Given all the snark on Slashdot about the sorry state of modern journalism, it is well worth a read to see one organization that got it right.
And that's where you biffed it. The Guardian is as heavily biased as Fox News is. But you tend not to see biases towards things you agree with as clearly as things you disagree with, so I forgive your temporary bout of insanity in making that statement. Maybe they got this one instance right, maybe not. An entire slashdot thread has been created just so we can scream at, er, I mean, debate, the veracity of that statement. But... the Guardian is biased. Sorry man.
Unlike most other commodities that businesses seek to control and restrict the supply thereof (such as stocks), processing power is expected to keep going up per Moore's Law for several years yet. Anyone investing now is not going to make money.
You know, they said the same thing about IPv4. Who'd ever pay to have an address? And they said the same thing about DNS. Well, here's the thing you don't get: Artificial scarcity. Why would you want to add more product to the market, crashing your margins, when you can keep it high and rake in the dough? It's not like just anyone can go and cloud it up. And you're forgetting the lessons of OPEC -- If you control production, you control the price. And demand naturally tends upwards because so does the population. There will always be more people tomorrow to buy your product than yesterday.
So don't kid yourself, man. People have made trillions by market manipulation. Where there are middlemen, there is manipulation.
Yeah, someone said "There aren't enough middle men!" and is trying hard to figure out how they can keep us from just getting the services directly like we can now.
If what's going on with Tesla Motors is any indicator... they'll just make it functionally, or actually, illegal, while screaming as loud as they can it's in the consumer's best interests. Heh. Like a company has ever said that in the history of all of humanity and it turned out it that they didn't have ulterior motives.:3
In the exchange, investors and traders could buy up these blocks
Step 1. Get most of the major internet websites and businesses onto cloud architecture. Step 2. Add middlemen between cloud providers and users who can arbitrarily increase the price of computational resources once they're locked in. Step 3. Profit!
In a nutshell at least 5% of a contract must be awarded by quota. It is certainly out in the open, there are entire government programs devoted to helping make sure this happens.
Dammit man! I know you in real life. You're better than this. There's no mention of a quota in any of those articles. There is mention of a preference, but no legal mandate. There are however legal mandates towards lowest cost in a contract, and legal mandates preventing discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, etc.
What they've done is created programs to assist minority business-owners, which is different than workers mentioned by the GP. And these programs are there to offer a service -- making sure contracts submitted by minority business-owners are able to compete with the other contracts available. It's like having a special program for black youth to go to get tutoring help; Something many colleges offer. They aren't handing out better grades on the basis of being black, just help to get better grades. The students still have to pass the same tests.
Do I like the idea of preferences? No. Do I like the ideology behind these programs? No. But none of this is relevant -- we're talking about the reason why the Healthcare.Gov project came to the drive-in and ordered 20 big macs and a fuckton of fries, when it was supposed to be on a calorie-restricted, low-carb diet. And I don't think it was because they ordered a regular coke instead of diet (which is about as meaningful in this analogy as a 'preference' for minorities is in the current context).
... or they'd write it themselves and release it as open-source. They've done it with other tools, and even a mobile operating system. Every other tech company in the world is using these same infrastructure technologies as Google and you're ranting at the one company that is paying at least something, albeit not really enough. I think you're outrage is a little misdirected.
Could you be any more transparent about being paid to write these comments? Please list these "other tools" they released and then stopped developing for, but kept using, and switched over to a "bug bounty" program as the sole method of encouraging people to continue work on them.
As well, your comment that Android is open source is laughable. Parts of Android are open source. And they licensed it under the Apache license specifically so they could keep some parts proprietary. And if you knew anything about mobile devices, it's that the OS only forms one half of the picture; Every device needs its own drivers and glue logic on it before the OS can be bolted in on top of it. None of this is available. It is effectively useless without those components.
Every other tech company in the world is using these same infrastructure technologies as Google and
... First, when people use words like always, never, etc., they're wrong. I mean, anyone who's been through high school knows that a true/false question containing one of those words is a 'freebie'. Second, of the less than every tech companies that use those products, they also have the same fiduciary responsibility if they are publicly-traded (as Google is) to ensure the products and services they offer meet quality control standards. Those companies very often meet that responsibility by contributing money for the ongoing development of the products they use.
I think you're outrage is a little misdirected.
I'm afraid I can't change my opinion of them until money is deposited into my bank account. Until then, all I have to go on is a basic understanding of business ethics and my somewhat more advanced understanding of the field of IT.
"You mean to say" is a massive hint that a strawman is about to happen...
it said anywhere "So, dudes, we're gonna fire all our developers and now we'll just pay you for patches, whatevs"?
... and there it is.
Some of those projects they intend to support aren't even probably used by Google - eg., they're going to pay for working on Sendmail, Postfix and Exim, you think they're using all of them?
