Nice link. Fascinating how they cream themselves for 2,000 words on the technical challenges they overcame to break into a system not meant for that, but only 3 short sentences that privacy is fine, they're serious, see this link. (At least until uproar made them add the italicized part at the end.) Very telling.
They don't care about admitting the evidence in court. They just want to see the names and fire/retaliate against those people internally. Mission accomplished.
See, this is why any kind of conservation efforts will fail in the long-term; humanity will, in the end, strip the face of the planet entirely bare. When things get a little tough we'll always raze a forest, mountain, or species to feed ourselves and our kids for a couple months longer. Broadly similar to personal data at a company: no matter what promises they made early on, when the company starts to go down the drain they'll whore out that data in a last-ditch attempt at monetization of everything they have.
"Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government."
You guys who say this have to realize that all of this belligerent surveillance winds up targeted squarely at the heads of American citizens at home. The security apparatus does have one quasi-legitimate problem with their current mission -- If the idea is to tap all of the world's communications all the time, on the Internet, packets are not tagged with geographic or political-state indicators. So the only solution, really, is to suck up every packet, American and non-American alike, which is what they are now doing.
With Internet packet switching, the only way for Americans to expect communication privacy rights is for everyone in the world to have communication privacy rights. Surveilling everyone means surveilling all Americans, all the time. Do you really want that?
America is fundamentally punitive and violent. Same reason gun massacres every couple weeks make no impact, the highest proportion of people in prison for any country in the world makes no impact, military expenditures equal to the rest of the world combined makes no impact. Perhaps all empires come to be like that.
Of course, to you and me that's equivalent to "you might as well just ban executions" (which is exactly why institutions always separate out those functions). But then there's the 1-in-30 sociopath for whom it's "a great opportunity to legally kill a person".
I suppose you might compare to subway service in NYC, moving people around in tubes. Originally built & run privately, later turned into a government service.
This is like, the most clear and rational explanation I've ever seen written down. Thank you for that. You'll get flamed by the jingoists but it's truly a breath of fresh air.
Other people have mentioned the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks (1975), the single most important book in software management. But to be perhaps a little more clear, when someone says "Tech Surge", this is what someone with a clue needs to scream in their face until they get it, Brooks's Law:
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
No, no, taking inspiration from how well the "send freed slaves back to Liberia" movement worked in the 1800's, the immigration-insane are queuing up to do something like all over again in the 21st century.
"Of course history repeats itself. Motherfuckers don't listen."
My impression is that the Facebook system, for all its corporate might, is a nigh baling-twine-and-duct-taped mishmash of servers with unpredictable sets of code in them. Partly this is due to my discovery that sometimes your post history fails to be included in a downloaded archive (link). At the time, it was working for some people but not for others. It had worked for me in the past, then stopped, then restarted later on. A Facebook worker in the comments actually asked around and said the feature was supposed to still be there, and someone should be fixing it. But how on earth would part of a downloaded archive just entirely go missing, including the link in the index page? The only way I can parse that is that different servers are running different code and features in unpredictable ways, sometimes changing for part of the client population and not others.
"You might also note that most real Tea Party folks agree that we spend too much on the military - on the waste, that is."
So Tea Party folks generally think that the U.S. spending about as much as the rest of the world combined on the military (waste excluded) is a sane thing to do? No sale.
"12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;"
The founders were almost uniformly against a standing army. James Madison at the Constitutional Convention in 1787:
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty... The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
"The only solution is to kill all the pork in one swipe. Most people will give up their own slice, as long as everyone else does the same simultaneously."
Total and complete lunacy. Do you have a survey that suggests any such thing? Do you have any historical example where such a thing was accomplished (barring violent conquest of a country)? This is the point of fantasy-land where supposedly educated Tea Partiers leave me agog.
Well, we now know that the NSA has been secretly and illegally handing off intelligence to other agencies (SOD, DEA, IRS, etc.) for years, telling them to cover it up for court cases via a process called "parallel construction". So it would be completely within their established modus operandi.
"I hope so, I don't know why so many people heard of one study, which was proved false, and not the others which disproved it."
This is what Marc-Auguste Pictet called "a secret taste for marvels" (~1800)
"So-called extraordinary events always split into two extremes naturalists who have not witnessed them: those who believe blindly and those who do not believe at all. The latter have always in mind the story of the golden goose; if the facts lie slightly beyond the limits of their knowledge, they relegate them immediately to fables. The former have a secret taste for marvels because they seem to expand Nature; they use their imagination with pleasure to find explanations. To remain doubtful is given to naturalists who keep a middle path between the two extremes. They calmly examine facts; they refer to logic for help; they discuss probabilities; they do not scoff at anything, not even errors, because they serve at least the history of the human mind; finally, they report rather than judge; they rarely decide unless they have good evidence." [link]
"As the article says they tested 32 hand prints, and 24 handprints were female, with the algorithm determining if the handprints belonged to a male or female painter having an accuracy of 60%."
60% accuracy for the modern sample, not the research sample. FTA:
Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn't especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow's modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy. Luckily for Snow, that wasn't a problem for the analysis of the prehistoric handprints. As it turned out—much to his surprise—the hands in the caves were much more sexually dimorphic than modern hands, meaning that there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice link. Fascinating how they cream themselves for 2,000 words on the technical challenges they overcame to break into a system not meant for that, but only 3 short sentences that privacy is fine, they're serious, see this link. (At least until uproar made them add the italicized part at the end.) Very telling.
They don't care about admitting the evidence in court. They just want to see the names and fire/retaliate against those people internally. Mission accomplished.
What the hell are you smoking? Seriously.
