-
isthatforreal
edited
6 days ago
|
link
| on:
Mozilla files arguments against the FCC – latest step in fight to save net neutrality
As a European, I don’t quite get it: Americans seem to be concerned with net neutrality, meanwhile not protesting huge monopolistic corporations(the gatekeepers) removing some controversial users on their own judgement and with no way to appeal. Are individuals excluded from the net neutrality?
-
I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.
edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.
-
Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.
They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.
-
-
Which ones?
-
-
One of them described a situation with a contracted, construction crew with guy doing the digging not speaking English well. They were supposedly digging for incumbent but dug through his line. He aaid he pointed that it was clearly marked with paint or something. The operator claimed he thought that meant there wasnt a line there.
That’s a crew that does stuff in that area for a living not knowing what a line mark means. So, he figured they did it on purpose. He folded since he couldnt afford to sue them. Another mentioned them unplugging their lines in exchanges or something that made their service appear unreliable. Like the rest, they’d have to spend money they didnt have on lawyers who’d have to prove (a) it happened snd/or (b) it was intentional.
-
-
-
-
-
-
The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).
It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).
Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.
Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.
You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.
Switching to the individual perspective.
I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.
As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.
Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.
-
Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.
Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not
Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.
P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.
-
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
-
I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
It’s interesting to contrast this to New Zealand, where I live in a town of 50,000 people and have at least 5 ISPs I can choose from. I currently pay $100 NZ a month for an unlimited gigabit fibre connection, and can hit ~600 mbit from my laptop on a speed test. The NZ government has intervened heavily in the market, effectively forcing the former monopolist (Telecom) to split into separate infrastructure (Chorus) and services (Telecom) companies, and spending a lot of taxpayer money to roll out a nationwide fibre network. The ISPs compete on the infrastructure owned by Chorus. There isn’t drastic competition on prices: most plans are within $10-15 of each other, on a per month basis, but since fibre rolled out plans seem to have come down from around $135 per month to now around $100.
I was lucky to have decent internet through a local ISP when I lived in one of Oakland’s handful of apartment buildings, but most people wouldn’t have had that option. I think the ISP picture is a lot better in NZ. Also, net neutrality is a non-issue, as far as I know. We have it, no-one seems to be trying to take it away.
-
I’m always irritated that there are policies decried in the United States as “impossible” when there are demonstrable implementations of it elsewhere.
I can see it being argued that the United States’s way is better or something, but there are these hyperbolic attacks on universal health care, net neutrality, workers’ rights, secure elections, etc that imply that they are simply impossible to implement when there are literally dozens of counterexamples…
-
At the risk of getting far too far off topic.
One of the members of the board at AT&T was the CEO of an insurance company, someone sits on the boards of both Comcast/NBC and American Beverages. The head of the FCC was high up at Verizon.
These are some obvious, verifiable, connections based in personal interest. Not implying that it’s wrong or any of those individuals are doing anything which is wrong, you’ve just gotta take these ‘hyperbolic attacks’ with a grain of salt.
-
-
Oh yeah it’s infuriating. It helps to hit them with examples. Tell them the media doesn’t talk about them since they’re all pushing something. We all know that broad statement is true. Then, briefly tell them the problems that we’re trying to solve with some goals we’re balancing. Make sure it’s their problems and goals. Then, mention the solution that worked else where which might work here. If it might not fit everyone, point out that we can deploy it in such a way where its specifics are tailored more to each group. Even if it can’t work totally, maybe point out that it has more cost-benefit than the current situation. Emphasize that it gets us closer to the goal until someone can figure out how to close the remaining gap. Add that it might even take totally different solutions to address other issues like solving big city vs rural Internet. If it worked and has better-cost benefit, then we should totally vote for it to do better than we’re doing. Depending on audience, you can add that we can’t have (country here) doing better than us since “This is America!” to foster some competitive, patriotic spirit.
