I (, in a non facetious manner) honestly don't get this. Aren't all of the above listed giants the ones that are going out of their way to track, spam and use our personal lives as objects of advertisement in the first place?
How or why are they petitioning for the government to not be able to do what they're already doing? Isn't that completely ironic? Is this a case of "it's okay if /WE/ steal your data, but we don't want to government too (so that only we have total access to it)"?
Someone more enlightened than me, please help me out.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, et al. do not have the power to arrest you, and never will. They can't find out you said or did something in the past and put you in a gulag for it 10 or 20 years from now when you're considered a political enemy of the state.
It's the critical difference between economic and political power. Google has no guns, much less the all-powerful legal authority - and then some - possessed by the government.
Microsoft can sell you software. Amazon can sell you a blender or ebook. Apple wants to sell you a phone. The US Government can kill you, destroy your life, put you on a no-fly list, proclaim you a terrorist to be constantly surveilled to the highest degree, punish you for speaking out, sic the IRS on you, blackmail you by tracking every single thing you do digitally without any consequences to themselves and then use it against you at their convenience or for their benefit (Google execs would go to prison for that), and dozens of other things using their countless agencies (and if you happen to be a leaker or journalist, the context is that much more amplified). And that's just what they can do to you today, the fascism in America is blatantly going to keep getting worse, they keep reaching for more and more power. Tomorrow, the things you do today, will be held against you. There isn't an example of a fascist system in which that hasn't been the case.
Google et al. are the absolute least of your worries. The free market profit motive is predictable and functions at its most efficient under systems of high degrees of freedom (thus free market). Increasing political power of the sort going on in the US however is always violent and always trends toward an ultimate restriction of liberty. One need understand only the very basics of history to grasp that.
A quick look at what governments have done over just the last 200 years, versus what corporations have done, tells you everything you need to know. It isn't a close comparison. Show me one modern big corporation like Google that has done the kind of evil things that eg Mugabe in Zimbabwe has done for example - there's one simple example, and hardly the worst I could reference (how about Pol Pot?), and it demonstrates how clearly absurd it is to be frightened by the 'big bad corporations.' The notion we need to be afraid of corporations is almost entirely a myth, typically pushed by people that then turn an intentional blind eye to the endless murder, war and abuse by governments. It's power-seeking governments you should be absolutely terrified of.
Hey, guys! I'm one of the core collaborators for JSON Resume[0], an alternative to this project.
Markdown is cool, but as scrollaway said,
> JSON Resume wants to standardize CV fields to improve compatibility between tools, ease conversion, ease theming and such.
In fact, we have a notion of "themes", and this sort of markdown-based format can be generated from your JSONResume. We think that JSON is a saner default interchange format than markdown.
If you've been following JSONResume development, you might have thought the project died, but myself, along with @aloisdg and others are reviving it and working towards a stable v1.0.0 release. Feel free to suggest changes and make PRs :)
What if the developers... forget to password-protect the server that hosts the source code, installers, etc. Can the law touch cases of... negligence like this?
Yes. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. The penalties for willful infringement are higher, but for unwitting infringement they are not zero, and IIRC for infringement for profit there's a high statutory minimum fine.
> We need a consistent way for third-parties to distribute software
Isn't this what package managers are all about? - a thing which, by the way, I believe the notion of an "App Store" from the other two OSes took inspiration from.
I believe that the author means that vendors have been saying for a very long time that there is no cross-distribution place to keep config files, or set of environment variables, etc. What the Linux Standard Base was invented to address.
The problem is package managers aren't consistent across distributions. If you want to provide a binary version of your app, you should be providing at least .deb, .rpm and tarball packages.
In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.
The basic problem there is that essencially all package formats are tar-balls, bit each one use a different way to note dependencies (and none of them seem to handle having multiple minor lib versions installed side by side).
Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.
After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.
If App stores took inspiration from anywhere it was the iTunes music store and other similar digital media stores, although the first such system, the 'Electronic App Wrapper'[1] for NeXT, predates Linux, distros, OSX and iTunes. So maybe it's a more iterative process where digital software stores inspired iTunes, which in turn inspired the latest generation of App stores?
