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posted by martyb on Sunday May 07 2017, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the Freedom-of-Speech^W$$$ dept.

Last month, Congress voted to repeal FCC rules that would prevent internet service providers from selling your personal web browsing and app usage data. It was a decision that's unpopular across the country, regardless of party affiliation. If the politicians that voted in favor of the reversal thought no one would notice, there are some big ass signs in their districts that say otherwise.

The internet activists at the non-profit Fight for the Future have crowdfunded four billboards, so far, that shame the members of congress that voted for the repeal. The lawmakers that have the honor of being called out will now have to see their face along the highway when they return home. Those lucky few are Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Dean Heller (R-NV), John Rutherford (R-FL) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). These four lawmakers accepted a combined $196,905 in campaign contributions from the telecom industry in the last election cycle. Blackburn, in particular, has been a longtime enemy of net neutrality. Just last year, she brought up SOPA and tried to frame it as an initiative that would have increased cybersecurity.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 07 2017, @05:52PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 07 2017, @05:52PM (#505929) Journal

    I'm not sure that the Hurd is actually a good way forwards. The microkernel theory seems to entail excessive interprocess communication. Of course, if those 256 CPU processors ever show up, that might become reasonable.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Sunday May 07 2017, @11:38PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday May 07 2017, @11:38PM (#506057) Journal

    There are overhead with the microkernel and HURD approach. But given that CPUs don't seem to get any faster anytime soon. But they do get more cores and it becomes easier with time to interconnect many CPUs into clusters. It seems it makes sense to exploit just that. The same way assembler made sense for 8-bit 1 MHz while C is a better choice for more powerful computers. With a few megabytes of RAM and fast storage, multi-user-process OS makes sense. And so on. I think the time is right for a microkernel. Another factor is the sheer complexity of kernels and software is a liability and then there's the always-up demand.

    One thing I like with HURD is that it's possible for each user to create their own filesystem not seen by others and not needing root.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @06:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @06:44AM (#506218)

    Hurd is a dead end in microkernel design. The idea that some things should be kept in-kernel for performance and that more featureful primitives will reduce IPC overhead has been consistently shown wrong with L4-based microkernels. SeL4, in particular, has incredibly low IPC overhead thanks to formal verification letting them optimize the crap out of their code. At this point, I think the main thing holding back microkernels is simply getting software written for them, not performance. Drivers specifically are a big pain because there has to be extensive compatibility layers written for other kernels code or they have to be written from scratch. There has been some work in getting netbsd drivers working on sel4 with rump kernels, and 2.4 linux drivers on some other L4 (pistachio iirc), but nothing ground-breaking yet. And of course, since it's such a niche field, the number of people who can actually do this right now is pretty small.

    But yeah, hurd is definitely not the way forward. It's a shame that there's been so much work put into it.