If petroleum companies want to fund such a project all by themselves, fine, but no taxes should be spent treating their pollution one symptom at a time. Instead, governments should fund replacements: solar, wind, cellulosic ethanol and maybe nuclear power.
Consider Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The War on Terror (TM) is not a source from which to draw generalizations about society's positions in general, except its attitude toward what it doesn't understand, which is: fear. So your first source, about a student who was arrested, not for sharing research, but for conducting research (whose subject was "Al Qaida") is interesting, but relative to this dispute it is dismissed an aberration, where an example or summary of how society normally functions is required.
That position is irresponsible in that it entails the researcher simply ignoring the very effects positive and negative that society will have to endure based on their publication. Governments and society as a whole have already seemingly taken a position counter to that [guardian.co.uk], [2] [slashdot.org], and the result will probably be eventual formal government regulation to better keep dangerous information quiet.
Your second source is an article about events centered on a high school, where students' rights are limited by the legal doctrine in loco parentis. (sp?) So that also is not an example of how society normally functions.
For example, there is classified information. If a researcher attempts to publish usable do-it-yourself details for making a nuclear bomb, they may well find themselves locked up.
Discovery Channel showed a history of the A-bomb a few years ago, which I thought was as good as the best consumer user's manual I've ever had the good fortune of getting bundled with purchase. The tricky step is purifying the radioactive material to weapons grade. After that, assembly is nothing. As a result, teaching particle physics in universities is permitted. What is not permitted is the act of producing weapons grade nuclear material. The good or evil is in an action, not in the knowledge.
Just because the laws haven't caught up yet to prevent computer security researchers from irresponsibly publishing dangerous information for all to get the most intricate details including ready-to-run attacks, does not mean that it is responsible or good for researchers to do so.
Facebook dangerously published all the information for all the Black Hats to get the most intricate details, etc., etc. The researchers made that information available to Facebook's customers. Bravo to them!
Heh. Researchers experiment with anything malicious they want in the name of research and publish their findings widely for the bad guys to consume.
Looks like you're a black hat, and you're annoyed that more young people are truly computer literate, and more useful information is available to non-expert but careful users.
With the tenuous justification "the bad guys would have surely come up with this already"
The purpose of research is knowledge. As a researcher, I'm not responsible to provide justification of what somebody else does with knowledge I discover, nor to provide further justification of my discovery of it due to that other person's choice to make criminal use of the knowledge I discovered. The criminal is solely responsible for the criminal act.
Plus not that many bad guys will think of X attack; at least not until there are news articles or a fad, other well-known bad apps to mimick.
Oh, yeah right!! No scumbag would ever have come up with such a diabolical plan of attack, as dump a malicious app on a site for casual computers to trade pictures, shortly after said site introduces app sharing to its crappy services. You are ridiculous.
The "researchers" are helping, providing inspiration, and guidance to would-be part-time bad guys.
Stuff that back where you pulled it from.
Sorry, but it was pretty obvious to people familiar with Facebook apps and computer security, that this weakness existed.
And to crackers. It was not obvious to the users, but now it is.
Nothing novel or valuable has really been found here
Both those qualities are in the eye of the beholder.
... except things that should have been reported to the site admins to be fixed.
Why? Will they share their profits, for such a service? For providing a fig leaf to help them cover their lack of vigilance, or how plainly stupid their idea was: "encourage casual users to share programs without any screening process"? Either the admins are competent and responsible enough to find and secure their site themselves, or else they're incompetent enough and irresponsible enough to deserve a public humiliation of the sort they are now receiving. They got what they deserved for trying to get rich on a networking-to-attract-advertising-revenue Ponzi scheme. You misidentify the social problem at the root of the symptom that is the general topic of this thread. That symptom is the insecurity of the biggest names in computing: Microsoft, US government, now Facebook. The root cause is the rewarding of sub-standard work. It has caused one dot-com bust already. I, for one, am in no mood for another. If projects of this scale were as a rule successfully deployed on the first public release, with all advertised features, and secure, I'd say programmers are by and large worthy of their 6-figure salaries. As it is, I say the average IT guy's salary is 85% hyperbole. Just because programmers are rare, the law of supply and demand dictates that even crappy ones have to be paid hand over fist. Such would change, if only secure apps and services were demanded by the consumer market. The more effectively crappy, insecure apps and services can be identified, the more efficiently the invisible hand can operate.