I don't think; I know. They're a business. Their mission statement includes the requirement that they are for-profit. Which means if they're just throwing money away like this, they'd be in trouble with the SEC and their stockholders.
Troll fucking harder.
You just tried that, and it failed. I'd have to agree; you need to work on it a bit more.
the case of Mark Zuckerberg, who faced similar issues when the David Fincher-directed 'The Social Network' made its debut in 2010; Facebook's PR team was probably preparing for
Taking extra money showers, then wiping their arse with $100 bills? Please! The entire business model of Facebook has been around monetization. They don't care about reputation as long as it sells. "Zuckerberg is evil! Buy this book!" Er, ok. "Zuckerberg is God! Buy this book!" Er, ok. Either way... the book is bought.
Still, I think they should get a little credit for offering money for stuff that benefits us all (including them of course).
They get NO credit. None. They're raking in billions of dollars on products which use this software. Imagine if similar products were only available through commercial vendors. They'd be paying tens to hundreds of millions in licensing and support fees every year for the guarantee that bugs found would be fixed, and proper code auditing had been done to minimize vulnerabilities. Instead, they get handed a free beer and told they can have as many more as they want, with the only thing being a stipend at the bottom saying "If you really like this product, please donate some money to the authors so they can continue work on it."
No. Google gets no credit. Google fails. Google is booted out of the class and banned from school. These people are being so unbelievably cheap and unethical at the same time they deserve nothing but our ridicule.
THey could just not bother at all. is there anyone else offering bug bounties on software they didn't even write to begin with? Anyone?
They're making offerings that use this software as part of it. They have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure their offering is secure, which means they need to make sure the software components, regardless of who made them, is also secure.
Every company that uses open source products should be making financial contributions to those products to ensure they meet the same standards their own product offerings do. If they aren't willing to do that, they have no business using the product to begin with; Open source wasn't created so corporations could get 'freebies' to cut costs. OSS costs money too.
But why should Google pay 31,337 or 313,370 for bugs in OTHER PEOPLE'S software?
*facepalm* Google is using open source products as a foundation for their own offerings to their clients. That means they have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure their offerings are secure. It's like contractors building a house; They have a professional responsibility to ensure the building materials are up to code. They can't just build a house and when it later collapses and kills the owner say "Oh, well, nobody told us those screws were made out of pure iron and rusted away in a few months and killed everyone inside." They were supposed to check. They certified that house was safe; It's their job to make sure the materials are free of obvious defects.
This is Google's (pathetic) attempt to meet that fiduciary responsibility to their clients, who are using their products, with these "building materials". But the thing is, Google isn't hiring people to actually look at the code and submit changes if problems were found (either internally patched/unreleased, or publicly available; The license allows for either). That would be the truly responsible thing to do. What they're doing is saying this most miniscule of efforts, so pathetically inadequate as to actually inspire resentment on the part of people who do this sort of work (legally or otherwise), is sufficient to shield themselves from legal liability.
Maybe it is. I'm not a lawyer. But it falls well short of being good business ethics, no matter how you cut it. Google is engaging in a reckless business strategy to save money. Shame on them.
However you can't discount the requirements for meeting quotas based on racism and sexism as a simple.1% cost increase. Remember the law requires that a certain portion of the work come from companies owned accordingly and requires their selection even if they cost substantially more.
Where is this law you speak of? Everyone talks about it like it's a real thing, but I haven't found any specific citation to a specific federal law, suggesting this is a law. I did find Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act from 1964 banning exactly this.
There may be a preference, but that's coming from individuals; It is not mandated. Until such a mandate is out in the open and can be cited, the only thing we have to go on is the extra work these people are creating for themselves -- the cost would be only from not choosing the most efficient sorting mechanism for resumes. In other words, it's down to individual productivity. And I can't imagine that a few people in HR can pull the budget that dramatically upwards. I'm sorry, but I just don't see it.
Some of these companies only do work with government agencies as the contracts are highly profitable and they can't match the profits anywhere else.
True, but that's a separate issue. For some government contract work, profits can indeed be quite high. But this because of the nature of the work, not the race, sex, etc., of the workers. Unless you're suggesting minorities are better at doing their jobs than non-minorities, and thus they are probably the ones we ought to be hiring anyway... o_O
And blah, blah blah. You sound exactly like the sheep that go on about "Well, if you're doing nothing wrong...", an argument I always reject out of hand.
Umm... da fuq you smoking dude? This is about the author's assertion that an American expert would be better than a Non-American expert. It's pure patriotism without any supporting facts to go along with it. In fact, the facts we have suggest other countries have experts on this sort of thing too. Other countries are doing this sort of thing. As much as America is.
