More than that, its like a marriage between traditional blackmail and much more subtle consumer advertising pressure, involving detailed psychological profiles that would make both the Stasi and Edward Bernays look like Boyscouts. They have the machinery and algorithms to sample and subtly nudge you hundreds of times each day, even to get your associates to help without realizing.
You think getting TV-watching children to scream bloody murder to get a toy or a treat or a trip was bad... At least people could tell the manipulation was going on. We could plainly see the cause and effect of the advertising. This new paradigm is far more insidious.
People who choose Firefox OS instead of Android, iOS, etc. and want their apps available on other machines too.
The problem with this is the "apps" are mostly websites where you don't get to see the URL and you're treated like a big, fat dummy in other ways too. Mozilla are hopping on Apple's anti-browser bandwagon.
An Internet where people can't be trusted or bothered to enter a URL on their own would be no real Internet at all. It means that the semantics of *who* you are dealing with don't matter nearly as much as the middlemen and their enticing trails of pretty icons. It's IdiocracyNet.
I was going to donate to Mozilla this year, but I decided instead that someone there really needs to get a clue first. The flash-related memory leaks were fixed for a little while in V10, and then came back (and still back after six more iterations). They added a security layer to Add-on downloads and updates... but instead of using GPG like they should have, they based it on CAs (PKI) which have big security issues and so is practically an invitation for abusive governments and more resourceful criminals to MITM malware into our systems.
Mozilla need to start demonstrating real leadership and deep understanding of emerging problems or else be prepared to have their asses forked.
Do you have any pointers for someone who is romantically involved with a person who claims to love science, but who can't tell the difference between spirituality dressed up in quantum mechanics terminology (as seen in the movie "What the bleep?") and a physics show on the Science Channel? (Admittedly, the latter indulges in a lot of vague, breathless descriptions of some out-there theories.) Over time I watched a person that was close to me get drawn into the Ramtha cult via "scientific" seminars on Sacred Geometry and Crystal Geology, and it was one of the main reasons we eventually broke-up. I keep thinking I should have said or done something that would have led to a realization or A-ha moment, but my talk about pseudoscience didn't get through.
Do you think humanism (a set of values that incorporates atheism and agnosticism) is a worthwhile alternative to religion? Or is it preferable to rally around the mere lack of religion/superstition as a shared identity, as some "positive atheists" are trying to do lately? The latter seems like a poor fit for building a sense of community to me, and I'm perplexed as to why so many younger, outspoken atheists are omitting explicit mention of a more holistic world view from their advocacy.
Given that humans have never lived on (hence not adapted to) an Earth that is 6C warmer than the baseline temperature, what do you think about our chances as a species to survive conditions that climatologists are saying we may be facing in less than a century?
Though it would be interesting to also comment on the FOSS desktop and "Desktop Linux" movement in general vs. Android's relative success.
My own thinking is that the people who made the emergence of UserLinux or a less amorphous "Desktop Linux" impossible seem to have aged and not migrated to the mobile space as a dominant force. There was an unhealthy collusion between hacker and sysadmin cultures that sort of went to war with concepts that are central to personal computing:
Making interface commitments to novice users (e.g. standard GUI) and a defacto definition of "operation system" that Apple and Microsoft expanded to include GUIs. (Unfortunately, hackers are much more concerned with impressing -- and committing to -- other tech experts like themselves.)
Treating app developers as an esteemed part of the ecosystem and committing to interfaces that would allow them to easily target and distribute to desktops -- The goal being to make it easy for app developers to attract end users, with the 'platform' being a rich, accessible and familiar meeting ground for the two parties and preferably with zero middle-men (i.e. repository managers) getting between them.
Vertical integration: a tradition of making powerful/complex functionality standard and UI-accessible
Drawing a clear circle around stuff that is always expected to be present as opposed to stuff that is considered optional (GUIs and features that usually came with them were always in a sort of limbo in this respect, usually and unhelpfully referred to as "userspace applications" by hardcore hackers / system coders)
The expectation that consumer hardware is designed as a whole computer model to work with certain software (i.e. merely adding support for some large number of components is a scattershot and insufficient way to support PC hardware).
I would be honored if Bruce would expand the scope on what makes or breaks an open source platform and perhaps reply to my interpretation of what has held FOSS back on the desktop.