The researchers did valuable work, but it's clear that the worldwide security threat of releasing the information to third parties is greater.
The opposite is clear. One valuable service these researchers provided -- the most valuable, I think -- is they showed a lot of Facebook users that their host is not capable of securely providing at least the app sharing services it offers: they showed its victims that Facebook is not trustworthy. Many of the users do not have the technical backgro
"Data mining" just means writing intelligent queries, defined by retrieval of needed data, with little excess to review manually. If you can't learn to do that, you don't deserve any job with "analyst" in the title. I believe I read somewhere that the Internet is as cliquish as meat space, or more so. Considering the work I'm paying these analysts to do, I want them to use a more impersonal interface, one which is less prone to encourage the herd animal instinct to split into separate and distinct social units.
PS of course the politicians would be allowed to return phone calls -- no, on second thought, only their secretaries should be allowed to return such phone calls, but only to state the best times and methods of making contact. Let's make this at least as intrusive as they're proposing to get with us. Lost liberties are not historically recovered without civil war, and I'd prefer not.
A couple of words grab my attention: "influence" and "harassing."
President Sarkozy already has a record of trying to influence mainstream medias, either by having his closest friends acquire newspapers or TV networks, or harassing news directors on the phone. I would be very interested to see, in my country, to whom power would shift if politicians were prohibited from initiating contact with the press. Informants on serious misconduct, such as the FBI agent who exposed Nixon's and his appointees' direct involvement in wiretapping Democratic opponents, would probably not be dissuaded in most cases from secretly making contact for the greater good, but casual abusers of their elected office would be hamstrung from one of the primary methods they have become accustomed to using to wield undue influence on political opponents, which is to say, on the general populace of citizens who wish to be left alone, and to enjoyment of our right to pursuit of our own happiness. Your thoughts?
Is that it, France? I used to have a cat that thought that way. It got squished by a truck. I think it was hiding then, and its last thought was "Lucky guess!"
This amounts to official, systematic evidence-tampering instead of prosecuting those crimes that are too heinous or too indicative of gross negligence by law enforcement to be prosecuted under public scrutiny, which is exactly why the Patriot Act and the Protect America Act have the same kind of crap in them. This is all smokescreen for the next major failure to apprehend terrorists before they achieve their objective, and for CIA child prostitution rings. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2005/260505newleads.htm
"Because entrepreneurship is an indicator of economic vitality in regions and across the country, this study raises important policy questions about how to foster greater tech entrepreneurship to boost economic growth," said Robert Litan, vice president of Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. "Probably the most compelling fact in the study is that advanced education is critical to the success of tech startups." That is all.
Even after revising the question in order to conveniently dismiss it, the question is valid. Why doesn't Microsoft spend more for programmers with more practical experience, even if they need to cut their PR budget to do it?
You can't blame Google. Write your Congressman if it bothers you that they're bending over for communists, and they are, Democrat and Republican alike. Free Tibet.
It's the crazy eyes. He always looks like somebody's tugging at his scalp to keep them so wide open. Also, he's just such a Pollyanna. Nothing Microsoft does is ever admitted as a "mistake" until it gets to WinME proportions.
Since gaining a competitive edge from eating babies is obviously absurd, I didn't have any trouble telling that your remark was ironic. To start a witch hunt would require an allegation that is horrifying, but plausible. "He acquired a taste for dog meat on a trip to [very poor country] as a youth, and now secretly dines regularly both on puppies and kittens retrieved by interns from pounds" might work, if you're interested in starting a witch hunt. "Turned me into a newt" probably won't cut it, these days.
I think it would be great fun to do downtime comparisons of proprietary vs. Free & Open Source Software. Tech Support logs could tell us what company has called Amber Alert AntiVirus, Corp, how many times, and the support personnel's case notes would tell us about downtime. The man-months of labor to pore through all those data couldn't amount to more than $2B, so let's go do that, right now! What, the Big Software lobby isn't interested in knowing those facts? I just lost $1 Billion (my projected profits on that little counting project) to Microsoft. Congress should increase my immigrant quotas and the President should lower my taxes.
