Sure, but a lot of the people taking classes at the Extension School don't want a degree. For example, I had students whose employers were paying for them to take a single course to give them some background knowledge or insight into their jobs. They're not looking to graduate; just to take a class or two that will help them with their careers.
As a grad student at Harvard I was involved in teaching several courses at Harvard Extension School. While the students were generally motivated and enthusiastic about the course material, it was a very different academic environment, one that was not as intellectually rigorous.
You are right about grade inflation, but the difference in the level of rigor between the two schools means that not all As are equal.
Policy is always about tradeoffs. Is it your stance that the creator of Reddit tip bots should have to register fingerprints with the FBI, hand over personal financial info, send quarterly reports with to the Superintendent with audited financial statements, collect the real identities and physical addresses of all senders and recipients, assign a compliance officer, hire an outside firm to do pentesting, get permission before releasing a new product, service, or features, and have an undisclosed amount of USD funds bonded to NY State along with an undisclosed amount on hand just to operate a simple app? What about open source projects that are not corporations?
And one of the key questions is, does this make sense for, say 1000 abandoned dogecoin (current value $0.24) on tipdoge.info? This is why we proposed de minimis exceptions.
We're in the process right now of writing up a more in-depth policy proposal, but you're spot on in terms of different levels of risk management. And we're not at all against security testing, which is also one of the great benefits of FOSS. ("Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.")
And the audits comprise financial audits as well, which surely make sense for bitcoin exchanges and companies holding funds, but not so much for open source projects or technologies that are built around bitcoin but where no funds are held.
That said, the actual regulatory proposal has many more requirements than even mentioned in the article (including quarterly reports to the NY State Superintendent, collecting of user data, and the possibility of being denied a license without a system for due process in place), and things that the creator of a Reddit tip bot surely couldn't comply with.
Part of the problem is that the regulations aren't just seeking to cover companies that hold peoples' funds (aka private keys), but instead any technology touching the ecosystem. New York doesn't have to and shouldn't conflate the two.
It makes sense to regulate and, for example, require escrow for companies that are holding user funds in order to avoid the exact situation you point out. It doesn't make sense for a web wallet where the user is storing her own keys client-side.
Indeed he's attempting to apply an existing regulatory framework to new technology, which rarely works well.
The point of the article was not to focus on the consumer protection issues, but instead to point out how it could kill startups in the name of consumer protection. We are both in favor of avoiding another Mt. Gox, and the numerous other cases where user funds were lost, which includes escrow of the funds held for users. I'd be curious to get your thoughts as to what you consider the most pressing consumer protection issues, as we're working on another piece that will focus more on these.
It certainly is an "ask for the moon" type proposal, which is how regulators often like to start. Part of the problem, though, is that it's so far skewed to one side that getting it back to even somewhat reasonable is going to take a lot of work.
You're missing the point here—we're grateful that people in the jailbreak community release things as FOSS, but the majority of jailbreaks as you yourself mention are not FOSS themselves, which is part of what motivated Chris, who proposed the prize, and myself.
It seems to me that that opensn0w campaign may have been fake (there are a lot of those on IndieGoGo).
And to be clear, in talking to friends in the security space, the auditing the code aspect was a huge concern, so I'm glad we can at least agree on something. :)
We're also planning on helping to fund many open hardware projects, and I'll actually be speaking at the SF Hardware Startup meetup tonight to solicit ideas from the community.
To our knowledge, no one was working on an open source jailbreak, and given that the site I'm building is designed to incentivize things like free and open source software, this was a huge component. I've also been told there are a good number of people that have jailbreaks, and it's possible that they might be motivated to release it as FOSS if enough funds are raised.
And it's not like anything is keeping evad3rs from getting donations if they release a closed source jailbreak, or even if they or anyone else releases a FOSS one and claims the prize (in fact with other related campaigns, lots of donations came in after the fact).
Hi Saurik, I'd love to hear your response to the substantive aspects of my email as opposed to an ad hominem attack. I didn't send it until this morning because I was sick and traveling for the holidays.
That text is referring to section 512(f) of the DMCA, which states that any person that knowingly misrepresents a claim of infringement is liable for any damages including costs and attorneys' fees of the alleged infringer.
Basically it's just restating what's already in the law.