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Ask Slashdot: What Could Go Wrong In Tech That Hasn't Already Gone Wrong?
dryriver writes: If you look at the last 15 years in tech, just about everything that could go wrong seemingly has gone wrong. Everything you buy and bring into your home tracks you in some way or the other. Some software can only be rented now -- no permanent licenses available to buy. PC games are tethered into cloud crap like Steam, Origin and UPlay. China is messing with unborn baby genes. Drones have managed to mess up entire airports. The Scandinavians have developed a serious hatred of cash money and are instead getting themselves chipped. CPUs have horrible security. Every day some huge customer database somewhere gets pwned by hackers. Cybercrime has gone through the roof. You cannot trust the BIOS on your PC anymore. Windows 10 just will not stop updating itself. And AI is soon going to kill us all, if a self-driving car by Uber doesn't do it first. So: What has -- so far -- not gone wrong in tech that still could go wrong, and perhaps in a surprising way?
It's going to happen on a massive scale at some point. THen what?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Eventually you will not be allowed to connect to the Internet unless you are using a closed "approved" hardware device using "approved" software that has been registered with your real name. It is coming.
I'm a long-time developer, stuck in code maintenance role hunting down other crappy coders' bugs in a software project written in the 1980s. I already see everything in a negative light. "Get off my lawn" kind of thing. And now you submit stories like this!? May as well pass the razor blades.
If we knew about it ahead of time, we’d probably be able to prevent - or at least ameliorate - it.
#DeleteChrome
The LHC hasn't created a black hole that eats the planet and sucked us all into another dimension.
Perhaps, out of sheer disappointment, this is the reason they are building an even larger collider :P
At least anonymous cowards aren't getting upvoted on Slashdot.
Or they're off their medication again.
I've scratched my share of game disks and with the amount of games I have, the last thing i want is 100 boxes of games cluttering up my home
if PC games were still sold in boxes we wouldn't have 1/4 the variety you see on Steam these days. None of the indies would be able to survive
Is dryriver vying to be the new Bennet Hasselton? His submissions are about as dumb.
Has Slashdot become this guy's personal blog?
Hmm...tech hasn't yet launched nuclear weapons...but it's not unimaginable.
It hasn't yet crashed global financial markets (in a serious way)...but it's not unimaginable.
It hasn't yet destroyed the earth's ability to support life...but it's not unimaginable...
Well, nobody has created AI that's actually Intelligent yet. Because FSM help us when they do.
Google releases Fuchsia or some other OS like it, replacing Linux with it everywhere interesting - Android, Chromebooks, and with time, even servers. Eventually, Google decides to relicence Fuchsia with a non-open licence but offer it for free (Microsoft drops Windows to $0 soon after). Open source forks of last free version do not manage to come close to competing with Google's vast resources and the special support it gives to its version of Fuchsia in GCP.
All of this makes Linux marketshare drop precipitately, hardware vendors don't even bother helping with drivers and soon all Free OSs become niche products barely working on current hardware.
** Note that I don't believe Fuchsia is bad in itself. The question is what Google will do with it if it controls the project.
That's easy: Linux.
Communist China pre crime detection comes to the free West.
The use of words, the ability to publish, comment:
SAS vans down UK streets for people who publish online using the wrong words, politics and terms?
People in the free USA having to give city and state gov their social media accounts to get their rights approved?
City and states go full Tenth Amendment to restrict all other rights in their city/states?
The EU expands its nations blasphemy laws and uses social media to find anyone questioning how faith is practiced and the history of a faith/cult.
Movie and TV series get a veto on any online review of their work. Only approved professional reviewers will get search results.
Terms like "learn to code" is not found by gov approved search engines and not allowed on social media.
NGO's, NATO, the EU put more efforts into finding people who still want the freedom to publish views about the news and link news.
PRISM gets invited into every home with an intelligent assistant at OS level. Cameras and microphones aware of every word spoken, new face, search term, voice print.
The power off on a smart phone did nothing to stop tracking and collection.
