Privacy extensions are implemented on the end host, not the router. But a router can always see the MAC addresses of directly-connected machines anyway regardless of IP address. That's the case even in a completely v4-only network.
In the long run, it's not going to matter what businesses do with wages, because wages are the payment for jobs and there won't be many jobs available at all, because a combination of AI and robots will be doing the work. That's kind of the whole reason we want to be looking into UBI in the first place.
A real alternative is the 'employer of last resort' Job Guarantee policy - where people are given actual jobs instead (and no, there will never be a lack of useful work to be done - fields like scientific research, for just one example, are infinite in the amount of work needing to be done).
Sure -- plenty of work. But no jobs, because automation can do the work better than humans can.
I feel like a job guarantee like that would pretty much end up being the same thing as a basic income anyway. When humans cost more than machines and there just isn't enough jobs available for everybody, the only way to guarantee people a job is to invent busy work for them, or have them do a job that a machine could do for less. Companies won't do that; it'll have to be the government that does it and pays for it. At which point you've pretty much ended up at UBI, except you're wasting people's lives away doing BS useless makework. Hardly an improvement.
except that when the Basic Income can be gutted afterwards relatively easily
Yeah. This is my concern too. UBI only works when you can actually expect to keep getting it, but as a single big target it'll probably be a lot easier to get rid of or reduce than the current mishmash of welfare programs.
To make it stick, we'll probably have to wait until the machine-induced unemployment problem hits critical mass, which means things are going to get a lot worse before we can start fixing them.
Probably, yeah. Still, it might be possible to come up with an experiment that gives us a hint one way or the other. I think that would be worth spending some effort on.
Here's a worse one: you can't even make the assumption that they know about us. We might just have evolved off-screen, in some part of the sim that nobody is ever going to look at.
I think this might possibly be the only reasonable counter-argument in the entire thread. Certainly better than all the "lolreligionbs" all over the rest of it...
I'd argue it's not particularly convincing by itself, because once you get all the bugs in your program worked out it's very easy to run many copies of it. Consider games, where the vast majority of total play time for any given game is done by the players, who are playing the bug-free release version, and not the developers who play the buggy versions.
The question then becomes "how easy is it to actually write a bug-free simulation?", which is a pretty tricky question. My suspicion is that once we dig our way down to the bottom layer of physics, it'll turn out to be very simple -- which would make it easier to implement without bugs. But who knows.
They couldn't deduce that they're in a simulation based on the statistical argument, but they can certainly argue that they're highly likely to be in one. (And because they have their own functioning simulation running, they have proof that such a simulation is in fact possible.)
Somewhere in the nested chain of simulations, there's a universe that makes that argument, and is wrong. But that probably won't be our universe.
Nothing in our trajectory hints at computer consciousness / self-awareness.
You think so? It's not like there's anything special about our brains, they're just a bunch of chemicals aligned in the right way. And we already do physics simulations, so we know those are possible -- yes, it's true that they're usually pretty simple and small scale, but it doesn't seem like there's any fundamental reason we couldn't expand them to the point where we could do a physical simulation of a brain (or lots of them, plus a universe for them to live in).
Yeah, I figured... it's just that they do have them. I've bought 2 so far, I've seen them in stock more times than that, and Pimoroni are even reporting available stock right now (although it's of one of their rip-off bundles). They're certainly selling out fast, and there was that months-long period where they didn't bother making any (because they thought it'd be a great idea to release the Pi3 at the same time, and/or because they were waiting for more of the BCM2835 chips to be fabbed) but it's not like they're completely unavailable.
They have no wifi either. And if you're going to buy a USB thing for network access, why not get a USB Ethernet adaptor instead of a USB wifi adaptor? You have to run a cable out anyway for power, so why bother with wifi at all?
("Because power outlets are more common than Ethernet ports", I suppose, but I don't really have a good answer to the actual question. I'd be wary of using wifi if your goal is an always-on video stream, since all wifi devices share bandwidth on the channel. If you're only doing one image per second and/or only streaming when someone's actively looking at the camera, then it becomes a bit more feasible though.)
Better to be in the robot programming end of things.
For the time being, sure, but between motion capture and machine learning, this is fast being automated as well. And for actual programming programming, well, AIs will be able to do that too soon enough, and then where will you go?
The food supply is being drugged to increase profits.
This, I think, is critically important. And it's not just sugar, either.