That’s what I’ve been doing as part of my research talking to people and bouncing messages off them. I’m not any good at mass marketing, outreach or anything. I’ve just found that method works really well. You can even be honest since the other side is more full of shit than us on a lot of these issues. I mean, them saying it can’t exist vs working implementations should be an advantage for us. Should. ;)
-
Beautifully said.
My family’s been in this country since the Mayflower. I love it dearly.
Loving something means making it better and fixing its flaws, not ignoring them.
-
Thanks and yes. I did think about leaving for a place maybe more like my views. That last thing you said is why I’m still here. If we fix it, America won’t be “great again:” it would be fucking awesome. If not for us, then for the young people we’re wanting to be able to experience that. That’s why I’m still here.
-
-
-
-
-
arguably the tech hub of the midwest.
Only if you can’t find Austin on a map… ;)
-
Native Texan/Austinite here. Texas is the South, Southwest, or just Texas. All the rest of y’all are just Yankees. ;)
-
-
But if their ISP starts doing anything shady, they’ll surely get some backlash, even if they can’t switch they can complain.
-
They’ve been complaining for decades. Nothing happens most of the time. The ISP’s have many lobbyists and lawyers to insulate them from that. The big ones are all doing the same abusive practices, too. So, you can’t switch to get away from it.
Busting up AT&T’s monopoly got results in lower costs, better service, better speeds, etc. Net neutrality got more results. I support more regulation of these companies and/or socialized investment to replace them like the gigabit for $350/mo in Chattanooga, TN. It’s 10Gbps now I think but I don’t know what price.
Actually, I go further due to their constant abuses and bribing politicians: Im for having a court seizetheir assets, converting them to nonprofits, and putting new management in charge. If at all possible. It would send a message to other companies that think they can do damage to consumers and mislead regulators with immunity to consequences.
-
The problem is that corporate fines are generally a small percentage of profits.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/should-companies-obey-the-law_b_1650037.html
-
-
-
-
Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal
Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.
We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.
(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.
Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.
Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.
There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.
Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.
There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.
-
That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t.
This was also brought up by @hwayne, @caleb and @friendlysock, and is not something that occurred to me. I appreciate all who are mentioning this.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States.
Wow, I did not know that. I can see that as a legitimate reason to want net neutrality. But, I also think that they’ll piss off a lot of people if they can stream CNN but not InfoWars.
It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content.
I understood it to also mean that you also couldn’t charge customers differently because of who they are. Also, don’t things like Tor mitigate things like that?
“At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
I completely agree. But in the US we have a free market (at least, we used to) and that means that the government is supposed to stay out of it as much as possible.
Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power.
I also agree. But these corporations (the tier-1 ISPs) haven’t done anything noticeable to me to limit my enjoyment of conservative content, and I’m pretty sure that they would’ve by now if they wanted to.
The reason I oppose net neutrality is more because I don’t think that the government should control it than any more than I think AT&T and others should.
not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
But they haven’t.
edit: how -> who
-
-
Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.
An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.
So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.
-
I read the comments, and I read most of the freecodecamp article.
I like the ideal of the internet being a public utility, but I don’t really want the government to have that much control.
I think the real problem I have with government control of the internet, is that I don’t want the US to end up like china with large swaths of the internet completely blocked.
I don’t really know how to solve our current problems. But, like @jfb said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think that net neutrality is the best possible solution.
-
Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age.
I might recognize a name, but I probably wasn’t even around yet.
So, I’m going to give you…
Thanks for the info, I’ll read it and possibly form a new opinion.
-
-
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.
-
I don’t personally care if the prioritize certain websites, but I sure as hell care if the block something.
As far as I’m concerned, they can slow down Youtube by 10% for conservative channels and I wouldn’t give a damn even though I watch and enjoy some. What really bothers me is when they “erase” somebody or block people from getting to them.
-
well you did say they have an incentive to provide “equal service” so i guess you meant something else. net neutrality supporters like me aren’t satisfied with “nobody gets blocked,” because throttling certain addresses gives big corporations more tools to control media consumption, and throttling have similar effects to blocking in the long term. i’m quite surprised that you’d be fine with your ISP slowing down content you like by 10%… that would adversely affect their popularity compared to the competitors that your ISP deems acceptable, and certain channels would go from struggling to broke and be forced to close down.
