Programming is a specialized field, guys. I know a lot of us are programmers, and yes I think courses should be offered in all middle and high schools so people who want to can learn more. But it is not for everyone -- it requires a fair amount of logical and critical thinking skills that public schools don't really cater to, as well as a decent knowledge of mathematics. Even more, it is basically learning an entirely new language. So yes, starting young is a good thing, but let's be honest: this is something most of the population simply can't be expected to do, and public schools are there to teach essential foundational skills, not specialized skills. That is what college is for.
Firstly, Microsoft has invalidated the cert (at least to my knowledge).
Your knowledge is incorrect. At the request of the Dutch government, Microsoft deliberately did NOT patch its systems from that country... until several weeks later when the government's request was made public and they retracted their request.
Secondly, it is not at all clear how moving to ipv6 tells the corporations to eat a bag of dicks
Perhaps not to you, but to the rest of us who have read the standard... end to end encryption means no man in the middle attacks, no certificate authorities, etc. Every organization has access to its own key in DNS, and if someone tries to replace it, anyone who has connected to it previously would know.
In other, unrelated news, a certificate authority was compromised and it's taken months before customers were able to protect themselves. Meanwhile, the government who profited from the breach continues to smile, wave, while Microsoft complies with its request to not invalidate its unethically-obtained certificates for its own citizens.
What's not news and should be: Why the hell we're not moving to ipv6 and telling these corporations to eat a bag of dicks, and our privacy and security is not for sale anymore, rather than just handing out free master keys to anyone with a big enough wallet or gun.
Okay, sooo... who's up for a mass individual filing of, oh, say, 20,000 lawsuits? we'll see how well that works when the courts choke to death on paperwork and reconsider that whole "class action" thing being allowed to be thrown out.
Q: How come all our labor got outsourced to 3rd world countries despite our significantly higher levels of modernization, efficiency, infrastructure, and technology?
A: Because it's cheaper to throw a thousand people at a problem that'll work for peanuts than purchase, install, and maintain a robot.... In short, there's no "rise" of robotic labor going on guys. On the contrary: The robots aren't competitive in a market where people work for cheap, no benefits, and there's (literally) billions of them that would jump at the chance to have the job of repetitive labor.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that Cisco had 12,900 employees that were doing things other than 'routing and switching, collaboration, virtualization, video, and... architecture.'"
We call those people 'managers' in other industries.
This is like supercharging a Pinto. Sure, it's the fastest a Pinto has ever gone, and maybe the highest RPM ever seen, but it's still a Pinto. AMD is two generations behind now on its fabrication facilities and chipset designs. Extreme overclocking is interesting, but hardly useful except as a PR stunt, unless they plan on selling liquid helium with every CPU purchase.
Go ahead and do that as the enemy - then please post results.
If it works, you think I'm going to tell you? For free? You must be new to this whole warfare thing. One of the rules is "Don't give anything away for free."
You know, the problem with all this cloaking stuff is... we're not fighting wars where it matters. Most of the people we're chasing around aren't in tanks, don't care much about tanks, and don't worry about it's infrared signature because their neighbors are like "holy f*ck! Do you hear the GIANT DIESEL-POWERED TANK coming?"
Tanks are a WWII holdover. We don't use them much anymore. We use fast armored personnel carriers that can survive an IED strike. We need tech that can spot snipers and control large sections of urban landscape where hostiles and non-combatants co-mingle and sometimes even co-habitate as well. The only way to spot them right now is either to wait for the bang (and we sure love those bangs), or drive around in a semi-truck with some backscatter x-ray equipment stuffed in the back that's busy giving the operators and innocent passerbys on the street cancer looking for hidden weapons. And yes, I think driving up and down streets filled with camels and rusted out cars in a state of the art armor-protected semi-truck is going to get noticed "Ah, they're looking for our guns again."
Company: We've rigged our software to phone home information so we can identify you as an individual and/or the company you work for... but don't worry, it's only to help them become "legitimate" customers.
The arguments in summary;
It's an invasion of privacy. Counter #1: "Then don't install it." a. Most people install the software they do because it does what they want it to, it has a familiar interface, and it is cost effective.
b. IP laws exist solely to create artificial markets and categories of consumers, which in turn increase the cost of entry into markets where IP is prevalent. China, as a developing country, would never develop as quickly, if at all, if it "went legit" and that is an intentional effect of intellectual property. It keeps rich people rich, and poor people poor.
