JavaScript is a completely different thing from Java. JavaScript is a scripting language that is contained within a web page. These scripts don’t have any access to system resources like hard drives or cameras.
Java is a virtual machine for running programs either inside or outside of the browser that may have direct access to system resources.
The similar names stem from a truly regrettable marketing mistake at Netscape in the 90s. They really have nothing to do with each other, aside from sharing the browser as a potential platform.
If you use base 28 for URL shortening or for encoding randomly generated strings you can avoid many of the worst English-language swear words. Base 28 has no S, T, or U. Think about it.
(Originally tweeted.)
Ars Technica’s quickie on Why anime fans pirate the shows they love made me want to comment:
The reason why fans shun “official” anime is obvious: it’s the difference between American Saturday morning cartoons and anime.
Western media companies think that anime and cartoons are the same thing, with the same target audience. So when they sub (or more often dub, ugh) the few series they decide to distribute, they dumb it down and remove anything which might offend the parent of a 5 year-old.
Anime != cartoons. The best rival any adult drama for quality of writing and complexity of plot.
They are also a great way to learn about and try to understand Japanese culture. Americanizing them removes most of the value, and dumbing them down removes the rest.
So yeah, until distributors figure out that they aren’t selling these shows to kids and morons, the fans will continue to pirate them. And why not? The economy of fansubbing isn’t broken, so where is the business case for trying to fix it?
I wish all TV shows and movies were fansubbed. We’d got a lot more out of them.
I think the FCC’s plan is potentially a win, if it actually does what they say it will. Phone and cable companies won’t be able to muck with the bits, and wireless providers will be able to prioritize service when necessary.
Think of it this way: if you can’t watch video in real time on AT&T, then switch providers to a carrier with a more video-friendly network. Or use wi-fi.
One reason that wireless providers need leeway is that the number of users on any one wireless cell is bound to fluctuate. If there’s suddenly a crowd in the area, the bandwidth use is going to spike. The cell needs to be able to prioritize voice and text packets at the expense of other services, the theory goes, in order to keep the largest number of subscribers connected.
In practice, of course, it would be better if providers invested in their physical networks rather than trying to rely on complex filtering schemes to squeeze every packet out of their existing plant.
One thing that would make all of this easier for wireless consumers to swallow: a ban on carrier-locked phones. Just sayin.
Update: A lot of people I respect are disappointed that the FCC hasn’t gone far enough to protect freedom of speech or fair access to network transit. You’re right, they haven’t. That doesn’t mean the current plan is a step backward or the end of the Internet, and we should in no way stop fighting for those things or demanding them from our carriers.
I think the whole issue of paid prioritization is a red herring. Who will buy into it? Just because your packets have priority doesn’t mean people will want them. It doesn’t make sense to me, from a content producer’s point of view. If a carrier reduced service to the point where the only way you could deliver content on their network was by paying extra, customers would desert them in droves for having a shitty network. If you can explain it, please do. I think it’s a hare-brained scheme cooked up by old-skool telcom CEOs who don’t know the difference between greed and a sustainable business model.
The recent Wikileaks fiasco (among other developments) has me thinking about political control of the internet. How do you route around national firewalls and knee-jerk corruption of the DNS? Or institutional firewalls? Or even just untrusted networks, like the compromised wi-fi at the local coffee shop?
One obvious solution is to use a VPN with an endpoint in a country which not only loves freedom, but protects the specific Freedoms that ensure a free, open, and neutral internet. But as my friend Ian pointed out, surfing the web over a VPN is full of suck. And it’s not necessary for all things, just the subset of things that might be restricted at your physical location.
What you really want is a remote session that you can use for freedom-sensitive web browsing, while you carry out your normal business over the local web. That’s where ChromeOS could be incredibly helpful: a free, open source, lightweight, sandboxed, web-only “desktop” would be the perfect thing to VNC into for this sort of browsing.
national firewall
My Desktop ———-||———-> ChromeOS ———-> the internets
Yes, you could do the same thing with any unixy OS, but with a much greater management overhead and complexity. When all you really need on the remote side is a trusty web browser, why not go with something that is purpose-built? A remote browsing appliance, in other words.
The death of ChromeOS as a product for netbooks has been suggested. I hope that the developers might see remote computing (cloud workstation? cloudbook?) as a viable niche for their project instead. We don’t need Android in the cloud. But we do need a reliable browser with a keyboard/mouse paradigm that we can connect to for unrestricted browsing.
Tweak it slightly so that it includes a VNC server and the ability to enable remote login from the command line (or boot switches passed by the virtual host). Or re-architect it so that it runs as a userland service. The end result would be a very useful “OS” for anyone who needs to be able to use the web from elsewhere in the cloud.
What have we been reminded of in the past three weeks?
- Governments are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to lie and spy on friends and enemies alike. The diplomatic cable releases from Wikileaks are the tip of the iceberg, in that they are not the biggest secrets, just the low-level ones available to millions of rank-and-file government employees.
- The CEO uses the same password for everything, and never changes it. Gawker, a company that was purpose-built for the Internet, had such lax security policies (and such bravado in the face of 4chan) that it was only a matter of time before they were ripped apart. But how much better are the policies where you work? I thought so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen exactly the same thing out there, and it’s always the head of the firm that has the weakest password.
- The FBI might have infiltrated the OpenBSD crypto stack. Even if this turns out to not be true, it is a damning simply by being plausible. The OpenBSD codebase is developed, used, and audited by some seriously security-conscious programmers, admins, and academics. Can they prove that there is not a clever exploit baked in by a conspirator? And if not the FBI, how about some other government with deep pockets and a desire to eavesdrop on VPNs?
Now consider the daily deluge of XSS attacks and buffer overflows and plugin exploits out there. I seriously question the notion that we have any expectation of privacy or security in our online lives. The courts may be able to keep the police from reading your email, but there is nothing stopping anyone else.
This is all well and good if the extent of your internet activity is posting pictures of your kids on Facebook. But if you do any serious, world-changing work, you need to re-evaluate the risks involved with using this hodgepodge of easily compromised hardware and software, and hedge against the exposure or corruption of any secrets you need to keep.
Once the polls close, each of the digital scanners used at the city’s polling sites spews out a supermarketlike receipt. Election workers cut the paper strips and sort them by election district, since a polling place may serve more than one district. They then use a calculator to tally the results for each candidate, and the count is transcribed by hand onto “return of canvass” forms. They are given to police officers at the polling places, who take them to local precinct houses, where the numbers are entered in a computer and transmitted to the board and to The Associated Press. - New York Times, Dec 3, 2010
What year is this? What city is this?
Hundreds of millions of our insanely high tax dollars were spent on this “system”, and the people responsible manage to sleep at night.
