For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession. And who knows what will be marketable by the time they're done. And...
And those are all strawman arguments.
Automation doesn't happen overnight. If I automate a production process, it's just one small part of the industry. There are still jobs available for the displaced workers on other lines production lines or in other departments. As an example, they might not be holding the meter, but they would be reading the test report. In the time it takes to automate a whole industry, the oldest workers usually retire, the mid-career ones head toward management, and the youngest (who started their career when automation was starting) are easily able to move, because they're grown alongside the new automated processes.
It's a common fallacy to think that someone like me (occasionally an automation specialist) will come into a factory in the morning, and put a thousand people out of work by evening. The reality is it takes about 20-30 years to fully automate an industry. Automation just shows such promise that most industries (even those that were reluctant in the 1980s) are about halfway down that road now, so people look around and see automation everywhere, and get worried, even though the unemployment rate has actually dropped, and workforce size has stayed relatively flat.
Now, I'm not saying automation isn't disruptive, and in the short term and small scale it can indeed be devastating to a local economy, but at a national scale it isn't going to lead to any major economic collapse.
It's called "proving the null hypothesis", and it's a basic approach to experimentation.
Using that approach, it allows experimenters to confirm that certain variables don't affect the outcome, which in turn makes future experiments and studies easier.
To use your terms, it allows us to be sure that what we think are the big differences are indeed the big differences, and not just the obvious differences.
That's the funny thing... academic corruption is actually a fascinating thing to study, and definitely worthwhile... but one of the key parts of having not-corrupt research is getting a ethics board to approve the study, which Boghossian didn't do, and that's why the discipline process is actually starting. It's not because he embarrassed a journal. It's because he didn't ask the college first.
"Social science" is nothing more than... attempt to... explain away... group differences.
Yep. Chemistry is also an attempt to explain away alchemy, and physics is nothing more than an attempt to explain away God's miraculous creation.
Different demographics have different traits. This is known and pretty widely accepted across social science. However, what's very much not accepted is that the traits are intrinsic and inseparable to the demographic. For example, it isn't a natural law that having dark skin makes someone more likely to be a criminal, but it is a fact that 33% of the "adult male African-American" demographic has a felony conviction. What social sciences try to understand is why. Speaking naively, it could be genetics, or unequal laws, or unequal socioeconomic dynamics, unequal enforcement, or even a bias in the accounting process.
A social scientist, then, would design a study to test for a given factor such as race, controlling other variables. Assemble a cohort of adult Caucasian males, selected so the other factors (legal jurisdiction, wealth, age, etc.) match that of the sampled African-American population. Then survey the test group and the control group, and see if race does actually make a difference.
I'll give away the not-so-surprising ending: Intrinsic differences in groups usually play an extremely small role, to the point where it becomes statistically difficult to figure out exactly how little they matter. The vast majority of social science studies end up finding no difference between any (human) groups once socioeconomic and cultural factors are controlled.
Coincidentally, that's also the bulk of the work done in social science, which is why it gets a reputation for being useless and politicized. However, that in turn is mostly because it's far easier to test a widely-varying characteristic like ethnicity than it is to, for example, ask a city to change its laws for a year "for science".
Fortunately, social science, like every other branch of science, does not need your faith to be real.
Social science is simply the study of our society. It does not push an agenda or "religion". It is the rigorous effort to understand the complex ways in which our society functions. Those complexities are themselves the emergent result of millennia of biology and history, now firmly entrenched in our human culture. You can't derive them from the more-theoretical fields like physics or geology. To understand the details of our society, you have to run experiments, revise theories, and openly share observations... you know, all the hallmarks of a real scientific discipline.
I understand the objection. We nerds greatly prefer having a nice outside perspective on our experiments. We like to think that we are the masters of our subjects. We pour the chemicals. We write the algorithms. We put the rat in the maze. It's distasteful to be a human in an experiment about humans.
That's precisely why we need science. Rigorous adherence to the scientific method, peer review of all work, and ethical review is absolutely vital, because corruption in social science has a more direct impact on researchers' lives outside of the academic field. A corrupt physicist might stand to gain an award or a research grant, but a corrupt social scientist could cause a genocide.
That brings us to this particular case. The professor wrote a bogus paper about bogus research. He then got it published in a journal, in an effort to discredit the field, just like your comment. His argument is that it's easy for bogus research to be published by a researcher acting in bad faith to simply make up claims and get them published, but nobody ever claimed otherwise. The foil against bad-faith researchers is to punish them with what is essentially expulsion from the field. That's what's happening here. He acted in bad faith, pursuing an agenda rather than understanding, and now the scientific community is rejecting him.
It's exactly the same as I would expect to happen if, say, someone claimed to have discovered a new kind of electromagnetic engine, and used that to defraud the scientific community, rather than to figure out what was really going on.
Oh yes... This is just my work account and archive. I have no idea how much is in my personal accounts (including my very-similar spam account). The storage isn't full yet, so I don't care.
