261–270 of 343 posts
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> Basically, the only way to save democracy in the USA from the clutches of oligarchy is constitional reform Hmm no, not any more than constitutional reform was needed to reverse Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Yes, technically we could wait 70 years and basically hope the supreme court judges at some later point see things our way and are less bought off oligarchic interests. I am even more sceptical of this outcome.
Every social media website is dominated by people supporting net neutrality. I don't even remember seeing an opposing opinion, except from Trump's government. Maybe I'm living in some weird bubble, but it seems to me the argument is really not an argument, but an artificially created nonsense.
I'm up for net neutrality, but what do you about one or two pigs hogging the network? This quotes netflix as having 37% of traffic in N.A. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix-boasts-37-... It's like you build an autobahn for everyone, and then one monster haulage company moves in and dominates the road, and the road isn't really as useful as envisaged.
So, now we have an autobahn whose "bandwidth" is 40000 cars per second.
The way haulage works is by the car with no real guarantee about a steady rate of delivery. I don't care, just get 10000 cars from point a to point b. This is no-deadline data transfer like downloading a file.
The way streaming works is that it needs exactly 10 cars per second with no mention of total cars. I don't care, I just need a steady 10 cars per second.
For reference, I can service 10,368,000 of those haulage requests in a 30 day month (ideally) but I can only have 4,000 simultaneous streaming users, ever.
The internet, before streaming, was almost all haulage. Most of the infrastructure was built on the idea of haulage being the dominant use case. People needed to get information from point A to point B as fast as possible. Even torrenting, was haulage. "Congestion" at peak times was not as important because delivery deadlines were looser. As long as you were averaging more cars delivered over a time period (24hrs) than requested the congestion would eventually clear.
Then streaming hit. Now most of the traffic on the internet is on a tight deadline. That infrastructure built for haulage was completely incapable of handling it. We have 40000 cars per second but this is now "Rush Hour" and we have 20k users wanting to get 200k cars in THIS EXACT SECOND otherwise their experience suffers. It doesn't matter if we unused bandwidth at 3am, it doesn't matter if we have unused bandwidth ever. What matters is that we can cover the peak cars per second requested on our network. If we cannot, we have oversold the autobahn and are now "guilty of fraud".
The Internet was like an autobahn but these days consumers only care about what happens during rush hour. Imagine how different an autobahn would be if you had to guarantee a lane for every driver that wanted it on-demand. It is an autobahn that is huge and mostly empty most of the time (your lane is your lane and if you are not driving its empty), it was also far far more expensive to build.
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Let's not pretend cryptographic signing of emails makes them immune to tampering. This makes it essentially a guarantee that they were not modified between Point A and Point B but that's about it. I'm not saying they were or weren't modified nor am I saying it's even a good theory they were modified but we shouldn't make cryptographic signing sound more capable than it is.
? Can you explain? My understanding is that the signatures are still on the dumped emails and that one purpose of digital signatures is non repudiation - essentially immunity to tampering.
There were a few other methods of attack proposed when this first came out. The most likely was the vulnerability of 1024 bit RSA that was used here. There are concerns that 1024 bit RSA may be vulnerable to well financed attackers.
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Sure, but we have (ideally/optimistically) a representative democracy , and not a direct government-by-the-people. That means that we nominate people we trust, and surrender some of our direct decision-making and opinion-influence authority to them when we vote for them. There are slightly more direct ballot measures and such at more local/municipal/state levels, but even those often take the form of "statement of pu…
> Sure, but we have (ideally/optimistically) a representative democracy, and not a direct government-by-the-people. You say it as if it's a good thing. Representative "democracy" is seldom representative, and is a watered down version of actual democracy.
And a true form of democracy is mob justice. Reddit is not a good way to govern.
The centralization of the web is what worries me. I suppose non-neutral net can contribute to that, but even with a neutral net we've seen extraordinary centralization around a few major sites. Will neutrality really save us?
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When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Every person who has voted for a president has voted against their own policy positions, often hundreds or thousands of their own policy positions. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN). It is of course…
> hoping he would destroy a free and open Internet Many of us disagree with the equivalence between nn and "free and open internet".
(Genuine request for more information)
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> Just like the election Please don't instigate a flame war.
If you’re referring to my comment (which is now flagged, for no reason other than it being less than sympathetic to HC’s argument that the Russians ruined the election for her - you have to love HN), I wasn’t flaming anyone. I simply pointed out that IMO this FCC incident is much more serious than what happened in the election. Leaked but real emails about unethical/illegal conduct did nothing more than make the vote…
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The government governs by the consent of its citizens. It is never acceptable for the government to ignore the opinions of its citizens, and anyone in government claiming otherwise should be removed. I utterly reject your claim that we should just acquiesce in the face of such malignancy.
The consent was given in the ballot box, No?
Try making the argument for net neutrality with some Trump groupies and you'll soon find the simplistic attitude that whatever is happening must be good because it's going against those entrenched insiders at the FCC. Permanent revolution, indeed.
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There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1]. Additionally every campaign, company, even private individual has emails that wouldn't look good if they were leaked to the public with no context. I'd bet there were emails from the other side that would have been just as damaging had they been leaked. In fact we know there were, because several damaging emails from Do…
Your reference, [1], refers to documents from Guccifer 2.0, which Salon uses to extrapolate that "emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign may not have been as reliable as the anti-Clinton camp would like to believe." But then there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail#Non... . As far as damaging e-mails from the other side, they would probably need to go further than: mocking peopl…
Additionally there are several attacks potentially available to state actors to forge those signatures. The most probable is to steal the server's private key.
>As far as damaging e-mails from the other side,
How about agreeing to take a meeting with a Russian agent?
Trump only won by about 80k votes in 3 states. The election was very close--a change in weather could've swung it.
You can Google Russian involvement with Pizzagate. It was mostly Russian linked bots retweeting it to push it into trending.
In addition to Russian bots, all the Turkish pro government newspapers were spreading Pizzagate conspiracies.
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I don't know if it mattered, but the comments as shown in the article are pretty much the same copy with various simple replacements for many phrases. This happens in lots of spam campaigns. I'm not sure anyone spent much time doing it - could be few hours for someone who does spam already. It doesn't look like a sophisticated or costly action.
You didn't answer the question. If it didn't matter, why did somebody invest time in doing it?
Given that spamming a comment form is a few lines of Perl - http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod - the idea that some nut might spend 30 seconds ordering their computer to spam the FCC does not strike me as farfetched, nor does it seem reasonable to waste time caring about that.
Better to focus our efforts on lobbying the FCC to change this boneheaded decision. Frankly, I think the point that they don't care about our comments to begin with is more damning than whether or not an idiot spammed a comment box.