When Netflix was just a DVD service, keeping up with the star ratings of movies you had watched wasn't hard. You'd log into the web site to manage your queue anyway and clicking on the ratings was simple.
Now so many people watch things via streaming that it's easy to not do it (and so many STBs make it difficult/awkward to rate anyway). Plus I'd bet that much of the streaming viewing is series where rating kind of falls apart because you might watch a single show for a couple of weeks and you lose opportunities to rate many titles since series have a single rating.
It makes me wonder if the suggestion algorithm ever included the critical quality of the movie or if it just included the user ratings. If critical quality was never a factor, skewing the movie base with bad titles makes it seem less effective, especially to a user who may have already taken into account general critical reviews because they see Netflix just pushing bad direct to video titles.
If users are spending more time watching series, not rating due to streaming changing their interactions with the rating system and the recommendation engine not taking into account movie quality it's even easier to see how recommendations become increasingly useless.
I thought they had a big contest where it was a big deal to beat the then-current suggestion engine by 10% because the current engine was supposed to be so good.
IMHO the bigger problem is that streaming has a huge amount of shit associated with it and they will suggest shit movies which makes it appear that the suggestion engine doesn't work.
My guess at this point given all they do to hide/obfuscate how crummy their streaming catalog is they don't really care about the suggestion engine anymore.
I'm curious though how you would leach anything out of a container with a negative pressure. Wouldn't the atmospheric pressure on the container mitigate this somewhat? It results in continuous inward pressure into the container.
The consumer system works great for foods but I've had seals fail before so I don't think I'd personally trust it for criminal activity but the commercial systems seem pretty good, the bags are much thicker and they draw a pretty heavy vacuum.
It's funny what you say about Burger King, but one thing I notice commonly in McDonalds is people hanging out for a long time with their laptops.
A local coffee shop I used to frequent because it had decent wifi, good coffee and a lot of tables with outlets recently eliminated about 2/3s of their tables and replaced them with lounge chairs and couches. And this was long after you had to have the daily password from your receipt to even use the wifi.
I suspect this was done to minimize people using it as something of an office. You can casually use a laptop or a tablet on a couch, but doing anything serious is much harder without a table.
I'd bet fast food places with free wifi are getting some of the cheaper punters who would have normally camped in coffee shops. Most fast food employees around here are immigrants who don't care to enforce any kind of time limit and they won't soon eliminate tables in a restaurant.
I think there's an obvious class conflict when it comes to STEM fields. Wages are high enough that it challenges the corporate class structure that dictates what field should be paid more than other fields.
My wife works in marketing for a company that makes an engineered product and we had a fairly heated discussion about this once. Without thinking about the implications, she actually said that marketing was more important than engineering and marketing should always be paid more. Raising engineering salaries above some ceiling wasn't an option.
Now, my wife isn't a mean spirited snob but I think she genuinely meant this and I think it reflects the class consciousness in corporate thinking.
Strangely I never see this mentioned in articles about H1-Bs and STEM workers. It always seems to devolve into an unresolvable debate involving conflicting macoeconomic labor statistics.
There was a Mythbusters where they tried to fool a drug dog. I only caught the tail end of it (no pun intended) and the only attempt I saw was the target item inside a suitcase with dirty diapers in a room full of suitcases. If I remember the wrap-up scene the dog always found the target.
I'm curious what else they tried to trick the dogs with. The cynic in me believes the cops wouldn't have cooperated if they had actually come up with a technique that worked.
I wonder if vacuum sealing works -- presuming of course you wash the exterior of the vacuum sealed container and possibly double-bagged it. I use a FoodSaver model for food items and since the sealed bag holds a vacuum, presumably there's no way for the odor to migrate out.
Citizen! When Comcast is ready, they will terminate that fiber with high quality coaxial cable and make available to you a quality entertainment bundle with hundreds of television channels and the opportunity to purchase many more. You will also gain a generous, metered Internet connection at only a small additional expense and Comcast will do its best to make sure you have just enough bandwidth to watch your Netflix in 240P with only a minimum of buffering.