I can buy a functional computer with the same capabilities that was top of the line 7 years ago for $35. I can't buy a commercial software license for just about anything at that price. A hundred years from now, that software license will still cost me the same, long after the hardware to run it is in a museum and even emulators for said hardware can't run on modern systems. This is not accidental.
Conclusion: For some lines of business, there is literally not a choice: You either use Product X or cease to exist. Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple are leaders in the area of vendor lock-in. Legality for many businesses is secondary to survivability. And in the third world, enforcing IP is a death sentence for economic development.
Counter #2: The company is doing something illegal. End User Licensing Agreements are actually quite legal, but mostly because nobody's had enough money to topple the businesses that write them. The majority of these EULAs are so restrictive that to use them only in the fashion prescribed by these contracts would make the software useless (or nearly so) for the purposes it is routinely used for. But... it's perfectly legal to sell something that is largely or totally useless, and invades your privacy as well.
I would suggest using a software firewall. They're designed to keep stuff from getting out more than in these days.
Damn you RIAA... Counter: facepalm* RIAA isn't interested in your software, they're interested in your music. And the MPAA isn't interested in either of those two, just movies. Know your enemy.
Just ignore them Because that's been so successful online. There was a time (it was called the 90s) when people thought the internet was anonymous, information would be free, and it would be the vehicle to promote democracy and free speech worldwide; And all these things would be impossible to stop. So when authorities started trying, people who were in a position to fight back did nothing out of arrogance that their opponent lacked the intelligence or resources to do so. Look how that turned out.
There's nothing you can do to fight them, so don't. There is in fact a lot you can do. For starters, chances are good that if you are reading this post you have the necessary skills to dissect a piece of software and disarm the bombs its developers have put in it, bypass or remove the mechanisms preventing portability and enforcing copy protection. They're enhanced by the fact that the majority of developers don't put their best effort into these schemes. They always leave a hole somewhere, maybe as a form of sabotage. Historical footnote: Sabotage used to be workers flinging their shoes into the machines to shut them down. These days, it's writing shitty code and leaving debug codes in the finished product, which is basically a big neon sign saying -- "Cut on dotted line here to remove protection."
Contrary to popular media, most of us who work in this industry know it's wrong and few people are willing to do anything more than go through the motions for a paycheck when they're contracted to do this kind of thing. Don't buy into the propaganda; Lots of people are on your side, they just can't say so.
It's not the government guys, at least not the cloak and dagger kind. They're too paranoid to let you know how much data they can store. They also don't want you to know that even with all that data, they're still only able to utilize a fraction of it. People are still going through WWII wire intercepts *today*. No, the problem in the intelligence community is making the data useful and organized as efficiently as possible, not collecting it.
That leaves only one real option: Scientific research. Look at how much data the Hadron Supercollider produces in a day...
this is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which basically makes it a Federal Crime to 'do anything we dont like, with a computer'.
Fair enough, but there is no way anyone can say Cisco is being hypocritical and "not taking responsibility" for the leak, when anyone who works security will say authentication credentials have to be secure or no matter what system is used. That's the purpose of credentials, after all; to allow access.
Best idea: Don't use DNS servers located in the United States.
I mean, at the rate our country's going, it won't be long before other countries just start walling us in. Not out. In. "Those 'mericans are craaaazy. They think they own this shit. Well, this here is mah router, and this here is mah website, and those yankee bastards can eat a bag of dicks."
Progress: It's gonna happen, whether Uncle Sam wants it or not.
What impact will this have on Verizon's legendary customer service?
It'll improve because during the interminably long hold times, more customers will solve the problem on their own, rather than be given the wrong answer.
In other, totally unrelated news, Verizon reported a 6.3% earnings jump from last year at this time. Of course, since Verizon has less free spending money and has invested in their hopelessly out of date network to remain competitive with the 3rd world... they decided to cut labor and give themselves raises for being so smart!
the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft
That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!