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Because it's distributed, so a bad guy would have to have huge computing resources to overwhelm the good guys! That'll be so expensive it won't be worth the cost.
There's a disagreement in philosophy here, and it seems Mr. Ageh has touched on both sides.
On the one hand, there's the idea that libraries should be open doors to all knowledge and experiences. Cutting-edge technology is crucial to this effort, because a significant portion of the modern human experience exists outside of what can be cataloged in books. Most libraries now hold audio or video collections, but only a few host video games (and the systems to play them). Sure, they offer public access to the Web, but the librarians aren't likely going to give you a guided tour of reddit's contributions to popular humor.
On the other hand, libraries are inextricably coupled with archives. By their nature, libraries have a duty to ensure that their collections are accessible in the future, and that means librarians have to consider the costs of adding a new technology to their collection. A book is simple - just place it on a shelf, and it will stay there......unless there are insect, environmental, indexing, or space problems that render the text inaccessible. A DVD full of ebooks avoids a few of those risks, but introduces a few new ones like formatting and equipment dependencies. For each new technology, there's a new set of requirements, and that means a new set of challenges for the already-overburdened library staff.
Librarians work toward the idealism of open access to everything for everyone, but unfortunately the reality of budget cuts and physical reality get in the way. Risk-averse decisions are really the only way to maximize the impact of the resources a library has.
My guess is this is just government doing their job and there is nothing nefarious here, or even related to Trump and all his shit show. I'd say let this play out.
My guess is this is the USA trying to bully foreign companies again, using some of their idiot massively over-reaching "laws", whether ordered by Mr. Orange himself or not.
My guess is that you don't understand the case. This is a U.S. law allegedly being broken, with U.S. victims, by a foreign person, by a person located (at the time of arrest) in a nation that agrees with American laws enough to sign a treaty to help enforce them.
Now, I'd agree with you on sanctions being looking awfully close to the American government meddling in another nation's affairs, but that's really not what this case is about. The charge is conspiracy to defraud American banks.
One test I like for whether a particular case deserves outrage is to use (to borrow a ridiculous phrase), alternative facts. Change anything irrelevant, and see if you still have the same moral conflicts. If changing some trivial detail changes your judgement of the situation, it's a sign of prejudice.
From a legal standpoint, let's suppose that instead of Mrs. Meng, we have Mr. Smith. Instead of working financial deals, Mr. Smith sells real estate. Instead of promising compliance, Mr. Smith promises ownership of a nice little imaginary villa in the Mediterranean. Instead of (allegedly) lying to banks, Mr. Smith lies to potential buyers. Now, Mr. Smith was silly and/or ignorant enough to be found in Canada, which has laws against fraud. None of his scams have happened to affect Canadians, but Canada has agreed that fraud is bad regardless of who it impacts, and has arrested Mr. Smith based on the evidence provided.
Is it still morally wrong to prosecute Mr. Smith for his fraud? Should a crime be forgiven just because the perpetrator happened to be in another country from their victim?
Intoxication might also be the reason for the headline.
When you sober up, here's a different summary: Huawei has ties to a company named SkyCom. SkyCom did business with Iran, while Huawei did business with US banks, and Huawei was saying (to the banks) that they weren't doing any business with Iran. Mrs. Meng is on the board for both companies.
The real legal questions, then, are:
1) Is SkyCom actually Huawei? The business ties seem to be close, but whether it's considered a separate entity enough that Huawei wouldn't be responsible is a complicated question, and likely needs more evidence than is available now.
2) Whether Huawei (as a company) knew that SkyCom was dealing with Iran while Huawei was dealing with the US. If Huawei knew, then it's a pretty easy fraud case. If not, then there's really no case, because U.S. law is not enforceable on Chinese companies (despite the theories of the tinfoil-hat crowd).
In short, her defense is saying that Huawei didn't know about SkyCom's dealings, and they're presenting an internal slideshow as evidence that Huawei (as a company) thought it wasn't violating sanctions. Even if that slide's statement is incorrect, it may be enough to start pushing the idea that Huawei was acting in good faith while talking with the U.S. banks.
In the scenario you describe, the massive vehicle's engine would be much more likely to slow down by crushing your engine, then run up the body and end up sitting nicely on top of your cabin, which has absorbed a huge amount of energy to break intentionally-weak welds, twist flexing beams, and otherwise slightly deform while keeping the passengers safely inside with minimal change in their protected space.
As it turns out, using "the way most people would expect" is a really poor substitute for using models and simulations to design prototypes, then actually testing them. While people are most afraid of getting crushed by something 3 times their mass, far more injuries and fatalities actually come from the sudden acceleration (or deceleration, if you prefer) during an impact. Making bigger and sturdier cars actually increases the hazard. Instead, vehicles with crumple zones and more flexibility will absorb the impact more slowly, drastically reducing the chance of damaging the occupants.
Sure, it's more likely that your car will look badly damaged in a collision, but you'll live to complain about it.
Unfortunately, I have an abundance of brain cells that I simply choose to ignore, so I will ask: Why?
