Personally I found Google+ to be fairly pleasant to use - mostly working like a simplified Facebook with elements of Twitter. It worked and given a user base I think it would have succeeded.
BUT, and this is a huge, service-destroying BUT, dear god did that fucking site do its best to annoy users and drive them away. Every time I went to use the thing it would annoy me with interstitials - Add more information about yourself! Invite your friends!etc. Then after skipping those to get to my feed there would be permanent embedded nag panels telling me to link, add info etc. I very much doubt the programmers decided to do this, but management / marketing did. I'm not surprised to learn management for the product was dysfunctional.
So anyway, I stopped using it.
Twitter and Facebook have their own annoyances, Facebook especially likes nagging but two points apply here a) Facebook's nagging is still not as annoying as Google+, b) why is Google copying the worst aspects of its competitor anyway? They should have just thrown it out there, ad-free, nag free and let it grow at its own pace. People would hang out there, treat it as a personal space without all the dissonance reminding them that it's not. Google could still no doubt scrape up information / usage under the surface so why even go this route?
Yup. Nothing to stop CAs selling their service as auditors, but if someone doesn't want a CA cert, or prefers to have other signers instead of or inaddition to the CA, then they should be allowed.
At the end of the day even an unsigned cert is better than nothing at all. At least it affords encryption to the website. Coupled with a service like SSL lighthouse, it would be resistant to MITM style attacks too.
I'm sure browsers could produce some relatively simple way to describe the trust and assign it a score.
At the end of the day I would trust a site more if I recognised who bestowed trust onto it.
Why can't banks have other financial institutions sign their certs? Why can't Google, Facebook, Apple et al, hold a key signing party? Why can't lawyers get their certs signed by their bar association? Why can't government websites have certs signed by their governments, which in turn might be signed by other governments?
It doesn't stop CAs from being signatories too if somebody pays $$$ for them to do it. But when ONLY CAs are allowed to sign certs, the security of sites is brittle and expensive. And often the signature is worthless other than it makes some scary box go away on the browser.
I'm thinking of a systematic system, not just a few docs left laying around. And I didn't say "guaranteed to be preserved". The way I see it is that every change to a page is one bit of information - if the bit is set then the person is in that half of people, if the bit is flipped it's the other half.
It should be possible to encode 5-8 bits of difference in various ways in a page without it being too visible or obvious. Even if a clever adversary were to reformat, transcribe every page they may have still leave some bits in the output. And since the adversary has probably stolen MULTIPLE pages and multiple documents, the the bits could be culmulative. And chances are most thieves aren't going to go to that effort.
It might only take a handful of pages to uniquely ID somebody in this fashion.
These weren't state secrets, they were police records & systems that a crooked cop decided to sell the use of.
And trust is important, but not in the way you think. Human nature means that no matter how much you vet employees, putting them in a position of trust you'll get some rotten ones. You will even have those who were once trustworthy who longer aren't due to some grievance or compromise.
Embedding hidden data into a document has ZERO impact on the trustworthy because they're not selling or giving the data to adversaries. However it will help in identifying those who aren't trustworthy.
Sounds like the documents contained unique identifiers in anticipation of this sort of thing. I wonder if there would be a way to embed invisible identifiers in docs in fonts, line spacing, punctuation, hyphenation etc. that could withstand modification to a greater or lesser degree.
... and be compensated then the implication is that piracy should be made legal. Pirate / copy anything you like, since you get billed for it.
But back in reality it's just a stupid, ill thought out tax. People using Netflix or another streaming service, or downloading games are the ones who'll be hit by this. If I were a Netflix / Amazon / Hulu subscriber and I though I was going to be taxed for using a legal service that I already paid for, I might be strongly inclined to just cut out the middle-man and pirate stuff from source.
Alt right hater? Are you mentally ill or something?
And nope, shorting does not involve imaginary stock. A short itself is a contract to sell stock to somebody at a particular price on a particular date. It's basically an IOU to the person buying it. When that date arrives, stock is purchased from the open market and given to the buyer. The hope for the short trader is sell it for more in the contract than its worth on the open market on the date the short matures.
