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User: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

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  1. Lawful rights and interests? on Chinese Certificate Authority CNNIC Is Dropped From Google Products · · Score: 2

    What 'rights and interests', exactly is CCIN blathering about? Google has changed absolutely nothing about any certain they have issued, the hierarchy will be precisely as it was, they just decided that 'being untrustworthy' was incompatible with being among the trusted CAs.
    Is this just swagger, or are they attempting the theory that CAs have some sort of right to be trusted?

  2. Re:The future is now. on Ask Slashdot: Who's Going To Win the Malware Arms Race? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And, unfortunately, ChromeOS is the comparatively softcore version of dystopian cryptographic lockdown. A ChromeOS device certainly works most smoothly if you leave it set to factory defaults, and generally play like a good little consumer; but, at least for now, there's a deliberate, documented, we-don't-assure-that-you'll-like-the-results-but-here's-how-to-do-it, switch for turning off the verification, becoming root, booting alternate payloads, and generally mucking around. My memory of the details is a little fuzzy; but I think that you can have your merry way with everything except some 'fallback' BIOS/bootloader that is hardware write-locked at the factory and isn't even modified by Google-provided updates; but instead intended to be just enough bootloader to un-brick basically anything you can do to the system in software. On some models, you can futz with that as well if you poke the right area of the board.

    It's definitely a 'crypto lockdown to make security easier, and possibly even possible' device; and Google hardly encourages you to go forth and GNU; but they at least allow you to. That puts ChromeOS devices well above all iDevices, a fair percentage of Android hardware, and potentially above some 'trusted boot' UEFI systems(depending on whether you can re-key the system or not). It's certainly a good example; but it's far less of an anomaly than one would like.

  3. Re:Good Luck on Amazon Requires Non-Compete Agreements.. For Warehouse Workers · · Score: 1

    Isn't it wonderful how your totally 'voluntary' agreement to basically all contracts required to not live in a cave frees you from the dead hand of the inefficient state judicial system and gives you access to high quality, competitive, private sector justice?

  4. Re:More of the same on Ask Slashdot: Who's Going To Win the Malware Arms Race? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd be inclined to suggest that it will be worse than that:

    Barring some sort of radical change in priorities that causes the market to accept zero new features for, oh, a (human) generation or more, while vendors put out bugfix releases, 'winning' certainly isn't going to happen by doing conventional stuff; but harder.

    If 'winning' in fact occurs, odds are excellent that it will be on some wonderfully dystopian lockdown platform that shrinks the problem space considerably by forbidding basically everything that hasn't been cryptopgraphically blessed by the vendor, sandboxed to hell and back, or both. Naturally, the power afforded to the vendor in this scenario will never be abused.

  5. Re:Presumably on Secret Service Plans New Fence, Full Scale White House Replica, But No Moat · · Score: 1

    Don't RPGs have accuracy issues at longer ranges? This sounds like more of a mortar job.

  6. Re:Why use secrete service agents on Secret Service Plans New Fence, Full Scale White House Replica, But No Moat · · Score: 3, Funny

    Based on reports about their behavior, I'd guess "the enthanol that their liver couldn't handle".

  7. Re:Good Luck on Amazon Requires Non-Compete Agreements.. For Warehouse Workers · · Score: 1, Funny

    That's a pretty broad exclusion to be enforceable.

    Convenient that warehouse workers tend to have excellent lawyers and be in a strong position to handle the time and trouble of contesting legal matters, isn't it?

  8. Re:Encrypt client side on Amazon Announces Unlimited Cloud Storage Plans · · Score: 1

    I'm sure that they've given considerable thought to subtly discouraging very heavy use, and looked at how different users actually tend to use online storage space, along with how much opportunity for additional profit there might be(eg. a 'photo storage' user might be a good candidate for being sold prints or something, while a 'generic files' user might not); and I imagine that lack of block level control helps. It would be interesting to know what the number-crunching looked like to arrive at those price points; though I'm sure that those data are not going to be public anytime soon.