Waking up people's minds to conflicting ideas rather than letting them sleep is a good thing...usually. No, not "usually," but specifically when there is legitimate doubt as to which of any set of conflicting ideas is correct, then it is useful to make people aware of real uncertainty. To claim that the supporting evidence for intelligent design or divine creation are in the same league as the supporting evidence for evolution is to lie, outright. Whether such lies are motivated by malice or willful ignorance is a question I'll leave to somebody with greater patience for evil.
That was an imperative, not a declarative sentence.
First, you admit that the price of keeping those machines secure exceeds the total value of the machines.
No I don't. Security software and the extra time to install, upgrade and maintain it isn't anywhere near that expensive, and if it is, it shouldn't be. You overestimate the "value-add" of the crappy machines then. "Security" should be an adjective we use to distinguish good software from insecure software. Any product that does require separate "security software" to become realistically usable for its advertised functions would not succeed in a free market any better than doors that unlock from both sides without a key.
Of course, we're probably talking Windows here, where security is nothing more than an afterthought tacked on at the last minute. No, I was and am certainly talking about Microsoft. I specified that twice -- in the same sentence in fact. And yes, with Microsoft, "security is nothing more than an afterthought tacked on at the last minute." +1
If we're talking Linux, Unix or some other real OS, it's [security] largely built in from the ground up, making your claim even less accurate. But we're not, and that "even less accurate" claim is not mine. I deliberately named Microsoft, twice, for the exact reason that they don't build their software securely, "from the ground up." If you want to say nice things about Linux & Unix all day long, I probably won't interrupt or ever disagree. Mainly, because they don't sell themselves as a convenient out-of-the-box experience. They're up-front overall about things like hardware requirements and the level of expertise necessary, and what they do promise, they deliver pretty well.
Now, back to the topic, Microsoft: who's paying and who's receiving money in this picture? Who, then, is responsible to deliver a useful product and who, by centuries of common law, has an implicit right to expect a product worth what was paid? Your "blame the victim" comment was and still is sickening. I won't be sidetracked by weaknesses in technical arguments you fabricate and try to attribute to me, tv.
Bob, an engineer for Cannibalistic Business Practices, Inc. (which has 10,000 employees) is a college buddy of one of the Littleguy workers. They have a dinner conversation about Littleguy's new engine. Bob tells his boss about the idea, the boss goes to the head of R+D, and they begin building and testing models of the engine. Because CBP has thousands of employees at their disposal, they find the ideal setup quickly, and then patent it. He is a cannibal, after all.
To solve your dilemma, we'd only need to allow patents to reach "pending" status via paperwork, then set a reasonable interval of time to deliver a working prototype as condition of approving the patent. If the patent gets approved, some royalties are paid for production during the pending period and regular patent protection is extended afterward. If not, Littleguy, LLC is no worse for their application (relatively minor costs, anyway) than if they had tried and failed to protect their invention as a trade secret, as in your scenario.
By commenting at all you contradict your intended message. If this is all so insignificant to you why do you comment at all? Why not just leave the discussion to those who do care? Obviously, whatever stake you do have in this debate, your case isn't valid enough to present on its own merits, thus you resort to attacking the person instead of the argument. Dig the sig?
Slashdot Mirror
Since water is much more reflective to infrared and ultraviolet than visible light, ocean plants should be unaffected.
If petroleum companies want to fund such a project all by themselves, fine, but no taxes should be spent treating their pollution one symptom at a time. Instead, governments should fund replacements: solar, wind, cellulosic ethanol and maybe nuclear power.
Same for the ice fields on Greenland & Antarctica. Sea levels will be affected by global warming, but not by voodoo math.
& probably is.
That position is irresponsible in that it entails the researcher simply ignoring the very effects positive and negative that society will have to endure based on their publication. Governments and society as a whole have already seemingly taken a position counter to that [guardian.co.uk], [2] [slashdot.org], and the result will probably be eventual formal government regulation to better keep dangerous information quiet.
Your second source is an article about events centered on a high school, where students' rights are limited by the legal doctrine in loco parentis. (sp?) So that also is not an example of how society normally functions.
For example, there is classified information. If a researcher attempts to publish usable do-it-yourself details for making a nuclear bomb, they may well find themselves locked up.
