The blog post this was based on (http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-...) which is from 2014 was widely panned when it was first publicized, and some of the many problems with the methodology pointed out by scholars with more experience and competence with the statistical methods involved.
That's how scholarship is supposed to work. However, it will never stop media from seizing on a great click-baity headline.
This seems buried. Is there a reason it's not mentioned or linked on the kloak page? I actually went looking for the code and couldn't find that repository.
I figured it was likely in the app, but for an experiment like this, that appeals to many of the ideals of an open source philosophy, I'm less likely to bother installing it if I'm unaware that it's an open source project.
Obviously the appeal ultimately needs to be greater than just being open source, but that initial bump can't hurt the outcome of the experiment.
Additional data point for all the people arguing about it deeper in comments: Firefox 3.6 had its last security update 9 months ago (2012-03-13) and hit official end of life from Mozilla a month later.
>That’s being challenged now for products that are made abroad and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it.
That ruling. I don't think it says what you think it says.
I wish I could say this was some of the worst reporting I've ever seen, but alas.
Maybe just read what it says? Third paragraph "“[i]mportation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under [the Copyright Act], of copies ․ of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the [owner's] exclusive right to distribute copies․”4
How is that ever going to apply to an iPhone - or to ANYTHING sold through an authorized distributor?
I'm in Australia, I buy my iPhone from an authorised distributor. I then decide to update to an iPhone 2, so I list it on eBay. Someone in the United States purchases the iPhone.
Do I have the authority of Apple to import that phone to the United States? In the absence of explicit terms and conditions, wouldn't this judgment prevent me from delivering the phone?
The Wiley textbooks were sold through an authorized distributor; just not one for the US. Suppose you buy an iPhone in Japan, because you live there. You buy it from an authorized dealer in Japan, but (in this imagined future) it has a restriction that it's not for export into the US. Two years later, you move to the US and take your phone with you. You later decide to switch to an Android phone, and sell your old iPhone on eBay.
The thesis is that this eBay sale would be considered illegal.
I prefer to let people read into the original as much as they choose, since it is fairly clear by the third introductory paragraph that the reporter misrepresented what was at issue in the case.
1. Just because it is allowed by the protocol doesn't mean any given client needs to pay any attention. Just like email, I can filter out any messages from people not in my contacts. I may choose not to and instead run each one of those messages through a spam filter. In this respect it really seems no different than email. Individual clients/servers can choose to be as strict as they like (but servers are servers, and they are sitting on the internet, so spammers can see them and send messages that will be ignored if they like).
2. Since connections with most of your contacts are theoretically maintained so you can push out new data, updating is more akin to propagating a new ip through the DNS system than using a redirect. Yes a DNS server can misbehave, but that can only screw up a network of well behaved servers for so long.
1. People learned (grudgingly) to use spam filters with their email because they had an existing service which had achieved large-scale network effect in a spam-free environment. A new service which develops a spam problem before it achieves critical mass is much more likely to be abandoned.
There must be some reason we haven't seen successful new decentralized service protocols on the Internet since the early '90s. I don't know of a more obvious one.
2. The problem is that contact names propagate outward from the master state where a push will update them. For instance, they get written down on business cards. They also get cached, imprudently but inevitably, in forms that are still digital but don't update properly.
Imagine a protocol that you could use to update your email address this way, and you'll see the problem. In theory, you could design a special SMTP message that would cause all clients to update their address books. In reality this would scale quite poorly and be quite unreliable, leading people to avoid it, leading it to be even more unreliable, etc. Of course, your chances are much better with a bright, shiny new protocol... but still.
RE 2. I agree since some servers that you are trying to push your new address may already have changed theirs. What happens then? Do my friends inform me? What if that unreachable server is not connected to my friends in any way?
