61–70 of 174 posts
This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong. When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access. The mere idea that a web server…
This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong. When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access. The mere idea that a web server…
Generally n = 1 is not a good sample size.
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It's not that young people grew up with stable rules. It's that young people grew up under the influence of industrial information warfare tactics and propaganda. As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy (thanks to the Software Publishers Association and the friendly local Microsoft rep), this conditioning to get kids (and less…
> As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy I remember having this discussion with in HS and also at work with people who were convinced pirating a PSX game is same as stealing, while not realizing there is no evidence that suggests a pirated copy means a lost sale (people can't afford it in places like Brasil where they still p…
Even the teachers copied software for us onto floppies that we’d “borrow” like library books.
Everyone pirated. Interestingly though most switched to Linux early on too.
And most of the members of our warez distribution BBS/IRC channels went on to great careers in technology, some becoming leading lights of the local and SV VC scene ;)
I think some of the early healthy disrespect for authority may have had a part in fostering our risk taking, questioning mindsets!
This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong. When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access. The mere idea that a web server…
I continue to be shocked that Twitter convinced an entire generation of software developers that you need to obtain something called an "API key"--which can somehow be refused or even revoked once granted--in order to write a client for their protocol. "Back in my day", we just reverse engineered the official client and used whatever algorithm it used to talk to the server and called the war won :/.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that young people grew up with stable rules. It's that young people grew up under the influence of industrial information warfare tactics and propaganda. As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy (thanks to the Software Publishers Association and the friendly local Microsoft rep), this conditioning to get kids (and less…
> As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy I remember having this discussion with in HS and also at work with people who were convinced pirating a PSX game is same as stealing, while not realizing there is no evidence that suggests a pirated copy means a lost sale (people can't afford it in places like Brasil where they still p…
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I dunno about that.. controlling access to your server is much more important today because tech is ubiquitous, and a big target for bad actors. In the old days very few people would know enough and care enough to reverse engineer your protocol.. when a service has billions of users and valuable data, that changes. If Twitter did not have an API key, they would spend 2x the money on absorbing & defending against DDoS…
> If Twitter did not have an API key, they would spend 2x the money on absorbing & defending against DDoSes and security vulnerabilities. That cost would get passed on to us with frequent outages and many more ads in our feeds. Or a leak of someones DMs. This is complete nonsense. Attackers aren't going to follow your TOS, so what possible benefit could asking your users to do it on little more than the honor system…
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Skype I know is infamously hard, but I'm wondering about the more general case -- are the problems there similar to the problems with Skype, or are they due to something else?
As far as I know, they're a combination of it being hard work and there just not being enough of a qualified developer community around Pidgin etc. to put in the effort required. I think people generally underestimate the sheer amount of work involved in reverse engineering an IM protocol, even one that's not particularly well obfuscated.
But if we know that the company is going to respond by changing the protocol. Then who wants to spend time reverse engineering it?
A website’s TOS is not law so why should the violation of a TOS be treated like a violation of the law? Curious if anyone has any arguments
"... the bounds of criminal law should not be defined by the preferences of website operators. And private companies shouldn't be using criminal laws meant to target malicious actors as tool to enforce their computer use preferences or to interfere with competitors." If a website operator wants to control if a user can access the website, then there are ways to do this without resorting to criminal prosecution. Throu…
I am certain that this ruling will be appealed, and we will hopefully see this case before the Supreme Court (assuming they have the time and desire to hear it.. if they don't, then this ruling will stand). Only then will we really be able to speak with the certainty you display. When you say "Ultimately, no website can force a user..." I wonder if you are actually considering the use of force there? A police officer…
Besides its not as if they can actually do anything about it. I probably don't even come up in their analytics.