Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.
This is not true.
There are a wide range of database engines to choose in AWS. RDS explicitly lets you choose from Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB or - Oracle or even SQL Server. And guess what else? Microsoft themselves offer a managed MariaDB instance on Azure! This guys post is straight-up bullshit and looks like he did zero fact-checking.
I agree, affluence is definitely the key factor here. Not only because of excellent point in above post, but also because of the constant rush to be able to do things differently, as some kind of weird status symbol, to demonstrate affluence to others, probably with the side goal of appearing to be more knowledgeable.
"Yeah I could have just bought a [averagely efficient and cost effective car model] but I did my own research and really this hand-crafted, 2-seater, avocado-powered scooter is the best thing for my family. It's Goop-certified, you guys should really think about getting one."
All the comments on here debating whether debt is 'good' or 'bad' or not, are totally missing the point. The point is that this system allows the Chinese government to set social norms, 'moral goals' and whatever else they want remotely - across the whole population - very easily.
Sure this example is about debt. But if this is 'successful' (however the hell they measure that), why don't we trigger notifications when you're passing a homosexual, an immigrant, or... I don't know... an actual Muslim, if you can imagine such an atrocity.
This system lets the government decide what is good, and what is bad. I have absolutely no idea why the Chinese population have simply rolled over and let this happen - what they're doing there is arguably worse than some of the 'regimes' that the West have felt compelled to invade.
On a personal level, I'm a fierce privacy advocate.
Professionally, I work in healthcare data/analysis and I can tell you this is very exciting. We have tons of unstructured/freetext data floating around that nobody uses because it's too hard. We rely on structured data points (date, scores, measurements) which tell only a part of the story. So now finally we have a really well researched and put together service, where we can call the Comprehend API to run it across our data and give us all kinds of new insights into patient/doctor activity that we currently have no sight of.
This brings a very sophisticated and powerful capability into the hands of cash-poor health services to understand how to deliver services better.
That would indicate you believe Chrome is scraping the content of the pages visited and sending that to google. That seems unlikely... I'm sure its something they'd like to do, but it would at least get reported.
Even then, what's stopping a school from buying a shitload of chromebooks, and then ripping Google's OS out of them and going with whatever the fuck they want, using something like MrChromebox?
Answer: the fact that noone in a school has the slightest clue about how to manage technology, hardware or basically even the photocopier.
My kid is at a NZ intermediate (middle) school where the 'ICT' guru is just a male teacher who seems to have just impressed everyone else by writing some wickid formula's in excel or something
School's have no capability or even desire to install custom OSs. In fact - many of them use third party surveillance (sorry I mean 'safety') tools and require you to sign all kinds of forms saying you agree to this otherwise your kid can just go and sit in the corner and fold napkins or something
Good point. I have no sympathy for these big companies, but they are operating in a capitalist system trying to make money. If regulation and public demand let them do this stuff, then why wouldn't they?
The key area that doesn't get a lot of air-time - mentioned above - is how consumers can make *informed* decisions. If products were forced to declare what telemetry was going, what got collected and how it would be used, at least people could make an informed decision about it. Lots of users would be happy with the benefits of facebook (staying in touch with friends etc) bearing in mind the costs of the personal data they give up (I find it abhorrent and staggering that anybody would, but we're all different).
The worst part about our current situation is that people just have no idea about what happens with their data - government regulation should compel much better transparency around this. Well done to the EU for pushing this forward.
How is it possible to avoid AMP sites entirely? Genuine question. I thought by use of ublock etc I was doing a reasonable job of staying out of googles data capture silo, but now I'm not so sure.
Same, but I went the whole DIY route and set up my own mail server on a digitalocean VPS. I'd always wanted to do it, but was a bit intimidated.
It ended up being a challenging but fun/interesting weekend using the excellent guide from Kapitein Vorkbaard. It literally was the only guide I found that worked. I now have a Debian 9/PHP7 mail server, with virus/spam protection (and geolocation-based blocking until maxmind changed their TOS). I've extended it to use nextcloud for a whole bunch of functionality I use across friends and family, which has let me bring more OSS into my daily life.
Gmail is now so prevalent that people are genuinely intrigued if you don't have one. It hasn't yet won me a job, but I'm really happy what I get for paying $10/mo with very minimal upkeep.
