There are just way too many of them and they are simply too hard for a normal user to evaluate whether the risk is truly severe or just another attempt of somebody to fleece them.
This. Most users just click thru popups. The almost always just click "OK". If you want them to actually read the message then maybe "OK" should default to turning off the computer. Even adults do this but for kids it's even worse. Adults will typically pause if there is a dollar sign somewhere. Kids will happily click along and click buy on inapp purchases, etc... if it means they can get back to their game.
Oh, so you're manually inspecting the self signed certificate every time you visit your website? If not, then how do you know nobody is intercepting your communication, making your self signed certificate as useless as having no encryption at all.
99% of times when I get a signed certificate error, it's to a site where I don't care if it's encrypted. In the 1% of remaining cases, I do look at it and it's usually something like a slightly different domain owned by the same company, a company that forgot to renew their certificate, or some other mundane issue.
Only very occasionally do I need to travel more distance than provided by an overnight charge.
But this is a huge problem for a huge number of people. On the average day I only drive 4-5 miles but 2-3 days a month I drive several hundred miles in a single day. There needs to be either battery swaps, quick charge stations, car swaps, or some other way for people to handle the extra surge. I like the idea of plug in hybrids but maybe even something as simple as dropping a small gas generator in the trunk could be a solution for the occasional splurge. Yes, gas generators are expensive to run but if it's only run for a few hours a couple times a month then you might still come out ahead.
Phone numbers do help, the only down side is that it's one more bit of information for security services to demand and for mobile service providers to monitor. They can see the verification texts sent in the clear.
Oh, well, there is one other problem. Twitter allows bots and other non-human entities to have accounts. Pets, weather stations, organisations etc. It could be tricky if they all need a unique mobile number... I suppose numbers could be shared, even though it would mean banning multiple accounts if one crosses the line.
Phones numbers is just one part and might not be feasible for non-entities but blocking the entire group associated with a single phone still seems reasonable. Most of my post though dealt with trust networks. Just like google became a multibillion dollar company because of pagerank and discovering relationships between sites, twitter has the ability to analyze their web of users. The same way that warez dealers, drug dealers, terrorists, gangs, etc.. have a web of trust where person A trusts person B and person B vouches for person C therefore person A trusts person C. This chain of trust would be easy for twitter to create. You could then easily restrict people by their "trust score" and/or when a stranger spams your site see which friend let them in. My guess is that if I allowed 6 degrees of separation (supposably the whole world) post on my site that a majority of the spammers would still be coming from a select few weak links in the chain.
... and what kind of bandwidth does your dad get with that setup? Gigabit?
My dad is using a single channel so is only getting 54mbps but 802.11 supports a lot higher than that and 54mbps is faster than my current "broadband" at home. There is no reason though that google would have to use 802.11. There are plenty of wireless technologies that can reach the last mile. You can likely do line of sight for the last mile but even if you can't if you're talking only needing it for the last mile then there are plenty of high bandwidth "junk" frequencies that would be suitable for short range communication.
It's easy to run fiber up and down the streets. It's a real bitch to run fiber from the street into the house.
If that's really the case then don't do it. There are plenty of wireless technologies that can easily cover that distance and a lot more. My dad has his office, his shop, and his house all linked with standard 802.11 wifi antennas. They are easily 5 miles apart and it's covered easily with a roof mounted antenna. Distances shorter than that wouldn't even need a roof mounted antenna. That same town uses 802.11 to sell cheap internet to the whole town. They put the antennas on top of their water towers. All you need is a small antenna in a window pointed towards the nearest water tower. Off the shelf 802.11 routers with directional antennas are more than capable of handling the last mile or two and in situations where 802.11 is saturated then the density should easily be enough to justify running physical lines.