If I'm a company that makes food, and it was possible to alter my food in some way to make it sell better -- by making it more attractive or addictive or harder to resist, or as the summary suggests, make it interfere with the brain's weight regulation controls -- then wouldn't I do that? If I can encourage or manipulate people (or their brains/bodies) to stuff themselves silly on my food, won't I sell more if I do? I don't even need to know the precise effect of my changes. If I change something, and the product sells better, who knows or even cares whether it's because the change made the food better, or whether it just made it more addictive? The sales numbers will be up either way.
Anybody that thinks that the companies we buy our food from aren't already doing this is being silly. They have entire research departments dedicated to it.
I see it as a bit closer to mandating you brick up your windows, use remote-controlled electronic locks on the doors and then need to phone up a company to get in to your house -- it'd certainly improve security, but you should have the option to install your own lock.
Argh. Yes. I've even outright said "it should be possible to disable by putting a file into the Firefox program folder, since the only people with access to that also have access to replace the Firefox binary" and yet still got "but we can't add a pref because malware can write to your profile folder" in response. Sometimes by the very same people that also tell me that they aren't trying to do anything against malware with admin rights.
It's $14 if you buy it via the blog author's dx.com affiliate link. Or slightly less if you switch to one of the other colors; for some reason, he linked to the ugliest, most expensive color.
Nope, it's not. You need to consider the consequences of the licenses too. "You have the ability to place restrictions on other people" means, in practice, that other people will place restrictions on you. (Remember that there's a lot more of them than there are of you.)
Seems to me that having more restrictions placed on you makes you less free.
Those are all excuses. None of that stuff needs to be touched to deploy v6. Deploying v6 won't make any of it work worse than it currently is. You don't need to upgrade all your DOCSIS1/2 modems to get v6 to the DOCSIS3 modems.
Also if you're an ISP that's been buying hardware in the past half a decade that's not v6 capable, then you screwed up -- or if your hardware is much older than that, then you're probably looking towards a replacement soon anyway.
Not NATing is sensible. Not firewalling your unpassworded database? Not so much.
In the (slight) defense of people running these servers, the article points out that MongoDB's default configuration used to be to accept connections from the internet. They've changed that, but upgrading uses your old config file so you won't get the new defaults automatically.
But still, this is something you should be checking for.
I was assuming a "can't share any cables for some reason" situation, since if you could leave the power cable connected you may as well leave everything else connected as well.
"This technology isn't reliable. [...] The people who want your computer to include a back door are evil and you can't trust them."
Sure, that's the actual situation, but most people are just going to hear "secure boot" and think it makes them secure. Mix in a bit of "I don't do anything complicated with my computer, so it's ok if nobody can do anything complicated with their computers" and oh dear.
Today, I'm told, the ratio of computers to kids is almost 1:1
My old school is similar, but all their computers are heavily locked down, with an application whitelist that limits what you can run to just authorized binaries. Which is a pretty good example of the problem.
It's a big if, sure. But phrase it as something we need to do to stop terrorists/paedophiles, and suddenly you'll have lots of support from people that don't know better. "EFI firmware should check PCs for known checksums of child porn and report them to the authorities, and why would you want to disable that unless you're a paedophile yourself?"
And the resulting monopoly-related lawsuits in every nation that would support them, not to mention almost inevitable regulatory action in jurisdictions like the EU, would most likely be the final nail in the MS coffin.
Yet we have none of this for the machines that are locked down today. (After all, it's not even MS's fault that these machines come with unconfigurable Secure Boot. They just set the Secure Boot requirement for Windows certification, they didn't force anybody to put it in!)
A new generation has grown up never not knowing what it's like to have their own PCs and consoles and mobile devices
The sad part is that this isn't true any more. A lot of children these days grow up with only a mobile phone, not a PC... and you can hardly call the phone theirs when it's so locked down that it may as well still belong to the manufacturer. And they consider that normal, because that's what they grew up with, and probably won't see how bringing the same situation to the desktop would be any worse.
I realize I'm being pessimistic here, and I really, seriously hope that you turn out to be right, but I fear I'm just going to discover that I'm not being pessimistic enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Privacy extensions are implemented on the end host, not the router. But a router can always see the MAC addresses of directly-connected machines anyway regardless of IP address. That's the case even in a completely v4-only network.
In the long run, it's not going to matter what businesses do with wages, because wages are the payment for jobs and there won't be many jobs available at all, because a combination of AI and robots will be doing the work. That's kind of the whole reason we want to be looking into UBI in the first place.