    However, I suspect that it's also there, at least in part, because this service is a relatively thin skin of consumer-friendly abstraction layer on top of S3, which is also object based. Amazon does have a block storage offering; but they only seem particularly interested in people using block storage 'devices' as disks on EC2 instances, rather than on farming them out over the web.

    There is nothing stopping you from configuring the OS on an EC2 instance to function as a file server and getting remote access to block storage that way; but it doesn't seem to be the encouraged use case.

    I don't know nearly enough about large-scale storage to say why they prefer object based storage over block based storage; but my understanding is that, even in the paid seats, object based storage is very much what they are offering, for anything externally accessed, with their block-based offering more or less there to allow you to configure the 'disks' in your EC2 'server' with a bit more granularity.

  9. Trade offs, no? on Modern Cockpits: Harder To Invade But Easier To Lock Up · · Score: 1

    While this air crash was undeniably tragic, the focus on the lockability of cockpit doors seems to be ignoring a fairly basic consideration: Who do you trust more: the people you hired to fly the plane or everybody who purchased a ticket to ride it?

    That doesn't rule out the possibility of problematic pilots; but it seems very, very, likely indeed that you are better off with a system where you can robustly lock the door, rather than one where blocking access is difficult. There may be room for other improvements, in hiring, training, navigation system safety overrides, etc. but this one just doesn't seem very hard.

  10. Re:In a departure from tradition... on NASA's ARM Will Take a Boulder From an Asteroid and Put It In Lunar Orbit · · Score: 1

    Not that I know of, just my feeble attempt at a joke. It seems like absolutely every other outfit that doesn't own a fab and wants to build an ARM hires TMSC to do it; so when I read about an Asteroid Redirect Mission, I was immediately struck by the image of NASA licensing some IP blocks and having TSMC slap out some wafers.

  11. Re:"to provide support for the cultural sector" on Quebec Plans To Require Website Blocking, Studies New Internet Access Tax · · Score: 2

    That sounds disconcertingly similar to the situation among people who fly confederate flags to represent their 'culture'. Only in french-ish.

  12. Re:"to provide support for the cultural sector" on Quebec Plans To Require Website Blocking, Studies New Internet Access Tax · · Score: 1

    Anytime you hear the word "culture" in Quebec, watch out. It has a much more ominous overtone there than in most of the rest of the world.

    Just ask anyone who got stuck with a 'Canadian Multilingual Standard' keyboard layout...

  13. Re:Encrypt client side on Amazon Announces Unlimited Cloud Storage Plans · · Score: 2

    Based on their API reference 3rd-party apps that do whatever you want on the client side certainly look doable enough.

    Obviously, the various stuff about "Access your files on all your devices!" and "Build into all your Amazon devices!" and whatnot is going to be less useful, so they are clearly expecting most customers to not do that(and implicitly encouraging them not to); but the service itself doesn't appear to have any objections to you dropping encrypted blobs into it.

    (Now, what Amazon would do if you were to use something like PNGdrive, to get the advantages of the rather more expensive 'unlimited files' tier using only the 'unlimited photos' tier, I don't know; but I suspect that they would be less happy...)

  14. Re:World War III on Indian Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Against Posting 'Offensive' Content Online · · Score: 1

    Depends on how broad the question is: given that not every potentially violent extremist will react in the same way, the answer to 'are potentially violent extremists better defused by coddling or by needling?' is likely to be something statistical, rather than "yes" or "no"; but that would be the right answer.

    I don't mean to pretend that the right answer will necessarily fit neatly on a bumper sticker(indeed, it'd be quite a shock if it did); but a potentially complex answer is by no means the same as some sort of intersubjective mush of multiple valid viewpoints.

  15. Re:Some things you can automate, some things won't on Amazon Robot Contest May Accelerate Warehouse Automation · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do you suspect that this is a product of ineptitude, or an exploration of the theory that degradation enhances compliance?

  16. Re:Some things you can automate, some things won't on Amazon Robot Contest May Accelerate Warehouse Automation · · Score: 1

    High paid? With millions of unemployed waiting in line for this or another job?