You are kidding, right? WeChat is owned by Tencent which has tight connection to te Chinese government. It's worse then Skype in terms of security
The original poster said security of any of them is a joke. That being said, the question that needs to be asked is who are are you trying to be secure from? If you're a drug dealer in the USA then having a secure client controlled by a country who is not likely to share with your local government is probably not a bad solution. The chinese government is not going to be too concerned about domestic crimes in the USA. Personally, if I was worried about security, I would opt for fragmenting my communication over multiple channels. It's much harder to intercept communication if you email an encrypted video to someone and then text them the encryption key via a burner phone. Even unencrypted, if the message is fragmented over 4-5 distinct channels then piecing it back together becomes much more difficult because you first must gain access to all the different channels. For the average person though, your best bet for a single channel is still probably to not look for the most secure solution but instead look for the most secure solution by a party in opposition to who you want to be secure from.
The block feature has proven to be ineffective because trolls just keep creating new accounts, or moving on to harassing followers and friends of their victims. When people try to make it more powerful, e.g. with the "ggautoblock" script, the howls of "censorship!!" start up.
But there are easy solutions to this too. Require twitter accounts to have a cell phone number which is harder to create hundreds of new copies. Also, allow users to approve their followers and/or specify criteria of which users need approval to post. There should be blocks/approval required for things like account age, number of tweets, etc... Allow me to block "friends of X". This is a feature that I wish facebook had. Basically, twitter has a trust network that they can leverage that could make trolling virtually impossible without infringing on free speech. Even trolling of hashtags could be prevented with the right criteria. If people were allowed to see who has been blocked by their friends or friends of friends then you could easily say something like "don't show me users that have been blocked by more that 10 of my friends or 50 of my friends of friends. This is what I thought of off the top of my head and there are likely other criteria that would work even better. Twitter needs to utilize their free trust network that they have built. There are now dozens of trust networks on the internet. It has been predicted that online reputation will become a major factor at some point, currently they are all mostly in walled gardens like facebook, ebay, and twitter but at least with the big players, their walled garden is large enough to create the coverage needed to police themself. I would actually love for them to somehow be exported to third parties. There are a few like Klout that are attempting to do this but there is still lots of room in this area for people to innovate.
Settling on Venus is at least as realistic as settling on Mars. In many ways it's a lot simpler and more sustainable.
Settling on Antarctica, the Sahara, the bottom of the Atlantic, Siberia, and a host of other places including possibly the moon and LEO are a lot simpler and more sustainable than either Venus or Mars. Some, like the bottom of the ocean, also probably protect against many of extinction level events (Which is really the main reason people use for justification). Other than the wow factor there really doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to colonize inhospitable planets until we have the ability to actually terraform them. Don't get me wrong, I think things like self-contained biodomes would be a good step but it's cheaper and more practical to put the first several hundred biodomes in one of the many inhospitable places on earth. You could probably build the first 100 biodomes in places like antarctica, the bottom of the Pacific, LEO, and Siberia for the cost of a single biodome on Mars. You would likely learn a lot more and it could even be a tourist destination and a way to promote a mission to mars/venus when it actually happens.
So it was yet another "whoever wins - we lose" scenario?
Just like every other war. Whether it is the cold war, an actual war, the war on drugs, or practically any other thing with the name war attached to it, the real losers is society and the huge opportunity costs. At least with the cold war space races there was some amount of knowledge gained. I could even argue with designing a missile or nuke that there is some knowledge gained but when you start exploding them at millions of dollars a pop, that's a million dollars worth of resources that literally just goes up in smoke.
The temperature and pressure is earthlike at a certain altitude but that's about it. The air is still unbreathable and full of sulphuric acid. Oh, and sulphuric acid isn't very friendly to most building materials either. If you think building in a salt water environment is highly corrosive, building in a sulphuric acid environment would be 10 times worse.
One problem with gaming on a tablet is that compared to a joystick and buttons that gives tactile feedback when an action is input, a flat sheet of glass gives far less feedback. Thus many genres need to have their control schemes completely rethought for a flat sheet of glass. Do your kids use an external Bluetooth controller with their tablets? If not, do they stick to point-and-click games or 1- or 2-button continuous runners?