Until then, Citizen, do not talk of this dark fiber until Comcast has prepared the entertainment package for you. Such technologies are not for you to understand and your idle ramblings only raise false ideas in other Citizens.
I think the fact that those kinds of attacks haven't happened is a very good argument that terrorism is highly overstated.
Despite all our collective disgust with cameras, eavesdropping, and so on, America remains a very easy society to move about freely and there is very little security over the kinds of targets terrorists would have a field day with, like shopping malls, power substations, oil refineries, and so on.
What effect on the economy would a series of coordinated attacks on malls have on the day after Thanksgiving? Even if you could get people to go out and shop, sales would be off disastrously. What kind of economic impact would even a half-intelligent and coordinated attack on electric transmission of a given region?
None of it seems very hard to pull off, especially if you consider the impact of the involvement of a state actor who could provide funding and basic training in tactics.
This just reminds me of the tedious work social events designed to promote social interaction.
I guess they're tolerable if they're on work time -- I have to be around these people during work hours anyway, I guess interacting in a non-work mode on someone else's dime isn't a problem.
But when the activity is off the clock and on my time, I'd really rather not.
Sure, they should require it but the usual desk-pounding by management that something be done is usually tempered by the costs associated with implementing it.
You need an enterprise-wide key management system to issue and manage the encryption keys, software to actually use the encryption in the various places and ways people may share the files (email, web document systems, ftp, etc). You have to take into account the ability of vendors and customers might decrypt the content if they aren't using your system.
And then there's the training and transaction costs involved in using it -- extra steps employees have to take, dealing with lost keys or passphrases,
None of this says it's not valuable and there are products that make it easier, but it's also not free.
Mostly for the same reason most people don't encrypt email. Key management and trust are beyond many people conceptually and practically difficult if you email people not using your encryption system or using other platforms.
There are gateway products though that greatly reduce these burdens, but in many cases might not solve this problem because they're primarily designed to limit eavesdropping not misaddressing messages, although I'm sure someone has thought of them (ie, encrypting attachments but requiring approval of the sender for unknown recipients to decrypt them).
What I wonder is what email would look like had Microsoft decided to integrate a PGP-like encryption system and key management into Outlook and Exchange so that encrypting a message would be as simple as (un-) ticking a box when sending a message.
Create an account in Exchange, generate an exportable keypair to go with the account. The keypair could then be imported into other applications to decrypt/encrypt email.
When has the Facebook newsfeed ever NOT been manipulated and been merely a list of posts in chronological order from people you are friends with and/or follow?
It strikes me as constantly being manipulated in multiple ways and in a manner noticeable to many people. Most obvious was the "top stories" filter which purported to filter the newsfeed in some manner designed to suppress some comments and promote others.
But we don't know about the criteria for this or the motivation of other, less obvious manipulations designed to enhance or suppress comments. Presumably most motivations are commercially driven to promote advertisers products or increase Facebook usage.
There are more than a few email filtering products, some designed specifically to prevent sensitive data from being emailed at will via heuristics designed to detect sensitive information.
You would think as heavily regulated as Goldman is they would have these kinds of systems in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
I would imagine that in many places, especially smaller ones, non-competes aren't something that anybody actually plans on enforcing.
Either someone who's afraid of getting blamed should something "bad" happens or some lawyer piles on the broadest and most restrictive terms they can come up with and everyone signs it and then promptly forgets about it.
Only when something actually bad happens do they go digging and remember "Oh hey, he signed this".
I've always suspected that the telcos took a huge cut of third party billing. Which of course is why they make it possible, don't call attention to it in billing and play the ignoramus when it comes to the basically fraudulent nature of the whole situation.
The cell carriers are better about removing the charges and refunding multiple months of charges (well, at least 2-3) as well as being able to block them. Qwest was always terrible on our commercial accounts about refunding crammed charges and claimed they couldn't block them.