I would also like to hear his ideas on what could remedy the situation: Should the Linux Foundation provide more leadership? Make LSB Desktop more specific? Provide a comprehensive hardware compatibility list? Or should we wait for a major corporation like Google to make a push with hardware OEMs?
By dismissing your request for citation they are also implying that no one could find this subject genuinely interesting, which IMO says more about the person who dismissed you (i.e. it is they who don't particularly care except to serve up their usual cheap batch of anti-intellectual BS).
Its been while since I used Cert Patrol, but I don't think a user would necessarily realize a MITM was happening because it generates so many alerts for legit/mundane cert changes. I stopped using it around the time I realized the CA trust model is fundamentally broken.
The bogus cert you mention got detected because it went into circulation... But having a CA participate in "lawful intercept" against a handful of targeted individuals at a time (per domain) carries far less risk of being detected.
It is fat (and wasteful) and much of that excess comes straight from Muslim countries that have been attacked repeatedly on the flimsiest pretexts (i.e. it is stolen).
Take away that gluttonous windfall and there is no evidence that the 'nice' Christian teachings would prevent them from reverting to savagery that made Muslim exploits look like a Teletubbies episode.
This is why I think your whole "But we're superior" post is a load of BS. Christian morality only looks passable from inside its own insular navel-gazing.
Science can tell you exactly how to totally enslave and violate every freedom people have, kill huge numbers of people and so on. All of this is perfectly in line with "science". science just tells you whats possible. It does not tell you whats right and wrong.
Actually, evolution increasingly helps explain why people gravitate toward a sense of morality. But in the process it shows us things that put certain aspects of religion in a negative light: Christianity would be no exception.
And its not a longevity thing but a quality of eyesight thing. I know people who drink lots of coffee and got this condition before they hit middle age (I think stress had something to do with it, but the excess coffee might have hurt them). It will be interesting to see if future studies agree with this paper.
In their drive for the sensational, they've stumbled upon the old, highly unethical "snuff video" genre. I wonder if their ex-commentator/madman Glen Beck would approve.
Now its out on the Internet. I sense a new angle for net censorship coming in 3...2...1...
Installed carpet with substantial padding underneath also helps.
Alternatively, you could buy some large vertical blinds and glue soundproofing material to the back. If the home soundproofing material isn't thin enough for blinds, the automobile sound insulation will be. If you need to hide the appearance of materials, glue on loosely woven fabric, not paper or other sound-reflecting materials.
Someone else suggested using a sound dampening room divider, and that's a good idea if your room is big enough. That will add sound-dampening surface area to your space.
It is the UI, partly. When you do phone support for a top-tier GUI app on Linux as I have, the lack of consistency is a big aggravating factor. It wastes a lot of time, effort and customer good will. And when many of those customers are also developers, you see the realization sinking in that Linux is a lousy target for writing a GUI application. You see them switching to Windows.
Hell Dell has to run their own fricking repo even though they only offer 8 Ubuntu models! Its THAT level of hassle that keeps little guys like me from supporting Linux, not the UIs.
Well then you shouldn't try going into smartphones because that is similar to the update model for phones. Dell taking ownership of hardware compatibility issues is probably the motivation for having it that way.
Frankly, I think the whole 'distro-repository' thing is a miasma on the desktop. Repositories and package managers, as Linux distros have implemented them, ought to be restricted to managing the core OS+GUI. And keep them the hell away from managing user-facing applications, which should not get caught up in spider-web-like dependency relationships. Apps need a separate, cleaner system for distribution that is also very friendly to ISVs.
Of course, hardware compatibility also figures large in how well Linux fares with the average user. Most Linux desktops are not distributed by a hardware vendor, but OS X, Windows and Android are.
Torvalds and the rest of the Linux kernel project somehow give a very good appearance of trying to accommodate various hardware, but in reality they are accommodating that hardware under conditions geared toward sysadmin and hacker types so they don't anticipate barriers and snags that the rest of the people may encounter. They leave it to the distros, which are so disconnect from OEMs they might as well be on another planet.
In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users.
There is money in supporting Mac and Windows desktops.
