not all change is progress
May 30, 2016
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00:01:43 News
01:05:22 Cryptomator
01:16:28 Feedback
01:31:58 Net Neutrality
Securing documents on the public cloud can seem a little overwhelming for the non-technical user, but is just what Cryptomator promises. We spin it up to see if it delivers. Plus, as well as all the latest news and your feedback, we dive into the contentious topic of Net Neutrality.
00:01:43 News
Here’s Everything You Missed During Google I/O [Part 1 –
Developers]
Here’s
Everything You Missed During Google I/O [Part 2 –
Users]
Google I/O 2016: Android’s failure to innovate hands Apple
free run at WWDC
Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US
The Play Store comes to Chrome OS, but not the way we were
expecting
Older Chromebooks, including the original Pixel, won’t run
Android apps
Samsung is done with Android Wear watches, says Tizen is the
future
Newest challenger to iOS and Android software dies before
leaving the gate
Google to bring official Android support to the Raspberry Pi
3
Google Steps Up Pressure on Partners Tardy in Updating
Android
Google beats Oracle—Android makes “fair use” of Java
APIs
Why the Very Silly Oracle v. Google Trial Actually
Matters
How Oracle made its case against Google, in pictures
The
Truth about Linux 4.6
MITRE fighter says CVE delays are no laughing matter, names
bug ROFL in branding protest
Canary Watch – One Year Later
Purism introduces privacy-focused, Linux tablets for $599 and
up
Petition for Intel to Release an ME-less CPU design
Indiegogo improves crowdfunding with a stamp of approval for
hardware projects
Sailfish Community Device Program
Introducing
Mycroft Core
01:05:22 Cryptomator
How can you go about securing your data when its stored on the public cloud? Paddy uses a combination of EncFS and GPG for his documents on Dropbox and Drive, but such solutions may be a little beyond the non-technical user. Could this be where the MIT licensed Cryptomator steps in?
01:16:28 Feedback
Aaronb got in touch regarding Debian’s dropping of support for older CPUs, and wondered if chips of that vintage would be able to cope with today’s bloated webpages anyway?
What happens when an update that causes boot issues goes undetected because we only infrequently reboot our boxes? Having been bitten by just such a problem, Ian Barton wondered if maybe we should be rebooting more frequently?
Robert Horn wrote in to question why such a fuss has been made about Ubuntu on Windows, and to ask why it’s really much different from Cygwin. And Floyd Wallace tried to make the case for a Linux desktop winning out over a Windows one.
01:31:58 Net Neutrality
Is Net Neutrality something to cherish and fight to protect, or simply a mythical state of affairs that never existed and would be detrimental if it did? Your Luddites have differing opinions.
I think the net neutrality discussion was missing the point most of the time by casting it in terms of the consumer. The major issue is select content providers–to the same consumers–getting preferential treatment, particularly when the internet provider is itself a content provider and offers its content at a discount relative to 3rd parties. It’s about paying to get an unfair advantage (like pay-to-win games).
Naturally different kinds of traffic will have different bandwidth requirements, like streaming video vs email. That’s not the issue. And a consumer can purchase whatever level of bandwidth he likes, including the doctor’s telemedicine. That’s not the issue either. It’s as I said above, where one provider gets preferential treatment reaching the same consumer for the same or similar service–or even some new service that we didn’t even know we’d want beforehand. We want to avoid getting stuck with legacy monopolies who prevent a new competitor from even being able to have a go because of preferential deals.
Hmm, I wonder if there will be some regulations about ISPs not being allowed to throttle a competitors traffic by more than x% of the customers bandwidth.
I think I’ve seen some German politician touting an ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to charge for x Mbit when they fail to deliver x/y Mbit. We’ll see where this goes.
This idea of looking out for ISP’s profit is incredibly frustrating. The conversation is much like listening to the power utilities demanding more money and saying rolling brown outs were needed because they were not receiving enough money for repairs and maintenance. Even hospitals were included in the rolling brown outs and many elderly died from heat. People debated whether they had to look out for the utilities profits. Much like you guys are currently going on about ISPs. Until secretly taped ENRON recordings were released. Tapes of gleefully smug corporate types talking about which geographical areas they were going to squeeze with brown outs and betting on how many elderly would die as a result of their games. Currently this is going on with comcast, verizon, and the various other ISPs. Each month these ISPs charge many of the homes $200 to $300 a month with their tv/telephone/internet bundles which all comes in on tcp/ip. Enough money to set up all the ISP hardware needed for that household in a single month. Net neutrality is only an issue for those who are frustratingly lacking experience.
Great show as always.
Speaking of updating to the latest Linux kernel – I have an old HP NX6325 laptop that I use to run Manjaro. I tried to upgrade to 4.4, but my system bogs right down. I had to downgrade to 4.1 to improve the performance. I’ll be staying with 4.1 for a while.
Yepp, reboots are very good to check if your persistent
configurations – or custom scripts run at boot ;) – are
working. Also `fsck`s.
And when you’re updating libraries it’s way easier than
going through `lsof` to figure out which processes have
libraries loaded which are already deleted in the
filesystem (a file’s data won’t disappear as long a
process has an open file descriptor for this file).
