calais

Those sure are some small California residents.

I would pay a monthly fee for a web browser if

1. It could be bundled into my monthly internet bill

2. The fee was not more than 10 USD

3. The browser had actively developed ad blocking and

4. Nuisance blocking and

5. Tracking protection and

6. The browser used less memory than competitors

By nuisances I mean cookie notifications, subscription requests, anti-ad-blocking messages, etc. By actively developed I mean I get an update every month, and the developers are actively testing and researching the features. Strict standards compliance could take a back seat to these features, as long as it could adequately render a page. Features that might make up for one of the desiderata above would be

1. Media ripping (if this could be done in a way that would respect publisher rights) or

2. Macros, down to mouse movements and key presses

Good to hear about the R&D-friendly stock exchange. I hope this and eventually private equity will enable Chinese tech to do well enough that they don't need to pursue the less laudable strategy—

> Made in China 2025 is Beijing's plan to dominate global markets in a wide range of high-tech products. China's strategy is to give large government subsidies to state-owned companies and supplement their research with technology stolen from American and other Western companies. This theft includes using the internet to invade the computers of foreign firms and forbidding companies to do business in China unless they share their technology with Chinese firms.

“Tariffs Should Target Chinese Lawlessness, Not the Trade Deficit” in The Wall Street Journal (28 December 2018).

I don't think China misreads the protests, however their state media depicts it. They see it clearly as a challenge to their authority. It is a push for greater independence for Hong Kong. Beijing simply isn't willing to yield.

I envision the practice of performance psychiatry as part of a broader 'neurochemical infrastructure,' to use the phrase of an old hippie, who saw psychedelics as another part of the same.

Goldwater, in particular, brought a greater skepticism of expertise to American conservatism, which has come to define it.

A trend that seems implicated in what Nichols reports but that he doesn't touch on much is the secularization of identity. Expertise is much more threatening to people's egos as people come to identify with things that didn't develop to function (as religion did) as a wellspring of identity.

That's definitely the feeling I've gotten from the Debian repositories, which are very cautious about what to distribute. I was thinking about it in the abstract.

What an informed reply! Thank you for pointing out the influence of mobilized, coordinated resources on security. I will have to factor this perspective into my own and reconsider.

This is a flaw with the repository model for software distribution: it confers the authority of the OS developers to packages not scrutinized to the same degree.

Users' metal models of trustworthiness don't track very well the actual scrutiny software is subjected to. This might be a problem with any distribution system.

We can reasonably disagree about the quality of their security. More generally though tech diversity makes a difference in security: Dan Geer did an excellent talk about this.

What Wikipedia records about it is precisely all I knew about it. Thank you for the exposition and commentary.

I don't think Linux nerds' taking the case personally is weird, though: antagonism towards Microsoft specifically is a cultural self definition for many of them. As with any court case that parallels a cultural narrative, it was felt personally.

So that more secure implementations than MS's can offer a transition for organizations dependent on it.

Antitrust law isn't a tool to secure democracy but to secure competition. I don't think the worry is about actions taken by Microsoft hurting democracy; the concern is MS systems being insecure owing to a lack of competitive pressure and, as a consequence, being vulnerable to democracy-disrupting attacks.

The last time antitrust action was taken against Microsoft (United States v. Microsoft Corp., filed in 2001), law folks' tech-illiteracy and Microsoft's slitheriness led to a penalty of merely having to publish API documentation. The aim had been to make Windows an interface that competitors could implement.

I hope Microsoft gets served for antitrust again, and that this time a savvier legal community can actually achieve the goal is the first suit.