That chart is utterly misleading. There is no such thing as an EU-wide law. Most EU countries have much more extensive consumer protection.
The only real difference is that with AppleCare you can contact Apple directly instead of the seller. But as far as the rest is concerned, in most EU countries you have better warranty by law than what Apple tries to peddle as "service".
Although they are absolutely right, it should also be said that Apple is far from unique. Many electronics shops and manufactures have warranty policies and try to sell extra warranty whilst EU consumer laws already mandate minimal warranty standards. As a consumer you almost always have to explicitly assert your rights or you'll get screwed.
Apple has just made itself a high profile target with it's AppleCare Protection Plan, and it doesn't help that Apple is being systematically uncooperative when consumers claim their warranty rights.
It doesn't help either that Apple markets itself as premium quality hardware rather than cheap junk. If you were buying cheap chinese knock-offs, you wouldn't gain much sympathy when they didn't honour the two-year minimum, but when you buy 'the premium brand', it's a different story.
Sometimes it takes a shock for people to reconsider their position, especially if what they're really doing is defending their own lack of action. Let's not run to judge the people who posted in that thread many months ago.
Personally, I gave up on participating in any kind of activism about 10 years ago, partly because I didn't feel we were getting anywhere and the next generation didn't seem to care. I feel pretty uncomfortable about that now.
My first thought on hearing about his death was thinking of the picture of the boycotters singing together in the Montgomery jail. We don't have songs of solidarity any more. Instead it's months of indictments and pre-trial proceedings and motions and legal fees, all over things we didn't even see happen in the first place, in a snarky community that will tear people down at least 50% of the time. I can't really think of a less effective resistance strategy.
It's also mostly fueled by indifference and self-interest, not activism. Most file sharers just don't care that they are breaking the law; they want to do what they want to do. If these laws are to ever change we're going to need to start downloading and sharing on the Capital Steps, or get arrested for printing free books for poor kids. We are going to need to be prepared to go to jail ahead of time, before they decide to come after us. That way people like Aaron who don't have the support network and preparation aren't the only ones facing this.
Unfortunately, in my experience the existing activist networks are not the place to start. The anarchists just want to relive the 70's, labor is watching their power dwindle and is focused myopically on the little that remains, poverty campaigners are burned out from fighting years of losing battles and the Occupy, anti-globalization and professional activists seem perfectly happy to march just to be doing anything at all. Many people can agree on the problems, but few people can agree on the solutions (much less small, concrete steps to get there) and so they don't accomplish anything. In intellectual "property" rights laws, however, I think we have a well-defined problem where direct action could be effective.
Those waters were murky from the beginning. Always have been, always will be.
Also, "illegal" is not a constant, often arbitrary and usually serves only the interests of those that want to maintain the status quo.
If curiosity and creativity was constrained by what happens to be illegal at any given time, our society would look a lot different, and not for the better.
Not signing up for a service that wants significant OAuth access to my Twitter (or any other) account without giving me neither a reason nor an alternative.
If it wasn't for the conversation here on HN, I would have assumed the whole site was just a referral-scam. Not just a paywall, but a scam, since there is zero warning upfront until after you've subscribed.
And please, unless what you do is explicitly aimed at the US, treat all users as equal. We're not "international users", just list the options equally for everyone.
Could you link to some good material about why smarty should be avoided? I'm eager to read about it.
We're using smarty at work now, and while we probably won't drop it in this project (too much working code written in it), we might learn something for the future.
It'd be better if you told us why you are using Smarty in the first place. I suspect a lot of places use it simply because they've heard a lot of other places use it.
My company also uses Smarty, but we're planning to move away from it. (Currently evaluating Mustache.php)
Smarty's parser/lexer is horribly slow. The 3.1.x branch has caused problems for us, such as corrupted compiles and broken nested blocks [1]. As evidenced by the article, the developers don't seem to know what they're doing. You should see the workaround for people with custom error handlers -- registering another error handler on top that checks the source of the error against registered template and cache directory paths!
sounds about right. I don't think anyone would choose Smarty for actual technical reasons at this point. I personally think plain PHP makes a far superior templating system. Smarty is slow, doesn't "protect" designers from any complexity because it's complex itself and is yet another thing to learn.
Otherwise PHP itself is a template language. That is why you start it with <? tag.
Just keep short tags on [it's off by default on new installations but ON by default on all hosting sites] and you got a better template engine than smarty.
PHP does not support HTML escaping and is therefor not secure by default. At least twig escapes HTML by default (I am not up to date with PHP so the others might too).
You do not want to type <?php echo htmlspecialchars($var, ENT_QUOTES) ?> every time you want to output data. (Yes, I know it could probably be written shorter but my PHP is rusty. My point still remains though, you have to remember to type it every time.)
I think my solution back in the day was just to include the template files by running a function, something like showTemplate($templateName, $templateVars). The function takes an array as an arg so only these values are available to the template context (apart from the many global vars of course).