I’ve also added a `cat /var/run/reboot-required 2> /dev/null`to the Ubuntu-version of my ‘updates’ shell alias, to remind me to reboot my workstation now and then.
Obviously the surgeon shouldn’t do remote surgeries from
home over his crappy consumer xDSL.
If institutions like hospitals buy guarantied bandwidth –
which come with service level agreements – and the ISP
fails to deliver because the customers of it’s consumer
side of business eat up their bandwidth it’s how is it
not the ISPs fault?
I have to wonder how well the hosts who have sided against net neutrality are familiar with the business practices of American ISPs. In America the big ISPs are also sell traditional television services and own numerous media properties. Comcast owns NBC and Universal Pictures. It is not just the cable based ISPs. Verizon and AT&T are also in the traditional cable/satellite TV market. There is an inherent conflict of interest for them as there is a desire for those monopolies to suppress the growth of competing video services such as Amazon and Netflix . Some have argued that there was never network neutrality in the past so we don’t need it in the future, but in the past the business models of our telecommunications/media monopolies weren’t being threatened by the internet. With the rise of cord cutting and the younger generation abandoning the old business model for selling television entertainment, the monopolies are looking to extort money from Google/Amazon/Netflix to make up for the lost revenue from people dropping pay TV. The only way without network neutrality that we could prevent the incumbent ISP/media monopolies from abusing their position is to strictly enforce antitrust regulations and bust up the vertical integration of American ISPs and the media.
Some have made the argument that it is not fair that Netflix uses so much bandwidth and upgrading the network costs money. However, in America the cost of internet is obscenely high and the speeds slow. I pay $67 dollars a month for 18/2 Mbps service through Comcast. Comcast has deemed my market unworthy of upgrading to reach speed parity with its other markets. However instead of using their capital to upgrade my market’s speed and capacity, they decided instead to use that money to try and buy Time Warner and sell my market to Charter Communications. After that merger was struck down by the government Charter purchased Time Warner. The feeling of Wall Street at the time was somebody had to merge with Time Warner, just because. In America the focus is for capital to be spent on multi-billion dollar corporate mergers and acquisitions to build an even larger monopoly rather than investing in network infrastructure.
If we eliminate network neutrality and all streaming companies will have to start paying money to ISPs and the majority of internet traffic is now becomes fast lane, will people see their ISP bills go down because companies like Netflix are now paying the ISPs? I think everyone knows what the answer to that question will be.
Great show — interesting topics and good discussion.
I have used EncFS in the past but stopped after the security audit, not because the findings were that bad but more because it led me to look into the development of EncFS and realize that it was not robust (development was actually suspended completely for about a year and even now the issues from the security audit are still not addressed and development is slow). More recently, I have used git annex which can work with many cloud storage services and uses GPG to encrypt files. Cryptomator looks very slick and I look forward to testing it out. I’d love to see a serious security audit of it as well. I take slight issue with calling it a backup solution. It is a cloud storage solution and could be part of a backup strategy but it does not have some features (versioning, protection from deleting files) that I would want in a backup program.
Paddy made the best point in your net neutrality discussion at the end. You likely should have started the discussion by defining net neutrality more precisely. As you mentioned and is evidenced in the previous comments here, you won’t find many people in America opposed to net neutrality because our ISP’s operate mostly as monopolies (or duopolies for some fortunate regions) and government regulation like net neutrality is pretty much the only feasible way of pushing back against the ISP’s (breaking up the monopolies is very unlikely). In many cases, the ISP’s monopoly is actually enforced by contracts with local governments, so government regulation doesn’t seem so out of line to consumers.
For most of your discussion, it seemed like the real issue you were discussing was a pricing problem rather than a content neutraliy problem. The pricing model of internet service reminds me of some cloud storage services that offered “unlimited” storage (e.g. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/microsoft-drops-unlimited-onedrive-storage-after-people-use-it-for-unlimited-storage/) — that only worked until people started using it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Amazon Glacier which uses tape storage and prices transfer, storage, and retrieval prices separately to match the costs of tape storage as closely as possible and results in stories like this one: https://medium.com/@karppinen/how-i-ended-up-paying-150-for-a-single-60gb-download-from-amazon-glacier-6cb77b288c3e#.w582hjycu. ISP’s should charge a variable amount that matches their varying costs (more per bandwidth at 8 pm, less at 3 am), but of course that would be too complicated for most consumers to understand. However, most other issues would work themselves out if price and cost were properly coupled.
Oh man. Never discuss net neutrality again, please. It always seems like shorthand for Netflix Neutrality. I hate Netflix with a passion. They are worse than the TV networks they want to replace, except Netflix are given a free pass by all the press for being the “good guys”. WTF?? Netflix are Evil. They are half of the reason we have DRM in browsers – the other half being Google – Netflix pushed Silverlight long after Microsoft killed it, and they are the reason the internet is slow for the vast majority of surfers as the minority ‘flix users are hogging all the bandwidth. Down with Netflix! Down with internet video!
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