Discovery Channel showed a history of the A-bomb a few years ago, which I thought was as good as the best consumer user's manual I've ever had the good fortune of getting bundled with purchase. The tricky step is purifying the radioactive material to weapons grade. After that, assembly is nothing. As a result, teaching particle physics in universities is permitted. What is not permitted is the act of producing weapons grade nuclear material. The good or evil is in an action, not in the knowledge.
Just because the laws haven't caught up yet to prevent computer security researchers from irresponsibly publishing dangerous information for all to get the most intricate details including ready-to-run attacks, does not mean that it is responsible or good for researchers to do so.
Facebook dangerously published all the information for all the Black Hats to get the most intricate details, etc., etc. The researchers made that information available to Facebook's customers. Bravo to them!
Heh. Researchers experiment with anything malicious they want in the name of research and publish their findings widely for the bad guys to consume.
Looks like you're a black hat, and you're annoyed that more young people are truly computer literate, and more useful information is available to non-expert but careful users.
With the tenuous justification "the bad guys would have surely come up with this already"
The purpose of research is knowledge. As a researcher, I'm not responsible to provide justification of what somebody else does with knowledge I discover, nor to provide further justification of my discovery of it due to that other person's choice to make criminal use of the knowledge I discovered. The criminal is solely responsible for the criminal act.
Plus not that many bad guys will think of X attack; at least not until there are news articles or a fad, other well-known bad apps to mimick.
Oh, yeah right!! No scumbag would ever have come up with such a diabolical plan of attack, as dump a malicious app on a site for casual computers to trade pictures, shortly after said site introduces app sharing to its crappy services. You are ridiculous.
The "researchers" are helping, providing inspiration, and guidance to would-be part-time bad guys.
Stuff that back where you pulled it from.
Sorry, but it was pretty obvious to people familiar with Facebook apps and computer security, that this weakness existed.
And to crackers. It was not obvious to the users, but now it is.
Nothing novel or valuable has really been found here
Both those qualities are in the eye of the beholder.
... except things that should have been reported to the site admins to be fixed.
Why? Will they share their profits, for such a service? For providing a fig leaf to help them cover their lack of vigilance, or how plainly stupid their idea was: "encourage casual users to share programs without any screening process"? Either the admins are competent and responsible enough to find and secure their site themselves, or else they're incompetent enough and irresponsible enough to deserve a public humiliation of the sort they are now receiving. They got what they deserved for trying to get rich on a networking-to-attract-advertising-revenue Ponzi scheme. You misidentify the social problem at the root of the symptom that is the general topic of this thread. That symptom is the insecurity of the biggest names in computing: Microsoft, US government, now Facebook. The root cause is the rewarding of sub-standard work. It has caused one dot-com bust already. I, for one, am in no mood for another. If projects of this scale were as a rule successfully deployed on the first public release, with all advertised features, and secure, I'd say programmers are by and large worthy of their 6-figure salaries. As it is, I say the average IT guy's salary is 85% hyperbole. Just because programmers are rare, the law of supply and demand dictates that even crappy ones have to be paid hand over fist. Such would change, if only secure apps and services were demanded by the consumer market. The more effectively crappy, insecure apps and services can be identified, the more efficiently the invisible hand can operate.
The researchers did valuable work, but it's clear that the worldwide security threat of releasing the information to third parties is greater.
The opposite is clear. One valuable service these researchers provided -- the most valuable, I think -- is they showed a lot of Facebook users that their host is not capable of securely providing at least the app sharing services it offers: they showed its victims that Facebook is not trustworthy. Many of the users do not have the technical backgro
s/distinct/exclusive
"Data mining" just means writing intelligent queries, defined by retrieval of needed data, with little excess to review manually. If you can't learn to do that, you don't deserve any job with "analyst" in the title. I believe I read somewhere that the Internet is as cliquish as meat space, or more so. Considering the work I'm paying these analysts to do, I want them to use a more impersonal interface, one which is less prone to encourage the herd animal instinct to split into separate and distinct social units.
Priceless.
PS of course the politicians would be allowed to return phone calls -- no, on second thought, only their secretaries should be allowed to return such phone calls, but only to state the best times and methods of making contact. Let's make this at least as intrusive as they're proposing to get with us. Lost liberties are not historically recovered without civil war, and I'd prefer not.
Is that it, France? I used to have a cat that thought that way. It got squished by a truck. I think it was hiding then, and its last thought was "Lucky guess!"