How the hell do you get from a rebuttal of blind patriotism to "herp a derp sheep herp herp... doing nothing wrong. hurrr durr" ?!
They could keep the theme and just add some zeros.
They purposefully shifted the decimal point. '31337' would be 31 grand. Still short of the mark, but it wouldn't be a slap in the face then. I have this sneaking suspicion that the only reason they're offering this is so when they find the people who cashed in they can say at their trial "oh no, they're extra evil because they weren't doing it for money... they wanted to hurt us!"... Er, yeah, sure okay, whatever. Guys, grow a brain. Seriously. You're asking people to voluntarily step forward and announce to the government they have the ability to find exploits in popular software products for a measily couple of grand.
"Yeah. Here's your three grand, welcome to the terror watchlist!"... You'd have to be criminally stupid to come forward with an exploit for that paltry sum. White hats aren't even that stupid. They go work for companies making six figures as "security researchers" to put up with the hassle of having the SWAT team bust in their door every now and then. They don't do it for peanuts.
Which pays from $500 to $3,133.70 to people who privately report bugs found in the company's software and Web properties."
Okay Google, that's just not nice. That's a slap in the face. So I'm not gonna be nice in my reply to you either. Everyone -- if you have a security vulnerability in a google product; Sell it on the black market. You can easily get a hundred grand for a popular product. Easily. The criminals will actually pay you what you're worth, as opposed to cheap-ass Google here, who thinks short-changing you can be forgiven because they worked "31337" into the pay off.
Screw you Google. Pay people what the vulnerability is actually worth, and protect your clients properly -- because a hundred grand is a lot less than they're gonna be hurting when their systems get pwned. You aren't "31337". You're ID10T5.
First, you're off topic. Still. Just like the last guy who got up-modded for the same idiotic statement, which I tried politely to sidestep by pointing out the far bigger and relevant problem. But if people are going to keep up-modding you damn trolls... fine.
You're the one that needs a "citation needed" -- where do you people come up with this stupid shit about minority preferences? The federal law bans such practices, and has ever since Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
Even if we are "only" paying.1% [citation needed] more for EVERYTHING in the government, it is extremely wasteful of taxpayer dollars.
Is this "extremely" wasteful in the same way that Obamacare is the "worst thing that has ever happened to this country"? This kind of hyperbole tells me you watch Fox News too much, and your brains have gone missing. Look,.1% isn't extremely wasteful. And you can't exactly calculate what this mythical "preference for minorities" would cost anyway, since the cost is essentially separating two piles of paper...1% is probably a massive over-estimation. It's probably more like.00000000027%. AGAIN! This assumes this mythical "minority preference" (a) exists and (b) was even. fucking. relevant.
You people screaming about this "minority preference" thing is tantamount to the Surgeon General looking at the top causes of death, and then deciding to go on a crusade against bottled water, ignoring all the deaths from smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, etc. It's intellectually dishonest, shows a remarkable lack of understanding over what the government actually costs... and why... and frankly, the only way you could be this wrong about the proportions and general understanding of the problem is if you actively tried to! You aren't just ignorant, you're being intentionally misleading, probably because you were mislead by somebody else, and being loathe to admit it, have now subscribed to their lies. Which, coincidentally, is what caused the Dark Ages.
Now come off it man, really. Nobody gives a flying fark through a rolling doughnut about your whack-job ideas about how this mythical "minority preference" is ruining America when we can see clearly that there's at least a hundred more significant things causing cost overruns. And if punching you in the face this hard hasn't gotten your attention, well then, I end with this: Although illegal and non-existant, should your mythical minority preference thing ever become a reality, it would serve you right for your goddamned sense of self-entitlement. Maybe being a trash man or working fast food for a few months would earn you some goddamned respect and perspective about how America really is.
the government has lots of conditions you have to meet if you want a contract and you have to prove that you meet these conditions preference is given to women, minorities, veterans, small businesses, etc. its not a lowest bidder deal
Notice how everyone points out their favorite political cause as the reason for the failure, while the actual one dwarfs them all by comparison yet goes unnoticed? Anyone who has worked with the government before knows that the main reason everything is so expensive is bureaucratic red tape and auditing.
This is why an LED that costs less than a penny winds up costing the government $50 over its total ownership. I've looked at military contracts; Every LED in the system is individually serialized and tracked. You can't just order a bin of them, and put them on a shelf like you would in a normal factory. Even a ten cent screw has to be vetted through approved vendors, assigned its own serial number, etc. And that's just the screws for the toilet paper holder in the Pentagon. You don't wanna know the kind of process screws destined for fighter jets are subjected to.
So don't say "oh noes, it's because minorities are given preference!"... which is a patently stupid thing to say anyway since they're paid the same as the non-minorities. That adds very little to the cost -- maybe a.1% bump due to the extra recruiting needed -- unlike the stuff I mentioned, which balloons it to many multiples of what you'd see in the same project in the private sector.