Changes to OS, ads and browsers.
Every big brand US OS ships with software to approve news and links in real time.
OS supported browsers show approved ads and block any attempt to use software to stop ads.
Creating lists to block ads will be more difficult to get into an OS, any OS approved browser.
Creating lists of ads to block is a sin. OS and browser alterations are blocked to remove any easy user level attempts to block ads and tracking.
Police and NGO charity software detects and reports back on every file downloaded and created on any big brand networked computer as part of "free" realtime AV efforts.
Every image, movie and data file gets a real time checksum on a new OS.
Governments keep all internet ISP logs for decades.
Full VPN logs show up years later to get connected to ISP IP accounts.
CC brands and payment processors block all types of payments to all political groups/businesses they don't support for political reasons.
Medical database sharing:
Past medical DNA tests get fully shared between gov/police/private sector.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Cars are completely replace by self-driving vehicles. Unfortunately, that did not mean an improvement in security practices. One day, some variety of jihadists finds a security hole that allows them to take control remotely. The result is a massive worldwide terror attack that makes 9/11 look trivial. Few non-sdv cars are available so the nation is paralysed. Politically, the nation goes haywire in ways that will make people longingly miss the Patriot Act.
If some bug or malware afflicted masses of planes, trains, and/or automobiles at the same time; it could clog up a large portion of the population's commute, commerce, and emergency handlers.
Table-ized A.I.
The soviet doomsday switch hasn't ever accidentally launched a retaliatory strike by itself (yet)...
We have not seen mobile malware able to jump back and forth to desktops.
...you may just find out what else could go wrong...
It largely seems like the threat of it happening at any time has been enough to control the populace.
Children's' toys turn into homicidal knife wielding maniacs, all because of some hacked proprietary software code in a popular toy.
Th scenario that Mozilla goes bankrupt after losing too much confidence in them after too many “experiments” causing Chrome to have a virtual monopoly with surviving mozilla forks having sub 1% market share and chromium forks having to have their adblockers crippled. For the sake of the web get a clue Mozilla and restore XUL before it’s too late.
You can say these things about anything, whether it's tech, cars, steam engines, things go wrong, things blow up, things kill people. What hasn't gone wrong is the entire industry being supplanted by another.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well, 3d-printed ghost guns haven't become a major problem, particularly in countries where gun ownership is heavily restricted. 3d printing hasn't really led to any major problems I've heard of.
Space tech has never had a disaster worse than a launchpad explosion killing a bunch of people at the launch site, and that was several decades ago. Worse as in, say, a rocket crashing into a city. We haven't hopelessly contaminated every body in the solar system with Earth microbes. We haven't had a major Kessler Syndrome incident that wiped out a large portion of satellites in orbit. We haven't had an Andromeda Strain-type incident.
We haven't had a large-scale Luddite backlash against technology, if that counts.
We haven't had a Jurassic Park-style disaster where revived/genetically-modified animals go on a rampage. Where's the GM bioweapons selectively wiping out certain ethnic groups or only active at certain latitudes? GM food causing (proven) mass sickness or poisoning to populations. GM babies leading to prejudice against them (or against unmodified people) a la Gattaca.
Nuclear terrorism has yet to happen. Large-scale nuclear exchange has never happened. Physics tech has yet to create bombs more powerful than thermonuclear. Directed energy weapons aren't superior enough to lead to an arms race. Hypersonic missiles have yet to lead to significant political/military conflicts. Space weapons have remained in the realm of rumor and innuendo (and a couple failed projects). Killbots 'exist' but are mostly remote-controlled waldoes, no AI has used poor judgment to decide to intentionally kill someone without a human in the loop (AFAIK).
Cloud seeding hasn't evolved to weather control that destabilized the planet's climate.