I'm glad to see the FTC do this and I think they should go so far as to actually ban the practice outright, at least as practiced. If they can do it the default should be "blocked" as a billing status on all accounts. Third party billers with a high degree of fraud complaints should be banned and their names forwarded to the FTC for criminal prosecution.
On the flip side, it seems so lucrative and low risk I wonder how I could get in on the action.
I've done a couple of projects with engineering companies including one at a power plant. From what I've seen, the thing that tends to lead from air gapping to lack of airgapping is support.
The engineering companies don't have the IT infrastructure experience or skills in their engineering practice. They hired me to do basic stuff like SAN setup, switch configuration, VMware, etc.
The engineering company is required to provide support for their subsystem for a period of a couple of years and this includes everything IT related. Their office is hundreds of miles from the plant so problems with the IT environment require them to fly someone out. This is expensive, the guy who goes out has limited troubleshooting and they turn to me.
But they don't want to pay for my services on site, so ultimately they end up ungapping the environment so it can be supported with less cost. They have some security -- VPN only and possibly other restrictions which limit VPN connectivity, but they break the air gap.
They could maintain the air gap, but it would cost money -- support and travel costs, etc.
Ideally the engineering company would make IT systems part of their practice, but I think a lot of engineers have an "I'm an engineer" mentality which makes them they're good at everything, so they see this as unnecessary. They could negotiate with the plant to engage their IT resources, but that would cost them money.
One of the pictures seemed to show a poster with odds for some kind of gambling game. Maybe some kind of issue with licensing or maybe even some kind of organized crime problem?
Lots of great ideas if you're building a new house.
Retrofitting is much harder. Since I'm not moving I think about the best option would be a central exhaust fan with ducts in every ceiling.
I'm still intrigued by the idea of some kind of heat pump in the walls tied to an earth-based heat sink for mitigating solar heating, but maybe just thicker walls and better insulation is saner overall.
I quit using Facebook six months ago, but for a couple of years was a regular user.
The "newsfeed" always struck me as enormously manipulated, with Facebook constantly altering the algorithm that determines what you're shown. Even nontechnical users would comment about this, wondering why they didn't see some posts from some people some times.
Some of this may have been benign, trying to figure out what order to display posts relative to relationships, posting frequency, sort of ordinary attempts to sort out "importance".
But I'm sure there was commercial manipulation -- ranking user comments with links to advertising-affiliated sites higher than non-affiliated sites, downranking links to sites likely to lead a person to shorten their Facebook session, etc.
All of this could be considered "manipulation" even though there might not be one single motivation behind it and not all the factors may be even focused on a specific outcome.
I sometimes wonder if there couldn't be some kind of way to cool the exterior of the house to somehow shed the solar-induced heating.
Our house, built in the mid-1950s and insulated in the attic crawlspace with blow-in insulation in the mid-70s, gets uncomfortably warm on sunny days even if the temperature doesn't get much above 80F. After sunset it seems to radiate heat, keeping the interior spaces above 80 well after midnight and downright uncomfortable until 2 AM.
If there was some way to absorb the heat and dump it into the ground it might keep the interior 5 degrees cooler.
I've also thought it would be nice to have some kind of whole-house forced air ventilation, like a central exhaust fan with ducts in every top level room to draw warm air out and allow cool air in through the windows.
The best earbuds I've ever owned. They stay in the ear, sound quality is excellent and the tangle/twist factor isn't bad considering the skinny round cable.
They were like $8 when I bought them from Amazon. I ended up buying six more pair of them they were so good. I have a set in the car, my laptop case, a pair by the door for walking the dog and a couple still in the sealed package.
I just looked them up, still $8.99 with Prime delivery. Maybe I should pick up a couple more just in case.
Slashdot Mirror
When Netflix was just a DVD service, keeping up with the star ratings of movies you had watched wasn't hard. You'd log into the web site to manage your queue anyway and clicking on the ratings was simple.