"The moral of the story? Confusing APIs are a security problem. If many users of your API get it wrong in a way that introduces a security bug, that’s a bug in your API, not their code."
Was this prevented from hitting the front-page as well? It's top 5 in /ask, but did the people responsible for the title edit disallow it from being on the front-page such to prevent bad YC press?
If my theory is true, I will be extremely disappointed.
On a tangential note, I had no idea what AeroFS is, so I clicked on their landing page.
> Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise. Free up to 30 users.
Boom. I immediately am fully educated about what this does. I wasn't forced to watch a 2 minute video with no sound at work, or to google the product - questioning about why it's popular[0].
This is how you write effective copy.
[0] Notable offenders are yeoman and dropbox itself - both of which, while widely-used products - are completely opaque in what they do from their initial text. "You already know what I do" isn't good enough for people who don't.
I mostly agree with you, but their first sentence ("Like Dropbox...") relies on you knowing what Dropbox is. Which, as you pointed out, isn't good enough for people who don't ;).
I think it can be broken up into three parts. First:
Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall.
For many people, that's a sufficient description to get the idea. If not, you have the second part:
File Sync and Share for the enterprise.
Not as descriptive as the first part if you know what Dropbox is, but if you don't it will at least let you know how to categorize the product and whether it's something you might remotely be interested in. Finally:
Free up to 30 users.
Now they've made sure the next most salient point is given, the next thing you would most likely want to know. Everything else is something you can dig a little deeper for, but for the most part you know whether this is something you want to pursue or not. I think it's brilliant.
If you don't know what it is after "Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise", you aren't their target market anyway.
Good copy takes into account who it addresses. Obviously someone who nows how to estimate what "firewall" means in an IT context will have a rough idea as to what a Dropbox is.
Exactly my reaction. I love this tagline because it just echoes how you would describe the product to a friend: "Oh it's like X but with Y".
It's at the complete opposite of the general trend of obscure generic headlines, like "Make your life better" or "Be more productive" or "Gain time and money", or the worst "Sign up for free" (yes, I've seen that as the main headline).
It just makes sense to not waste your visitors' time because they won't stay long enough to decipher your marketing gibberish.
Or narratively describes the product to customers already accustomed to the value add of product x, but need ancillary features and benefits not present in x. I'm of the opinion that comparing one product to another only devalues the one if the other is objectively a bad product.
If I'm evaluating several products, the one who makes it harder to get information is the first on the scrapheap, unless it clearly has a killer feature.
Might be just me not being an IT guy, but from that copy I'm not sure how it differs from a traditional file server with cifs/whatever shares like most businesses already have.
I think it's the opposite: to me you sound like an IT guy since you know about cifs and file servers and you have hard time understanding the value because you are looking from a technical instead of user perspective.
AeroFS syncs files to the local hard drive, meaning you can access them when not connected to the office network. It also automatically syncs any changes once you reconnect.
"Put your stuff in Dropbox and get to it from your computers, phones, or tablets. Edit docs, automatically add photos, and show off videos from anywhere."
What about this is unclear? It's on the front page..
Huh, and I reloaded and got different text:
"Dropbox is a safe, simple way to access your files on any device." - this time right above the download button.
> What about this is unclear? It's on the front page..
It is, but companies are not entitled to me reading their entire landing page. There's a large amount of truth in the "you only have 5 seconds to hook a user".
You should always put your best copy as the first thing a user sees.
I don't know the current state of affairs, but a couple of years ago Dropbox wasn't so good for businesses, as they were lacking a lot of compliance tickboxes.
This is why people use NoScript. Not that we're Luddites, but rather arbitrary scripts means arbitrary vulnerabilities that are automatically exploitable.
It's not that we don't want to see your cool new site built in Angular 2.0, but rather the principle of least privilege[0] is even more relevant with respect to the web.
People wouldn't think you're crazy for leaving Java applets off by default (even when they were popular), and it's an ad populum fallacy to say that just because everyone uses JavaScript you should trade your own personal security so that developers can use AJAX instead of a form POST.