Unless you're already one of America's foremost experts on these subjects,
Okay first, two things: Other countries are doing this too. Their experts are not any less 'expert-y' than the USA is. In fact, I'm betting they can at least build a data center that doesn't spontaniously shoot lightning at the equipment and catch fire. Soo... sorry but maybe you need to just stick with "expert" without the qualifier there, mate.
Second, why do you have to be a "foremost expert" on this? I see plenty of people in this thread that know everything! *cough* But more seriously; You don't have to work for the government, or be a security expert, to figure out how they use the data. Look at what they have access to, look at their stated goals, then forget the stated goals and look at what they're actually trying to do and have done... and it's easy-peasy:
They're supplying the internet with limitless porn captured from surveillance footage. Duh. Where do you think all the crappy amateur pics come from?
And as soon as everyone follows you, the shows you torrent will disappear.
Yeah, in the same way people stopped reading newspapers when the internet came out, and stopped riding horses once the car was developed. Oh wait... that never happened.
Your definition for advertising is so broad as to be meaningless.
Er, no. It's the dictionary definition. Used by english-speaking people all over the world. See, we have these things called 'adjectives' when you need to be more specific. Take these examples:
produced fusion at an accelerated rate in the laboratory without generating harmful neutrons
... Okay, sooo... less "harmful" neutrons... buuuut still a raging inferno trapped in a magnetic field that we're shooting with lasers. Which, I guess, isn't harmful. This must be a new definition of 'harmful' of which I was previously unaware.
[disclaimer: for those utterly lacking in a sense of humor, the above is not meant to be taken literally. If you reply with a 'that's not what they meant' comment, I will put up the internet bat signal and will send geeks armed with EMPs and death rays to your residence.]
I completely understand your point, but I really think putting resume submission in the advertising column is a bit of a stretch. Ads are mostly unsolicited. I rarely go around shoving my resume into the hands of random pedestrians.
Stay unemployed long enough, and you'll be holding up a sign that says "IT/Network Administrator. Will Compute For Food." Actually, I did that for a few days. While wearing a cardboard cutout of a computer monitor around my head, and the text was on another piece of cardboard made to look like a keyboard. Got several interviews out of that -- I guess some employers still like seeing initiative.
People need to square with the idea that advertising isn't evil; anymore than a screwdriver is. It's the person that's evil (or not). Now my creative advertising worked for me; Why should corporations not be afforded the same priviledge? It all comes down to moderation and limitation; There's some things we just shouldn't do. But that's where the discussion needs to be; Not making blanket statements and proclaiming ultimate good or evil. Leave that to the professional news casting of Fox News if you need a dose of "the sky is falling". I want reasonable debate from reasonable people.
Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.
When you lose your job, please remember these words of wisdom, and submit no job applications, resumes, or talk to anyone about your skills and abilities.
Dude, black and white thinking -- you got a severe case of it. Please see a doctor.
Is part of that right to internet access the right to use YouTube without seeing an ad for Colgate Toothpaste or listen to Pandora without hearing a blurb for a Ford Fusion?
Umm... they can try. Good luck getting past all the adblock in my browser though. And fun fact; Have you ever noticed that if you're willing to wait until a couple hours after a show has initially aired, the torrent sites light up like a big christmas tree with new torrents of that show... invariably with the advertising cut out? I salute these people; Truly, you are doing God's work there. I will gladly wait a day to watch my favorite shows; Cut away all the fat and leave just a lean, mean, content machine. Delicious.
All those people who can't wait or don't know how to download a torrent client and join the revolution... they deserve the advertising. Burn in advertising hell, you lazy peons.:3
Myth: Busted Several countries have added internet access to their constitutions as a basic human right. Sorry if you don't live in one of those countries.
I'm sure someone will respond telling me that advertising is an outdated business model,
No. I don't think we will. We'll respond by telling you that you jumped the snark. Advertising isn't an outdated business model, it is essential to it. Nobody's arguing that. Well, nobody with more than a tenuous grip on the subject matter. Our concern is the toxic byproducts of excessive advertising, which include violations of privacy, computer security, and watering down of mass communication technologies like TV to the point they are so super-saturated in advertising as to be nearly unusable for the purpose of getting anything else, which in turn is caused largely by a massive power imbalance between private citizens and corporations -- our legislators are inaccessible, hidden behind a wall of money built by advertisers who are engaged in a Red Queen race with each other... with increases in advertising driving the response level and interest of their audience straight into the dirt.
Slashdot Mirror
Given all the snark on Slashdot about the sorry state of modern journalism, it is well worth a read to see one organization that got it right.