This could really only be a problem in the United States because there is such little competition in the market. In any market where true competition exists, a company that attempted to restrict access in a way that did not have a clear economic benefit or cost would slowly lose customers. Restricting access to certain websites or data could never work in a competitive marketplace. The only reason the United States has bandwidth caps is because of a lack of competition as well... But at least there is an underlying economic reason for the ISPs to do so.
Well yeah, but it's unlikely others will be able to match the level of stupidity displayed by making a statement on a website stating they don't have internet. I mean, certain customer service representatives, perhaps... like the kind that e-mail you your new password after you tell them you're locked out of your e-mail account. But it's unlikely they'd be able to find slashdot if you gave them the name and set google as their homepage, so YMMV.
In other news, embedding executable code into data files still considered stupid. Researchers continue to emphasize that executable code should only exist in (wait for it) -- executable files!
Now, we all understand that Intel and Microsoft had drunken money sex one evening and out of that relationship DOS was born... a retarded child that couldn't tell the difference between its food (the data) and the plate (executable code), and regularly ate both.
I'm just wondering why we're still entertaining this 'precious snowflake' and it's plate-eating habits twenty years on. Didn't we learn from the retarded kid that isolating data from executable code from the hardware level up was the Right Thing?
Sir, we're going to have to ask you to leave. Turn in your man card at the front office. You can pick it up on monday at the Men's Rules Enforcement Department off 7th street. You'll need to explain to them why you, as a heterosexual male, asked to replace a hot female actress with a pudgy male one. Depending on your answer, there may be a fine.
Hypothetically, I'd tell them to stop worrying about SSL and get busy rolling out IPv6 where this problem (and several other pressing issues) are solved. But that's because I have an engineering mindset, not a committee one. The answer to "Is this technology out of date or poorly implimented?" is universally yes in my world. Nobody gets it right, and it's a bloody miracle the internet continues to work in spite of its own massive structural deficits.
Slashdot Mirror
Programming is a specialized field, guys. I know a lot of us are programmers, and yes I think courses should be offered in all middle and high schools so people who want to can learn more. But it is not for everyone -- it requires a fair amount of logical and critical thinking skills that public schools don't really cater to, as well as a decent knowledge of mathematics. Even more, it is basically learning an entirely new language. So yes, starting young is a good thing, but let's be honest: this is something most of the population simply can't be expected to do, and public schools are there to teach essential foundational skills, not specialized skills. That is what college is for.
Wasn't this law unanimously passed in the first place? Now that the stupidity of it has been unanimously agreed upon, they unanimously repeal it?
Firstly, Microsoft has invalidated the cert (at least to my knowledge).
Your knowledge is incorrect. At the request of the Dutch government, Microsoft deliberately did NOT patch its systems from that country... until several weeks later when the government's request was made public and they retracted their request.
Secondly, it is not at all clear how moving to ipv6 tells the corporations to eat a bag of dicks
Perhaps not to you, but to the rest of us who have read the standard... end to end encryption means no man in the middle attacks, no certificate authorities, etc. Every organization has access to its own key in DNS, and if someone tries to replace it, anyone who has connected to it previously would know.
In other, unrelated news, a certificate authority was compromised and it's taken months before customers were able to protect themselves. Meanwhile, the government who profited from the breach continues to smile, wave, while Microsoft complies with its request to not invalidate its unethically-obtained certificates for its own citizens.
What's not news and should be: Why the hell we're not moving to ipv6 and telling these corporations to eat a bag of dicks, and our privacy and security is not for sale anymore, rather than just handing out free master keys to anyone with a big enough wallet or gun.
Okay, sooo... who's up for a mass individual filing of, oh, say, 20,000 lawsuits? we'll see how well that works when the courts choke to death on paperwork and reconsider that whole "class action" thing being allowed to be thrown out.
Q: How come all our labor got outsourced to 3rd world countries despite our significantly higher levels of modernization, efficiency, infrastructure, and technology?
A: Because it's cheaper to throw a thousand people at a problem that'll work for peanuts than purchase, install, and maintain a robot. ... In short, there's no "rise" of robotic labor going on guys. On the contrary: The robots aren't competitive in a market where people work for cheap, no benefits, and there's (literally) billions of them that would jump at the chance to have the job of repetitive labor.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that Cisco had 12,900 employees that were doing things other than 'routing and switching, collaboration, virtualization, video, and ... architecture.'"
We call those people 'managers' in other industries.
