Post "Good Google," Who Will Defend the Open Web? 133
psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have both the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"
Re:Which Organizations Have the Clout and Principl (Score:4, Interesting)
Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others
It was clearly over four minutes before you posted. Pretty much everyone here would scoff at MS.
What's left is pointless discussions of opinion about "Oh, I think THIS large multinational corporation which is utterly devoid of any conscience, as they all are, is lately acting better than this OTHER one, so we should root for them instead."
We may as well skip right to godwining. (Insert the name of the company you think is evil) is basically (insert inappropriate historical bad guy here).
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Slashdot is basically Rasputin. ... Am I doing it right?
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I think so.
In Pre-Soviet Russia, mystic advisors slashdot you!
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I think the historical pattern is pretty clear - companies support openness and interoperability when they have a very small share of the market, because it lets them potentially claim a bigger share. Once they own a big share of the market, it's in their interest to break interoperability and close down options, because it lets them lock competitors out of the market. Google has p
Does Vint Cerf still work at Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I would have thought a dude with the title "Chief Internet Evangelist" would have something to say about this.
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Hopefully, he'd say "the only one capable and motivated to defend the open web in perpetuity is the USER", so mind your own business, literally, by committing your computing infrastructure to tech you have some control over.
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Yeah, I think he still works there; but it feels more like he's on an advisory marketer post than anything, and like any power he has within Google is dwarfed or obviated by Larry Page and the Real Name nuts [slashdot.org]. As far as I can tell, (re?)opening a YouTube account would require a Google- profile, and even if that doesn't require a Real Name at all it would unnecessarily tie social media to the service to inflate its perceived influence and success, the same way Microsoft ties IE to Windows. (One more reason
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Well, I don't think real names imposed by one service are a real threat to the open web anyway.
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Slashdot (Score:1)
Oops, I meant Slashdotted. The link was Slashdotted.
The best company on the planet... (Score:2, Funny)
Samsung!
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Ever after their journey to Damascus they never were quite the same again.
Like Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if such a mythical company existed, you can't pick that one because ideas change; people change; companies change. For the same reason, you can't grant party X the power to do M, because party Y will use that power to do N. What may seem "good" now will never remain that way.
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Re:Like Politics (Score:5, Interesting)
The EFF has been pretty consistent over the years. Perhaps they lack the clout, but they certainly have remained pretty steadfast for a long time now.
Re:Like Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps they lack the clout, but they certainly have remained pretty steadfast for a long time now.
That's because they lack clout. The old thing about the camel going trough the eye of a needle applies here too. Power does not come cleanly.
Re:Like Politics (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies always act in their own interests, it's just that some are more ethical than others.
Why do we need a Champion, when we could have a Hall of Heroes?
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USA was making a surplus (Score:2)
An enterprise's sole function is to make profits as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Unfortunately, once an enterprise becomes publicly traded by speculators with a 90-day or shorter window, "quickly" often begins to eclipse "efficiently".
Governments by definition cannot make a profit
USA was making a surplus in the closing years of the Clinton government.
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USA was making a surplus in the closing years of the Clinton government.
Clinton never pulled the nation out of debt. What you refer to as a surplus just means that the government pulled in more revenue than it spent for the year--NOT that there was no national debt. The national debt increased by $2 T over Clinton's administration, overall.
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That was also by claiming SS as income and not into the fund it had been for years.
Clinton and Gingrich pulled off some major accounting trickery to do it.
Only way to fix it is slash the 3 sacred cows and raise taxes (both are unpopular by specific segments of the population). No other way at this point. Do one or the other and we will be back where are 10 years from now.
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That's no more tricky than Congress floating a bond against SS revenue, essentially breaking the law and breaking faith with every worker and present and future retiree back in Nixon's second (?) term. Last I saw, they've never even paid the interest on that float. They did it to avoid the real work of trimming expenditures, closing loopholes and raising taxes - just as they're doing now.
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Clinton never pulled the nation out of debt. What you refer to as a surplus just means that the government pulled in more revenue than it spent for the year
Well yes. That is the meaning of a "surplus" in the national accounts. And it is indeed analogous to making a profit. So what's your point? What are you complaining about? Tepples can be an annoying git, but on this occasion he was perfectly correct.
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I couldn't agree more!
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Free Market companies have one overriding interest; to make profits for their shareholders, that is the only reason they exist.