-
Well, I have pretty fast internet, so 10% wouldn’t be terrible for me. However, I can see how some people would take issue with such a slowdown.
I was using a bit an extreme example to illustrate my point. What I was trying to say was that they can’t really stop people from watching the content that they want to watch.
-
I recall, but didn’t review, a study saying half of web site users wanted the page loaded in 2 seconds. Specific numbers aside, I’ve been reading that kind of claim from many people for a long time that a new site taking too long to load, being sluggish, etc makes them miss lots of revenue. Many will even close down. So, the provider of your favorite content being throttled for even two seconds might kill half their sales since Internet users expect everything to work instantly. Can they operate with a 50% cut in revenue? Or maybe they’re bootstrapping up a business with a few hundred or a few grand but can’t afford to pay for no artificial delays. Can they even become the content provider your liked if having to pay hundreds or thousands extra on just extra profit? I say extra profit since ISP’s already paid for networks capable of carrying it out of your monthly fee.
-
yeah, the shaping of public media consumption would happen in cases where people don’t know what they want to watch or don’t find out about something that they would want to watch
anti-democratic institutions already shape media consumption and discourse to a large extent, but giving them more tools will hurt the situation. maybe it won’t affect you or me directly, but sadly we live in a society so it will come around to us in the form of changes in the world
-
-
-
-
-
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.
In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.
-
Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP.
That’s a witty way of putting it.
But yeah, @lorddimwit mentioned the small number of tier-1 ISPs. I didn’t realize there were so few, but I still think that net neutrality is overreaching, even if its less than I originally thought.
-
-
-
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:
ISPs do not operate in a free market.
In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.
-
most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect
I think you’re a bit late to the party, I’ve conceded that fact already.
-
-
All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.
-
Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.
@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.
-
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.
It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”
-
Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).
Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.
-
I might’ve been conflating two different political issues, but I have heard “fascist” and “nazi” used to describe the entire right wing.
A quick google search for “net neutrality fascism” turned this up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbye4z/heres-why-net-neutrality-is-essential-in-trumps-america
“With the rise of Trump and other neo-fascist regimes around the world, net neutrality will be the cornerstone that activists use to strengthen social movements and build organized resistance,” Wong told Motherboard in a phone interview. “Knowledge is power.”
-
You assume that net neutrality is a left-wing issue, which it’s not. It actually has bipartisan support. The politicians who oppose it have very little in common, aside from receiving a large sum of donations from telecom corporations.
As far as terms like “fascist” or “Nazi” are concerned—I think they have been introduced into this debate solely to ratchet up the passions. It’s not surprising that adding these terms to a search yields results that conflate the issues.
-
Ill add on your first point that conservatives who are pro-market are almost always pro-competition. They expect the market will involve competition driving whats offered up, its cost down, and so on. Both the broadband mandate and net neutrality achieved that with an explosion of businesses and FOSS offering about anything one can think of.
The situation still involves 1-3 companies available for most consumers that, like a cartel, work together to not compete on lowering prices, increasing service, and so on. Net neutrality reduced some predatory behavior the cartel market was doing. They still made about $25 billion in profit between just a few companies due to anti-competitive behavior. Repealing net neutrality for anti-competitive market will have no positives for consumer but will benefit roughly 3 or so companies by letting them charge more for same or less service.
Bad for conservative’s goals of market competition and benefiting conservative voters.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Do you really carry anything in your pockets? I find it very uncomfortable.
-
-
-
A “mobile” phone in a pocket surely restricts my movements, especially sitting. Personally sometimes I use a briefcase just for my phone and keys. It’s heavier but you may put it on your knees. Also it looks better than stuffed pockets. Article and presentations are very nice indeed.
-
For the briefcase you need one hand, ot you need to be sitting in order to put it on your lap. I intentionally choose phones that fit in a pocket comfortably, and I’m not happy with that stupid trend of phone size increasing to the point when even men’s pockets are not enough.