See, you're going to have to lay out some clear definitions here. Is it really "screwing with nature" to genetically engineer a variant of mosquito to displace disease carriers? What about widespread spraying of pesticides? Destroying swamplands? Building cities? Building a house? What about a crude shelter in the woods? Just a cooking fire?
Humanity's history is defined by our ability to screw with nature. The entirety of our technological progress is simply enabling ourselves to screw with nature in new and faster ways. Without that, there simply wouldn't be any human civilization. Where do we draw the line between acceptable progress and a "terrible idea". Perhaps more importantly, why should the line be precisely there?
I'd certainly agree that the more wide-reaching the potential consequences, the more caution must be exercised, but I can't advocate arbitrarily limiting any technology just to preserve a romantic notion of "nature".
You might want to take your refresher briefings, then.
The things you describe usually fall into a lot of nice labels like "violations", "infractions", "procedural errors", and the like, but they very rarely end up as "felonies", because the applicable statute is one that includes that high bar of intent, by stipulating that the perpetrator must "knowingly" commit the act.
Indeed, that "felony" label is typically only reserved for someone who's about to be indicted for a lot of other related crimes, and for good reason: The security community has worked hard over the last hundred years or so to develop a culture of forgiving loyalty. Honest mistakes are usually forgiven, and written off with a minor warning, removal of access, or removal of clearance, but usually no attempt to pursue criminal charges or other long-lasting ramifications. The system intentionally errs on the side of caution, preferring to let even the most egregious violations pass rather than risk prosecuting an innocent mistake and creating a potential traitor. In doing so, there's a much greater chance that someone will come forward and report violations, rather than hide in fear that they might be held liable.
I spent a good number of years working in the defense industry, and I've seen plenty (probably a 3-digit number) of "spills", "slips", and "mistakes". I've only seen one person actually be accused of having that criminal level of intent, though... and that was mostly due to him leaving the country immediately after committing several violations. If he ever comes back, I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting discussions including that "felony" label.
Justice is a funny thing, in that the reality usually matters less than the perception. In matters that are necessarily kept secret, there will seldom be satisfaction that justice was actually served. Justice is only assured when there is faith that the judicial process is always applied consistently. That's precisely why I think Mrs. Trump's server should also be subject to a full investigation, with all the same review, and the same fussing over the implications of whatever dozen problems are actually found. I'd expect the same process if a Pentagon official were found to run his own email server, too, or even a lowly base commander in the field. Like it or not, a precedent has been set, and it must now be applied evenly.
That said, I'd also prefer to do without the media circus that surrounded the Clinton investigation. This is now routine. A personal email server was found that might hold sensitive or classified information, so we go through the process. It's not newsworthy, it's not political, and it's not something that should skew public perception. Fix the problems, give a good stern warning to whatever moron approved the idea, and let's get on with running the country, shall we?
Right there in the statute is the word "willfully", though. That's still the same high bar that requires awareness of implications. For the statute you cite (destroying official documents), that would mean having to prove that Clinton herself was a willing participant in the deletion. The actual timeline of events doesn't support that notion, as she was only involved in the deletion order after a review found that those emails were all personal, and before any subpoena was in force.
To be clear, it's not necessarily a crime that a private server existed, or that it was used for official business. Usually, any criminal statutes require knowledge and intent of the crime being committed.
For example, even if there is classified information on this server, that would be a security violation, but not a crime unless someone intended to mishandle the information. Just because someone "should have known better" does not actually mean they're guilty.
How about we focus on fixing the violations, get everything into compliance, and move on with business as usual, eh? Just like we should have done with Clinton's incident...
I was going to make a snarky post about blockchain being utterly useless in an application where a game operator controls everything, then I realized it actually has a practical effect.
Back in the bad old days of early online games, a common way to cheat was to attack the game server to tweak the game database. Sure, the admins would come in and correct things soon enough, but it was trivial to just inject a bit more SQL and ruin things again.
In later games where trading became a part of the game, item duplication or other replication bugs skewed in-game economies in the cheater's favor, as it was possible to have your item and sell it, too.
Having every item tied to a unique token (and having appropriate verification in the game code) would make such attacks far more difficult. You couldn't just create or duplicate an item... you'd have to also generate a new token for it, and inject it into the blockchain appropriately, which would be a significant amount of effort for an attack payload.
It has an interesting parallel to multi-factor authentication. You might easily attack one channel, but having to launch a coordinated attack on a second channel makes the whole endeavor much more difficult.
Of course, it does all hinge on the game code implementing such security properly. I have no idea whether this particular game would do so.
'Auditing' is a business term, I think? 'Certificates'.. even a computer technician or programmer will have a hard time to understand what the hell are these HTTPS or SSL certificates and how they work.
Auditing is making a record of actions. Just like a business ledger, the integrity of that record is important if you ever need to confirm or explain exactly what happened. If your audit log is secured in the same area as the main record, anyone doing something illicit can simply change both at the same time, and hide their crime.