A real alternative is the 'employer of last resort' Job Guarantee policy - where people are given actual jobs instead (and no, there will never be a lack of useful work to be done - fields like scientific research, for just one example, are infinite in the amount of work needing to be done).
Sure -- plenty of work. But no jobs, because automation can do the work better than humans can.
I feel like a job guarantee like that would pretty much end up being the same thing as a basic income anyway. When humans cost more than machines and there just isn't enough jobs available for everybody, the only way to guarantee people a job is to invent busy work for them, or have them do a job that a machine could do for less. Companies won't do that; it'll have to be the government that does it and pays for it. At which point you've pretty much ended up at UBI, except you're wasting people's lives away doing BS useless makework. Hardly an improvement.
except that when the Basic Income can be gutted afterwards relatively easily
Yeah. This is my concern too. UBI only works when you can actually expect to keep getting it, but as a single big target it'll probably be a lot easier to get rid of or reduce than the current mishmash of welfare programs.
To make it stick, we'll probably have to wait until the machine-induced unemployment problem hits critical mass, which means things are going to get a lot worse before we can start fixing them.
Probably, yeah. Still, it might be possible to come up with an experiment that gives us a hint one way or the other. I think that would be worth spending some effort on.
Here's a worse one: you can't even make the assumption that they know about us. We might just have evolved off-screen, in some part of the sim that nobody is ever going to look at.
I think this might possibly be the only reasonable counter-argument in the entire thread. Certainly better than all the "lolreligionbs" all over the rest of it...
I'd argue it's not particularly convincing by itself, because once you get all the bugs in your program worked out it's very easy to run many copies of it. Consider games, where the vast majority of total play time for any given game is done by the players, who are playing the bug-free release version, and not the developers who play the buggy versions.
The question then becomes "how easy is it to actually write a bug-free simulation?", which is a pretty tricky question. My suspicion is that once we dig our way down to the bottom layer of physics, it'll turn out to be very simple -- which would make it easier to implement without bugs. But who knows.
They couldn't deduce that they're in a simulation based on the statistical argument, but they can certainly argue that they're highly likely to be in one. (And because they have their own functioning simulation running, they have proof that such a simulation is in fact possible.)
Somewhere in the nested chain of simulations, there's a universe that makes that argument, and is wrong. But that probably won't be our universe.
At the top. The odds for any given universe might be that it's a simulation, but that doesn't mean that every universe is a simulation.
Nothing in our trajectory hints at computer consciousness / self-awareness.
You think so? It's not like there's anything special about our brains, they're just a bunch of chemicals aligned in the right way. And we already do physics simulations, so we know those are possible -- yes, it's true that they're usually pretty simple and small scale, but it doesn't seem like there's any fundamental reason we couldn't expand them to the point where we could do a physical simulation of a brain (or lots of them, plus a universe for them to live in).
Yeah, I figured... it's just that they do have them. I've bought 2 so far, I've seen them in stock more times than that, and Pimoroni are even reporting available stock right now (although it's of one of their rip-off bundles). They're certainly selling out fast, and there was that months-long period where they didn't bother making any (because they thought it'd be a great idea to release the Pi3 at the same time, and/or because they were waiting for more of the BCM2835 chips to be fabbed) but it's not like they're completely unavailable.
They have no wifi either. And if you're going to buy a USB thing for network access, why not get a USB Ethernet adaptor instead of a USB wifi adaptor? You have to run a cable out anyway for power, so why bother with wifi at all?
("Because power outlets are more common than Ethernet ports", I suppose, but I don't really have a good answer to the actual question. I'd be wary of using wifi if your goal is an always-on video stream, since all wifi devices share bandwidth on the channel. If you're only doing one image per second and/or only streaming when someone's actively looking at the camera, then it becomes a bit more feasible though.)
At The Pi Hut (UK), Pimoroni (UK), Adafruit (US) and in physical Micro Center stores (US). It says that right in the blog post.
For the time being, sure, but between motion capture and machine learning, this is fast being automated as well. And for actual programming programming, well, AIs will be able to do that too soon enough, and then where will you go?
This, I think, is critically important. And it's not just sugar, either.