This amounts to official, systematic evidence-tampering instead of prosecuting those crimes that are too heinous or too indicative of gross negligence by law enforcement to be prosecuted under public scrutiny, which is exactly why the Patriot Act and the Protect America Act have the same kind of crap in them. This is all smokescreen for the next major failure to apprehend terrorists before they achieve their objective, and for CIA child prostitution rings.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2005/260505newleads.htm
Not certain enough to file a police report? Then you're not certain enough to block my alt.*, punks. See you in court.
Even after revising the question in order to conveniently dismiss it, the question is valid. Why doesn't Microsoft spend more for programmers with more practical experience, even if they need to cut their PR budget to do it?
You can't blame Google. Write your Congressman if it bothers you that they're bending over for communists, and they are, Democrat and Republican alike. Free Tibet.
It's the crazy eyes. He always looks like somebody's tugging at his scalp to keep them so wide open. Also, he's just such a Pollyanna. Nothing Microsoft does is ever admitted as a "mistake" until it gets to WinME proportions.
Since gaining a competitive edge from eating babies is obviously absurd, I didn't have any trouble telling that your remark was ironic. To start a witch hunt would require an allegation that is horrifying, but plausible. "He acquired a taste for dog meat on a trip to [very poor country] as a youth, and now secretly dines regularly both on puppies and kittens retrieved by interns from pounds" might work, if you're interested in starting a witch hunt. "Turned me into a newt" probably won't cut it, these days.
This should be done privately, and above all, with absolutely no input from the military except as customer of the procedures developed.
I think it would be great fun to do downtime comparisons of proprietary vs. Free & Open Source Software. Tech Support logs could tell us what company has called Amber Alert AntiVirus, Corp, how many times, and the support personnel's case notes would tell us about downtime. The man-months of labor to pore through all those data couldn't amount to more than $2B, so let's go do that, right now! What, the Big Software lobby isn't interested in knowing those facts? I just lost $1 Billion (my projected profits on that little counting project) to Microsoft. Congress should increase my immigrant quotas and the President should lower my taxes.
No I don't. Security software and the extra time to install, upgrade and maintain it isn't anywhere near that expensive, and if it is, it shouldn't be. You overestimate the "value-add" of the crappy machines then. "Security" should be an adjective we use to distinguish good software from insecure software. Any product that does require separate "security software" to become realistically usable for its advertised functions would not succeed in a free market any better than doors that unlock from both sides without a key. Of course, we're probably talking Windows here, where security is nothing more than an afterthought tacked on at the last minute. No, I was and am certainly talking about Microsoft. I specified that twice -- in the same sentence in fact. And yes, with Microsoft, "security is nothing more than an afterthought tacked on at the last minute." +1 If we're talking Linux, Unix or some other real OS, it's [security] largely built in from the ground up, making your claim even less accurate. But we're not, and that "even less accurate" claim is not mine. I deliberately named Microsoft, twice, for the exact reason that they don't build their software securely, "from the ground up." If you want to say nice things about Linux & Unix all day long, I probably won't interrupt or ever disagree. Mainly, because they don't sell themselves as a convenient out-of-the-box experience. They're up-front overall about things like hardware requirements and the level of expertise necessary, and what they do promise, they deliver pretty well.
Now, back to the topic, Microsoft: who's paying and who's receiving money in this picture? Who, then, is responsible to deliver a useful product and who, by centuries of common law, has an implicit right to expect a product worth what was paid? Your "blame the victim" comment was and still is sickening. I won't be sidetracked by weaknesses in technical arguments you fabricate and try to attribute to me, tv.
To solve your dilemma, we'd only need to allow patents to reach "pending" status via paperwork, then set a reasonable interval of time to deliver a working prototype as condition of approving the patent. If the patent gets approved, some royalties are paid for production during the pending period and regular patent protection is extended afterward. If not, Littleguy, LLC is no worse for their application (relatively minor costs, anyway) than if they had tried and failed to protect their invention as a trade secret, as in your scenario.
By commenting at all you contradict your intended message. If this is all so insignificant to you why do you comment at all? Why not just leave the discussion to those who do care? Obviously, whatever stake you do have in this debate, your case isn't valid enough to present on its own merits, thus you resort to attacking the person instead of the argument. Dig the sig?