Certificates are like the certificate of authenticity associated with artifacts or pieces of art. Even if genuine, the certificate is only as trustworthy as who issued it, and to be effective, they need to be impossible to forge. Since forgeries get better all the time (and some issuers turn out to be less trustworthy than originally thought, it's important to have a periodic cycle where everything is reviewed and new certificates are generated.
The trick to teaching is to connect new information to old. The hard part is figuring out what old information exists. When I'm teaching an actual class, I like to start lectures with an anecdote about something apparently unrelated to the class. The concepts used in the story end up being similar to what's about to be taught.
Considering the size of the program, I'd be more surprised if any language wasn't involved somewhere.
When I worked in defense, the only rules on languages for one component (a sub-contract to a sub-contract) was that it had to be more than 10 years old, with compilers still supported. I suggested INTERCAL. The engineers laughed, and my boss was pissed, but he couldn't object. I suggested Java. He was happier, but the engineers weren't. I think we settled on Perl for that component...
TFA reads like FUD. If I were trying to sell my services as a cybersecurity contractor, this is the kind of crap I'd write. Essentially, it boils down to "complexity is bad", and "wireless is scary".
I've worked defense contracts. They're always trying to "shore up vulnerabilities", and always making a big deal about every tiny detail that isn't perfectly in compliance with a rule written for an entirely-different scenario. Exceptions are the norm. That doesn't mean the system is actually vulnerable to any attack, or even that a possible attack would be successful.
Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone stop looking at security, especially in such important systems... I'm just saying that shouting about generic insecurity doesn't improve anything, and in fact makes things worse by encouraging a checklist-based approach to compliance.
That's my thought, too. I've been teaching people to use computers for 20 years. It's pretty easy to show people what technology will let them do.
What's a lot more difficult is to teach the thought process to recognize unsafe interactions that is necessary for a security expert. I can't easily teach someone to second-guess technical assumptions stated as facts. I can't easily teach someone to understand that nobody is trustworthy enough to have unaudited system privileges. I can't easily teach someone that security comes from work, not from progress.
Sure, I can try to teach these things. I can lecture lots of students, and they might even learn a few of the concepts, but thinking from a security perspective is very different from the "just make it work" approach that engineers and sysadmins tend to follow. Give me an old businessman who understands how to manage people and processes to do the huge amounts of work needed to maintain security, and I can teach him the few technical details he'll need to make sense of the systems.
All "privacy-focused" VPNs are useless for normal folks.
Sure, they can all claim to have your privacy in mind, but there's no legal basis for that claim. They can't just refuse subpoenas or gag orders, and can't obstruct a lawful investigation. Any idiot with a server can set up a VPN provider and start selling access, and invent claims of resilience for marketing purposes. When they're facing a choice between a contempt-of-court charge or sacrificing a customer, suddenly that idea of being a bastion of anarchistic freedom doesn't look so appealing.
There are some very good reasons to have VPN technology. It's crucial for operating remotely-located network equipment or offices. For activists whose work puts them in danger from oppressive regimes, a trustworthy VPN can literally save lives. For a paranoid user who just thinks the Big Bad Gub'mint is going to persecute him for torrenting bootleg anime, a VPN is just a scam to extract money for no actual benefit.
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety
Because the general public has no idea how microwave ovens work, or what microwave radiation does to humans. It's just a magic box that makes food hot, and probably doesn't kill the operator too quickly.
The size and shape of the oven is actually important. The microwaves bounce around inside, and produce standing waves. If you disable the motor on an oven (or put an upside-down plate over the spinning hub), and heat a large chocolate bar, you'll see some places get hot quickly (at the antinodes of the standing waves), and other places stay cool (where the reflecting waves aren't reinforcing each other). The motor acts to move food around through the hot spots, to more evenly expose the food to the high points of radiation.
Now about that radiation... It's really just a really bright light at a particular "color" (like all electromagnetic waves). It's in the 2.45 GHz range, just like 802.11 WiFi and Bluetooth signals. At that frequency, it makes molecules a bit more active, especially water molecules. It's not energetic enough to move atoms or electrons, so it won't change your DNA or cause cancer, but water will absorb microwave energy very nicely. Notably, that includes all the water just under your skin, so there's almost no radiation getting through more than about 17 millimeters of tissue.
Yes, that means that if your oven's shielding isn't particularly good, you will actually get "cooked" if you stand close to it... but because you aren't inside the oven, the microwaves aren't reinforcing each other, so there aren't any of those "hot spots" that actually cause significant heating. Essentially, you're getting hit with radiation, but usually not enough, and in too small of an area to matter (unless you do something particularly hazardous, like stand in front of a high-power microwave transmitter).
In short, it doesn't matter much if your microwave oven is a little leaky. It might disrupt WiFi and Bluetooth a bit, but it won't cause any more harm than eating a few bananas... the radiation from those will actually be inside you, passing right by your vital organs! However, you do still want your oven to leak as little radiation as possible, but for a different reason: any energy that escapes the oven isn't going to be heating your food.