And that's where you biffed it. The Guardian is as heavily biased as Fox News is. But you tend not to see biases towards things you agree with as clearly as things you disagree with, so I forgive your temporary bout of insanity in making that statement. Maybe they got this one instance right, maybe not. An entire slashdot thread has been created just so we can scream at, er, I mean, debate, the veracity of that statement. But... the Guardian is biased. Sorry man.
Unlike most other commodities that businesses seek to control and restrict the supply thereof (such as stocks), processing power is expected to keep going up per Moore's Law for several years yet. Anyone investing now is not going to make money.
You know, they said the same thing about IPv4. Who'd ever pay to have an address? And they said the same thing about DNS. Well, here's the thing you don't get: Artificial scarcity. Why would you want to add more product to the market, crashing your margins, when you can keep it high and rake in the dough? It's not like just anyone can go and cloud it up. And you're forgetting the lessons of OPEC -- If you control production, you control the price. And demand naturally tends upwards because so does the population. There will always be more people tomorrow to buy your product than yesterday.
So don't kid yourself, man. People have made trillions by market manipulation. Where there are middlemen, there is manipulation.
Yeah, someone said "There aren't enough middle men!" and is trying hard to figure out how they can keep us from just getting the services directly like we can now.
If what's going on with Tesla Motors is any indicator... they'll just make it functionally, or actually, illegal, while screaming as loud as they can it's in the consumer's best interests. Heh. Like a company has ever said that in the history of all of humanity and it turned out it that they didn't have ulterior motives. :3
In the exchange, investors and traders could buy up these blocks
Step 1. Get most of the major internet websites and businesses onto cloud architecture.
Step 2. Add middlemen between cloud providers and users who can arbitrarily increase the price of computational resources once they're locked in.
Step 3. Profit!
In a nutshell at least 5% of a contract must be awarded by quota. It is certainly out in the open, there are entire government programs devoted to helping make sure this happens.
Dammit man! I know you in real life. You're better than this. There's no mention of a quota in any of those articles. There is mention of a preference, but no legal mandate. There are however legal mandates towards lowest cost in a contract, and legal mandates preventing discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, etc.
What they've done is created programs to assist minority business-owners, which is different than workers mentioned by the GP. And these programs are there to offer a service -- making sure contracts submitted by minority business-owners are able to compete with the other contracts available. It's like having a special program for black youth to go to get tutoring help; Something many colleges offer. They aren't handing out better grades on the basis of being black, just help to get better grades. The students still have to pass the same tests.
Do I like the idea of preferences? No. Do I like the ideology behind these programs? No. But none of this is relevant -- we're talking about the reason why the Healthcare.Gov project came to the drive-in and ordered 20 big macs and a fuckton of fries, when it was supposed to be on a calorie-restricted, low-carb diet. And I don't think it was because they ordered a regular coke instead of diet (which is about as meaningful in this analogy as a 'preference' for minorities is in the current context).
... or they'd write it themselves and release it as open-source. They've done it with other tools, and even a mobile operating system. Every other tech company in the world is using these same infrastructure technologies as Google and you're ranting at the one company that is paying at least something, albeit not really enough. I think you're outrage is a little misdirected.
Could you be any more transparent about being paid to write these comments? Please list these "other tools" they released and then stopped developing for, but kept using, and switched over to a "bug bounty" program as the sole method of encouraging people to continue work on them.
As well, your comment that Android is open source is laughable. Parts of Android are open source. And they licensed it under the Apache license specifically so they could keep some parts proprietary. And if you knew anything about mobile devices, it's that the OS only forms one half of the picture; Every device needs its own drivers and glue logic on it before the OS can be bolted in on top of it. None of this is available. It is effectively useless without those components.
Every other tech company in the world is using these same infrastructure technologies as Google and
... First, when people use words like always, never, etc., they're wrong. I mean, anyone who's been through high school knows that a true/false question containing one of those words is a 'freebie'. Second, of the less than every tech companies that use those products, they also have the same fiduciary responsibility if they are publicly-traded (as Google is) to ensure the products and services they offer meet quality control standards. Those companies very often meet that responsibility by contributing money for the ongoing development of the products they use.
I think you're outrage is a little misdirected.
I'm afraid I can't change my opinion of them until money is deposited into my bank account. Until then, all I have to go on is a basic understanding of business ethics and my somewhat more advanced understanding of the field of IT.
So you mean to say
"You mean to say" is a massive hint that a strawman is about to happen...
it said anywhere "So, dudes, we're gonna fire all our developers and now we'll just pay you for patches, whatevs"?
... and there it is.
Some of those projects they intend to support aren't even probably used by Google - eg., they're going to pay for working on Sendmail, Postfix and Exim, you think they're using all of them?
