Thank you Nicola for the link.
Husband, father, information security professional and avid photographer living at the junction of Montgomery Township, Rocky Hill and Princeton Township, New Jersey.
Tag: Internet
In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we evaluate advertise censorship-resistance as a major benefit. Second, these systems could indirectly enable greater competition and user choice, by lowering the barrier to entry for new platforms. As it stands, it is difficult for users to switch between platforms (they must recreate all their data when moving to a new service) and most mega-platforms do not interoperate, so switching means leaving behind your social network. Some systems we evaluate directly address the issues of data portability and interoperability in an effort to support greater competition.
This research report is fascinating.
Husband, father, information security professional and avid photographer living at the junction of Montgomery Township, Rocky Hill and Princeton Township, New Jersey.
We cut the cord years ago—where we live, over the air signals are good enough for the broadcast networks, and combining Netflix & Hulu Plus gave us more than enough viewing options. Even subscribing to both of those, we cut our TV bill by a little more than 80 percent. Throw in Amazon Prime, and we’re still saving money month to month.David J. Loehr
A few years ago I considered canceling the cable port of our Comcast XFINITY subscription but for a variety of reason chose not to.
We have an XFINITY bundle that includes HD cable and high-speed access to the Internet. The XFINITY TV package does not include premium content like HBO or Showtime but we do get HGTV, FoodNetwork and the SciFi channel. Mostly we watch those three channels and a number of shows on the broadcast networks. With one or two exceptions we never watch live TV, preferring to time shift via an older generation TiVo HD.
I don’t remember when we cancelled our Netflix DVD subscription but it was a while ago. We bought an Apple TV and started working our way through the catalog of movies and syndicated TV shows. We don’t get the latest movies but we weren’t finding time to watch the DVD anyway. However, I did notice that movies we wanted to watch on DVD were released on iTunes only a short time later. To me it made sense to cancel the Netflix DVD subscription and use the money save to rent (or sometimes purchase) movies on iTunes when we had the time to watch the. However, once we switched to Netflix streaming and iTunes rentals I noticed that we were routinely over the 250GB limit of the XFINITY bandwidth cap. It seems that Comcast is not enforcing this.
Once I realized that our TV habits had changed I approached my wife about canceling the XFINITY TV service and going full streaming with Hulu, Netflix, and iTunes as our sole source of video content; all streamed via the Apple TV. I worked out a spreadsheet showing how much we would save. Our monthly spend for internet and TV is $167.18. That’s $2006/year. That’s quite expensive but justifiable. Here’s why.
I live in an area of New Jersey that is mid-way between New York City and Philadelphia but just beyond the transmission range for the stations in those cities. That means that even though the TV networks in New York and Philadelphia are transmitting at full strength, residents of my area will not receive a usable HDTV signal. Of course Hulu is one solution to this. Another solution is an iTunes subscription to the show we want to watch. It can be expensive depending on the number of shows we want to watch.
Even if we eliminated certain shows, if we just reduced our TV watching, cutting the cable cord means I will have no access to live sports.
Formula 1 racing is my spectator sport of choice. I get an adrenaline rush watching finely tuned and superbly engineered automobiles driven around a race circuit at ridiculously high-speed. The NBC Sports Network, a cable only channel, now holds the US broadcast rights to Formula 1. If we cut the cable I would have to give this up. I am stuck subscribing to cable is I want to watch anything live on the major broadcast networks. There is no alternative. The cord remains.
Husband, father, information security professional and avid photographer living at the junction of Montgomery Township, Rocky Hill and Princeton Township, New Jersey.
The discovered weakness could allow hackers to spy on the targets by watching video and “hot-mike” audio on the cameras, inject fake videos into the surveillance startup in an effort to hide their malicious activities and use the compromised system to attack network.
via Web-based DropCam Surveillance Systems Vulnerable to Hackers
Ah. Yes, the Internet of Things.
The device runs an outdated and unpatched version of an open source Unix toolkit BusyBox, that may not even receive updates, and the older as well as vulnerable version of OpenSSL that made it vulnerable to the critical Heartbleed bug.
Well, that’s the problem isn’t it.
Husband, father, information security professional and avid photographer living at the junction of Montgomery Township, Rocky Hill and Princeton Township, New Jersey.
On June 5th, this web site, along with many others across the Internet will join in protest against the unwarranted government surveillance of our digital domains. Come join me.
Husband, father, information security professional and avid photographer living at the junction of Montgomery Township, Rocky Hill and Princeton Township, New Jersey.