I think most of the games are tap to jump or tap to shoot type games. I didn't say that they are comparable gameplay. Even an NES with a joystick and 2 buttons is superior gameplay. The point I was making was that they have nice consoles and for some reason would still rather just use their tablets. Not exactly sure why, honestly but I know that they are not the exception. It seems most people accept the limitations of a tablet and still prefer playing on a tablet or phone even when other options are available. One thing I can say is that because most games on tablets are free it does allow them to sample and find many more games versus having to pay for every title on the console.
But to make a game like that today with the consoles we have would just feel like a ripoff.
Maybe with consoles but my kids (age 8 and 10) hardly touch their console. They spend most of their time playing tablet games which are very much like the old school games. Simple graphics easily created by one developer. Many are side-scrollers that look like something pulled straight out of the 80s. Some even go out of their way to make it look like pixelated 80s games.
outright blocking people who use adblockers without even offering them an alternative method of viewing by paying for the content with no ads at all (say, 5-10 cents per article depending on how recent the article is) is not doing them any favors, either. Like many others that I know, most people see the message that they can't access the content because of the anti-adblocker policy, they just go, "oh well", and find an alternative source of information, many people never returning.
I do something similar. I get my news from google news. A lot of sites have started only giving you 10 free articles per month and then want you to subscribe. Anything important will always be on 100 other sites so I just click on another site after I reach that limit. I also sometimes take the additional step of just excluding that particular site from my newsfeed. I understand that newspapers want to make money but they need a new method because I'm not going to be subscribing to some random newspaper in a city that I don't even live in.
You aren't dystopic enough. The logical extreme is when the content and ads are literally the same thing. (or in other words, there is no content but you'll mistake ads for it)
Facebook is already experimenting with this. It shows me stuff that my friends "liked" which is really just an ad. i.e. My friends liked coke's facebook page some time in the distance past so it shows me their current ad. Sadly, with their magic sorting algorithms they could take it even further by prioritizing my friend's posts that for instance had pictures of them holding a can of coke in the picture.
It's you who are mistaken. As long as the first-order derivative of the population growth rate is a positive number, then it is correct to say that population growth is 'accelerating.'
Yes but we are at least starting to slow down. Using the car example if you were accelerating by 10 miles/hour every hour and are now accelerating by only 5 miles/hour every hour then your rate of acceleration is slowing. More importantly, if it is consistently falling then we can also calculate when we cross over and start to decelerate.
The simplest solution for a website is if the ad isn't displayed then the content doesn't load either.
That's also extremely easy to workaround.
It depends on how they check it. Sure, a simple check might be fooled by loading it in a hidden window but a more complex check could require you to interact with the ad in a way only a human could. Another option is make the ad inline and integral to your site. There are even many sites today written in flash that you would never suspect are not html.
Well - I also use flashblock and script block so the chances I'll see anything Is fairly null.
Exactly. The chances of you seeing their content or using their website also approaches zero if they actually track who is seeing the ads and only show the content you want AFTER they show you the ad.
Are you sure about the correct cause/effect. I almost made the comment that I wonder if this isn't a sign that facebook is starting to hurt. It seems to me like the companies that try the hardest to block ad blockers are companies that are declining and slowly failing. This could also be said for companies that start using more and more intrusive ads (that pay slightly better per view). It's seem like many times it is a failed attempt to stop the bleeding that is happening for other reasons.
Well, there'll be an ad free social network, I'll join that!". Go ahead. If you can't get everybody on it then it's useless. Google learned that with G+.
Google plus failed for other technical reasons not critical mass. Most of my friends are on facebook but they all also have google accounts. I actually talk to them more using google chat/hangouts than I do with facebook. I could easily switch to using google plus if it actually worked right. There is even third party software that allows you to post to multiple services at the same time. Google plus just doesn't work/feel right. They tried to merge twitter and facebook and failed at both. Facebook has actually done a better job of adding followers into the flow with their friends. Google created circles which in theory should be just as good as friends but in practice still falls short.
