and not in a good way" ;) But this short-term downside is an upside if you take the long view. If you get your midlife crisis out of the way in your twenties, you can spend the rest of your life doing something meaningful.
There's no way to experience the transcendental upside without the potential downside. But if you're willing to face your own demons, and you take precautions by having a trusted + sober guide, you'll be fine.
I imagine there is a lot of confirmation bias going on with stories like that. Drugs are seen almost universally as taboo, so people want to see the bad things that may happen and when people want to see something, exaggerations tend to happen.
I'm not saying your friends weren't changed for the worse, but I do know I've never met someone who was proud to be an LSD user. As such I have to conclude that people choose to speak poorly about LSD, which in turn means we all hear more horror stories than feel good endings.
>I do know I've never met someone who was proud to be an LSD user
I am proud to be an LSD user. For a few of my friends who struggle with depression, they take LSD once every few months. They report that it acts as an emotional 'reset.'
Are you proud to be an LSD user in the context of everyday society? Do you tell your employer? Have you recommended LSD to all of your close family members?
I don't know you or where you're from, but that's unheard of inside the circle of people I know.
>Are you proud to be an LSD user in the context of everyday society?
Not really a fair question, given the taboo still surrounding the drug. Imagine asking a homosexual in the 1950's "Are you proud to be gay in the context of everyday society?" Of course the answer is going to be "No." But in certain circles - namely those that don't give in to the notion that such experiences are unspeakable - the answer is surely "Yes."
That said, I agree with zafka that being "proud" to have taken LSD is effectively a category error.
That's my whole point, though. Negative confirmation bias happens because there is taboo surrounding the drug and those that are silently proud, are just that, silent. While those that condemn it are vocal. Hence more negative stories are told giving people more negative anecdotal data to draw from.
I'm certainly the exception, but I've shared my experience with psychedelics with many people. Coworkers, friends, family. I'm not ashamed in the least.
Maybe my friends did have some sort of confirmation bias, I don't know. I would describe them as "pro" drug users though, definitely not the type to stigmatize drugs. Regardless, why would a rational person risk their body and mind, of which they only have one, on that assumption? Especially on a drug without a reliable source (assuming you are not a chemist) ...
Depends where you are. If you're in the San Francisco area, you'll see a lot of people display Grateful Dead logos - eg bumper stickers on cars, t-shirts, or even cufflinks (I've met quite a few senior executives who were 'deadheads' at one point, same way you'll run into all sorts of people at a Burning Man event). You can safely assume anyone showing off their Grateful Dead affiliation has tried LSD at least once.
One reason people don't talk about it much is that if someone is arrested and has LSD, the amount in their possession for evidence purposes is based on the weight of the delivery medium, usually blotter paper. So what you might think, that's only a few milligrams per square. Unfortunately the standard dose, which is soaked into the paper, is about 50-100 micrograms. Thanks to the 1986 anti-drug legislation and the 1991 Chapman decision, the weight of the blotter paper was included as part of the 'mixture containing LSD' without regard to the very low dose:carrier weight ratio, so even a modest amount owner for personal use could easily pass the threshold for a presumtive attempt to distribute, attracting a long sentence.
This has been fixed to some extent in the most recent edition of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, but that was only last year, after 20+ years of really jacked-up sentences. Now the sentencing commission assumes a carrier weight of 0.4 milligrams (vs. a base dose of 0.05ug for the chemical itself: https://books.google.com/books?id=TbJlhRCG4NYC&pg=PA164&lpg=...
This still seems an order of magnitude too low to me; a quantity suitable for personal use could put someone away for a couple of years. So it's not the sort of thing that people flaunt openly the way many marijuana devotees do.
With the passage of Prop 47 this past year, simple drug possession has been reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor in California (among other things), so the state's sentencing guidelines for LSD possession may be further reduced.
well I for one am proud to have been an LSD user. It was amazing, but after about half a dozen trips I started to see "the dark side" and stopped doing it. I have no regrets, it's friggin awesome.
It can significantly intensify your mood so if you become anxious, fearful, angry or unhappy that feeling may be so magnified as to seem overwhelming. It can often be because you took a trip while you had something on your mind, and then your thoughts about that seem monstrously distorted. Imagine being a child who gets really scared by a movie, the idea of the scary thing outweighs the context of being fictional or just a story or even the non-scary part that came before, because now your childish mind can't stop thinking about the Bad Thing.