A main reason for the difference is that supporting "Linux Desktop" users is much less logistically feasible due to its amorphous nature. You have to support multiple UIs per distro, so there is enormous pressure to avoid the GUI and guide users to the CLI, and the CLI feels very unfriendly to users.
What also feels unfriendly and confusing to users is that they can have a few friends, family or coworkers who "switched to Linux too!" And that seems neat and reassuring until the moment you realize their systems look and interact very differently from the Linux system you are trying to get used to.
Advertising == spyware in this day and age, so yes I am finished with Ubuntu. This sort of thing seemed OK when Lindows was around, because there was still some pretense of decency and respect for privacy back then. Now it's all about no-holds-barred surveillance with the extra dollop of whipped cream and double-cherry on top in the form of warrant-less demands for data from the government.
Blocking ads used to be about readability; getting rid of the writhing, flashing, insane pools of upchuck that also brought many systems to a crawl and then became a prime vector for malware infection. It used to involve scraping the crud out of Windows, or using Ablock, or switching to Linux. Now it means switching distros.
It is easy to defeat most counter-intelligence techniques, including yours.
For each piece of bad data you give Facebook, you also give them plenty of good pieces of data (your IP-address, the timing difference between the keys when you type something, which ciphers your browser support, etc etc). This means that your strategy gives them more information than it pollutes, and hence you are still helping Facebook. By inviting your friends into this operation of yours you are increasing their visibility as well by providing Facebook with the information that your friends would either like to be more anonymous or that they like to cause problems (which can be interpreted by some people to mean "potential criminal").
Either you learn how to do CI properly, or you block every IP-address used by Facebook (and those of all similar companies) in your firewall.
By the way, if your first impulse to learn more about CI is to google for it, you should stick to the firewall plan...
In addition to what AC said, analysts have statistical methods to weed out noise, outliers and just plain liars. You are only raising the bar for them ever so slightly so they have to include well-worn filtering techniques within their codebase.
...given the number of automatic SPAM appeals to join Facebook that service generates.
PS: I'm glad this story made you uncomfortable enough about your insidious 'investment' in FB to lash back. FB must really be pouring on the charm these days for its critics to be labeled 'dehumanizing'. LOL!
Slashdot Mirror
As a general rule, use VPN into your home or business for any/all Internet activity... even if you don't want to use anonymity tools like Tor.
The parent is right that putting something like Tor on a mobile device doesn't make a lot of sense.
More than that, its like a marriage between traditional blackmail and much more subtle consumer advertising pressure, involving detailed psychological profiles that would make both the Stasi and Edward Bernays look like Boyscouts. They have the machinery and algorithms to sample and subtly nudge you hundreds of times each day, even to get your associates to help without realizing.
You think getting TV-watching children to scream bloody murder to get a toy or a treat or a trip was bad... At least people could tell the manipulation was going on. We could plainly see the cause and effect of the advertising. This new paradigm is far more insidious.
People who choose Firefox OS instead of Android, iOS, etc. and want their apps available on other machines too.
The problem with this is the "apps" are mostly websites where you don't get to see the URL and you're treated like a big, fat dummy in other ways too. Mozilla are hopping on Apple's anti-browser bandwagon.
An Internet where people can't be trusted or bothered to enter a URL on their own would be no real Internet at all. It means that the semantics of *who* you are dealing with don't matter nearly as much as the middlemen and their enticing trails of pretty icons. It's IdiocracyNet.
I was going to donate to Mozilla this year, but I decided instead that someone there really needs to get a clue first. The flash-related memory leaks were fixed for a little while in V10, and then came back (and still back after six more iterations). They added a security layer to Add-on downloads and updates... but instead of using GPG like they should have, they based it on CAs (PKI) which have big security issues and so is practically an invitation for abusive governments and more resourceful criminals to MITM malware into our systems.
Mozilla need to start demonstrating real leadership and deep understanding of emerging problems or else be prepared to have their asses forked.
Otherwise, efficient technical support is impossible. Techs must have confidence guiding people through all aspects of the GUI.