So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Slashdot Mirror
Rely on the retraining fairy tale?
Yep.
For one, everyone cannot be retrained for a marketable profession. And who knows what will be marketable by the time they're done. And...
And those are all strawman arguments.
Automation doesn't happen overnight. If I automate a production process, it's just one small part of the industry. There are still jobs available for the displaced workers on other lines production lines or in other departments. As an example, they might not be holding the meter, but they would be reading the test report. In the time it takes to automate a whole industry, the oldest workers usually retire, the mid-career ones head toward management, and the youngest (who started their career when automation was starting) are easily able to move, because they're grown alongside the new automated processes.
It's a common fallacy to think that someone like me (occasionally an automation specialist) will come into a factory in the morning, and put a thousand people out of work by evening. The reality is it takes about 20-30 years to fully automate an industry. Automation just shows such promise that most industries (even those that were reluctant in the 1980s) are about halfway down that road now, so people look around and see automation everywhere, and get worried, even though the unemployment rate has actually dropped, and workforce size has stayed relatively flat.
Now, I'm not saying automation isn't disruptive, and in the short term and small scale it can indeed be devastating to a local economy, but at a national scale it isn't going to lead to any major economic collapse.
A leisure society* is possible.
* Using the standard of leisure set in 1950
It's called "proving the null hypothesis", and it's a basic approach to experimentation.
Using that approach, it allows experimenters to confirm that certain variables don't affect the outcome, which in turn makes future experiments and studies easier.
To use your terms, it allows us to be sure that what we think are the big differences are indeed the big differences, and not just the obvious differences.
That's the funny thing... academic corruption is actually a fascinating thing to study, and definitely worthwhile... but one of the key parts of having not-corrupt research is getting a ethics board to approve the study, which Boghossian didn't do, and that's why the discipline process is actually starting. It's not because he embarrassed a journal. It's because he didn't ask the college first.
"Social science" is nothing more than ... attempt to ... explain away ... group differences.
Yep. Chemistry is also an attempt to explain away alchemy, and physics is nothing more than an attempt to explain away God's miraculous creation.
Different demographics have different traits. This is known and pretty widely accepted across social science. However, what's very much not accepted is that the traits are intrinsic and inseparable to the demographic. For example, it isn't a natural law that having dark skin makes someone more likely to be a criminal, but it is a fact that 33% of the "adult male African-American" demographic has a felony conviction. What social sciences try to understand is why. Speaking naively, it could be genetics, or unequal laws, or unequal socioeconomic dynamics, unequal enforcement, or even a bias in the accounting process.
A social scientist, then, would design a study to test for a given factor such as race, controlling other variables. Assemble a cohort of adult Caucasian males, selected so the other factors (legal jurisdiction, wealth, age, etc.) match that of the sampled African-American population. Then survey the test group and the control group, and see if race does actually make a difference.
I'll give away the not-so-surprising ending: Intrinsic differences in groups usually play an extremely small role, to the point where it becomes statistically difficult to figure out exactly how little they matter. The vast majority of social science studies end up finding no difference between any (human) groups once socioeconomic and cultural factors are controlled.
Coincidentally, that's also the bulk of the work done in social science, which is why it gets a reputation for being useless and politicized. However, that in turn is mostly because it's far easier to test a widely-varying characteristic like ethnicity than it is to, for example, ask a city to change its laws for a year "for science".
Fortunately, social science, like every other branch of science, does not need your faith to be real.
Social science is simply the study of our society. It does not push an agenda or "religion". It is the rigorous effort to understand the complex ways in which our society functions. Those complexities are themselves the emergent result of millennia of biology and history, now firmly entrenched in our human culture. You can't derive them from the more-theoretical fields like physics or geology. To understand the details of our society, you have to run experiments, revise theories, and openly share observations... you know, all the hallmarks of a real scientific discipline.
I understand the objection. We nerds greatly prefer having a nice outside perspective on our experiments. We like to think that we are the masters of our subjects. We pour the chemicals. We write the algorithms. We put the rat in the maze. It's distasteful to be a human in an experiment about humans.
That's precisely why we need science. Rigorous adherence to the scientific method, peer review of all work, and ethical review is absolutely vital, because corruption in social science has a more direct impact on researchers' lives outside of the academic field. A corrupt physicist might stand to gain an award or a research grant, but a corrupt social scientist could cause a genocide.
That brings us to this particular case. The professor wrote a bogus paper about bogus research. He then got it published in a journal, in an effort to discredit the field, just like your comment. His argument is that it's easy for bogus research to be published by a researcher acting in bad faith to simply make up claims and get them published, but nobody ever claimed otherwise. The foil against bad-faith researchers is to punish them with what is essentially expulsion from the field. That's what's happening here. He acted in bad faith, pursuing an agenda rather than understanding, and now the scientific community is rejecting him.
It's exactly the same as I would expect to happen if, say, someone claimed to have discovered a new kind of electromagnetic engine, and used that to defraud the scientific community, rather than to figure out what was really going on.