Not really. First, there is no such thing as a "Free Market company" because markets don't exist without rules to define them, not to mention all the legal and fiduciary infrastructure that supports and defends the ability of a private entity to extract a profit from an activity. The "Free Market" is an unobtainable ideological goal, like Nirvana (the state of being, not the band). Second, the mandates of a corporation are defined in their corporate charter, which is in turn defined by the governing body un
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You think wisely.
The companies listed aren't going to be champions of anything but shareholder returns, and whatever gets shareholder return will be their cause du jour.
It's the organizations that make up openness, whether the cranky people doing debian, the actual coders at IBM, Mark Shuttleworth's chauffeur, that is to say, actual people and their organizations rather than the corporate bodies that are charged with making money from this stuff.
The folks at Linux.org, various champions of FOSS, maker-peeps
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Companies always act in their own interests, it's just that some behave more closely like I would than how someone else would.
FTFY
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Thats why should be a non-profit organization, not a for-profit company. No money nor power must be involved if you want fairness, else even if the organization goals are good people wanting power/money will try to get there to take decisions to benefit them or 3rd parties that will benefit them. Look at what happens at governments, the "voice of the people", or other organizations where money or some kind of power is involved.
A lot of organizations (ISOC, W3C, ICANN, *NIC, ITU, etc) could have commercial
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Why pick just one? Have a consortium or such. For long-run interests, seems to me there oughta be several companies and organizations with reasons to keep an open and free Web.
We will (Score:5, Insightful)
If the grassroots don't organize then all will be lost. There is too much money to be made closing it all up, overcommercializing it, and using it to extract maximum revenue from compliant consumers.
Unfortunately, I don't think we will. Too many people have been blinded by the merchants of "cool" to see the true cost in terms of freedom and privacy which come with drinking the Apple/Google kool-aid.
We have to stop doing business with those who close it up. That means a full boycott of DRM and paid content. That means eschewing privacy-stripping "app stores" on locked down platforms for sideloaded FOSS. That means running strict ad blockers to choke the funding stream and make being intrusive scumbags a bad business model.
The web is turning into a hybrid shopping mall/movie theater. Don't like it? Stop funding it. Stop being a source of revenue and eyeballs.
I'm sure many of those who read this post will complain about the direction of the web then head right back to the app store to buy something they don't need on a platform they don't control.
The "web" is no longer what is in a browser. It now extends to all Internet-connected services. Locked down paid apps on restricted, DRM-friendly platforms are going to replace open, standards-compliant pages, but only if we let them.
How is it funded? (Score:2)
That means eschewing privacy-stripping "app stores" on locked down platforms for sideloaded FOSS.
In that case, who will finance the production of video games as free software and free cultural works?
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That means eschewing privacy-stripping "app stores" on locked down platforms for sideloaded FOSS.
In that case, who will finance the production of video games as free software and free cultural works?
We will, via Kickstarter and it's ilk...
Re:We will (Score:4, Insightful)
If the grassroots don't organize then all will be lost.
This is basically the fundamental principle of politics, especially democracy. If you don't defend your interests, no one else will. Even if other people are well intentioned, they will only have an imperfect understanding of your interests.
If the people don't get involved in politics, then the corporations that do will have all the power.
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If the grassroots don't organize then all will be lost. There is too much money to be made closing it all up, overcommercializing it, and using it to extract maximum revenue from compliant consumers.
Oh my! So Ayn Rand's invisible for-profit free-market hand won't ensure proper stewardship of this resource?!?! How many arch-capitalists heads will explode I wonder.
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Too many people have been blinded by the merchants of "cool" to see the true cost in terms of freedom and privacy which come with drinking the Apple/Google kool-aid.
People prefer concrete benefits like functionality and ease of use, to notional benefits like "open".
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The DoD (Score:2, Interesting)
DoD, and universities. Use Internet standards or we'll kick your...well, you won't get that contract renewal. It worked pretty well in the old days.
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That was back when that was the only source of money for the people inventing the standards. Now, the internet is more commercialized and there is plenty of money to be had.
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There's only one company on that list... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's only one company on that list that seems qualified to me, and that would be Mozilla.
My reasoning (and this is based on my opinion, so mod how you will):
Mozilla has long championed open standards, and although they once toppled the "invincible" Microsoft, whether they still hold that kind of power remains to be seen...
