lilei

> It's amazing what happens when Internet is treated like a utility.

It's not really like a utility though. A utility usually has a low fee and charge per use. Not that I encourage data or bandwidth limits, but there's a difference. Consider you could either get gigabit for $90 or you could get a fixed speed or data (say 10 mbit or 100gb) for $30 but full speed access to Netflix, YouTube, Windows Update etc. is included. How many people would pay $60 extra for unlimited access to the rest of the Internet?

I think it's a fair question to ask why consumers are paying for both installation, the bandwidth itself and the services they access (in cash or ad revenue) while everyone else is making money.

Edit: Not sure what the point of downvotes is. If you can't answer a basic argument like this you can't expect your views to be taken seriously. But hey, instead of actually doing something relevant let's talk about which Internet connection we all have.

Yes, because "duty" is such a technocratic argument? Maybe the reason people don't listen isn't because they don't have knowledge, but because hackers as a group, label or viewpoint are no longer necessarily that relevant?

I'm generally for net neutrality as stated in the article, but that's still mostly a political view. I've had it quite good in terms of Internet connection living in different parts of Europe. It's generally been fast and uncapped. But it's still been around 40€ per month or more. That's a lot of money for many people. And most people want to communicate with their friends, manage their bank accounts and read the news without having things break, get their data stolen or pay a lot of money for the pleasure.

Some esoteric ideas about freedom doesn't do it for many people. Heck, it doesn't even do it for me anymore and I largely understand the issues. What are you going to tell people when Microsoft, Netflix or other companies offer to pay for the bandwidth when you use their services so you can download updates and watch movies for a cheaper price? That they are missing out on setting up their own Linux server to run a bitcoin market via tor?

At some point these freedom has to boil down to something tangible for normal people, otherwise I'm not sure what the point of having them or if we even deserve them.

You are largely correct.

Passwords operate under the principle "something you know". (Unfortunately operating under this principle on the Internet is quite hard, but that's a different story). When you save passwords somewhere it's no longer with the assumption of being just "something you know", but more "something you have". Of course passwords are even less apt as "something you have", because they are hard to secure, both in storage and in use.

Nothing has fundamentally changed. That people can't imagine why someone would want to keep passwords "something you know" is because they don't understand they theory behind passwords. A password manager might seem like a solution, but in reality what you're getting is the worst of both worlds. You don't get the security of "something you have", like a key that can be stored in hardware and verified with disclosing it to the host. Nor do you get the flexibility, at least not as a user, of "something you know".

I actually think it would be a great idea to block password managers and offer an alternative protocol for authentication. That way if they want to keep their users they would have to implement that protocol. Suddenly you would have quite a lot of users using something more secure.

(just a random text on the subject: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs513/2005fa/NNLauthPeopl...)