Science is hard. Behaving ethically is harder.
Geese tend to fly away from the big noisy machine. Drone pilots (and I use that term loosely) tend to think "Oh, this'll be a great view!"
Oh yes... This is just my work account and archive. I have no idea how much is in my personal accounts (including my very-similar spam account). The storage isn't full yet, so I don't care.
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
Because it's distributed, so a bad guy would have to have huge computing resources to overwhelm the good guys! That'll be so expensive it won't be worth the cost.
Oh, wait...
There's a disagreement in philosophy here, and it seems Mr. Ageh has touched on both sides.
On the one hand, there's the idea that libraries should be open doors to all knowledge and experiences. Cutting-edge technology is crucial to this effort, because a significant portion of the modern human experience exists outside of what can be cataloged in books. Most libraries now hold audio or video collections, but only a few host video games (and the systems to play them). Sure, they offer public access to the Web, but the librarians aren't likely going to give you a guided tour of reddit's contributions to popular humor.
On the other hand, libraries are inextricably coupled with archives. By their nature, libraries have a duty to ensure that their collections are accessible in the future, and that means librarians have to consider the costs of adding a new technology to their collection. A book is simple - just place it on a shelf, and it will stay there... ...unless there are insect, environmental, indexing, or space problems that render the text inaccessible. A DVD full of ebooks avoids a few of those risks, but introduces a few new ones like formatting and equipment dependencies. For each new technology, there's a new set of requirements, and that means a new set of challenges for the already-overburdened library staff.
Librarians work toward the idealism of open access to everything for everyone, but unfortunately the reality of budget cuts and physical reality get in the way. Risk-averse decisions are really the only way to maximize the impact of the resources a library has.
My guess is this is just government doing their job and there is nothing nefarious here, or even related to Trump and all his shit show. I'd say let this play out.
My guess is this is the USA trying to bully foreign companies again, using some of their idiot massively over-reaching "laws", whether ordered by Mr. Orange himself or not.
My guess is that you don't understand the case. This is a U.S. law allegedly being broken, with U.S. victims, by a foreign person, by a person located (at the time of arrest) in a nation that agrees with American laws enough to sign a treaty to help enforce them.
Now, I'd agree with you on sanctions being looking awfully close to the American government meddling in another nation's affairs, but that's really not what this case is about. The charge is conspiracy to defraud American banks.
One test I like for whether a particular case deserves outrage is to use (to borrow a ridiculous phrase), alternative facts. Change anything irrelevant, and see if you still have the same moral conflicts. If changing some trivial detail changes your judgement of the situation, it's a sign of prejudice.
From a legal standpoint, let's suppose that instead of Mrs. Meng, we have Mr. Smith. Instead of working financial deals, Mr. Smith sells real estate. Instead of promising compliance, Mr. Smith promises ownership of a nice little imaginary villa in the Mediterranean. Instead of (allegedly) lying to banks, Mr. Smith lies to potential buyers. Now, Mr. Smith was silly and/or ignorant enough to be found in Canada, which has laws against fraud. None of his scams have happened to affect Canadians, but Canada has agreed that fraud is bad regardless of who it impacts, and has arrested Mr. Smith based on the evidence provided.
Is it still morally wrong to prosecute Mr. Smith for his fraud? Should a crime be forgiven just because the perpetrator happened to be in another country from their victim?
Intoxication might also be the reason for the headline.
When you sober up, here's a different summary: Huawei has ties to a company named SkyCom. SkyCom did business with Iran, while Huawei did business with US banks, and Huawei was saying (to the banks) that they weren't doing any business with Iran. Mrs. Meng is on the board for both companies.
The real legal questions, then, are:
In short, her defense is saying that Huawei didn't know about SkyCom's dealings, and they're presenting an internal slideshow as evidence that Huawei (as a company) thought it wasn't violating sanctions. Even if that slide's statement is incorrect, it may be enough to start pushing the idea that Huawei was acting in good faith while talking with the U.S. banks.
In the scenario you describe, the massive vehicle's engine would be much more likely to slow down by crushing your engine, then run up the body and end up sitting nicely on top of your cabin, which has absorbed a huge amount of energy to break intentionally-weak welds, twist flexing beams, and otherwise slightly deform while keeping the passengers safely inside with minimal change in their protected space.
As it turns out, using "the way most people would expect" is a really poor substitute for using models and simulations to design prototypes, then actually testing them. While people are most afraid of getting crushed by something 3 times their mass, far more injuries and fatalities actually come from the sudden acceleration (or deceleration, if you prefer) during an impact. Making bigger and sturdier cars actually increases the hazard. Instead, vehicles with crumple zones and more flexibility will absorb the impact more slowly, drastically reducing the chance of damaging the occupants.
Sure, it's more likely that your car will look badly damaged in a collision, but you'll live to complain about it.
Unfortunately, I have an abundance of brain cells that I simply choose to ignore, so I will ask: Why?