    Even if you can get the pesky feds away, and pay them less than minimum wage, lazy, entitled, human workers still tend to waste 4-8 hours/day 'sleeping' and engaging in rudimentary grooming behaviors; and their lack of work ethic means that if you try to pay them starvation wages they may just decide to go starve somewhere else, and at least work fewer hours while doing so.

    The effect is most obvious in places where automation is ridiculously efficient(it's pretty tricky for even your most downtrodden human to be cheap enough to stuff PCBs more efficiently than a pick-and-place, for instance); but it's true across the board that no matter how hard you beat them down, humans still have a price floor. Even slaves aren't necessarily cheaper than robots.

  17. In a departure from tradition... on NASA's ARM Will Take a Boulder From an Asteroid and Put It In Lunar Orbit · · Score: 1

    American aerospace contractors are displeased to note that NASA plans to have the Asteroid Redirect Vehicle fabbed on a 20nm process by TSMC, rather than more traditional launch partners...

  18. Re:World War III on Indian Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Against Posting 'Offensive' Content Online · · Score: 1

    I'm certainly not going to argue with you there; though I will wonder how you can content yourself with an observation about where an opinion was born, rather than how accurate it is...

  19. And now, things get Ugly. on Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember back when Uber's big privacy problem was 'God View?

    Well, they promised to cut back their sleazebag executives' personal access to that. They might even have been not-lying. Unfortunately, that just meant that they were growing up, and moving into the big-kid leagues of privacy violation. As I said then:

    "So, in a predictable (honestly, surprising they made it to this market cap without doing it already) part of the maturation process; Uber is claiming that they'll rein in discretionary access to personal information by their frat-bro-asshole management, and instead put full database access to all the data ever in the hands of their advertising and customer analytics weasels.

    That's the unpleasant flip side to a story like this. Yes, as it happens, Uber has some of the most punchable management shitweasels one could ask for. The very idea of one of them using 'god view' on you makes you want to take a hot shower and scrub yourself until the uncleanness is gone. However, while opportunistic assholerly is repulsive, it is also unsystematic. Once they grow up a bit, and put those data into the hands of solid, value-rational, systematic, people who aim to squeeze every drop of value out of it, then you are really screwed."

    Well, there we are: 'turning into a big data company' is pretty much the thermonuclear option when it comes to customer privacy; more or less the most invasive thing we yet have the technology to make cost effective. It'll take some real innovating for them to dig deeper.

  20. Just great... on Short Circuit In LHC Could Delay Restart By Weeks · · Score: 2

    Now would probably be a good time to stalk up on crowbars and prepare for unforeseen consequences, right?

  21. What makes it so expensive? on Stanford Breakthrough Could Make Better Chips Cheaper · · Score: 2

    I apologize if this was explained in TFA and I missed it; but I was left wondering why gallium arsenide would be so dramatically expensive. A quick look shows that even the scammers selling 'gallium bullion' in small quantities are charging under a dollar a gram for the stuff(at allegedly very high purity); and arsenic certainly isn't terribly pricey. Silicon, of course, is really abundant, and still fairly cheap once you've coaxed the oxygen out of the quartz-form you typically find it in; but not lower cost enough to explain a wafer-level difference as large as the one that exists.

    Are gallium, arsenic, or both markedly more difficult to purify enough to serve as reliable semiconductors? Is growing sufficiently flawless crystals large enough to be cut into wafers too error prone to get good yields? Some other unpleasant aspect of processing or handling the material?

  22. Re:World War III on Indian Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Against Posting 'Offensive' Content Online · · Score: 1

    People who react badly to having their precious little feelings hurt rarely improve through being carefully coddled and pandered to. If anything, they tend to reach the (fairly sensible, if everyone is busy justifying it) conclusion that threatening violence is an effective way to get what you want; which encourages them to push for additional concessions. And there is always something else on the list, even if you agree to everything initially demanded of you.