-
-
-
I carry my phone, phones, house keys, work keycard and tissues, I wouldn’t survive with women’s pockets.
-
I usually add a wallet and a small bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer which is really great if you are eating something on the go.
I’d like to add that roughly one in 15 people worldwide has a form of diabetes and that a large portion of them also carries medication and a sugary and a salty snack as treatment.
-
-
-
-
Imagining a time where I can go to the local maker space and print some open source garments that I have modified to have larger pockets.
In the present, I just stick to what works and get a lot of stuff from the same brand, since I know it fits me and my essential items well.
-
Programmable sewing machine would be quite amazing.
-
http://softwearautomation.com/li-fung-announce-partnership-softwear-automation/
Softwear’s revolutionary digital t-shirt SEWBOT® Workline is fully autonomous and requires a single operator, producing one complete t-shirt every 22 seconds…
-
Found this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXFUqCijkUs Seems like clothes would have be ‘re-architected’ for this method.
-
Why would they need to be rearchitected? The video doesn’t seem to point to that directly.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
What about impersonations?
-
Kind of a hard problem. You can check that the author’s URL is on the same domain as the entry’s, but some people do want to intentionally post entries where their domain is not the same as the domain the entry is on…
For more discussion, see https://indieweb.org/authorship
-
-
alexkorban
1 month ago
|
link
| on:
EU fines Google €4.3B for using Android to strengthen dominance of Google search engine
It looks like they haven’t even paid the previous fine and are still appealing: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/11/16291482/google-alphabet-eu-fine-antitrust-appeal
I guess this one will go the same way? Even if their appeals are unsuccessful, these fines are probably not a big deal if they are able to drag these things out for years (ie cost per year wouldn’t be that high). By the time they have to pay and change their practices, they might have some other strategy in place.
This reminds me a lot of Microsoft of the 2000s.
-
-
That’s good to know. It might be a bit more convincing then.
-
-
-
There are five different investigations the EU is doing into Google. They are at different stages. The previous fine is being appealed now. https://imgur.com/6uLtQX5
This chart comes from a WSJ article from the day of the fine announcement.
-
They may be fined for every day of not complying. EU is effective: if there’s will to do so.
-
-
Draco Linux was quite similar.
-
Shamar
1 month ago
|
link
| on:
Police searches homes of "Zwiebelfreunde" board members as well as "OpenLab" in Augsburg
Hell! Did they abolished the rule of law while nobody was looking?
-
I doubt it. It’s Germany, they do follow the law. Also, they have a history of domestic terrorism.
-
In Germany, illegal searches are relatively common. I don’t want to say “all the time”, but regularly. They are later ruled (partially) illegal, the assets returned, and some costs paid.
Searches may be illegal (and I’m dead sure this will be ruled with Zwiebelfreunde as well) because the police tends to search more then they are allowed to. Entering rooms that are not to be searched, opening cabinets they are not allowed to open, getting permissions that they are not allowed to get. The police is aware of that, but also aware that there are no repercussions for transgressions.
The problem is that we have no such thing as “fruit of the poisonous tree”. The legal proceedings can still continue except in very crass cases if something “additional” is found.
Sadly in german, but here’s an interview with a constitutional judge(!) on the subject, stating that many of them are violating the constitution. http://www.taz.de/!5108848/
-
I believe you are also having some politicians vs. federal constitutional court conflict going?
-
-
-
Sadly, we had our issues with domestic terrorism in Italy too, but we still feel the shame for the police behaviour in 2001, at Diaz school.
But you cannot preserve law and security by arresting people for drawings on a whiteboard.
-
but we still feel the shame for the police behaviour in 2001, at Diaz school.
This is the first time I’m hearing of that. Wow. That’s horrible. :(
-
I heard about it a year or two ago. Took me a while to calm down that night. They weren’t even sneaking around or trying to justify themselves like the corrupt cops often do over here. Just in-your-face, systematic brutality. That’s the exact kind of shit that we have the 2nd Amendment for. I mean, elite propaganda kept people from using it or even voting right. Still, I can’t think of any other option in a situation like that if you don’t want a pile of screaming, beat-down people in a building.