I don't think; I know. They're a business. Their mission statement includes the requirement that they are for-profit. Which means if they're just throwing money away like this, they'd be in trouble with the SEC and their stockholders.
Troll fucking harder.
You just tried that, and it failed. I'd have to agree; you need to work on it a bit more.
the case of Mark Zuckerberg, who faced similar issues when the David Fincher-directed 'The Social Network' made its debut in 2010; Facebook's PR team was probably preparing for
Taking extra money showers, then wiping their arse with $100 bills? Please! The entire business model of Facebook has been around monetization. They don't care about reputation as long as it sells. "Zuckerberg is evil! Buy this book!" Er, ok. "Zuckerberg is God! Buy this book!" Er, ok. Either way... the book is bought.
Still, I think they should get a little credit for offering money for stuff that benefits us all (including them of course).
They get NO credit. None. They're raking in billions of dollars on products which use this software. Imagine if similar products were only available through commercial vendors. They'd be paying tens to hundreds of millions in licensing and support fees every year for the guarantee that bugs found would be fixed, and proper code auditing had been done to minimize vulnerabilities. Instead, they get handed a free beer and told they can have as many more as they want, with the only thing being a stipend at the bottom saying "If you really like this product, please donate some money to the authors so they can continue work on it."
No. Google gets no credit. Google fails. Google is booted out of the class and banned from school. These people are being so unbelievably cheap and unethical at the same time they deserve nothing but our ridicule.
THey could just not bother at all. is there anyone else offering bug bounties on software they didn't even write to begin with? Anyone?
They're making offerings that use this software as part of it. They have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure their offering is secure, which means they need to make sure the software components, regardless of who made them, is also secure.
Every company that uses open source products should be making financial contributions to those products to ensure they meet the same standards their own product offerings do. If they aren't willing to do that, they have no business using the product to begin with; Open source wasn't created so corporations could get 'freebies' to cut costs. OSS costs money too.
Pony up, Google.
But why should Google pay 31,337 or 313,370 for bugs in OTHER PEOPLE'S software?
*facepalm* Google is using open source products as a foundation for their own offerings to their clients. That means they have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure their offerings are secure. It's like contractors building a house; They have a professional responsibility to ensure the building materials are up to code. They can't just build a house and when it later collapses and kills the owner say "Oh, well, nobody told us those screws were made out of pure iron and rusted away in a few months and killed everyone inside." They were supposed to check. They certified that house was safe; It's their job to make sure the materials are free of obvious defects.
This is Google's (pathetic) attempt to meet that fiduciary responsibility to their clients, who are using their products, with these "building materials". But the thing is, Google isn't hiring people to actually look at the code and submit changes if problems were found (either internally patched/unreleased, or publicly available; The license allows for either). That would be the truly responsible thing to do. What they're doing is saying this most miniscule of efforts, so pathetically inadequate as to actually inspire resentment on the part of people who do this sort of work (legally or otherwise), is sufficient to shield themselves from legal liability.
Maybe it is. I'm not a lawyer. But it falls well short of being good business ethics, no matter how you cut it. Google is engaging in a reckless business strategy to save money. Shame on them.
However you can't discount the requirements for meeting quotas based on racism and sexism as a simple .1% cost increase. Remember the law requires that a certain portion of the work come from companies owned accordingly and requires their selection even if they cost substantially more.
Where is this law you speak of? Everyone talks about it like it's a real thing, but I haven't found any specific citation to a specific federal law, suggesting this is a law. I did find Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act from 1964 banning exactly this.
There may be a preference, but that's coming from individuals; It is not mandated. Until such a mandate is out in the open and can be cited, the only thing we have to go on is the extra work these people are creating for themselves -- the cost would be only from not choosing the most efficient sorting mechanism for resumes. In other words, it's down to individual productivity. And I can't imagine that a few people in HR can pull the budget that dramatically upwards. I'm sorry, but I just don't see it.
Some of these companies only do work with government agencies as the contracts are highly profitable and they can't match the profits anywhere else.
True, but that's a separate issue. For some government contract work, profits can indeed be quite high. But this because of the nature of the work, not the race, sex, etc., of the workers. Unless you're suggesting minorities are better at doing their jobs than non-minorities, and thus they are probably the ones we ought to be hiring anyway... o_O
And blah, blah blah. You sound exactly like the sheep that go on about "Well, if you're doing nothing wrong...", an argument I always reject out of hand.
Umm... da fuq you smoking dude? This is about the author's assertion that an American expert would be better than a Non-American expert. It's pure patriotism without any supporting facts to go along with it. In fact, the facts we have suggest other countries have experts on this sort of thing too. Other countries are doing this sort of thing. As much as America is.
How the hell do you get from a rebuttal of blind patriotism to "herp a derp sheep herp herp ... doing nothing wrong. hurrr durr" ?!