Shorting is a neutral act. It doesn't affect stock price. What may affect stock price is that these investors have an incentive to put out negative stories about Tesla. At the moment though Musk is doing a pretty fine job of this himself.
Every time Musk moans about these "value destroyers", or tweets something dumb to stick it to them, his own stock tanks. If he wants to build value he should learn to shut up.
Some hybrids ARE electric vehicles. Plug-in electric hybrids typically run for 30-50 miles from a battery charge through the mains, then flip to ICE when the battery is depleted. If your journey / speed / charge cycle fits in the range, then it's basically an EV. Some PHEVs may however kick the engine in at higher speeds though, depends on the power train.
Regular hybrids are a different story. They don't charge from the mains, they charge from running the combustion engine. That means the combustion engine is the predominant means of propulsion and the battery / motor only kicks in at low speeds in stop-go style traffic.
Regular hybrids are essentially on their last legs, obsolete really. Toyota is still flogging that dead horse, probably expecting to wring a few more years out of the tech. PHEVs are basically a stop-gap too, but in a sense they serve as an introduction to electric vehicles for the more risk averse / range anxious so they still serve a purpose.
There have been glimmers of a federated style systems (Jabber, RSS / Atom / Salmon, Diaspora etc.) in the past. There are even devices such as Freedom Box that attempt to encapsulate a person into a device that can be controlled by the person themselves.
The main problem with all these things is that the majority of people lack the means / motivation / technical skill to set them up. Therefore if a federated system is to work, or we expect people to store their private info in "pods", it requires that there are either a) hosting sites (lots of them), b) means to self-host, e.g. via a smartphone app or desktop software. It has to be a total no-brainer to setup and use, and as easy to install and use as any commercial storage (DropBox, Drive, etc.). It should not require any technical proficiency to set up or maintain, or to protect data. It should preferably be p2p so somebody could sync multiple devices up for redundancy.
It's also not just enough to have a pod that stores stuff unless there are apps use it for its intended purpose. e.g. the Solid website cites a fitness tracker as an app that could store data in a pod but I don't see Google, Apple, FitBit et al ever supporting Solid from their fitness apps or devices. Rinse & repeat for other kinds of apps. This is going to be a very serious problem to overcome, perhaps insurmountable. We'll see I guess, but as I said at the top, it's been tried before.
Actually the story is simpler. Musk made a stupid, dumbass statement to manipulate the stock price, to screw some shorters and it backfired spectacularly.
I expect more likely they got Epic to not try and fuck them over by cross promoting, or allowing PS4 players to purchase items or season passes from outside of the PSN store.
That's essentially what it boiled down to. Epic are doing the same on Android, stepping entirely outside of the Play store so they can sell items without paying anything to Google for doing so. I imagine Sony were more than a little bit worried about the same thing happening to them.
If Amazon want to prevent unions then the best thing they can do is ensure their staff are happy - i.e. well paid, well rewarded and incentivized. Employees should be treated with respect with a full redress scheme and the company should be open to grievances, complaints and criticism. Do all those things and a union isn't necessary.
The problem is that Amazon's culture is paranoid, micromanaging and demeaning. Workers are poorly paid and work long hours especially in the warehouse / fulfillment side of things. Complain about unfair treatment, or sexual harassment, or some other grievance and it's more likely to be you who gets whacked than the other person. It's absolutely toxic.
But hey, let's put out a video slamming unions. BTW I've seen the damage unionisation can do so I wouldn't be pro union by any stretch but Amazon are basically begging for it to happen with their attitude.
Drivers are not technically minded and they don't know all the ways that a system could fail. Should we be surprised that they judge the system from the way it behaves when it appears to work and not by the way it could disastrously fail?
And that's a problem that extends into self driving cars or cars with semi-autonomous functions. The car appears to do more or less the right thing for the most part and naturally the driver becomes less and less attentive. The problem is that even the smartest automated software is only edge case away from catastophe and a driver MUST be attentive to mitigate from that risk.