-
Just in-your-face, systematic brutality.
During cold war, in Italy, we had all sort of these things, in particular in the late 60 against students’ protests and political activists.
The effect was twofold: some people were afraid to express their political opinions if they were not aligned with the Government, but it also spread radical extremism that used to justify armed war as a reaction to State’s violence.
In reality, violent revolutionaries were actually useful to the US aligned government to justify repression against the pacific but effective political culture of the left. So much that in 2001, members of the police were sent among manifestants as “black blocks” that launched molotov against civil buildings in the streets and against police to justify the repression.
This is why in Italy we do not consider arming civilians an option against the power: because trained cop are more effective and better armed anyway but if protestants are armed and dangerous you can justify any sort of repression.
-
-
-
-
-
Unlikely, from what I gathered, this is a search warrant for witnesses. Additionally taking all equipment that looks vaguely like computers and CD ROMs isn’t that unusual, police officers are sadly not that trained in this direction, some of them have trouble operating computers (a fellow student in my CS courses has taken part in a “computer course” for the police which largely consisted of the bare minimum of excel and word usage). It’s not the first time something like this happens (there are various accounts of this happening in the past, for example, a CCC member having their home equipment taken even though the warrant said “take the server the stuff happened on” and the server was in another datacenter).
The requirements for being a police officer in germany don’t intersect well with having basic knowledge of computers.
-
-
Disclaimer: I’m one of the organizers of Copyfighters.eu, a campaign to involve young people in Europe in the ongoing copyright debate.
It’s not exactly back at the drawing board, but at least the mandate has been repealed to allow negotiations with the other co-legislators (Remember: EU laws need approval by both the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union – meaning the member states’ responsible ministers) based on the previous committee vote, which included the contentious Article 11 (a new additional right for press publishers) and Article 13 (a content-filtering obligation for online platforms).
In practice that means at the next plenary session after summer (September 11 to 13), there will be a vote on the proposal as it came from the committee (bad!) as well as the option to change it via amendments, which can be tabled by individual Members of Parliament. It will be very difficult to find majorities for any of these amendments and we will need all of your support to keep up the pressure that made it possible to repeal the negotiation mandate now. Our opponents won’t sleep: not only have they been lobbying for these proposals from the very beginning, they also started digging out popular artists now – heck, even Paul McCartney – to guilt parliamentarians into line.
Nonetheless, this is doable and it’s important! I guess, you’ve heard about the negative consequences of these proposals a thousand times already (if not, here), so I won’t bother you with them – but also remember there are some positive points in there as well for example on text and data mining, use of out-of-commerce works and preservation of public domain works.
Edit: There will be a Europe-wide copyright action day on August 26. More information to come – if you’re inclined to do so, mark this date in your calendar and join the demonstration in your city.
If you want to stay up-to-date, follow Julia Reda on Twitter or this person from OCCRP on Mastodon.
-
Was there any debate?
-
There has been a debate on this reform for quite some time now. Check out the European Parliament’s Legislative Observatory page on this matter: The original proposal by the European Commission was published on 14/09/2016, it was then referred to the EP’s Legal Affairs (JURI) committee on 06/10/2016 and was since then debated in JURI as well as IMCO, ITRE, CULT and LIBE – so a number of different committees. (And at the same time also in the Council, so by the member states.)
Unfortunately, there is a clear imbalance in the way (especially Conservative) parliamentarians listen to different groups – rightsholders and their lobbyists are often equated with artists or European art and culture in general, whereas activists, academics and other stakeholders who are against Article 11 and 13 are automatically seen as in the pocket of evil tech giants. This has been especially bad since the former lead negotiator (or rapporteur) in JURI on copyright (Therese Comodini Cachia, a Maltese Conservative, who actually did listen to arguments) left EU politics for a position in Malta and was replaced by MEP Axel Voss, a German Conservative who swiftly moved to cement the JURI position and push it through.