LSD hallucinations can involve fairly severe distortions of time and space which are not helpful in that context. A trip can also last 8-12 hours which is quite a long time, so if you start feeling 'oh, I think this is too much for me..' then you're stuck with it for a long period, possibly your foreseeable future during the trip due to the extra cognitive burden of the hallucination. A dose of vitamin b12 can help (by inducing a distracting and rather pleasant hot flush), but after a few different negative experiences I realized the easiest thing to do if feeling bad was to find a quiet spot and just sit down - not too many bad things can happen to you while you're sitting still and adopting a more relaxed posture generally helps the bad mood evaporate of its own accord. Partly because of this insight, I developed an interest in Zen Buddhism and Taoism.
Excess consumption (or comsumption with other drugs like pot) can have unexpected or unhelpful effects. I've experience mild aphasia (difficulty in forming speech) one for a few minutes, and the one really bad trip I had (due to a combination or prior bad mood, excess consumption and inexperience) got unmanageable in two ways. One, I developed temporary amnesia for about an hour, and was unable to remember where I was until someone said 'you know...America?!', which was a place I could remember having heard of - that was pretty confusing, since I didn't know where I lived. Also, I had forgotten everything about my own identity except my first name, which was scary for obvious reasons. Identity is something you take for granted to such an extent that we're not really equipped to deal with not having one. Two, all this happened on a landing halfway down a long staircase, and both the up and down directions looked like the inside of a concertina that was vibrating with the loud music which was going on in the background (but which I was incapable of processing as music right then, it was just a bunch of scary noises). In short I had no idea who I was or how I had arrived in the world, and the world itself seemed chaotic and dimensionless. Eventually I got tired of feeling freaked out and the stairs settled down for a bit, so I wandered around the party in order to try figuring out my new and unfamiliar environment. Probably because I had let go of my anxiety, all my memories suddenly popped back into place - much like when you find your keys after you had lost them, sp you don't need to check every individual key on the keyring. And once that happened, I felt great for the rest of the trip. Not just better, with the satisfaction of having overcome an incredibly difficult situation.
Sounds awful, right? But what's hard to explain is that a bad (or good) trip isn't just something that happens to you; it's about how you react to your distorted perception of yourself, like the psychological equivalent of a hall of distorted mirrors. If you're prone to panic or other sorts of mental discomfort then that would obviously be pretty bad, but if you have a high tolerance of weirdness or ambiguity then it can be very rewarding, despite the existence of some dangerous or scary situations (which you could also encounter in sports or many other contexts). It's not illusory, bad or good; it's just the experience of the interaction between your brain and this particular chemical which modulates the threshold of synaptic firing. Your mind will work differently, but it's still your mind - and is the scary aspect for many people who have negative experiences, they regocnize the troubling experiences as manifestations of the subconscious.
I've tripped maybe 80 or 90 times. I stopped eventually (>10 years ago) because it felt familiar enough that I wondered if I was just exploiting it for entertainment rather than self-exploration or expansion. I would like to take some again now that time has gone by but would be more inclined to do so in quiet solitude rather than in a social context, maybe I've just come to value tranquility and calm rather than excitement as I got older. I have absolutely no regrets, even of the frightening bits - I would say that psychedelics have been among the great positive and valuable experiences in my life, not as something to be consumed and enjoyed, but as an experience to be pondered and ocntinuously re-integrated. I feel they brought a significant improvement to my mental health - I have suffered from chronic major depression since youth but was able to develop a much stronger sense of agency and larn to manage my condition thanks to my psychedelic experience.
While rare, LSD trips can result in a psychological meltdown. A rough guideline for reducing the chances of a bad trip down to almost zero is to make sure your mindset is good, and your setting is good. This is what people mean when they say "set and setting". If you are severely depressed or paranoid, or you have schizophrenia, you will probably want to avoid LSD, as it could amplify these characteristics. Even if you are not, being with an experienced individual who has a positive mindset will bolster your own trip. Regarding setting, find an open, comfortable, and safe environment. Avoid dirty, cramped locations like small unkempt apartments, or overly crowded clubs. Daytime in nature with a few good friends is ideal.
If the LSD isn't contaminated or fake and the portion you consume is moderate you should be OK. Psyocibin is slightly less risky and more spiritual from what I hear. I've witnessed friends suffer permanent negative personality changes from bad LSD.
Psychoactive drugs are no joke. The psychedelic kind hold the potential of a life changing experience, LSD is one of those.