It might be a better approach to fingerprint content (I.e scripts, images) and prevent them from running and then outright block anything that has either sound or animation, replacing it with a "click to play" placeholder.
Won't work. If a website gets aggressive, ad blocking is doomed to fail. The simplest solution for a website is if the ad isn't displayed then the content doesn't load either. One simple solution would be to require the user to answer a question about the ad they just saw, forcing them to pay attention to the ad. This would be a highly aggressive strategy and would likely annoy a lot of people but an ad like that would also pay a lot more than a passive ad. Facebook only makes a few dollars per user per month and could probably cover their cost with only a couple of these kind of ads a week.
Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook? Facebook is 100% about selling its users to advertisers. I'm surprised it took them this long. This really says less about facebook and more about ad blocking software. The only reason facebook is likely doing this now is because a larger percentage of their users are starting to block ads.
TFA is using "lazy" to mean lack of physical activity. So if I pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, I am lazy. If I go for a walk instead, then I am not lazy.
This makes no sense. How exactly does "lack of physical activity" equal lazy? I would love to have a job that is more physically demanding than my current job. Unfortunately, most high paying intellectual jobs also tend to be low physical activity. Unless you are tracking what people are doing off the clock then this data is meaningless. Based on my experience, many people with office jobs tend to be more active in their off hours than people with physical jobs.
It sounds like he is trying to get a hold of someone. He said "did you work with me" so maybe he has someone who helped him still on the inside. It's likely either a key to something like you said or it's to prove he is who he says he is. Does he have a public key? It could be simply a message like "I am the real edward snowden" encrypted with his private key. I agree though, if anyone downloaded his encrypted dump files that trying to use that to decrypt it would be something to try.
Slashdot Mirror
There are just way too many of them and they are simply too hard for a normal user to evaluate whether the risk is truly severe or just another attempt of somebody to fleece them.
This. Most users just click thru popups. The almost always just click "OK". If you want them to actually read the message then maybe "OK" should default to turning off the computer. Even adults do this but for kids it's even worse. Adults will typically pause if there is a dollar sign somewhere. Kids will happily click along and click buy on inapp purchases, etc... if it means they can get back to their game.
Oh, so you're manually inspecting the self signed certificate every time you visit your website? If not, then how do you know nobody is intercepting your communication, making your self signed certificate as useless as having no encryption at all.
99% of times when I get a signed certificate error, it's to a site where I don't care if it's encrypted. In the 1% of remaining cases, I do look at it and it's usually something like a slightly different domain owned by the same company, a company that forgot to renew their certificate, or some other mundane issue.
Only very occasionally do I need to travel more distance than provided by an overnight charge.
But this is a huge problem for a huge number of people. On the average day I only drive 4-5 miles but 2-3 days a month I drive several hundred miles in a single day. There needs to be either battery swaps, quick charge stations, car swaps, or some other way for people to handle the extra surge. I like the idea of plug in hybrids but maybe even something as simple as dropping a small gas generator in the trunk could be a solution for the occasional splurge. Yes, gas generators are expensive to run but if it's only run for a few hours a couple times a month then you might still come out ahead.
Phone numbers do help, the only down side is that it's one more bit of information for security services to demand and for mobile service providers to monitor. They can see the verification texts sent in the clear.
Oh, well, there is one other problem. Twitter allows bots and other non-human entities to have accounts. Pets, weather stations, organisations etc. It could be tricky if they all need a unique mobile number... I suppose numbers could be shared, even though it would mean banning multiple accounts if one crosses the line.