There are an infinite number of ways that humans can err and things can fail, so it's impossible we'll ever approach the infinite. However: "If something can go wrong, it eventually will." - Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Seriously? There are entire genres of literature devoted to answering this question, quite creatively. Here's my favorite anthology:
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
Take a look at "Dystopian" and "Post Apocalyptic" literature. Those two terms will help anyone interested. There are probably subgenres I'm not exactly aware of, but those broad classifications are a good starting point.
If anyone actually believes that everything that could possibly go wrong, has gone wrong, they are not very creative in their imagination of potential things to go wrong....
Sure, today's software is buggy and crash prone as hell, but at least the bugs do not usually kill people.
Something tells me that will change once we start getting mass produced self driving cars, and more computer controlled and network connected medical devices. The "release early, release often, fix the bugs and security holes later" mantra of modern software development combined with those products is going to be a fatal combination.
Oh, wait ...
Zuck already knows where my house lives and resold that info 7 times to the highest bidder.
The airport drone scares are largely a ploy to get hobbyists out of the airspace which will be used for commercial delivery drones. Today will be the next generation's "good old days", when humans could still earn slave wages by delivering crap for Uber Eats and Amazon.
Bonus round:
I don't think the concept of purchasing movies is going to be around for too much longer, either. Hollywood has been pushing for a full-on subscription/pay-per-view business model ever since Circuit City's ill-fated Divx disc format.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Stop worrying about buggy software and start worrying about the large scale use of killer drones!
Two examples:
1. SalesForce charges a premium to enable encrypted-at-rest for your data. This means the company is charging to protect your data from possibly being compromised by SalesForce's own employees.
2. ZenDesk basic plans allow user passwords to be any five characters. No policy can be applied requiring more digits or types of characters (alpha, case, numbers, punctuation, etc.) unless your organization subscribes to the "Professional" or "Enterprise" level. Zendesk is using the threat of end-users having their accounts compromised to encourage customers to pay extra for the ability to enforce safe password policies.
It seems that some public cloud proprietors intend to mimic real-world ghettos. If customers want the cheapest rent for their cloud service, then thugs and criminals may break in and steal your data. Pay higher rent and you get protection.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
coronal mass ejection
Your CPU could be "sold" on a subscription basis, if it can't verify that you've paid your subscription your hardware won't power up.
We just don't FULLY know what already went wrong. Like new crimes by Facebook are being posted each week. I guess other companies have quite some skeletons hidden. The most scary thing is actually when AI will pwn us -- we wouldn't know. We would be too stupid to even notice...
It's like AI run a muck but worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Easy one, a solar flare takes us all back to zero.
-
... technology dystopia can't be avoided under a private ownership model. You can't hold tech and software companies accountable when they are 100's of miles away.
The reason why the world is corrupt as fuck and why human culture is being destroyed and corporations rule the world, is because people are politically and historically illiterate. If one looks objectively at the facts. We live in a lawless oligarchy and have for 200 years if intellectual property law is anything to go by. So no, until people start to really understand how their society actually works and stop falling for oligarch asskissing free market fundy ideology, the madness will continue.
George carlin said it best about humanity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What I'm waiting for is some disgruntled employee, l337 haxor or "axis power" to push a "security" update ... think windows 10... with a time bomb that destroys hundreds of millions of computers simultaneously.
Would wipe all data then destroy the operating system. It could try and brick/corrupt any hardware containing field upgradable firmware (disk drives, NICs, GPUs, mgmt engines, keyboards, system firmwares...etc)
The current system in my view is simply too dangerous. It costs too little to fix programming mistakes and normalizing constant perpetual updates as if this is a normal and healthy exercise is an exceedingly dangerous local optima to fall into.
Likewise there is nothing wrong with field firmware updates so long as they are distributed upon boot and physically unable to persist after reboot. Current practices are simply too dangerous.
Look up the Carrington event. Realize that it's not a question of if, but of when the next X-class solar flare hits the Earth. It will be like an EMP, but it will last for days, not milliseconds, and it will be global. If we don't prepare for it, most electrically powered equipment will be destroyed, and in consequence most humans will die.
