Re: Great SWT Program

On Oct 6, 1:46 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I find the idea that Google is obligated to provide you with
anything at all rather baffling. They're a business, not a
charitable or governmental organization, so why should they be
obligated to do anything that doesn't increase their profits?

I'm really suggesting that they are *self*-obligated. They could have
chosen not to provide usenet access at all, years ago. Since they did
choose to provide it, they chose to accept the responsibilities that
go with being a usenet provider, or at least, they should have.

I think we need a Bill of Users' Rights online, standardized and
eventually adhered to by any software company or web site that wants
any interaction deeper than just browsing and reading from its user
base. Not only are onerous terms and conditions commonplace, but
there's nothing very standardized save that users may be treated like
dirt at any time and for no good reason and have no recourse. :P This,
by the way, applies even to *pay* sites AFAICT.

"Even to pay sites" -- huh. I'd have said "especially to pay sites".

Pay sites already have some incentive to behave (money you might take
elsewhere), though extra incentives to misbehave too (if they can
extort or defraud by various shenanigans). Free sites have a tendency,
even if ad-supported or otherwise dependent on user goodwill anyway,
not to see disgruntled users as money walking out the door though, and
show a greater propensity towards shoddy behavior. Overbearing forms
of obnoxious advertising, for starters, and poor QA, though the latter
is to varying extents endemic to the entire field of IT for some
stupid reason. Fairly cheap and easy to implement best practises in
change management, backup management, and standards compliance are
widely known and yet underutilized.

I'm not sure whether to call this idealism or .... No, all the
other words I can think of would suggest something negative about
you, and we can't have that.

Do you have a specific objection to any of the things I suggested?
They're only in the interests of fairness, after all, and no online
site would have any *legitimate* reason to object that I can think of.
("Legitimate" as in consistent with whatever goals it publicly claims
to have in terms of a) whatever services it's trying to provide its
users and b) whatever it claims is its business model for making
money, if any.)

Now that I think about it, I'd think a debit card would work, and
that anyone with a bank account should be able to get one of those.
But there are security risks there too. <shrug>

I don't see many e-shopfronts with an Interac Accepted Here symbol or,
most usually, anything but a few credit card logos (e.g. MasterCard,
AmEx, and Visa) and a field for inputting a "credit card number" on
the checkout form. Square peg, round hole, and you're suggesting the
square peg will somehow work in that hole anyway...odd.

And even if it *did* work, it's even less secure than a CC
transaction, though at least it wouldn't require credit. The real
problem is the lack of a truly secure online payment mechanism.
Everything is either dependent on the vendor not misusing a secret
auth token (e.g. CC#) or on a third-party that isn't trustworthy
(Paypal). We need a protocol for online payment that only involves
exposing a public key, proving you know (without exposing!!) a private
one by digitally signing a transaction (which also means what you sign
is what the transaction actually is, so they can't show you "Click
here to pay $9.99 for XYZ" and actually ding you for $999.99 -- what
you see is what you get. And of course it has to be an open protocol
where anyone can implement the roles of customer, merchant, *or* bank.
This prevents lock-in to a bad vendor (e.g. Paypal), or having to jump
through totally different hoops for each and every merchant, or
discrimination against any broad class of consumer (e.g. those without
credit, or those not in the USA, or...); also, a proprietary protocol
would probably be patented or something, and thus have some single
company charging royalties on every transaction. That would be like an
"internet sales tax" and going to Microsoft or some such instead of a
duly elected representative government to boot. Yuk, and the
artificially-inflated transaction costs would basically torpedo the
whole system anyway and make it too expensive for most people to
bother with. (Paypal also has this problem.)

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