The problem comes when an ID system becomes mandatory or essentially mandatory for things it shouldn't be needed for in the first place
Excellent point, this is exactly the problem here. The legislation text itself says nothing at all about it being mandatory (although government lawyers in the 2017 Supreme Court case have argued that it should be). However, there are now at least 50 official schemes that require Aadhaar to utilise - anything from receiving social welfare payments, applying for a scholarship, opening a bank account, making any payment above a threshold (INR 50,000) or receiving treatment for - for example - HIV. So it isn't mandatory, but you basically need it to do anything remotely useful.
Not only this, but details of 130 million people and 100 million bank accounts have been leaked via four *government* websites, and a handy little backdoor has turned up (under the 'ExpressLane' programme) which allows the CIA real-time access to unencrypted Aadhaar data.
I did exactly this recently. Swapped ~10yrs worth of gmail for a digital ocean droplet at $10/month, and now have a well-functioning email service I can get on desktop and phone and has been really easy to maintain after setup.
Despite being a competent linux user there is some pretty arcane shit required in setting up postfix etc, and it took me a LONG time to nut it out. I started with the arstechnica piece quoted above but this was easily the most useful guide I came across (my VPS is debian 8).
Homelessness isn't the problem, it's a symptom. Usually "mental illness" is the actual problem, and that's the reason you can't just give a homeless person a house and make everything right again. That's also the reason they typically don't get a job.
Wrong. Wow do you know anything about this outside of the one guy you knew once? There's a really good evidence-base to suggest that simply having stable housing is the critical factor in someone managing their mental health issues. In your analysis, people can't hold jobs or tenancies until their 'mental illness' is dealt with appropriately. What do you propose, then? Asylums? Nice.
Here's a guy who actually knows something on the topic. Give it a whirl.
This exact problem has already been solved for a number of years, here in New Zealand of all places.
The government recognised there is a public health issue in school vaccinators/GPs having up to date info on immunisations, so they could schedule vaccination programmes and quickly know where low coverage rates existed in case of an outbreak.
So - the school carries out vaccinations, and the details get electronically transmitted (using HL7 protocol) to a central register managed/hosted by the ministry of health. Similarly, if a kid goes to their doctor and gets a jab there, the GP uses their own local system to query that register, download details of other immunisation events, and add ones they do there. It all syncs with this central register, and seems to work very well.
That way, in case of an outbreak in a particular region, they can easily know who is at risk and send nurses into a specific school to notify teachers and parents.
This is the *only* use case other than allergies I can imagine schools needing any contact with medical info, and even then - they should not be storing it locally or via any kind of cloud site, if an effective solution like this can be done in a small country like NZ. Is there a reason something similar couldn't be done centrally in the US, with federal/govt money or is the system that deregulated?
Yep agree. Lots of comments here go along the lines of "this is a free market, just take your business elsewhere". Fine - I can do that (and in this case I certainly will). But what proportion of the general internet using population do you think are even aware they are being tracked? This faith in the rational decision-making power of consumers relies on them having information about the relative pros and cons of accessing a particular service. I guess what I'm suggesting is that this 'expectation' to be tracked has just sneaked up on us, and there is no transparency from individual web sites, or these tracking services, about what is really happening with people's data. I don't believe any of us have made a rational decision that being tracked is 'OK' - it's just the way things are now, so we all just have to kind of accept it. It's pretty sad.
I'd like to send a link to my friends introducing them to some encryption tools that they can readily use, and maybe some good write up on why its important - any tips?
thanks.
But no, you just focus on the fact that he also happens to work for Valve.
To be fair, the stupid article is somewhat to blame.
You rightly indicate that a far more appropriate title would have been 'Widely respected Professor of Economics appointed Greece's Finance Minister'. Which has the apparent downside of:
actually sounding like a very sensible thing to do, and
Slashdot Mirror
A similar approach got one scammer quite far down in lil 'ol New Zealand
Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.
This is not true.
There are a wide range of database engines to choose in AWS. RDS explicitly lets you choose from Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB or - Oracle or even SQL Server. And guess what else? Microsoft themselves offer a managed MariaDB instance on Azure! This guys post is straight-up bullshit and looks like he did zero fact-checking.