Now so many people watch things via streaming that it's easy to not do it (and so many STBs make it difficult/awkward to rate anyway). Plus I'd bet that much of the streaming viewing is series where rating kind of falls apart because you might watch a single show for a couple of weeks and you lose opportunities to rate many titles since series have a single rating.
It makes me wonder if the suggestion algorithm ever included the critical quality of the movie or if it just included the user ratings. If critical quality was never a factor, skewing the movie base with bad titles makes it seem less effective, especially to a user who may have already taken into account general critical reviews because they see Netflix just pushing bad direct to video titles.
If users are spending more time watching series, not rating due to streaming changing their interactions with the rating system and the recommendation engine not taking into account movie quality it's even easier to see how recommendations become increasingly useless.
I thought they had a big contest where it was a big deal to beat the then-current suggestion engine by 10% because the current engine was supposed to be so good.
IMHO the bigger problem is that streaming has a huge amount of shit associated with it and they will suggest shit movies which makes it appear that the suggestion engine doesn't work.
My guess at this point given all they do to hide/obfuscate how crummy their streaming catalog is they don't really care about the suggestion engine anymore.
I'm curious though how you would leach anything out of a container with a negative pressure. Wouldn't the atmospheric pressure on the container mitigate this somewhat? It results in continuous inward pressure into the container.
The consumer system works great for foods but I've had seals fail before so I don't think I'd personally trust it for criminal activity but the commercial systems seem pretty good, the bags are much thicker and they draw a pretty heavy vacuum.
It's funny what you say about Burger King, but one thing I notice commonly in McDonalds is people hanging out for a long time with their laptops.
A local coffee shop I used to frequent because it had decent wifi, good coffee and a lot of tables with outlets recently eliminated about 2/3s of their tables and replaced them with lounge chairs and couches. And this was long after you had to have the daily password from your receipt to even use the wifi.
I suspect this was done to minimize people using it as something of an office. You can casually use a laptop or a tablet on a couch, but doing anything serious is much harder without a table.
I'd bet fast food places with free wifi are getting some of the cheaper punters who would have normally camped in coffee shops. Most fast food employees around here are immigrants who don't care to enforce any kind of time limit and they won't soon eliminate tables in a restaurant.
I think there's an obvious class conflict when it comes to STEM fields. Wages are high enough that it challenges the corporate class structure that dictates what field should be paid more than other fields.
My wife works in marketing for a company that makes an engineered product and we had a fairly heated discussion about this once. Without thinking about the implications, she actually said that marketing was more important than engineering and marketing should always be paid more. Raising engineering salaries above some ceiling wasn't an option.
Now, my wife isn't a mean spirited snob but I think she genuinely meant this and I think it reflects the class consciousness in corporate thinking.
Strangely I never see this mentioned in articles about H1-Bs and STEM workers. It always seems to devolve into an unresolvable debate involving conflicting macoeconomic labor statistics.
There was a Mythbusters where they tried to fool a drug dog. I only caught the tail end of it (no pun intended) and the only attempt I saw was the target item inside a suitcase with dirty diapers in a room full of suitcases. If I remember the wrap-up scene the dog always found the target.
I'm curious what else they tried to trick the dogs with. The cynic in me believes the cops wouldn't have cooperated if they had actually come up with a technique that worked.
I wonder if vacuum sealing works -- presuming of course you wash the exterior of the vacuum sealed container and possibly double-bagged it. I use a FoodSaver model for food items and since the sealed bag holds a vacuum, presumably there's no way for the odor to migrate out.
Boats have been stored this way for a long time. Huge warehouse spaces with racks.
Backups in a stainless steel cylinder welded shut dropped in 50 feet of water and the GPS coordinates memorized.
Citizen! When Comcast is ready, they will terminate that fiber with high quality coaxial cable and make available to you a quality entertainment bundle with hundreds of television channels and the opportunity to purchase many more. You will also gain a generous, metered Internet connection at only a small additional expense and Comcast will do its best to make sure you have just enough bandwidth to watch your Netflix in 240P with only a minimum of buffering.