LSD is quite safe relatively to others psychoactive but this is not to be confused with the effects from the psychedelic experience. When you get to perceive things differently, be exposed to different views of the world and yourself, get a different outlook on things. Well yes, change can occur and last, sometimes for a lifetime.
And frequent abusers of LSD are known to develop a sort of holier than you personality as they develop the illusion of having superior knowledge and understanding.
Psychedelics have not been demonstrated to have long-term negative effects. Important to consider that 2% of the general population will have a psychotic disorder and many more will have anxiety, depression, other mental problems at some point.
Straw man argument is made of straw. I'm speaking of word of mouth from informed, trusted friends, not what I heard from those who have an agenda have to say on fox news.
It's been at least 15 years since my last trip, but they do make a lasting impression. It wasn't something I did a lot, but it maybe totaled 20 times over about 10 years.
Having said that, it's not always a grand magical experience.
I had one semi-bad trip, which in retrospect I unconsciously but intentionally set myself up for. You've got to watch that carefully, and be aware of it, what your mindset is going in. I saw others do much the same thing on a number of occasions, so it's something that happens.
If I'm completely honest about the experiences, most of the time whatever I was doing was incredibly fascinating at the time, but utterly banal in retrospect. Becoming really fascinated with small variations of light and shadow on a wall, for example. Which is pretty cool while you're doing, but not exactly a mystical experience.
The way I always talked about tripping was that it removed the filters from your perception. There's a lot of information coming in that your brain just filters out. That's desirable on a lot of levels, but it's worth reminding yourself that it's happening. Once you've had that experience a few times, it becomes possible to turn it on and off if you work at it. You still won't, most of the time, but it's nice to have the ability when you want it.
Similar experience here. I spent about 30 minutes staring at a Windows NT 4 wallpaper[1] in college, and saw many objects such as skulls, bodies, etc. in it which cognition under normal circumstances filters out. Our cognitive filters must be really good at preventing us from seeing false positives in the patterns out in the visual field.
The way the setting made a difference for me were perceived risks. In the same way my cognitive filter was disabled for visual patterns, it must have been disabled for danger too; seeing a candle on the coffee table made me panic about a fire so I put it out, and seeing a friend go out on the balcony of our second floor apartment made me terrified that he would try to "fly" or hurt himself, so I made him come in and locked the balcony door. I can definitely see how a more adverse setting could lead to a really scary trip.
It should be obvious that AT&T's "concerns" are simply a thinly-veiled threat to withhold high-speed access from the citizenry unless they get guarantees that they can manipulate said access with impunity.
The thing is that AT&T and others won't just pack up their broadband monopolies and go home; they'll respond to whatever market conditions the regulatory regime shapes. They can complain all they like, but the citizenry overwhelmingly wants more integrity guarantees for their internet connections.
This sort of threat is akin to a tantrum from a spoiled child.
>AT&T's "concerns" are simply a thinly-veiled threat
I don't even think they are a threat. They're a rhetorical point that their lobbyists and bought and paid for supporters in government are going to drum endlessly leading into the 2016 elections.
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Do you remember how Obamacare said you could keep your policy, but it turned out that there were many horrible policies that wouldn't turn a profit if there were better policies with lower prices available from exchanges, so the insurance companies stopped offering them? Obama 'lied'. Just wait for Obamanet, where Obama told everyone that net neutrality would guarantee equal access for everybody, but AT&T couldn't afford to roll out to your town because of the burden of his new regulations. Regulations that didn't exist during the Internet's rise, and if they had existed would have strangled it in it's crib.
It is simply unprofitable to operate under regulations that micromanage every aspect, every packet that is delivered to every home. The rollout of gigabit internet to 2M homes over the past two years (to wealthy/gentrified portions of a few, big, prosperous cities) shows you how wonderful your internet could have been if AT&T could have figured out to make their original plan to roll that same speed out to 100 cities profitable under Obamanet. They couldn't; nobody could - the only reason they rolled out to the 2M households was as an extortion payment because Obama threatened to hold up their acquisition of DirecTV if they wouldn't do what he wanted.
Obama wants to treat every piece of the internet equal[sic] - hardcore child pornography and stolen music should download exactly as fast as your netflix that you paid for downloads to your TV, or your electronic medical records (that keep your family safe) download to your family doctor. That seems like something that should be managed by the technicians and job creators that actually built the networks, and have run the networks since the beginning - maybe they know a little more about your internet than some jerks in Washington that are worried that their fancy wine and cheese magazine website won't download fast enough because no real people want to read it. They don't like what we like, so their socialist instincts kick in, and they get scared that what they like can't survive in the market without cheating (Solyndra!!! Solyndra!!! They're trying to kill us!!!), so they regulate that their things must always have as much of the internet as everybody else's things do, even if nobody has ever visited those websites in so long that when you go there, you get spiderwebs on your keyboard (chortle!)