You can then run this entire array through htmlentities or htmlspecialchars before doing include().
this is exactly how many modern frameworks do it. your response body is assembled and cached as your application executes, along with any variables it needs, and before the template is rendered the variables are sanitized.
I think it's good this way, it forces the developer to think about the implications of escaped vs unescaped output. The way I see it, having htmlspecialchars/htmlentities applied automatically by a template engine is a close relative to the magic quotes; it abstracts something esential for the developer to know.
Really, PHP itself is a fine templating language if used properly. Get to know the short tags (including the short echo <?=$stuff?>) and the alternative syntax for conditional statements and you are good to go.
From what I can figure out, this ISP merely provides a modem/router with a built-in optional adblocker.
I don't see anything wrong with that in particular, especially in the context where virtually all display ads violate European privacy laws because of cross-site user tracking without explicit permission.
It's just one more additional security/privacy feature on a consumer router to help ordinary users protect themselves.
But yes, the fact that it's on by default is questionable.
However, most ISP-supplied consumer routers have firewall rules on by default, for very good reasons. Although I personally think this one should be opt-in, on by default is not necessarily evil in this particular use case.
Besides being a bit ham-fisted, there's nothing inherently wrong with an ISP offering filters against malicious content.
Also, with the user-accessible opt-out, it would even be legal under the Netherlands' much praised Net Neutrality law. Unlike most of these alarmist headlines, the ISP is not blocking anything.
Actually in France you can't control most ISP-supplied consumer routers.
And for sure on this one you don't have the control at all.
Source: i'm french.
Well, you can, but you lose a whole bunch of important functionality, like being able to watch TV over IPTV (source - I work on SFR's STB, and we watch the competition closely :D)
Most ads are not malicious content at all. Wake up, the web has changed in 15 years. And like it or not, the whole web economy is based on advertising. Do you prefer to be charged 5 cents for every query on Google?
Anything that tracks me without my permission it is malicious. I view the web the way I want - and that includes using AdBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy.
If it happens to be that enough people share that preference with me to make the current ad-ridden web unprofitable for many sites, well, then so be it. In that case a new model will appear in due time.
So use Adblock then. That's your choice. But don't turn it on by default for everyone. What if every ISP in the world decided to block all ads by default within 5 years. How many Internet businesses it would kill? Most of them?
This is why I never liked IE's DNT on by default solution either, which besides being mostly pointless, and making it even more pointless by activating it for everyone and making advertisers not even consider it, I think it's a really bad idea to get gatekeepers like these (ISP's, browser vendors, etc) to block ads for everyone by default - all ads.
Imagine if cable companies blocked and skipped all TV ads by default. There would literally be a revolution from the networks.
I'm pretty sure Google can win a lawsuit against this ISP if they sue them, and they should. However, France is also pretty weird about Internet stuff. They forced Google to offer paid Maps instead of free before, and other such silly backwards things.
You know there is a huge difference between TV ads an web ones: passivity. TV announcers don't have the possibility to "personalize" ad content according to what they could learn from their audience individual habits.
When you own a huge database of personal information on your users, you should have a lot of responsibility towards your users. Data mining is the business of most advertising companies on the web, that's how they make money, so no wonder ethics become a bit blurred there.
Here are the real questions:
- how can we mitigate the use of tracking, make sure that harnessed data is not misused?
- if it is not possible, why not enforcing on the web an advertising system similar to the TV one, to get rid of the tracking nightmare we're building? We should seriously think about that fallback solution, because we're going to get it in our face (or some other place) anyway (the mandatory ad spot is becoming a reality on many sites now), and we still have tracking on full speed.
DNT doesn't block ads, it prevents tracking (ideally). Other ad-supported businesses (e.g. most TV in the US) seem to get by fine without needing tracking cookies.
You mean, by spamming you every ten minutes with random ads between crappy shows? The premium content (Netflix, HBO, Hulu...), people are willing to pay for it.
It's the same trade-off for the web: if you want good content, either you pay for it (NYTimes), or you have to deal with targeted ads.
TV networks don't target ads not because they don't want and prefer their own business model. They don't do it because they can't.
And anyway: targeted ads are also way better for the user experience. If the advertiser know you're blind, it won't show you 1000 times an ad for sunglasses.
Tracking and ad targeting mean less ads across the web.
Sure, there are definitely benefits to tracking, and if TV advertisers could do it I'm sure they would. I just wanted to address the contention that DNT implied that ads would be blocked. And I wonder how much benefit tracking cookies really have - even without them you can target based on a site's rough demographics, just not on a particular user's. Personally I find it creepy when ads follow me around after searching for a product, for instance.
I browsed the web for some time without ad blocker. I kept clicking on ads, because they featured a big green right arrow, that looked just like a "next page" button. These ads were clearly designed to mislead me, rather than inform me. This falls pretty much under what I consider a malicious ad.
Of course it is. Blocking at the router level is still blocking. And the fact that it's on by default makes it only worse for websites depending on ad revenue.