See, you're going to have to lay out some clear definitions here. Is it really "screwing with nature" to genetically engineer a variant of mosquito to displace disease carriers? What about widespread spraying of pesticides? Destroying swamplands? Building cities? Building a house? What about a crude shelter in the woods? Just a cooking fire?
Humanity's history is defined by our ability to screw with nature. The entirety of our technological progress is simply enabling ourselves to screw with nature in new and faster ways. Without that, there simply wouldn't be any human civilization. Where do we draw the line between acceptable progress and a "terrible idea". Perhaps more importantly, why should the line be precisely there?
I'd certainly agree that the more wide-reaching the potential consequences, the more caution must be exercised, but I can't advocate arbitrarily limiting any technology just to preserve a romantic notion of "nature".
You might want to take your refresher briefings, then.
The things you describe usually fall into a lot of nice labels like "violations", "infractions", "procedural errors", and the like, but they very rarely end up as "felonies", because the applicable statute is one that includes that high bar of intent, by stipulating that the perpetrator must "knowingly" commit the act.
Indeed, that "felony" label is typically only reserved for someone who's about to be indicted for a lot of other related crimes, and for good reason: The security community has worked hard over the last hundred years or so to develop a culture of forgiving loyalty. Honest mistakes are usually forgiven, and written off with a minor warning, removal of access, or removal of clearance, but usually no attempt to pursue criminal charges or other long-lasting ramifications. The system intentionally errs on the side of caution, preferring to let even the most egregious violations pass rather than risk prosecuting an innocent mistake and creating a potential traitor. In doing so, there's a much greater chance that someone will come forward and report violations, rather than hide in fear that they might be held liable.
I spent a good number of years working in the defense industry, and I've seen plenty (probably a 3-digit number) of "spills", "slips", and "mistakes". I've only seen one person actually be accused of having that criminal level of intent, though... and that was mostly due to him leaving the country immediately after committing several violations. If he ever comes back, I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting discussions including that "felony" label.
Justice is a funny thing, in that the reality usually matters less than the perception. In matters that are necessarily kept secret, there will seldom be satisfaction that justice was actually served. Justice is only assured when there is faith that the judicial process is always applied consistently. That's precisely why I think Mrs. Trump's server should also be subject to a full investigation, with all the same review, and the same fussing over the implications of whatever dozen problems are actually found. I'd expect the same process if a Pentagon official were found to run his own email server, too, or even a lowly base commander in the field. Like it or not, a precedent has been set, and it must now be applied evenly.
That said, I'd also prefer to do without the media circus that surrounded the Clinton investigation. This is now routine. A personal email server was found that might hold sensitive or classified information, so we go through the process. It's not newsworthy, it's not political, and it's not something that should skew public perception. Fix the problems, give a good stern warning to whatever moron approved the idea, and let's get on with running the country, shall we?
Right there in the statute is the word "willfully", though. That's still the same high bar that requires awareness of implications. For the statute you cite (destroying official documents), that would mean having to prove that Clinton herself was a willing participant in the deletion. The actual timeline of events doesn't support that notion, as she was only involved in the deletion order after a review found that those emails were all personal, and before any subpoena was in force.
To be clear, it's not necessarily a crime that a private server existed, or that it was used for official business. Usually, any criminal statutes require knowledge and intent of the crime being committed.
For example, even if there is classified information on this server, that would be a security violation, but not a crime unless someone intended to mishandle the information. Just because someone "should have known better" does not actually mean they're guilty.
How about we focus on fixing the violations, get everything into compliance, and move on with business as usual, eh? Just like we should have done with Clinton's incident...
I was going to make a snarky post about blockchain being utterly useless in an application where a game operator controls everything, then I realized it actually has a practical effect.
Back in the bad old days of early online games, a common way to cheat was to attack the game server to tweak the game database. Sure, the admins would come in and correct things soon enough, but it was trivial to just inject a bit more SQL and ruin things again.
In later games where trading became a part of the game, item duplication or other replication bugs skewed in-game economies in the cheater's favor, as it was possible to have your item and sell it, too.
Having every item tied to a unique token (and having appropriate verification in the game code) would make such attacks far more difficult. You couldn't just create or duplicate an item... you'd have to also generate a new token for it, and inject it into the blockchain appropriately, which would be a significant amount of effort for an attack payload.
It has an interesting parallel to multi-factor authentication. You might easily attack one channel, but having to launch a coordinated attack on a second channel makes the whole endeavor much more difficult.
Of course, it does all hinge on the game code implementing such security properly. I have no idea whether this particular game would do so.
'Auditing' is a business term, I think? 'Certificates'.. even a computer technician or programmer will have a hard time to understand what the hell are these HTTPS or SSL certificates and how they work.
Auditing is making a record of actions. Just like a business ledger, the integrity of that record is important if you ever need to confirm or explain exactly what happened. If your audit log is secured in the same area as the main record, anyone doing something illicit can simply change both at the same time, and hide their crime.