If I'm a company that makes food, and it was possible to alter my food in some way to make it sell better -- by making it more attractive or addictive or harder to resist, or as the summary suggests, make it interfere with the brain's weight regulation controls -- then wouldn't I do that? If I can encourage or manipulate people (or their brains/bodies) to stuff themselves silly on my food, won't I sell more if I do? I don't even need to know the precise effect of my changes. If I change something, and the product sells better, who knows or even cares whether it's because the change made the food better, or whether it just made it more addictive? The sales numbers will be up either way.
Anybody that thinks that the companies we buy our food from aren't already doing this is being silly. They have entire research departments dedicated to it.
I see it as a bit closer to mandating you brick up your windows, use remote-controlled electronic locks on the doors and then need to phone up a company to get in to your house -- it'd certainly improve security, but you should have the option to install your own lock.
Argh. Yes. I've even outright said "it should be possible to disable by putting a file into the Firefox program folder, since the only people with access to that also have access to replace the Firefox binary" and yet still got "but we can't add a pref because malware can write to your profile folder" in response. Sometimes by the very same people that also tell me that they aren't trying to do anything against malware with admin rights.
That doesn't really fix any of the problems with signing.
It's $14 if you buy it via the blog author's dx.com affiliate link. Or slightly less if you switch to one of the other colors; for some reason, he linked to the ugliest, most expensive color.
Nope, it's not. You need to consider the consequences of the licenses too. "You have the ability to place restrictions on other people" means, in practice, that other people will place restrictions on you. (Remember that there's a lot more of them than there are of you.)
Seems to me that having more restrictions placed on you makes you less free.
Not infinitely nested NATs. Just one level of nesting is usually needed.
Good luck with that when your ISP puts you behind NAT, or when their ISP puts them behind NAT.
Without NAT, our corporate and government overlords will know exactly which computer each packet is going to
Please look up privacy extensions. They've only been mentioned in the comments of every single Slashdot article that mentions IPv6.
Those are all excuses. None of that stuff needs to be touched to deploy v6. Deploying v6 won't make any of it work worse than it currently is. You don't need to upgrade all your DOCSIS1/2 modems to get v6 to the DOCSIS3 modems.
Also if you're an ISP that's been buying hardware in the past half a decade that's not v6 capable, then you screwed up -- or if your hardware is much older than that, then you're probably looking towards a replacement soon anyway.
Not NATing is sensible. Not firewalling your unpassworded database? Not so much.
In the (slight) defense of people running these servers, the article points out that MongoDB's default configuration used to be to accept connections from the internet. They've changed that, but upgrading uses your old config file so you won't get the new defaults automatically.
But still, this is something you should be checking for.
I was assuming a "can't share any cables for some reason" situation, since if you could leave the power cable connected you may as well leave everything else connected as well.
The power cable. But other than that, no, you only need to plug or unplug 3 things. Big whoop.
"This technology isn't reliable. [...] The people who want your computer to include a back door are evil and you can't trust them."
Sure, that's the actual situation, but most people are just going to hear "secure boot" and think it makes them secure. Mix in a bit of "I don't do anything complicated with my computer, so it's ok if nobody can do anything complicated with their computers" and oh dear.
Today, I'm told, the ratio of computers to kids is almost 1:1
My old school is similar, but all their computers are heavily locked down, with an application whitelist that limits what you can run to just authorized binaries. Which is a pretty good example of the problem.
It's a big if, sure. But phrase it as something we need to do to stop terrorists/paedophiles, and suddenly you'll have lots of support from people that don't know better. "EFI firmware should check PCs for known checksums of child porn and report them to the authorities, and why would you want to disable that unless you're a paedophile yourself?"
And the resulting monopoly-related lawsuits in every nation that would support them, not to mention almost inevitable regulatory action in jurisdictions like the EU, would most likely be the final nail in the MS coffin.
Yet we have none of this for the machines that are locked down today. (After all, it's not even MS's fault that these machines come with unconfigurable Secure Boot. They just set the Secure Boot requirement for Windows certification, they didn't force anybody to put it in!)
A new generation has grown up never not knowing what it's like to have their own PCs and consoles and mobile devices
The sad part is that this isn't true any more. A lot of children these days grow up with only a mobile phone, not a PC... and you can hardly call the phone theirs when it's so locked down that it may as well still belong to the manufacturer. And they consider that normal, because that's what they grew up with, and probably won't see how bringing the same situation to the desktop would be any worse.
I realize I'm being pessimistic here, and I really, seriously hope that you turn out to be right, but I fear I'm just going to discover that I'm not being pessimistic enough.