Phones numbers is just one part and might not be feasible for non-entities but blocking the entire group associated with a single phone still seems reasonable. Most of my post though dealt with trust networks. Just like google became a multibillion dollar company because of pagerank and discovering relationships between sites, twitter has the ability to analyze their web of users. The same way that warez dealers, drug dealers, terrorists, gangs, etc.. have a web of trust where person A trusts person B and person B vouches for person C therefore person A trusts person C. This chain of trust would be easy for twitter to create. You could then easily restrict people by their "trust score" and/or when a stranger spams your site see which friend let them in. My guess is that if I allowed 6 degrees of separation (supposably the whole world) post on my site that a majority of the spammers would still be coming from a select few weak links in the chain.
My dad is using a single channel so is only getting 54mbps but 802.11 supports a lot higher than that and 54mbps is faster than my current "broadband" at home. There is no reason though that google would have to use 802.11. There are plenty of wireless technologies that can reach the last mile. You can likely do line of sight for the last mile but even if you can't if you're talking only needing it for the last mile then there are plenty of high bandwidth "junk" frequencies that would be suitable for short range communication.
It's easy to run fiber up and down the streets. It's a real bitch to run fiber from the street into the house.
If that's really the case then don't do it. There are plenty of wireless technologies that can easily cover that distance and a lot more. My dad has his office, his shop, and his house all linked with standard 802.11 wifi antennas. They are easily 5 miles apart and it's covered easily with a roof mounted antenna. Distances shorter than that wouldn't even need a roof mounted antenna. That same town uses 802.11 to sell cheap internet to the whole town. They put the antennas on top of their water towers. All you need is a small antenna in a window pointed towards the nearest water tower. Off the shelf 802.11 routers with directional antennas are more than capable of handling the last mile or two and in situations where 802.11 is saturated then the density should easily be enough to justify running physical lines.
You are kidding, right? WeChat is owned by Tencent which has tight connection to te Chinese government. It's worse then Skype in terms of security
The original poster said security of any of them is a joke. That being said, the question that needs to be asked is who are are you trying to be secure from? If you're a drug dealer in the USA then having a secure client controlled by a country who is not likely to share with your local government is probably not a bad solution. The chinese government is not going to be too concerned about domestic crimes in the USA. Personally, if I was worried about security, I would opt for fragmenting my communication over multiple channels. It's much harder to intercept communication if you email an encrypted video to someone and then text them the encryption key via a burner phone. Even unencrypted, if the message is fragmented over 4-5 distinct channels then piecing it back together becomes much more difficult because you first must gain access to all the different channels. For the average person though, your best bet for a single channel is still probably to not look for the most secure solution but instead look for the most secure solution by a party in opposition to who you want to be secure from.
The block feature has proven to be ineffective because trolls just keep creating new accounts, or moving on to harassing followers and friends of their victims. When people try to make it more powerful, e.g. with the "ggautoblock" script, the howls of "censorship!!" start up.
But there are easy solutions to this too. Require twitter accounts to have a cell phone number which is harder to create hundreds of new copies. Also, allow users to approve their followers and/or specify criteria of which users need approval to post. There should be blocks/approval required for things like account age, number of tweets, etc... Allow me to block "friends of X". This is a feature that I wish facebook had. Basically, twitter has a trust network that they can leverage that could make trolling virtually impossible without infringing on free speech. Even trolling of hashtags could be prevented with the right criteria. If people were allowed to see who has been blocked by their friends or friends of friends then you could easily say something like "don't show me users that have been blocked by more that 10 of my friends or 50 of my friends of friends. This is what I thought of off the top of my head and there are likely other criteria that would work even better. Twitter needs to utilize their free trust network that they have built. There are now dozens of trust networks on the internet. It has been predicted that online reputation will become a major factor at some point, currently they are all mostly in walled gardens like facebook, ebay, and twitter but at least with the big players, their walled garden is large enough to create the coverage needed to police themself. I would actually love for them to somehow be exported to third parties. There are a few like Klout that are attempting to do this but there is still lots of room in this area for people to innovate.
Settling on Venus is at least as realistic as settling on Mars. In many ways it's a lot simpler and more sustainable.