Re:There's only one company on that list... (Score:5, Funny)
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The internet is veiled in darkness. The Pirate Bay servers stop, the DRM is wild, and the Wayback Machine begins to rot. The users wait, their only hope, an About box....
Adobe Photoshop v. X.0
(C) 200X Adobe
H4X3D by Wizlab [wikipedia.org]
'When the internet is in darkness Four Wizards will come....'
After a long LAN party, four bearded programmers arrive, each holding a LAPTOP.
Re:There's only one company on that list... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yahoo will rise again. They clearly grasp the significance of cloud computing, which is why they've collected all their employees in one place.
Oh my god. You have figured it out. Yahoo is planning a mass suicide.
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The defense of the web will come not through corporate two-faced goons but through technologies like RSA, SSL, & PGP.
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There's only one company on that list that seems qualified to me, and that would be Mozilla.
We can have a pointless major new revision of web openness standards every week!
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Most importantly Mozilla is a nonprofit and promoting/protecting the open Web is a key part of our mission. We don't have shareholders or paying customers so we can pretty much do whatever we think is right as long as enough people keep using Firefox to ensure we have influence.
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Re:There's only one company on that list... (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla has plenty of clout.
Post-Opera Mozilla controls one of the three important Web engines. Any Web standard needs to be implemented by at least two engines to become a recommendation. That gives us a powerful say in what gets standardized.
We have enough Firefox users that things we do in Firefox have a real impact on the Web. For example, we introduced Do Not Track. We think Google's Native Client isn't good for the Web so we've introduced asm.js instead which is rapidly getting traction. Webkit's original CSS gradients sucked so we introduced a better alternative that is now standardized. We don't like encumbered codecs on the Web so we pushed the creation of the royalty-free Opus audio codec which is getting a lot of traction. Etc.
Having said that, we don't have infinite clout and we sometimes lose battles and have to make compromises. But then, so do our much bigger competitors.
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We're already hurting their business and they haven't done that. Noticed how much money they're spending promoting Chrome? That would be easier if Mozilla was dead, wouldn't it?
Re:There's only one company on that list... (Score:4, Interesting)
> Mozilla has just caved in to H.264
We don't always win our battles, unfortunately. Holding out against H.264 was doing no-one any good.
> they removed the feed button from their browser long before Google killed that feed reader
Come on, lack of a "feed button" != evil.
> and their new mobile OS comes with a paid "app store".
Supporting paid apps != evil.
Apps only available through a single app store controlled by the system vendor with obnoxious policies == evil. But FirefoxOS isn't like that at all.
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...not sure how we got on that list
you're not selling advertisements nor does ibm own content.
too bad ibm isn't in browser building business either.
microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
my vote goes to microsoft to champion an Open Web. Past history has shown that they are staunch defenders of the principles which guide the Open Web initiative, and I would always trust them, when the time comes, to make a solid business decision which is in the best interests of an Open Web.
hahahahahahahahaa omgwtfbbq roflamo hahahaahahaha.....
Why is MS mentioned as a candidate? (Score:1)
MS has never been about any open web, they have been trying to make their own standards since the beginning.
MS only cares about MS.
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Because this is a complete troll piece to begin with, and adding Microsoft to the list just makes it blatant. Nowhere is evidence given for Google "abdicating their position as such a champion," it's simply stated with the hope we accept it as a given. Then toss Microsoft into a list of "good guys".
Who owns Fogbeam Labs, anyway? They claim to be "Open Source 2.0" (what does that even mean?) and very new.
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Because this is a complete troll piece to begin with, and adding Microsoft to the list just makes it blatant.
Then toss Microsoft into a list of "good guys".
MS aren't seriously listed as "good guys" they are only on the list because it was initially written in something of a "stream of consciousness" fashion, listing companies that jumped to mind, pro or con and then sometimes (as in the case of Microsoft and Facebook) immediately disqualifying them from the "good guys" list.
Nowhere is evidence given for Google "abdicating their position as such a champion," it's simply stated with the hope we accept it as a given.
Anybody who reads the news and is paying attention to what has been going on lately realizes that Google has changed. Are they completely "evil" now? No, but it's quite clear that openness
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this is really that much different. Mostly in that Google was never particularly open. They just happen to have finally killed a service that people actually care about (vs like Wave or Buzz or even iGoogle) in their Ahab-like (or Quixotic, depending on your view) pursuit of G+.