Do you have any pointers for someone who is romantically involved with a person who claims to love science, but who can't tell the difference between spirituality dressed up in quantum mechanics terminology (as seen in the movie "What the bleep?") and a physics show on the Science Channel? (Admittedly, the latter indulges in a lot of vague, breathless descriptions of some out-there theories.) Over time I watched a person that was close to me get drawn into the Ramtha cult via "scientific" seminars on Sacred Geometry and Crystal Geology, and it was one of the main reasons we eventually broke-up. I keep thinking I should have said or done something that would have led to a realization or A-ha moment, but my talk about pseudoscience didn't get through.
Do you think humanism (a set of values that incorporates atheism and agnosticism) is a worthwhile alternative to religion? Or is it preferable to rally around the mere lack of religion/superstition as a shared identity, as some "positive atheists" are trying to do lately? The latter seems like a poor fit for building a sense of community to me, and I'm perplexed as to why so many younger, outspoken atheists are omitting explicit mention of a more holistic world view from their advocacy.
Given that humans have never lived on (hence not adapted to) an Earth that is 6C warmer than the baseline temperature, what do you think about our chances as a species to survive conditions that climatologists are saying we may be facing in less than a century?
What consumer-oriented FOSS applications do you consider to have a broad appeal and to be highly successful? Firefox? LibreOffice? Others?
Are there any you think could be much more popular with some tweaking?
Are there any hidden gems we should know about?
Though it would be interesting to also comment on the FOSS desktop and "Desktop Linux" movement in general vs. Android's relative success.
My own thinking is that the people who made the emergence of UserLinux or a less amorphous "Desktop Linux" impossible seem to have aged and not migrated to the mobile space as a dominant force. There was an unhealthy collusion between hacker and sysadmin cultures that sort of went to war with concepts that are central to personal computing:
I would be honored if Bruce would expand the scope on what makes or breaks an open source platform and perhaps reply to my interpretation of what has held FOSS back on the desktop.
I would also like to hear his ideas on what could remedy the situation: Should the Linux Foundation provide more leadership? Make LSB Desktop more specific? Provide a comprehensive hardware compatibility list? Or should we wait for a major corporation like Google to make a push with hardware OEMs?
By dismissing your request for citation they are also implying that no one could find this subject genuinely interesting, which IMO says more about the person who dismissed you (i.e. it is they who don't particularly care except to serve up their usual cheap batch of anti-intellectual BS).
Its been while since I used Cert Patrol, but I don't think a user would necessarily realize a MITM was happening because it generates so many alerts for legit/mundane cert changes. I stopped using it around the time I realized the CA trust model is fundamentally broken.
The bogus cert you mention got detected because it went into circulation... But having a CA participate in "lawful intercept" against a handful of targeted individuals at a time (per domain) carries far less risk of being detected.
I think you just nailed it. That's where Apple is headed, and quickly.
It is fat (and wasteful) and much of that excess comes straight from Muslim countries that have been attacked repeatedly on the flimsiest pretexts (i.e. it is stolen).
Take away that gluttonous windfall and there is no evidence that the 'nice' Christian teachings would prevent them from reverting to savagery that made Muslim exploits look like a Teletubbies episode.
This is why I think your whole "But we're superior" post is a load of BS. Christian morality only looks passable from inside its own insular navel-gazing.
Actually, evolution increasingly helps explain why people gravitate toward a sense of morality. But in the process it shows us things that put certain aspects of religion in a negative light: Christianity would be no exception.
3 cups or more per day is bad for your eyes.
And its not a longevity thing but a quality of eyesight thing. I know people who drink lots of coffee and got this condition before they hit middle age (I think stress had something to do with it, but the excess coffee might have hurt them). It will be interesting to see if future studies agree with this paper.
It would be ironic for a proper new organization.
Fox News Climate Coverage 93% Wrong, Report Finds
Uh oh, Fox fanbois runnin' around with mod points...
It would be ironic for a proper new organization.
Fox News Climate Coverage 93% Wrong, Report Finds
In their drive for the sensational, they've stumbled upon the old, highly unethical "snuff video" genre. I wonder if their ex-commentator/madman Glen Beck would approve.
Now its out on the Internet. I sense a new angle for net censorship coming in 3...2...1...
to insulate against sound. Googling "sound insulation" will bring up relevant products and services.
Try putting soundproofing on your ceiling and then get some sound proof blinds like these: http://www.blindschalet.com/aqq-1580-soundproof-blinds.html
Installed carpet with substantial padding underneath also helps.