What the last couple of days have again shown is, that you can have all the arguments in your favour – what really counts is making it clear to every single MEP that their ass is on the line, if they do something stupid. This was achieved by an immense amount of people who called, tweeted at, or emailed their representatives, who signed petitions, organized protests,…
We’ll still need the good arguments (and we do have them on our side – copyright scholars around Europe almost unanimously agree that these two Articles really are bad), but what’s even more needed is action! :)
-
Wow, sure you are well informed! Thank you!
-
-
-
-
-
The insertion-order preservation nature of dict objects is now an official part of the Python language spec.
My ruby friends will finally stop laughing at me
Does this mean that
OrderedDictwill be phased out?-
That’s a great question, I think there’s still a place for OrderedDict. Dict isn’t getting anything beyond the insertion-order guarantee, whereas OrderedDict has a bunch of other things going on like reversed(). There’s some more on this stackoverflow question. Also, there is a pretty interesting mailing list thread that gets into this a little bit, though from the perspective of 3.6 (which introduced some of this).
-
I recall perl5 having a feature shuffling hash keys for security reasons. Python2 also had similar problem. So, is that safe?
-
That’s a different issue involving forcing hash collisions to trigger pathological run time behavior. This has nothing to do with the hash function, but rather just adds a level of indirection in the storage to save memory. A side effect of that is it’s easy to preserve insertion order.
-
-
-
European Parliament is a huge disappointment. It’s just an afterthought supposed to bring some democracy into the EU. Search YouTube to see how voting looks like.
-
The European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11.
Somebody know how to check who is represented in the Commitee?
-
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/juri/members.html Wikipedia’s list is outdated.
-
-
It reminds me how Perl used to be: Catalyst had hundreds of prereqs(like Moose and Dbic), each being a constantly moving target, framework being just the glue holding loose parts together. Mojolicious by @kraih was an effort to create more consistent solution by creating in-house modules. It was successful in reducing the fadtigue and flattening the learning curve. What was different is that Perl5 was a mature and stable language back then with the Camel Book and excellent documentation.
-
You should care about the GDPR simply because the UE is pretty effective enforcing its rules. If you want to have access to the global market you have to accept that some laws are enforced globally, the antimonopoly law is a good example.
-
It would be interesting to compare it with ejabberd in Erlang.
-
-
Not much of the original camera has remained though. Perhaps a bit bigger scale reverse-engineering project is The Impossible Project/Polaroid Original a bunch of people recreating formula for Polaroids’ instant papers. Rediscovering forgotten photographic processes is fun.
-
Take a look at Unicode::UCD for an example how perl’s “Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible” is getting a thing of a past.
-
That’ll teach me to rely on implementation details :-D :-/. I can understand the desire to use, without further modification, the datafiles supplied by Unicode.org; and probably the new system makes harder things possible; but that flat file was really nice to find, and had a low usage barrier that I really appreciated. Ah well, we’ll get by.
-
perl6 lowers the barrier a bit.
-
How’s the performance? Perl5 can also do the search in a one-liner, but it’s very slow:
grep { charnames::viacode($_) =~ /$search/i } 0..0x10FFFF;Here’s a full script with the imports and formatted printing in case anyone wants to test:
use open qw/:std :utf8/; use charnames ':full'; my $search = shift; my @found = grep { charnames::viacode($_) =~ /$search/i } 0..0x10FFFF; print "$found[0] - " . charnames::viacode($found[0]) . "\n";-
Slow as well.
-
-
-
-
-
Do they really think publishers will accept this?
It’s really saddening how authentication on the web has turned in to “Let google do it”. Does anyone know of any active projects for google like sign in?
I found https://www.keycloak.org/ to be relatively “easy” to operate. It’s well documented and supported, based on the JVM. You could use it with OAuth/OpenID connect or SAML and administer users via web interface or from external sources like LDAP.
It’s not google, it’s oauth. You may allow your users to use other providers. Like Facebook or Amazon. What makes the matter only slightly less horrible.
The project readme says otherwise
There are also other OAuth2 providers.