"Would you like to play a game"
So far, we haven't had machines start global thermonuclear war. So far.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If the climate doesn't get its act together soon, we may have to just take it upon ourselves and launch all of the nukes.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
Probably because you aren't looking. Could you name which phone you have that can connect to the cellphone tower and not be provisioned by the company? Even if you buy a burner from walmart, they know you bought it. You can clone a phone, steal an ID, get someone else to buy it, etc so the system isn't perfect at this time. I suppose that it isn't "perfect" yet because there hasn't been a need for enforcement. All our government would need to put this into enforcement mode would be to force use of military-style Common Access Cards for all transactions. With that, the best you'd be able to do is steal an already activated phone, or clone one- which isn't easy with a CAC system. Extending these same principles to a normal internet modem is not hard at all.
Better not post any idea, or people will certainly use em.
Ohhhhh. So it CAN get worse.
-This signature is strictly to prevent comments ending with questions or propositions.-
I'd say things are pretty good.
Cheer up!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
2. ZenDesk basic plans allow user passwords to be any five characters.
WTF? From ZenDesk
Note: If an end-user or agent fails to enter their password correctly ten times in a row, they are locked out and cannot sign in again until they reset their password.
Am I missing something? I get locking an IP address out of a system if too many incorrect login attempts are tried, but locking the whole account down? Doesn't this just give, to anyone, the ability to lock anyone's account that they know the username, but not password, for?
Seems, to me, that this policy just begs for denial-of-service attacks against entire lists of usernames..
Despite the fears from the kale-munching, OMG-I-can't-deal-with-artifice crowd, I for one have yet to hear of any actual widespread problems from the dissemination of GMO crops on humanity.
Sure, business practices of e.g. Monsanto may not be great for farmers, but the actual products themselves don't seem to be problematic AFAICT.
Change my mind ;-)
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
We aren't in the Matrix yet, so all is not lost. Just keep taking that blue pill and everything will be ok.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... A huge geomagnetic storm shitting on all our satellites and electronics at once.
When Bitcoin was introduced, I would've bet a fair amount of money that it would be hacked into inoperability within months if not weeks -- if only because there was so much monetary incentive for doing so, and any new, non-trivial software always contains bugs if you look hard enough. Non-trivial massively-multiuser software running on untrusted hardware should've been easy pickings... and yet, it soldiers on -- not taking over the world, exactly, but without any cataclysmic failure yet, either.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
But once it is complete, boom! One unforeseen problem and suddenly the power grid is down and now internet is down and now nothing wants to come back up because A service needs B service, which needs C service, which won't start until A service is back up, all while F service decides there is a problem and tells A service to wait to restart until Z service is restored, which depends on B...
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I just read on The Verge that iRobot, makers of the Roomba, have created a lawnmower version. I'm wondering if someone's pet is going to be ground to a pulp by that ilttle murderous lawnmower robot.
https://www.theverge.com/circu...
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The general gist of this is, "Dang. Stallman was right". I wonder how much more miserable technology would be making our lives without the precedent of things like the GPL. I applaud the man for having the foresight to see the dark days that were coming and trying to hold them back with something that benefits society.
- PC policing with immediate fines like in "Demolition Man"
- A Super Bug that spreads faster (antibiotics fail.)
- Lacking net neutrality, those nightmares begin to grow.
- ISPs join a privatized legal system to punish/fine for ToS violations involving other industries. (such as loss of internet if you don't pay for hearing a song.)
- Quantum Computing actually works. Encryption dies.
- GMO designed disease; mad scientist or gov leak or mutation.
- Self-driving cars are exempt from liability... or like cars became after smearing pedestrians etc. jay walking... but now it's you driving that is 2nd class.
- Government quality automated attack using the existing massive data breaches.
- Such as identity theft millions at once (USA)
- Bank money routing
- power grid goes down
- Stock Exchange Hacked (by machine, not the few human scams at the edge of happening.)
- Government requires backdoors into tech... openly legalized by many governments; making it even more of a mess
- Cash is no longer forced to be allowed by law for all for payment of all debts.