The problem is that car manufacturers aren't doing enough to ensure they are. We see that every time a Tesla runs into a semi or whatever because the driver was staring at the pretty clouds or playing with their phone.
A "choose your own adventure" book has multiple endings. Many open world games like the Witcher have multiple outcomes. Other similar interactive fiction games like Life is Strange, Heavy Rain etc. managed story arcs / branches.
How is it that a company that supposedly specialised in this genre couldn't manage it? Perhaps the reason they are in financial trouble now is players got fed up with the superficiality of these "games".
Slashdot Mirror
BUT, and this is a huge, service-destroying BUT, dear god did that fucking site do its best to annoy users and drive them away. Every time I went to use the thing it would annoy me with interstitials - Add more information about yourself! Invite your friends!etc. Then after skipping those to get to my feed there would be permanent embedded nag panels telling me to link, add info etc. I very much doubt the programmers decided to do this, but management / marketing did. I'm not surprised to learn management for the product was dysfunctional.
So anyway, I stopped using it.
Twitter and Facebook have their own annoyances, Facebook especially likes nagging but two points apply here a) Facebook's nagging is still not as annoying as Google+, b) why is Google copying the worst aspects of its competitor anyway? They should have just thrown it out there, ad-free, nag free and let it grow at its own pace. People would hang out there, treat it as a personal space without all the dissonance reminding them that it's not. Google could still no doubt scrape up information / usage under the surface so why even go this route?
At the end of the day even an unsigned cert is better than nothing at all. At least it affords encryption to the website. Coupled with a service like SSL lighthouse, it would be resistant to MITM style attacks too.
I'm sure browsers could produce some relatively simple way to describe the trust and assign it a score.
Why can't banks have other financial institutions sign their certs? Why can't Google, Facebook, Apple et al, hold a key signing party? Why can't lawyers get their certs signed by their bar association? Why can't government websites have certs signed by their governments, which in turn might be signed by other governments?
It doesn't stop CAs from being signatories too if somebody pays $$$ for them to do it. But when ONLY CAs are allowed to sign certs, the security of sites is brittle and expensive. And often the signature is worthless other than it makes some scary box go away on the browser.
It should be possible to encode 5-8 bits of difference in various ways in a page without it being too visible or obvious. Even if a clever adversary were to reformat, transcribe every page they may have still leave some bits in the output. And since the adversary has probably stolen MULTIPLE pages and multiple documents, the the bits could be culmulative. And chances are most thieves aren't going to go to that effort.
It might only take a handful of pages to uniquely ID somebody in this fashion.
And trust is important, but not in the way you think. Human nature means that no matter how much you vet employees, putting them in a position of trust you'll get some rotten ones. You will even have those who were once trustworthy who longer aren't due to some grievance or compromise.
Embedding hidden data into a document has ZERO impact on the trustworthy because they're not selling or giving the data to adversaries. However it will help in identifying those who aren't trustworthy.
Sounds like the documents contained unique identifiers in anticipation of this sort of thing. I wonder if there would be a way to embed invisible identifiers in docs in fonts, line spacing, punctuation, hyphenation etc. that could withstand modification to a greater or lesser degree.
But back in reality it's just a stupid, ill thought out tax. People using Netflix or another streaming service, or downloading games are the ones who'll be hit by this. If I were a Netflix / Amazon / Hulu subscriber and I though I was going to be taxed for using a legal service that I already paid for, I might be strongly inclined to just cut out the middle-man and pirate stuff from source.
And nope, shorting does not involve imaginary stock. A short itself is a contract to sell stock to somebody at a particular price on a particular date. It's basically an IOU to the person buying it. When that date arrives, stock is purchased from the open market and given to the buyer. The hope for the short trader is sell it for more in the contract than its worth on the open market on the date the short matures.
I hope they catch lots of creeps.
