jonathanpierre

People using it colloquially is exactly the thing that leads to trademark erosion.

Most eroded trade marks were previously owned and registered. It's not the registration that gives trademark protection. Trademark protection exists to protect the market place. It prevents companies from piggybacking on someone else's success.

But if the consumer doesn't think that "Jeep" is a mark, but a form factor, then no one is protected from any misunderstanding and it would be no longer a trade mark. Happened to Motorola in 2005 with "flip phone".

The regulations are not "weird". Before telcos were required to route all calls without discrimination, they didn't. And as soon as telcos are no longer required to route their competitors' calls, they stop. A recent example is the new area code for VOIP calls introduced in Germany in 2009. Major telcos just didn't route them, citing "technical reasons" despite being able to route local area numbers with the same mechanism without problem.

Competition is only a solution for problems where the telcos' interest and the consumers' interest align. And that's very rare.

I don't think this was an attempt in good faith to participate in the discussion about the utility or futility of codes of conducts. This seems to be, depending on your inclination to give the authors the benefit of the doubt, either a joke in bad taste or simply a troll.

The straw-man "Frequently Asked Question" about the project name sounding like cock makes me lean to the latter option. In any case, this isn't really worth discussing much, as it's primary use seems to be to poison that discussion right from the beginning.

That's just a shortcut mechanism though, nothing more.

I think it might be true on the grounds that credit cards are only king in the US and Latin America, whereas they represent less than 10% of cashless payments in the large markets, namely Asia.

Developed countries have more accessible and cheaper systems, like M-Pesa. In China, you generally just scan a QR code to make a payment. Neither of these systems piggyback on the expensive and slow credit card system.

So, I think this statistic might be as true as it is misleading. Impressive marketshare, just not as big a market.

Again: why do you use such belittling words like "conspiracy theory"? We know that the services interfere. We know that they interfered with vendors of cryptography products. And we know that National Security Letters exist, as do other – legal – means to pressure such vendors. There is no conspiracy needed for them to try to pressure someone by, say, threatening them with denial of a entry visa. Or they could have simply tried to buy them off which they might not have liked. It's not a crazy idea by any stretch.

> It wasn't even a speed bump for the Ulbricht investigators.

Are you talking about the situation where they had to very carefully snatch a running laptop from a suspect so that they can't lock it? Seems to me like FDE would have been at least a significant speedbump had they not circumvented it. Why else would they go to such trouble? And what would they have done if the suspect hadn't used his laptop in a public place?

Since not all information in the database is public, yes, you'd need to duplicate the work. You'd also need to put a lot of work into securing the now open service against attack and denial of service.

It would still be just as easy to censor. If a censor goes beyond simple DNS manipulation and drops packages to specific IPs, he can just as easily add the few hundred IPs of database servers to that list as he can add the few hundred IPs of the frontend web servers.

Now, your example of SSB shows very well why this is a red herring. Even if Mediawiki put in the huge work to use SSB as a storage backend, nothing would change at all regarding censorship. What you really want is, I assume, a federated version of Wikimedia's architecture.

Feel free to develop such a system but I don't think anything but a complete rewrite of Mediawiki would allow for that, and even then, I doubt it would be much more censorship resistant, unless you also take on such features like using TOR hidden services or invite-only networks, which are both perfectly possible right now (and are in fact available right now).

And as I said, there is a multitude of options to access the data right now. For example, to build mirrors of Wikipedia for citizens of countries where Wikipedia is blocked. However, it's not necessarily trivial and it doesn't get easier simply by sprinkling some cryptography over the storage layer of all places.

Is that just a rant or do you have an actual reason to call TrueCrypt crappy? It was at least somewhat solid and it definitely had a great mindshare at the time. It wasn't niche.

Also, describing small-scale intervention in cryptography by services "mythologic" in a thread about news about large-scale intervention in cryptography by those services is a bit odd.

Yes, in a strictly semantic sense, it is a limitation. However, in general such access would be not only a bad idea due to the loss of abstraction and additional work to implement (duplicate) access controls, it would also not be very useful for users over the multiple possibilities for access that already exist.

And all this is really a red herring, both in relation to the unspecified use of blockchain and in relation to resistance to state censorship.

It does work well though. As a user, I can't remember significant Wikipedia or Wikidata outages.

And I'm really not sure if whatever blockchain solution that person on twitter wants Wikimedia to use is even able to get to that scale, yet alone perform better an it than what Wikimedia currently has.