- Social Rating scale like in Black Mirror... minor forms exist already but it's not there yet.
- Right to Repair backfires and it becomes illegal to repair
- Solar power taxes protectionism for old power companies
- AI systems that are "stable" have ghosts set off by simple triggers. Like a sticker on a stop sign causes them to drive off the road.
- Dick Cheny's mind is successfully simulated on a computer. It's crazy flawed but half US voters can't tell.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's human that have gone wrong with their use of tech. The blame should never be laid on a piece of technology just because some magnate decided he could use it to oppress his fellow human beings a little more.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Those with the worst nightmares get the most power/influence in disaster planning.
Weaponized Psychology:
App addictions to distract, control, and misinform the masses -- and customize techniques towards having a personal psychologist messing you up. We've only a hint of the start of this.
Cult-like control freaks AS AN APP. Isolation from friends/family/community replaced with hollow additions... Faster and more capable than a talented cult leader. Tech is already incidentally isolating people ironically in the communications tech age...
Continues to advance to the point where democracy is impossible in practice.
Slavery but you love your tiny freedoms! I get to choose the color of my shackles!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Geez, do you think there's a day so sunny that this guy won't be able complain about the clouds? Sure, there are some problems with tech, but let's reformulate this just a bit:
If you look at the last 15 years in tech, it's just amazing! Everything you buy contains more processing power than an
supercomputer. You don't have to keep buying and re-buying software - it comes as a subscription that you use just as long you want.
With services like Steam, games "just work" - no more installation problems and driver nightmares. Gene editing to correct
birth defects is just around the corner. Drones give us amazing aerial photography, and they're so cheap that anyone
can play. We have new alternatives to currency, experiments from chips to Bitcoin, which may change the future of commerce.
And on, and on... The security problems on today's PCs are no worse than they were 10 years ago, just different. Cybercrime
is through the roof? Only because so much more of modern life is online - crime as a whole has certainly not increased; it
has just moved online along with the rest of our lives.
The author needs some serious counseling...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
A large-scale intentional attack of on-the-road autonomous vehicles causing rapid acceleration to a high rate of speed, veering off the road, crashing into eachother, walls, etc, resulting in mass casualty, inability to access roadways and congestion in medical centers, etc.
High-powered and relatively cheap devices are in the pockets of most people - what they do with the sum of Human knowledge? Spend all day playing Candy Crush and sexting of course!
Thus far nobody has instituted penis-based biometric sensors which randomly short out and electrocute or flay your member.
I assume this is just for the sake of equality, since it could only be used to oppress ~49% of the population.
Counterpoint: We actually live in a golden age of free speech. Even a decade ago the idea that people could make a career out of shitposting on YouTube was hard to imagine, yet here we are. With social media individuals with no corporate or government backing have more ability to reach more people than ever before, and post things that they would never dare to offline.
The kind of stuff you can find on YouTube and Twitter and Facebook in seconds today would never have been broadcast or widely published 30 years ago.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everything.
That's the biggest threat we know for sure exists, i.e. is already out there.
Antbiotics in livestock and CISPR are bound to someday breed a global killer that measurably reduces the global population. I'd expect something like this to perhaps cost 50 to 100 million lives before it can be stopped.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We have thousands of nukes out there. How about that gov't shutdown? Do the nuke herders count as essential staff?
Some virus or a targeted attack makes self driving cars run through shopping malls or drive off bridges.
This could even happen if there is a GPS glitch making all maps offset by 100m to the east and the selfdriving software being buggy and assuming the GPS is right and the camera is wrong.
On one DrWho episode (or was it Torchwood?) there is an automated car system which is tricked into killing it's drivers on purpose.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
My own article on this has a more extensive list of what is wrong in IT, and why all the technology is so non-robust and untrustworthy.
Your smart locks opening for all the wrong people, and staying locked for you.
Appliances not working or changing settings to "recommended" ones without asking, ruining your food.