    This is not to say that the exercise of free speech is a risk-free activity that has never been the (proximate) cause of a nasty flare-up between the opinionated assholes of history; such a claim would be trivially false: some of history's arguments have gotten downright ghastly. It's just that situations that need only a little talk to turn violent tend not to be ones that were in the process of just simmering down and solving themselves until those pesky free speech absolutists came in and ruined things. Rather, such situations are usually festering merrily away, just looking for an excuse. That's the main reason why it's so easy for trivial slights, sometimes even ones that were merely rumored to have been committed; with no solid evidence of anything actually having happened(see also: witch hunts, lynch mobs) to set them off: They want a reason, any reason, doesn't really matter much if it's any good or not, for some good, cathartic, violence.

    India has had its share of moderately nasty mob violence along sectarian lines; and probably hasn't seen the last of it. Is it possible that somebody's inflammatory comment/video/whatever will be the proximate cause of another bout? Sure, totally plausible. Will it be the actual cause; or will criminalizing saying mean things on the internet to anything useful to address the underlying tensions or prevent some other, equally spurious, incident from kicking off the violence instead? Not very likely.

  23. Incidentally... on Indian Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Against Posting 'Offensive' Content Online · · Score: 4, Funny

    It isn't every day that you see a law that would make posting a copy of itself online a punishable act...

  24. Well, I guess they don't need to do any science... on Draconian Australian Research Law Hits Scientists · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Per a spokesweasel(in TFA): "Some academic research uses proliferation-sensitive controlled goods and technologies. While the sensitive items are used for legitimate civilian research by Australian researchers, they can also be used for the proliferation of military, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. "

    Notice anything odd? The word 'military' shows up along the usual trio of "nuclear, chemical, biological". Last I checked, the boundaries of 'military weapons' were very, very, broad, running the gamut from fancy-nuclear-power aerospace widgetry to relatively crude hand-fabricated small arms more or less loosely based on designs dating back to the first half of the 20th century, if not older.

    Is there some stricter definition of 'military weapons' that makes this slightly less ridiculous, or are they in fact export-controlling basically any tech you could conceivably integrate into a weapon in some fashion, including weapons already extremely widely available, adequately functional with downright crude technology, and otherwise utterly absurd to pretend are still within the reach of counter-proliferation efforts?

  25. Re:Competing with government-sanctioned monopolies on Elon Musk's SolarCity Offering To Build Cities, Businesses Their Own Grids · · Score: 1

    Actually, it has been quite some time since utility power has been treated as a 'natural monopoly'.

    There are some vestiges of regulated monopoly stuff, mostly in consumer electrical delivery(partially inertia, partially the fact that political influence over the price of consumer staple goods can be electorally popular, partly because it fits neatly with the usual state interest in not having people cut off for nonpayment and freezing to death, which generates a lot of bad PR per dollar in utility bills collected); but electricity markets(between companies operating generating assets and companies selling to end users) have been in place for years to decades at this point. Sometimes this goes badly(looking at you, Enron); mostly it is fairly uneventful.

    The 'natural monopoly' is in transmission assets. Just as internet backbone and fairly fat pipes at peering points are a reasonably robustly competitive industry; but 'last mile' connectivity is somewhere between a monopoly and an oligopoly; electricity generation is a competitive market(and a surprisingly functional one, given that it has historically been utterly uneconomic to store electricity for even a few minutes, unlike most normal commodities); but 'the grid' pretty much has one path to your house; and nobody has a remotely plausible plan to build multiple, competing, paths; unless you are a really big customer, like an aluminum smelter or something.

    Different utility companies still own different mixtures of generating and grid assets, so the name on your electrical bill can be anything from a 'virtual' electrical company(owns no physical infrastructure, attempts to make its money by carefully purchasing electricity on the market at prices low enough to turn a profit by selling to you at an agreed-upon price); to a distribution company(owns and operates the electrical grid in a given area; but purchases the electricity it carries from generating companies on the market) to a fully integrated outfit(owns power plants and distribution lines, buys fuel, sells electricity to end users on its distribution grid and possibly electricity to other companies outside its retail distribution area).

    The advent of economically practical electricity storage (especially decentralized storage) would be a huge shake-up, because that has simply never been on the table before(a few places are naturally suited to pumped hydro; but that's about it); but energy markets are already more dynamic than you suggest, within the limits imposed by competitive grid building being hard to justify and electricity being hard to store.