Hotspots for Obama (or Romney)(hotspotsforobama.com) |
Hotspots for Obama (or Romney)(hotspotsforobama.com) |
Publishers trying to make an honest buck will dislike this. So will cafe customers that just want coffee and wifi and not your political positions, and the privacy conscious who now have their browsing data being sent off to an anonymous third party.
And that's putting the security question aside. (If these guys got hacked, they could very easily harvest your bank and email passwords; I'd be more trusting if they're weren't also using an anonymous whois proxy.)
The best businesses find win-wins (Airbnb is good for travelers and real-estate owners) -- but I only see one win here.
Edit: If this company ends up expanding available public wifi hotspots by rewriting some ads and providing some revenue back to the wifi provider, that could be a win-win for customers and cafes and could be a real hit.
Publishers most likely won't know this is happening.
> Cafe customers that just want coffee and wifi and not your political convictions will dislike this.
It is up to the cafe owner whether they want to do this, or whether they want to put a political sign on their windows for that matter.
> The privacy conscious who now have their browsing data being sent off to an anonymous third party will dislike this.
All advertising networks sends browsing data to third parties. Whether it is this one or some other one doesn't seem that big a deal.
His point wasn't about whether or not the owners could or could not support a candidate, it was whether or not they should support a candidate.
You're absolutely right, it is up to the owners. And this seems to be pretty cool. But most coffee shop owners (which seems to be the target) will not want to alienate part of their already small group of customers.
I don't think so, because secure sites will use SSL, and your browser does certificate verification.
However, many people still manually enter website urls (citibank.com) which redirects to https. If the DNS points citibank.com to a fake citibank phishing site, they simply wouldn't redirect to an https site at all.
Very savvy customers may notice that they aren't connected vis https; most people wouldn't.
1. The top-right page curl to switch between Romney and Obama has mismatched alt-text.
2. Instead of being partisan, maybe you would want a "HotspotsForAmerica" that would just remind people to vote for the candidate of their choice, instead of telling people who they should vote for.
I'm not going to criticize this comment but ...
Far easier, and more tasteful: rename your SSID. It's the digital equivalent of a sign on your lawn.
Justice Ginsburg is only 79 -- both John Paul Stevens and Oliver Wendell Holmes retired when they were 90.
Edit: It looks like Ginsburg has expressed her desire to retire at 82 (in 2015), so unless she changes her mind, it will matter.
What kind of world is this where I can't fund companies by learning about the best kind of paper towels or being retargeted about a product I already bought?
I recently saw an interesting thought about the state of piracy, and it being a symptom of a flawed business model. What's to say advertising in its current state is the future of Internet business models?
If enough users don't want to see the current kind of ads, don't they become far less effective?
Or drive or be around children for that matter - because you are dangerously ignorant.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/st...
For the 70+ year olds on the court, that's not always up to them. If it was, the ideological makeup of the court would essentially never change.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6t82lixl5mzhiea/IMAG0746.jpg
Although Jill Stein or Virgil Goode would also be acceptable alternatives to the parade of bozos the status quo puts in front of us.
It seems you have never gone to get coffee in San Francisco.
And your highlighted issues are certainly lesser than the associated meta issues that frame the debate, push government into more areas, and cause your issues to even be up for debate. The possibility of a theocratic law banning pornography wouldn't matter as much if Internet traffic weren't tapped and recorded in the first place.
In practice, you've got to look at what model of the world is motivating candidates and their economic advisers. In both cases, Keynes is whom they turn to.
Would you be okay with me going into coffee shops and running a NewsTweek node on their wifi that swapped out all the advertisements with ones that I could get paid for? Of course you would not, and not merely because I was not the operator of the hotspot.
Do you honestly think changing advertisements is the worst case for a mitm device?
Once again however, it seems we are in a situation where people on HN do not recognize that there are two distinct meanings of "expect" (for the remainder of this post, the second will be emphasized). Consider the following:
A parent of a teenager in highschool finds their child watching
TV instead of studying for an exam. The parent shakes their head
and says, *"I expect you will do well on that exam tomorrow!"*.
They expect the child to do well on the exam, but they would be a
fool to *expect* the child to do well on the exam.
...Now, back to the actual point at hand, in reality, tampering with public wifi traffic, not merely logging/dissecting it, is fairly rare. There is no reason to fault non-technical users (the majority of society!) for having technically unfounded expectations. Their expectations may be foolish (in this case, there is little doubt of that), but that does not give technically inclined members of society a license to prey on them.