They never cared about RSS and it's obvious Reader was never anything but a back-shelf product people happened to like, because, well, Google. None of their (major) products have been developed "in the open"; the fact you can even get the source to Android is quite something. Where's the open development (or source code) for Web Search, Gmail, G+, calendar, etc? Locked up tight. Don't idealize Google; they were never an "open source" company.
Screw the web. If you want to beat Google, don't do it on their playground. It's not even a very good one.
Then it's very disingenuous of you to post the article as if you were a third party when you are not.
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Then it's very disingenuous of you to post the article as if you were a third party when you are not.
Disingenuous? I don't quite see that. At the end of the day, what I said stands or falls on its merits (or lack thereof)... who submitted it to /. is actually pretty irrelevant. Anyway, I'm not going to stop and take the time to create a whole new Slashdot account just to post something today, when I have one I've been using for years.
I suppose you could quibble that I could have used the word "we" in the article description, and that would be something of a fair point. But I just have a habit of writin
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"who submitted it to /. is actually pretty irrelevant"
Not when you use the phrase 'Those crazy kids at...' which implies you aren't one of them. It's disingenuous, as GP suggests.
"I suppose you could quibble that I could have used the word "we" in the article description, and that would be something of a fair point. But I just have a habit of writing in a detached, 3rd party voice like that."
Except this is not mere detachment ('Fogbeam labs have...'). It's something different and you know it.
This.
You were being less than completely honest.
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Post "Good Google," Who Will Defend the Open Web? (Score:3, Funny)
What about 4chan?
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+i, Fear for your future
Microsoft is the only Company (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft is the only company that cares or will defend the rights of the end user to ensure all software is secure, free, Open and meets all standards which the end user should be able to use, understand or knows of.
Microsoft has proven over the past 35+ years how much they do their best to meet the needs, requirements of all end users.
They are also very trust worthy and honest when it comes to doing what is right for the end user. For example, look at how IBM attempted to rip off end users with OS/2. Microsoft saw this for what it was, and worked on their own version called 'NT', which meet and surpassed OS/2 in every way.
Another example is Netscape and IE. Microsoft saw Netscape ripping off end users by selling something which could be giving away for free. Microsoft produced IE which was free, met all standards, and allowed end users to have secure, free and open access to the Internet. Without IE, the Internet would be locked down and owned by Netscape.
Microsoft even fought Sun/Oracle on the Java front. Granted they lost, because they did not provide enough finical incentives to the US legal system, however they still stood up to Sun/Oracle to keep the Internet free from Java, which as we all know is a security risk and should never be used in DVD Players, Blu-Ray Players, nor even for server side Chat Room Programs.
Now Microsoft is taken on Apple and Google with their Windows RT and Windows 8. Will hope they win as they feel the sales of Windows RT and 8 tables and phones surpasses the sale of iOS and Android combined.
When Windows 8 was being developed, Microsoft wanted to reduce the source code size and the final binary size of Windows 8 to improve the performance for the end user. They removed the start button, which has increased the performance of Windows 8 and all other Microsoft products running on top of Windows 8.
Microsoft only cares about the end user, and will do whatever it takes to own to standards to keep the end user free and open.
As Mr. Gates said in an interview a few weeks ago, if we give Mr. Obama enough power to do what is right for the people of the US and the rest of the world, we will be free, and safe.
So lets all give Microsoft and Mr. Obama all the power they need to do what is right for everyone.
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Mental gymnastics keep some in shape. Looks like you need some mental physical therapy!
I will! (Score:3)
Just send me loads of cash so I can quit my regular job and devote my efforts to your needs.
What was it you wanted again?
Oh Google Google... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm don't exactly disagree, Google is a corporation, and corporations will defend and support structures and principles like the Open Web as long as they percieve strategic benefit and fianacial gain, so clearly other organisations need to defend these structures and principles. But other for-profit companies like Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft? Seriously? Companies will defend and protect their interests only, our interests are users can only align with theirs, not be permenantly linked.
In fact, I still believe that Google 'gets' the web in ways that other companies, like some of those that are listed as alternatives, don't. This doesn't mean that they are 'good' but that they at least have a decent long-term interest in seeing some of the principles crucial to us as users be upheld. I've gone in deeper in this in an article on 'Our uneasy relationship with Google' [blogspot.co.uk] (resolutely ad-free and non-commercial, please don't kill this comment as spam).