Environment controls (heat and A/C) reverting to outside defined settings, possibly cooking or freezing people.
Digital Assistants trying to counsel you, based on input, or even alerting the Police (or other authorities).
The IoT being hacked on a much wider basis.
Still, a great case for "Certified Dumb Device" (TM)
Slashdot is permanently slashdotted, and no longer keeps me informed of the status of the giant bat-like creatures that fly between the power lines in front of my house, each grasping a shiny metal cylinder containing what was once the soul of a COBOL programmer, their leathery wings black as the inky depths of space, from where they originate. Why they fling the cylinders at the chemtrails originating from Canadian aircraft is as enigmatic as the diminutive chauffeur piloting the black Cadillac SUV used by Richard M Stallman on his mysterious assignations with "the lossless ones". These eldrich entities appear with uniforms sporting epaulets and cummerbunds, but it's impossible to see their faces which are wrapped in steaming, writhing "bandages". These facts are IGNORED BY INFOWARS and only reported on Slashdot, and then only by looking at the steagonographic messages hidden in the graphics from the adverts. But I digress. Where did I put my meds?
Just the washing instructions on life's rich tapestry
How about the software industry being flooded with a bunch of progressive opinion writers turned software developers who put the same effort into coding as they did to factual content after being told to "Learn to Code"?
- All Nest thermostasts set and locked to 40C ... playing the latest Celine Dion's hit in loop!!! ...
...)
- All Phillips light flashing everywhere
- Like one said, all smart locks opening randomly
- All connected security cameras broadcasted to everyone
- Alexa, Google Home,
-
And then all thoses IoT devices DDoS attacks on Cloud providers (Goog,e Amazon, Azure,
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
I fully expect all of our power supply plants to be shut down (or worse), as they have already admitted multiple times that they are extremely vulnerable to computer attacks. Maybe an enemy country will do it. Maybe some insane hackers or religious extremists will do it. Either way, it will result in mass chaos, after which, the State will clamp down even harder on personal freedoms.
That's correct. If you can brute-force guess, phish, or steal usernames you can merrily start locking everyone out.
I mean, that's why it was invented, right?
What you start to describe is the commercialization of free speech, which cannot be a good thing for us plebes: they've fully incentivized our race to the bottom, to making speech meaningless.
We also have what Trump says, which while it may be allowed due to "free speech", should not be allowed due to lack of accuracy, incitement, lacking an ounce of morality or dignity, etc.
Alternatively, places like Groklaw shut themselves down before the U.S. government took action, ie. ACTUAL INFORMATION AND INFORMED DISCUSSION about things currently happening in the world.
R.I.P. freedom of information and communication.
Well Russians aren't making posts to scare people on Slashdot. Wait... (squints at the article)
Ask Slashdot: What Could Go Wrong In Tech That Hasn't Already Gone Wrong?
Sexbots. Sexbots gone wrong. Sexbots out of control rampaging across the countryside having you whenever they want.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Free speech is not related to the number of people you can reach or the number of people who are willing to listen.
We live in the golden age of old wives tales. It has nothing to do with free speech.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The volume of bits flowing over the Internet goes up and up, but investment in infrastructure goes down, and current infrastructure decays. Latency goes up. Streaming services have pauses, intermittent failures, Interactive websites have flaky responses. Everything that depends on a continuous connection becomes irritating and unreliable. "Always connected" becomes a dream. Major businesses fail.
A vaccine has never caused autism. Yet....
Note: the proper mod for this comment is "troll"
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Yes, these are the scenarios I am referring to when I say "being compromised by SalesForce's own employees." Encrypted-at-rest means it prevents some extraction of your data that would involve a SalesForce employee as a part of the compromise. Charging for encryption-at-rest is profiting off of preventing the vendor from being a threat vector.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm waiting for the inevitable fall-out when a large-scale cloud product is shut down due to criminal or financial problems at the parent company.
What happens to the thousands of school districts that rely on GSuite to get their work done if Google decides to exit that business or declare bankruptcy.