It's not only Google ads that are blocked; almost all ads are blocked. So, it's not an agressive action against Google per se, contrary to what you may understand from that very incomplete article.
It's mostly Google adsense and Youtube ads. People say it's because of peering issues between Free and Youtube. It's surprising considering that Free is the one french ISP that had always had his shit together, I guess the discussion is becoming heated.
Good question and the point of discussion. Most user don't care about settings or ads as long as their usual activity is not impaired.
What does the ISP gain with it ? I think most people won't notice. I'm more worried about the step back regarding net neutrality of this ISP.
Some people suggest that this filtering is a move in the long fight the ISP has with google to get it to pay a share of the network usage cost.
While the ISP is very user friendly, for net neutrality and open minded, Google and more specifically Youtube, is a totally abnormal situation. Google earns billions in advertisment and don't give a cent to ISP while the traffic of Youtube is largely dominant on networks.
One move the ISP did in the last years is to reduce Youtube traffic bandwidth and claimed the problem was due to a network peering issue. More and more people complained of the problem so that the ISP had probably something to do about it.
It is thus suggested that the ISP might be targetting the revenue source of Google without impairing user experience.
The thing is that Google has probably pushed the shared network usage model beyond its reasoable limit. It kind of make sense to me that the network infrastructure cost should be sharde between producers and consumers. This usually tends to naturally balance and even itself. But with Youtube and Google there is a very strong imbalance regarding network usage and profit making.
If other ISP would make a similar move, this could initiate discussion to find a fair solution.
I doubt The ISP would try to cut revenue of reasonable free web services living from ad revenue, because this is its bread and butter.
Except, the bandwidth has already been paid for, at least twice.
Once by the consumer by way of a monthly internet bill and once by the content provider(website) in the way of their hosting/bandwidth costs.
It is not clear by the ISP's name(Free) whether or how much they are charging for internet access. negrit seems to suggest that this ISP has a fairly aggressive pricing model.
However, if the cost of people actually using their internet access, especially just to browse websites, is too much for Free, they should look to their pricing model or consider upgrading their networks, as opposed to trying to extort(or at least block) advertisers.
As you mention, this ends up being a much bigger issue in regards to net neutrality. For now, it is just youtube that is using 'too much' bandwidth, but blocking that will only mean other sites will take its place as bandwidth hogs.
Hopefully this will result in discussions to finding a fairer solution, but I believe that should involve upgrading infrastructure and providing better service, rather than blocking sites like youtube or netflix.
Here is a french blog post providing more information on this explanation which, according to this post, was indirectly confirmed by Xavier Niel, the founder of the ISP.
the blocking is not optional by default, it's an opt-out system. It also blocked (yesterday) the Analytics tag. The system is based on DNS and forwards requests to a server hosted by Free (the ISP) that returns a blank page.
The only "bullshit" I can see here is your comment[0].
Of all possible crows I would expect the Hacker News one to be the more rational about this; but no; many here are pretending this is somehow OK; lets be very clear, for many sites this for all practical reasons the same as hiding the pay button in any SaaS or PasS start-up.
The tracking done by many ads could be stopped by deleting cookie-headers and using a proxy to serve the ads to hide the real IP from advertisers; but no; they decided that removing the ads completely was a perfectly good idea.
Google should stop allowing all users from that ISP to use _any_ Google service at all (Including Google search and Gmail) with a little message saying that "Your internet provider is actively hurting our business model by using default ad-blocking in all their routers including yours. If you like to keep enjoying our services please contact them and ask them to stop using such aggressive tactics. Thank you."
The only reason we the people with ad-blockers as browser extensions are not actually harmful is because (believe or not) we are a minority.
[0]Yes, calling "bullshit" the title someone decided was appropriate for this article is just as offensive as calling your comment the same way.
> The tracking done by many ads could be stopped by deleting cookie-headers and using a proxy to serve the ads to hide the real IP from advertisers; but no; they decided that removing the ads completely was a perfectly good idea.
If you mean the ISP should modify any information coming over my connection, no thanks. IP blocking (which I understand is what they are using) is nice and simple.
The blocking should be opt-in rather than opt-out, and I am not opposed to Google blocking everyone on Free because of the ad blocking. But do not advocate intrusive methods that involve an ISP actively modifying data.
Offering everything users want only can be done when they are paying, otherwise they must accept the little things they don't like such as the main income source of all the websites they like to use. It would be like google asking all other ISPs to block this French ISP just because they don't like their business decisions.
However, most clients will only agree to pay for building what they need after you've first built what the want.
Very few businesses are interested in getting paid once if they can get paid twice, so this pattern is perpetuated to the mutual benefit of everyone except the developers forced to spend 50% of their time building something they know won't work, and the other 50% rewriting it...
The only real difference is that with AppleCare you can contact Apple directly instead of the seller. But as far as the rest is concerned, in most EU countries you have better warranty by law than what Apple tries to peddle as "service".