Alternatively, you could buy some large vertical blinds and glue soundproofing material to the back. If the home soundproofing material isn't thin enough for blinds, the automobile sound insulation will be. If you need to hide the appearance of materials, glue on loosely woven fabric, not paper or other sound-reflecting materials.
Someone else suggested using a sound dampening room divider, and that's a good idea if your room is big enough. That will add sound-dampening surface area to your space.
It is the UI, partly. When you do phone support for a top-tier GUI app on Linux as I have, the lack of consistency is a big aggravating factor. It wastes a lot of time, effort and customer good will. And when many of those customers are also developers, you see the realization sinking in that Linux is a lousy target for writing a GUI application. You see them switching to Windows.
Hell Dell has to run their own fricking repo even though they only offer 8 Ubuntu models! Its THAT level of hassle that keeps little guys like me from supporting Linux, not the UIs.
Well then you shouldn't try going into smartphones because that is similar to the update model for phones. Dell taking ownership of hardware compatibility issues is probably the motivation for having it that way.
Frankly, I think the whole 'distro-repository' thing is a miasma on the desktop. Repositories and package managers, as Linux distros have implemented them, ought to be restricted to managing the core OS+GUI. And keep them the hell away from managing user-facing applications, which should not get caught up in spider-web-like dependency relationships. Apps need a separate, cleaner system for distribution that is also very friendly to ISVs.
Of course, hardware compatibility also figures large in how well Linux fares with the average user. Most Linux desktops are not distributed by a hardware vendor, but OS X, Windows and Android are.
Torvalds and the rest of the Linux kernel project somehow give a very good appearance of trying to accommodate various hardware, but in reality they are accommodating that hardware under conditions geared toward sysadmin and hacker types so they don't anticipate barriers and snags that the rest of the people may encounter. They leave it to the distros, which are so disconnect from OEMs they might as well be on another planet.
Ever tried to run *any* RHEL-related distro on a Macbook? No, wait, don't do it unless you want to bake your CPU.
In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users.
There is money in supporting Mac and Windows desktops.
A main reason for the difference is that supporting "Linux Desktop" users is much less logistically feasible due to its amorphous nature. You have to support multiple UIs per distro, so there is enormous pressure to avoid the GUI and guide users to the CLI, and the CLI feels very unfriendly to users.
What also feels unfriendly and confusing to users is that they can have a few friends, family or coworkers who "switched to Linux too!" And that seems neat and reassuring until the moment you realize their systems look and interact very differently from the Linux system you are trying to get used to.
Advertising == spyware in this day and age, so yes I am finished with Ubuntu. This sort of thing seemed OK when Lindows was around, because there was still some pretense of decency and respect for privacy back then. Now it's all about no-holds-barred surveillance with the extra dollop of whipped cream and double-cherry on top in the form of warrant-less demands for data from the government.
Blocking ads used to be about readability; getting rid of the writhing, flashing, insane pools of upchuck that also brought many systems to a crawl and then became a prime vector for malware infection. It used to involve scraping the crud out of Windows, or using Ablock, or switching to Linux. Now it means switching distros.
It is easy to defeat most counter-intelligence techniques, including yours.
For each piece of bad data you give Facebook, you also give them plenty of good pieces of data (your IP-address, the timing difference between the keys when you type something, which ciphers your browser support, etc etc). This means that your strategy gives them more information than it pollutes, and hence you are still helping Facebook. By inviting your friends into this operation of yours you are increasing their visibility as well by providing Facebook with the information that your friends would either like to be more anonymous or that they like to cause problems (which can be interpreted by some people to mean "potential criminal").
Either you learn how to do CI properly, or you block every IP-address used by Facebook (and those of all similar companies) in your firewall.
By the way, if your first impulse to learn more about CI is to google for it, you should stick to the firewall plan...
In addition to what AC said, analysts have statistical methods to weed out noise, outliers and just plain liars. You are only raising the bar for them ever so slightly so they have to include well-worn filtering techniques within their codebase.
...given the number of automatic SPAM appeals to join Facebook that service generates.
PS: I'm glad this story made you uncomfortable enough about your insidious 'investment' in FB to lash back. FB must really be pouring on the charm these days for its critics to be labeled 'dehumanizing'. LOL!