It's socialism for their internet, but not for yours. When you hear them talking about this 'net neutrality' being 'fair' for everyone, look at all of those people in Brooklyn with their super-fast internet while your netflix is freezing so long that you can make a sandwich before it comes back and ask yourself - is this fair???.
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If AT&T weren't confident it had the political support, it would do whatever it was told. It would still be absurdly profitable. Profit levels might even end up being written into the law. AT&T knows that they have all of the Republicans (even the libertarians), they have the head of the FCC, and they have plenty of individual Democrats.
I think it's a good thing because the industry is going to pull out all stops and show all of their cards in order to kill this. We'll know who to target politically and who to support. I have little doubt that they will win, though, and this push will be entirely killed for some legislative procedural reason or in the courts on a technicality. Obama is terrible, always loses because he doesn't actually care, and the only reason he's pushing this is political pandering to people like me.
First, there's quite a difference between unprofitable and less profitable.
Secondly, the internet is a utility. Utilities are regulated because they are essential and because they spawn natural monopolies. Interestingly, the prices I pay AND the service I get for utilities that are recognized as such and regulated (electricity, water, natural gas) are great. Completely the opposite for my cell service and internet. YMMV.
The only way capitalism works is if you have competition. The investment costs are too high, the players have implicit noncompete agreements, and when competition threatens to happen in this area, one player just buys out the other.
Regulation before, the whole monopoly thing, came with rates set based on a rate of return, in exchange, all traffic had to be carried equally - and service had to be provided universally, meaning to every customer in the service footprint.
If we return to that mechanism, it will all work, if we try to do one or the other, nothing will work, meaning, you can't net neutrality it without making internet access a common carrier product, and by setting rates based on a reasonable rate of return.
Local regulation is a far bigger impact on building out a new network than any other single factor - it can take up to two years just to pull a permit to upgrade a cell site cabinet, its an order of magnitude more for something the magnitude of building out even a FTTN network.
The CEO is implicitly claiming here that: a) given the current regulatory environment, the expansion would be profitable (since they're doing it), and b) if net neutrality were passed, there is a serious possibility that it would no longer be profitable.
Net neutrality does not really affect what customers pay. So, there are two possibilities here: the first is that AT&T was planning on shaking down Netflix, Google, et al for peering, in an amount large enough to make the difference between the expansion being profitable or unprofitable. The second possibility is that he is full of hot air and net neutrality would not significantly affect their profit margin.
If Google and Netflix want to use all of the internet and still take all of your money, why shouldn't they pay for it? Under net neutrality they're not allowed to.
Traffic on the modern internet is almost totally unidirectional: it comes from big content providers and goes to consumers. When I pay my ISP for internet, I am paying them for the service of delivering the bits from the content providers to me. The concept of Netflix or Google "using up" all the internet is incoherent, because by the definition of an ISP all the traffic they generate is going to consumers who are paying the ISP and are bandwidth-capped.
Imagine if the major postal service providers decided that, instead of only the sender paying for the package, now both the sender and the receiver have to pay, because they are both "using" the service.
I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with someone being paid twice for the same service, although it comes across as incredibly greedy, but the end effect is that consumers pay more and the ISPs get more profit, because the content providers' costs will be passed on to consumers.
EDIT: There's also no logical reason why the content providers should be paying ISPs for peering. The reverse is equally "logical". You might as well ask why Google and Netflix aren't shaking down ISPs because they provide things that customers want and the ISP would be less desirable without them.
> I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with someone being paid twice for the same service, although it comes across as incredibly greedy, but the end effect is that consumers pay more and the ISPs get more profit, because the content providers' costs will be passed on to consumers.
Well there are obvious conflicts of interest here. Many ISPs are also content providers. E.g. Comcast has xfinity TV streaming which competes pretty directly with Netflix.
So if Netflix has to pay an exorbitant amount to link a server to Comcast but Comcast can stream stuff to their customers basically for free...
Poe's Law strikes again. That argument was intentionally twisted to be maximally confusing and deceptive. The fact that it's working so well in this thread that people feel like they have to respond to it makes me think it'll work on Fox News just as well.