Settling on Antarctica, the Sahara, the bottom of the Atlantic, Siberia, and a host of other places including possibly the moon and LEO are a lot simpler and more sustainable than either Venus or Mars. Some, like the bottom of the ocean, also probably protect against many of extinction level events (Which is really the main reason people use for justification). Other than the wow factor there really doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to colonize inhospitable planets until we have the ability to actually terraform them. Don't get me wrong, I think things like self-contained biodomes would be a good step but it's cheaper and more practical to put the first several hundred biodomes in one of the many inhospitable places on earth. You could probably build the first 100 biodomes in places like antarctica, the bottom of the Pacific, LEO, and Siberia for the cost of a single biodome on Mars. You would likely learn a lot more and it could even be a tourist destination and a way to promote a mission to mars/venus when it actually happens.
So it was yet another "whoever wins - we lose" scenario?
Just like every other war. Whether it is the cold war, an actual war, the war on drugs, or practically any other thing with the name war attached to it, the real losers is society and the huge opportunity costs. At least with the cold war space races there was some amount of knowledge gained. I could even argue with designing a missile or nuke that there is some knowledge gained but when you start exploding them at millions of dollars a pop, that's a million dollars worth of resources that literally just goes up in smoke.
in the clouds where it's more Earth-like.
The temperature and pressure is earthlike at a certain altitude but that's about it. The air is still unbreathable and full of sulphuric acid. Oh, and sulphuric acid isn't very friendly to most building materials either. If you think building in a salt water environment is highly corrosive, building in a sulphuric acid environment would be 10 times worse.
One problem with gaming on a tablet is that compared to a joystick and buttons that gives tactile feedback when an action is input, a flat sheet of glass gives far less feedback. Thus many genres need to have their control schemes completely rethought for a flat sheet of glass. Do your kids use an external Bluetooth controller with their tablets? If not, do they stick to point-and-click games or 1- or 2-button continuous runners?
I think most of the games are tap to jump or tap to shoot type games. I didn't say that they are comparable gameplay. Even an NES with a joystick and 2 buttons is superior gameplay. The point I was making was that they have nice consoles and for some reason would still rather just use their tablets. Not exactly sure why, honestly but I know that they are not the exception. It seems most people accept the limitations of a tablet and still prefer playing on a tablet or phone even when other options are available. One thing I can say is that because most games on tablets are free it does allow them to sample and find many more games versus having to pay for every title on the console.
But to make a game like that today with the consoles we have would just feel like a ripoff.
Maybe with consoles but my kids (age 8 and 10) hardly touch their console. They spend most of their time playing tablet games which are very much like the old school games. Simple graphics easily created by one developer. Many are side-scrollers that look like something pulled straight out of the 80s. Some even go out of their way to make it look like pixelated 80s games.
outright blocking people who use adblockers without even offering them an alternative method of viewing by paying for the content with no ads at all (say, 5-10 cents per article depending on how recent the article is) is not doing them any favors, either. Like many others that I know, most people see the message that they can't access the content because of the anti-adblocker policy, they just go, "oh well", and find an alternative source of information, many people never returning.
I do something similar. I get my news from google news. A lot of sites have started only giving you 10 free articles per month and then want you to subscribe. Anything important will always be on 100 other sites so I just click on another site after I reach that limit. I also sometimes take the additional step of just excluding that particular site from my newsfeed. I understand that newspapers want to make money but they need a new method because I'm not going to be subscribing to some random newspaper in a city that I don't even live in.
You aren't dystopic enough. The logical extreme is when the content and ads are literally the same thing. (or in other words, there is no content but you'll mistake ads for it)
Facebook is already experimenting with this. It shows me stuff that my friends "liked" which is really just an ad. i.e. My friends liked coke's facebook page some time in the distance past so it shows me their current ad. Sadly, with their magic sorting algorithms they could take it even further by prioritizing my friend's posts that for instance had pictures of them holding a can of coke in the picture.