They could keep the theme and just add some zeros.
They purposefully shifted the decimal point. '31337' would be 31 grand. Still short of the mark, but it wouldn't be a slap in the face then. I have this sneaking suspicion that the only reason they're offering this is so when they find the people who cashed in they can say at their trial "oh no, they're extra evil because they weren't doing it for money... they wanted to hurt us!" ... Er, yeah, sure okay, whatever. Guys, grow a brain. Seriously. You're asking people to voluntarily step forward and announce to the government they have the ability to find exploits in popular software products for a measily couple of grand.
"Yeah. Here's your three grand, welcome to the terror watchlist!" ... You'd have to be criminally stupid to come forward with an exploit for that paltry sum. White hats aren't even that stupid. They go work for companies making six figures as "security researchers" to put up with the hassle of having the SWAT team bust in their door every now and then. They don't do it for peanuts.
Which pays from $500 to $3,133.70 to people who privately report bugs found in the company's software and Web properties."
Okay Google, that's just not nice. That's a slap in the face. So I'm not gonna be nice in my reply to you either. Everyone -- if you have a security vulnerability in a google product; Sell it on the black market. You can easily get a hundred grand for a popular product. Easily. The criminals will actually pay you what you're worth, as opposed to cheap-ass Google here, who thinks short-changing you can be forgiven because they worked "31337" into the pay off.
Screw you Google. Pay people what the vulnerability is actually worth, and protect your clients properly -- because a hundred grand is a lot less than they're gonna be hurting when their systems get pwned. You aren't "31337". You're ID10T5.
But why should we give ANYONE preference...
First, you're off topic. Still. Just like the last guy who got up-modded for the same idiotic statement, which I tried politely to sidestep by pointing out the far bigger and relevant problem. But if people are going to keep up-modding you damn trolls... fine.
You're the one that needs a "citation needed" -- where do you people come up with this stupid shit about minority preferences? The federal law bans such practices, and has ever since Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
Even if we are "only" paying .1% [citation needed] more for EVERYTHING in the government, it is extremely wasteful of taxpayer dollars.
Is this "extremely" wasteful in the same way that Obamacare is the "worst thing that has ever happened to this country"? This kind of hyperbole tells me you watch Fox News too much, and your brains have gone missing. Look, .1% isn't extremely wasteful. And you can't exactly calculate what this mythical "preference for minorities" would cost anyway, since the cost is essentially separating two piles of paper.. .1% is probably a massive over-estimation. It's probably more like .00000000027%. AGAIN! This assumes this mythical "minority preference" (a) exists and (b) was even. fucking. relevant.
You people screaming about this "minority preference" thing is tantamount to the Surgeon General looking at the top causes of death, and then deciding to go on a crusade against bottled water, ignoring all the deaths from smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, etc. It's intellectually dishonest, shows a remarkable lack of understanding over what the government actually costs... and why... and frankly, the only way you could be this wrong about the proportions and general understanding of the problem is if you actively tried to! You aren't just ignorant, you're being intentionally misleading, probably because you were mislead by somebody else, and being loathe to admit it, have now subscribed to their lies. Which, coincidentally, is what caused the Dark Ages.
Now come off it man, really. Nobody gives a flying fark through a rolling doughnut about your whack-job ideas about how this mythical "minority preference" is ruining America when we can see clearly that there's at least a hundred more significant things causing cost overruns. And if punching you in the face this hard hasn't gotten your attention, well then, I end with this: Although illegal and non-existant, should your mythical minority preference thing ever become a reality, it would serve you right for your goddamned sense of self-entitlement. Maybe being a trash man or working fast food for a few months would earn you some goddamned respect and perspective about how America really is.
the government has lots of conditions you have to meet if you want a contract and you have to prove that you meet these conditions preference is given to women, minorities, veterans, small businesses, etc. its not a lowest bidder deal
Notice how everyone points out their favorite political cause as the reason for the failure, while the actual one dwarfs them all by comparison yet goes unnoticed? Anyone who has worked with the government before knows that the main reason everything is so expensive is bureaucratic red tape and auditing.
This is why an LED that costs less than a penny winds up costing the government $50 over its total ownership. I've looked at military contracts; Every LED in the system is individually serialized and tracked. You can't just order a bin of them, and put them on a shelf like you would in a normal factory. Even a ten cent screw has to be vetted through approved vendors, assigned its own serial number, etc. And that's just the screws for the toilet paper holder in the Pentagon. You don't wanna know the kind of process screws destined for fighter jets are subjected to.
So don't say "oh noes, it's because minorities are given preference!" ... which is a patently stupid thing to say anyway since they're paid the same as the non-minorities. That adds very little to the cost -- maybe a .1% bump due to the extra recruiting needed -- unlike the stuff I mentioned, which balloons it to many multiples of what you'd see in the same project in the private sector.