This is like supercharging a Pinto. Sure, it's the fastest a Pinto has ever gone, and maybe the highest RPM ever seen, but it's still a Pinto. AMD is two generations behind now on its fabrication facilities and chipset designs. Extreme overclocking is interesting, but hardly useful except as a PR stunt, unless they plan on selling liquid helium with every CPU purchase.
I don't know what the solution is, but the current system definitely resembles "paying for protection".
Heeey, that's a nice computer you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it. -- Your copy of Norton Antivirus.
Nope. No similarities here at all.
Go ahead and do that as the enemy - then please post results.
If it works, you think I'm going to tell you? For free? You must be new to this whole warfare thing. One of the rules is "Don't give anything away for free."
You know, the problem with all this cloaking stuff is... we're not fighting wars where it matters. Most of the people we're chasing around aren't in tanks, don't care much about tanks, and don't worry about it's infrared signature because their neighbors are like "holy f*ck! Do you hear the GIANT DIESEL-POWERED TANK coming?"
Tanks are a WWII holdover. We don't use them much anymore. We use fast armored personnel carriers that can survive an IED strike. We need tech that can spot snipers and control large sections of urban landscape where hostiles and non-combatants co-mingle and sometimes even co-habitate as well. The only way to spot them right now is either to wait for the bang (and we sure love those bangs), or drive around in a semi-truck with some backscatter x-ray equipment stuffed in the back that's busy giving the operators and innocent passerbys on the street cancer looking for hidden weapons. And yes, I think driving up and down streets filled with camels and rusted out cars in a state of the art armor-protected semi-truck is going to get noticed "Ah, they're looking for our guns again."
Company: We've rigged our software to phone home information so we can identify you as an individual and/or the company you work for... but don't worry, it's only to help them become "legitimate" customers.
The arguments in summary;
It's an invasion of privacy.
Counter #1: "Then don't install it."
a. Most people install the software they do because it does what they want it to, it has a familiar interface, and it is cost effective.
b. IP laws exist solely to create artificial markets and categories of consumers, which in turn increase the cost of entry into markets where IP is prevalent. China, as a developing country, would never develop as quickly, if at all, if it "went legit" and that is an intentional effect of intellectual property. It keeps rich people rich, and poor people poor.
I can buy a functional computer with the same capabilities that was top of the line 7 years ago for $35. I can't buy a commercial software license for just about anything at that price. A hundred years from now, that software license will still cost me the same, long after the hardware to run it is in a museum and even emulators for said hardware can't run on modern systems. This is not accidental.
Conclusion: For some lines of business, there is literally not a choice: You either use Product X or cease to exist. Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple are leaders in the area of vendor lock-in. Legality for many businesses is secondary to survivability. And in the third world, enforcing IP is a death sentence for economic development.
Counter #2: The company is doing something illegal.
End User Licensing Agreements are actually quite legal, but mostly because nobody's had enough money to topple the businesses that write them. The majority of these EULAs are so restrictive that to use them only in the fashion prescribed by these contracts would make the software useless (or nearly so) for the purposes it is routinely used for. But... it's perfectly legal to sell something that is largely or totally useless, and invades your privacy as well.
I would suggest using a software firewall. They're designed to keep stuff from getting out more than in these days.
Damn you RIAA...
Counter: facepalm* RIAA isn't interested in your software, they're interested in your music. And the MPAA isn't interested in either of those two, just movies. Know your enemy.
Just ignore them
Because that's been so successful online. There was a time (it was called the 90s) when people thought the internet was anonymous, information would be free, and it would be the vehicle to promote democracy and free speech worldwide; And all these things would be impossible to stop. So when authorities started trying, people who were in a position to fight back did nothing out of arrogance that their opponent lacked the intelligence or resources to do so. Look how that turned out.
There's nothing you can do to fight them, so don't.
There is in fact a lot you can do. For starters, chances are good that if you are reading this post you have the necessary skills to dissect a piece of software and disarm the bombs its developers have put in it, bypass or remove the mechanisms preventing portability and enforcing copy protection. They're enhanced by the fact that the majority of developers don't put their best effort into these schemes. They always leave a hole somewhere, maybe as a form of sabotage. Historical footnote: Sabotage used to be workers flinging their shoes into the machines to shut them down. These days, it's writing shitty code and leaving debug codes in the finished product, which is basically a big neon sign saying -- "Cut on dotted line here to remove protection."