But long-term and from an ideological viewpoint, the only organisations that you should have faith in for the big issues that will affect us and shape the future of the web, it'd have to an entity with no financial stake and no legal obligation to shareholders. There is simply no way around the fact that any corporation will retain and protect principles only as long it percieves them to be benefical to itself as a business.
The Web sucks, let it die (Score:1, Insightful)
Most of the interesting stuff I read on the Internet these days is on email lists, which are relatively hard to find and hence have a high signal to noise ratio from people who went out of their way to find them, while the web has mostly become a means of tracking people and pushing ads on them.
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Most of the interesting stuff I read on the Internet these days is on email lists, which are relatively hard to find and hence have a high signal to noise ratio from people who went out of their way to find them, while the web has mostly become a means of tracking people and pushing ads on them.
Agreed.
I mean, hell, the only reason me and you came here was to renew our tracking cookies!
Not get other opinions and post our own completely ironic ones.
The champoin will be us (Score:3)
In the end, there is no one foundation or company. We have to use technology to create p2p/distributed types of solutions that can bypass the state and proprietary controls, even assuming they have 100% control over the infrastructure.
both necessary clout & required ethical princi (Score:2)
That's the problem right there. All power corrupts, absolute power etc.
Pick your example; MSFT, Google, Politicians, Catholic Church, in the end they all end up acting, overtly, covertly or usually both, to protect their positions.
History shows that you can't depend upon others, especially large organisations with power, to defend your interests.
(Although as pointed out above, the EFF has a good record; but they're hardly Google).
You have to do it yourself. Vote for politicians who support open standards,
If "for profit" then "hate open web" (Score:2)
Any questions?
Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Extrapolation, much?
Evidence for abandonment of the "open web" - cancelling Reader and the CalDAV API. Evidence for support of the open web: Chrome, GWT, open sourced jscompiler, V8, tons of random libraries and developer tools, SPDY, extensions to SSL, HTML5 rich snippets in search, etc.
I will state right now that I'm a Google employee, so you may think that makes me biased, but employees are often the companies harshest critics (internally). Yet this is a ridiculous stretch. Yes, I love(d) Reader too. Cancelling a widely loved but ultimately niche tool for which there are many replacements is not "abandoning the open web", it's recognising that with a finite amount of resources not every product area can be tackled.
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OP here...
Evidence for abandonment of the "open web" - cancelling Reader and the CalDAV API.
AND abandoning OpenSocial, not implementing any relevant open standards in G+, not developing Android in an open fashion, and probably a few dozen other examples that I can't remember offhand.
Evidence for support of the open web: Chrome, GWT, open sourced jscompiler, V8, tons of random libraries and developer tools, SPDY, extensions to SSL, HTML5 rich snippets in search, etc.
Yeah, nobody is saying that Google haven't done some amazing things in the past. Or even that they don't still do *some* good things. That's what makes this whole situation even more disturbing! When an organization that you have trusted and looked up to for a very long time begins displaying behavior whic
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I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but OpenSocial was DoA. It never stood a hope of a chance. Google embracing it wouldn't have changed a damned thing.
Also, Android is open source. You can go download the source code right now if you care to and build your own distro. How do you think there are about a million custom ROMs for it?
You should stop trolling for page views. You're very bad at it.
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Cancelling a widely loved but ultimately niche tool for which there are many replacements is not "abandoning the open web", it's recognising that with a finite amount of resources not every product area can be tackled.
I disagree. For several reasons:
1) Although you're right that Reader was a niche product, it catered to a _particular_ niche which should be relevant to Google: geeks, webmasters, internet power users... Making this "niche" pissed off at you == not smart;
2) It's not like Reader required that much maintenance or development (code-wise)... it was pretty much good as it was. And, please... don't tell me it was such a huge bandwidth hog for a behemoth like Google (it was "niche", after all, right?);
3) From an e
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I, and most any other semi-intelligent person, immediately saw the trollishness of the article. As someone else pointed out above, the assumption given that Google had ceded their position as "champion" and the inclusion of Microsoft in the list CLEARLY shows that the article was a troll.