Unless you're already one of America's foremost experts on these subjects,
Okay first, two things: Other countries are doing this too. Their experts are not any less 'expert-y' than the USA is. In fact, I'm betting they can at least build a data center that doesn't spontaniously shoot lightning at the equipment and catch fire. Soo... sorry but maybe you need to just stick with "expert" without the qualifier there, mate.
Second, why do you have to be a "foremost expert" on this? I see plenty of people in this thread that know everything! *cough* But more seriously; You don't have to work for the government, or be a security expert, to figure out how they use the data. Look at what they have access to, look at their stated goals, then forget the stated goals and look at what they're actually trying to do and have done... and it's easy-peasy:
They're supplying the internet with limitless porn captured from surveillance footage. Duh. Where do you think all the crappy amateur pics come from?
And as soon as everyone follows you, the shows you torrent will disappear.
Yeah, in the same way people stopped reading newspapers when the internet came out, and stopped riding horses once the car was developed. Oh wait... that never happened.
Your definition for advertising is so broad as to be meaningless.
Er, no. It's the dictionary definition. Used by english-speaking people all over the world. See, we have these things called 'adjectives' when you need to be more specific. Take these examples:
Corporate advertising.
evil advertising.
non-profit advertising.
targeted advertising.
Adjectives: They Do Shit(tm).
produced fusion at an accelerated rate in the laboratory without generating harmful neutrons
... Okay, sooo... less "harmful" neutrons... buuuut still a raging inferno trapped in a magnetic field that we're shooting with lasers. Which, I guess, isn't harmful. This must be a new definition of 'harmful' of which I was previously unaware.
[disclaimer: for those utterly lacking in a sense of humor, the above is not meant to be taken literally. If you reply with a 'that's not what they meant' comment, I will put up the internet bat signal and will send geeks armed with EMPs and death rays to your residence.]
I completely understand your point, but I really think putting resume submission in the advertising column is a bit of a stretch. Ads are mostly unsolicited. I rarely go around shoving my resume into the hands of random pedestrians.
Stay unemployed long enough, and you'll be holding up a sign that says "IT/Network Administrator. Will Compute For Food." Actually, I did that for a few days. While wearing a cardboard cutout of a computer monitor around my head, and the text was on another piece of cardboard made to look like a keyboard. Got several interviews out of that -- I guess some employers still like seeing initiative.
People need to square with the idea that advertising isn't evil; anymore than a screwdriver is. It's the person that's evil (or not). Now my creative advertising worked for me; Why should corporations not be afforded the same priviledge? It all comes down to moderation and limitation; There's some things we just shouldn't do. But that's where the discussion needs to be; Not making blanket statements and proclaiming ultimate good or evil. Leave that to the professional news casting of Fox News if you need a dose of "the sky is falling". I want reasonable debate from reasonable people.
Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.
When you lose your job, please remember these words of wisdom, and submit no job applications, resumes, or talk to anyone about your skills and abilities.
Dude, black and white thinking -- you got a severe case of it. Please see a doctor.
Is part of that right to internet access the right to use YouTube without seeing an ad for Colgate Toothpaste or listen to Pandora without hearing a blurb for a Ford Fusion?
Umm... they can try. Good luck getting past all the adblock in my browser though. And fun fact; Have you ever noticed that if you're willing to wait until a couple hours after a show has initially aired, the torrent sites light up like a big christmas tree with new torrents of that show... invariably with the advertising cut out? I salute these people; Truly, you are doing God's work there. I will gladly wait a day to watch my favorite shows; Cut away all the fat and leave just a lean, mean, content machine. Delicious.
All those people who can't wait or don't know how to download a torrent client and join the revolution... they deserve the advertising. Burn in advertising hell, you lazy peons. :3
Well sure. You deserve the internet.
Myth: Busted
Several countries have added internet access to their constitutions as a basic human right. Sorry if you don't live in one of those countries.
I'm sure someone will respond telling me that advertising is an outdated business model,
No. I don't think we will. We'll respond by telling you that you jumped the snark. Advertising isn't an outdated business model, it is essential to it. Nobody's arguing that. Well, nobody with more than a tenuous grip on the subject matter. Our concern is the toxic byproducts of excessive advertising, which include violations of privacy, computer security, and watering down of mass communication technologies like TV to the point they are so super-saturated in advertising as to be nearly unusable for the purpose of getting anything else, which in turn is caused largely by a massive power imbalance between private citizens and corporations -- our legislators are inaccessible, hidden behind a wall of money built by advertisers who are engaged in a Red Queen race with each other... with increases in advertising driving the response level and interest of their audience straight into the dirt.