In addition to the egrigious complaints citizens could make, wouldn't telecoms and cellphone manufacturers have grounds to sue over this? It sounds like these boxes are actively disrupting or reducing cell-phone service reliability by tricking devices to connect to them, despite not being a good tower.
Ultimately, it's the government that mediates the dispute. They're the government's airwaves and you (the cell phone provider) receive a license to use them. I haven't read the relevant FCC regulations, but they can easily say "cell phone service is secondary; law enforcement is primary".
There is precedent: amateur radio operators can use any means available to them to transmit life-critical messages when licensed methods/frequencies don't work. If that was to set up a fake cell phone tower and get phones to connect, then one could argue that one was using the frequencies legally. (IANAL; don't do this and say I said it was OK. The usual case is something like using your amateur radio to contact the coast guard if your ship is sinking.)
IIRC, most phones will talk to multiple towers at the same time. They mention attempting to keep disruption to a minimum. One would assume they care about not tipping someone off if their phone was acting funny.
It is a tricky issue, but I can see a good argument for increasing the amount of traffic going through TOR, even if much of it was from users without proper OPSEC.
As with all security, it is an education issue; just as "Private Mode" warns users that they might be tracked by ISPs or other agents, "Super-private mode" would have to warn users that supplying identifying information would jeopardize their privacy.
> it is an education issue; just as "Private Mode" warns users that they might be tracked by ISPs or other agents
I wonder what percentage of users understand that. How many read the fine print, grasp its meaning, and act on it?
It would be interesting if Mozilla has studied this security training in particular or if someone has studied security training in general. That is, test how many users read the information, retain it, understand it, and act on it? What works and what doesn't?
This sort of this is pretty exciting. Now that users are aware of NSA hijinks, and are familiar with the Privacy modes of their current browsers, I'd like to see Mozilla move towards a "Super Privacy" mode where they route over a built-in Tor client.
Of course, the dream would be to have all Firefox clients run Tor relay nodes out of the box, backed by Mozilla-supported exit nodes.
As hackuser says elsewhere, Tor is not really a fire-and-forget security solution. My understanding is that in order to use it without compromising yourself you need to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of its limitations.
But isn't that the point of Incognito mode in the first place? To only use it in certain situations when you need extra privacy? I doubt too many try to login through Facebook using the Incognito mode, or at least they wouldn't use their real accounts.
Mozilla just needs to enhance Incognito mode (or create a new mode) with Tor.
My understanding was always that Incognito mode was only intended for instances when you didn't want browsing history saved, not instances where you wanted to protect your privacy. That said, I think an 'enhanced Incognito mode' which does protect your privacy that's built-in could definitely be a good addition.
The point of Private Mode is also to start with a blank session, without any cookies.
Service providers, such as Google or Facebook, are tracking users even when they aren't logged in, by setting unique identifiers in cookies with a very long age. Then as soon as you login, they can even correlate those identifiers and their history to your name should they want to.
Facebook for example is known to build profiles on people that do not have a Facebook account. And given that many websites are integrating with services provided by such companies (e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook buttons are everywhere), it's not like you have to go to Google.com or Facebook.com to be tracked.
So that's the point of Private Mode, because in Private Mode all they have is your IP. And in case we're talking about IPv4, we could be talking about a home connection, or a public Wifi, or a work connection, so to track users one needs to take a look at usage patterns coming from the same IPv4 and make a decision - home connections are what you want, as otherwise too many people are connecting from the same public wifi or work connectin.
And given the shortage of IPv4 addresses, ISPs have switched to dynamically allocated IPs at least for home subscriptions. Mobile phone operators are doing the same thing - an IPv4 coming from a mobile phone doesn't even tell you the user's city.
It will be interesting to see how we'll be able to protect ourselves along with the switch to IPv6, but in the meantime, yes Private Mode has everything to do with privacy.
A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily.
To recap the current situation: You need to run a normal browser (for convenience) for facebooking (of course running NoScript, Ghostery, RequestPolicy etc.) and the Tor browser for researching things you don't want to be associated with your identity (yet nothing that law enforcement or intelligence agencies care about).
"A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily."
When data is inputted to a HTML-form an alert could pop up.
"Disclosing your login details may compromise your privacy"
At least that would educate users, similarly as the warning text on Chromes New Tab incognito page.
It couldn't. It'd take a fundamental re-architecture of Tor to implement a solution, but you also actually have to solve the problem, which is pretty hard too.
I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.