I agree, affluence is definitely the key factor here. Not only because of excellent point in above post, but also because of the constant rush to be able to do things differently, as some kind of weird status symbol, to demonstrate affluence to others, probably with the side goal of appearing to be more knowledgeable.
"Yeah I could have just bought a [averagely efficient and cost effective car model] but I did my own research and really this hand-crafted, 2-seater, avocado-powered scooter is the best thing for my family. It's Goop-certified, you guys should really think about getting one."
All the comments on here debating whether debt is 'good' or 'bad' or not, are totally missing the point. The point is that this system allows the Chinese government to set social norms, 'moral goals' and whatever else they want remotely - across the whole population - very easily.
Sure this example is about debt. But if this is 'successful' (however the hell they measure that), why don't we trigger notifications when you're passing a homosexual, an immigrant, or ... I don't know ... an actual Muslim , if you can imagine such an atrocity.
This system lets the government decide what is good, and what is bad. I have absolutely no idea why the Chinese population have simply rolled over and let this happen - what they're doing there is arguably worse than some of the 'regimes' that the West have felt compelled to invade.
On a personal level, I'm a fierce privacy advocate.
Professionally, I work in healthcare data/analysis and I can tell you this is very exciting. We have tons of unstructured/freetext data floating around that nobody uses because it's too hard. We rely on structured data points (date, scores, measurements) which tell only a part of the story. So now finally we have a really well researched and put together service, where we can call the Comprehend API to run it across our data and give us all kinds of new insights into patient/doctor activity that we currently have no sight of.
This brings a very sophisticated and powerful capability into the hands of cash-poor health services to understand how to deliver services better.
That would indicate you believe Chrome is scraping the content of the pages visited and sending that to google. That seems unlikely... I'm sure its something they'd like to do, but it would at least get reported.
Here you go.
yeah but me turning all my google location services off also meant that they cannot log or store any of my location information, didn't it?
Even then, what's stopping a school from buying a shitload of chromebooks, and then ripping Google's OS out of them and going with whatever the fuck they want, using something like MrChromebox?
Answer: the fact that noone in a school has the slightest clue about how to manage technology, hardware or basically even the photocopier.
My kid is at a NZ intermediate (middle) school where the 'ICT' guru is just a male teacher who seems to have just impressed everyone else by writing some wickid formula's in excel or something
School's have no capability or even desire to install custom OSs. In fact - many of them use third party surveillance (sorry I mean 'safety') tools and require you to sign all kinds of forms saying you agree to this otherwise your kid can just go and sit in the corner and fold napkins or something
Good point. I have no sympathy for these big companies, but they are operating in a capitalist system trying to make money. If regulation and public demand let them do this stuff, then why wouldn't they?
The key area that doesn't get a lot of air-time - mentioned above - is how consumers can make *informed* decisions. If products were forced to declare what telemetry was going, what got collected and how it would be used, at least people could make an informed decision about it. Lots of users would be happy with the benefits of facebook (staying in touch with friends etc) bearing in mind the costs of the personal data they give up (I find it abhorrent and staggering that anybody would, but we're all different).
The worst part about our current situation is that people just have no idea about what happens with their data - government regulation should compel much better transparency around this. Well done to the EU for pushing this forward.
Thank you that's very informative. I had no idea it was so obvious from the URL, I just hadn't been looking for it.
How is it possible to avoid AMP sites entirely? Genuine question. I thought by use of ublock etc I was doing a reasonable job of staying out of googles data capture silo, but now I'm not so sure.
No it's really not simple. I've run a small linux network at home for almost 20 years, but mail servers are a totally different proposition.
Only the instructions I found here actually helped me. No relation/link, they are just the best and clearest instructions I have yet found.
Same, but I went the whole DIY route and set up my own mail server on a digitalocean VPS. I'd always wanted to do it, but was a bit intimidated.
It ended up being a challenging but fun/interesting weekend using the excellent guide from Kapitein Vorkbaard. It literally was the only guide I found that worked. I now have a Debian 9/PHP7 mail server, with virus/spam protection (and geolocation-based blocking until maxmind changed their TOS). I've extended it to use nextcloud for a whole bunch of functionality I use across friends and family, which has let me bring more OSS into my daily life.