Not many people thought GM could ever go bankrupt - yet they did.
= single point of failure.
It makes some sense for Salesforce to charge extra - because their platform is on the Oracle database. And the Oracle version that supports encryption at rest is more expensive - so they are passing along the extra cost to their customers. Don't blame Salesforce - blame Oracle !
I hear you.
s/SalesForce/Oracle/g
No less disdain for SalesForce, though.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Rather that think about malicious intent, I prefer to interpret this question as: Despite our best efforts, what can still go wrong?
In that respect, I think the answer it "plenty".
The reason is that as we gain better-and-better understanding of how stuff works, we design in less-and-less safety margin. Eventually, someone's design point will cut it too close, something bad happens as a result, we learn about some previously unknown phenomenon, adapt our models, improve out safety margins, and move on.
Re "golden age of free speech"
Where social media report users to governments?
Movie reviews get banned?
Governments are considering more blasphemy laws?
Shadow bans and the tracking of users publication and speech?
Free speech, the freedom to publish is not a "dare" its a right.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I was expecting this thread to be a whole bunch of descriptions of things exactly as they are, followed by "Oh, wait...".
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Thats really the different between social media been just a utility. Passing on each uses comments.
:) :)
The user is the person to made the comment.
Social media becomes a publisher of only users "comments" the social media brand approves of.
Social media becomes the publisher of all approved comments.
Social media is not for "free". Thats what all the tracking and ads are for
"Free" does not pay for the workers who are needed to approve comments and make profits
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What's really problematic is triggered snowflakes trying to silence everyone they disagree with, e.g. by modding them troll.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Remember when they wanted to close the USPTO because "everything that could be invented, already had been"?
That was in 1899.
Now we're here wondering what possible mischief could possibly be invented, that hasn't already been invented?
We are only just getting started!
https://www.youtube.com/user/H...
All the stop lights in NYC turn green (in all four directions) at the same time. Predicted in the early 1960s by Irwin Lewis, "The Day They Invaded New York" (published as short story, later published as book in 1964), along with the counterfeiting of over-sized subway tokens (blocking turnstyles--but now we have electronic ways to do that).
And I wonder how much better Stallman's efforts would have turned out if he hadn't insisted on his ludicrously stringent and idiosyncratic redefinition of the word "freedom", as if there could only be one kind, and it was his way or the highway.
Even with Stallman, the CPU and BIOS and much of the rest of the hardware remains a malware mosh pit (just how many state actors do you have on your machine?)
He wasn't ever going to win his battle to establish the one true ecosystem of copyleft all the way down, but still he found it necessary to characterize the BSD licence as "non-free".
What could actually go wrong that hasn't yet is that all these named horror shows could actually lead to the collapse of civilization, instead of eternal, long-winded speculation.
It's almost like we have some kind of guardian-angel dark matter that keeps the world turning despite our worst efforts.
Shame if someday something happened to our guardian-angel dark matter.
Everything else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think machine learning and expert systems are going to take over much of the decision-making that is today done by humans.
1. They'll be better than humans, statistically. We already see this in e.g. cancer diagnosis.
2. They'll be cheaper than humans.
Expert systems will control or play a major role in healthcare, insurance, employment, tax, social benefits, courts..
The problem is, already today algorithms created by ML are too complex to follow. We can only test and simulate to ensure they're at least more reliable than humans - in the end we'll just have to accept they're almost always right.
That's a bloody scary thing when your doctor says "Well, the computer says you need surgery so we'll just have to let it do that", but the reasons are too complicated for both your doctor and you to understand.
No sig to see here. Move along.
I think it's a matter of choosing what technology you will allow to enter your life. I usually wait for it to mature and never adopt anything in the early stages. I'd never have a Voice assistant in my home for such reasons shown in the article. And probably never will. I also cancelled my Facebook, instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn 3 years and 9 months ago and proudly wait for every anniversary. I really don't miss any functionality off them. Choose what tech you will grant access to your life before buying or participating.