Yup, Tesla has a LOT of kool aid drinkers. The really is between these extremes.
Shorting is a neutral act. It doesn't affect stock price. What may affect stock price is that these investors have an incentive to put out negative stories about Tesla. At the moment though Musk is doing a pretty fine job of this himself.
Every time Musk moans about these "value destroyers", or tweets something dumb to stick it to them, his own stock tanks. If he wants to build value he should learn to shut up.
Nintendo always cheaps out on hardware. There is no reason to suppose they would change now.
Regular hybrids are a different story. They don't charge from the mains, they charge from running the combustion engine. That means the combustion engine is the predominant means of propulsion and the battery / motor only kicks in at low speeds in stop-go style traffic.
Regular hybrids are essentially on their last legs, obsolete really. Toyota is still flogging that dead horse, probably expecting to wring a few more years out of the tech. PHEVs are basically a stop-gap too, but in a sense they serve as an introduction to electric vehicles for the more risk averse / range anxious so they still serve a purpose.
His coffin was coated in starlite and they couldn't cremate him. Ended up burying him instead.
The main problem with all these things is that the majority of people lack the means / motivation / technical skill to set them up. Therefore if a federated system is to work, or we expect people to store their private info in "pods", it requires that there are either a) hosting sites (lots of them), b) means to self-host, e.g. via a smartphone app or desktop software. It has to be a total no-brainer to setup and use, and as easy to install and use as any commercial storage (DropBox, Drive, etc.). It should not require any technical proficiency to set up or maintain, or to protect data. It should preferably be p2p so somebody could sync multiple devices up for redundancy.
It's also not just enough to have a pod that stores stuff unless there are apps use it for its intended purpose. e.g. the Solid website cites a fitness tracker as an app that could store data in a pod but I don't see Google, Apple, FitBit et al ever supporting Solid from their fitness apps or devices. Rinse & repeat for other kinds of apps. This is going to be a very serious problem to overcome, perhaps insurmountable. We'll see I guess, but as I said at the top, it's been tried before.
Actually the story is simpler. Musk made a stupid, dumbass statement to manipulate the stock price, to screw some shorters and it backfired spectacularly.
That's essentially what it boiled down to. Epic are doing the same on Android, stepping entirely outside of the Play store so they can sell items without paying anything to Google for doing so. I imagine Sony were more than a little bit worried about the same thing happening to them.
The problem is that Amazon's culture is paranoid, micromanaging and demeaning. Workers are poorly paid and work long hours especially in the warehouse / fulfillment side of things. Complain about unfair treatment, or sexual harassment, or some other grievance and it's more likely to be you who gets whacked than the other person. It's absolutely toxic.
But hey, let's put out a video slamming unions. BTW I've seen the damage unionisation can do so I wouldn't be pro union by any stretch but Amazon are basically begging for it to happen with their attitude.
And that's a problem that extends into self driving cars or cars with semi-autonomous functions. The car appears to do more or less the right thing for the most part and naturally the driver becomes less and less attentive. The problem is that even the smartest automated software is only edge case away from catastophe and a driver MUST be attentive to mitigate from that risk.
The problem is that car manufacturers aren't doing enough to ensure they are. We see that every time a Tesla runs into a semi or whatever because the driver was staring at the pretty clouds or playing with their phone.
It still has more meaningful choice than the typical TT game. And it was produced on a shoestring, had episodic content etc.
A "choose your own adventure" book has multiple endings. Many open world games like the Witcher have multiple outcomes. Other similar interactive fiction games like Life is Strange, Heavy Rain etc. managed story arcs / branches. How is it that a company that supposedly specialised in this genre couldn't manage it? Perhaps the reason they are in financial trouble now is players got fed up with the superficiality of these "games".
Or rather it'll lead to an inconsequential cutscene or line of dialogue.
US Army, run a fucking mile away from this. If you're desperate for a VR contract Bohemia and Occulus to supply something.
They're not sold below cost. I can think of many reasons to hate on Tesla but this isn't one of them.