Contrary to popular media, most of us who work in this industry know it's wrong and few people are willing to do anything more than go through the motions for a paycheck when they're contracted to do this kind of thing. Don't buy into the propaganda; Lots of people are on your side, they just can't say so.
Warning: Blatantly stereotyped joke ahead. The easily offended should stop reading now.
Okay, the rest of you: This is America! Forget shoes, we need to attach these things to forks!
It's not the government guys, at least not the cloak and dagger kind. They're too paranoid to let you know how much data they can store. They also don't want you to know that even with all that data, they're still only able to utilize a fraction of it. People are still going through WWII wire intercepts *today*. No, the problem in the intelligence community is making the data useful and organized as efficiently as possible, not collecting it.
That leaves only one real option: Scientific research. Look at how much data the Hadron Supercollider produces in a day. ..
Sure my client's BES could be hacked with an image file, but the image is of a really hot chick, so it's a fair trade.
That's pretty sexist. Only about half the population would appreciate that.
this is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which basically makes it a Federal Crime to 'do anything we dont like, with a computer'.
Fair enough, but there is no way anyone can say Cisco is being hypocritical and "not taking responsibility" for the leak, when anyone who works security will say authentication credentials have to be secure or no matter what system is used. That's the purpose of credentials, after all; to allow access.
Best idea: Don't use DNS servers located in the United States.
I mean, at the rate our country's going, it won't be long before other countries just start walling us in. Not out. In. "Those 'mericans are craaaazy. They think they own this shit. Well, this here is mah router, and this here is mah website, and those yankee bastards can eat a bag of dicks."
Progress: It's gonna happen, whether Uncle Sam wants it or not.
What impact will this have on Verizon's legendary customer service?
It'll improve because during the interminably long hold times, more customers will solve the problem on their own, rather than be given the wrong answer.
In other, totally unrelated news, Verizon reported a 6.3% earnings jump from last year at this time. Of course, since Verizon has less free spending money and has invested in their hopelessly out of date network to remain competitive with the 3rd world... they decided to cut labor and give themselves raises for being so smart!
the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft
That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!
This could really only be a problem in the United States because there is such little competition in the market. In any market where true competition exists, a company that attempted to restrict access in a way that did not have a clear economic benefit or cost would slowly lose customers. Restricting access to certain websites or data could never work in a competitive marketplace. The only reason the United States has bandwidth caps is because of a lack of competition as well... But at least there is an underlying economic reason for the ISPs to do so.
If you did, then others can.
Well yeah, but it's unlikely others will be able to match the level of stupidity displayed by making a statement on a website stating they don't have internet. I mean, certain customer service representatives, perhaps... like the kind that e-mail you your new password after you tell them you're locked out of your e-mail account. But it's unlikely they'd be able to find slashdot if you gave them the name and set google as their homepage, so YMMV.
In other news, embedding executable code into data files still considered stupid. Researchers continue to emphasize that executable code should only exist in (wait for it) -- executable files!
Now, we all understand that Intel and Microsoft had drunken money sex one evening and out of that relationship DOS was born... a retarded child that couldn't tell the difference between its food (the data) and the plate (executable code), and regularly ate both.
I'm just wondering why we're still entertaining this 'precious snowflake' and it's plate-eating habits twenty years on. Didn't we learn from the retarded kid that isolating data from executable code from the hardware level up was the Right Thing?
"Starbuck should be a dude"
Sir, we're going to have to ask you to leave. Turn in your man card at the front office. You can pick it up on monday at the Men's Rules Enforcement Department off 7th street. You'll need to explain to them why you, as a heterosexual male, asked to replace a hot female actress with a pudgy male one. Depending on your answer, there may be a fine.
Thank You,
The Internetz
Hypothetically, I'd tell them to stop worrying about SSL and get busy rolling out IPv6 where this problem (and several other pressing issues) are solved. But that's because I have an engineering mindset, not a committee one. The answer to "Is this technology out of date or poorly implimented?" is universally yes in my world. Nobody gets it right, and it's a bloody miracle the internet continues to work in spite of its own massive structural deficits.