It's you who are mistaken. As long as the first-order derivative of the population growth rate is a positive number, then it is correct to say that population growth is 'accelerating.'
Yes but we are at least starting to slow down. Using the car example if you were accelerating by 10 miles/hour every hour and are now accelerating by only 5 miles/hour every hour then your rate of acceleration is slowing. More importantly, if it is consistently falling then we can also calculate when we cross over and start to decelerate.
The simplest solution for a website is if the ad isn't displayed then the content doesn't load either.
That's also extremely easy to workaround.
It depends on how they check it. Sure, a simple check might be fooled by loading it in a hidden window but a more complex check could require you to interact with the ad in a way only a human could. Another option is make the ad inline and integral to your site. There are even many sites today written in flash that you would never suspect are not html.
Well - I also use flashblock and script block so the chances I'll see anything Is fairly null.
Exactly. The chances of you seeing their content or using their website also approaches zero if they actually track who is seeing the ads and only show the content you want AFTER they show you the ad.
Why, just look how well it worked for the likes of Forbes and Wired!
Are you sure about the correct cause/effect. I almost made the comment that I wonder if this isn't a sign that facebook is starting to hurt. It seems to me like the companies that try the hardest to block ad blockers are companies that are declining and slowly failing. This could also be said for companies that start using more and more intrusive ads (that pay slightly better per view). It's seem like many times it is a failed attempt to stop the bleeding that is happening for other reasons.
Well, there'll be an ad free social network, I'll join that!". Go ahead. If you can't get everybody on it then it's useless. Google learned that with G+.
Google plus failed for other technical reasons not critical mass. Most of my friends are on facebook but they all also have google accounts. I actually talk to them more using google chat/hangouts than I do with facebook. I could easily switch to using google plus if it actually worked right. There is even third party software that allows you to post to multiple services at the same time. Google plus just doesn't work/feel right. They tried to merge twitter and facebook and failed at both. Facebook has actually done a better job of adding followers into the flow with their friends. Google created circles which in theory should be just as good as friends but in practice still falls short.
It might be a better approach to fingerprint content (I.e scripts, images) and prevent them from running and then outright block anything that has either sound or animation, replacing it with a "click to play" placeholder.
Won't work. If a website gets aggressive, ad blocking is doomed to fail. The simplest solution for a website is if the ad isn't displayed then the content doesn't load either. One simple solution would be to require the user to answer a question about the ad they just saw, forcing them to pay attention to the ad. This would be a highly aggressive strategy and would likely annoy a lot of people but an ad like that would also pay a lot more than a passive ad. Facebook only makes a few dollars per user per month and could probably cover their cost with only a couple of these kind of ads a week.
Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook? Facebook is 100% about selling its users to advertisers. I'm surprised it took them this long. This really says less about facebook and more about ad blocking software. The only reason facebook is likely doing this now is because a larger percentage of their users are starting to block ads.
TFA is using "lazy" to mean lack of physical activity. So if I pull an all-nighter and write 1000 lines of code, I am lazy. If I go for a walk instead, then I am not lazy.
This makes no sense. How exactly does "lack of physical activity" equal lazy? I would love to have a job that is more physically demanding than my current job. Unfortunately, most high paying intellectual jobs also tend to be low physical activity. Unless you are tracking what people are doing off the clock then this data is meaningless. Based on my experience, many people with office jobs tend to be more active in their off hours than people with physical jobs.
Does this mean I might get to root my otherwise unrootable phone?
I was thinking the same thing. Someone please publish the exploit on github so I can compile it and root my own phone.
It sounds like he is trying to get a hold of someone. He said "did you work with me" so maybe he has someone who helped him still on the inside. It's likely either a key to something like you said or it's to prove he is who he says he is. Does he have a public key? It could be simply a message like "I am the real edward snowden" encrypted with his private key. I agree though, if anyone downloaded his encrypted dump files that trying to use that to decrypt it would be something to try.