Until then, Citizen, do not talk of this dark fiber until Comcast has prepared the entertainment package for you. Such technologies are not for you to understand and your idle ramblings only raise false ideas in other Citizens.
I think the fact that those kinds of attacks haven't happened is a very good argument that terrorism is highly overstated.
Despite all our collective disgust with cameras, eavesdropping, and so on, America remains a very easy society to move about freely and there is very little security over the kinds of targets terrorists would have a field day with, like shopping malls, power substations, oil refineries, and so on.
What effect on the economy would a series of coordinated attacks on malls have on the day after Thanksgiving? Even if you could get people to go out and shop, sales would be off disastrously. What kind of economic impact would even a half-intelligent and coordinated attack on electric transmission of a given region?
None of it seems very hard to pull off, especially if you consider the impact of the involvement of a state actor who could provide funding and basic training in tactics.
This just reminds me of the tedious work social events designed to promote social interaction.
I guess they're tolerable if they're on work time -- I have to be around these people during work hours anyway, I guess interacting in a non-work mode on someone else's dime isn't a problem.
But when the activity is off the clock and on my time, I'd really rather not.
Sure, they should require it but the usual desk-pounding by management that something be done is usually tempered by the costs associated with implementing it.
You need an enterprise-wide key management system to issue and manage the encryption keys, software to actually use the encryption in the various places and ways people may share the files (email, web document systems, ftp, etc). You have to take into account the ability of vendors and customers might decrypt the content if they aren't using your system.
And then there's the training and transaction costs involved in using it -- extra steps employees have to take, dealing with lost keys or passphrases,
None of this says it's not valuable and there are products that make it easier, but it's also not free.
Mostly for the same reason most people don't encrypt email. Key management and trust are beyond many people conceptually and practically difficult if you email people not using your encryption system or using other platforms.
There are gateway products though that greatly reduce these burdens, but in many cases might not solve this problem because they're primarily designed to limit eavesdropping not misaddressing messages, although I'm sure someone has thought of them (ie, encrypting attachments but requiring approval of the sender for unknown recipients to decrypt them).
What I wonder is what email would look like had Microsoft decided to integrate a PGP-like encryption system and key management into Outlook and Exchange so that encrypting a message would be as simple as (un-) ticking a box when sending a message.
Create an account in Exchange, generate an exportable keypair to go with the account. The keypair could then be imported into other applications to decrypt/encrypt email.
When has the Facebook newsfeed ever NOT been manipulated and been merely a list of posts in chronological order from people you are friends with and/or follow?
It strikes me as constantly being manipulated in multiple ways and in a manner noticeable to many people. Most obvious was the "top stories" filter which purported to filter the newsfeed in some manner designed to suppress some comments and promote others.
But we don't know about the criteria for this or the motivation of other, less obvious manipulations designed to enhance or suppress comments. Presumably most motivations are commercially driven to promote advertisers products or increase Facebook usage.
There are more than a few email filtering products, some designed specifically to prevent sensitive data from being emailed at will via heuristics designed to detect sensitive information.
You would think as heavily regulated as Goldman is they would have these kinds of systems in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Maybe we should just breed more ants.
I would imagine that in many places, especially smaller ones, non-competes aren't something that anybody actually plans on enforcing.
Either someone who's afraid of getting blamed should something "bad" happens or some lawyer piles on the broadest and most restrictive terms they can come up with and everyone signs it and then promptly forgets about it.
Only when something actually bad happens do they go digging and remember "Oh hey, he signed this".
You mean personal responsibility might actually work versus assuming that the "system" will protect you or guarantee your safety?
I've always suspected that the telcos took a huge cut of third party billing. Which of course is why they make it possible, don't call attention to it in billing and play the ignoramus when it comes to the basically fraudulent nature of the whole situation.