See, this is why any kind of conservation efforts will fail in the long-term; humanity will, in the end, strip the face of the planet entirely bare. When things get a little tough we'll always raze a forest, mountain, or species to feed ourselves and our kids for a couple months longer. Broadly similar to personal data at a company: no matter what promises they made early on, when the company starts to go down the drain they'll whore out that data in a last-ditch attempt at monetization of everything they have.
"Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government."
You guys who say this have to realize that all of this belligerent surveillance winds up targeted squarely at the heads of American citizens at home. The security apparatus does have one quasi-legitimate problem with their current mission -- If the idea is to tap all of the world's communications all the time, on the Internet, packets are not tagged with geographic or political-state indicators. So the only solution, really, is to suck up every packet, American and non-American alike, which is what they are now doing.
With Internet packet switching, the only way for Americans to expect communication privacy rights is for everyone in the world to have communication privacy rights. Surveilling everyone means surveilling all Americans, all the time. Do you really want that?
America is fundamentally punitive and violent. Same reason gun massacres every couple weeks make no impact, the highest proportion of people in prison for any country in the world makes no impact, military expenditures equal to the rest of the world combined makes no impact. Perhaps all empires come to be like that.
Of course, to you and me that's equivalent to "you might as well just ban executions" (which is exactly why institutions always separate out those functions). But then there's the 1-in-30 sociopath for whom it's "a great opportunity to legally kill a person".
I suppose you might compare to subway service in NYC, moving people around in tubes. Originally built & run privately, later turned into a government service.
It does lend credence to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
It's like a Catholic catechism. No matter what data is presented, win loss or draw, it's evidence of how efficient the free market is. Well done.
This is solid and rational. Mod this up.
This is like, the most clear and rational explanation I've ever seen written down. Thank you for that. You'll get flamed by the jingoists but it's truly a breath of fresh air.
"The point is, your argument works for government licensing & regulation of speech as well."
Yes, the 1st Amendment and all other amendments that include the phrase "well-regulated".
Oh, wait....
Other people have mentioned the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks (1975), the single most important book in software management. But to be perhaps a little more clear, when someone says "Tech Surge", this is what someone with a clue needs to scream in their face until they get it, Brooks's Law:
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
Too sensible. Shit like that is what triggers the assheads to shut down the government.
That smells like horseshit. Put some numbers on those extraordinary claims, and [Citation needed].
No, no, taking inspiration from how well the "send freed slaves back to Liberia" movement worked in the 1800's, the immigration-insane are queuing up to do something like all over again in the 21st century.
"Of course history repeats itself. Motherfuckers don't listen."
My impression is that the Facebook system, for all its corporate might, is a nigh baling-twine-and-duct-taped mishmash of servers with unpredictable sets of code in them. Partly this is due to my discovery that sometimes your post history fails to be included in a downloaded archive (link). At the time, it was working for some people but not for others. It had worked for me in the past, then stopped, then restarted later on. A Facebook worker in the comments actually asked around and said the feature was supposed to still be there, and someone should be fixing it. But how on earth would part of a downloaded archive just entirely go missing, including the link in the index page? The only way I can parse that is that different servers are running different code and features in unpredictable ways, sometimes changing for part of the client population and not others.
"You might also note that most real Tea Party folks agree that we spend too much on the military - on the waste, that is."
So Tea Party folks generally think that the U.S. spending about as much as the rest of the world combined on the military (waste excluded) is a sane thing to do? No sale.
Let's look at that text:
"12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;"
The founders were almost uniformly against a standing army. James Madison at the Constitutional Convention in 1787:
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty... The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24671
"The only solution is to kill all the pork in one swipe. Most people will give up their own slice, as long as everyone else does the same simultaneously."
Total and complete lunacy. Do you have a survey that suggests any such thing? Do you have any historical example where such a thing was accomplished (barring violent conquest of a country)? This is the point of fantasy-land where supposedly educated Tea Partiers leave me agog.
Well, we now know that the NSA has been secretly and illegally handing off intelligence to other agencies (SOD, DEA, IRS, etc.) for years, telling them to cover it up for court cases via a process called "parallel construction". So it would be completely within their established modus operandi.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805
Practically only Slahdotters ever think of technologically-targeted ads as a good thing. In polls, nearly 70% of the public oppose such practices:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/12/privacy-do-not-track-ads-internet-gallup-poll.html
"I hope so, I don't know why so many people heard of one study, which was proved false, and not the others which disproved it."
This is what Marc-Auguste Pictet called "a secret taste for marvels" (~1800)
"So-called extraordinary events always split into two extremes naturalists who have not witnessed them: those who believe blindly and those who do not believe at all. The latter have always in mind the story of the golden goose; if the facts lie slightly beyond the limits of their knowledge, they relegate them immediately to fables. The former have a secret taste for marvels because they seem to expand Nature; they use their imagination with pleasure to find explanations. To remain doubtful is given to naturalists who keep a middle path between the two extremes. They calmly examine facts; they refer to logic for help; they discuss probabilities; they do not scoff at anything, not even errors, because they serve at least the history of the human mind; finally, they report rather than judge; they rarely decide unless they have good evidence." [link]
"As the article says they tested 32 hand prints, and 24 handprints were female, with the algorithm determining if the handprints belonged to a male or female painter having an accuracy of 60%."
60% accuracy for the modern sample, not the research sample. FTA:
Because there is a lot of overlap between men and women, however, the algorithm wasn't especially precise: It predicted the sex of Snow's modern sample with about 60 percent accuracy. Luckily for Snow, that wasn't a problem for the analysis of the prehistoric handprints. As it turned out—much to his surprise—the hands in the caves were much more sexually dimorphic than modern hands, meaning that there was little overlap in the various hand measurements.