Wikimedia hath no clout? (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who say Wikimedia is powerless, I completely disagree. They're a non-profit concerned with sharing the largest quantity of the most accurate knowledge with the most people. They control several of the most popular websites on earth with few commercial interests and have representatives in MANY languages.
Their largest subset (or was it them too? wp and wm?) also showed their willingness to shutdown completely for a day to demonstrate principles. Google would have taken quite a hit monetarily if they completely shut down (they just posted links and warnings).
What a dumb question... (Score:2)
None of these organizations, except IBM, has the clout with the federal government to be more than a buzzing mosquito in the ears of our elected representatives. And, that being said, why would IBM want to put themselves out?
If it's not IBM, Intel, Google, Amazon, PayPal, eBay, Facebook, Oracle, or Microsoft, you aren't going to get the ear of anyone other than the Congresspeople representing the area where your corporate headquarters is located. And even then, you'll need more than your one Representative
Really, (Score:2, Interesting)
The entire list is irrelevant and has no influence.
Aside from that the real question is, does the Internet need to be open?
I believe most people are falsely lulled into accepting that the moment you put open in front of something it must, by rights, be better then the alternative. Open Web is obviously better then the un-Open Web (really, what do you call the alternative), but who exactly is crippled by the current state of the Internet? Is there someone or some organization out there fundamentally unable
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the un-Open Web (really, what do you call the alternative)
You mean the closed web?
who exactly is crippled by the current state of the Internet? Is there someone or some organization out there fundamentally unable to use the Internet because its not "open".
These are two separate questions, and one does not lead into the other. To answer the first, no one in the free world really is crippled at the moment, because the web is still open. The answer the second, you can look at all the places where the web is closed. China, Iran, Syria, Australia, etc. But instead of government, you can replace it with corporations. Corporations telling you what you can put online and what you can't, what you can say online and what you can't, which sites
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anyone can code a web browser.
what this is talking about is that would change if there was mandatory drm and every friggin newssite etc would start using it.
you know what they would use it for? displaying ads. DISPLAYING ADS SOLD BY GOOGLE. this is why google producing a popular web browser has it's downsides. and that is the real reason why google doesn't give a fuck about the open web, their crawlers would still crawl the drm'd portions too.
it's not irrelevant concept, because it would be good that new en
On the other side, we have... (Score:2)
The big problem is that almost everybody in US "mobile", telephony, and cable already has a "walled garden". From Comcast to Apple, everybody in that space has a tight grip on their users. Most "apps" are really just a form of DRM.
This is a US thing, though. In Europe, and most of the rest of the world, everybody uses interchangeable GSM phones. The carriers have less control over handsets.
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Decentralize the Web! (Score:2)
IMO, the time is ripe to start creating of P2P, decentralized, server-less web - staring with the (mostly) static content like Wikipedia and YouTube and numerous other predominantly publish-only website. In the beginning, a way to push updates, a newer version of content, would suffice for the dynamism.
Models and implementation for decentralized directories (with search function) are available (Kademlia, BitTorrent's DHT). Ditto distributed naming services. But there nothing I'm aware of about how to, in
Why are we relying on corporations? (Score:2)
Corporations have their own agenda. Which basically comes down to "how much money can I rip out of the poor suckers wallets". Do not rely on corporations. Rely on yourself and your associations with individuals. That is all that matters. Real people.
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Best stuff would be for Slasdot to provide a RegExp filter, even if it had to run on client-side in JavaScript. It would be nice to improve the signal to noise ratio, even if just a bit.
Greasemonkey junkie, that funky monkey (Score:2)
Best stuff would be for Slasdot to provide a RegExp filter, even if it had to run on client-side in JavaScript
You could always prototype this as a script for an augmented browsing environment such as Firefox with Greasemonkey.
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Alright, this is retarded. I've butted heads with APK myself, and yeah, the guy's got issues... but I actually think he's honest about them. He really thinks the hosts file is a reasonable security measure, and he's just trying to explain this brilliant design to the world.
This, though, is purely offensive. Besides derailing conversations, it's mocking someone else's opinion (sane or not) without provocation. As a parody, it was funny once. Now it's just sad.
Re: (Score:2)
He really thinks the hosts file is a reasonable security measure, and he's just trying to explain this brilliant design to the world.
APK, if you're reading this, I'm willing to give you some space on my wiki to explain how to protect a computer with such a DNS blacklist.