Gmail is now so prevalent that people are genuinely intrigued if you don't have one. It hasn't yet won me a job, but I'm really happy what I get for paying $10/mo with very minimal upkeep.
The problem comes when an ID system becomes mandatory or essentially mandatory for things it shouldn't be needed for in the first place
Excellent point, this is exactly the problem here. The legislation text itself says nothing at all about it being mandatory (although government lawyers in the 2017 Supreme Court case have argued that it should be). However, there are now at least 50 official schemes that require Aadhaar to utilise - anything from receiving social welfare payments, applying for a scholarship, opening a bank account, making any payment above a threshold (INR 50,000) or receiving treatment for - for example - HIV. So it isn't mandatory, but you basically need it to do anything remotely useful.
Not only this, but details of 130 million people and 100 million bank accounts have been leaked via four *government* websites, and a handy little backdoor has turned up (under the 'ExpressLane' programme) which allows the CIA real-time access to unencrypted Aadhaar data.
In short, it's a gigantic shit show.
but he didn't say he'll be using his home ISP did he?
I did exactly this recently. Swapped ~10yrs worth of gmail for a digital ocean droplet at $10/month, and now have a well-functioning email service I can get on desktop and phone and has been really easy to maintain after setup.
Despite being a competent linux user there is some pretty arcane shit required in setting up postfix etc, and it took me a LONG time to nut it out. I started with the arstechnica piece quoted above but this was easily the most useful guide I came across (my VPS is debian 8).
Homelessness isn't the problem, it's a symptom. Usually "mental illness" is the actual problem, and that's the reason you can't just give a homeless person a house and make everything right again. That's also the reason they typically don't get a job.
Wrong. Wow do you know anything about this outside of the one guy you knew once? There's a really good evidence-base to suggest that simply having stable housing is the critical factor in someone managing their mental health issues. In your analysis, people can't hold jobs or tenancies until their 'mental illness' is dealt with appropriately. What do you propose, then? Asylums? Nice.
Here's a guy who actually knows something on the topic. Give it a whirl.
two words: blockchain
I don't see a distinction between your 'benevolent dictator' and how things work right now
Hi! How's the weather in Auckland today?!
The government recognised there is a public health issue in school vaccinators/GPs having up to date info on immunisations, so they could schedule vaccination programmes and quickly know where low coverage rates existed in case of an outbreak.
So - the school carries out vaccinations, and the details get electronically transmitted (using HL7 protocol) to a central register managed/hosted by the ministry of health. Similarly, if a kid goes to their doctor and gets a jab there, the GP uses their own local system to query that register, download details of other immunisation events, and add ones they do there. It all syncs with this central register, and seems to work very well.
That way, in case of an outbreak in a particular region, they can easily know who is at risk and send nurses into a specific school to notify teachers and parents.
This is the *only* use case other than allergies I can imagine schools needing any contact with medical info, and even then - they should not be storing it locally or via any kind of cloud site, if an effective solution like this can be done in a small country like NZ. Is there a reason something similar couldn't be done centrally in the US, with federal/govt money or is the system that deregulated?
Will check out uMatrix as a Ghostery replacement
Yep agree. Lots of comments here go along the lines of "this is a free market, just take your business elsewhere". Fine - I can do that (and in this case I certainly will). But what proportion of the general internet using population do you think are even aware they are being tracked? This faith in the rational decision-making power of consumers relies on them having information about the relative pros and cons of accessing a particular service. I guess what I'm suggesting is that this 'expectation' to be tracked has just sneaked up on us, and there is no transparency from individual web sites, or these tracking services, about what is really happening with people's data. I don't believe any of us have made a rational decision that being tracked is 'OK' - it's just the way things are now, so we all just have to kind of accept it. It's pretty sad.
I'd like to send a link to my friends introducing them to some encryption tools that they can readily use, and maybe some good write up on why its important - any tips? thanks.
But no, you just focus on the fact that he also happens to work for Valve.
To be fair, the stupid article is somewhat to blame. You rightly indicate that a far more appropriate title would have been 'Widely respected Professor of Economics appointed Greece's Finance Minister'. Which has the apparent downside of: