We already have a government agency tasked with evaluating workplace hazards. It doen't need to be independent of government itself. Just TSA. Inter-agency conflict can be useful here, in that OSHA might be happy to bust TSA for radiating their employees.
Also, the issue we should be worried about is not whether the claimed dose is dangerous. The more urgent issue is whether these things, as deployed, are dosing people at the correct level, which is easy to evaluate, and no one currently is doing so.
Many people will post suggestions for incredibly difficult to implement solutions. I work with groups of people (journalists, mostly) which need something NOW, that they can run themselves without getting a degree in network engineering.
For them, I send them to AnchorFree Hotspot Shield.
Free, ad supported (you can run AdBlockPlus) and allegedly does not log for non-paying accounts (I wouldn't want to know either). It gives you a random IP address terminating in Northern California, which is very helpful for people with censorship issues.
The response to SOPA/PIPA petition on We The People was fairly detailed discussion of those policies. It helpfully advanced the discussion by establishing a formal White House position on the bills. It was fairly negative, which signaled that a veto was possible if concerns were not addressed. They also made a lot of noise about how terrible piracy is, just in case you weren't clear on their overall loyalties.
From my friends at Global Integrity: Lobbying is fine. Lobbying is a form of political participation, which lawmakers find genuinely helpful to explain complex issues. But it gets a lot more messy when money changes hands. To quote:
"1. Lobbying in and of itself is not an evil. In fact, it is helpful to lawmakers in any country to understand complex issues, gather additional facts and details, and weigh the opinions of commercial interests and special interest groups in deciding policy.
2. Lobbying does become a problem when lobbyists serve as major fundraisers for candidates or otherwise become sources of financial support to parties.
3. In the Latvian context, the rise of campaign costs and the role of many lobbyists as advisors and consultants to the major parties does present the risk of undue influence.
4. Any lobbying reform in Latvia should seek to regulate the industry by increasing transparency around the process (through regular lobbyist reporting and financial disclosures), not by heavy-handed restrictions.
5. There are very few examples in either the developed or developing world to point to for effective lobbying regulatory regimes. The two most robust regimes – Canada and the US – boast political systems riddled by lobbying and corruption scandals. Most Western Europe countries lack any regulation over lobbying whatsoever, and the European Union’s new voluntary registration program is a rather pathetic attempt to govern the more than 15,000 lobbyists now roaming the streets of Brussels."
If only Mozilla Foundation had some sway with browser makers... wait... they are a browser maker.
BrowserID is being user tested as a standalone, but incorporating it directly into Firefox is explicitly their end game. Once there, others will follow.
1) It was a pain to implement. It is not widely adopted among sites I want to log in to.
2) It tells my OpenID provider (say, Google) every site I log in to. This is unacceptable to me as a solution. BrowserID only let's Google know that SOME Google user is logging in.
This is a fallacy based on the idea that something is either completely secure or completely not secure. We don't live in that binary. We make security trade offs all the time, and measures which increase the time, cost and complexity of interception or attack are a good thing, even if they are not by themselves complete solutions.
Searched for 16% and found the source of mistake: support for punitively restricting a convicted person from using the Internet is at 16%. Plain old content filtering is more popular -- 60% in favor of some scenarios.
The last sentence in the summary -- "Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%." -- is not accurate. Check page 8 of the PDF. There is a particularly harshly worded prompt which drew only 36% support, but in every other question there was higher support for internet filtering -- in some scenarios a majority support filters.
The core innovation is that BrowserID does not require you to phone home to your certificate authority (say, Google) every time you want to look at a page. Instead, it passes certificates around in a way that allows the site (DonkeyPronz, or whatever) to check that the cert is valid, but does not reveal to Google (or Mozilla, or whoever is running the cert authorty) which of the many BrowserID users is opening the page. This is a fundamental difference.
At a recent event featuring a great many people smarter than me (the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s wonderful #TAbridge workshop), I asked for recommendations on amazing books to read in the upcoming winter. This is what I got back, based on the following prompts:
On networks, sharing, democracy...
The Leviathan and the Penguin: The Promise of Cooperation, Yochai Benkler Weath of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler Africa, Richard Dowden The Corruption Notebooks: Volume 7, ed. Hazel Feigenblatt and Global Integrity Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency, Archon Fung, Mary Graham and David Weil – @arfung The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman “The Quiet Coup”, The Atlantic, Simon Johnson The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morezov Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, Peter Morville Thrivability, Jean Russell, editor Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott The Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky Republic.com, Cass Sunstein The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, Joe Trippi
On work...
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, David Allen Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hannson Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is, Donald C. Gause; Gerald M. Weinberg The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, Tim Harford The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Michael Lewis Moneyball, Michael Lewis Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
On lean startups...
Business Model Generation, multiple authors The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Success Strategies for Products That Win, Steven Gary Blank The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Ash Maurya
A few quick reactions. I’ve read several of these already, and this does a nice job of validating the set — all of the books I’ve read were quite good.
Nearly all of the books I’ve read were handed to me by @innokate — so much for crowdsourcing; maybe you should just marry an expert.
Of the authors with strongly gendered names, 100% of them are male. No ladies. [update: this changed with revisions] Which goes a long way toward invalidating the set: besides some 50% of the population, how many other viewpoints are not represented here? Hard to tell.
GroupOns are sold on the phone by a sales team with incentives to maximize deal size. What makes you think she got anything approaching full disclosure?
Except he didn't create anything... Twitter did. And as such, the case law is completely batshit. Bottom line: employers should a) have a written policy that ratifies common sense and b) don't be a dick. Those two things prevent a lot of problems.
Point of clarification: The most frequently proposed number I've seen is a 0.01% tax on the value of each transaction. This would effectively eliminate High Freq Trading (which nets ballpark 0.001% per trade... millions of times an hour), but have no noticeable effect on buy-and-hold investing.
The HFT people are already taxing the public -- they do nothing* to allocate capital to good companies, take money out of markets, and have insane systemic instability problems to boot. Having this go to the treasury instead will knock the instability problem on it's ass. In a sane polity, this would be an easy, obvious technical solution. Only when Wall Street writes its own regulations (such as a Congressional ban on regulating CDOs!) does this become controversial.
*They say they create liquidity. I say that once we're dealing in milliseconds, liquidity is already achieved. Microsecond liquidity serves no social purpose.
Fair point on Apple. In that case it's huge, huge volume that's driving the price down. However, I still think that without itunes and related properties, Apple would have priced that higher at launch.
Until they figure out a way to get the price down where it can match the loss leaders from Apple and Amazon, this is going to be yet another almost-as-good device, for slightly more money. Good luck with that.
> And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
One could make the conclusion that life-threatening peanut allergies are more common than they used to be. Or you could go with massive media/scientific/medical conspiracy, because diagnosing someone whose airway has closed from anaphylaxis is, like, totally subjective.
This isn't going away. The only real answer is to clog the information channels about you with what you actually want the world to know.
Does this pose a problem for, say, pseudonym online dating? Yep. Unless you're willing to drop the pseudonym and link out to your dating profile, alongside your work profile, your hobby blog. It's time to stop pretending that we can post to Facebook and compartmentalize it -- the service providers do not want to do this, and increasingly are unable to provide this even if we do.
Slashdot Mirror
We already have a government agency tasked with evaluating workplace hazards. It doen't need to be independent of government itself. Just TSA. Inter-agency conflict can be useful here, in that OSHA might be happy to bust TSA for radiating their employees.
Also, the issue we should be worried about is not whether the claimed dose is dangerous. The more urgent issue is whether these things, as deployed, are dosing people at the correct level, which is easy to evaluate, and no one currently is doing so.
Leverage what you've got: kids, time, a local network. Many have walked this route, but I don't see the market saturating any time soon.
http://www.moms-with-cameras.com/
Many people will post suggestions for incredibly difficult to implement solutions. I work with groups of people (journalists, mostly) which need something NOW, that they can run themselves without getting a degree in network engineering.
For them, I send them to AnchorFree Hotspot Shield.
Free, ad supported (you can run AdBlockPlus) and allegedly does not log for non-paying accounts (I wouldn't want to know either). It gives you a random IP address terminating in Northern California, which is very helpful for people with censorship issues.
The response to SOPA/PIPA petition on We The People was fairly detailed discussion of those policies. It helpfully advanced the discussion by establishing a formal White House position on the bills. It was fairly negative, which signaled that a veto was possible if concerns were not addressed. They also made a lot of noise about how terrible piracy is, just in case you weren't clear on their overall loyalties.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/14/obama-administration-responds-we-people-petitions-sopa-and-online-piracy
From my friends at Global Integrity: Lobbying is fine. Lobbying is a form of political participation, which lawmakers find genuinely helpful to explain complex issues. But it gets a lot more messy when money changes hands. To quote:
"1. Lobbying in and of itself is not an evil. In fact, it is helpful to lawmakers in any country to understand complex issues, gather additional facts and details, and weigh the opinions of commercial interests and special interest groups in deciding policy.
2. Lobbying does become a problem when lobbyists serve as major fundraisers for candidates or otherwise become sources of financial support to parties.
3. In the Latvian context, the rise of campaign costs and the role of many lobbyists as advisors and consultants to the major parties does present the risk of undue influence.
4. Any lobbying reform in Latvia should seek to regulate the industry by increasing transparency around the process (through regular lobbyist reporting and financial disclosures), not by heavy-handed restrictions.
5. There are very few examples in either the developed or developing world to point to for effective lobbying regulatory regimes. The two most robust regimes – Canada and the US – boast political systems riddled by lobbying and corruption scandals. Most Western Europe countries lack any regulation over lobbying whatsoever, and the European Union’s new voluntary registration program is a rather pathetic attempt to govern the more than 15,000 lobbyists now roaming the streets of Brussels."
http://www.globalintegrity.org/node/228
This. I'm on team human. As it turns out, Team Human is better off if we leave the planet more or less the way it is now.
I completely misunderstood the parent. Native apps. Derp derp derp.
If only Mozilla Foundation had some sway with browser makers... wait... they are a browser maker.
BrowserID is being user tested as a standalone, but incorporating it directly into Firefox is explicitly their end game. Once there, others will follow.
Two things wrong with OpenID --
1) It was a pain to implement. It is not widely adopted among sites I want to log in to.
2) It tells my OpenID provider (say, Google) every site I log in to. This is unacceptable to me as a solution. BrowserID only let's Google know that SOME Google user is logging in.
Take these little gems as evidence of a real, vicious problem in geek culture:
"It’s by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source." http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-the-pantyshot-package-controversy/509
“I was trying not to, but it needed to be said.” http://skepchick.org/2011/12/reddit-makes-me-hate-atheists/
"c'mon. you're not a girl if u don't show us pics." http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_17/109-OMG-Girlz-Dont-Exist-on-teh-Intarweb-1
"Or — more likely — you may simply never hear from him again. Win-win-win."
Only on Slashdot would a breakdown in communication be described as a best-possible outcome. Making nice things requires talking, usually.
In soviet russia, rag washes out you!
US mobile phone backdoors are pretty well documented. Not hypothetical.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/surveillance-shocker-sprint-received-8-million-law
This is a fallacy based on the idea that something is either completely secure or completely not secure. We don't live in that binary. We make security trade offs all the time, and measures which increase the time, cost and complexity of interception or attack are a good thing, even if they are not by themselves complete solutions.
Searched for 16% and found the source of mistake: support for punitively restricting a convicted person from using the Internet is at 16%. Plain old content filtering is more popular -- 60% in favor of some scenarios.
The last sentence in the summary -- "Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%." -- is not accurate. Check page 8 of the PDF. There is a particularly harshly worded prompt which drew only 36% support, but in every other question there was higher support for internet filtering -- in some scenarios a majority support filters.