Certificates are like the certificate of authenticity associated with artifacts or pieces of art. Even if genuine, the certificate is only as trustworthy as who issued it, and to be effective, they need to be impossible to forge. Since forgeries get better all the time (and some issuers turn out to be less trustworthy than originally thought, it's important to have a periodic cycle where everything is reviewed and new certificates are generated.
The trick to teaching is to connect new information to old. The hard part is figuring out what old information exists. When I'm teaching an actual class, I like to start lectures with an anecdote about something apparently unrelated to the class. The concepts used in the story end up being similar to what's about to be taught.
Considering the size of the program, I'd be more surprised if any language wasn't involved somewhere.
When I worked in defense, the only rules on languages for one component (a sub-contract to a sub-contract) was that it had to be more than 10 years old, with compilers still supported. I suggested INTERCAL. The engineers laughed, and my boss was pissed, but he couldn't object. I suggested Java. He was happier, but the engineers weren't. I think we settled on Perl for that component...
TFA reads like FUD. If I were trying to sell my services as a cybersecurity contractor, this is the kind of crap I'd write. Essentially, it boils down to "complexity is bad", and "wireless is scary".
I've worked defense contracts. They're always trying to "shore up vulnerabilities", and always making a big deal about every tiny detail that isn't perfectly in compliance with a rule written for an entirely-different scenario. Exceptions are the norm. That doesn't mean the system is actually vulnerable to any attack, or even that a possible attack would be successful.
Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone stop looking at security, especially in such important systems... I'm just saying that shouting about generic insecurity doesn't improve anything, and in fact makes things worse by encouraging a checklist-based approach to compliance.
That's my thought, too. I've been teaching people to use computers for 20 years. It's pretty easy to show people what technology will let them do.
What's a lot more difficult is to teach the thought process to recognize unsafe interactions that is necessary for a security expert. I can't easily teach someone to second-guess technical assumptions stated as facts. I can't easily teach someone to understand that nobody is trustworthy enough to have unaudited system privileges. I can't easily teach someone that security comes from work, not from progress.
Sure, I can try to teach these things. I can lecture lots of students, and they might even learn a few of the concepts, but thinking from a security perspective is very different from the "just make it work" approach that engineers and sysadmins tend to follow. Give me an old businessman who understands how to manage people and processes to do the huge amounts of work needed to maintain security, and I can teach him the few technical details he'll need to make sense of the systems.
All "privacy-focused" VPNs are useless for normal folks.
Sure, they can all claim to have your privacy in mind, but there's no legal basis for that claim. They can't just refuse subpoenas or gag orders, and can't obstruct a lawful investigation. Any idiot with a server can set up a VPN provider and start selling access, and invent claims of resilience for marketing purposes. When they're facing a choice between a contempt-of-court charge or sacrificing a customer, suddenly that idea of being a bastion of anarchistic freedom doesn't look so appealing.
There are some very good reasons to have VPN technology. It's crucial for operating remotely-located network equipment or offices. For activists whose work puts them in danger from oppressive regimes, a trustworthy VPN can literally save lives. For a paranoid user who just thinks the Big Bad Gub'mint is going to persecute him for torrenting bootleg anime, a VPN is just a scam to extract money for no actual benefit.
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety
Because the general public has no idea how microwave ovens work, or what microwave radiation does to humans. It's just a magic box that makes food hot, and probably doesn't kill the operator too quickly.
The size and shape of the oven is actually important. The microwaves bounce around inside, and produce standing waves. If you disable the motor on an oven (or put an upside-down plate over the spinning hub), and heat a large chocolate bar, you'll see some places get hot quickly (at the antinodes of the standing waves), and other places stay cool (where the reflecting waves aren't reinforcing each other). The motor acts to move food around through the hot spots, to more evenly expose the food to the high points of radiation.
Now about that radiation... It's really just a really bright light at a particular "color" (like all electromagnetic waves). It's in the 2.45 GHz range, just like 802.11 WiFi and Bluetooth signals. At that frequency, it makes molecules a bit more active, especially water molecules. It's not energetic enough to move atoms or electrons, so it won't change your DNA or cause cancer, but water will absorb microwave energy very nicely. Notably, that includes all the water just under your skin, so there's almost no radiation getting through more than about 17 millimeters of tissue.
Yes, that means that if your oven's shielding isn't particularly good, you will actually get "cooked" if you stand close to it... but because you aren't inside the oven, the microwaves aren't reinforcing each other, so there aren't any of those "hot spots" that actually cause significant heating. Essentially, you're getting hit with radiation, but usually not enough, and in too small of an area to matter (unless you do something particularly hazardous, like stand in front of a high-power microwave transmitter).
In short, it doesn't matter much if your microwave oven is a little leaky. It might disrupt WiFi and Bluetooth a bit, but it won't cause any more harm than eating a few bananas... the radiation from those will actually be inside you, passing right by your vital organs! However, you do still want your oven to leak as little radiation as possible, but for a different reason: any energy that escapes the oven isn't going to be heating your food.
So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Yep.