The cell carriers are better about removing the charges and refunding multiple months of charges (well, at least 2-3) as well as being able to block them. Qwest was always terrible on our commercial accounts about refunding crammed charges and claimed they couldn't block them.
I'm glad to see the FTC do this and I think they should go so far as to actually ban the practice outright, at least as practiced. If they can do it the default should be "blocked" as a billing status on all accounts. Third party billers with a high degree of fraud complaints should be banned and their names forwarded to the FTC for criminal prosecution.
On the flip side, it seems so lucrative and low risk I wonder how I could get in on the action.
I've done a couple of projects with engineering companies including one at a power plant. From what I've seen, the thing that tends to lead from air gapping to lack of airgapping is support.
The engineering companies don't have the IT infrastructure experience or skills in their engineering practice. They hired me to do basic stuff like SAN setup, switch configuration, VMware, etc.
The engineering company is required to provide support for their subsystem for a period of a couple of years and this includes everything IT related. Their office is hundreds of miles from the plant so problems with the IT environment require them to fly someone out. This is expensive, the guy who goes out has limited troubleshooting and they turn to me.
But they don't want to pay for my services on site, so ultimately they end up ungapping the environment so it can be supported with less cost. They have some security -- VPN only and possibly other restrictions which limit VPN connectivity, but they break the air gap.
They could maintain the air gap, but it would cost money -- support and travel costs, etc.
Ideally the engineering company would make IT systems part of their practice, but I think a lot of engineers have an "I'm an engineer" mentality which makes them they're good at everything, so they see this as unnecessary. They could negotiate with the plant to engage their IT resources, but that would cost them money.
One of the pictures seemed to show a poster with odds for some kind of gambling game. Maybe some kind of issue with licensing or maybe even some kind of organized crime problem?
Lots of great ideas if you're building a new house.
Retrofitting is much harder. Since I'm not moving I think about the best option would be a central exhaust fan with ducts in every ceiling.
I'm still intrigued by the idea of some kind of heat pump in the walls tied to an earth-based heat sink for mitigating solar heating, but maybe just thicker walls and better insulation is saner overall.
I quit using Facebook six months ago, but for a couple of years was a regular user.
The "newsfeed" always struck me as enormously manipulated, with Facebook constantly altering the algorithm that determines what you're shown. Even nontechnical users would comment about this, wondering why they didn't see some posts from some people some times.
Some of this may have been benign, trying to figure out what order to display posts relative to relationships, posting frequency, sort of ordinary attempts to sort out "importance".
But I'm sure there was commercial manipulation -- ranking user comments with links to advertising-affiliated sites higher than non-affiliated sites, downranking links to sites likely to lead a person to shorten their Facebook session, etc.
All of this could be considered "manipulation" even though there might not be one single motivation behind it and not all the factors may be even focused on a specific outcome.
I sometimes wonder if there couldn't be some kind of way to cool the exterior of the house to somehow shed the solar-induced heating.
Our house, built in the mid-1950s and insulated in the attic crawlspace with blow-in insulation in the mid-70s, gets uncomfortably warm on sunny days even if the temperature doesn't get much above 80F. After sunset it seems to radiate heat, keeping the interior spaces above 80 well after midnight and downright uncomfortable until 2 AM.
If there was some way to absorb the heat and dump it into the ground it might keep the interior 5 degrees cooler.
I've also thought it would be nice to have some kind of whole-house forced air ventilation, like a central exhaust fan with ducts in every top level room to draw warm air out and allow cool air in through the windows.
The best earbuds I've ever owned. They stay in the ear, sound quality is excellent and the tangle/twist factor isn't bad considering the skinny round cable.
They were like $8 when I bought them from Amazon. I ended up buying six more pair of them they were so good. I have a set in the car, my laptop case, a pair by the door for walking the dog and a couple still in the sealed package.
I just looked them up, still $8.99 with Prime delivery. Maybe I should pick up a couple more just in case.