Wishing don't make it so.
The core innovation is that BrowserID does not require you to phone home to your certificate authority (say, Google) every time you want to look at a page. Instead, it passes certificates around in a way that allows the site (DonkeyPronz, or whatever) to check that the cert is valid, but does not reveal to Google (or Mozilla, or whoever is running the cert authorty) which of the many BrowserID users is opening the page. This is a fundamental difference.
Via: http://www.eylerwerve.com/2011/reading/ (CC/by)
At a recent event featuring a great many people smarter than me (the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s wonderful #TAbridge workshop), I asked for recommendations on amazing books to read in the upcoming winter. This is what I got back, based on the following prompts:
On networks, sharing, democracy...
The Leviathan and the Penguin: The Promise of Cooperation, Yochai Benkler
Weath of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler
Africa, Richard Dowden
The Corruption Notebooks: Volume 7, ed. Hazel Feigenblatt and Global Integrity
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency, Archon Fung, Mary Graham and David Weil – @arfung
The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman
“The Quiet Coup”, The Atlantic, Simon Johnson
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morezov
Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, Peter Morville
Thrivability, Jean Russell, editor
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott
The Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
Republic.com, Cass Sunstein
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, Joe Trippi
On work...
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, David Allen
Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hannson
Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is, Donald C. Gause; Gerald M. Weinberg
The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, Tim Harford
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Michael Lewis
Moneyball, Michael Lewis
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
On lean startups...
Business Model Generation, multiple authors
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Success Strategies for Products That Win, Steven Gary Blank
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries
Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Ash Maurya
A few quick reactions.
I’ve read several of these already, and this does a nice job of validating the set — all of the books I’ve read were quite good.
Nearly all of the books I’ve read were handed to me by @innokate — so much for crowdsourcing; maybe you should just marry an expert.
Of the authors with strongly gendered names, 100% of them are male. No ladies. [update: this changed with revisions] Which goes a long way toward invalidating the set: besides some 50% of the population, how many other viewpoints are not represented here? Hard to tell.
GroupOns are sold on the phone by a sales team with incentives to maximize deal size. What makes you think she got anything approaching full disclosure?
Except he didn't create anything... Twitter did. And as such, the case law is completely batshit. Bottom line: employers should a) have a written policy that ratifies common sense and b) don't be a dick. Those two things prevent a lot of problems.
Point of clarification: The most frequently proposed number I've seen is a 0.01% tax on the value of each transaction. This would effectively eliminate High Freq Trading (which nets ballpark 0.001% per trade... millions of times an hour), but have no noticeable effect on buy-and-hold investing.
The HFT people are already taxing the public -- they do nothing* to allocate capital to good companies, take money out of markets, and have insane systemic instability problems to boot. Having this go to the treasury instead will knock the instability problem on it's ass. In a sane polity, this would be an easy, obvious technical solution. Only when Wall Street writes its own regulations (such as a Congressional ban on regulating CDOs!) does this become controversial.
*They say they create liquidity. I say that once we're dealing in milliseconds, liquidity is already achieved. Microsecond liquidity serves no social purpose.
Fair point on Apple. In that case it's huge, huge volume that's driving the price down. However, I still think that without itunes and related properties, Apple would have priced that higher at launch.
Until they figure out a way to get the price down where it can match the loss leaders from Apple and Amazon, this is going to be yet another almost-as-good device, for slightly more money. Good luck with that.
> And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
One could make the conclusion that life-threatening peanut allergies are more common than they used to be. Or you could go with massive media/scientific/medical conspiracy, because diagnosing someone whose airway has closed from anaphylaxis is, like, totally subjective.
This isn't going away. The only real answer is to clog the information channels about you with what you actually want the world to know.
Does this pose a problem for, say, pseudonym online dating? Yep. Unless you're willing to drop the pseudonym and link out to your dating profile, alongside your work profile, your hobby blog. It's time to stop pretending that we can post to Facebook and compartmentalize it -- the service providers do not want to do this, and increasingly are unable to provide this even if we do.